Here's an odd article but very detailed and interesting for our understanding of the carbon cycle. I've always wanted a detailed explanation of how phytoplankton convert atmospheric CO2 into their skeletons, and how this eventually re-enters either the ocean water (through absorption) or drifts down to the sea bed, where it becomes calcium carbonate (limestone). turns out, the link is "salps" that migrate vertically thousands of feet each day to feed on phytoplankton at the ocean surface. When they die, or when larger fish eat them and they in turn die, the skeletons sink to the ocean floor. Salp blooms take vast amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean every day, and play a role in limiting CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I wonder if stimulating growth of more of these creatures could offset fossil fuel emissions? Anyway, here's the article, courtesy of Yahoo.

Ocean "Gummy Bears" Fight Global Warming

By Robin Lloyd
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Sat Jul 22, 8:15 AM ET

Swarms of lowly thumb-sized ocean creatures that often resemble chains of transparent Gummy Bears play a critical role in transporting a greenhouse gas deep into the deep sea, scientists report.

The semi-transparent barrel-shaped creatures, called salps, emerge by the billions in groups that occupy as much as 38,600 square miles of the sea surface (about the size of the state of Indiana), Laurence Madin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution wrote in a newly published study.

Madin and his colleagues have now estimated that "hotspots" of salps could spell a dead-end for carbon, transporting tons of it daily from the ocean surface to the deep sea and preventing it from re-entering the atmosphere and contributing again to the greenhouse effect and possibly to global warming.

In and out

Scientists have long known that ocean water and marine creatures absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, much of which results from the fossil fuels we burn.

Tiny marine plants called phytoplankton extract the carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide to build their skeletons and shells. Larger ocean animals then eat the phytoplankton. When the animals die or defecate, the carbon dissolves back into the oceans.

Salps are among the larger creatures that eat phytoplankton, consuming up to 74 percent of them from the surface water in a day. The salps then defecate, and their sinking pellets transport up to 4,000 tons of carbon daily to deeper water.

"Salps swim, feed and produce waste continuously," said Madin, who headed up the study recently published in the journal Deep Sea Research. "They take small packages of carbon and make them into big packages that sink fast."

[In a separate study, giant ocean "snot balls" were found to use a different method to same end.]

Round trip

Salps move through water by drawing water in one end and propelling it out the other, sort of like jet propulsion.

Madin and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science have stalked a species of salps, Salpa aspera, along the Eastern Seaboard on at least four occasions over the past 30 or so years. They collected salps with trawling nets and by hand while scuba diving and found that this species can form dense swarms that last for months. With video and other lab methods, they were able to estimate the size of swarms, their feeding rate, their defecation rate and their impact on the local population of phytoplankton.

Previous research showed that these salps swim to dark, deep ocean recesses by day, usually around 2,000 to 2,600 feet deep, and back up to the surface at night—something called vertical migration.

"At the surface, salps can feed on phytoplankton," Madin said. "They may swim down in the day to avoid predators or damaging sunlight."

Surfacing at night allows them to come together for reproduction and multiply quickly when food is abundant, he said.

Deep deposits

The result is that salps release fecal pellets in deep water, where few animals consume them, making them efficient transporters of carbon away from the atmosphere.

Salp pellets can sink even more than half a mile per day. And when they die, salp bodies take carbon down with them, sink rapidly up to a quarter mile a day.

Different species of salps have also been documented in recurring dense swarms in waters off Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, the southeastern United States, the Western Mediterranean Sea, the eastern North Atlantic Ocean and the Southern Ocean.

Scientists still don't know how often salp swarms emerge, but it is clear that they can quickly take advantage of sudden blooms of phytoplankton, efficiently feeding on them with their mucus membrane filters and growing rapidly. Swarms can emerge in just a few weeks, to the point where they interfere with fishing, Madin said.

