Climate Hysteria Slowly Yields to Better Science
As better science is applied to climate science, much of the early hysteria is beginning to yield to tempered optimism. Consider the panic over "acid oceans", and the "impending death" of corals, phytoplankton, and the entire ocean.In Friday’s issue of the journal Science, however, scientists led by M. Debora Iglesias-Rodríguez of the National Oceanography Center at the University of Southampton in England and Paul Halloran, a graduate student at the University of Oxford, report that they found the exact opposite. The algae grew bigger in the more acidic water.What these findings mean is that bad science can be overcome by better science. This study was only one data point among many. Better research is also needed on the pH reactions of various species of coral.
Dr. Iglesias-Rodríguez said the conflicting findings probably arose from differences between how the experiments were conducted. In the earlier work, the researchers lowered the pH by directly adding acid to the water.
In the work reported in Science, the scientists added the acid indirectly by bubbling carbon dioxide into the water, which more closely mimicked the chemical reactions that are occurring in the oceans. As a consequence, in addition to the lowered pH, levels of carbon dioxide in the water also rose — speeding up the algae’s photosynthesis machinery — as did the levels of bicarbonate ions, the building material for the carbonate disks.
“It’s a really complex problem,” Dr. Iglesias-Rodríguez said. “You cannot look at calcification in isolation. You have to look at photosynthesis as well.” __NYTimes
Coral evolved over a hundred million years ago, when atmospheric CO2 was much higher, and oceans much more acidic. It defies logic to claim--as many climate hysterics have done--that modern levels of atmospheric CO2 and ocean pH present a global threat to the world's coral species. Better science. More data. Clearer heads. It will take at least a decade, perhaps two, to clean up after climate hysterics such as Gore, Hansen, and the rest of the usual suspects.
Jennifer Marohasy also looked at this issue, among others.
Labels: carbon hysteria, Climate Grifters
posted by al fin at 9:31 am
4 Comments:
Thomas Gold made a claim that much of limestone /dolomite deposits were formed by CO2 reacting with sea water WITHOUT the interaction of life (i.e. claims forming shells. He claimed that CO2 is therefore is continuously sequestered via deposits on the ocean floor.
Lots of searching, I finally found a website part of some graduate program (long gone) that provided some details of the chemical reactions. The site stated that the process is not well known, but appears to be affected by pressure and temperature.
Curious if anyone here knows more about it.
It seems like rather a lame oversight to have used acid rather than CO2 to lower the pH to begin with.
Is that too harsh of an assessment?
I mean... Damn!
Snake Oil Baron --
I don't think that what they did was merely add acid, but rather the acid type formed by increased CO2 in salt-water.
To be fair, yes -- it is rather a silly move to introduce the acid directly rather than introduce it by a means that occurs in nature.
On the other hand, it does permit for better controls to determine the impact of increased //acid// in water. The trick, of course, is that the natural environment will never replicate this state of affairs.
But, of course, tricks like that are used all the time by our friends the anthropogenic global warming theory proponents.
For example, the "Mann hockeystick". It took years for people to figure out that they never correlated the change in data sets to the change in data reported.
Even today, the Mann chart is still being used by AGW 'advocates'. And of course, they claim that the changeover from proxies to actual records means "the data is even more reliable". Which to the uneducated is a valid statement.
But of course to anyone who pays attention, that's one of the biggest possible warning flags. Whenever you change data sets, you must calibrate the two to one another.
And of course Mann et al. did not do this.
In fact in some studies of coral and phytoplankton they added hydrochloric acid to lower pH--a distinctly unnatural acid to use for monitoring response to rise in CO2 levels.
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“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” _George Orwell
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