Ocean Acidifiction Hysteria Unjustified

As if we didn’t already know that it was all wildly overblown. From JoNova:

There goes another scare campaign.

Until recently we had very little data about real time changes in ocean pH around the world. Finally autonomous sensors placed in a variety of ecosystems “from tropical to polar, open-ocean to coastal, kelp forest to coral reef” give us the information we needed.

It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day.

Data was collected by 15 individual SeaFET sensors in seven types of marine habitats.  Four sites were fairly stable (1, which includes the open ocean, and also sites 2,3,4) but most of the rest were highly variable (esp site 15 near Italy and 14 near Mexico) . On a monthly scale the pH varies by 0.024 to 1.430 pH units.

Ocean acidification happens all the time

 

 

Catastrophic Sea Level Rise

Update 8/2/11:

One of the things that might be an issue in guestimates of sea-level rise is the fact that tides change over the years.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The ebb and flow of the ocean tides, generally thought to be one of the most predictable forces on Earth, are actually quite variable over long time periods, in ways that have not been adequately accounted for in most evaluations of prehistoric sea level changes.

Due to phenomena such as ice ages, plate tectonics, land uplift, erosion and sedimentation, tides have changed dramatically over thousands of years and may change again in the future, a new study concludes.

The rest: The tides, they are a changin!

 

Original posting:

Just to put things in persepctive… (click to enlarge)

A subtle change of about 120 meters (almost 400 feet.) Right side is the present and this goes back 32,000 years. I think Al Gore & Co. are about 16,000 years off with their predictions.

WUWT on Sea Level Rise acceleration

About That “Measured” Sea Level Rise

When shown graphs that look precise we tend to forget the errors bars, which, for some reason, weren’t included on the graph…

From a WUWT comment:

(commenter is responding to a previous comment, emphasis is mine.)

…

I have recommended this document in comments here several times in the past

http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/J2_handbook_v1-4_no_rev.pdf

It is the data products handbook for the Jason-2 satellite system, the latest and greatest of the our measurement systems for determining MSL (Mean Sea Level.) It’s worth studying for the large amount of basic information on the multitude of elements involved in attempting to derive what the global mean sea level is, but for the purposes of the discussion of the burgeoning rise in sea level the most pertinent section is 2.3.1 Accuracy of Sea Level Measurements. In particular this sentence ” The sea surface height shall be provided with a globally averaged RMS accuracy of 3.4 cm(1 sigma), or better, assuming 1 second averages.”

A number of points to consider regarding that sentence

1) Lay a +/- 3.4 cm error bar across that frequently published graph of rising MSL in the satellite era and it covers the whole graph quite nicely.
2) The 3.4 cm accuracy is a pre launch specification that is still TBD.
3) As I mentioned the Jason-2 is the latest and greatest iteration in our efforts, which has significant improvements relative to Jason-1, which was itself an almost order of magnitude improvement over the older TOPEX/Poseidon sats.

Also, if you peruse the Table at pg 17/67 of the PDF, you’ll see a line for significant wave height which suggests that the system is unable to read the surface to better than 0.4 METERS when waves are present, which makes the bold claims of achievable accuracy seem more than a bit suspect.

Even I occasionally fall into the trap of granting excess credibility to satellite data, but we would all be well advised to remind ourselves on a regular basis that, although these products of our incredible human ingenuity are published and quoted with amazing levels of precision, they are vastly complex systems which even if they could be operated at levels of physical perfection never achieved in any much less complex human mechanism, would still not be able to provide accuracy anywhere near that precision suggested in the presented data.

More on the subject:

• A Report on Sea Levels for the Greening Earth Society – a long discussion of issues involved with sea level measurements and some remarks on how little rise there has likely been.
• Rates of sea-level change over the past century in a geocentric reference frame – … leading to a reconciled global rate of geocentric sea level rise of 1.61 ± 0.19mm/yr over the past century in good agreement with the most recent estimates.
• Sea-level Expert: It’s Not Rising! – among other things, he says (regarding the IPCC sea level graph:) …So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences meeting in Moscow—I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!

Ocean Acidification Debunked

There’s a nice article on WUWT debunking the ocean acidification hysteria. Like most things on the extremist, Al Gore inspired, alarmist fringe, there’s no there, there.

The Electric Oceanic Acid Test

There is more on the subject on my previous ocean acidification post.

More on the subject:

Acid Oceans Due to Undersea Volcanoes? New Study Refutes Theory Humans Are Responsible for Acidification

Ocean Acidification: Chicken Little of the Sea Strikes Again

More about volcanic CO2

Ocean Acidification

It looks like the next great hoax to follow the global warming scam (and I’m not talking about the .5 to 1.0C that the world may have warmed over the last 100+ years) is ocean acidification.

