What the future ocean has in common with an asthma attack

Abstract

Ocean acidification and ocean deoxygenation are consequences of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions that remain largely unknown to the general public. Mostly, because lay audiences are not familiar with the complex chain of physical and chemical processes that drive these phenomena. This demands that communicators find clear, simple and psychologically effective language to frame ocean health issues in familiar terms. From antiquity to the Renaissance, and independently across multiple cultures, premodern thinkers have conceptualized the Earth in terms of the human body. This is not surprising given that metaphor lies at the core of human understanding. Building on this premodern tradition, I found a system of mathematical equations that calculates the chemical composition of the human body or the ocean, when forced by human physiological or oceanographic parameters, respectively. Based on this result, I build an extended analogy that introduces the basic functioning of the oceanic CO₂ and O₂ cycles to the general public. The analogy incorporates ocean acidification and deoxygenation, that have parallels in the acidification and deoxygenation of the human body caused by an asthma attack, providing ocean health communicators with a tool that promotes interest in, and explains the origin of, declining ocean heath. Extending the analogy to the continental domain allows to see the Earth as a superorganism, a perspective that may help promote an environmentally healthier relationship between humanity and the Earth.