Specialist #2: My Teeth Are Sore (Ocean Acidification)

Bluey here,

I'm pleased that’s over, dentist days aren’t my favourite.

My teeth (sometimes called marine calcifiers or coral reefs) have been suspiciously sore for days. Having indicated the pain could be due to ‘Ocean Acidification’ (OA), Dr Steffen referred me to Dentist Albright, who is the supposed expert. I'm particularly worried about the long-term future of my 'Great Barrier Teeth' (GBT).

First scan of my two front teeth: 'The Great Barrier Teeth' (Source: NASA)

Dentist Albright inserted her dental explorer and dental mirror into my mouth the moment I lay down. As she poked and prodded, she talked to me; I listened. Yes, it was 'highly likely' that my teeth were suffering from OA, but she’d have to conduct some advanced 'seawater chemistry' tests, just to be sure. It was generally accepted within the medical and dental community, that OA was the ‘evil twin of climate change’ and having already been diagnosed with anthropogenic climate change, a diagnosis of OA was likely.

On the completion of the examination, in order to provide me with some OA background and give her some time to process my results, Dentist Albright introduced me to her assistant, Nurse Hönisch.

The nurse pulled out my dental records. Unfortunately, they only went back 300 million years, due to a problem with proxy information (due to a lack of 'pelagic calcifiers'). Before we looked at my records though, she helpfully explained two important ocean-chemistry facts:

1) Acidity

• Atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by my bodily fluid (oceans), including by my saliva (surface-ocean water), which causes chemical reactions that reduce my pH levels 
• Increasing acidity occurs when pH decreases.

2) Saturation State of Calcium Carbonate 

• Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) minerals, such as aragonite, are the building blocks for my teeth
• Increasing saliva acidity causes saturation rates in minerals like aragonite (Ωarag) to decrease, making it harder for my teeth to stay strong, therefore resilient to dissolution. 

The nurse also dropped another fact; that before humans came along, CO2 absorption was buffered on long-time scales by interplay between seawater, seafloor carbonate sediments, and weathering on land. Not really relevant anymore, if you ask me. Unless contemporary dentist, Taylor et al's enhanced weathering concept's cost can reduce several magnitudes.

My records showed that the last time I'd had my teeth checked was 11,600 years ago—when CO2 was at 265ppm. My 'planktic foraminiferal' tooth had reduced in size by 50% then, caused in part by a gradual 30% increase in CO2 concentrations over the preceding 6,000 years. 

My memory was coming back; I remembered that during my PETM, a large CO2 release caused my 'benthic foramanifer' tooth to completely disappear! The records insisted that the exact cause of this event (and others) is difficult to determine as 'environmental changes covaried' but I'm certain it was from OA. My records also reminded me about the golf ball that hit me in the jaw 65 million years ago, causing my 'planktic calcifier' to fall out, but somehow leaving my teeth corals intact.

That was about the time Dentist Albright returned to give me my results. Here they are:

Medical Report 2: Ocean Acidification

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I'm in the green but should I really be in the green if we all know that I'm going to be in the yellow shortly...

I'm particularly worried about my GBT. So is Dentist Albright who says she has proven that net community calcification is depressed compared with values expected for pre-industrial conditions, indicating OA may already be affecting my GBT replenishment.

A visiting dentist, Dentist De'ath (quite an appropriate name really) agreed, citing increased temperature as another contributing factor alongside decreased saturation rates of aragonite in my saliva. He also mentioned something about coral bleaching. I didn't know if that was good, like a cleaning product or something but by the tone of his voice it sounded bad. I didn't ask, as I'd had enough bad news for one day.

Looks like climate change really is OA's evil twin; maybe even worse. My teeth have always been a real source of pride, especially as they can be seen all the way from space.

Yours for awhile,
Bluey

Learning Human

Bluey here,

I think I get it! You guys I mean. I finally get why Dr IPCC, Dr Steffen and Nurse Mackay can't stop talking about humans, especially in relation to my health concerns, aka my 'planetary boundaries'.

Humans

As I operate on larger timescales than 2050 years, getting my head around the below video was challenging, but it provided a good starting point. It also contained a figure I can more readily relate to. In years, 10 billion is a little under my anticipated life expectancy.

Ok, there's a lot of you Homo sapiens, you like procreating and you enjoy consuming my natural resources. That's fine but I needed to find out more—something substantial, but not too substantial. Books, yes, but not big boring books.

Human History and Energy

I went for Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" because Mars recommended it. While it read suspiciously like a personal biography, it also contextualised humans, opening my eyes to their perspective, and hopefully broadening my planetary one.

