Ocean acidification and iron: bad for phytoplankton

Acidifying Ocean May Stifle Phytoplankton - Science News

Some people argue that increased CO2 will result in more phytoplankton blooms, which will help sink more CO2 to the bottom of the sea.

One study that appeared a couple of weeks ago in Science suggests that this may not happen due to the lower water pH that the increased CO2 is definitely already causing:

Research by oceanographer Dalin Shi and his colleagues at Princeton University hints that rising CO₂, instead of providing extra nutrients for phytoplankton, may actually curb the growth of these organisms, which form the base of the ocean’s food chain. The team reports these findings online January 14 and in an upcoming Science.

In their tests, the researchers studied how acidification, a decline in ocean pH, affects the ability of phytoplankton to take up dissolved iron, another nutrient required for growth. The scientists measured growth rates of four species of the marine microorganisms — including two that Shi described as “the lab rats of phytoplankton” — in ocean water with pH values that ranged from 8.8 to 7.7. On average, the pH of ocean surface waters today is about 8.08, says Shi.

Across large swaths of the ocean, phytoplankton are already starved for iron, Shi says. And the team’s research suggests that acidification will make things worse: If ocean pH drops by about 0.3 units over the next century — the acidification expected if CO₂ emission trends continue — iron uptake by phytoplankton could drop by between 10 and 20 percent, the data suggest. Ironically, even though more-acidic waters are able to hold increased amounts of dissolved iron, a larger percentage of that nutrient would be chemically bound to organic matter dissolved in the water and therefore unavailable to nourish phytoplankton, Shi says.

Earth defence underfunded

Detecting and countering near-Earth objects that could threaten Earth underfunded, according to report

We need a nice, smallish asteroid hit somewhere relatively harmless and leave a gigantic smoldering hole in the ground to focus the minds of government into properly funding this useful activity.

Sensible one day, idiot the next

Wanted: Tony Blair for war crimes. Arrest him and claim your reward | George Monbiot

George Monbiot provides a spectacular example of how you never trust a pundit on absolutely everything.

He's been reasonably impressive on climate change, and came across on the Lateline "debate" last year with Ian Plimer as rational and calm.  Yet when it comes to the Iraq War, he's idiotic enough to do this:

So today I am launching a website – www.arrestblair.org – whose purpose is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen's arrest of the former prime minister. I have put up the first £100, and I encourage you to match it. Anyone meeting the rules I've laid down will be entitled to one quarter of the total pot: the bounties will remain available until Blair faces a court of law. The higher the ­reward, the greater the number of ­people who are likely to try.

At this stage the arrests will be largely symbolic, though they are likely to have great political resonance. But I hope that as pressure builds up and the crime of aggression is adopted by the courts, these attempts will help to press ­governments to prosecute. There must be no hiding place for those who have committed crimes against peace. No ­civilised country can allow mass ­murderers to move on.

Increasing global temperatures must be affecting his judgement.

Garnaut on "where to now"?

Better an imperfect scheme than delay

In a very long speech, Ross Garnaut talks about the options available for an ETS or carbon tax.

If you skip the irrelevant cricket analogy, it's quite interesting.

He still supports an ETS, but it would seem he has warmed more towards a carbon tax.

The first Australians: bad environmentalists

Early humans wiped out Australia's giants : Nature News

Heh heh heh. According to Nature, the evidence that the first humans here killed off Australian mega fauna (either by huntingg, or by changing the environment by burning, or both) has been getting stronger over the last decade:

Richard Roberts, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and biologist Barry Brook, of the University of Adelaide, Australia, say in a commentary⁴ in Science that "human impact was likely the decisive factor", possibly through hunting of young megafauna. Increased aridity during the last Ice Age might have reinforced this effect, but Australian megafauna were well adapted to dry conditions because they had survived repeated droughts in the past, they say.

Chris Johnson, an ecologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, says the direct dates from Cuddie Springs mean the site now "falls in line with a mass of other evidence" for the rapid extinction of the Australian megafauna between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago.

I also note that Nature also uses this term:

Some have proposed that the ancestors of Australian Aborigines, who reached the continent between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago, rapidly hunted the animals to extinction.

Will modern day aborigines use this to distinguish themselves from those who did the killing 40,000 years ago? It would be interesting if they did, given that they like to claim a culture going back that far, when it suits them.