Gallery: Rich Life Under the Sea Mystery Ocean Glow Confirmed in Satellite Photos Global Warming or Just Hot Air? A Dozen Different Views VIDEO: Goldilocks and the Greenhouse Original Story: Ocean 'Gummy Bears' Fight Global Warming

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Posted by Guy Crittenden at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Associated Press story below is an interesting example of what scientists need to monitor in the next couple of years. I agree with those who say it's jumping to conclusions to say this seabird colony problem is the result of global warming, but it could be, and therefore needs to be tracked seriously. If global warming is real and unfolds as some predict, we're in for a lot more stories like this. This issue of the disruption of the food chain and the disappearance of krill is disturbing. I hope the warming proponents are wrong (because it'll be so awful if they're right).

Warmer waters disrupt Pacific food chain

By MARCUS WOHLSEN, Associated Press Writer

On these craggy, remote islands west of San Francisco, the largest seabird colony in the contiguous United States throbs with life. Seagulls swarm so thick that visitors must yell to be heard above their cries. Pelicans glide.

But the steep decline of one bird species for the second straight year has rekindled scientists' fears that global warming could be undermining the coastal food supply, threatening not just the Farallones but entire marine ecosystems.

Tiny Cassin's auklets live much of their lives on the open ocean. But in spring, these gray-and-white relatives of the puffin venture to isolated Pacific outposts like the Farallones to dig deep burrows and lay their eggs.

Adult auklets usually feed their chicks with krill, the minuscule shrimp-like crustaceans that anchor the ocean's complex food web.

But not this year. Almost none of the 20,000 pairs of Cassin's auklets nesting in the Farallones will raise a chick that lives more than a few days, a repeat of last year's "unprecedented" breeding failure, according to Russ Bradley, a seabird biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory who monitors the birds on the islands.

Scientists blame changes in West Coast climate patterns for a delay in the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters from the ocean's depths for the second year in a row. Weak winds and faltering currents have left the Gulf of the Farallones without krill, on which Cassin's auklets and a variety of other seabirds, fish and mammals depend for food.

"The seas are warmer. And the number of krill being produced is lower," said Bradley as he held a Cassin's auklet chick, the only one from a study of 400 nests he expected to survive.

"Normally we would have hundreds," he said.

The failure of last year's Pacific upwelling killed seabirds from California to British Columbia. Scientists had hoped the change was just a natural temperature fluctuation in what is known as the California Current.

But the return of higher ocean temperatures and scarce food resources this year has scientists wondering whether last year's erratic weather was not a fluke but the emergence of a troubling trend.

"How many years in a row do you see this before you start raising your eyebrows?" said Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Pacific Grove.

Climatologists describe global warming as a worldwide rise in temperatures caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses thought to trap heat in the atmosphere. Predictions of global warming's effects include rising sea levels, fiercer storms, more wildfires and warmer oceans.

Without long-term data, scientists have so far found it difficult to make direct links between specific natural events and global warming.

But the Farallones present a special case. Researchers have kept Cassin's auklet counts there every day since 1967. Never before have they seen such a drop-off in numbers. That decline comes as California ocean temperatures hover three to five degrees above average.

"One of the things that the climate models predict is that we're going to have unpredictable weather, extreme weather, that the whole seasonal cycle of events will not be what we expect," said Bill Peterson, a NOAA oceanographer in Newport, Ore. "We aren't seeing normal patterns."

Perhaps nowhere is this ecological disruption felt more than here on the Farallones, a 200-acre island chain often described as California's Galapagos. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service keeps the national wildlife refuge closed to visitors except for a small group of scientists and volunteers who live there year-round.

The krill-dependent whales and salmon that inhabit the surrounding waters have not appeared to suffer from the changes in food supply. But during a visit to the islands this summer, scientists pointed to other species feeling the consequences.

The absence of krill has led to a collapse of the juvenile rockfish population. This is the main food source for young of the common murre, a bird that resembles a flying penguin. Though the murre has made a dramatic comeback recently, with about 200,000 adults nesting on the islands this year, nearly three-quarters of murres breeding this year are not expected to raise chicks that survive.

"At this point it's way too late in the season for the birds to initiate another attempt at breeding," said Peter Warzybok, a Farallones-based biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. "They'll just have to wait around for next year and hope that it's better."

Significant drops in murre and Cassin's auklet numbers occurred during the El Nino years of 1983 and 1992, when warmer Pacific waters near the equator upset weather patterns worldwide.

