Geoengineering and Ocean Acidification

There are two different approaches to designing Planetary Geoengineering concepts that can help counteract the effects of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere.  Most geoengineering proposals are designed merely to offset or counteract the effects of global warming.  These proposals, which include ideas like injecting particles or aerosols into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet, making clouds whiter to reflect more sunlight, and putting a giant parasol into to outer space to shade parts of the Earth are designed to cool the planet.   However, this line of geoengineering proposals would do nothing to reduce the high CO2 levels already in the atmosphere, and nothing to stop CO2 from going ever higher as more fossil fuels are burned in coming years.

This is a severe drawback, as CO2 buildup in the atmosphere has other negative side effects in addition to causing global warming by enhancing the atmospheric greenhouse effect.   One of the more direct coeval effects of high atmospheric CO2 levels is increasing acidification of the oceans.  About a third of all the CO2 released into the atmosphere is ultimately absorbed by the ocean, resulting in increasing acidication of all ocean waters.  While the acidification level of the ocean will never reach the level that it can dissolve polar bear fur, as shown in the cartoon above, ocean acidification in some regions is already killing corals and damaging the shells of other invertebrate marine species.  Continued acidification of the ocean will severely damage many components of marine ecosystems around the world.

Geoengineering proposals which seek merely to ameliorate the effects of global warming presumably must also entail separate large scale geoengineering efforts to address the side effects of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere and oceans, greatly increasing the costs of these kinds of proposals.    And GCM studies show that this variety of geoengineering proposals can themselves cause harmful environmental and climatic changes that in turn may require still more remediation efforts.

Alternatively, geoengineering proposals targeted at reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere address the root cause of global warming, and have the added benefit of simultaneously addressing all the side effects of CO2 build up such as ocean acidification.   Pumping down CO2 from the atmosphere is a very large technical problem, but reasonable proposals do exist.  These include freezing CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it in giant refrigerators, dumping iron into the ocean to encourage algae blooms that may pump down CO2, encouraging natural rock weathering, and my own proposal to use industrial chemicals and Buckyballs to pump down CO2 over Antarctica leading to burial of the CO2  in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.