MANADO, Indonesia -- The role oceans play in countering climate change will dominate talks between environmental experts from 120 countries meeting in Indonesia this week.
The World Ocean Conference that opened on Monday in the northern city of Manado will shape the scientific debate ahead of final negotiations to replace the U.N. treaty on global warming in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.
The Kyoto Protocol, the most important document on climate change, expires in 2012.
Officials hope the meeting on Sulawesi island will boost recognition of the need to protect oceans and marine ecosystems that absorb carbon dioxide.
One of the gathering's main goals will be to create a permanent international forum to coordinate conservation attempts and counter the impact of rising oceans blamed on higher temperatures.
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, will host a simultaneous summit of leaders from the Coral Triangle Initiative, a grouping of six Asian countries comprising one of the world's richest marine areas.
The three-day gathering will be attended by host Indonesia and leaders from Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands and East Timor, whose territories boast 75 percent of all known coral species and more than 3,000 fish species.
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Fri, 05/01/2009 11:15 AM | National
Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Freddy Numberi renewed calls on world leaders to pay serious attention to ocean issues when negotiating emissions cuts to help combat climate change.
"There is no reason to neglect ocean in discussions about emissions cut target as the ocean has also capability to absorb the carbon," he told reporters.
He said that total of carbon absorbed in ocean should be calculated under the clean development mechanism (CDM).
The CDM was part of the Kyoto Protocol commitment allowing developing countries to develop projects aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
In turn, developed nations should provide financial incentives based on total emissions reduction.
Freddy said that Indonesia's ocean could absorb about 67 million carbon per year or equal with 245.5 million tons of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) per year.
The CO2 was main contributor on global warming causing climate change. Under Kyoto, only carbon from energy combustion eligible for carbon trading.
Freddy, however, invited the world's researchers to determine whether ocean could be a carbon sink and sources.
March 25, 11:38 / AMLA Science News Examiner / SA Kyle
The current restoration of the Huntington Beach wetlands could hold a more significant ecological recovery than previously imagined—beyond giving habitat to endangered species like the California Least Tern, the saltwater marsh could help fight global warming by acting as a natural carbon sink. But the very quality that endows this wetland with its unique ability to fight global warming—its connection to the ocean—may be its undoing. Global warming, in the end, may win.
According to the first State of the Carbon Cycle Report, wetlands in North America are estimated to sink, or store in their soils, 49 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
“Wetlands tend to store organic carbon in their soils because they’re wet,” said Dr. Jason Keller, professor of biology at Chapman University, “When there isn’t oxygen available, they store carbon in their soils.”
Salt marshes or brackish marshes that have some connectivity to the ocean are likely to be net sinks of carbon from the atmosphere.
Wetlands are also a natural source of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, however. Microbes that live in the soil of these ecosystems break down plant matter, and in the process release gas. This is why some marshes smell like rotten eggs: gas is released by microbes that use sulfate found in saltwater. It is the smelly sulfate microbes at Huntington Beach that make it such a good candidate to sink carbon from the atmosphere.
“Salt marshes or brackish marshes that have some connectivity to the ocean are likely to be net sinks of carbon from the atmosphere,” said Keller.
The sulfate found in ocean water drives a microbial process called sulfate reduction, which replaces the microbes that produce methane in freshwater marshes. Because saltwater marshes absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and don’t make methane, they are natural carbon sinks. They can even absorb enough CO2 from the atmosphere to be important on a regional scale.
If companies ever have to pay to reduce the amount of carbon they produce, wetland restoration that could pay for itself by taking enough carbon out of the air to pay for its construction.
In fact, some wetland restorations are being proposed as carbon sinks, according to Keller. State governments are interested in how salt marshes can be used as a carbon trading tool because they are well suited to storing large amounts of carbon, while not releasing the more potent greenhouse gas, methane.
Keller imagines that if companies ever have to pay to reduce the amount of carbon they produce, wetland restoration that could pay for itself by taking enough carbon out of the air to pay for its construction.
“If we can restore a large number of these [eco]systems, we have the potential to take some carbon out of the atmosphere,” said Keller. “And you also get all of the other benefits that you get with a marsh: you’re creating habitat, which is always a good thing, you’re creating flood control, which is always a good thing.”
