The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base.
I wonder if the continued use of this term by the "climate change industry" is to relay accurate scientific information or just to help increase their funding?
As other posters have pointed out, pH is logarithmic. A 0.1 drop from ph 8.2 to 8.1 corresponds to something like a 30% increase in hydrogen ion concentration.
If your blood where to drop by 0.1 pH you'd start having seizures. (it's called Acidosis, and that's a medical term, not an alarmist term) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidosis
If anything, the "climate change industry" as you put it are doing a piss poor job of attracting attention to something very scary.
The pH is moving towards the acid end of the spectrum, no matter what's the current position - hence acid-ification. It's a scientific term, just open a chemistry book and read about pH.
Similarly, we say the spectrum of light undergoes a "red shift" even when there's no red in it. But I'm guessing that's also an alarmist term from the black-and-white TV industry, right? /s
... which would be disastrous for a huge chunk of the ocean's ecosystem. "Acidification" seems entirely appropriate; what's the alternative you'd propose?
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That is fucking miles away. At the other end, C3 plant life goes extinct if CO2 falls below 250ppm or so? So why don't you alarmists get your knickers in a twist about that "tipping point"?? If we hadn't dug up and put some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle (where it bloody well came from in the first place) then we'd be facing that extinction scenario instead.
Erm no. Exhaling it is just part of the carbon cycle, it doesn't make the net level in circulation go up or down, it isn't a sink or a source... the carbon you breathe out doesn't get magicked out of thin air. It comes from the sugars, fats and protein you eat which is then burnt by your body for energy, exhaled, photosynthesized by plants, consumed by animals, and moves on up the food chain where you eat it and we start again. Round and round. That's why they call it a cycle.
Without our intervention the net amount of carbon in the cycle would continue to fall due to weathering of rocks and sequestration beneath the Earth, eventually leading to the extinction of all trees and most (non C4) plant life. Luckily, we're digging it up to restore the carbon cycle to its former glory. I think about 800ppm should be our target.
In other words, low CO2 is uphill from where we are, whereas high CO2 is downhill. And the slope is steep due to the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry.
That is fucking miles away. At the other end, C3 plant life goes extinct if CO2 falls below 250ppm or so? So why don't you alarmists get your knickers in a twist about that "tipping point"?? If we hadn't dug up and put some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle (where it bloody well came from in the first place) then we'd be facing that extinction scenario instead.
I have doubt that they are going to get close to actually predicting the future environment with most of their models, since like with the temperature models they are trying to find and extrapolate seemingly-linear relationships in a very complex non-linear system, and that doesn't usually work as well as you'd like it to.
Also the subtext in the press release seems to indicate that this research will immediately be used as a political bludgeon, which I'm never a fan of. It's a shame and it reminds me of this classic cartoon: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
- H. L. Mencken