Climate change’s ‘evil twin’ is much worse than we thought

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By Science. 

Excerpt: As human activities continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more and more of the stuff gets absorbed into Earth’s oceans, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. When this weak acid dissociates into ions of hydrogen and bicarbonate, it drives down the ocean’s overall pH, which is typically slightly basic. This acidification—sometimes referred to as climate change’s “evil twin”—can wreak havoc on marine life, for example by interfering with the mineralization process that corals, oysters, and other organisms use to build and maintain their skeletons and shells. A 2014 video released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (NOAA PMEL), for instance, shows a marine snail called a pteropod struggling to swim, its shell having been partially dissolved by acidic waters. In 2009, a group of researchers led by Swedish climate scientist Johan Rockström developed what is known as the planetary boundaries framework, which sought to define a “safe operating space” for human activities. The framework describes limits for nine key global systems—such as ozone depletion, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution—that, if reached, would lead to catastrophic, irreversible levels of environmental change. Last year, scientists reported that six of these boundaries had been crossed already, with ocean acidification “approaching a critical threshold.” According to a new study, however, the situation is more dire than anyone anticipated. ...The “boundary” for ocean acidification, the team reports in Global Change Biology, was actually crossed five years ago .... 

Paper, Ocean Acidification: Another Planetary Boundary Crossed by Helen S. Findlay et al at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.70238. 

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