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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4633681.stm
Anyone have any bones to pick over this article?

Emission cuts 'vital' for oceans

Marine species are under threat from rising levels of acidity in the oceans, says the UK's Royal Society.

Unless carbon dioxide emissions are cut, there could be irreversible damage to ecosystems, it warns.

It is further evidence of the need to take action at next week's G8 summit, says working group chair, John Raven.

"Failure to do so may mean that there is no place in the oceans of the future for many of the species and ecosystems that we know today," he said.

Falling pH

The report: Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, says excess carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has already increased the acidity of the world's oceans to a level that is irreversible in our life times.

The world's oceans have already absorbed about half of the CO2 produced by humans, mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, over the past 200 years.

This has led to a reduction of the pH of seawater by 0.1 units on the 14-point scale. If emissions of CO2 continue to rise as predicted, there will be another drop in pH by 0.5 units by 2100, a level that has not existed in the oceans for many millions of years.

"The carbon dioxide dissolving in the ocean is not a trivial problem, the effects are likely to be severe in some areas of the ocean," Prof John Raven told the BBC News website.

"These effects may not be immediately translated into direct economics but there are potentially important effects on the way the earth system is working and how it will continue over many millennia to support humans in the way we've become accustomed."

Antarctic Ocean

Scientists fear the rising acidity of seawater will have a particularly detrimental effect on corals and other marine organisms, because it will be harder for them to form their skeletons and shells.

Tiny shelled plankton in the Antarctic Ocean that are a major food source for fish and other animals are likely to be among the first to suffer.

Higher CO2 levels will also make it harder for many marine fish and shellfish to breathe and reproduce.

In addition, the changes in the chemistry of the oceans will reduce their ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, which in turn will accelerate the rate of global warming.

Dr Carol Turley of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory said that ocean acidification is a "sister" problem to that of climate change.

"The oceans have already taken up about 50% of the CO2 that man has produced over the last 200 years and will continue to do so," she said.

"Essentially, the oceans have been reducing the impact of climate change but at their own expense."

Actually it doesn't matter too much, I was arguing the case against man-made global warming theory with someone somewhere else.

Excess CO2 may be causing havoc in the oceans, but while these are environmental problems, they are not climate change ones. Well, if the alternative theory of CO2 levels rising after temperature levels is sound.

More scaremongering

What I can't understand is the continual ignorance of Politicians and "Scientists" cum beaurucrats to ignore solar activity of our climate. I have seen many graphs that show the sun has so many different cycles that sometimes interact and cause the planet to warm up or cool down. A point I have never heard is that when the planet heats up-as it has done in the last 200 years or so after the mini-ice age-the oceans expand and they actually emit CO2 stored in them so we have had increased solar activity in the last 50 years and an increase in CO2 in the last 50 years, does it take a scientist to work it out?

http://www.john-daly.com/solar/solar.htm


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci ... 026375.stm


http://www.imperial.ac.uk/P1832.htm


Notice in the last link the amount of Government research money given to the Imperial College.


Regards



Andrew

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It's a scam........or possibly a scamola


Homer Simpson

I can't remember the chemistry in full detail - but there's something about pH buffering. I seem to remember that dissolved chalks or limes regulated the sea's pH by buffering. Does this fit with the new claims?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

How do they know that the average ocean pH has dropped by 0.1 over the past 200 years?
It sounds like they've just extrapolated this figure from atmospheric CO2.
How can they be sure that some (if not all) of the rising atmospheric CO2 is coming from the (slightly) warmer oceans giving up CO2?
And if they have measured a fall, how can they be so sure that it's due to rising CO2?

Cheers
Peter

An alternate theory I heard about is that coral bleaching etc might well be caused by a combination of other pollutants and the slight warming of the oceans. Maybe, maybe not. But you have to wonder what the oceanic CO2 levels were like millions of years ago when atmospheric levels were several times higher than they are now. Presumably sea life then was either unaffected or adapted and quietly got on with it. The other question is that warmer water holds less dissolved gas, so if the oceans have got warmer there should be less CO2 and therefore less acidity. I stand to be corrected as my chemistry A level result was less than spectacular .

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

What I think is amazing about the GW argument is the ability to strike so much fear into people with the word 'warming'...

...do you freak out when someone says your tea is warming up or the car is warming up or the heating is warming the house up.


What would be interesting is to see if the same fear could be got from global cooling, which ironically is supposed to be a secondary result of GW shutting off the atlantic currents that keep us warm (ish).

They've got every scenario tied up in the GW spin I think


Regards


Andrew

_________________
It's a scam........or possibly a scamola


Homer Simpson

It always amazes me just how many people - even very intelligent people - simply accept everything they're told about global warming without question, when 99.99% of it is media hype and political spin.

Cheers
Peter

They tried that in the 70s. Got everyone convinced a new ice age was a decade or two away, but since it failed to get any colder and started to warm slightly there was a very quick about face. "Did we say cooling? Oh sorry. Warming was what we meant to say. Yes, definitely warming."

