Monterey Bay Research Head - Oceans Absorbing Acidifying CO2 At 1 Million Metric Tons Every Hour

[hatrack]

Greenhouse emissions' warming effect on the atmosphere is bad enough, but their bigger threat is the ecological chaos they are causing as the world's oceans become more acidic, according to a marine scientist.

Oceans are absorbing the glut of atmospheric carbon dioxide - stemming from two centuries of rampant burning of fossil fuels - at the rate of 1 million metric tons an hour. Reacting with seawater, the absorbed carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid and throws marine chemistry out of whack. Without a major effort to curb emissions, massive die-off will occur in coral reefs, the shells of crucial mollusk species will dissolve and key marine plant life, which produces half the world's atmospheric oxygen, will disappear, Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist who heads California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, said at the University of Utah as part of the Frontiers of Science lecture series.

The decisions you make, even though you live 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean, impact the oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface," McNutt said.

Climate change has a far greater impact on the oceans than the atmosphere because oceans have absorbed 30 times more anthropogenic heat than have the skies, disrupting circulation patterns and the oceans' ability to

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http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_8165160

[hunter]

1. No place to hide anymore.

No wilderness far away.

[Dead_Parrot]

2. ...

"Climate change has a far greater impact on the oceans than the atmosphere because oceans have absorbed 30 times more anthropogenic heat than have the skies, disrupting circulation patterns and the oceans' ability to EDIT"

I hadn't realised you were an ocean, Hatrack.

:hide:

[hatrack]

3. "Oh, you were finished? Well allow me to retort!"

. . . moderate the weather, she said. Thermal expansion accounts for a far greater portion of rising sea levels than melting ice."

:toast:

[phantom power]

4. I feel a terrible hurt coming on.

[Nihil]

5. The sooner the better.

That way at least it isn't just the children who will suffer from the
greed of the current & preceding generation ...