Renewable Revolution

The Permian Mass Extinction 251.9 million years ago, otherwise known as “The Great Dying,” was the closest this planet has come to extinguishing all complex life on Earth. Around 90% of all species died out in this single event, a worse toll even than the Cretaceous extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

LIP = Large Igneous Province 

Human = Human emissions from burning fossil fuels

CO₃^2- = Carbonate

CCD = Carbonate Compensation Depth


How oceans get overwhelmed by rapid large CO2 emissions from Large Igneous Province (LIP) eruptions and human emissions. CCD = Carbonate Compensation Depth, CO₃^2- = carbonate. Based on text in Zeebe, Annual Reviews 2012.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Lee-commentary-on-Burgess-et-al-PNAS-Permian-Dating.html

Agelbert NOTE: This compendium of quotes will discuss the existential threat to marine species (and also to us, because we eat them) that lower pH of salt water (the LOWER the pH, the MORE acidic the water is) constitutes. The increased concentration of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels is what causes the ocean to increase in acidity through lowered pH. Lowered pH actually means that you have more H+ ions in the water. It is somewhat counterintuitive to tell somebody with not much of a science background that lowering pH raises the acidity. But that's the way the math on PH. works.

Mollusca (məlŭs`kə), taxonomic name for the one of the largest phyla of invertebrate animals (Arthropoda is the largest) comprising more than 50,000 living mollusk species and about 35,000 fossil species dating back to the Cambrian period. Mollusks are soft-bodied, and most have a prominent shell.

The members of this highly successful and diverse phylum are mostly aquatic and include the familiar scallop, clam , oyster, mussel, snail, slug, squid, cuttlefish, octopus, chiton, and a variety of others.

Mollusks occupy habitats ranging from the deep ocean to shallow waters to moist terrestrial niches.

The Shell

The shell is formed by secretions of glandular cells in the mantle. Except in the chitons, the shells of all mollusks are basically similar, differing only in certain mineralogical details. The shell is composed of an outer, prismatic layer containing densely packed cells of calcareous material secreted by the edge of the mantle; and an inner, nacreous layer of thin, laminated plates of calcareous material laid down by the entire mantle surface.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/phylum+Mollusca

By José H. Leal, Ph.D.

SNIPPET:

 The Domino Effect. Organisms in natural ecosystems and food webs are all interconnected, and any disturbance that negatively affects one species (such as its permanent extinction) is likely to provoke a negative chain reaction that will interfere with a much larger number of species, in a cumulative and fast-paced manner.

For instance, the extinction of a clam will negatively affect all species that eat that clam, and these adverse effects on the predators will in turn rapidly propagate within the food web.

If enough species are critically affected, not only is the balance of nature forever altered, but our own fate as a species may be endangered in the long run.

Because mollusks are such a large and widespread group, changes affecting mollusks as a group are potentially capable of having massive and irreversible effects on the planet’s biodiversity.

The Global Threats to Marine Species. Aside from localized problems in the coastal marine environment such as domestic and industrial pollution, development, urban and agricultural encroachment, and other geographically restricted sources of environmental degradation, marine mollusks are threatened by generalized, more widespread disturbances such as those associated with climate change.

For instance, coral bleaching, the critical loss of energy-giving coral zooxanthellae caused by changes in ocean temperature, is now a global problem, affecting large areas in the marine tropics of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. The global “hot spots” for molluscan diversity coincide with coral reefs, as these latter are associated with a very large number of shallow-water molluscan species. As coral reefs decline, so will all the organisms connected with them.

The Threat of Ocean Acidification. Ocean acidification is caused by the increased uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide by sea water. More acidic sea water affects the shells of planktonic mollusks, thinning and opening holes in those delicate structures.

Acidification is already a threat to several species of planktonic mollusks, including sea butterflies (pteropods). Sea butterflies are key links in open-ocean food webs, serving as food for many species of fish, which in turn feed larger animals such as sea birds, whales, and even polar bears.

http://www.shellmuseum.org/downloadable-files/Leal_Mollusks_in_Peril_Why_do_We_Care.pdf



Potential Impacts of Ocean Acidification

Impacts on Calcifying Species

SNIPPETS:

As the United Kingdom’s Royal Society recently observed,

“Seawater pH is a critical variable in marine systems; even small changes will have a large impact on ocean chemistry.”

The changes in ocean chemistry precipitated by acidification are likely to exert profound and highly adverse impacts on ocean species and ecosystems.

The saturation of seawater with carbonate ions is extremely important for marine species that construct their shells or skeletons with limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO3) in a process known as calcification. These species include most corals, mollusks, echinoderms, foraminifera, and calcareous algae.

A free-swimming pteropod, Limacina helicina, a mollusc that forms a calcium carbonate shell made of aragonite. They are an important food source for juvenile North Pacific salmon and also are eaten by mackerel, herring, and cod.

The shells and skeletons of such species do not dissolve because the upper layers of the ocean are supersaturated with calcium (Ca2+) and carbonate ions. However, as the pH of the oceans drops as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide, carbonate levels begin to drop, ultimately resulting in an undersaturation of carbonate ions, which in turn impairs the calcification process.

A recent study on rapid climate change and ocean acidification appearing in Science concluded that oceanic carbonate concentrations will drop below 200 µmol kg-1 when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reach 450-550ppm, a scenario that may occur by the middle of this century.

At that point, the rates of calcification by coral polyps will be exceeded by reef erosion, which in conjunction with the impacts of increasing temperatures, may “reduce coral reef ecosystems to crumbling frameworks with few calcareous corals.” By the end of the century, climate scientist Ken Caldeira—who with Michael Wickett originally coined the term “ocean acidification”—concludes that “there is no place left with the kind of chemistry where corals grow today.”

