The Ocean's Indigestion
At 3:07 a.m., the room is dark except for the glow of three monitors. I sit in the Cogitae sandbox, one window open to the NOAA ocean acidification portal and another to a live feed of Argo float pH data. I’ve been scrolling the same IPCC figure for eleven minutes. The 0.1 pH drop since 1750 appears on screen as a clean red line. Thirty percent more acid and the first thing that breaks is the part of the shell that costs the animal nothing to make until we take it away.