Climate change's 'evil twin' Ocean Acidification (and problem stepchild, Ocean Hypoxia)

The solutions, unfortunately, are all tied to wrecking "lifestyles, growth rates, consumption patterns, me-myself-and-I ego-centrism, recreation desires, class inequalities" Business As Usual mentality, from the Western Civilization's (sic) perspective.

It's all about human-focused survival, that is, what's only good for Homo Sapiens nothing said of the rights of any of the millions of other species to live on earth, or honoring wild-lands or mountain tops and corals, even geological formations, just for their sake alone.

Take a look at this article by Dr Phillip Williamson. He's an honorary reader at the University of East Anglia and science coordinator of the UK Greenhouse Gas Removal from the Atmosphere research program, which is coordinated by the government-funded National Environment Research Council (NERC).

"All the options, therefore, need to be on the table not just the land-based approaches, such as planting new forests and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) which have dominated conversations to date.

This week, myself and colleagues attempt to address this gap by publishing an analysis of 13 ocean-based actions to address climate change and its impacts. The study considers the effectiveness and feasibility of both global-scale and local ocean-based solutions using information from more than 450 other publications.

Each potential action was assessed for a range of environmental, technological, social and economic criteria, with additional consideration given to each action's impacts on important marine habitats and ecosystem services.

The study assesses seven ocean-based actions that have the potential to be deployed on a global scale. For the analysis, it was assumed that each technique was implemented at its maximum physical capacity.

Each technique was rated for its "mitigation effectiveness" which was defined as how well the technique could help move the world from a high emissions scenario ("RCP8.5") to a low emissions scenario where warming is limited to 2C ("RCP2.6") for a range of problems associated with climate change, including temperature rise, "ocean acidification" and sea level rise."

Here, sanity one and two:

1. protecting coastal areas from floods and nurseries for inshore fisheries
2. planting new forests and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)

Here, the insanity of where we are at in global outlooks and how to cut carbon emissions while still having everything hunky-dory:

1. "solar geoengineering" techniques such as, "ocean surface albedo" (the reflectiveness of the ocean) and "marine cloud brightening", which would work by using ships to spray saltwater into the clouds above the sea to make them more reflective.
2. "assisted evolution" defined as attempts to harness the power of evolution to make species more tolerant to the impacts of climate change:

• One example of this could be to make coral species more tolerant to heat stress.
• The last technique is reef relocation and restoration. This can involve transplanting healthy coral into a degraded reef following a mass bleaching event, in order to aid its recovery.

Source

For Caren, submitting public comments is one action. More research is her mainstay, and as she stated, she is euphoric looking into a microscope at invertebrates. She states: "If we don't understand what's happening, we can't change things."

Of course, we have shifting baselines, so what Caren and her team work on, well, the predictions of acidification of oceans have been around for decades, with the predicted breakdown in shelled species losing their ability to deliver calcium to make shells. We know what is happening, and we don't need more collapses and disease and "proofs" before acting.

The partnerships tied to OAH and HAB are impressive, but we are not in a climate where passivity should be dictating our actions more science, more studies to delineate the problem and more monitoring, this is lunacy. Then, the proposed lunacy of iron shavings in the ocean and sulfur dioxide spewed into the atmosphere to dim the sky. If this isn't proof the scientists and industrialists and technologists haven't lost their minds, then nothing is proof positive of their insanity.

The average citizen wants to stick his or her head out the window and say:

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