Earlier this week, The Guardian publicized the results of a recent study in Global Change Biology showing that ocean acidification has crossed a "planetary boundary" in many parts of the world, and that it gets worse the deeper you go below the ocean's surface. According to the story's lead, "Ocean acidification has already crossed a crucial threshold for planetary health, scientists say in unexpected finding," followed by a summary of the new paper and interviews with scientists who try to convey how serious the problem is and how urgently governments need to address it.
Two related things bother me about The Guardian's coverage of this research.
First, the author mischaracterizes the findings as "unexpected," when in reality scientists have been warning about the risks of ocean acidification for decades. Scott Doney, a marine scientist at the University of Virginia, published a very clear statement -- "The Dangers of Ocean Acidification" -- in Scientific American in 2006, which he followed up a few years later with a co-edited special issue of Oceanography on ocean acidification as a "critical emerging problem for ocean sciences." In the years leading up to these publications, several major articles on the drivers and effects of ocean acidification were published in journals like Nature and the Royal Proceedings. By 2008, the threat of ocean acidification to marine life (especially corals) was such common knowledge that a UN Environment Program report on fisheries collapse devoted a whole section to it.
Given that ocean acidification is driven by CO2 emissions, and given that CO2 has been steadily rising since the first big round of ocean acidification warnings in the early 2000s (which were published in the highest ranked journals and picked up by mainstream political institutions), I suspect it would be pretty difficult to find an ocean scientist who is surprised by these findings or would consider them "unexpected."
That leads to the second problem with the article: Where is the historicization of ocean acidification research? At the very least, The Guardian should have framed this with a sentence or two informing readers that scientists have been worried about the rate of ocean acidification (and have had a pretty consistently clear understanding of both its causes and consequences) for at least twenty years.
I think newspaper editors (not unlike academic editors) think "novel" findings are more interesting and more impactful, but in this case at least, it seems like the much more important story is that the alarm bells have been blaring for decades, governments (and of course companies, too) have known precisely what the problem is, and all the while they have refused to act.
Ocean acidification is the expected result of specific decisions -- to invest in new fossil fuel projects, to subsidize airlines and industrial meat producers, to undermine public transportation, and so on. It's a scandal that we need the media to carefully and critically scrutinize alongside their important coverage of climate science.
Two related things bother me about The Guardian's coverage of this research.
First, the author mischaracterizes the findings as "unexpected," when in reality scientists have been warning about the risks of ocean acidification for decades. Scott Doney, a marine scientist at the University of Virginia, published a very clear statement -- "The Dangers of Ocean Acidification" -- in Scientific American in 2006, which he followed up a few years later with a co-edited special issue of Oceanography on ocean acidification as a "critical emerging problem for ocean sciences." In the years leading up to these publications, several major articles on the drivers and effects of ocean acidification were published in journals like Nature and the Royal Proceedings. By 2008, the threat of ocean acidification to marine life (especially corals) was such common knowledge that a UN Environment Program report on fisheries collapse devoted a whole section to it.
Given that ocean acidification is driven by CO2 emissions, and given that CO2 has been steadily rising since the first big round of ocean acidification warnings in the early 2000s (which were published in the highest ranked journals and picked up by mainstream political institutions), I suspect it would be pretty difficult to find an ocean scientist who is surprised by these findings or would consider them "unexpected."
That leads to the second problem with the article: Where is the historicization of ocean acidification research? At the very least, The Guardian should have framed this with a sentence or two informing readers that scientists have been worried about the rate of ocean acidification (and have had a pretty consistently clear understanding of both its causes and consequences) for at least twenty years.
I think newspaper editors (not unlike academic editors) think "novel" findings are more interesting and more impactful, but in this case at least, it seems like the much more important story is that the alarm bells have been blaring for decades, governments (and of course companies, too) have known precisely what the problem is, and all the while they have refused to act.
Ocean acidification is the expected result of specific decisions -- to invest in new fossil fuel projects, to subsidize airlines and industrial meat producers, to undermine public transportation, and so on. It's a scandal that we need the media to carefully and critically scrutinize alongside their important coverage of climate science.
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