Carbon dioxide isn’t just in the atmosphere—it’s in the ocean, and it’s having some very disturbing side effects. Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky makes the connection between ocean acidification and a warming planet.
Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface and have a huge capacity to store heat, playing a critical role in the climate system. In addition to that role, oceans are a complex and rich ecosystem on their own — helping to sustain life on land. But there are many threats to the viability of the oceans. One of them is acidification. CO2 mixes
MoreThe rate of atmospheric warming has been slower in past 15 years than the previous 30 — even as we’ve continued to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is tempting to think that everything we’ve learned about greenhouse gases since 1857 is wrong, but it is not. We tend to focus on land surface temperatures, because that’s where we live.
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Climate change is seriously stressing out the oceans. That’s the conclusion of a new study that used measurements of an array of human pressures on the ocean — from acidification to overfishing — to make a map of where those factors combined into stressed-out hotspots, as well as how the combinations of stressors had changed over time. They found
MoreOceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface and have a huge capacity to store heat, playing a critical role in the climate system. In addition to that role, oceans are a complex and rich ecosystem on their own — helping to sustain life on land. But there are many threats to the viability of the oceans. One of them is acidification.
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