Let me re-phrase: "...one 'practically implementable' technology...."

Alex -

I stay fairly current wrt AGW. Not so much, well, rather little, on ocean acidification. I really don't see a peep from scientists re: nuclear power. I don't know what "lot's" means. But I'll take your point that they are out there, but politically they have no chance. Just no chance because of the whack jobs.

I'm all for solar or wind power. But I've never seen anyone make a reasonable argument that they can provide large scale and universal energy production. here in Chicago you can go for months in the winter with mostly cloudy days. And I'm not sure people want twirling beenie hats on their houses.

The answer is nuclear. Period, full stop. But I'm not hopeful. Even our illustrious President brought out the old "it's not safe" saw when interviewed. Either he's 1) never been to the country that produces the world's best wines.........or 2) he's playing politics with the future of the earth. Or 3) just playing politics.

I'll take #3 for $100, Alex.

For those seriously worried about CO2 emissions, are you not concerned by the inadequacy of the menu of proposed responses?

The responses suck.

I am all for nuclear power.

I think there ought to be a carbon tax.

I think people should get a tax credit for adding solar panels and wind turbines to their home.

I think that the Federal government should offer loans to businesses who are willing to take over abandoned industrial infrastructure and turn them into viable alternative energy concerns.

This is irrational. If the environmental outcomes are as apocalyptic and near term as suggested, the scientific and green communities should be screaming holy hell in favor of nuclear energy. Yet they are not. And that should make people wonder.

Au contraire--I know lots of climate scientists pushing for nuclear. It's just that the environmental movement comes, unfortunately, in two flavors, and the one the rakes in the most PAC dollars is the anti-nuke flavor. I wish that weren't the case. It drives me nuts. France gets 80% of their electricity from nuclear power, for God's sake. It's SAFE. I'm with you on that one.

Water is capable of holding only so much CO2 at any given temperature and pressure. The warmer the water is the less CO2 it can contain. Anyone who has ever popped open a warm cola can, and had it fizz out onto their hand, should know this. Opening a cold soda won't do that unless you shake it up first.

The record shows that the oceans rose in temperature and then the CO2 in the atmosphere increased, not the reverse. That is what science should expect. The Earth increased its temperature by 0.5 degrees between 1900 and 1945, the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere didn't increase until after 1945.

Actually, there is another technology, space-based solar power. It's energy density is higher than terrestrial solar power, it's platform that can provide stable base-load power. The performance of the solar cells or the solar thermal generating equipment is higher in an environment not exposed to the erosive effects of climate.

The problem is that earth orbit has no industrial infrastructure in place, so any effort to build generating capacity in orbit requires the builder to also supply the air that people breath, to build fabrication plants, to build mining operations, to build smelting operations, to build farming operations, to build housing, to build fuel operations to support the light vehicles used for assembly, etc.

Homosexual marriage is a clear example of cultural change and I'm using it as an example where the precautionary principle is completely abandoned by folks who use the precautionary principle in environmental debates. The subject of the comment is not homosexual marriage, it's the precautionary principle.

1) Ocean acidfication is a problem to both ocean ecosystems and most likely to humans.

It's a problem in that it represents a change. The notion that change is in itself a problem is a manifestation of thinking that is predicated upon the precautionary principle -"We shouldn't do anything to bring about change in the environment so we need to keep things the same."

The oceanic ecosystem has experienced drastic change over the millenia. The biomass of the oceanic ecosystem didn't evaporate during periods of high CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and in the ocean, all that changed was the distribution and concentration of the species inhabiting the ocean.

I have answered all of your points

I'm sorry, but my monitor doesn't display invisible ink. Could you possible use traditional fonts and paste in your answers to the following:

1.) Show me evidence that this is simply a temporary increase. The research I cited makes no reference to this being a temporary phenomenon.

2.) Further, don't you have any wisdom to impart on why you favor static models rather than dynamic models? You completely ignored the point I was stressing, the linkage between increased levels of CO2 in the oceans to increased levels of phytoplankton production, thus leading to an increased carrying capacity for fish, which in turns leads to a increased level of calcium carbonate production, thus reducing the effects of CO2 on the ocean chemistry.