WUWT has Ocean acidification: the “evil twin of global warming”

The rise in human emissions of carbon dioxide is driving fundamental and dangerous changes in the chemistry and ecosystems of the world’s oceans, international marine scientists warned today.

“Ocean conditions are already more extreme than those experienced by marine organisms and ecosystems for millions of years,” the researchers say in the latest issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE).

The report is pretty thoroughly ripped to pieces in the comments. Some of them cal it “grant bait.”

More stuff on “acidification

My view: aince airborne CO2 is trivial compared to oceanic CO2 and since the ocean is a well buffered system and since warming oceans release CO2 and since historic CO2 levels have been far higher with no issues of acid oceans and since oceanic organisms have shown their ability to adapt to higher and lower CO2 I conclude that acidification is a non-issue. More likely the reverse is true, that increased CO2 will be a boon in water as it is on land.

• Monckton on acidification – corrects Sigourney Weaver’s scary movie on acidification. (Here’s the PDF)
• China Sea pH bounces all over
• SeaFriends site on Acidification – “Alkalinity in the ocean depends substantially on the plankton balance in which the pH results from autotrophs (plants) using hydrogen ions and driving the pH up, while decomposers return hydrogen ions, thus driving the pH down. The daily rhythm can amount to 0.4pH units (250%), and the difference between estuaries and the open sea as much as 1-2 units (1000-10,000%). It is important to keep this in mind, as one can find healthy calcification in shells in these conditions. When seas become eutrophied (overnourished), they also become more acidic due to high levels of decomposing bacteria and their work. Particularly coastal seas show this.”
• CO2, acidification, tempering of extreme views

Global Warming Sinks an Island? Not.

A friend sent me this page via Stumbleupon. Disappearing islands are always interesting, whether due to storms, land subsidence, erosion, floods, etc. (Based on current sea level measurements in that area it would take 4,000 years to sink that 2 meter high island. )

Naturally they find some professor who’s goofy enough to blame it on global warming. I guess that means that global cooling must have caused the island to appear back in the 70s? After all, there was a global cooling scare about that time.

WattsUpWithThat has some fun with the story and proves that warming had nothing do do with the disappearance.

Note that sea levels DID rise quickly, and by a lot, as the last ice age ended. There is a huge, well developed city (mentioned in the post) that’s under 120 feet of water. So Al Gore may be right about sea level rise destroying civilization, but he’s over 9,000 years too late.  I wonder how many other ruins from that period are also underwater? It’s not a tiny city they’re showing there.

There are some other interesting links to relevant stuff in the comment section of that post:

• Interestingly enough the same professor mentioned above attributes most of the “sea level rise” to land subsidence, due to the weight of sediments being washed down by the rivers in the area. Climate Change Hoax
• Some people like to point to the Carteret Islands as victims of sea level rise caused by warming. Even Wikipedia, hardly skeptical to warming claims, debunks that idea.
• Bangladesh: losing mangroves to shrimp farming leads to food loss and environmental insecurity
• More on that little island: Sea level rise? Global warming? I don’t think so…
• Indications of a city that’s just a bit deeper…
• An expert’s remarks on the sea level rise (very little.) He has some interesting things to say about the IPCC, as well.

Update:

More WUWT: No real sea level rise – info on coral atolls, fresh water lenses, atolls wise with sea level. Atolls are created by sea level rise, not destroyed by sea level rise.

Another paper: Sea levels are stable

SPPI on that little island: The birth and death of an island in the Bay of Bengal

Debunked – Worries About the Collapse of the Gulf Stream

People worry about conditions in the Arctic causing the collapse of ocean current systems, keeping Europe warmer than otherwise, said collapse resulting in another ice age. Nothing to worry about here.

North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation / Gulf Stream

Some global warming alarmists suggest that the North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation (NATC) or (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) will be disrupted by the melting of the Arctic ice cap, causing an ice age. This is known by scientists to be a bogus scenario.

This has mainly come about due to a general misunderstanding of the NATC and the Gulf Stream.

Rest the rest, here.

Among other things, the above links to additions events and demonstrates that there are no worries about “Global Warming” causing issues, with precipitation, hurricanes, ice caps, sea level rise, glaciers, polar bears (and other critters,) or human disease.

Surprising Return of North Atlantic Circulation Pump

One of the “pumps” contributing to the ocean’s global circulation suddenly switched on again last winter for the first time this decade, scientists reported Tuesday ( Dec. 23 ) in Nature Geoscience.

Here’s the rest