Bryson’s masterpiece on humans, our universe and everything in between did what it said, it put nearly everything into perspective. He reminded me, and everyone else, of the majesty of me (ok, not me, mainly our cosmos and life itself). It inspired me to delve deeper.

Exploring the aspect of humans most relevant to me—their insatiable appetite for energy—was next. Daniel Yergin's "The Prize", not only revealed details of the human obsession with my organic deposits (the ones stored beneath my skin), 'fossil fuels' as they term them, it also helped me come to terms with their initial lack of awareness regarding the connection between GHG emissions and my temperature. It also revealed something else that could be equally worrying for my future well-being: 'human power struggles' and 'nuclear proliferation', but that's another story.

Bryson and Yergin revealed much, but I had an important task still to satisfy; getting to the bottom of a term Dr Steffen used in my initial consultation, but which I'd not properly understood.

The Anthropocene

My body has been through multiple 'epochs' since I coalesced into being around 4.5 billion years ago. Epochs are to me as years are to humans, 'eras' like human decades and 'eons' like childhood, middle-age etc. Unlike human years though, epochs are not uniform; they vary depending on geological 'signals'.

Source: International Commission on Stratigraphy 

According to Dr Steffen, my current (official) epoch, the Holocene (11,700 years BP) has already moved unofficially into the Anthropocene. The human signs are "everywhere" he says; the only contention amongst his colleagues is seemingly not if it's happened, but when it happened.

For me, this temporal triviality—Dr Steffen: 1945-1950 (artificial radionuclides), Dr Cruetzen Stoemer: ~1750-1800 (elevated CO2 and CH4 concentrations from the Industrial Revolution), Dr Ruddiman Thomson: 8000-5000 years BP (elevated CO2 and CH4 concentrations from forest clearance / rice irrigation respectively) and Dr Certeni Scalenghe: ~11,700 BP ('Holocene as Anthropocene')—does little more but reinforce a much more important point. Humans are my current epoch.

Source: National Geographic

Having spent two days learning human, I've come to a preliminary conclusion that this epoch might not last all that long for them, but from a personal perspective, I'll need to brace myself for longer-lasting consequences.

Yours for awhile,
Bluey

Specialist #1: The Most Qualified Doctor in the World (Climate Change)

Bluey here,

I went to the climate specialist yesterday. What an awesome experience, despite the not-so-promising test results, but we’ll get to all that soon. First though, I have to tell you guys about the amazing specialist Dr Steffen et al. referred me to.

My Specialist

Dr IPCC is the most experienced specialist I’ve ever come across. She’s only 28 years old, speaks all major languages, has PhDs in every field of earth sciences (not to mention all the traditional sciences and social sciences) and has over 100 different passports to her name.

More incredibly, she isn’t even working today. She’s taken the day off to volunteer talking me through my tests! That’s not all. Before I even arrived for the appointment, she’d already taken my temperature and a load of other ‘equally important’ tests. Technology these days.

As soon as I arrived, she sat me down and asked me to listen intently to what she had to say. I have summarised it all for you below:

Climate Background

Dr IPCC felt compelled to first provide me with some climate context so she introduced me to one of her nurses, Professor Mackay. He patiently took me through the underlying reasons why my temperature has varied over all these years. It was fascinating:

1) The path I take when I stroll around the Sun varies slightly each year, as do the body parts I expose. Nurse Mackay calls this ‘orbital forcing’ or the ‘Milankovitch cycles’, and says it was named after the Serbian scientist who studied how I walked a century ago. Yea, right. He broke the concept into three interrelated elements (for more information):

• The path I take when I walk around the sun ('eccentricity'); ~100,000 year cycle
• The angle of my body as I walk around the sun ('obliquity'); ~41,000 year cycle
• The direction of my head at any given point ('precession'); ~21,000 year cycle.

Milankovitch Cycles (Source: NASA)

2) The amount of energy emitted from the sun that hits my body. The nurse calls this ‘solar variability’. It's about how the sun's ‘solar irradiance’—which varies slightly—interacts with my atmosphere between my skin and my clothes (my 'troposphere') and above my clothes (my ‘stratosphere’). More on clothes below.

3) How often and powerfully I fart. The nurse reassured me that this was natural, calling this ‘volcanic activity’. It’s linked to how much particulate matter and sulphur aerosols I release into my immediate atmosphere. Sulphate aerosols, for instance, if they get up into my stratosphere, can cause a general ‘radiative’ cooling at my surface.