If you read the paper involved, you will note that the species that thrive in higher acidity are (a) algal species, and (b) algal species that are toxic to humans.

The fact that coccolithophores, of the families and Hymenomonadaceae and Pleurochrysidaceae are toxic doesn't mean that all coccolithophores are toxic, for if that were the case, then coccolithophores would not form the base of the food chain:

Due to their large numbers coccolithophores belong to the most important primary producers at the base of the marine food-chain.

Further, speaking to the issue of dynamic modeling, which you are completely ignoring, the coccolithophores play a part in reducing global warming:

Moreover, a climatic link can be seen between the abundance of coccolithophores and cloud formation. This is due to the emission of their metabolite, dimethyl sulphonioproprionate (DMSP), that if converted into dimethyl sulphide (DMS) promotes cloud condensation. Clouds prevent the heat to be reflected back into space.

As to your quips on my point about the costs of limiting CO2 production, your claim that you "have answered all of your points," once again relied on invisible ink for I can't find any commentary by you on the European situation:

The Kyoto Protocol requires industrialized countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. However, 13 of the 15 original members of the European Union have increased their emissions, not reduced them:

* New data by the EU's European Environmental Agency shows that by 2010, the 15 nations' emissions collectively will exceed 1990 levels by seven percent.
* Kyoto could cause the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom to fall more than one percent in 2010 from what it otherwise would be, Italy's by more than two percent and Spain's by more than three percent.
* The U.K., Italy and Germany each would lose at least 200,000 jobs and Spain would lose 800,000.
* Even if European nations did comply with the Kyoto targets, they would achieve a paltry reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of just 0.1 percent by 2010.

More here:

During separate meetings of foreign affairs and energy ministers in Brussels, the Italian government firmly restated its intention to obtain exemptions from the package for its energy-intensive industrial sectors such as paper, glass, steel and brick industries. . . .

But Italy, Germany and other Eastern European countries claim the rules, if applied too strictly, will force energy-intensive sectors to close down factories and move abroad, leading to job losses and rising CO2 emissions outside Europe ('carbon leakage').

That's why Australia's decision to ignore solar power hasn't cost it a dime.

This is funny. You have Steve Verdon, an economics blogger, as your colleague, and you seem to ignore all his wisdom. Let's look at this parody you advance as an argument. To recap the argument laid out in your link - Australia is losing money by not advocating solar. It's losing money because European solar companies won't invest in Australia. These companies won't invest in Australia because the Australian government won't offer them business incentives and won't regulate the market to favor solar installations. Your argument is in lockstep with the arguments of Government Backed Stadiums for Private Owners. Just think, the Australian government is losing out on all of that alternative energy business dynamism and all it has to do to reap those wonderful benefits is offer up loads of subsidies to the companies, give them special tax breaks, and write legislation that interferes in the energy marketplace and gives special privilege to solar power installations.

Frankly, I don't see how Australia is coming out the poorer. Perhaps if they followed your advice they could achieve the nirvana that Spanish Greens inflicted on their countrymen:

Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data1, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.

Your link to German benefits from implementing solar technology is taken from the same cloth as the Australian argument. I'm sure that there are many computer programmers who read this blog and I wouldn't be surprised if they saw vaporware staring them in the face when they read your link.

As to the first link, I note this observation: "Europe remains the leading market for PVs, accounting for over 80 percent of world demand in 2008." I would imagine, considering that you're posting this link in support of your argument, that you believe that this is something that is beneficial for Germany and that we should emulate their progressive action on forcing solar power onto consumers. If I've read your motivations correctly, let's see the trade-off involved that makes you think that this is a boom for Germans:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Ms. Höhn, how much does a kilowatt-hour of electricity cost in Germany?

Bärbel Höhn: I pay 17 cents net for electricity from renewable sources.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: That was about the national average in late 2007. In France, a country that gets 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, they pay only 10.4 cents. In Italy, which gets by without nuclear power, it was 21.6 cents -- more expensive than anywhere else in Europe.

Here are the residential prices paid for electricity in America.

Look, you're showing yourself to be very confident with your empty posturing - claiming that you're answering my questions, while ignoring them, focusing on the example of homosexual but ignoring the precautionary principle argument that simply used homosexual marriage as an example in the cultural sphere to highlight the hypocrisy underlying the principle. You invoke category errors, such as toxic blooms from some families of coccolithophores meaning that all families of coccolithophores are toxic, and thus ignoring their presence as a primary building block of the food chain. People can see you dodging the issues and it doesn't advance the discussion at all.

For those seriously worried about CO2 emissions, are you not concerned by the inadequacy of the menu of proposed responses?

If you look at the growth rates and volumes produced by the major CO2 producers, the assumed damage done to date, and the projected climate or oceanic problems and time frames, it quickly becomes clear that massive reductions in CO2 will be necessary. Just massive.

There is only one technology with any hope of replacing (in the required amount and time frame) the heating/cooling, transportation and industrial process energy needs now supplied by fossil fuels. And yet there is almost complete silence on nuclear energy.

Instead we are treated to gleam-in-the-eye niche energy alternatives that may have their rightful places in the mix, but are not even close to being a viable solution. Or truly bizarre notions that the West will return to 1800's style living while the third world industrializes. (Michael Tanzer, anyone?)

This is irrational. If the environmental outcomes are as apocalyptic and near term as suggested, the scientific and green communities should be screaming holy hell in favor of nuclear energy. Yet they are not. And that should make people wonder.

Alex - you touched on this briefly, but I thought your response was superficial, or perhaps tongue in cheek. Saying, as you did, that nuclear energy was not the topic at hand seems a bit like two guys standing over a corpse with one guy asking "he was hemorrhaging, why didn't you use a tourniquet?" And having the other guy say "well, all I had was a band-aid."

OK, fair enough. But it is just pure folly to pursue remedies destined to fail. For those who are truly alarmed it would seem to be far better to spend the intellectual and political capital marshaling the resources required to actually fix the problem.

Yes, investments in solar power really suck for Germany. That's why Australia's decision to ignore solar power hasn't cost it a dime.

If you read the paper involved, you will note that the species that thrive in higher acidity are (a) algal species, and (b) algal species that are toxic to humans.

I have stated on several occasions that I agree with you that toxic algae blooms are a side effect of ocean acidification. It's just that I happen to believe that a rise in toxic algae blooms is a bad thing.

You didn't actually answer the question. You're changing the subject. The cultural effects of homosexual marriage are completely irrelevant to the problem of ocean acidification.

My position is clear:

1) Ocean acidfication is a problem to both ocean ecosystems and most likely to humans.
2) We need to curb CO2 emissions to try and prevent it.

I have answered all of your points, and you have ignored my rebuttals. Instead, you've chosen to cloud the issue with your nonsense about the precautionary principle, when I never brought up the principle in the first place. (And, I might add, you even ignored my rebuttal on gay marriage.)

You clearly aren't interested in debating the science or the facts.

This would be a losing wager. Look at the European efforts to cap CO2 emissions. Those targets were abandoned when they put a brake on job growth and economic development. Putting a legislative roadblock in the path of people's livelihoods don't result in the magical materialization of robust alternative energy schemes. There are physical limitations that amount to deal killing dead-ends built right into the fabric of alternative energy.

1.) So what?
2.) What matters is the quantity of biomass in the oceans, not the composition of the biomass.
3.) Consider:

Rodriguez’s method found that higher carbon dioxide concentrations increased calcification, speeding up growth of the tiny calcite plates on the plankton cell.

Coccolithophores appear to benefit in two ways.
The extra carbon dioxide aids photosynthesis, while the more acidic waters increase the concentration of bicarbonate the main ingredient for coccolith plates, known as liths.

Making the liths results in the release of carbon dioxide, but when dead plankton fall to the ocean floor, the carbon in the shells is locked away in deep ocean chalk deposits.

“Increased bicarbonate appears to stimulate an increase in mass of calcium carbonate produced by each coccolithophore cell,” said Paul Halloran, a co-author from the University of Oxford.

The team’s result is not confined to the lab.
By studying fossil coccolithophores from a deep ocean core, they found that there has been a 40% increase in average coccolith mass over the last 220 years, mirroring the rise in carbon dioxide levels.

Other scientists think the results make sense and help to explain how coccolithophores survived the last rapid global warming event the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum 56 million years ago.