Although wetlands could be a powerful tool in combating greenhouse gases, climate change itself could threaten wetland ecosystems. The drying of Southern California and a rising sea level could destroy saltwater marshes like the ones at Huntington Beach.
The global concern for Mediterranean regions, according to climate simulation models, is that there will be a significant drying by mid-century.
“The global concern for Mediterranean regions, according to climate simulation models, is that there will be a significant drying by mid-century,” said Dr. Dan Cayan, a climate researcher at University of California in San Diego. The California Climate Change Center predicts that Southern California’s rainfall will decrease by 10 to 20 percent over the next 50 years.
When wetlands dry out, organic carbon stored in the soil suddenly has access to oxygen. Microbes that feed on this kind of aerobic respiration cause the drying wetland to vent carbon dioxide, rather than storing it.
“[This] would mean a long term chronic release of carbon dioxide,” said Keller.
When combined with the 4.7 to 10.5 degree temperature rise predicted by the California Climate Change Center by the end of the century, the drying trend is expected to significantly accelerate.
“As it gets warmer, you increase evapo-transpiration which could be a cause of wetlands drying out even faster than they would if just precipitation changed,” said Keller, “There are feedbacks as well. It gets warmer and drier, which causes wetlands to release carbon dioxide, which causes it to get warmer and even drier.”
Rising sea level is the other significant threat to the survival of coastal wetlands like the marshes at Huntington Beach. Though projections vary, the rise in sea level we see today is higher than any point in history, according to Keller.
Our coast could march dramatically inward in the next hundred years, and that places coastal wetlands in a real challenge.
“Our coast could march dramatically inward in the next hundred years, and that places coastal wetlands in a real challenge,” said Keller, “Wetlands can only exist if they can add soil at the same rate or faster than the sea level is rising. If the sea level rises an inch, the wetland gets flooded unless it can add an inch of soil. It’s not clear that all wetlands are going to be able to do that.”
Today, biologists around the world are playing a catch-up game as the natural world as shows its beginning signs of global warming. They are trying to understand how ecosystems will function and, in turn, affect a warmer world.
“All of these interactions make it really, really difficult,” said Keller.
Say you take a specific ecosystem and warm it two degrees, Keller explains. Scientists think they can predict a certain result from this. But if it warms two degrees and gets wetter, that will change the prediction. And if it warms two degrees and gets drier, then a different prediction is made.
But the natural systems Keller and his colleagues work with are much more complex. He explains that often they are dealing with ecosystems that are warming, changing in precipitation levels, and experiencing higher nitrogen and CO2 levels from anthropogenic activities.
“So these interactions of multiple climate change factors are an area where people are still trying to figure out how all these things come together,” said Keller.
New York (PTI): Fish may play a more important role in the marine carbon cycle than previously thought, a new study shows.
Researchers have found that fish excrete prodigious amounts calcium carbonate, that had been thought to come almost exclusively from marine plankton such as shelled algae, Nature reported quoting the study.
Biologists, Nature reported, knew that bony fish a group that includes most fish apart from cartilaginous ones such as sharks and rays produced calcium carbonate in their guts to rid themselves of excess calcium ingested from seawater. But this process hadn't been factored into models of ocean chemistry.
"This is the first study that has even tried to link carbonate production by fish to global carbon cycles," Rod Wilson, a fish physiologist at the British University of Exeter, is quoted as saying Wilson and his colleagues from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada set about estimating the contribution of fish to global marine carbonate production, Nature said.
They took X-rays to observe carbonate formation in fish intestines and measured the amount excreted by the European flounder (Platichthys flesus) and the Gulf toadfish (Opsanus beta), model species studied previously in the authors' labs. Then, they used two independent computer models to calculate the total mass of fish in the world's oceans.
The models suggested that there are between 0.8 billion tonnes and 2 billion tonnes of fish biomass in the oceans. And this indicates that bony fish produce 40 million 110 million tonnes of calcium carbonate per year, the study says. The range accounts for 3 per to 15 per cent of the estimated total.
The lab results can be extrapolated to global fish populations, Wilson is quoted as saying, because the predictions are based on well-studied relationships between fish metabolism, mass, activity level and temperature.
The estimate is conservative and could be as high as 45 per cent of total calcium-carbonate production under more liberal assumptions, he says. The study appears in www.nature.com.
