Vocal Voices

Suff and I are well known for banging on about CO2, the environment and climate change, and the effects of the long and short term damage we are doing. The strength of the Philippines typhoon is an example of one short-term effect. Our own St Jude's storm was another.

Well here's another take. Pump CO2 into the atmosphere and it mixes with water vapour. The resulting Carbonic acid falls as one type of acid rain. A lot of this acid rain falls on land where its type is not such a big problem and can even be beneficial.

Most of it, however, along with the other acids, falls in the alkaline seas and oceans and there it does create BIG problems. The latest report http://www.igbp.net/publications/summar ... s2013.html shows that 30% of all of the ocean's biodiversity may be lost by the end of this century.

Molluscs will be first. Their shells are calcium carbonate and will weaken or even dissolve in less alkaline seas. They are at the lower end of the food chain. Once they go so do the fish...

Go figure.

What depresses me most is this:

The authors warn that the economic impact of the losses from aquaculture could be huge - the global cost of the decline in molluscs could be $130bn by 2100 if emissions of CO2 continue on their current pathway.

Sod the economy - millions of lives, human and animal - are at stake.

Workingman wrote:Sod the economy - millions of lives, human and animal - are at stake.

Worse, as always. Billions of humans and millions of entire animal species lost, the individual lives will be a sum so big we'll want to hide from it.

Increasing CO2 absorption and increasing ocean heat budget are stripping the Oceans of their oxygen, creating dead zones. Incidents of dead fish washing up in the hundreds of millions on the Guf and California coasts are on the increase.

I often find that people forget that 50% of usable oxygen generated for the planet is provided by the sea and the sea life. Reduce our oxygen content by even 10% and life could start becoming very difficult indeed.

This doesn't bear thinking about. What hope for future generations?

Kate wrote:This doesn't bear thinking about. What hope for future generations?

Exploration of Mars and the Moon and, if possible, other planets round other suns.

Beyond that, not a lot. Those who can afford it will have a life. Those who can't will have what is left.

Suff wrote:I often find that people forget that 50% of usable oxygen generated for the planet is provided by the sea and the sea life.

They don't forget, they do not know, they have not been told.

They also do not know that the Dead Zones lie directly off the coasts of places where industrialised farming takes place - USA, Europe, and Japan and FE Asia. These places drain billions of litres of nitrates and phosphates into the sea.... those that were not taken up by the crops. More fertilisers than necessary are used to ensure a good harvest.

These nutriments are taken up, not by the good phytoplanktons, but by their poisonous cousins the cyanobacteria. The result is algal blooms which deoxify the sea and kill most life in it - Dead Zones.

So, we get a good land crop while killing the sea crop.

We are so clever.......

We don't know if there is another life after death, but if there is, perhaps we will be able
to look down on the mess the world will become, and some of us (me for sure) will be able
to say (or think?), " I told you so."

Workingman wrote:They don't forget, they do not know, they have not been told.

Nothing like an enquiring mind. And these days there is very little like an enquiring mind. Trivia, no problem, s/lebs, no problem. What's going on in the world? Why bother, somebody else's problem....

I honestly think that many people, especially young ones, feel totally disaffected and that they cannot change anything - as politicians all seem the same! Therefore they have this "Live now, worry about the future when it happens" attitude. It is sad really....................

Very few youngsters even bother to vote, or even register to vote

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ing-apathy

I think that you and the article are right Kaz, but I also wonder about general education.

We were given all sorts of basics in physics, maths, chemistry and biology etc.. Pupils today do not appear to have those basics. If a volume of air is increased in pressure its temperature will rise, hotter air can hold more water vapour. From those basic principles we can learn to understand so many other things.

But it is so much easier to follow slebs on Twitbook and not think - at all.

The problem is Frank, they are not taught how to think or problem solve - just how to tick boxes This is bound to impact in other areas of their lives.....................