For those who think my recent report on ocean acidification and
plankton is unrepresentative, do check out this comprehensive database that has collated
all studies. The conclusion is very, very clear: PH reduction has a
negative effect only at greater changes than are likely in the
twenty-first century. At likely changes, the effect is positive.
Can we have some honesty from scientists, please?
In the final graphical
representations of the information contained in our
Ocean Acidification Database, we have plotted
the averages of all responses to seawater
acidification (produced by additions of both HCl
and CO2) for all five of the life characteristics of
the various marine organisms that we have analyzed over the five pH
reduction ranges that we discuss in our
Description of the Ocean Acidification Database
Tables, which pH ranges we illustrate
in the figure below.
The conclusions of the authors:
The results we have depicted in
the figures above suggest something very different from the
doomsday predictions of the climate alarmists who claim we are in
"the last decades of coral reefs on this planet for at least the
next ... million plus years, unless we do something very soon to
reduce CO2 emissions," or who declare that "reefs are
starting to crumble and disappear," that "we may lose those
ecosystems within 20 or 30 years," and that "we've got the last
decade in which we can do something about this problem." Clearly,
the promoting of such scenarios is not supported by the vast bulk
of pertinent experimental data.
Two other important phenomena
that give us reason to believe the predicted decline in oceanic pH
will have little to no lasting negative effects on marine life are
the abilities of essentially all forms of life
to adapt and evolve. Of those
experiments in our database that report the length of time the
organisms were subjected to reduced pH levels, for example, the
median value was only four days. And many of the
experiments were conducted over periods of only a
fewhours, which is much too short a
time for organisms to adapt (or evolve) to successfully cope with
new environmental conditions (see, for example, the many pertinent
Journal Reviews we have archived under the general heading
ofEvolution
in our Subject Index). And when one allows for such
phenomena, the possibility of marine life experiencing a negative
response to ocean acidification becomes even less
likely.
In conclusion, claims of
impending marine species extinctions driven by increases in the
atmosphere's CO2 concentration do not appear to be
founded in empirical reality, based on the experimental findings we
have analyzed above.
