MONTEREY BAY NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY, Calif. – If the world ever does get around to significantly reducing carbon emissions, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area will be among the beneficiaries. These foragers of the sanctuary’s frigid waters, flipping in and out of sight of California’s coastal kayakers, may not seem like obvious beneficiaries. But reducing carbon emissions worldwide also would help mend a lesser-known environmental problem: ocean acidification. ‘We’re having a change in water chemistry, so 20 years from now the system we’re looking at could be affected dramatically but we’re not really sure how. So we see a train wreck coming,’ said Andrew DeVogelaere, the sanctuary’s research director, while out kayaking this fall with a reporter in the cold waters. Oceans absorb about 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere from human activities each year, helping to take off some warming pressure. But carbon dissolving in oceans also forms carbonic acid, raising waters’ acidity that damages all manner of hard-shelled creatures, and setting off a chain reaction that threatens the food chain supporting marine life, including the […]