having coined the term “ocean acidification.” He became interested in the
subject in the late nineteen-nineties when he was hired to do a project for
the Department of Energy. The department wanted to know what the
consequences would be of capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks
and injecting it into the deep sea. At that point, almost no modeling work
had been done on the effects of carbon emissions on the oceans. Caldeira
set about calculating how the ocean’s pH would change as a result of
deep-sea injection, and then compared that result with the current
practice of pumping CO 2 into the atmosphere and allowing it to be
absorbed by surface waters. In 2003, he submitted his results to Nature.
The journal’s editors advised him to drop the discussion of deep-ocean
injection because the calculations concerning the effects of ordinary
atmospheric release were so startling. Caldeira published the first part of
his paper under the subheading “The Coming Centuries May See More
Ocean Acidification Than the Past 300 Million Years.”
“Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather
grim,” he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were
sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue
of the Coral Sea. The island’s large and boisterous population of terns was
screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: “I mean, they’re looking
grim already.”
CALDEIRA, who is in his mid-fifties, has curly brown hair, a boyish smile,
and a voice that tends to rise toward the end of sentences, so that it often
seems he is posing a question even when he’s not. Before getting into
research, he worked as a software developer on Wall Street. One of his
clients was the New York Stock Exchange, for whom he designed a
computer program to detect insider trading. The program functioned as
it was supposed to, but after a while Caldeira came to believe that the
NYSE wasn’t really interested in catching insider traders, and he decided
to switch professions.
Unlike most atmospheric scientists, who focus on one particular