Fossil Fuels, Ocean Acidification, and the Oyster Population

If I had to live on exactly three foodstuffs for the rest of my life, I’d choose oysters, mangoes and beer.  Perhaps I could do better nutritionally if I were to study the subject seriously, but it would be hard to beat the culinary enjoyment.

As it turns out, however, oysters have come across hard times, at the hands of ocean acidification, a phenomenon that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chief Jane Lubchenco refers to as “climate change’s equally evil twin.”

The article linked above explains, in a very readable presentation, how the rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is causing a steady lowering of the oceans’ pH, and that the increasingly corrosive seawater is making it hard for young oysters to build shells.  Author Brendon Bosworth writes:

Like the atmosphere, the world’s seas are burdened by our fossil fuel use and deforestation. The ocean has sponged up a quarter of the carbon dioxide humans have produced since the Industrial Revolution, steadily lowering its pH. Today’s seas are 30 percent more acidic than their pre-industrial ancestors. By the turn of the century, scientists anticipate they will be 150 percent more so…. Even if man-made carbon emissions ceased tomorrow, the West Coast would face decades of increasingly corrosive water because the ocean is laden with CO₂  from decades past and will continue to absorb the CO₂ already in the air, slowly changing its chemistry. “The train has already left the station,” says Richard Feely, a senior fellow at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “If we don’t reduce carbon dioxide emissions, we’ll (see) conditions that will be corrosive to more species.”