Showing posts with label ocean acidification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ocean acidification. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Climate change causes acidification of the oceans. Really!

No alarmism and hysteria is shrill enough for the demagogues of global warming and climate change! As usual this alarmism is based among other things on computer model simulations (a great tool for demagogues)!

CO2 is a minuscule atmospheric, life essential trace gas (about 400-450 ppm [parts per million])! To acidify the oceans there would probably need to be a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere than currently.

Carbonic acid is also very unstable. It constantly breaks down again.

As usual such nonsense is spread by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Every time, the AAAS does this it is shocking!

Apparently, the NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) is also actively involved in this demagoguery (see e.g. this video on YouTube)! President Trump are you listening! Please, fire these ideologues!

We still know very little about our oceans to make such outrageous claims! Plant some more trees and be happy!

"Climate change’s ‘evil twin’ is much worse than we thought
...
As human activities continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more and more of the stuff gets absorbed into Earth’s oceans, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. When this weak acid dissociates into ions of hydrogen and bicarbonate, it drives down the ocean’s overall pH, which is typically slightly basic.

This acidification—sometimes referred to as climate change’s “evil twin”—can wreak havoc on marine life, for example by interfering with the mineralization process that corals, oysters, and other organisms use to build and maintain their skeletons and shells.

A 2014 video released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (NOAA PMEL), for instance, shows a marine snail called a pteropod struggling to swim, its shell having been partially dissolved by acidic waters. ...

According to a new study, however, the situation is more dire than anyone anticipated. Drawing on measurements from ice cores, computer models, and studies of marine life, scientists developed an assessment of the last 150 years. The “boundary” for ocean acidification, the team reports in Global Change Biology, was actually crossed five years ago . And the deeper researchers delved beneath the ocean’s surface, the worse the problem became: At 200 meters down, 60% of global waters had breached the limit for “safe” acidification, compared to over 40% of the surface ocean. The findings suggest that, when it comes to protecting vulnerable marine ecosystems, humanity is already running out of time. “Ocean acidification isn’t just an environmental crisis—it’s a ticking time bomb for marine ecosystems and coastal economies,” ...

The impacts on marine life are far-reaching. Research published earlier this year in Environmental Science & Technology found, for instance, that changes in ocean chemistry could be shifting male-female ratios in populations of oysters, which rely on environmental cues to determine their sex.
Oysters exposed to more acidic conditions, researchers reported, were more likely to have female than male offspring—a shift that could affect oyster reproduction and population dynamics for generations, both in hatcheries and in the wild. According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, increased ocean acidity could also harm populations of carbon-eating phytoplankton. This effect could potentially cause additional increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus speeding up global climate warming. ..."

ScienceAdviser

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

More carbon dioxide in the ocean could harm carbon-eating microbes and speed up climate change. Really!

Ocean acidification has been going on for over 200 years! Another attempt at hysteria and alarmism!

Notice, how they speculate from an increase of atmospheric CO2 may affect ocean acidity.

Notice too that acidity or acidification are a scary terms by itself that probably automatically raises fears in many people.

I bet like so much that is going on in our oceans is still poorly understood this applies also to ocean acidity and acidification.

Notice also the simplistic, superficially plausible underlying hypothesis: "Once dissolved in ocean water, CO2 undergoes a series of chemical reactions that release hydrogen ions and increase the water’s acidity". I bet it is a lot more complex than this!

"... However, too much CO2 threatens this natural system. Once dissolved in ocean water, CO2 undergoes a series of chemical reactions that release hydrogen ions and increase the water’s acidity. As human activity has raised atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 parts per million in the 1850s to 420 ppm today, ocean acidity has increased by roughly 30%. ..."

From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
Marine phytoplankton, which contribute ~45% of global net primary production, are projected to be affected by ongoing ocean acidification (OA). However, the response of phytoplankton to acidification is not well constrained in ultraoligotrophic tropical and subtropical oceans where small (<20 µm) phytoplankton dominate. By conducting onboard microcosm experiments, we found community-level primary production decreased consistently following CO2 enrichment in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre and northern South China Sea, while no significant changes were observed at the northernmost boundary of the subtropical gyre.
Eukaryotic phytoplankton but not cyanobacteria were key drivers of these responses which occur primarily under nitrogen limitation. These findings enhance our understanding of OA impacts on phytoplankton and marine productivity in a changing climate.

Abstract
Ocean acidification caused by increasing anthropogenic CO2 is expected to impact marine phytoplankton productivity, yet the extent and even direction of these changes are not well constrained. Here, we investigate the responses of phytoplankton community composition and productivity to acidification across the western North Pacific. Consistent reductions in primary production were observed under acidified conditions in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre and the northern South China Sea, whereas no significant changes were found at the northern boundary of the subtropical gyre.
While prokaryotic phytoplankton showed little or positive responses to high CO2, small (<20 µm) eukaryotic phytoplankton which are primarily limited by low ambient nitrogen drove the observed decrease in community primary production. Extrapolating these results to global tropical and subtropical oceans predicts a potential decrease of about 5 Pg C y−1 in primary production in low Chl-a oligotrophic regions, which are anticipated to experience both acidification and stratification in the future."

ScienceAdviser