Ocean acidification continues

USF Study Shows First Direct Evidence of Ocean Acidification

Actually, that headline is misleading, in that studies off Hawaii and Iceland have already shown acidification at the rate predicted. The new point about this study is that it covered a wide area of ocean instead of looking at just one spot.

The abstract of the paper is not too long, and I may as well repeat it here:

Global ocean acidification is a prominent, inexorable change associated with rising levels of atmospheric CO₂. Here we present the first basin-wide direct observations of recently declining pH, along with estimates of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic contributions to that signal. Along 152°W in the North Pacific Ocean (22–56°N), pH changes between 1991 and 2006 were essentially zero below about 800 m depth. However, in the upper 500 m, significant pH changes, as large as −0.06, were observed. Anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic contributions over the upper 800 m are estimated to be of similar magnitude. In the surface mixed layer (depths to ∼100 m), the extent of pH change is consistent with that expected under conditions of seawater/atmosphere equilibration, with an average rate of change of −0.0017/yr. Future mixed layer changes can be expected to closely mirror changes in atmospheric CO₂, with surface seawater pH continuing to fall as atmospheric CO₂ rises.

Yay for hand-drawn

Leap of faith: The Princess and the Frog - Features, Films - The Independent

Yesterday the family saw The Princess and the Frog, and it's great.

As the above article notes, it's clear that the animators, being given this opportunity to revive the art, really went out of their way to make an absolutely georgeous looking film. I can't remember any of the big hits of the Disney 1980's period being so impressive simply as art.

The story is just pitch perfect too. It updates old Disney themes in a way that is not too pandering to modern culture, and although it is again a female protagonist (it nearly always is in Disney musicals) it's not really as "girly" a film in its romantic themes as I recall, say, Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid.

The songs are by Randy Newman, and some reviews complain they are, at best, only serviceable, but I found it something of a relief not to have the old style gush suddenly surfacing (again, think of some of the songs from the two movies I just mentioned.) They all seemed pleasant songs to me.

Go see it. (It's an excellent date movie even if you don't have kids.)

Widely ignored advice

Dealing with ear wax - Health & Wellbeing

I have always found it hard to credit doctors' advice (repeated in the story linked above) that using cotton buds to clean out ear wax is not a good idea. The rate at which people's ears make the stuff seems to vary widely, and I suppose if your ears don't get itchy and feeling sticky at the entrance within a few of days of the last cleaning, you may not have a problem.

But for me, it is pretty much unimaginable that I wouldn't get in there with a cotton bud at least every few days. In summer, they seem to need it more often. And surely that purpose is behind about 90% of cotton bud sales, so I am sure I am not on my own.

Maybe the doctors' advice is based on them all investing in companies that make wax softening products, as well as the "money for nothing" consultation fees for syringing out the ears of those patients who do take their advice.

There should be an enquiry into this scandal.

Serves them right

Mercury levels of whale-eating town's residents 10 times average

Japan Times has run stories about the high level of mercury in Japanese whale meat for years, but it's never been especially clear to me as to how much attention it has received in the Japanese press.  But this is surely important news that should get their attention:

Levels of mercury in hair samples of residents of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, which is known for customarily eating small whales caught by coastal whaling, are about 10 times the average in Japan, possibly due to consumption of whale meat with high concentration of mercury, one of researchers who conducted the survey said Thursday.... 
 
The survey showed the average total mercury levels in the men’s and women’s hair samples were 21.6 parts per million and 11.9 ppm, respectively, while the levels of average Japanese men and women are 2.55 ppm and 1.43 ppm, he said...

Endo expressed alarm that contamination levels among some of the residents appeared to be high enough to develop health problems according to oversea standards.
   
‘‘It’s necessary to conduct more detailed research on their health conditions and the current status of contamination,’’ he said. ‘‘We should also make efforts to curb consumption of whale meat which is highly contaminated with mercury.’‘

But women priests will keep it so relevant

Church of England attendance falls for fifth year in row | World news | guardian.co.uk

As reported above:

The average weekly attendance in 2008 fell to 1.145 million from 1.16 million in 2007, while the average Sunday attendance fell from 978,000 in 2007 to 960,000 in 2008.

This is despite attempts to be relevant such as:

...allowing children to be baptised at the same time as their parents' marriage.

