Heat and acid will destroy coral and other living things

by JennyHuang

Not Good Enough: Copenhagen Accord May Doom Coral Reefs
[Via Deep Sea News]

When you’re in the biodiversity conservation biz for any significant length of time, you inevitably develop a thick skin to grim pronouncements of ecosystem collapse from the scientific community. It’s a coping mechanism. Coral reef conservation, in particular, is not a place for overly delicate sorts. Nary a week passes without some fresh obituary being written about reefs. And this week is no exception. But even this news gave me pause.

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Increasing CO2 levels do more than just raise temperatures that produce bleaching in coral reefs. The dissolved CO2 changes the ocean chemistry, acidifying the water.

This has large effects on the sustainability of any organism that requires carbonate chemistry to create a hard shell. Too large a change in the acid levels of the oceans could be devastating.

This has been seen in the past during large extinction events. But today’s changes in acidification are unprecedented over the last 50-60 million years. As I quoted before, from Andy Ridgwell at the University of Bristol:

The acidification of the ocean today is bigger and faster than anything geologists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. Indeed, its speed and strength — Ridgwell estimates that current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago — may spell doom for many marine species, particularly ones that live in the deep ocean.

“This is an almost unprecedented geological event,” says Ridgwell.

The Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum was the last period of extreme temperatures on the Earth. It was a rapid event, taking less than 20,000 for global temperatures to rise 6°C. To think that current conditions are rising faster is not good news.

Dismissing technology that is less than 5 years old

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted
[Via Daily Ideafeed | Big Think]

“Malcolm Gladwell is surprisingly dismissive of the power of social networking to effect change. In the latest issue of the New Yorker, he writes that the role played by Facebook and Twitter in recent protests and revolutions has been greatly exaggerated. … ‘We seem to have forgotten what activism is,’ writes Gladwell. If activism is defined only as taking direct action and protesting on the streets, he might be right. But if activism extends to changing the minds of people, to making populations aware of what their governments are doing in their name, to influencing opinion across the world, then the revolution will be indeed be tweeted.”

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Facebook and Twitter are less than 5 years old as any sort of widespread social networking tool. Yet they are already having effects just in being able to organize protest and mass actions, to be able to mobilize the hearts and minds of large groups of people.

What will the system look like after 10 years of this?

More bad news on climate

by hermanusbackpackers

Threshold for dangerous climate change closer than believed?

[Via CEJournal]

The overarching goal for international climate policy is to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels. Beyond that threshold, climate scientists have believed, lies dangerous climate change, including sea level rise that could inundate major cities.

But a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Quaternary Science suggests that the threshold may be lower than 2° C. (Click for a press release on the research.)

“The results here are quite startling and, importantly, they suggest sea levels will rise significantly higher than anticipated and that stabilizing global average temperatures at 2˚C above pre-industrial levels may not be considered a ’safe’ target as envisaged by the European Union and others,” says study co-author Chris Turney of the University of Exeter in the U.K. (quoted in a press release).

This isn’t the first suggestion that targets for preventing dangerous climate change have been set too high. Based on research into ancient climates, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a group of colleagues, have made a similar argument:

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that.

Current emissions targets are supposed to help achieve the goal spelled out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by 192 nations in 1992: avoid “dangerous interference with the climate system.” But what exactly is the threshold of danger?

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Examination of the climate during the last interglacial period about 120,000 years ago reveals that the temperature was about 1.5°C above today’s and that sea levels were much higher.

Also, though, it describes the change in ocean currents that might have been part of this. They found that warm, salty waters form the Indian Ocean – the Aqulhas Current (anyone watching Shark Week has seen this of the coast of South Africa)– spilled into the Atlantic. This has the effect of warming ocean currents overall in positive feedback loop that intensified warming.

Aqulhas rings are seen today and are a major way that the salty, warm water needed to drive Atlantic Ocean circulation arrives. (There is a great animation of this process on this webpage.) An increase in the amount of warm water from the Indian Ocean could have large effects.

As I wrote about earlier, the ocean is where a lot of warming piles up. Ocean currents are involved in moving this heat around and, as shown in this paper, changing ocean currents can shift the climate to a completely different regime. Weather patterns can change, rainfall can be different and large changes in the oceanic environment can occur.

The more we learn, the worse things look.

What happens when the choice is GM bananas or no bananas at all?

by leoncillo sabino

Uganda prepares to plant transgenic bananas

[Via News at Nature]

Sweet pepper gene confers resistance to bacterial wilt.

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Bananas are a tremendously import food crop, not only locally in Africa but worldwide. But most modern cultivars have little genetic diversity, making it difficult to find varieties that can overcome disease.

Thus it may be necessary to introduce diversity by genetic modification. Adding the single gene from pepper that strengthens the ability of the banana plant to fight off invaders seems to be very effective. 6 out of 8 of the independent transgenic lines were 100% resistant.

This looks like a reasonable attempt but will, of course, depend on many things, including any effect on the taste of the banana.

This is a recently discovered disease but one that could have a huge effect on banana cultivation. Interestingly, the draft genomic sequence of this bacteria is now available. This could perhaps provide further insights into the disease.