Eric, the main problem with reading that is it's impossible to take them seriously when they write about "acidification", "rising acidity", "corrosive waters" "sour water". I have lived among and by eating shellfish all my life [other than stints in foreign countries]. There are still petatrillions of them and their shells are hard. This summer just gone, there were more tuatuas on Mount Maunganui beach than I have ever seen. They were young ones about 20 mm long.
When they write those words, they are either lying for effect or stupid. What they should write is "reducing alkalinity". The oceans have always been corrosive to iron and the like, but not to shells of living molluscs.
They know that regular humans are easily seduced by words. For example "Weapons of Mass Destruction" now legally [in the USA] includes a teapot with some diesel and fertilizer in it. It seems a bit silly to have started a huge war in Iraq over teapots. They looked for the teapots after the war was won but couldn't find any. But hopefully the families of the dead considered the hunt for teapots to have been worthwhile. Now "acidification" of the oceans is used to scare the gullible. Regular people imagine cauldrons of steaming sulphuric acid. But of course it's alkaline and if vinegar is tipped in, it will be rapidly neutralized. There are stupendously vast reserves of limestone on land, and absurdly vast amounts of calcium-based shells of all sizes filling the oceans. Making the oceans acidic is simply not possible.
It's like filling a leaky tank. The more you have in it, the faster it leaks out. People are not able to fill the air with enough CO2 to keep the game going. Already, about half the CO2 people have produced has been stripped from the air. Megatons of dead marine life falls to the ocean floor to be buried in kilometres of sediment over millions of years as it trundles towards the subduction zones, taking carbon with it.
Producing CO2 is not fun. It's expensive. People avoid it as best they can. So you can't depend on people going on doing it as they did when oil was cheap. When photovoltaics, fusion and maybe even cellulose are economic as fuels, you'll find people switch to those cheaper energy sources. Then there's insulation and new technologies, such as Cyberspace, which mean a whole new way of life without a dirty great SUV having to drive to the mall - couriers do deliveries cheaply and efficiently [in fuel consumption].
The Global Alarmists have lost on the CO2 in air argument so are trying for a win with "ACIDIFICATION" of oceans. "LOOKOUT, all the fish are going to die and you'll starve". The little boy who cried wolf.
Mqurice |