It would be a fair bet that the parents who lived together, had kids and then decided to get the all-in-one special of marriage and baptism will next only next be a church for a funeral.

Blockage

Overweight? Then you’ll have to buy two seats - News & Advice, Travel - The Independent

Have a look at the photo that accompanies this article. It is claimed to be genuine, and it if is, it surely highlights the fact that the morbidly obese on aircraft is a safety issue if they are not able to take up two seats.

Interestingly, Australian airlines claim it is not necessary to have a policy on it:

A spokeswoman for Virgin Blue said most overweight people who did not fit into one seat were aware of the problem, and many bought two seats for their own comfort.

''There is no formal policy'', the spokeswoman said.

''However, if a guest does not fit into a seat on a full flight they will be moved to the next available flight, and we have no plans to follow the example of Air France-KLM,'' she said.

A spokeswoman for Qantas said the airline did everything it could to meet the needs of customers.

''Should a customer require extra space on a flight, we seat them next to an empty seat where possible,'' she said.

''However, the only way for a customer to guarantee extra space is to either purchase two economy seats or fly business or first class.

Those who think they don't have a problem fitting into a seat must cause some problems from time to time, though.

Uncertainties detailed

The real holes in climate science : Nature News

It would appear that "climategate" (and perhaps now the Himalaya glacier mistake in the IPCC report) has led to some prominent climate scientists sounding humbler. Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has been sounding more modest lately, and he features prominently in the above article, which I hope Nature keeps available for some time.

It's a very good explanation of those areas of climate science which are still poorly understand and/or subject to very uncertain predictions. In short, they are:

1. regional climate predictions,
2. the effect on precipitation,
3. the role of aerosols, and
4. use of proxies for past climate reconstructions.

The short story is: the atmosphere is really, really complicated, and building accurate models of its behaviour on the scale needed for good regional predictions is very, very hard.

I think this probably goes against the modern intuition, at least of younger people who use computers all the time. I suspect that even the use of sophisticated games software, which deal with thousand of options and combinations and seem to create incredibly detailed "worlds" inside a mere household computer, gives the false impression that modelling a column of air (and extending it globally) could not be so hard.

So it is good now and again to be reminded that big uncertainties remain.

But: the big danger of articles like this is that, as we all know, AGW deniers will use absolutely any mistake (no matter how minor) or admission of lack of knowledge to claim that it is totally rubbish and unreliable.

The Nature article does have short "box" on enduring climate change myths, but it just deals with them briefly.

Of course, what deniers also miss is that there is (as far as I know) no particular reason to assume that the areas in which knowledge are still lacking are all matters which will eventually be resolved in a way relatively harmless for humanity. They could all be matters which end up worse than current predictions.

The other issue that people always forget is ocean acidification, about which I have not posted for a while, but there is plenty of new material out there. I remain strongly of the view that it alone is reason to stop CO2 as soon as possible, as it is extremely difficult to tell where the ecological changes that will bring will take us.

Super cool power

No more power lines? / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Interesting article here on superconducting power cables, which sound to be more advanced that I would have guessed:

A tour of American Superconductor’s factory found the company creating flat metal tape out of “high-temperature superconducting” (HTS) oxide materials and costly silver, then slicing it into thin flat strips. The strips wrap around a pipe carrying liquid nitrogen, which cools the cable to minus 346 degrees Fahrenheit....

Cost, however, has long been a major issue. However, the price gap is closing, American Superconductor says. A 1,000-mile length of superconducting cable capable of carrying 5,000 megawatts would cost about $8 million to $13 million per mile, a recent company white paper says. That’s about on par with the 
$7 million to $10 million cost per mile for an equivalent conventional 765 kilovolt line.

I wonder what happens if the nitrogen supply leaks. The article says that being below ground, the cables are more terrorist proof, but I wouldn't be so sure.

Credibility gap

Rape case puts sharia police in difficult position | The Jakarta Post

A group of sharia police personnel unusually just sit in the back of a pick-up patrol vehicle while making the rounds in downtown Banda Aceh, Aceh province, on Monday.

No raid is conducted that day at beauty salons or other public places considered prone to sharia (Islamic law) violations. No stern actions are taken or arrests made that day.

“We are decreasing the intensity of raids these days,” Aminah, the spokeswoman for the Banda Aceh female sharia police force, said.