A January conference of more than 40 climatologists, oceanographers, and wildlife biologists issued a report describing last year's altered coastal climate as El Nino-like conditions in a non-El Nino year. Some researchers have given the new climate shift its own name: "El Coyote."

The report said a "ridge" of winter air blocking winds from the Gulf of Alaska lingered more than two months longer than normal in 2005, which delayed the upwelling until well past the birds' breeding seasons.

"It's not just a local effect," Schwing said. "It's related to global-scale changes in atmospheric circulation."

But it could take researchers another decade to determine whether global warming caused those changes. Some climatologists warn against drawing overly broad conclusions from only two years of unusual weather.

Definitive results are "not around the corner," said Nick Bond, a research meteorologist the University of Washington who has studied the upwelling's failure.

"We just don't know how much the deck is stacked" by the effects of global climate change, Bond said. "It's hard to tell from just a deal or two."

But whatever the cause, the ecological outcome if the trend continues is already clear, according to scientists.

The Cassin's auklet is unlikely to adapt to the sudden loss of its main food source. And other animals could follow, Schwing said.

In the worst case, he said, "we could see a great depression of the entire ecosystem."

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The only thing I don't like about the fact that I'm taking the kids camping this sunny weekend is the fact that I'll have to wait until next week to view the new documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car (directed and written by Chris Paine and narrated by Martin Sheen). You can read reviews in the weekend papers or on internet sites like Yahoo's movie section. I saw the trailer when I went to see the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth, and am fascinated that there was once (and fairly recently) a real working emissions-free electric car named the EV1 from GM that it took off the market (by repossessing every last one -- they were only sold via lease arrangements). I don't know the reason, but the trailer for the film suggests it was a sort of conspiracy of Big Oil and other business and political interests (which actually makes sense). With fear of global warming, it's likely such a vehicle will re-emerge, although perhaps not from the United States. Yet it could be a huge business opportunity for the ailing Big Three auto makers. Anyway, go see the film. I'm going to check it out next week at the Cumberalnd Theatre in Toronto, and will write about it afterwards.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally, an article (from Associated Press) about a study that speaks to something I've worried over and written about for years: the acidification of oceans from CO2 releases. For quite a long time I've told people, who view me as a "warming skeptic," that the science of climate change is not just about whether or not the climate is warming, by how much, and whether or not humans are the cause. That's the dumbed down "media" version of the issue, and opinions are all over the place on that among scientists.

I was told years ago and have subsequently confirmed that a very serious consequence of our CO2 releases, one that is simply not debatable, is that much of those billions of tonnes of CO2 we are pumping into the air are ultimately absorbed by the ocean and this changes the pH. I'll let the article below speak for itself, and I've provided the link to the scientific study at the end. But I'll mention just one consequence of even a slightly acidified ocean: the entire food chain of the seas is based on phytoplankton, the microscopic sea creatures that float about in the warm upper layer of the ocean. They make their tiny skeletons from carbon in the water. Over millions of years the carbon from the dying creatures floats to the ocean floor where it accumulates as calcium carbonate (limestone) some of which eventually is pushed up into continents and mountain ranges as the sea floor is relentlessly reformed by continental drift and plate tectonics. This is why marine fossils may be found at the tops of mountains such as the Rockies, and why limestone deposits are ubiquitous in North America, where they're mined for cement manufacture (among other things). (Before plate tectonics was understood, creationists used to point to the presence of sea creature fossils on mountaintops as evidence of the Bible's Great Flood. Even Charles Darwin was puzzled about how they got there.)

It's all about the "carbon cycle" which is very subtle. The earth's climate and cloud formation is regulated, for instance, in part from the carbon that is gradually worn away by rain from limestone on mountains, that finds its way into rivers and oceans. We're only beginning to understand this cycle, at the very time we're altering it by dredging up fossilized carbon that's accumulated over hundreds of millions of years and pumping it into the atmosphere within only a couple of centuries.