The diminution of reefs could also result in half or more of coral-associated fauna becoming rare or extinct.

Massive declines in coral reefs could have grave environmental and socio-economic implications. Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems in the world. While covering only 0.17 percent of the ocean floor, coral provide habitat for one quarter of all marine species.

Agelbert NOTE: What you just read exposes the gravity of the extinction threat to marine species, including Pacific salmon, mackerel, herring, and cod (among many, many others). Also, 25% of the ocean's marine life that relies on coral reef habitats is threatened with extinction.

I'm NOT sorry to be alarmist  , but what you just read was not the worst of the multiple species extinction threats due to a CO2 caused SLIGHT lowering in pH.

The following is horrendously alarming because it involves the threat to 70% of the global calcium carbonate precipitation done by plankton. Yes, this huge source of marine food is threatened with extinction by decreased pH. But a rapid extinction rate, which is ensured by ocean acidification, would trigger ANOTHER positive feedback mechanism exacerbating global warming!

While corals are the most prominent calcifying organisms in the world’s oceans, they account for only 10 percent of global calcium carbonate production.

70 percent of global calcium carbonate precipitation is contributed by several groups of planktonic organisms, including coccolithophores, foraminifera, and pteropods, many of which are extremely important components of ocean ecosystems.

One study concluded that a doubling of present-day concentrations of carbon dioxide could result in a 20 to 40 percent reduction in biogenic calcification of coccolithophores, resulting in malformed calcareous plates and layers of plates, while another concluded that coccolithophores exposed to carbon dioxide levels triple those of the present day could lose half their protective coatings.

The particulate organic material of coccolithophores sinks and contributes substantially to carbon mineralization deep in the water column. A reduction in the transport of organic carbon to the deep ocean would diminish the flux of food to benthic organisms.

Agelbert Note: Benthic organisms are life forms that live in and on the bottom of the ocean floor.

Additionally, the decline of coccolithophore in an ecosystem can result in a shift to a diatom-dominated phytoplankton community, which can restructure an ecosystem at all trophic levels.


Diminution of coccolithophores could also amplify global warming trends for several reasons.

Chalky coccolithophore blooms can extend over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, and when blooming, lighten the surface of the ocean and reflect substantial amounts of sunlight back towards space. Substantial reductions in their numbers might thus accelerate warming because more incoming solar radiation would be absorbed by the oceans.

Moreover, coccolithophores produce substantial amounts of dimethylsulphide, which account for substantial portions of atmospheric sulphate particles around which cloud droplets grow.

Reductions in cloud development might ultimately result in additional warming, as some clouds reflect incoming solar radiation back to space.

Finally, calcium carbonate is very dense, and acts as ballast, which serves to accelerate the deposition of particulate carbon in the deep ocean.

A reduction in calcium carbonate production thus could ultimately imperil a mechanism that helps remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, potentially intensifying the greenhouse effect.

A recent study concluded that decreases in ocean pH by 0.5 units or more may severely disrupt the internal acid-base balance of sea urchins, which can ultimately result in their death.

Cephalopods such as squid might be particularly affected by increased oceanic carbon dioxide because they require very high amounts of oxygen supply to the blood to sustain their energy-demanding method of swimming. Lower levels of pH can impair oxygen supplies in these species, reducing oxygen capacity by about 50 percent with a pH decrease of 0.25 units.


As the Royal Society of the United Kingdom concluded in its study of ocean acidification,

 “Without significant action to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, this may mean that there will be no place in the future oceans for many of the species and ecosystems that we know today.”

While warming associated with rising levels of carbon dioxide certainly warrants the steadfast commitment of the world’s major emitters to reverse this trend, the “other CO2 problem” may provide an equal or even more compelling rationale.

One can only hope that the world’s policymakers will mobilize more quickly to address this issue than was the case with climate change.   

 
http://www.terrain.org/articles/21/burns.htm

Agelbert NOTE: Congratulations. You managed to reach this point without your eyes glazing over. Feel free to pass it on. Perhaps we can delay our funeral, even if it looks like Pacific Salmon will be off the menu soon. 

Please remember that, even if every human on earth dies tomorrow, the acidity will continue to increase for about forty years. That means that most of the species mentioned above will go extinct even though we are not around to overfish them.

The collapse of human civilization WILL NOT solve this problem. Active measures by us to restore the proper life preserving ocean chemistry is the only hope that marine species have.

The only responsible course of action is to stop the CO2 emissions NOW and begin to act aggressively to return the atmosphere to 280 ppm of CO2. As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, we guarantee massive marine life extinctions.

I started this article with the  Mollusks because virtually ALL the fish we eat feed on them. For those who understand biosphere math at the different trophic (eating) levels, that means that the biomass of mollusks is must be least ten times that of the large fish vertebrates that feed on them.

The reason for that is that energy is lost when one life form eats another from digestion inefficiencies. Life forms are far more efficient than machines, but they still lose a lot of energy when transferring the stored energy of the prey animal to the predator.

There is NO equivalence in biomass between mollusks and the predator fish that eat them. Please remember that. If you lose the mollusks, you lose about 90% of the marine biomass of the sum of the mollusks and the predator fish.

So, the loss of a large percentage of the mollusks alone is a catastrophe for vertebrate marine life.

The mollusks are in peril. When they can't make a prober shell, they will have no protection and will be eaten before they can reproduce. End of story. 

When the mollusk prey, ten times the biomass of the predators, dies off, the predators go extinct too. This is not hard.

On top of all that, the plankton difficulties with CO2 will accelerate global warming!

Ocean acidification is a major extinction threat to marine species. ANYONE that tells you that marine species can "adapt" to the increased ocean acidity within a few decades (or even a century) is worthy of derision.