Photo: Yuriy via PicasaDive into the NRDC’s new documentary Acid Test and you’re immediately immersed in a beautiful undersea world complete with vibrant coral reefs, graceful kelp beds, and rhythmic schools of fish.
But Acid Test is no Blue Planet, thanks to heavy use of green-screen technology. And what’s in front of those screens is a lot less pleasant than the fish porn projected onto them. (No offense to the scientists, commercial fisherfolk, and other experts who are doing the talking, of course—it’s more about what they’re saying.)
The 30 minute film, part of Discovery Planet Green’s “Blue August” month of online and onscreen ocean coverage, is about the threat of ocean acidification, the gradual chemical changes in our waters linked to increased levels of carbon dioxide. Just how much CO2? Turns out that since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has absorbed about one quarter of the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.
But don’t go celebrating all the sequestered CO2 that’s been kept from contributing to global warming, because it’s beginning to cause more problems than it’s solving, increasing the acidity of the water by 30 percent. And that acidity is starting to dissolve seashells in areas as close to home as the California coast, meaning tragic consequences for many organisms—and the millions more who count on them for food, including us.
It’s a scary phenomenon that scientists are only just coming to understand, and it’s only going to get worse—leaving us with “an urgent choice,” as narrator Sigourney Weaver puts it, “to move beyond fossil fuels or to risk turning the ocean into a sea of weeds.”
As you watch Acid Test, keep an eye on the beauty projected onto the green screen and the choice seems pretty obvious.
Acid Test premieres tonight on Planet Green and continues to air throughout the month. Catch the trailer below:
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Comments
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Erik Hoffner Posted 9:35 am
12 Aug 2009
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Sarah van Schagen Posted 9:53 am
12 Aug 2009
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Clifford Wells Posted 1:33 pm
12 Aug 2009
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Christopher S. Johnson Posted 4:18 pm
12 Aug 2009
Many of the studies talk about 2100, but more recent studies mention "early sites" where the ph is likely to be low enough to indicate a dissolving of shells in polar waters and cold deep upwellings within just a few decades.
These same areas contain productive fisheries and shell dependent species like pteropods, that fin fish depend on.
The solution takes a huge amount of effort on a global scale, as opposed to nutrient pollution problems which happen on a local scale and can be more easily remedied. So sounding the alarm now is not just practical, but really, if we are honest, maybe even a little late.
The film goes out of its way and bends over backwards to mention the multiple stressors, like warming and coastal outflow pollution, especially on coral reefs, and demonstrates the slime you speak of.
There may be SOME complex things you can point to, like the species ability to adapt to high acidity, but the science seems simple and predictable. So much human caused CO2 is likely to cause a predictable amount of lowering ph. My understanding is that this is elementary stuff to figure out and model vs. global warming.
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Clifford Wells Posted 6:30 pm
12 Aug 2009
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Christopher S. Johnson Posted 12:20 am
13 Aug 2009
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