Ask A ScienceBlogger: Hooray for global warming

This week we've been asked to comment on James Robbins' ridiculous essay in The National Review, Hooray For Global Warming. Although a more appropriate response would probably be to ignore such twaddle, that would be contrary to the whole blogging thing. Others might argue that it's obviously satire. I will go out on a limb and assume Robbins is serious.

Seriously ignorant, that is.

Robbins' notion that global warming will be good for the world, give or take a few isolated locales, is so misinformed that it's not even wrong, to borrow a very clever phrase from Wolfgang Pauli.

Pointing out all the errors in science would take all afternoon, and I still have plaster patchwork to do in the future nursery, so allow me to introduce one of the many consequences of rising CO₂ levels that Robbins has overlooked. New Scientist ran a good feature by Caspar Henderson on the subject of ocean acification -- lowering of pH levels, to be more precise -- and this is one problem that needs way more attention than it's getting.

The basic problem is all that CO₂ forms carbonic acid when it dissolves in the ocean, as it is wont to do. The result is an environment hostile to a host of biological processes. The vulnerability of coral reefs to acidification is well known, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's also the sensitivity of pteropods, whose shells begin to dissovle "in just two days in water at the pH predicted for 2050" and lots of other, even more worrisome consequences.

The New Scientist piece is subcription only, so here's a couple of excerpts:

The ocean's natural buffering capacity was assumed to be capable of preventing any changes in acidity even with a massive increase in CO2 levels.

And it is - but only if the increase happens slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years. Over this timescale, the release of carbonates from rocks on land and from ocean sediments can neutralise the dissolved CO2, just like dropping chalk in an acid. Levels of CO2 are now rising so fast that they are overwhelming the ocean's buffering capacity.

A recent review by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, Australia, concluded that corals could become rare by the middle of this century because of the double whammy of rising temperature and falling carbonate levels. Caldeira's view is even starker: "If you look at the business-as-usual scenario for emissions and its impact with respect to aragonite on surface waters, by the end of the century there is no place left with the kind of chemistry where corals grow today."
...
If the outlook for tropical corals is bleak, the consequences of acidification for organisms in more southerly and northerly waters causes even more concern. "Tropical surface waters will be affected by ocean acidification last," says Ulf Riebesell of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany. "In higher latitudes the waters could tip much sooner into being corrosive."
...
Calculating the effect on people and economies is virtually impossible, given all the uncertainties, but it could be enormous. Take the impact on tropical corals, assuming that warming and other pressures such as pollution do not decimate them first. Estimates for the number of people deriving substantial benefits from the reefs are sometimes put in the range of 500 million to 1 billion, many millions of whom depend directly on reefs. Reefs also protect the shorelines of many countries and form the foundation of many islands. Acidification could start eating away at reefs just when they are needed more than ever because of rising sea levels, and possibly stronger storms.

"No serious scientist believes the oceans will be devoid of life or even that there will be less photosynthesis," Caldeira says. "Wherever there is light and nutrients something will live. A likely outcome will be a radical simplification of the ecosystem."
"I tell my son to go and see the corals now because soon it will be too late"

That will mean the loss of many species. "Our children will no longer be able to see the amazingly beautiful things that we can," says Orr. "I tell my son, go to see the corals now because soon it will be too late."

This is a relatively new field of inquiry and many questions remain. But it is the height of irresponsibility for climate science dilettantes like Robbins to assume everything will be hunky-dory.

Next question?