Carbon dioxide emissions facts – ocean acidification scenarios are used by most climate doomsday scientists as a means to frighten the public about fossil fuels – latest study debunks those fears
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Read here. Ocean acidification sounds like a catastrophe waiting to destroy all marine life, until one examines the actual empirical research. ‘C3’ has written about the bizarre, chicken-little acidification fears multiple times, and multiple studies keep coming to the same conclusion – the facts don’t correlate with the blatant fearmongering.
Now, a new peer reviewed study (Crawfurd et al.) examines “acidification” impacts on marine diatoms – the most common phytoplankton, the basis of the food chain. As previous studies determined and this study confirms, in reality ocean acidification impacts are tiny and future marine catastrophic death scenarios are on par with other hyped urban legends.
“The authors state that diatoms are very important for the productivity of the world's oceans, as they contribute about 45% of global marine primary production; and they therefore say it is essential to understand how diatoms and other marine phytoplankton will respond to the higher aqueous CO2 and lower pH conditions that will prevail in their surface waters in the near future, as a result of the dissolution of anthropogenic CO2 in them... grew over 100 generations of the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana in seawater maintained in equilibrium with air of either current (ambient) CO2 concentration or expected end-of-the-century (twice-ambient) CO2 concentration (380 or 760 ppm)...conclude in the final sentence of their paper that "if all diatoms respond in a similar fashion to T. pseudonana, acidification of this magnitude in the future ocean may have little effect on diatom productivity."” [Katharine J. Crawfurd, John A. Raven, Glen L. Wheeler, Emily J. Baxter, Ian Joint 2011: PLoS One]
Conclusions: The carbon dioxide facts, ocean “acidification” is not a practical threat to marine life per this recent study. Although computer models may predict marine life harm, multiple empirical research efforts have proven the models to be without merit. Any climate doomsday scientist or chicken-little pundit claiming otherwise is practicing nothing more than shrill fearmongering.
Previous peer-reviewed postings.