The credibility of sharia police in the province has been completely, and rightly, destroyed following the rape of a university student by three sharia police officers last week.

“Because of this case we don’t dare warn or advise people in violation of sharia law. They will fight back and insult us if we do so. It’s better to keep a low profile at the moment,” Aminah said.

The article goes on to note that there is quite a popular movement to get sharia police banned in Aceh.

Whipped up in an hour?

Dezeen - Lad Musician Nagoya by General Design

I love it when architects come up with a concrete windowless box as a design concept, and then get praise for it. I always suspect the project must get knocked over in an afternoon on the computer.

Bill Gates on reducing CO2

Bill Gates: Why We Need Innovation, Not Insulation

Nothing too complicated here: he simply makes the point that no where near enough is being done in R&D for the necessary long term goals of reducing CO2.

A post viewing recommendation

Flying the Secret Sky: The Story of the RAF Ferry Command

I very much enjoyed this documentary on the ABC a couple of nights ago. It's still available for viewing on ABC iView.

It's always good to learn about aspects of the Second World War which are new to me and make for fascinating stories.

The good oil

Fish oil slows burn of genetic fuse in ageing | Science | The Guardian

Taking fish oil supplements is said to protect against heart disease, improve survival rates after a heart attack, reduce mental decline in old age and help to prevent age-related changes in the eye that can lead to blindness. Research has also shown that rodents live one-third longer when given a diet enriched with fish-derived omega-3.

Although omega-3 fatty acids have powerful anti-inflammatory properties and lower levels of some blood fats, the mechanisms behind these effects are poorly understood. The new research suggests that omega-3 has a direct effect on biological ageing by slowing down the rate at which protective caps on the ends of chromosomes shorten.

The caps, called telomeres, are made from copied strands of DNA and have a similar function to bookends or the plastic ends of shoelaces. They prevent the ends of chromosomes – the "packages" of DNA in the cell nucleus – becoming damaged and keep the DNA organised and contained.

Congratulations - your genitals have rights

'Naked scanners' may breach human rights | News.com.au

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has written to the Government expressing concerns about the proposed installation of the scanners, saying they may violate the right to privacy outlined in the Human Rights Act.

Yes, who would have guessed that my penis has the right not to be viewed on a sketchy black and white headless body image (I understand the systems are planned to obscure the face) by a bored security guard in a remote room who probably has to watch about 3000 images a day.

I hope someone in Britain goes to the Commission over the scandalous human rights issue of public urinals without privacy screens.

Glaciers are confusing!

Well, there's been a lot of media coverage over the IPCC mistake of referring to Himalayas glaciers "disappearing by 2035."

Perhaps the best analysis of how the error evolved is in a comment by Dan following Tim Lambert's post about the controversy. It would appear that the source of the error was in a 1999 India Environmental Port article, which changed a 1996 Russian's rough estimate of how long it would take all glaciers to melt from 2350 to 2035.

New Scientist helped perpetrate the error in a 1999 article, and now claims (wrongly, it appears) that its story was the original source of the error. NS journalist Fred Pearce also says that Indian glaciologist Hasnain had used 2035 in an interview with him. (In New Scientist he says it was an email interview; yet in The Times he is reported as saying it was a telephone interview. If he has the email, I would certainly like to see it. Pearce says Hasnain now admits it was just a rough estimate.)

Pearce's 1999 story claims that the 2035 figure appears in Hasnain's ICSI report, but it's apparently not there at all.

I would like to see directly what Hasnain says about this now. Was he responsible for the error in the Indian Environmental Portal article too? Or is it possible he's "confessing" to something he said in a interview 11 years ago of which he does not have a transcript? (He complains today that he never used 2035 in his research papers, and was never consulted by the IPCC before it used that figure. He's not denying he quoted the figure to Pearce, but I still wonder.)

Anyhow - there is no doubt at all that this is a very, very bad look for the IPCC, especially given IPCC head Pachauri's decision to come out swinging on a clearly wrong figure.

But - that was not really the point of this post. I wanted to note how confusing the whole topic of glaciers (and in particular the effects of their loss) appears to be. In particular, : just how important to Indian rivers is water from glacier melt?

