Oceans Day at COP15
Posted by cdchase on December 14, 2009 | 1 Comment
It is Oceans Day at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change on Copenhagen, Denmark.
It has been said that if we were truly honest in our nomenclature, we would call this planet “Ocean” rather then “Earth”.
I made a point to attend a briefing held by scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography where they reported their research on ocean acidification. Ocean acidity has increased by 30% since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This increase is 100 times faster than any change in acidity experienced by marine organisms for at least the last 20 million years. If the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to increase at the current rate, the ocean will become corrosive to the shells of many marine organisms by the end of this century. One recent paper shows part of the Arctic Ocean is already “corrosive” and that’s before what the models have predicted, so we’re seeing organisms that already will not be able to adapt.
Increasing acidification means that organisms either cannot produce new shells, existing shells break down, or it takes more energy than they can muster to create new shells. Literally it means dissolving of shells in an acid solution as the oceans absorb our increasing carbon dioxide emissions.
Sixty-five million years ago, ocean acidification was linked to mass extinctions of calcareous marine organisms, an integral part of the marine food web. At that time. coral reefs disappeared from the geologic record and it took millions of years for the coral reefs to recover.
I asked the SIO scientists what needs to be done. “We are already in an overshoot situation. Our emissions are going past what we regard is a safe level so the actions that are going to take place in COP15 are designed to bring us back down to a safe level as quickly as possible. We’re already past a point that any of us would regard as safe. We need to minimize the time we’re in this dangerous regime.”
Where do the oceans fit into the COP15 process? Oceans are not even addressed directly since they are not “owned” by any one nation. The oceans are a “sink” (dump) for our activities (emissions and waste) from industry, agriculture and land use. If we address those emissions, the oceans should improve.
SIO was also there to report some good news – that they have created the techniques required to improve measurement and verification of what is actually going into the atmosphere. It turns out that current raw measurements and industry reporting of emissions is off by as much as a factor of two and this is extremely significant. “To really know if the actions a community is taking are working, we will be able to put a virtual curtain around an area of the globe and measure the emissions in that area both in and out. This has not been done yet, but we think this is a tremendous trust building opportunity and we will be able to deploy detectors and have measures that can be compared. Methods to verify both from the ground and from space are improving quickly.”
See also:
http://centerforoceansolutions.org/climate/blog/
http://oceanclimate.org
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