Earth Out Of Oxygen: GLOBAL HYPOXIA

Move over, “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”! You meek, obsolete euphemisms have been paid by your fossil fuel masters to occupy the front stage, in a masquerade of objectivity. These euphemisms pretend, in the very description they entail, that we are just going to change to a warmer state… No big deal then. Actually the real full consequences of the CO2 emission crisis, are much more catastrophic. We could run out of oxygen.

Indeed, let me introduce, instead of a “warm change”, the radical notion of “GLOBAL HYPOXIA“. Yes, no less. That, running out of oxygen is the real ultimate danger in the enfolding man-made CO2 crisis. There are basically three known threats converging on global hypoxia: killing the oxygen making plankton, killing the oxygen making forests… and, even more pernicious, the oxidation of 1,600 gigatons of permafrost (that’s twice the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere…) That will suck oxygen out of the atmosphere…

I have explained that I do not believe in the Impact theory of previous mass extinctions. Instead I believe in what I call (Earth) Core Volcanism. Core Volcanism would have erupted with huge quantities of CO2, hence would have devastated the seas. Hint: at the time when the dinosaurs died, mammals and birds (a type of dinosaur) survived handsomely. Yet the devastation in the ocean was total.

Kill Seas With Acid, Kill Oxygen Production

Krugman wrote an editorial “Cutting Back On Carbon“, that explained the obvious, namely that switching to a non carbon economy would not cost much, if at all:

“Next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules designed to limit global warming. Although we don’t know the details yet, anti-environmental groups are already predicting vast costs and economic doom. Don’t believe them. Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy…

You might ask why the Chamber of Commerce is so fiercely opposed to action against global warming, if the cost of action is so small. The answer, of course, is that the chamber is serving special interests, notably the coal industry — what’s good for America isn’t good for the Koch brothers, and vice versa — and also catering to the ever more powerful anti-science sentiments of the Republican Party.”

I sent an approving comment. However, it was censored. With my approach on this particular subject, it’s systematic. It seems that the censors at the New York Times are either very well paid by very clever supervisors, or so stupid that they believe that those who believe in GLOBAL HYPOXIA are genuinely mad.

Out of charity, I decided to operate under the later hypothesis, and to make even more efforts to educate those ignorant little Wall Street sycophantic tyrants.

Oceans Warming Globally, But Acidity Concentrating Locally

This is a (boosted) version of what the New York Times censored:

Agreed to all, well analyzed. Now to add a few points
Cutting carbon burning to zero is not just a question of cost, but a matter of survival. The present Green House Gases concentrations already guarantee that the planet’s climate will be brought back to the Jurassic. That guarantees flooding where billions of people are presently living: the Jurassic was characterized by shallow seas.

But that’s not all. Because this is the most violent eruption of CO2 in at least 65 million years, at least a third of the CO2 created by man’s folly goes straight in the ocean. It does so at a rate at least one hundred times faster than at any times in the last tens of millions of years (as ice core studies for the last 650,000 years have confirmed).

Once in the ocean, the carbon dioxide chemically reacts with water to create carbonic acid. The acidity has already climbed by 30%, globally. However, it concentrates mostly in some surface layers… Where sea life is also the most concentrated.

Thus the CO2 crisis is not just about Global Heating: It is also causing another crisis, a GLOBAL ACID environment too.

If the acidity rises too much, the phytoplankton will die and half of the oxygen supply will be lost.

Now add to this that the forests will burn, and that the permafrost will met and oxidize… and so will many mineral in the ground exposed to higher temperatures. So the Green House Gases pollution is not just a question of changing climate, like one changes clothes. What we have now is a programmed destruction of the biosphere…. and even of the oxygen it breathes!

The fact the US Congress wants to prevent the Pentagon to be well armed for climate change (in particular having as much carbon free fuel as needed), shows indeed that all what the Congress of the USA cares about is preserving the existing power structure. Well, it may be paid for that, but that’s a fatal disposition.

Patrice Aymé

Notes:

Hypoxia Censored: The preceding comment I made of the Krugman editorial was censored by the New York Times, as all previous comments of mine alluding to running out of oxygen, Global Hypoxia, have also been. This shows the hypocrisy of the Times: it pretends to be worried about the climate, but it does not want its readership to be aware of the ultimate danger we are facing: not just sea level rise, and crocodiles in the Arctic, but a lowering of global oxygen levels. It’s simple, yet radical science.

Scientific Background, From Anthropogenic Decline in High-Latitude Ocean Carbonate by 2100 : “The surface ocean is everywhere saturated with respect to calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Yet increasing atmospheric CO2 reduces ocean pH and carbonate ion concentrations, and thus the level of saturation. Reduced saturation states are expected to affect marine calcifiers even though it has been estimated that all
surface waters will remain saturated for centuries.

Here we show, however, that some surface waters will become undersaturated within decades. When atmospheric CO2 reaches 550 ppmv, in year 2050 under the business-as-
usual scenario, Southern Ocean surface waters begin to become undersaturated
with respect to aragonite, a metastable form of CaCO3.

By 2100… undersaturation extends throughout the entire Southern Ocean and… Pacific. These changes will threaten high-latitude aragonite secreting organisms including cold-water corals, which provide essential fish habitat, and shelled pteropods, an abundant food source for marine predators.”

That was published ten years ago, in 2004. Ever since the CO2 injections from human industry have accelerated considerably.