Ocean acidification scares the crap out of me, in a way that the rest of climate change doesn't.
Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
So the oceans are going to rise, flooding out couple billion coastal residents over the next 50 years? Sucks for them, sure, but actually that's a slower rate of population-dislocation than we've seen over the last 50 years from rural-urban migrations. Shame about the sunk costs and lost nations and all that, but civilisation has lived through worse, and will go on.
So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again.
So the ice-free north pole is going to kill the polar bears? Yeah, probably, most of them -- but there've been ice-free north poles many previous times in the Polar bears' 2.5-million-year evolutionary history. Evidence suggests that during the warmest part of interglacial periods, they hybridise with Grizzlies and then re-speciate when the climate cools down again. They can cope -- and even if they can't, losing an apex predator isn't the worst thing that can happen to an ecosystem.
Losing the base of the food chain, however, is.
My point is not that climate change isn't real, or that humans aren't causing it, or that the disruptions it will cause won't be horrible and tragic and painful and expensive -- my point is that both ecosystems and civilisations are complex adaptive systems which have already proven themselves to be reasonably robust against exactly these sort of disruptions.
Ocean acidification is different than sea level rise and global warming, however. With ocean acidification, we're making an excursion unlike anything the planet has seen in 300 million years. There's simply no precedent that allows us to say "yeah, it's gonna hurt, but the world has already shown that it can cope with this kind of thing". It hasn't. As far as we know, this level of OA could produce a full trophic collapse -- and that isn't something that even I can't be cavalier about, as it would certainly be a civilisation-limiting (and possibly complex-life-limiting) event. Until we know for certain that the impacts of OA will be less severe than this, we should be doing everything we can to stop and reverse it.
Fact is, a lot of the rest of the chaos that is predicted from climate change is, on a long baseline, a more or less normal state of affairs.
So the oceans are going to rise, flooding out couple billion coastal residents over the next 50 years? Sucks for them, sure, but actually that's a slower rate of population-dislocation than we've seen over the last 50 years from rural-urban migrations. Shame about the sunk costs and lost nations and all that, but civilisation has lived through worse, and will go on.
So the rising and warming oceans are going to drown the great coral reef ecosystems? No problem -- every coral reef in the world was drowned by the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last Ice Age. They reconstituted themselves after a few thousand years. They can do that again.
So the ice-free north pole is going to kill the polar bears? Yeah, probably, most of them -- but there've been ice-free north poles many previous times in the Polar bears' 2.5-million-year evolutionary history. Evidence suggests that during the warmest part of interglacial periods, they hybridise with Grizzlies and then re-speciate when the climate cools down again. They can cope -- and even if they can't, losing an apex predator isn't the worst thing that can happen to an ecosystem.
Losing the base of the food chain, however, is.
My point is not that climate change isn't real, or that humans aren't causing it, or that the disruptions it will cause won't be horrible and tragic and painful and expensive -- my point is that both ecosystems and civilisations are complex adaptive systems which have already proven themselves to be reasonably robust against exactly these sort of disruptions.
Ocean acidification is different than sea level rise and global warming, however. With ocean acidification, we're making an excursion unlike anything the planet has seen in 300 million years. There's simply no precedent that allows us to say "yeah, it's gonna hurt, but the world has already shown that it can cope with this kind of thing". It hasn't. As far as we know, this level of OA could produce a full trophic collapse -- and that isn't something that even I can't be cavalier about, as it would certainly be a civilisation-limiting (and possibly complex-life-limiting) event. Until we know for certain that the impacts of OA will be less severe than this, we should be doing everything we can to stop and reverse it.