4) The role clothing has on temperature. Dr IPCC and Nurse Mackay refer to my clothes as ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHGs) and not just because they’re all green, because they’re not. Without my clothes, I’d be frozen at about -18°C. Instead, thanks to my clothes—mainly Cotton (CO2), Chino (CH4), Ninon (N2O), Organza (O3), Chiffon (CFCs) and even Hemp (Water Vapour)—trapping infrared heat, I’m pretty hospitable to what Dr IPCC calls ‘life’, averaging out around the 14°C mark. Temperatures at my different body parts, however, vary considerably.

Greenhouse effect (Source: NOAA) 

Finally, Dr IPCC began telling me about a species called Homo sapiens that started moving across my body between 60,000 to 125,000 years ago and—since about 11,000 years ago—‘literally blossomed’. I’d never heard of 'humans' but the Doctor insisted I get to know them.

Results

They’d not even ‘scratched the surface’ regarding the background natural variability stuff but as my appointment was only one hour, Dr IPCC moved on to explaining my test results.

The full results can be found here, however the medical summary is below:

Medical Report 1 - Anthropogenic Climate Change

So many questions. Who ‘on earth’ were these humans? Why are they adding more clothes (GHGs) to me? Is it bad to have a temperature? Just glancing at the results—and the rates of change over such a cosmologically insignificant time frame—it appears my temperature is about to increase. I’m not that worried yet though; nothing I haven’t coped with before—I’m always changing, albeit a bit slower than this ‘great acceleration’.

There were plenty of facts to digest, and many more to research. Dr IPCC helped immensely though, explaining that as I visited other specialists about my ‘planetary boundaries’, I'd learn more about this specific problem.

Next task? I was off to the library to research these humans.

Yours always,
Bluey

Bluey's Feeling Blue

Hi, my name's Pale Blue Dot. People call me Bluey. I'm four and a half billion years old and according to a few of my mates, I’m experiencing a minor mid-life crisis. Everyone gets one though, they say. I’m not so convinced because everything’s been going pretty smoothly—minus the odd hiccup—since my 'cambrian explosion' about 541 million years ago.

Either way, this blog is about working out whether or not I need to worry. One of my friends, Mars, thinks I'm fine. My other friend, Venus, isn’t so sure. She thinks I should be taking better care of myself.

Me, December 7, 1972 (Source: NASA)

Eventually, I made it down to my GP, Dr Steffen et al, who ran some initial tests. He came back a bit concerned so he's suggested I book in to see some specialists over the next few weeks. According to GP Steffen (Doc), who referenced my previous GP’s records (Dr Rockstrom et al), I could have a few things 'wrong' with me. I'm not sure why but he's nicknamed them ‘planetary boundaries’:

1. I've got a slight temperature but people think I'm crazy. The Doc calls it anthropogenic ‘Climate change’. One old man in the waiting room called it something different though: ‘Alarmism’. 
2. My teeth are sore and some individual teeth feel brittle. The Doc wants me to see the dentist. He says it could be one of an ‘Ocean’ of reasons, including ‘acidification’. Bit worrying, especially as I’m no exception—I hate dentists! 
3. My white blood cell count is a bit low. Doc calls it biodiversity loss or ‘Biosphere integrity’ or something. I’ve never heard of it. 
4. I dyed my hair blonde a month ago and people started asking questions. I said I just felt like a change. Doc calls it ‘Land-system change’. It confused me so I’m going to ask the psychologist about that one. 
5. I have a big mole on my bottom but I think it's benign. He mentioned something about ‘Stratospheric ozone depletion’ and a hole or he could have just said mole. Not sure. 
6. I've recently taken some stimulants (called P & N) to help me grow but I think there could be a few side effects I never saw coming. The side effects are called ‘Biochemical flows’. 
7. I’ve had a few minor ‘plumbing’ issues of late. The doc said it wasn’t major but I'll probably need to manage it. He euphemistically named it ‘Freshwater use’ so I wouldn’t get too embarrassed. 

The Doc even broke the results down visually (he said to ignore the question mark sections, for now):

Planetary Boundaries (Source: Science)

There you have it, plenty of things to get to the bottom of. By the way, apologies for all the medical jargon. Please check out my glossary page if you want to know more about any of the technical terms that the doc lost me on. I noted them down so you (and I) could refer back to them.

I’m not sure which specialist I’ve got first but I’ll be sure to update you straight away following my first appointment. I bet you’re itching to find out what’s wrong ;)

Yours always,
Bluey