"They hit on an important but, before this, unrecognized source of calcium carbonate in the ocean," Victoria Fabry, an oceanographer at California State University, San Marcos is quoted as saying.
And this might elucidate why ocean surface waters are more alkaline, or less acidic, than models have predicted, the article says, adding that the carbonate coming from plankton doesn't dissolve until it sinks to depths greater than 1,000 metres. But carbonate produced by fish contains more magnesium, an impurity that causes the mineral to dissolve more readily and reduce the acidity of the water.
Fish, the article argues, may boost their carbonate production rate in response to increased carbon-dioxide levels, the researchers suggest.
Ocean scientists, it noted, have warned that plankton and corals will produce less calcium carbonate as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises, but Wilson is quoted as saying "what's a bit peculiar is we think fish go in the other direction."
Wilson says fish make calcium carbonate by combining calcium from seawater with carbonate ions generated from carbon dioxide in their bodies. If the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide goes up as expected leading to a carbon dioxide increase the fish may produce more carbonate ions and thus more calcium carbonate.
Posted on: January 16, 2009 11:25 AM, by Mike Dunford
When we talk about the role of fossil fuels in climate chance, what we're really talking about is the carbon cycle. That's the term that scientists use to describe the different forms that carbon is stored in on the earth, and the different ways that it can move from form to form. Understanding the carbon cycle is one of the keys to understanding both the effect of burning carbon-based fuels and the issues involved in trying to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. According to a paper in the latest edition of Science, there may still be some pretty significant gaps in our knowledge of the carbon cycle. In particular, it looks like our understanding of the way carbon moves through the oceans may have been suffering because we didn't know poop about fish poop.
Before we get down to the gritty details and talk about what poop has to do with anything, it might be good to start with a quick review of the carbon cycle. Actually, it might be even better to start with a quick review of one of those concepts that we all learn in third-grade physics, but don't think about much in our day to day world: the law of conservation of mass/matter.
Matter is not created or destroyed. Therefore the amount of mass in a closed system will remain constant no matter what happens.
Like most things in science, that might be a bit of a simplification, but when we're looking at something the size of the Earth, it's good enough. Relativity, quantum mechanics, and space dust might all complicate things a bit, but not enough to matter. For our purposes, we can reasonably assume that all the carbon that we're putting into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide has been here since the earth was formed, and that if we want to take the carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere, we're going to have to find somewhere on this planet to store the carbon.
With that in mind, let's look at the some of the more important ways that carbon can move through the crust, oceans, and biosphere, and atmosphere.
Carbon can be found in the atmosphere in a few forms, the most important of which is carbon dioxide. It can be found on land and in the crust in any number of forms, both as organic compounds in living organisms and their remains (including the range of fossil fuels) and in rocks and soils as inorganic minerals like calcium carbonate. It can be found in the oceans as dissolved carbon dioxide, dissolved minerals, and in organisms that live in the oceans.
Carbon can be released into the atmosphere in a number of different ways. Carbonate rocks, for example, can produce carbon dioxide through natural weathering processes, and volcanoes can release carbon dioxide from magmas. At this point in the history of the earth, though, we know what the biggest cause of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is - and he is us.
It's possible that our entire success as a species has been the result of our learning how to use a particular chemical reaction:
Organic carbon + Oxygen = Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy
For most of human history, we were mostly burning plant matter in relatively small quantities, so this wasn't a huge deal. The organic carbon in question had mostly come from photosynthesis, and most of it would have been released as carbon dioxide anyway - we use, along with lots of other living things, use that same chemical reaction when we produce our own energy.
The Industrial Revolution changed that. We started to burn fossil fuels - coal, petroleum products, and natural gas. The carbon that's in the fossil fuels comes from the remains of plants that pulled it out of the atmosphere and fixed it as organic compounds. Most plants, when they die, decompose and their carbon is released back into the atmosphere. The same thing happens to most animals. But not all. Some living things get fossilized after they die.
The thing is, we don't have lots of fossil fuel because lots of things get turned into fossils all the time. We have lots of fossil fuel because there's been a lot of time for things to get turned into fossil fuels. These are deposits of carbon that were formed very slowly, over tens and hundreds of millions of years. Left to themselves, these deposits would have been released back into the atmosphere through weathering and other natural processes over similarly long periods of time. We're taking these deposits that were formed over intervals of tens and hundreds of millions of years, and we're burning them over periods of tens to hundreds of years.
