The Evil Twin...

As lawmakers in Washington continue to ignore the most pressing issue facing our planet today - climate change - we are about to pass a very disturbing environmental milestone.

The CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii will likely soon reach 400 ppm, which could spell further disaster for our planet.

Named after Charles Keeling, who started measuring CO2 air concentrations in 1858, the Keeling Curve measures the concentration of CO2 in the air in parts per million.

Since measurements started at Mauna Loa in 1958, there has been a steady increase in CO2 concentration.

In fact, since 1960, CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa has increased by almost 28%.

Thanks to our society’s toxic addiction to fossil fuels, unprecedented levels of CO2 are being pumped into our environment each and every day.

But why have CO2 concentrations increased so much over the past few decades?

Part of it has to do with increased industrialization and reliance on dirty fossil fuels, but part of it also has to do with the world’s oceans. 

According to Richard Bellerby, Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, the oceans have “been performing a huge climate service over the last 200 years.”

That’s because oceans have the ability to absorb CO2, which prevents it from escaping into the atmosphere and hastening the process of climate change.

In fact, the world’s oceans, especially the coldest waters, have absorbed 50 percent of the CO2 that we have emitted, and continue to take up 25 percent of the CO2 that we produce.

But, we, as a global community, have abused the oceans’ ability to absorb CO2, and now the oceans and the ecosystems within them are paying the price.

As the world’s oceans absorb more and more CO2, they become more and more acidic, and, according to a new study released yesterday by the Norwegian Institute for Water Research at the International Conference on Arctic Ocean Acidification, the rapid acidification of the Arctic Ocean has pushed us beyond “critical thresholds,” and it’s likely that widespread impacts will be felt for “tens of thousands of years” even if  we stopped all carbon emissions today.

Dubbed “climate change’s evil twin”, acidification of ocean surface waters has increased by around 30 percent over the last 200 years, with the highest levels of acidification occurring in the Arctic and the rest of world’s coldest waters.

Richard Bellerby, the chief scientist on the report, said that, “Arctic ocean acidification is happening at a faster rate than found in other global regions. This is because climate change such as warming and freshening of the oceans is acting in tandem with the enormous oceanic uptake of C02.”

And Bellerby told BBC News that “continued rapid change is a certainty.”

Another researcher on the study, Sam Dupont of the University of Gothenburg, told the conference that, “something really unique is happening. This is the first time that we as humans are changing the whole planet; we are actually acidifying the whole ocean today.”

According to the study, it’s quite possible that, within a few decades, the world’s oceans will be two times more acidic, and the situation could be even worse in the Arctic. 

So what are the impacts so ocean acidification?

Well, to start, the oceans are able to absorb less CO2, which means more of it enters our atmosphere and helps to hasten the processes of global warming and climate change.

But more importantly, ocean acidification can lead to mass ocean species extinction. 

One example of a possible species extinction that the scientists at the conference gave was of the brittle star.

When exposed to the ocean acidification conditions that can be expected in the decades to come, the eggs of the brittle star died within days.

If the brittle star dies off, than the species that feed on it could die off as well and there would be a massive chain reaction of oceans species extinctions.

And if the ocean dies, we die.

It’s that simple.

The bottom-line here is that our toxic addiction to fossil fuels rooted millions of years in the past is not only polluting our skies and wreaking havoc on our climate, it’s also destroying our oceans and the species in them.

It’s time to ditch the fossil fuels, make the switch to cleaner and greener forms of energy, and save the world’s oceans, before they die and we go with them.