Good point about OA. I couldn’t find what the control was in the pteropod study. What are they comparing them against?
Also looks like OA isn’t uniformly bad. Some species seem to thrive: https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification-a-r...
Re:Seawater Might Soak Up More Carbon
by anonymouskimmer on Saturday February 11, 2023 @07:46PM
(#34758169)
> Good point about OA. I couldn’t find what the control was in the pteropod study. What are they comparing them against?
No clue. I was just using it as an example.
> Also looks like OA isn’t uniformly bad. Some species seem to thrive
Sure, that's why the harm is measured in terms of entire ecologies, not individual species.
Increased in CO2 requires ecological adaptations of organisms living in the oceans, for instance. https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
"Researchers have already discovered severe levels of pteropod shell dissolution in the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica."
The optimal concentration for the ecology that we recently had is the CO2 concentration we had a bit before that (as it takes times for effects to be felt). Plus or minus, here or there, depending on other factors such as warming.
Forcing the rest of the ecology to try to adapt to increased CO2 levels starts to become really problematic for them when we are also forcing them to try to adapt to things like human-introduced invasives, human-caused habitat destruction and repurposing, population loss due to over-hunting and over-harvesting. It all adds up.