Thank you so much, Willett, for sharing all this with us, and for taking the time to clarify these potential misunderstandings. I'm sure that I speak for the list as a whole when I say that I find your occasional postings to be enormously helpful and provocative.
Yours, Michael Michael Maniates Allegheny College Spring 2007: Academic Dean, Semester at Sea. (Follow the voyage at http://explore11.securesites.net/voyages/spring2007/) ----- Original Message ----- From: willett To: rldavis ; Global Environmental Education Cc: Kai N. Lee Sent: Monday, March 12, 2007 1:39 PM Subject: Re: Community-based management of coral reef resources Larry, Caldera and Wickett do not give a "scenario" that "posits" burning all fossil fuel. It's a graph through time. Pick your estimate of when you think we're going to stop increasing atmospheric CO2, and read off pH. ("Stop increasing" means something over 80% reduction in emissions from today, right?) I wouldn't be sanguine that current political processes will get us there before the end of this century. So, look at the end of this century, -0.4 pH change in the surface waters. If you're reading the graph the same way I am, and you understand the consequences of -0.4 pH change, you are saying that you are confident enough that we'll get 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050 that you see efforts to direct attention to the problem are not worth distracting people from other problems. Or, perhaps more clearly, see the graphs in: http://co2.cms.udel.edu/Ocean_Acidification.htm for both a blown up version of the Caldera and Wickett time graph, and for a picture of the environment for tropical corals in 2070. In other words, I thought I WAS dealing with breathing, rather than the cut on the finger. (I took a first aid course too.) I accept blame for pushing the student. He sought his own council from the literature and from oceanographers, then decided. Willett Kempton On 12 Mar 2007, at 08:40, rldavis wrote: The scenario described in the Caldera and Wickett article is extreme. It posits burning all of the world’s fossil fuels. This is unlikely on many levels, not the least of which is geological (can’t get at a lot of those resources). Beyond that, even though the acidification would be on a fairly short time scale, loss of marine resources due to poor (or no) management of local problems will take place on an even shorter time scale. Basically, a strong argument could be made that by the time ocean acidification gets bad enough to cause a severe problem, the reefs will be gone anyway due to overfishing, physical damage, disease, and so forth. In my wilderness first aid course, I was taught to deal with airway, breathing, circulation first, no matter what the problem, because unless those are taken care of within a very few minutes, other problems become irrelevant. That, I believe is the case here. I can’t help wondering if the student in question changed his thesis topic because of the science or because of his advisor? Larry Davis
