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How credible a source is IPSO, the author of the report backing this story? From what I can tell it's a U.K. non-profit hosted by the Zoological Society of London [1], itself a U.K. non-profit [2]. Alex Rogers, IPSO's Scientific Director [1], is also a Professor in Conservation Biology at the University of Oxford [3].

Paper article is based on: http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/Bijma-et-al-2013.pdf

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Programme_on_the_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoological_Society_of_London

[3] http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/view/rogers_ad.htm



Fake science for the masses

Older article on the issue -

"The coming centuries may see more ocean acidification than the past 300 million years."

https://pangea.stanford.edu/research/Oceans/GES205/Caldeira_...

It seems to me, 300 million is used a lot since it's the period scientists can measure?

Probably it's gotten caught up in some sort of quote that we are heading to a time where it's higher than 300 million.

It wasn't hard to intuitively know the article is dodgy, it jumped between acidification, to pollution, to over fishing, not really related topics.


What is 'fake' or 'dodgy' about the article? You haven't actually specified what problems you have with it.

Acidification, pollution and overfishing are all related if you care about ocean biodiversity or about the economic impacts of the collapse of fisheries.

A much more recent article than your 10 year old one: http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/Honisch_et_al_2012_Science_oc...

Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. In contrast, the geological record contains long-term evidence for a variety of global environmental perturbations, including ocean acidification plus their associated biotic responses. We review events exhibiting evidence for elevated atmospheric CO2, global warming, and ocean acidification over the past ~300 million years of Earth’s history, some with contemporaneous extinction or evolutionary turnover among marine calcifiers. Although similarities exist, no past event perfectly parallels future projections in terms of disrupting the balance of ocean carbonate chemistry—a consequence of the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.


Well ocean acidification is real and proven. At this point all we're arguing about is how many years we have left.


This is certainly true, but amount matters. If its 300 years then we have a problem, if its 3000, maybe not so much. Articles like this do not help give perspective.


Not at all ... if the acidification is moving some positive feedback loops (and it seems it is) we have much less.


There are almost no positive feedback loops in nature, for the simple reason that they tend to get triggered by random variations and feedback on themself till they reach limit and convert to negative loops.


Try Siberian bog swamps releasing an amount of methane with effects equal to the US yearly emissions.


"The fact that the ice core records do not seem full of methane spikes due to high-latitude sources makes it seem like the real world is not as sensitive as we were able to set the model up to be."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/01/much-a...


Actually since ocean acidification provides a chemical power source for protozoa, we probably only have a year or two before one of the species adapts and brings it back to it's previous level by harvesting the energy in it. That will allow one of those species to rapidly spread, which is exactly what we want in this case.

Trying to fix it using any kind of non-self-replicating technology is, imho, a non-starter.


Unless its a species that ends up doing more harm than good. Like huge swarms of jellyfish.





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