If you think that we're not pumping fossil-fuel derived carbon dioxide into the atmosphere millions of times faster than it would get there on its own, I'd suggest that you go back and look at the two bits of boldfaced text earlier in this article.
The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is leading to an increase in the amount of heat that we're retaining from the sun because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas - it traps energy that would otherwise have radiated out into space.
Now that we've figured out that this is a real problem - the odd conservative ideologue notwithstanding - we've started to try and find ways to fix the problem, while still producing enough energy to drive our modern world. A wide variety of solutions have been proposed, many of which involve continuing to burn fossil fuels, but trapping and storing the carbon dioxide that's produced. In fact, there's a coal plant in Germany that's started doing just that.
The German plant is storing (or at least planing to store) the carbon dioxide by injecting it into a depleted oil field, but another storage site that's frequently proposed is the deep ocean. At depth, the ocean is undersaturated with respect to carbon dioxide, which is a fancy way of saying that it can hold more than it currently does. That means, it's been suggested, that we can take the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion and pump it down into the deep ocean through really long pipes.
And this, finally, brings us to the gut of the matter. And to fish poop.
The I haven't talked about it much yet, but the ocean is involved in the carbon cycle. Things like the depth at which the ocean is no longer carbon-dioxide saturated are determined by the chemistry of the ocean, and by the way carbon moves through the seas. An article that was just published in the journal Science by Wilson et al. suggests that we may not have known as much about the oceanic carbon cycle as we thought we did.
In particular, we might not have considered the impact that billions of fish can have, just by living, drinking, and pooping.
You see, the internal environment of a fish contains a higher concentration of water (and lower concentration of salt) than the ocean does. As we all learned at some point in school, this means that water is going to tend to move from the fish back into the ocean. This is the same process that's in play when salt is poured on a slug, and even in the ocean the effects would be similar if the fish weren't able to somehow counteract it.
Fish counteract the tendency of water to leave their body by actively pulling more water in. Fish drink like fish. But, because they're drinking saltwater, they need to do something to pull out the salts. In the case of the calcium and magnesium, they precipitate it out in their guts by forming inorganic calcium and magnesium carbonate crystals. What happens to these "piscine carbonates" is entirely predictable, as Wilson et al. point out:
Carbonate precipitates formed in the gut are excreted either within discrete mucus-coated tubes or pellets, or incorporated with feces when fish are feeding. The organic mucus-matrix is rapidly degraded in natural seawater, leaving only inorganic crystals of CaCO3 with high magnesium content (Mg:Ca ratio ranging from 10 to 33 mol %) [endnotes omitted]
The importance of this effect is a bit less obvious. There's a lot less fish than plankton, after all, so how important is it really likely to be? The answer is a bit surprising. The authors did a range of calculations based on a number of different estimates of both fish biomass and the rate of production of "piscine carbonates":
To calculate the teleostean contribution to oceanic carbonate budgets requires knowledge of global marine fish biomass. We used two entirely independent models to describe the size composition and abundance of marine fish across the global oceans, one by using a size-based macro-ecological approach and the other by using Ecopath software. The fish biomass estimates generated for each size-class and the relevant average local sea temperatures were then combined with individual fish carbonate excretion rates to predict global fish CaCO3 production ranging from 3.2 x 1012 to 8.9 x 1012 mol year-1 (0.04 to 0.11 Pg of CaCO3-C year-1). This range accounts for 2.7 to 15.4% of estimates for total global new CaCO3 production in the surface oceans.
[endnotes omitted]
In simple terms, the authors of the paper have just informed us that we may not have noticed a process that's responsible for a substantial amount of the carbon movement in the oceans. That's kind of a big deal (which would explain the Science article).
The effect that climate change is going to have on this particular form of carbon movement is not entirely clear (at least to me), nor is the effect that this might have on climate change. "Not none" is probably a reasonable guess, and I'm sure that we'll learn more in the future.
What is clear is that this shows us something that we would be advised to remember when we start to talk about things like pumping a gajillion tons of CO2 into the oceans:
Do we really want to take chances messing around with things that we might not know piscine carbonates about?