“Coccolithophores seemed to sail through the surface water acidification then, so perhaps they are quite insensitive to this kind of change,” said Paul Bown from University College London. (ANI)

I made the point very clear. Your question here is a simple ruse. Once again, in kiddie steps just for you. Those most inclined to invoke the precautionary principle with respect to environmental issues are also the ones who are most likely to pay no heed to the precautionary principle on cultural issues. Repairing cultures is as difficult as repairing the environment. It is this very difficulty in remedying conditions which underscores the principle of the precautionary principle. These activists are full steam ahead on cultural revolution and full stop on environmental issues. If one really believes in the precautionary principle then one should be applying it consistently in all venues. The fact that it isn't being applied consistently suggests to me that the precautionary principle is simply used as a rhethorical club in environmental debates rather than as an intellectual principle from which policy consequences follow. In other words, the policy seems to be decided beforehand and then the precautionary principle is wheeled out and used as convenient justification.

Was that simple enough for you to understand or should I expect more teenage verbal gamesmanship from you?

What the hell does gay marriage have to do with increased acidity in the oceans?

(As a side note, by the way, check your history--marriage "between a man and a woman" is not the only way it's been done.)

yet they don't have the same belief about the human ability to adapt to changing environmental parameters, assuming that the environmental computer models will translate into tangible environmental change in the far future.

Please provide data that calcifying organisms in the ocean will somehow magically be able to process said calcium under increased pH levels...

Secondly, it would do everyone who worships the precautionary principle a world of good if they considered the famous Simon-Erhlich wager.

The Simon-Erhlich wager is irrelevant to this case. That wager was about resource scarcity and the ability of humans to substitute a scarce product for more prevalent one through technological innovation. That has no bearing on global changes to oceanic ecosystems (though it does have bearing on our ability to develop cleaner energy sources).

Thirdly, considering that all policy choices involve opportunity costs, it would help the credibility of precautionary principle advocates if they would state outright how many people they advocate be killed or harmed in order to bring about the environmental stasis that they dream off.

I don't want environmental stasis. I want the ocean pH to not dip below 8.

the alternative uses for funding can bring about a lot of improvement in people's lives not to mention saving many millions of lives and geoengineering to keep the environment stable is, when considered against the alternatives, a very low priority.

The "Cophenhagen Consensus" was about temperature change, not oceanic pH.

Fourthly, how much economic misery is involved in getting to the point of stopping ocean acidification? How much electricity rationing, how much transportation rationing, how much food rationing, how much curtailment of free trade, etc, because all of these economic actions have environmental consequences. Spell it out for us rather than feeding us blather about non-self-sustaining "green jobs."

I doubt it will entail much misery at all. As the Simon-Ehrlich wager demonstrated, human beings are very clever at coming up with alternatives for doing what they want to do when they lose access to a resource. In fact, I'd wager right now that caps on CO2 emissions would lead to very little economic catastrophe, because alternative energy and conservation technologies will catch up out of necessity.

Drew,

I'd like to see your calculation. At just a delta of 25 degrees vs 17 deegrees (the mean ocean temp) equilibrium CO2 in solution falls by 25%.

That's if you are just looking at CO2 solubility. CO2 + H20 -> H(+) + HCO3(-). But the ocean equilibrium equation involves CO2 reacting with Calcium. You can see the function here, which, as you can see, is also pH dependent.

That said, an 8 degree increase in ocean temperatures would shut down the gulf stream and cause some really nasty weather effects in the United States. I'll pass.

1. The wide range of views of various scientists on the impact of this phenomenon. There is no settled result here. None. Zip. Zero. Especially on dynamic vs static systems.

Where are you looking? I've been reading peer-reviewed papers on oceanography and marine biology--haven't seen too much out of consensus here.

The widespread and weird invocation of imminent "tipping point" arguments. My, my. In the entire history of the planet, what a unique time (nanosecond) we live in. (snicker)

Drew, we have been here before. After the dinosaurs died off, ocean pH decreased to the point where coral reefs dissolved and a lot of shellfish and phytoplankta died off. However, this was millions of years prior to human evolution. Throughout the entire span of primate evolution, CO2 levels and ocean pH have been relatively stable. That is, until about 1750 and the beginning of the industrial revolution.