Yesterday I detailed how economic considerations usually trump environmentalism (and AGW concerns) because of the near-term immediate impact of “economics”. When people are more worried about the next paycheck, they are less concerned with how much the climate might warm up 90 years from now, or how much the ocean might rise 1,000 years from now.
Despite the current economic recession, there are still many people concerned about what might happen to the environment and climate, as am I. Given the sometimes hyperbolic pronouncements of how nearly everything in the biosphere is going to die due to AGW, I am surprised more people don’t at least follow more of the headlines (whether a person is skeptical or not). Even as I am concerned about future pollution, I am not fatalistic. I know that fossil fuel usage is unlikely to continue the same upward trend into the future as it did in the past. I know that technological progress continues and this should help us be more efficient in the future as well as clean up some “messes”. I also know that life has a tremendous ability to adapt.
In the case of adaptability, many people are quite fatalistic about the fate of the oceans as the water warms up, even in the bottom water around Antarctica. Warmer and more acidic oceans are expected to be more hostile to life, including corals. Thankfully, at least in the near term, it appears that corals are not going to all die off. Recently scientists have found corals that can thrive in warmer than normal water and some that can adapt to higher acidity. Still, there might be some limit to which adaptation fails and some sort-of mass extinction occurs in the oceans, as seemed to have happened in the distant past.
If ocean acidification does become a major problem, it will potentially be a harder problem to crack/fix than just plain old warming of a couple of degrees. If heat would get to be too much of a problem, it could be fixed fairly easily with some sort-of sunshade technology. A recent study suggested that sunshade geoengineering would not affect crops too much. But cooling by blocking the sun would not help reduce the acidity of the ocean. Also, as far as future energy sources go, biofuels would once again be the worst choice because they still result in carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere (as well as bunch of other reasons - I have covered before). In addition we also need to keep a close eye on all of the synthetic biology that is being developed in the pursuit of biofuels. Solar, nuclear, geothermal, and wind would probably be our best bets to not only reduce pollution but to reduce the acidification of the oceans. Otherwise, we might end up doing some grand antacid experiments in the future.
Have a good Wednesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.
