Read here. Because the CO2 alarmists keep losing the empirical evidence battle regarding global warming and climate change claims, they've turned to the bizarre hypothesis that human CO2 emissions will "acidify" the seas turning them deadly to all sea life, including sea corals. Like so many of the outlandish AGW-claims, this one does not stand up to empirical scrutiny either.
In a peer-reviewed study, Kreif et al. (2010) ran experiments to study the impact on sea corals in a water environment resembling those that would occur if extraordinary high levels of CO2 were found in the atmosphere. The result of the experiments found the sea corals not only surviving under low pH value extremes, but pertaining to certain health measurements, actually thrived.
"In the words of the seven scientists who conducted the study, "following 14 months incubation under reduced pH conditions, all coral fragments survived and added new skeletal calcium carbonate.....This was done, however, at a reduced rate of calcification compared to fragments growing in the normal pH treatment.....Yet in spite of this reduction in skeletal growth, they report that "tissue biomass (measured by protein concentration) was found to be higher in both species after 14 months of growth under increased CO2."....." and they write that "since calcification is an energy-consuming process ... a coral polyp that spends less energy on skeletal growth can instead allocate the energy to tissue biomass,".....In concluding their paper, Krief et al. say "the long acclimation time of this study allowed the coral colonies to reach a steady state in terms of their physiological responses to elevated CO2," and that "the deposition of skeleton in seawater with Ωarag < 1 demonstrates the ability of both species to calcify by modifying internal pH toward more alkaline conditions."" [Krief, S., Hendy, E.J., Fine, M., Yam, R., Meibom, A., Foster, G.L. and Shemesh, A. 2010]
