Ocean Adification, Accelerating Emissions

Some frightening, and related, news from two Australian sources:

According to the Australian Research Council, a third of global marine life is endangered by ocean acidification. This is caused by a long-term build-up of carbon emissions: the world's oceans are believed to have absorbed a third of all carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

Coral reefs are among the most threatened; the Science Daily article notes that “[g]lobally, the welfare of 500 million people is closely linked to the goods and services provided by coral reef biodiversity.”

This should be taken alongside the IPCC's warning that 20-30% of all species could be endangered by climate change.

And this process will only speed up, because the rate of increase in global emissions is…increasing. The Adelaide Advertiser reports that researchers at the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Centre, and the group Global Carbon Project, have found that global carbon emissions increased 3% annually from 2000 to 2006. This represents a tripling of the rate of increase from the 1990s, when it was 1% annually.


The researchers found that:

“The rate at which carbon dioxide was being absorbed by oceans and land had also decreased in the past 50 years.
The efficiency of the Southern Ocean in particular to absorb carbon dioxide had reduced by 30 per cent in the past 20 years. The analysis is published today in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

[…] ``The message from this picture is emissions are increasing and a lot faster than we thought they would, even a few years ago. Dr [Mike] Raupach said oceans were ``overwhelmed'' by the amount of emissions in the atmosphere and were unable to soak up the carbon dioxide as fast as it was produced. Deforestation, heatwaves and drought had affected the amount of carbon land could absorb, he said.”

In 2006, the British Treasury issued a 700-page report on climate change by its senior economist, Sir Nicolas Stern. Some of Stern's predictions include a 200 million environmental refugees by mid-century, and a contraction of the global economy by one fifth, or about $7 trillion.