Oceans make up 70% of the earth’s surface and hold 90% of natural carbon. So why do they only make up a small portion of the research on the global impact of carbon emissions?
The role of “blue carbon” in climate change is getting more interest from the international community. With a growing body of research exploring how an increase in atmospheric carbon is impacting the chemistry and biology of ocean ecosystems — and thus influencing climate change — people are starting to pay more attention.
However, it’s still not a well-explored concept outside the scientific community. At the COP climate talks in Durban, for example, there is endless talk about atmospheric carbon and about how to control terrestrial carbon emissions through deforestation programs like REDD+. But there are still very few mentions of oceanic carbon.
“Hopefully, by exposing the science to higher level decision makers, we will bridge a gap of communication for that necessary understanding” of the role that oceans play in climate change, said Alberto Piola, an oceanographer with the Naval Hydrographic Service in Argentina, speaking at a side event on Blue Carbon at COP 17 this week.
We can look at Blue Carbon in two ways. The first is the climate change impact of releasing natural carbon from the oceans through the destruction of ecosystems. Most research in this area is focused on near-shore ecosystems like mangroves and sea grasses. The second is the impact of burning fossil fuels on ocean ecosystems by adding geologically-trapped CO2 to the carbon cycle.
Considering the immense shift already underway in the oceans, it’s amazing that the concept hasn’t gotten more attention in the international negotiations on addressing climate change.
In pre-industrial times, the ocean was a source of CO2, and the atmosphere was a sink. But the release of staggering amounts of geologic carbon has made the oceans a net sink.
We’ve reversed the natural carbon cycle in about 200 years.
How much carbon does it take to do that? Consider this: We burn 9.1 petagrams of fossil fuels per year. That’s the equivalent of a coal train wrapped around the world 63 times – or about 2.5 million kilometers. And that train is only growing.
“Now you get a sense of how much CO2 we add to the atmosphere,” said Chris Sabine, director of the Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who outlined the numbers in a presentation.
“This pool of carbon should not be a natural part of the cycle on the time scales that we’re looking at. The terrestrial sinks and oceans are trying to take that up,” said Sabine.
Every day, we add 22 million metric tons of CO2 into the oceans. But our ability to accurately gauge the impact of those additions is still evolving.
“The models are very divergent at this point. We still need more data,” said Sabine. “We do know that resulting changes in chemistry and warming are expected to significantly impact ecosystems.”
The trends are certainly alarming. Alongside the dramatic reversal of the carbon cycle, we’ve seen a commensurate increase in the acidity of the oceans, greater fluctuations in temperatures, and an increase in oxygen depleted waters – a phenomenon known as hypoxia.
In more acidic conditions, organisms cannot use calcium carbonate for growing shells. Researchers have called acidification “a ticking time bomb” for ocean ecosystems and fisheries. And the combination of increased levels of CO2 and decreasing O2 levels can affect the temperature tolerance curve in organisms, making it harder for them to survive. The cascading impacts of these changes could be immense — but it’s still difficult to predict exactly how ocean ecosystems will respond, said Pedro Monteiro, the principal oceanographer with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, talking to Climate Progress.
In order to better predict how CO2 levels will influence oceans, Monteiro and his team are using O2 as a proxy. Because data sets for O2 are much longer than for CO2, researchers can examine the impact that fluxes in carbon and oxygen uptake have historically had on the oceans.
Until recently, research on blue carbon has been focused on how near-shore ecosystems can sequester carbon. But there’s increasing international coordination on projects looking at the role of the deep ocean. Monteiro calls the CO2 fluxes from the deep ocean “game changers” in how they influence oceanic chemistry and biology, and potentially release massive amounts of greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.
“The exchanges are orders of magnitude larger,” explained Monteiro.”We’re trying to recognize all the different pools. What we’re seeing now is a shift from relatively small-scale regional studies to international research. And no single country can do them.”
Below is a film played at COP 17 on research in Argentina being conducted by Alberto Piola. The film was produced by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research:
Related Posts:
- Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred
- Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”
- Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century” — Co-author: “Unless we curb carbon emissions we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae.”
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Oceans should a major area of climate action.
Intense integration with natural capital where human capital is the most important component:
The riches of the world’s oceans are extraordinary providing services currently beyond comprehension.
We need to figure out as much as possible how the oceans work and introduce subtle forcings that slow and ultimately stop climate change acceleration.
. . . something like: pull the CO2 out & restore
. . . manmade emissions to atmosphere must stop
Then one day we figured out how to remove 22 metric tones of co2 from the ocean for that day and we went to rest before starting the next days work. (Figuring out how to remove was the actual removal of the co2 from the oceans.) whew, pleasant dreams for the holidays.
