News today that climate change is going to kill off all the little fishies off Alaska. The rise in atmospheric CO2 leads to a similar rise in the ocean where it forms carbonic acid and thus reduces the alkalinity of the water making it hard for various species to operate. This ending up with a reduction in fish as the lower parts of the food chain suffer. The part of all of this that we might have difficulty getting our heads around is that there's a known technique to deal with this problem: it's just that the UN insists that we don't use it. Odd that we're not actually allowed to do something that will mitigate both climate change itself and also alleviate one of the effects of it. The story about the fishies is here:
Alaska’s fishing industry could soon be threatened by increasing ocean acidity, says an NOAA-led study to be published in the journal Progress in Oceanography. The acidification is due to increasing carbon dioxide release, which is absorbed by the ocean
Molluscs, such as the aforementioned Red King crab may struggle in acidic water, and find it difficult to maintain their shells and skeletons. As well as this, it has previously been shown in studies that Red King crabs die in highly acidic water, and both it and the Tanner crab grow more slowly in acidic water.
Alaska is particularly threatened by ocean acidification for a number of reasons: cold water will absorb more carbon dioxide than warm water, communities in certain parts of Alaska, namely the South-East and the South-West are reliant on fishing, and there are fewer other job opportunities in these areas than other parts of the state.
OK, is there anything we can do to deal with this?
When a chartered fishing boat strewed 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the ocean off western Canada last July, the goal was to supercharge the marine ecosystem. The iron was meant to fertilize plankton, boost salmon populations and sequester carbon. Whether the ocean responded as hoped is not clear, but the project has touched off an explosion on land, angering scientists, embarrassing a village of indigenous people and enraging opponents of geoengineering.
The iron did fertilise plankton, there was an algal bloom, fish numbers increased and at least some of that carbonic acid was removed from the local waters, all at the same time. There was even some amount of the CO2 being deposited as nascent rock on the ocean floor and thus it being sequestrated for geologic periods of time. All in all it sounds like a most wonderful technology really, doesn't it?
The project was also on uncertain legal grounds. Ocean fertilization is restricted by a voluntary international moratorium on geoengineering, as well as a treaty on ocean pollution. Both agreements include exemptions for research, and the treaty calls on national environment agencies to regulate experiments. Officials from Environment Canada say that the agency warned project leaders in May that ocean fertilization would require a permit.
Other than this, probably illegal, experiment the last official one was done 10 years ago. It's just great that everyone's working so hard to find even a partial solution to what we're generally told is the greatest problem of our times, isn't it?
We've spoken to one of those who studied, in detail, that last official experiment and there's no doubt that it works, would be extremely cheap and is capable of not only increasing fish numbers but also of sequestering some 1 gigatonne a year of CO2 into rock. But the powers that be won't let anyone actually do it and there are no further officially approved experiments in the pipeline either. It's almost as if people don't want solutions to climate change, isn't it?