Study of ocean acidification using natural volcanic C02 seeps

Another study - reported on the Physorg website - predicting the demise of coral reefs; a longer time-frame here: they say the die off may occur at the end of 21st Century
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-ocean-acidification-diversity-resiliency-coral.html

that article's source listed as:
"Losers and winners in coral reefs acclimatized to elevated carbon dioxide concentrations," Nature Climate Change, June 2011.

More bad news for corals

An Australian researcher has found that acidification of the ocean gives some seaweeds an edge over their coral neighbours.

"The new study experimentally confirms this hypothesis using two of the most abundant species co-occurring—and competing—on the Great Barrier Reef. The branching coral Acropora intermedia and the brown fleshy seaweed Lobophora papenfussii were placed in tanks exposed to four different carbon dioxide-dosing regimes, simulating the range of historical and projected ocean acidification conditions: pre-industrial, present-day, mid-century and late-century carbon dioxide levels ...

 "The new study experimentally confirms this hypothesis using two of the most abundant species co-occurring—and competing—on the Great Barrier Reef. The branching coral Acropora intermedia and the brown fleshy seaweed Lobophora papenfussii were placed in tanks exposed to four different carbon dioxide-dosing regimes, simulating the range of historical and projected ocean acidification conditions: pre-industrial, present-day, mid-century and late-century carbon dioxide levels"

Click the link to see the short article on Seaweb.
Their  Source: Diaz-Pulido, G. et al. 2011. High CO2 enhances the competitive strength of seaweeds over corals. Ecology Letters 14(2): 156-162

Upside-down "Hills Hoist" - an idea about growing kelp in equatorial deep ocean

It occurs to me that one way of providing for the needs of kelp in deep ocean at the equator is to make something like an enormous, upside down, "Hills Hoist" circular clothes line and suspend this from a buoy.

Like the Hills Hoist clothes line [see Hills Products for examples of this] in which the central column can be wound up and down to facilitate easy hanging of cloths on the line, the upside down seaweed growing framework would be capable of being raised up at the start of a growing cycle to allow attachment of kelp and other seaweed seeds, and then lowered to the particular depth favoured by that species. Later the framework would be raised to facility harvesting and the seaweed. The buoys would need to be connected by a network of floating ropes or cables of which some would be linked no doubt to the Ocean Cities ice rafts. In order to keep the seaweed growing frameworks in good condition and not let them get damaged, or keep the kelp on them from being overshadowed by seaweed on other frameworks, some nodes of the network would need to be anchored to the sea floor four kilometres below.

海上城市

海上城市﹕我想世界上的人們需要建立幾張非常大的泊在海中的冰台。
這幾大冰台可以泊在赤道。上面會帶城市﹐商業地﹐農村﹐ 娛樂 地﹐什麼的。冰台
周圍的海水里會作海草場跟魚農場。

Further thoughts on bringing equatorial ice rafts and kelp farming into being: social and political necessities

Further thoughts on how to bring equatorial ice rafts and kelp farming into being.

Initial finance for pumping equipment, compressors, piping, insulation, second-hand nets, cables, building materials, food supplies,   transportation, and so forth, will come from large companies wanting to invest in sequestration so as to ensure their own long term access to carbon credits.

Government of the ice rafts will have to be democratic and also involve citizen/elector equity. Voting must be direct with possibly two aspects of the franchise:
    1/ delegates for equal sized electorates would meet as a parliament and would be elected by means of compulsory, partial preferencial, voting;
    2/ electors themselves would constitute a citizens' house where voting power would be in proportion to the individual's equity in the city.

In effect each ice raft would have to be a type of municipality, a combination of city state, and proprietary company. It will be vitally important to prevent these municipalities spawning [of worse still becoming] entrenched bureaucracies so their constitutions would need to be overtly and unassailably democratic. One good way to bring that about will be to base them first and foremost on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with an emphasis on the essential need for embodiment of compassion, democracy, ethics and scientific method in the laws, policies, and projects the citizens create.