“We burn 9.1 petagrams of fossil fuels per year. That’s the equivalent of a coal train wrapped around the world 63 times…”
Good Grief!
If memory serves me correct, about a year ago Joe did a post that figured the energy imbalance of the excess fossil CO2 produced is equivalent to exploding 1 million Hiroshima size A Bombs each and every day. That breaks down to roughly one nuclear explosion for each 16 mile diameter circle on earth EVERY DAY and growing about ten more per day as we dither.
Coal trains or A bombs. That is a lot of excess energy.
The massive scope of our crisis is so far out of proportion to the response from our leaders and negotiators that we must expect the worse. Much worse than we have already seen. It is a testament to the fact that the majority of the human race has just not reached a level of maturity or developed an ability to cooperate for the greater good of humanity as a whole. I, for one, am not surprised. Apparently we must wait until the crisis causes mass destruction never seen before in the history of our civilization.
M, I agree about the scope of the crisis but it is not because we do not have the ability to cooperate for the common good. We have that ability as we have always had it. The ancient cultures of the world exercised it for thousands of years. And it is easy to demonstrate it in today’s humans.
We aren’t using it en masse today because about 200 years ago we started changing the genotypical design principle behind all our organizations to that which induces competition rather than cooperation. That design principle is now totally dominant to the point that many now don’t believe there is an alternative. Many believe competition and self interest is a part of human nature but it isn’t. If you want to chck it out, start with http://www.thelightonthehill.com or http://www.sustainablefutureplanning.com.au, ME
Excellent contribution. I have always been impressed by just how malignant the social arrangements of the West are, that gave rise to capitalism, that cancer of the soul and of society. In comparison to the indigenous societies of the New World, that were destroyed with such genocidal brutality, with a combination of insatiable greed and religious bloodlust, and the great civilizations of the East, the West seems to me to have been on a mission to ‘subdue the earth’, as ordered by Western man’s psychopathic ego-projection, ‘God’, that has now reached its suicidal apotheosis. Not that Western culture is irredeemable or without virtue, but its worst features have triumphed, become solidified in social and economic arrangements, perverted the soul and mind of those that live under it, and promoted the very, very, worst types to power, in a vicious and self-destructive feedback loop.
What is “Blue Carbon”? Is it different from naturally occurring CO2?
Oceans make up 70% of the earth’s surface and hold 90% of natural carbon.
Huh? What is this based on? What is unnatural carbon?
The real issue of CO2 in oceans is that of the total CO2 emitted to date, let’s call it a trillion tonnes, it is only slowly being absorbed and converted into acid in the sea. CO2+H2O=H2CO3 which as we see with only about 25% of the first dose administered ocean pH has dropped by 30%. This first dose of CO2 is a lethal dose for the vast majority of higher life in the oceans. There is only one means to provide the antidote for this first deadly dose. No amount of limiting the second lethal dose, that being CO2 emissions today and tomorrow and into the future, that will cure the first lethal dose. ONLY the ocean phyto-plankton have the proven capacity to capture CO2 and divert it from the certain acid forming reaction and ocean death. The late great John Martin showed us the science and the way to help restore the phyto-plankton we have eliminated from the seas and how those phyto-plankton will change the destiny of our CO2 from ocean death to ocean life. Choose ocean life. All it takes is dust in the wind.
One of the reasons we have neglected the oceans is probably because we have lungs rather than gills. We seem to have forgotten that water is the cradle of life.
But the oceans have not been totally ignored as Nainoa notes. It is a few years ago that I watched Prof Jeremy Jackson give a TED talk entitled “The future of the ocean is slime”. He has probably torn all his hair out by now, ME
Good piece, but I must admit, this bit has me scratching my head: “In pre-industrial times, the ocean was a source of CO2, and the atmosphere was a sink…”
Isn’t a sink usually thought of as something absorbing carbon from the atmosphere? In pre-industrial times, natural sources and sinks were apparently in a state of quasi-equilibrium, so I’m not sure how the atmosphere itself was a sink. And you’d think that if the oceans were a substantial net source, then atmospheric concentrations would’ve trended up, unless the terrestrial biosphere was taking up the excess (making it the sink). Unless I’m missing something.
Ah, maybe it depends on how far back into the “pre-industrial” you go. I don’t know how accurately we can gauge carbon fluxes of the 1700′s, but it looks like things had at least been largely in balance. CO2 exchange can vary slightly on shorter timescales, though, and levels do ‘recover’ (over millennia) as a feedback of glacial period termination.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Presumably a lot of that comes from the oceans.