This 2005 Nature report of Barnett & Ors about the dangers to water supply from melting glaciers (and less snow) is an important one. In it, we find in a section talking about the Himalaya-Hindu Kush area:

The hydrological cycle of the region is complicated by the Asian monsoon, but there is little doubt that melting glaciers provide a key source of water for the region in the summer months: as much as 70% of the summer flow in the Ganges and 50–60% of the flow in other major rivers[40,41,42]. In China, 23% of the population lives in the western regions, where glacial melt provides the principal dry season water source[43].

This figure in bold sounds very high, but is repeated in many other places, although I won't link to them now. The references supporting the claim are not available for free online, and the abstracts at least don't seem to repeat it.

On the other hand, Science has quoted a note by an American hydrologist Donald Alford, the purpose of which is:

... to present the results of a preliminary analysis of the hydrologic contribution of the 5000 -7000+ m altitudinal belt of the Nepal Himalaya to the annual streamflow volume of the major rivers of Nepal, and to assess the hydrologic role of the glaciers within this belt.

His conclusion (although it appears to be a very tentative one, pretty much a "back of the envelope" calculation I reckon) is that glacier melt only accounts for 4% of total annual streamflow of the rivers of Nepal. (I think all Nepalese rivers end up in the Ganges.)

Big difference, it seems. Is the issue that:

The Indus and Ganges Rivers currently have little outflow to the sea during the dry season

as stated in an interesting recent study that found one Himalayan glacier seems to have put on no "weight" since the 1950's, since there was no radioactive layer from the atom bomb tests at that time. (So, if the Ganges has little outflow at all in the dry season, might it be that a very small feed from glacier melt might still account for 70% of it?)

The point of this "nuclear glacier" paper is that loss of glacier volume may be occurring by "high elevation thinning", and this has not been taken into account when working out rates of glacier loss. But, then, at the same time I have to admit that the paper repeats the mistake that:

The surface area of glaciers across the TP is projected to decrease from 500,000 km2 measured in 1995 to 100,000 km2 in 2030

when it should have been (see Dan's comment above) 2350.

Furthermore, someone in comments at Real Climate has linked to some background notes used at the recent AGU conference for a press presentation which has lots of relevant information. (Be warned, it is a very big .pdf file.)

This is actually well worth reading carefully. They point out that Himalayan glaciers are behaving differently in different zones, but overall they are losing mass. Their estimate of the average rate of Himalayan glacier loss (measured by area, not volume, I think) is anywhere from .05% to .01% per annum (see page 14). If the higher rate is true (although they seem to think it unlikely) that would be 20% loss in 40 years. (Total loss in about 200 or so years, then, I guess; which isn't so far off the 350 years that we earlier mentioned.)

But as to the effect on water supply of Indian generally, the conclusion (see page 42) is:

As we have calculated, melting glaciers (specifically, negative mass balance components of the melt) contribute an estimated 1.2% (perhaps factor of 2 uncertain) of total runoff of three of the most important drainages, the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra combined. The seasonal flow regulation influences and the negative mass balance is more important in local drainages close to the glacier sources, where glaciers can dominate the hydrology in arid regions, but on the scale of the subcontinent, glaciers are secondary players in looming hydrologic problems, which stem more from population growth and inefficiency of water resource distribution and application.

So, there are some mighty confusing figures being flung around as to how important or unimportant glacier melt is to Indian water supply.

Is it possible that the very high figure of 70% of the summer flow of the Ganges (as mentioned in the Barnett Nature paper) is actually including basin snow melt and not just glacier melt? That could explain a lot. If climate change reduces snow in those areas, it may well be much more important issue than glacier melt, at least further downstream. And the title of the Barnett article is, after all: Potential impacts of a warming climate on water availability in snow-dominated regions.

Besides which, even without worrying about snow and glaciers, at least one study (and I am sure there are more) suggests climate change:

could influence monsoon dynamics and cause less summer precipitation, a delay in the start of monsoon season and longer breaks between the rainy periods.

The reliance of India on the monsoon is pretty remarkable:

The summer monsoons are responsible for approximately 75% of the total annual rainfall in major parts of the region and produce almost 90% of India's water supply, he said.

Anyhow, despite all this reading, I still remain quite confused on the issue. Glaciologists and hydrologists seem to have done a pretty bad job at dealing with the issue without confusing themselves, as well as the public.