Monday, September 23, 2013
Defining One's Terms (Per Dictionary.com)
Acidify - To make or become acid; convert into an acid.......Please, explain to me how the making of something slightly less alkaline/slightly more neutral is in any way acidifying it. This is absurd. At the very most we are talking about a change in the ocean's pH of 8.2 to 8.0, and the fact of the matter is that even if we burned every cubic foot of fossil fuel on the planet we STILL couldn't make the oceans acidic (the fact that seawater is buffered to the point that it can take up massive amounts of dissolved inorganic carbon and its pH level not be hugely affected). This is nothing but yet another attempt (being that the warming hypothesis has so thoroughly crashed and burned) to demonize CO2, technology, capitalism, etc. and to frigging slap another tax upon us............................................................................P.S. A few additional points. a) There is nothing even remotely alarming about the present-day CO2 levels and, if anything, we are at a relatively low ebb pertaining to them and b) CO2 is beneficial to ocean life in that it generally helps plants to grow and shellfish to develop.
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CO2 levels: Mauna Loa figures indicate an increasing RATE the last few decades. Not alarming, but of interest-why is it not being absorbed by the fauna and oceans in the usual balance equation? What maximum will be
reached? What maximum would be
considered alarming? The level has gone from 310 ppm when I was born
to historic
levels. The data must tell us something and I would be interested as well if the accretion suddenly reversed.
I'm not sure about the 3 million years but even so 3 million years is just a blip. Geological evidence abounds that the rate of atmospheric COs has been many fold of what it currently is and that there was never a runaway greenhouse effect or acidic oceans. And, besides, once you get to 400 ppm the CO2 has pretty much absorbed all of the infrared radiation that it can and so even if we doubled it to 800 ppm the effect on temperature would probably be only a couple tenths of 1 degree.......And the CO2 accounting doesn't add up. There are 40,000 gigatonnes of CO2 in the oceans (and even more than that in limestone) and only 800 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere (of which man is only contributing 4%). Elevating the former to 40,010 and decreasing the latter to 790 is going to cause a climate and ocean catastrophe? George Carlin does a really funny skit on how we humans think that we're somehow destroying the planet and I really think that everybody should view the thing.
And there's also a discrepancy in the half life. Human induced CO2 (something that we learned from testing a-bombs in the '50s) has a half life of 5 years. The present CO2 has a half life of 35 years. That leads me to think that something else besides us is causing at least some of it.......Oh, and a lot of those early CO2 figures from the 1800s were cherry-picked by the IPCC (gee, what a surprise). They purposefully picked the lowest figures (270-280) and ignored the years in which the readings were just as high as they are today. I would say that that is yet another confounding variable.
The CO2 half-life discrepancy is addressed in an article which suggests that the surface saturation in the oceans seems to increase atmospheric residence time. Pales in comparison to the human capacity to affect the planet should we decide to exchange a few thousand thermonuclear weapons, though.
Please, anything but "Skeptical Science".
And oceans aren't the only thing that are taking up the CO2. The global uptake of carbon by land plants seems to be up considerably more than previously thought, too.......And I just don't get this very notion that CO2 is defacto bad. It's one of the primary building blocks of life.
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