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Look! Look everyone!

The emperor isn't wearing any clothes!


(aren't we warned against such blind devotion to mantra's and misguided theories from an early age?)

The ban the bomb/Greenham common/anarchist/insert as appropriate activits didn't go away....they just started wearing suits and getting voted for by us!

The end is nigh!

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

IIRC - that was a speculative article in News Week - just a one off, with nothing like the same levels of support. It won't be funny for low land brits, unless they can find refuge somewhere, e.g. high up in the Rockies in Canada!

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I stole this .sig

It wasn't just a one-off. I remember it got quite extensive media coverage at the time (giving my age away)
As the Internet wasn't around at the time, you'll probably need to physically dig through the archives to find anything, though.

Books were written about it, one by Sir Crispin Tickell, who was Thatcher's chief scientific advisor. A few years later he wrote another book - on global warming.

As an aside, it was about the latter time that the Hadley Centre (one of the world's main climate research facilities) was opened by Thatcher.
That was also the time of the coal miner's strikes (2 + 2 = ?)

If I'm not mistaken, Al Gore also wrote a book on it.

It didn't have the same level of support because there was little - if anything about it that they could blame on humans.

Global warming might very well go the same way as global cooling, if, in a few years time, temperatures take an undeniable downward trend - as they are already showing some signs of doing.

Well, I'm prepared to give my age away. I was about six or seven at the time and wouldn't have heard of News Week. But I knew for sure that the world was going to come to a chilly end soon because the adults around me were talking about it. It certainly was sufficiently widely covered in the media that it worked it's way down to the mind of a seven year old boy. There were also books, as Pete mentioned. One was The Cooling by Lowell Ponte, which is now out of print but I hear it turns up second hand still.

Best of all, there was, according to some at the time, scientific consensus for the cooling theory, and it damn well was being blamed on human activity. Steven Schneider, now a vocal proponent of anthropogenic warming theroies, was a cooling proponent in the 70s. He co-authored a paper on cooling published in Science in 1971 called "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols - Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate".

Now, on the cooling/warming business, IMO he's got as much right to change his mind in the face of new evidence as anyone else, though why he chooses to disrgard all the evidence against AGW is something else. Perhaps this well known Schneider quote might shed some light.
To me that seems to say that bullshit is acceptable because ends justify the means, and that smacks very strongly of having an agenda.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

So we're knackered if CO2 screws the world by making it hot, or screws the world by making it cold? I know what cold weather is like - I guess it's better, because my boys might get to play hockey for the Montreal Canadiens when they grow up!

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I stole this .sig

I wouldn't lose to much sleep over it.

Piling any amount of CO2 into the atmosphere can, by any known mechanism, only lead to a very moderate warming of two to three degrees in the very coldest parts of the world, eg Siberia in winter.
That's why, even though the effects of CO2 have been known for over a hundred years, nobody worried about it until sometime in the 'eighties.

And it certainly cannot cause cooling, by any known mechaism.

The 'enhanced' global warming effect - which is supposed to make the whole planet several degrees warmer - is just a theory, nothing more. In this theory, the small amount of warming from CO2 is supposed to be amplified by positive feedback effects from water vapour etc. But it's just a theory - no mechanism is known. It's only 'real' within their computer models, and it certainly has not been measured in the real world.

And 99.99 percent of what you hear about global warming is quite simply media hype and political spin.

Me neither. There are plenty of things going on that we hould be concerned about, particularly IMO habitat loss. Global warming? Climate change? We're certainly making a contribution, but so is every other living thing on the planet as are all the natural processes that have ensured that the climate has always been changing. Our puny contribution gets lost in the noise.


Worse than that, the theory and the models that try to justify it have been chosen to fit observations, but there are big question marks over the observations themselves. The short version is that the surface record is patchy due to poor coverage in some areas and almost non-existent coverage of the oceans, and is also subject to several known errors if readings are taken from urbanized areas, areas which have chnaged over time (e.g. vegetation has been allowed to grow to form a sun trap or wind break), or where the instruments and/or their housings are poorly maintained. These tend to inflate temperture readings, and surprise, surprise the surface record shows worrying warming.

However, the satellites that have been taking the temperature of the atmosphere since 1979 and the radiosonde balloons that have been around for something like 50 years do not suffer from these problems. Satellite and balloon measurements agree with each other that there has only been very mild warming. Interestingly, ground stations that have been well maintained and are sited in rural locations tend to agree with the balloons and satellites rather than the surface record. It's a hell of a stretch of the imagination to suppose that not only are the ballons and satellites mistaken, and by about the same amount, but that also selected ground stations are similarly affected. A simpler and more likely explanation is that the surface record is wrong.

That's the short version. For the long version, and I'm sure some will have seen it before, this is worth a read - Report to the Greening Earth Society "The Surface Record: 'Global Mean Temperature' and how it is determined at surface level".

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein