Hi all,

Sir John Beddington is chief scientific adviser to the UK govt, and Dr 
Jane Lubchenco is Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere 
and is now heading NOAA.  So their piece in NYT is important, 
politically [1].

Ocean acidification is generally recognised as one of the greatest 
hazards of rising CO2 levels, though one sees little about this in the 
media or journals.

Ocean acidification may be most dangerous in the Arctic, and the problem 
is worsened by methane release, as bacteria in seawater convert much of 
the methane to CO2.

Does anybody have a feel for how important this is?  At the CaCC 
conference last weekend [2], I suggested that we might need to get CO2 
below 350 ppm by 2030 to be on the safe side.  But that's just my guess, 
from what little I've managed to read.  Is 2030 well before the danger 
point, or, on the other hand, might 2030 prove to be too late?

Lubchenco herself gives a talk suggesting that acidification will be 
serious by the end of the century [3], but is this forecast like the 
IPCC sea ice forecast in 2007, suggesting the sea ice would last beyond 
the end of century [4]?  I am afraid that many long range forecasts have 
been shown to be absurdly optimistic after only a few years!  There is 
an optimism bias in human nature, but some scientists take this to an 
absurd degree.  A quick google search threw up this to support my 2030 
date [5].

Assuming 2030 is our target, then we definitely need geoengineering to 
remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and I suggest a combination of agro and 
chemical means, e.g. combining biochar with rock crushing.   If we can 
take as much carbon out as we put in, then we can have a world carbon 
neutral economy - possibly in ten years.  After that we could bring down 
the CO2 level.  How to pay?  Get the oil and gas extraction industry to 
pay for the pollution that their product will cause!  It's simple and 
logical.  Have a carbon tax, ramped up over 10 years to produce carbon 
neutrality, then some further time to bring the CO2 level down to an 
acceptable level.  Taxing at source makes the tax simple to collect and 
enforce.

We'd also have a chance to keep global warming below 2 degrees.

Of course, we also need to save the Arctic sea ice, but for that we need 
a different kind of geoengineering, known as Solar Radiation Management, 
to cool the Arctic [6].  This was the pamphlet I distributed at the 
conference, pus the 8 references [7], all explained in the AMEG session 
on Saturday [2].

These could be simple messages for Rio, but would anybody listen to reason?

Cheers,

John

[1] 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/opinion/acid-test-for-oceans-and-marine-life.html?_r=2 


[2] http://www.campaigncc.org/altsummit

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuttOKcTPQs

[4] http://www.ualberta.ca/~eec/Stroeve2007.pdf

[5] http://earthsky.org/earth/ocean-acidity-studies-raise-more-yellow-flags

[6] http://ameg.me/

[7] http://ameg.me/index.php/31-cacc