I think it is not possible to overemphasize the importance of democracy in such an endevour. Karl Popper provided us with the theory to explain why democracies can succeed where dictatorships and authoritarian societies fail. The history of the 20th Century and this early stage of the 21st have shown us clearly that what he said is correct: democracy is a prerequisite for security, social stability and economic growth [and not the other way round]. The problems that have turned up and threatened disaster are more or less all the consequences of attempts at subversion of democracy and suppression of the openness it depends on.

How we can save our world and have fun in the process.

Dear reader, if you run into Sir Richard Branson please ask him to take a look at this. He might find it very interesting.

It would be really good if everybody was interested in fixing up the environmental damage that has been caused by human activities. If that were the case I wouldn't have to write this because dozens of other people, most of them smarter than me no doubt, would have already written this and vast numbers of people would already be beavering away to make it happen.

In my understanding the really big challenge coming our way is acidification of the ocean. The effects to be expected as the PH of the ocean decreases due to the ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide being dissolved are that corrals will no longer grow, many kinds of shellfish will die out, and many kinds of bony and cartilaginous fish will die out also. We will all have to learn to eat jelly fish, and squid maybe.

I propose a way to reverse the increase of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean. The method is to sequester the carbon in seaweed, such as kelp.
This can be done as follows.

• Kelp can be grown by means of attachment to cables or large nets suspended horizontally beneath the waves and parallel to the surface
• It may be possible to grow corral in the same way
  
• The best place to do this is out in the open ocean around the equator because that is where there is most sunlight to provide energy for the algae to grow and near the equator tropical cyclones [hurricanes] do not occur because there is no strong Coriolis wind effect
  
• Nutrients for the kelp can be provided by raising ocean bottom water to the surface. This can be pumped upwards by the same kind of simple and robust technology used for extracting oil from the ground
• The ocean bottom water is very cold and therefore can easily be mixed with surface waters to achieve optimum seawater temperatures for the kelp and corrals
• The pumps for raising the ocean bottom water will be housed on very large ice rafts which will also provide a potentially vast area for people to establish permanent settlements, and factories for processing kelp, etc, into useful artifacts or chemical feed-stocks for plastic manufacturing
• The ice will need to be insulated of course, above, below, and around the sides. This is all doable with current technology. Insulation in many places on the upper surface of the ice will be provided by soil and mulch.
  
• The inhabitants of the ice rafts could grow their own food crops. Oil palms, genetically engineered to be very short in the stem and growing in the soil and mulch for example, could provide another source for income.
  
• The energy for powering the bottom water lift pumps, the refrigeration compressors, and all the other needs will be taken from solar thermal concentration during the day, and at night from the temperature difference between surface water and ocean bottom water.
  
• The motive force will be generated by means of Stirling engines wherein the cold ocean bottom water will provide the heat sink while concentrated solar energy will provide the heat source by day
  
• Ice rafts of this sort could provide living space for many millions of people around the equator
• Ice rafts of this sort could also provide a destination for eco-tourism; the possibilities are endless
• For example, the equatorial location could also provide a place for certain types of launch facility for shooting small prefabricated steel parts into orbit
  

Cheers,
Mark Peaty

Solar powered cooking

Thinking about solar power [AKA diurnal thermo-nuclear]; Maybe one of the most effective things we can do to counteract global warming and ocean acidification is to store heat energy in rocks and bricks to be used for frying, steaming and baking food. The simplest way of doing this will be to use curved mirrors to focus the sun's heat onto hollow pipes. The air inside the pipes needs to be heated to about 250 deg C but that just means the mirror concentrator for each such pipe needs to be about 6 times as wide as the diameter of the pipe. My recommendation is that the collector pipes are held immobile and exactly parallel to the Earth's axis of rotation. This arrangement means that the mirror concentrators only need to move right around the pipe once every 24 hours. [The word "Clockwork" comes to mind.] A Stirling engine can be used to pump/blow the hot air along an insulated delivery pipe [underground for preference], and into the bottom of the insulated rock pile or brick stack. The oven will be whatever shape suits the baking style of the home and will simply be the top part of the insulated brick stack with thick tiles for floor, walls and roof. The door could be hinged, or sliding, or just some kind of insulated metal sheet. As can be seen, none of this is "rocket science" is it! Furthermore, something similar but with different dimensions and lower temperatures could be made for drying the washing instead of using mechanical electric energy guzzling driers like so many urban households do now.