Reference:
R. W. Wilson, F. J. Millero, J. R. Taylor, P. J. Walsh, V. Christensen, S. Jennings, M. Grosell (2009). Contribution of Fish to the Marine Inorganic Carbon Cycle Science, 323 (5912), 359-362 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157972
The USGS project has captured eye-popping amounts of carbon—an average of 3000 grams of carbon per square meter per year (g-C/m2/yr) over the past 5 years. For comparison, reforested agricultural land, eligible for carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, socks away carbon at a rate much less than 100 g-C/m2/yr, says Gail Chmura, a biogeochemist at McGill University (Canada).
Saltwater marshes provide biggest cooling potential The USGS researchers determined that saltwater marshes provided the most bang for the buck. Wetlands are great at storing carbon dioxide because of their near-constant water cover, which prevents oxygen from entering the muddy soil; this effectively keeps bacterial decomposition, a process which releases a lot of CO2 (this is one of the reasons why permafrost thawing is so worrisome), to a minimum.
In fact, unperturbed wetlands are so effective that their peat soils can sometimes be 60 ft deep and over 7,000 years old. The project, which started out in California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, will be expanded to determine whether the restored wetlands can help regain the land elevation lost when the delta island was drained a century ago and to see whether "wetland carbon credits" could be sold on the state's upcoming carbon market.
Concerns remain over methane release This all sounds well and good, but some scientists are urging caution, pointing out that the project has yet to provide reliable figures for the amount of methane emissions being released. Though they may not cancel out the beneficial cooling effects of the wetlands' carbon storage, the emission levels could still be relatively significant -- especially on a large scale.
One reason for concern, according to University of Florida biogeochemist Ramesh Reddy, is that the same low oxygen to anoxic conditions that favor carbon storage also favor the release of methane. Even if the bacteria can't access oxygen, they can use iron oxides, CO2 or sulfate as sources of electron acceptors. Using CO2 produces methane emissions.
This makes saltwater marshes all the more appealing, says Chmura:
Because saltwater is high in sulfate, microbes in saltwater marshes don’t have to use CO2 as an electron acceptor, and therefore they produce negligible amounts of methane, Chmura says. She estimates that North American salt marshes sequester an average of 210 g-C/m2/yr. These hefty rates, along with an ability to accrete carbon faster as the sea level rises, make saltwater marshes ideal sites for restoration and carbon storage, she says.
Restoring ecosystems and naturally sequestering carbon dioxide? Sounds like a plan. Kudos to Florida for getting the ball rolling on what will (hopefully) be an international trend in the coming years.
ACS Publications: Wetlands are champions at carbon storage, but they also release methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2. Scientists are boosting research efforts to determine whether the cooling power of carbon storage outstrips the global warming potential of methane in wetlands. They are finding that the greatest cooling occurs from saltwater marshes.
This summer, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced that it was launching a $12.3 million project to capture carbon by growing tules (a species of sedge also known as bulrushes) and cattails in wetlands created on abandoned farmland on islands in California’s Sacramento−San Joaquin River Delta. Two months later, the carbon-storing capacity of wetlands headlined 2 days of workshops at the September 16 meeting of the Association of State Wetland Managers in Portland, Ore.The USGS project has captured eye-popping amounts of carbon—an average of 3000 grams of carbon per square meter per year (g-C/m2/yr) over the past 5 years. For comparison, reforested agricultural land, eligible for carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, socks away carbon at a rate much less than 100 g-C/m2/yr, says Gail Chmura, a biogeochemist at McGill University (Canada).
Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating CO2 from the air into new plant growth, explains Roger Fujii, a soil chemist with USGS. When the plant material dies, near-constant water cover keeps oxygen out of the rich mud, slowing decomposition that would otherwise emit CO2. Undisturbed wetlands are so effective at accreting carbon that their organic peat soils can be 60 feet deep and 7000−10,000 years old, he says. USGS is now expanding the delta project to see whether it can regain the land elevation lost since farmers drained the delta island marshes 100 years ago, causing the soil to decompose, emit CO2, and subside, Fujii says. A secondary goal is to find out whether the extraordinary carbon storage capacity of the tule and cattail “farms” could be sold as carbon credits on California’s upcoming CO2 cap-and-trade market, he says....
Although wetlands could be a powerful tool in combating greenhouse gases, climate change itself could threaten wetland ecosystems. The drying of Southern California and a rising sea level could destroy saltwater marshes like the ones at Huntington Beach.
