agw-religion changing from warmism to ocean-acidifactionism, still caused by the evil CO2 and the evil fossil fuels
noo b
December 13, 2009
If climate change doesn�t grab you, meet its evil twinCharles Clover
86 Comments
Recommend? (21) Whoever leaked that clutch of Climategate emails last
month must be laughing his socks off. For he has unleashed upon the
rest of us the phenomenon of the born-again climate sceptic, the kind
of man (always a man, almost invariably wearing a tweed jacket) who
now materialises beside me at parties and confides that he has been
having second thoughts about climate change.
My first instinct is always to humour him. I say I would be absolutely
overjoyed if in a few years� time we were to find out that Richard
Lindzen, the most distinguished sceptic among the academic
meteorologists, has turned out to be right and that the early 21st
century got itself into a hysterical panic on the basis of trends
based on highly uncertain computer predictions. But, I add, there are
reasonable odds that he is wrong. My follow-up question is this: �Do
you know that climate change is not the only reason to be uneasy about
carbon emissions?�
On each occasion I am met by a look of puzzlement, followed by a
perplexed nod, and I realise the person in question hasn�t a clue what
I am talking about. He hasn�t heard of the acidification of the sea, a
phenomenon quite separate from global warming but just as alarming.
The reason, I suspect, is that it does not rate a line in the
bestselling sceptical books on global warming by Christopher Booker or
Nigel Lawson � which seem to be all that my tweedy friends have read
on the subject.
Ocean acidification has been quite scandalously left out of the
reckoning in the past few weeks. I am not for a moment belittling the
science behind man-made global warming. This still seems to me solid,
despite the shenanigans at the University of East Anglia. That levels
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rising is not disputed. We
have known since the 19th century that carbon dioxide was a crucial
greenhouse gas. Venus has a lot of it and is hot as hell. Mars has
almost none and is cold as ice.
However, even if you happen to believe that everything we know about
greenhouse gases is illusory � unlikely though that is � we would
still need to agree at Copenhagen this week to cut our emissions of
carbon dioxide because of what is happening to the sea, the source of
roughly half our food and provider of other useful services that we
tend to take for granted.
We know the ocean absorbs about 25% of the carbon dioxide we emit each
year. This CO2 dissolves through wind and wave action to form carbonic
acid. This is altering the chemistry of the seas in ways that are not
disputed and are far simpler to understand than the effect the same
pollutants are having on the atmosphere. I recommend the startling
practical demonstration on YouTube of what acidity will do to the
oceans given by Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the US National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to a congressional select
committee this month.
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in about 1750, sea
water acidity has increased by 30%. The speed and degree of this
change are faster than anything that had happened for 55m years. The
changes being observed are beginning to disrupt the ability of any
organism to make shells out of calcium carbonate. Organisms that do
this include corals, crabs, lobsters, small creatures vital to the
diet of fish and plankton of the kind that die and form chalk deposits
such as the white cliffs of Dover.
Projections show that by 2060, given the current rate of fossil-fuel
emissions, sea water acidity could have increased by 120%. Lubchenco
showed Congress a scary picture of what a shell would look like if it
had spent a month in water as acidic as this. The shell had begun to
dissolve.
Such an effect could trigger a chain of reactions through entire
ecosystems, from whales to fish and shellfish, with huge implications
for economies and wildlife. It could even stop the sea absorbing as
much carbon dioxide as it does now, accelerating global warming. It is
pretty scary stuff.
Predictably, the science of ocean acidification, which is accepted by
governments on both sides of the Atlantic, does not go uncontested by
the global warming sceptics. They say you can�t acidify the ocean
because it washes over alkaline rocks. This process of weathering
rocks is indeed how the alkalinity of the ocean will recover, but
leading scientists say it will take hundreds of thousands of years. At
the unprecedented speed that acidification is happening, the marine
organisms will be knocked out before the rocks can dilute the acid.
There is plenty we still need to know about the acidification of the
ocean. However, it looks as if unpleasant things start to happen if we
go beyond 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
(bear in mind we reached 390ppm earlier this year). That is,
coincidentally, the threshold for holding the Earth�s average
temperature rise down to a relatively �safe� 2C.
So ocean acidification, which people are beginning to call climate
change�s �evil twin�, may be an even more pressing reason to move to a
low-carbon economy than climate change itself. And that makes it
doubly irresponsible for those people who scorn the need to cut carbon
emissions to ignore what is going on in the oceans.
***
Now that agw is completely debunked, expect the commies and lefties to
find another CO2-caused "disaster" to be looming in our near future.
They are not just moving the goalposts but building an entirely
different field.