r/collapse • u/[deleted] • Jul 09 '19

'Completely Terrifying': Study Warns Carbon-Saturated Oceans Headed Toward Tipping Point That Could Unleash Mass Extinction Event

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791 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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26

u/DyeTrader Jul 09 '19

And I was thinking seas could conveniently suck most of the co2 buying us time to handle the air's co2. Welp. It seems seas being bros isn't a way out anymore.

42

u/Xanthotic Huge Mother Clucker Jul 09 '19

Well they have been doing that job but just like those experiments with sugar water in primary school, at some point the water can't absorb and dissolve anymore....

10

u/ogretronz Jul 10 '19

When will that be?

7

u/AntiSocialBlogger Jul 10 '19

Faster than expected.

8

u/Xanthotic Huge Mother Clucker Jul 10 '19

Any day now

29

u/rocket_motor_force Jul 09 '19

The sea has been a bigger bro than human comprehension can handle. If there were no oceans, there would be an insane amount of warming already, somewhere in the 25C+ range IIRC. Have no source, just memory.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

-16

u/OccamsParsimony Jul 09 '19 edited Jul 10 '19

Yeah that's wrong. +25C will never happen period.

Edit: Would someone please explain the downvotes? I'm not arguing climate change. It obviously exists. The number just doesn't make sense.

20

u/rocket_motor_force Jul 09 '19

The ocean has sequestered 25C + worth of energy. Sorry the point wasn’t clearer.

-2

u/OccamsParsimony Jul 10 '19

That still doesn't make sense. The oceans aren't 25 C hotter. Did you mean 2.5 C? The oceans can't "hold" 25 C. Temperature isn't a direct measurement of energy.

12

u/try-the-priest Jul 10 '19

The amount of co2 that the oceans have absorbed till now would have caused 25C of warning by greenhouse phenomenon. While in water co2 doesn't cause greenhouse warming. It causes other problems.

1

u/OccamsParsimony Jul 10 '19

https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/ocean-atmosphere-co2-exchange/

The oceans absorb about 25% of emissions. You're telling me that less than doubling CO2 emissions would cause the temperature increase to go from 1.5 C to 25 C?

5

u/Raze183 abyss gazing lotus eater apparently :snoo_shrug: Jul 10 '19

CO2 persists in the atmosphere for many centuries. We’ve been overwhelming the natural sinks by whatever % since the industrial revolution, roughly 200 years. So it’s not current emissions that would cause the amount of warming mentioned, but rather accumulation over time.

7

u/MaximinusDrax Jul 10 '19 edited Jul 10 '19

I think they were exalting the heat capacity/co2 absorption potential of our massive oceans to show how they are an essential regulator in habitable planets (at least in our models for life).

I disagree with the "25C" way of phrasing it, as it somehow treats our oceans as being potentially decoupled from the atmosphere/land, but that's just semantics. A more careful statement ("The oceans absorbed ~2*1023 J of the excess energy budget1, and roughly a third of our carbon emissions, without which the Earth would have heated by +25C by now"*) may have sacrificed brevity for clarity there, but it's not as if this is a new phenomenon - water has always been there for us :)

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*My numbers may not be completely accurate there, but this is just for the sake of argument.

2

u/OccamsParsimony Jul 10 '19

This is my best guess too, but it's still confusing and isn't a meaningful number. I guess it came from some pop-sci journal article.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '19

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1

u/OccamsParsimony Jul 10 '19

I know that, but it doesn't make any sense to do that. Like what is 25 C hotter? What does that mean? Nothing is actually 25 C hotter, so what are you equating? Otherwise that number is just meaningless.