Gee, What Could Be Making Those Salmon Die Off Like That?

Where have all the salmon gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the salmon gone,
Long time ago.
Where have all the salmon gone,
Down to the bottom, everyone,
When will we ever learn?
When will we ev--er learn?
- with a nod to Pete Seeger.

Wild Pacific salmon have pretty much disappeared from the West Coast fisheries. You can still get the farm variety, but people are reticent to eat fish which swim around in their own shit all day. The option, for awhile, was to eat Pacific salmon which swam around in acid all day, out in the Deep Blue, but that door is closing now, too. I did notice that the San Francisco Chronicle actually carried an article on Saturday, July 5, about the problem of ocean acidification. Right on schedule. I heard Dr. Inez Fung from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory give a detailed presentation on the details of this problem just about exactly two years ago at the China-U.S. Climate Conference. One of her points was that the temperature change problem, the global warming hypothesis, was one issue which, while not actually debatable, gets debated because ExxonMobil and other companies, foundations and CongressWhores working hard to kill off humanity can argue "we can't even tell what the weather will be next week," or "sun spots!" or "natural cycles!" And the human race goes back to sleep while another chunk of Antarctica the size of Russia goes spooo-lash! into the Southern Ocean. But ocean acidification is a little different, Inez ruefully explained. It's not hard to figure out why the oceans are becoming acid -- it's because of all the CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere.

It's nice to understand things at a basic level, even when the thing you're understanding maybe means you're going to die. Humans are just naturally curious that way. This is from Realclimate.org, that redoubtable website that bravely swims against an incoming tide of human stupidity and massive corporate fraud. First, how do you make carbonic acid? Simple, really. Take CO₂ and add water, H₂O, to form carbonic acid, H₂CO₃. Count 'em up; the H2 is there, the C is there, and the O2 became O3.

Realclimate continues:

"An acid is a chemical type that releases H⁺ ions into solution, as does H₂CO₃ to form HCO₃^- and CO₃^2-. Adding CO₂ to water causes the pH to drop. Coral reefs are built from limestone by the reaction Ca²⁺ + CO₃^2- == CaCO₃, where Ca is calcium. Acidifying the ocean decreases the concentration of CO₃^2- ions, which by le Chatlier’s principle shifts the equilibrium toward the left, tending to dissolve CaCO₃. Note that this is a sort of counter-intuitive result, that adding CO₂ should make reefs dissolve rather than pushing carbon into making more reefs. It’s all because of those H⁺ ions."

Unfortunately for those of us who love the taste of wild salmon (with a nice dill sauce and a squeeze of lemon), and even more unfortunately for the fleets of Pacific salmon fishermen, salmon depend heavily upon a species of plankton which builds a calcium carbonate shell. The plankton are having a harder time building their shells now because of a raw materials shortage, as noted above, and they're at the bottom of a very long food chain.

Different theories have been advanced to explain the disappearance of the salmon. The one I've sketched out is very unpopular with fishermen and Sacramento politicians, who prefer to think the salmon are infected with a gill bacteria which has caused a die-off, or water diversion from the Delta area, or perhaps the salmon are simply on strike this year, seeking better swimming and spawning conditions. It's better if they're right and the acidification hypothesis is wrong, because the acidity of the oceans is a permanent condition. If this is the reason, waiting till next year won't help. Nor the next. As we sit here in California beneath smoke-filled skies, skies which have not produced a drop of rain since late February, with the entire state on fire because of the crackling aridity, we're beginning to get the idea that things have really changed.