Just wait until we hit the ocean acidification tipping point where it becomes chemically impossible for certain tiny creatures at the base of the food chain to form calcium-based hard shells.

The whole ocean won’t hit that point all at the same time, but once we get close, it will happen very rapidly, affecting most of the oceans in the world within a few years. Entire ocean ecosystems will rapidly collapse when the bottom of the food chain falls out from under them. Already-strained fisheries will suddenly run completely out of fish, quickly driving the last few populations to extinction. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg for our problems. Those tiny organisms have a profound impact on the entire world’s climate and weather patterns, as well as being a huge part of the carbon cycle. When the oceans die, the effects felt on land will be extreme. And it will drastically accelerate carbon accumulation and climate change – those calcium-based hard shells are calcium carbonate, which incorporate carbon and often end up sequestering it on the sea floor when the creature dies, where it could stay locked away for millions to billions of years. Without them removing carbon from circulation, climate change will get far worse and accelerate much faster (which, in turn, makes ocean acidification worse, so there’s no going back once we hit that tipping point).