Ocean Acidification

“Ocean acidification is the process of ocean pH decreasing (i.e. becoming more acidic) due to absorption of fossil fuel CO2 from the atmosphere. Another effect of ocean acidification is to reduce the amount of carbonate that is available to marine organisms, such as shellfish, for making their calcium carbonate shells.” 

This is one of the impending disasters of our head in the sand attitude to our continued belief that she’ll be right and it will all sort itself out, in the past our understanding of many things meant we just hoped and prayed they would come right. Now, to be honest, left alone most things in nature will self correct over time, but time being tens of thousands to hundred of thousands of years.

The problem is now we know what the problem is and we know how to fix it. But we can’t give up the habits can we. We delude ourselves that things will be OK. Well OA is not OK and will be one of the very high prices we pay for ignoring what we now know is happening to our oceans now and will keep happening during this century. 

Our current Government that only lives in the present have just announced that. 

“The Sustainable Farming Fund open to aquaculture a government fund that supports community-led growth and innovation in the rural sector has been widened to include aquaculture.”  

The bad news is: 

“Having absorbed one-third of the CO2 produced by human activities over the last two centuries, oceans are now 30 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution. By the end of the century, if CO2 emissions continue on the current trajectory, the world’s oceans could become 150 percent more acidic.” 

“The chemistry of the ocean is changing at an unprecedented rate and magnitude due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions,” warned a report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences. “The rate of change exceeds any known to have occurred for at least the past hundreds of thousands of years.” 

As usual the Nact’s are throwing around the words like sustainable every chance they get, but as most of us know the Nact’s couldn’t give a rats ass about sustainability, short term profit is their motive and a short time is all the fishing industry has left it seems. Ocean Acidification means the aquaculture industry could be in big trouble by the middle of the century, not to mention the rest of the fishing industry. 

The old argument we won’t be around or can’t do anything about OA are shortsighted and selfish, we will always be around and so will our extended families and friends. 

MrSmith