http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article3172144.ecePublished: 18 November 2007
Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world's governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process – thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years – is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse...
The new IPCC report, which is designed to give impetus to the negotiations, highlights the little-known acidification of the oceans, first reported in this newspaper more than three years ago. It concludes that emissions of carbon dioxide – the main cause of global warming – have already increased the acidity of ocean surface water by 30 per cent, and threaten to treble it by the end of the century....
Scientists have found that the seas have already absorbed about half of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humanity since the start of the industrial revolution, a staggering 500 billion tons of it. This has so far helped slow global warming – which would have accelerated even faster if all this pollution had stayed in the atmosphere, already causing catastrophe – but at an increasingly severe cost. The gas dissolves in the oceans to make dilute carbonic acid, which is increasingly souring the naturally alkali seawater. This, in turn, mops up calcium carbonate, a substance normally plentiful in the seas, which corals use to build their reefs, and marine creatures use to make the protective shells they need to survive. These include many of the plankton that form the base of the food chain on which all fish and other marine animals depend...
A report by the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, concludes that, as a result, of the pollution, the world's oceans are probably now more acidic that they have ever been in "hundreds of millennia", and that even if emissions stopped now, the waters would take "tens of thousands of years to return to normal". Professor Ulf Reibesell of the Leibnitz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany's leading expert on the process, concludes in an issue of UNEP's magazine Our Planet, to be published next month, that, if it continues to the levels predicted by yesterday's report for the end of the century, the seas will reach a condition unprecedented in the last 20 million years...interesting times are just around the corner.
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