Carbon dioxide has something of a chemical reaction with water, so it’s more than just all the extra CO[sub]2[/sub] dissolving in the ocean water. A part of this becomes carboxylic acid which releases one H[sup]+[/sup] ion, driving down pH.
I’m back online in the usual way, at a community center.
It may seem that I jumped on a sort of bandwagon just because there is literature out there, but I “believe” all such claims are subject to double-edge research and meaningful debate.
In case anyone is wondering about my convictions re AGW, I “believe” it to be true in essentiais, and the only recent tweaking in my mind is that maybe FXMastermind (with others here) has a point about the Earth not responding as predicted.
Who was that skeptcal maverick who wondered aloud about sufficient compunction in “everyone” else’s research so he did his own? He concluded that Climate Change. involving overal warming, was indeed caused principally by human indusrty involving tremendous fossil fuel burning.
That is good, now keep in mind that there are many more reasons, and they do not depend on computer models and a lot of this was discussed for more than a century.
It would be foolish to proceed with fossil fuels without safeguards. These “contrarians” GIGO speaks of are seemingly unaware of the profit potential that would come with installing these safeguards. I can’t tell you how pleased I am with how cheap this wind energy is even without government subsidies. AGW or not, ditching this fossil fuel crap is the way to go.
Okay, GIGO. I’ve been wrong on things so many times over the decades that mayhaps I’ve developed the bad habit of “bending over backwards” to be some extreme version of “open-minded.”
And as Thurber concluded his short story about the recovered alcoholic, you can hurt yourself as much by falling over backward as by falling on your face! *
BTW, thanks for the answer re the formerly skeptcal researcher.
“You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.”
As I’ve mentioned before, ocean acidification may end up as a more serious problem than AGW. This is because there may be a relatively inexpensive way to reduce global warming – inject coolants, e.g. sulfate aerosols, into the atmosphere – but there is no easy way to increase ocean pH.
For once I must respectfully disagree with you. The idea of geo-engineering the climate is in the realm of pure speculation and, in my view, dangerous speculation at that – dangerous because it provides the illusion that there may be an easy fix to an urgent problem, and because in the unlikely event that any such schemes were tried, the unintended consequences could be disastrous. You mention sulfate aerosols. To take that example, that would indeed contribute to mitigation of warming, but its also the primary cause of acid rain, something we worked long and hard to clean up. It’s not going to help either ocean acidity or anything else in our environment to have sulphuric acid raining down on us.
There is simply no such scheme that is viable, non-polluting, and free of potentially huge unintended consequences. Nor is it clear that such a scheme would solve one of the big problems of unbalanced forcings, climate destabilization.
As I see it, ocean acidification is just one symptom of a broad range of problems caused by AGW, and we need to address all of them. The oceans are a large part of our ecosystem, but AGW affects the entirety of our ecosystem. It affects atmosphere and ocean circulation, regional climates, climate stability, food crop viability, biodiversity, extreme weather and damaging storms, pests and disease – it affects everything that life itself depends on, and there’s not much we can do about outside the realm of science fiction except to reduce the greenhouse gases that are the root cause.
I mentioned sulfate aerosols just for an “exisence proof.” I’ll guess there are cost-effective cooling agents with much less chemical effects.
But on the whole I’m sure your views are correct. Treat my post as a predictive warning. A few decades from now, when the adverse effects of climate change are undeniable, the same group pimping the deniers today, allied with insurance companies who foresee that millions of houses will need to be replaced, will propose aerosol coolants as a way to reduce temperatures while still continuing the carbon-burning party.
I think scientists should be ready to answer them.
As I pointed in past threads the saddest thing regarding the deniers is that to reliably calculate the amounts needed to do effective geoengineering means that we do have to then consult the experts that work with computer models.
A big contradictory item from many deniers is that at the same time they continue to disparage computer modeling when applied to climate projections they seem to think that the same climate scientists that work with models are the beesnees when the time comes to add aerosol particles on purpose if we let the problem fester.
