For a rebuttal of the myth about ocean acidification which they occasionally copy-paste mindlessly, e.g. if it is Wattsup croc of the week, see:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ocean-ac...
Like many denialist simpletons, Kano has a problem understanding geological time scales. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/60...
"For example, the pteropod examined in this study, Limacina helicina, is a key food for fish eaten by pink salmon, an important North Pacific fishery."
When humans keep messing up the natural balance of our planet, the links in the food chain weaken and this is what happens..........more stories like this will follow until people demand action from corporations and government to curtail activities responsible for the devastating changes in our environment.
Wow I bet they had to search high and low to find that, IT IS LOCAL an upwelling, an unusual situation that has probably been happening since time immemorial.
CO2 will cause no problems to the oceans, as they have this huge enormous buffer of calcium, corals first evolved when CO2 levels were many times higher than now.
What amazes me though, I could maybe worry about what CO2 could do to rivers and lakes, but no one has thought about that.
Climate Realist freshwater snails can live in acidic water, take this Apple snail for example
http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0SO80UbU...
Plus just consider water covers 70% of our planet an average of 3km deep, just how much CO2 will it take to alter all that water, and how many thousands of years to drop from 8.1 to 8.0
The article suggests that the optimum pH for many marine organisms, like snails, is higher than 7.
If this is linked to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere then both we and the snails would have seen this many many times before. The oceans are were most of the planets CO2 is stored and if small changes CO2 concentrations cause changes in pH, then its happened before. Its not as if the pH of the oceans has remained the same for millions and millions of years and then suddenly 0.1 units different. The pH of the oceans is going to naturally fluctuate, probably over time scales that seem large to humans but are nothing to evolution or the oceans themselves.
I find this to be a common theme with global warming this idea that we're somehow doing something new. That changes in ocean pH are not something that happen constantly as part of the natural cycle of the planet. Its like the polar bear argument people say we lose the Arctic sea ice and we lose the polar bear. Well, polar bears as a species are about 4 or 5 million years old which means this isn't their first rodeo. Snails must be well over 300 million years old they've seen everything this planet has to throw at them. Still here.
Even if we accept that we are changing the Earth's environment for the worse (worse for animals and plants I mean) we must still accept that they've been through a hell of a lot worse than anything we could ever do to them. I'm not saying **** the snails I'm just saying lets keep things in perspective here.
Snails seem to be OK down to about pH 7.
What is the pH of the oceans? Even the scary scenarios only go down to 7.8.
My guess is that in a few years, scientists will discover that snails always did this, pH is not necessarily implicated and that report won't make any headlines.
The variation in pH by area and time is much higher than the variations of pH of a few tenths. This is just guessing, looking to blame things on global warming. Not sure how you can do a proper experiment here. This does look better than the studies that showed the effects of dumping acid into an ocean. Note that their shells are built with dissolved carbonate, which suggests they need dissolved carbon dioxide to grow.
Yes, it is harmless and no one has proven otherwise.
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/snails-are-dissolving-pacific-ocean
A lot of "skeptics" seem to think that ocean acidification either isn't happening, or is harmless because it's not actually passing a pH of 7. Doesn't this article suggest otherwise rather strongly?
