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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It?
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To: weatherguru who wrote (182314)6/17/2015 6:31:30 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps  Read Replies (1) of 224729
 
An analysis of CO2 preserved in ice cores shows that for more than 600,000 years the ocean had a pH of approximately 8.2 (pH is the acidity of a solution measured on a 14-point scale, with a pH below 7 being acidic and above 7, basic). But since 1800, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the pH of the ocean has dropped by 0.1 unit. That may not sound like much, but pH is a logarithmic scale, so the decline in fact represents a whopping 30 percent increase in acidity. With the oceans now absorbing man-made CO2 at a rate of 22 million tons a day and climbing, the situation is certain to worsen rapidly. More than a dozen projections by the International Panel on Climate Change indicate that ocean pH by the end of the century could drop as low as 7.8, which would correspond to a 150 percent increase in acidity since preindustrial times. “A drop of that magnitude is more than we’ve seen in 20 million years,” says Richard A. Feely, supervisory oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “That’s going to profoundly change the ecology of the sea as we now know it, in ways that could potentially be devastating.”

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