There's a school of thought that altering the carbon cycle is dangerous not simply because an already-warm interglatial period may become hotter, but because the slight acidicification of oceans will interfere with the phytoplanktons' (and small creatures like krill) ability to build skeletons and shells, and the entire oceanic food chain and ecosystem will collapse. If this happens, it's not alarmist to predict that the environmental and social pressures this will triger will lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it. (By the way, if you want the best possible explanation of the carbon cycle in layperson's terms, I again direct you to the wonderful new book The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock, which completely changed by outlook and life.)

Now here's the article:

Fossil fuels said to damage ocean life

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science WriterWed Jul 5, 2:08 PM ET

Corals and other marine creatures are threatened by chemical changes in the ocean caused by the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, a panel of scientists warned Wednesday.

Already blamed for a greenhouse effect warming of the climate, much of this added carbon dioxide is dissolving in the oceans, making them more acid.

Such a change can damage coral and other shells and sealife, according to the panel of researchers convened by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Geological Survey.
"A most fundamental property of ocean chemistry, pH, is changing and will continue to change as long as CO2 emissions are increasing. That is not debatable," Joan Kleypas, the report's lead author and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said in a briefing.

The pH scale measures how acid or alkaline a substance is, rating from 0 to 14 with 7 being neutral. The lower the number the more acid something is.

"In the oceans pH is a relatively constant property and it has not changed over time scales of hundreds of thousands and probably even millions of years," Kleypas said.

"The pH changes that are occurring in the ocean today are truly extraordinary," she added. The oceans are normally slightly alkaline. Their average surface pH was 8.2 in 1800 and is headed for a predicted 7.9 by the middle of this century, she said.

"But we are only beginning to understand the complex interactions between large-scale chemistry changes and marine ecology. It is vital to develop research strategies to better understand the long-term vulnerabilities of sensitive marine organisms to these changes," Kleypas said.

The researchers estimated that between 1800 and 1994 the world's oceans absorbed 118 billion metric tons of carbon, reducing the natural alkalinity of seawater. A metric ton is 2,205 pounds.

Richard Feely, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said "this is leading to the most dramatic changes in marine chemistry in at least the past 650,000 years."

Chris Langdon at the University of Miami said studies show that coral calcification consistently decreases as the oceans become more acidic. That means these organisms will grow more slowly, or their skeletons will become less dense, a process similar to osteoporosis in humans. That threatens reefs because corals may be unable to build reefs as fast as erosion wears away the reefs.

Ocean acidification report:

http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/report.shtml

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last week I attended two interesting meetings. The first was a luncheon put on by Waste Management Inc. where the speaker presented on the topic of energy from landfill gas, a very hot topic these days as people make the connection between buried waste and the need for alternative energy sources. My sense is that these kinds of projects are of great value where large landfills already exist. The prospects don't look so good for any new or expanded landfills where the surrounding communites such as Toronto separate their organics for composting, since obviously the main methane generating materials are handled separately. The event was well attended and the networking was excellent.

The next day I participated in the Ontario Conservative Party one-day Waste Summit. The Tories are the opposition party in Ontario, led by John Tory who was on hand for the day along with the opposition environment critic. They'll take the notes from the meeting -- which included roundtable discussions -- and turn them into a report like the one they did last year on crime, and try to get some action on key issues by making a fuss over them in the legislature. Maybe we'll see some real progress over time on key issues like meaningful EA reform. (As an aside, one of the points I raised was that in Ontario there's still a 10 cent environment levy collected on every alcohol beverage container sold in the province. I'm told this raises about $60 million per year that simply flows into general revenues. I think the tax should either be abolished ordirected toward some truly useful environmental purpose directly linked to beverage container packaging. It's interesting to me that the $60 million happens to be almost exactly half the net cost of municipal curbside recycling in Ontario. Perhaps the funds should be matched with those of the industry stewards to pay for the blue box. Or how about using them to set up a return-to-depot system for used beverage containers that would be placed on deposit?

On another note, I'm going to be away for a couple of days (Thursday through Monday inclusive) on a wilderness kayaking trip on Georgian Bay with my brother, my oldest (age 10) son and his cousin (age 13) from Washington. We're putting in at Killarney and paddling among the various limestone and granite islands out there. For fun I'm going to try and keep track of what litter we encounter and report back next week in this space what we find. Hopefully no bears or Massassauga rattlers!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)