14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists have long been aware of the fact that ocean acidification negatively affects marine wildlife. However, it took them quite a while to figure out that said phenomenon also amplifies global warming.
Researchers writing in yesterday's issue of the journal Nature Climate Change explain that, according to their investigations, ocean acidification is causing certain organisms inhabiting our planet's seas and oceans to emit less sulphur compounds that they did only a few years ago.
This might not be such a problem if it were not for the fact that the sulphur released by these creatures is supposed to work its way into the Earth's atmosphere and encourage the formation of clouds.
Therefore, the less sulphur our planet's atmosphere contains, the fewer clouds form, Nature explains.
This means that, on the long run, our planet has high chances of warming to a considerable extent, simply because it lacks the cloud cover than would otherwise keep it cool.
The researchers argue that, in light of these findings, specialists in charge of piecing together predictive global models concerning how climate and whether conditions will evolve over the next decades would to best to not ignore ocean acidification and its ability to amplify global warming.
“Climate change and decreasing seawater pH (ocean acidification) have widely been considered as uncoupled consequences of the anthropogenic CO2 perturbation,” the researchers write in the Abstract to their paper.
“Our results indicate that ocean acidification has the potential to exacerbate anthropogenic warming through a mechanism that is not considered at present in projections of future climate change,” they go on to say.
As reported on several occasions, ocean acidification boils down to changes in the acidity of our planet's seas and oceans.
It occurs because these masses of water absorb carbon dioxide that is floating about in the atmosphere.
Given the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels have been steadily increasing over the past few years, it need not come as a surprise that ocean acidification has also taken a turn for the worse.