From the tiny Earth file, we learn via the Daily Sceptic of a Daily Mail story about how “Last August, 65,000 litres of bright red chemicals were pumped into the Gulf of Maine – yet this wasn’t an enormous industrial disaster. Instead, it was a controversial geoengineering experiment that scientists claim could help to slow down global warming.” Now you can just imagine what people would say if some unauthorized group were dumping some speculative sludge into the water for almost any other purpose. But oddly this group was authorized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and was from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The plan, so to speak, is to make the water more alkaline so it will absorb more CO2. Which manages to combine a preposterously small chance of success with hugely ominous consequences if it worked. What could go wrong?
The whole thing is totally bizarre. For instance, the Daily Mail writes with a straight typeface that:
“In theory, the novel approach could solve two problems at once by locking away excess CO2 from the atmosphere and fixing the oceans’ rising acidity. Without an ‘antacid’ like sodium hydroxide to react with, CO2 dissolving in the oceans forms a mild acid that has slowly but surely reduced the pH level. This is already having catastrophic effects on sea life, as the acid dissolves marine creatures’ shells, damages coral, and even wears away sharks’ teeth.”
Catastrophic. Bosh. Toothless sharks are not swimming about the bleached bones of coral reefs in starving hordes.
Also bosh to “a mild acid”. It’s true that bubbling CO2 through neutral water forms carbonic acid, and that carbonic acid is mild. (We did it in high school chemistry with just a straw, then measured it with litmus paper. It worked.) But the oceans are mildly alkaline, around 8.1 on the pH scale.
Also bosh to:
“Over the next few days, the scientists measured 10 tonnes of carbon entering the water as the pH increased from 7.95 to 8.3 – matching pre–industrial levels.”
Double bosh, in fact. First this inane use of “pre-industrial” to refer to a tiny slice of very recent history when the whole of Earth’s past before 1776 is “pre-industrial” and the pH of the oceans varied dramatically during it.
The EPA actually has the gall to say:
“Ocean acidity has increased about 25% from pre-1700’s to the early 21st century, a pace faster than any known in Earth’s geologic past.”
The problem here isn’t just that they have no way of knowing what kinds of fluctuations over geologically extremely brief periods like four centuries happened in the past, though they must certainly do not. What proxies are they using to estimate it in, say, the Jurassic, and how long did they take to form?
The problem here is that “acidity has increased about 25%”. What does it even mean, especially as the ocean is not “acidic” at all, it’s alkaline. And 25% of what? The pH scale is logarithmic (so a change of one integer means a 10-fold change in the concentration, of hydrogen, or hydroxyl ions on the pOH scale). So is 25% a 2.5-fold change in concentration? A .25-fold change? Who knows? But it sure sounds so good they repeat it:
“Each decrease of one pH unit is a ten-fold increase in acidity. This means that the acidity of the ocean today, on average, is about 25% greater than it was prior to the 1700’s.”
Despite not being acidic.
Also they say it’s now around pH 8.1, down from 8.2 “Prior to the 1700’s”, another of those dopey statements that imply, falsely, that prior to the 1700s it was the same all the way back to, say, the Devonian, which they cannot possibly believe and should not say.
One author of a paleo study says three to four billion years ago it was “somewhere between 6.0 and 7.5 – between that of milk and human blood”. But with that big a range it’s clear they have no real idea. They certainly don’t know if it went up and down.
Other studies, which mysteriously all seem to focus on how extra CO2 in the atmosphere caused a spike in acidity causing mass extinction almost as if you’d never get a research grant otherwise, certainly believe that ocean pH was neither constant nor identical to 17th-century figures. Even “Skeptical science”, which is anything but, says:
“When we look back through the geological record, we see that for much of the last 500 million years there was an abundance of life in the oceans and that atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher than today for the vast majority of that time. Though it may seem counterintuitive, especially considering that ocean pH was lower than present-day, the ancient oceans were generally more hospitable to marine calcification (building shells or skeletons of calcium carbonate) than they are now [Arvidson et al (2013)].”
Second, they didn’t measure it. How would you measure 10 tonnes of CO2 going out of the air into the water over the surface area involved? With a membrane and molecule counters?
No, of course not. They used various estimates of what would happen to determine what had happened and by golly the same method run twice gave the same results, just as a prediction the first time and a conclusion the second.
Checking a model against itself is naïve, at best. But the bosh supreme deluxe here is the claim that:
“Over four days, scientists added vast quantities of sodium hydroxide – an alkaline chemical tagged with a red dye – to the waters off the coast of Boston.”
We believe it was NaOH and that it had red dye. But vast?
If you want vast, consider that the world’s oceans are estimated to hold 1.37 billion cubic kilometers of water, 97.5% of Earth’s total, or weighing some 1.4 x 10^18 tonnes, since a litre of water weighs a kilogram or very nearly. Thus one cubic kilometer of water weighs 1 trillion kilograms and contains a trillion litres, of which that 65,000 litres is 0.0000065%. But that’s just one cubic kilometer. The oceans hold 1.37 billion of them, so that red splash is… uh… 4.7445255e-15% of the total. As in nothing.
What complex reactions may be unleashed by a brief local decrease in alkalinity we do not know and neither do they. But the key point is scale, as the item eventually admits:
“In the best-case scenario, the researchers estimate that the sodium hydroxide would absorb about 50 tonnes of carbon over the next year, equivalent to the average yearly emissions of five UK citizens.”
Since the UK has around 70 million citizens, you’d need 14 million times that dose to offset all of theirs, which are in turn a tiny fraction of the planet’s human emissions. Don’t get us started on where you’d get that much sodium hydroxide or the carbon footprint of manufacturing it. Or the impact on local sea life if you did dump 910 billion tonnes of sodium hydroxide into the water every year.
Especially since “sodium hydroxide, also known as lye and caustic soda” is:
“a highly corrosive base and alkali that decomposes lipids and proteins at ambient temperatures, and may cause severe chemical burns at high concentrations.”
The sort of thing factory owners would go to jail for releasing into waterways in much smaller amounts than this dose. And it would be pollution in an angling stream. But in the Pacific Ocean? Hoo hah!
As the Daily Mail says:
“the oceans already hold around 38,000 billion tonnes of CO2, trapped as dissolved sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda.”
Also known as 38 trillion tonnes. So dissolving an extra 10 tonnes isn’t even clever and it certainly isn’t significant. But, finally, what if it were?
Geoengineers rushing in where angels fear to tread, what if the long, slow and profoundly ominous decline in atmospheric CO2, nearly to the point of annihilating most plant life during the Last Glacial Maximum some 20,000 years ago, is actually driven by the relentless sequestration of carbon in the oceans by calciferous critters, as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore says? If so, the tendency of slightly less alkaline water to dissolve their shells is vital to the biosphere, and the result of this experiment , in the unlikely event that it worked along the lines of its designers’ dreams, would be to accelerate the extinction of practically all life on Earth.
Why would anyone want that outcome?
Given that the marine carbonate production of the last half-billion years has resulted in Limestone and other carbonates amounting to 8% of the Earth's crust (think Rocky Mountains) the surface runoff alone tends to buffer a lot, perhaps all? new carbonic acid.