Shifting Baselines : Ocean Assification

The Shifting Baselines Blog

Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

Scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.

August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.

July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.

July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.

July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.

July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card

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Ocean Assification

Category: New Research
Posted on: November 18, 2007 4:26 PM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

Last week, I heard zoologist Chris Harley speak on how climate change will affect intertidal diversity along our rocky shores. There was a typo in his poster ("acification" instead of "acidification") and he said he would like to officially coin assification for what we're collectively doing to the oceans (climate change, pollution, overfishing, etc.). Well, today there is greater consensus for ocean acifidication and, therefore, ocean assification.

A report completed yesterday by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that increasingly acidic oceans due to climate change might just be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans seen for 20 million years.

I have some numbers from a talk by Alana Mitchell, a journalist researching a book about large-scale system shifts in our ocean. Carbon dioxide levels in the ocean were historically around 280ppm. Today they're 381 ppm. Historically, the pH of the ocean was 8.20 while today ocean pH is 8.05. The IPCC predicts that, by 2050, oceans will have a pH of 7.6.

Ocean acidification is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans. More acid destroys the protective shells of calciferous organisms, like molluscs, and is detrimental to plankton and corals. Ocean acidification is also expected, in snowball style, to worsen the effects of climate change.

Read more on the report and its political implications (i.e., we really need the U.S. and China to act) at The Independent.

Find more posts in: Environment

Comments

Ocean acidification due to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations is bad enough on its own, but some people want to push the trend even further by actually dumping CO2 into the sea: possibly through methods as crude as heaving blocks of dry ice off boats.

Posted by: Milan | November 18, 2007 4:49 PM

Great post, Milan. Worse still, they'll expect to be PAID for their services (by way of carbon credits) and will tuck the carbon they burn in the entire process out of sight...

Posted by: Jennifer L. Jacquet | November 18, 2007 4:53 PM

And yet others will try to gain attention by coining new words like, "assification," just to exploit the situation. CO2 brings out the worst in all of us.

Posted by: Randy Olson | November 18, 2007 7:32 PM

How optimistic are you about geological sequestration? Do you think it will prove cost-effective for large fixed emitters (like power plants)?

Posted by: Milan | November 18, 2007 7:32 PM

Randy Olson. You wouldn't even have read this post if it hadn't had that word in it...

Can't let carbon dioxide get us too down. Or too rich. I did my M.S. on carbon sequestration before it was made hip with new phrases like 'carbon credits' (any phrase with 'credit' in it appeals to the American soul), 'carbon offsets', and that dirty 'assification'. My advisor then spoke of Logs in Space (LIS) as the best sequestration idea. Imagine, we could grow trees (forestry is good) and launch them into outerspace (funding NASA is good) and save the world for a hefty price (money is VERY good). I hate to rain on the parade, but I tend not to be optimistic about anything that doesn't require sacrifice at some level.

Posted by: Jennifer L. Jacquet | November 18, 2007 7:40 PM

p.s. That's acid rain on the parade, by the way.

Posted by: Jennifer L. Jacquet | November 18, 2007 7:42 PM

What if we renamed "carbon emissions" as "carbon Britney sex" -- then people would feel good when it's talked about and it would get the most hits on the internet. I think Frank Luntz would be impressed.

Posted by: Randy Olson | November 18, 2007 7:57 PM

Jennifer,

The logs idea occurred to me, as well, though I think it would be a lot easier to cut down whatever trees grow fastest, encase them in something airtight, and bury them as deeply as possible. Then, let the forest regrow and repeat.

Of course, this whole song and dance would have other ecological effects. It is probably a lot more sensible to deal with emissions head on.

P.S. Did you notice that the Summary for Policymakers for the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Review (released on Saturday) has a short section on ocean acidification?

Posted by: Milan | November 19, 2007 8:33 AM

Good graphics on this page:

http://www.pacificscience.org/tfoceanacidification.html

Posted by: Jimbo | November 19, 2007 2:30 PM

#10

Thanks! Cool graphics indeed. Isn't it bizarre, though, that everyone keeps using that globe of the changes to the 1990s (it's even up on Wiki)? I considered using it but it's more than a decade old. Wonder who is responsible for the update...

Posted by: Jennifer L. Jacquet | November 19, 2007 3:36 PM

#11

I'd check with PMEL CO2. They link over to http://www.ocean-acidification.net/ (with other good graphics, including the bleak outlook for pteropods) but they don't have a new pH change map.

Posted by: Jimbo | November 20, 2007 7:33 AM