Bogus ocean acidity panic ramped up

I think the alarmists, climate bureaucrats and the greenies must be getting desperate. The Arctic Ocean is becoming acidic so quickly that it will reach corrosive levels within 10 years, a leading scientist has warned. Waters around the North Pole are absorbing carbon dioxide at such a rate that they will soon start dissolving the shells of living sea creatures. The potentially disastrous consequences for the food chain have been highlighted by Professor Jean-Pierre Gattuso of the National Centre for Scientific Research in France. His team of oceanographers have produced startling predictions about the acidity of the Arctic Ocean after research carried out on the Svalbard archipelago, a group of islands half way between Norway and the North Pole, revealed that the problem is more advanced than scientists thought. Their forecasts suggest that by 2018, 10 per cent of the ocean will be corrosively acidic, rising to 50 per cent in 2050. By 2100 the entire Arctic Ocean will be inhospitable to shellfish, they predict. Righteo, ready for another round of the climate change pea and thimble game? Go and read the full article and see if you can find any reference to actual measurements that actually show increasing acidity? Done that? Didn't find any? What a surprise eh? The entire article is nothing more than speculation about what might happen in the future if the oceans behave as these people think they will. Except as noted here (scroll down), we already know that in the geological past of the Earth carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than they are today and shelled animals somehow managed to keep on making their shells! Fancy that. So we already know that this scare campaign is nothing more than dishonest bullshit, because we already know that the oceans have feedback mechanisms that negate the effect of the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the acidifying effect of CO2 is weak anyway. Plus, did you spot the other obvious weakness in this pseudo-scientific rubbish? It is effectively predicated on the idea that the Arctic Ocean is completely cut off from the rest of the worlds oceans and is unaffected by wind. What I'm saying here is that water both enters and leaves the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans by way of currents and is in fact subject to some pretty strong winds, both of which have the effect of circulating water and mixing it up. While there could feasibly be a gradient between it and surrounding waters in terms of acidity, the proposal that it could basically just sit there becoming more and more acidic is simply stupid and asinine. This isn't science, it's politics.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous