Saturday
Apr142012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The OK coral
Apr 14, 2012 Climate: WG2 Matt Ridley reports on a new paper in Current Biology, which finds that natural variations in pH along the Great Barrier Reef are larger than anything likely under global warming:
The good news from the research, says Professor Hughes, is that complete reef wipeouts appear unlikely due to temperature and pH alone.
"However, in many parts of the world, coral reefs are also threatened by much more local impacts, especially by pollution and over-fishing. We need to address all of the threats, including climate change, to give coral reefs a fighting chance for the future."
Reader Comments (162)
To be fair to William, I think we're a bit prone to calling 'troll' when newcomers arrive - understandably when reviewing past contributions from people like Zed and Hengist! I suspect that self-deprecation on WM's part is being interpreted as naivety. A real troll would be a lot more snarky, IMO.
Apr 16, 2012 at 8:58 AM | Unregistered CommenterJames P
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You obviously never came across "Josh" over at Judy Curry's place. He was always polite, asked lots of questions, posted lengthy replies asking further questions when they were answered - and hijacked and derailed every discussion he entered.
He disappeared overnight when his true identity (a paid employee of a warmist lobby group) was uncovered and revealed. Over there, he has been replaced by 'Bart', who uses the same aw-shucks tactics while relentlessly thread-bombing.
A troll in a tuxedo is still a troll.
Mr Morris may be all that he claims to be. But his foray into this thread is eerily similar to Josh and Bart's oh-so-reasonable but ultimately distracting behaviour. Time will tell.
"He disappeared overnight when his true identity (a paid employee of a warmist lobby group) was
uncovered and revealed. "
Wow. I missed that part. Could you please point to the approximate area of locating this stuff, johanna?
aniveg
The papers you provide links to,...are they in any way supportive of the 'unprecedented' something something, or are they just acid alarmism papers? Most of the links don't work - that is why I ask.
It is ok about 'outnumbered' etc. Just take your time.
shrub: four out of six of anivegmin's links work for me. browser trouble? or fingers? Don't look worth the effort though...
This is like saying how human body temperature can't vary too much without a big risk. Hence, you shouldn't go to a sauna or swim in cold water.
Truss & Shrub,
Apologies if any links I have posted don't work. I'll have to learn how to embed links into posts properly.
Vieras,
Amazing! So now it's not just the climate science community who are perpetrating a massive hoax upon humanity, but the medical profession as well! What can I say? Maybe you need to go and have a chat with your doctor? Back under my bridge now I think.
The bit I can never figure out is how people arrive at the conclusion that man-made CO2 could make much difference to the pH of the oceans given the numbers involved.
It appears from various sources that the gross weight of the oceans 1.4 x 10 to the 9 giga tonnes. Man’s activities apparently put 29 giga tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. So, if this was all absorbed by the oceans (so none goes into the atmosphere – that’s a result!), over 50 years the CO2 content of the oceans would rise by 1 ppm. Whatever equation (computer model?) I plug that into doesn’t produce much in the way of a pH decrease.
I’d be interested to know what, if anything, is fallacious in my reasoning.
Mike A
Shub asked:
"He disappeared overnight when his true identity (a paid employee of a warmist lobby group) was
uncovered and revealed. "
Wow. I missed that part. Could you please point to the approximate area of locating this stuff, johanna?
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His nom de plume was "Joshua", not Josh, sorry. It was also his real first name, as it turned out.
I'm pretty sure it was some time in February - I tried to search the site, but since I can't remember who did the unmasking, couldn't find anything.
Anyway, it was remarkable how threads went from having dozens of spammy posts from him to zero, just like that. It improved the flow of the threads enormously!
avineg
You should be trying not to shoot from the hip about the 'medical community'.
The human body is subjected to pH altering metabolic changes, probably by orders of magnitude more than what is actually observed. The *buffering capacity* of blood/blood elements and the excretory functions of the kidney, and lung function, hold things in check.
So yes, vieras is right - you actually can and do put a lot of acid and alkali in your body, not unlike what jumping into a sauna or skinny-dipping in frigid waters subjects your body heat content and temperature to. The human body is a living organism with physiological mechanisms and feedback loops in place for active control of parameters, and people usually give medical analogies in climate change for pointless reasons. So your random factoid about the body's narrow pH range is meaningless in the context of what were are trying to discuss. Since your talked about the Cochrane collaboration and patronized the readers here, I thought the quality of responses might go up a bit, but I guess that is not to be.
Shub,
It wasn't meant as an exact analogy. I apologise if you find it irrelevant or patronising in the context of this thread. Quite often in the various debates around climate science people focus on small changes as being quite obviously ineffective and ridiculous. Invoking medical analogies sometimes helps to clarify the fact that small changes can sometimes have big effects. I'm not saying that you or many of the other posters here need that clarification. Some posters and lurkers might.
"I apologise if you find it irrelevant or patronising..."
No need for that. ... this is an environemental debate/area so people are generally aware of such concepts.
Mike A: "I’d be interested to know what, if anything, is fallacious in my reasoning." Could it be mixing? I mean you are talking about total ocean volume, but there is relatively little mixing of deep ocean water with surface waters. So we need to know what volume of surface waters are absorbing the CO2, not total volume. It is a bit like spreading sunblock on your skin, where it might (or might not) be absorbed in the surface layer and comparing the volume of sunblock to that of your whole body.
Mixing, or the lack of it, would certainly change things. Anyone know how much mixing takes place? Is there a depth that we know gets mixed or is it just a gradual decline until it stratifies to a static layer? Even so, whatever the numbers are, given that the assumption is that a lot (most?) of man-made CO2 finishes up in the atmosphere, it’s a struggle to show that our CO2 is affecting the pH of oceans very much at all I would have thought. Bit like RSL said re CO2 and global warming – it’s trivially true (and some would say not even that) but insignificant.
Mike A