Kudos for looking these things up. It is something everyone would benefit from, for the sake of amplifying the right ideas and dampening down the bad ones.
People are forwarding information from each other and then citing the sheer volume of discussion as if that is evidence. It reminds me a lot of a bad sound system for a stage production, where a mic picks up a speaker, sends a signal to an amplifier, which then drives that same speaker. The resulting feedback can be absolutely piercing.
The sound came from somewhere, originally, but the only parts you hear are the ones that hit the strongest positive feedback loops in the signal chain. It is often one single frequency, close to a sine wave, even though the original audio on stage has a broad mix of frequencies.
The way out is to add some filtering rather than just amplifying everything that comes by.
“The way out is to add some filtering rather than just amplifying everything that comes by.”
The biggest problem imo is that the media, which used to perform a semi-respectable filtering function, now has converted to being a leftist amplifier on all topics with any political connection.
I observed the same pattern fifty years ago when the terrible problem that required drastic action was overpopulation. There was an orthodox position supported by looking at only arguments for one side and almost all respectable opinion endorsed it. I was skeptical then, concluded from looking at both positive and negative effects of population increase that it wasn't clear whether the net effect was positive or negative, the same conclusion I reached this time.
Evolution can be very fast as long as you're adjusting existing mechanisms rather than needing to make new ones. 10,000 years is plenty to adjust to slight pH changes. Equally it wouldn't surprise me if sea creatures could evolve fast enough to accommodate the current pH changes. But it's still a risk. They're likely happiest at whatever the recent levels are.
It shouldn't be that hard to grow some shelled molluscs in two tanks, one of which is slightly more acidic than the other, and see what happens?
If things are bad, it's totally reasonable to say they're getting better rather than saying they're getting less bad. I don't see saying the basic ocean is acidifying as being a disingenuous statement, just a concise one.
The obvious explanation why the rate of change of acidification would matter is that plants and animals can evolve to cope with new conditions in hundreds or thousands of generations, but not dozens.
You're right it would be interesting to hear a rebuttal to your arguments from an expert in the field, but either way for now these arguments are weak enough im going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I agree that the rate might be crucial, but as far as I can tell nobody so far has offered evidence — it's all speculation. The one thing sometimes offered as evidence is the large-scale extinction during the PETM, but although that involved effects on the ocean of a comparable scale to those we are in the process of producing they were much slower.
I don't think my post should convince you that lower pH isn't a long term threat — I don't know that it isn't — but it should convince you that much of the talk is either scientifically ignorant or deliberately dishonest. More generally, I think my past posts on climate provide quite a lot of evidence that the current climate orthodoxy is being pushed by arguments, made by respectable sources, bad enough so you should not trust the people making them, hence that while you do not know the conclusion is false you have little reason to believe it is true, should conclude that you don't know. I can point you at particular posts if you are curious.
I've read a lot of your past posts (probably all of them since I subscribed a couple years ago) and agree with most of them, I've just found this particular one weaker and figured I'd give the obvious rebuttals.
The posts where I think you're on the best footing (not surprisingly) are the ones where you point out that we need to consider both the large, definite, negative externalities of reducing CO2 production on the global poor, as well as account for all the potential effects of global warming, good and bad.
Your post on how science suggests increased CO2 has likely significantly increased the food supply was fascinating, and I couldn't believe the first place I'd heard it from was an economist's substack. So yeah, I have to agree there's bias in how climate change is talked about, enough to knock me off my default position to trust the experts. But I do think you may be underestimating the risk to the ecosystem, especially tail risk.
I agree. One reason to post this was to see if I could get critical responses that would point out weaknesses in my argument. I have, in the past, treated reduced pH as a negative of uncertain size. The piece I commented on a few posts back contained information suggesting that the effect was small, which made me want to see if I could write up that argument.
Long tail risk cuts both ways, as I have pointed out before. It is possible, although unlikely, that preventing climate change will have large negative effects, with the end of the current interglacial the obvious one.
A more general argument against action is that it substitutes decisions made by political mechanisms for market decisions, and political mechanisms are very bad at making decisions. The obvious example is the biofuels program, which does a great deal of damage to poor people living largely on maize and, it turns out, does nothing to reduce climate change. The climate issue provided an excuse for a policy created and maintained to benefit American farmers.
"Change" in ecology is always bad and "change" in politics is always good.
Or so it seems from what I read online.
The single most surprising thing about the human world is how perfected it is. Almost everything is tuned to be easy, safe, and convenient. Stores are full of goods, roads conveniently go where most people want to travel, police exist to deter crime, cinemas exist to entertain us in comfort, hospitals exist to heal us, courts exist to settle our differences fairly and peacefully, hotels exist to house us away from home, pens come in shapes and sizes perfectly fitted to the human hand. We notice the few exceptions where imperfection occurs only because it's so rare and unexpected.
This is something we should be celebrating. Instead many people think human society sucks.
And sucks compared to WHAT? Residents of first-world countries live in the wealthiest, healthiest, safest, most fair societies that have ever existed in the history of the Earth. Every other type of society that ever actually existed was vastly worse.
People think change for the better is easy, but if such changes were both easy and possible, they'd have been accomplished long ago. </rant>
Agreed. At least for large and rapid changes. We need small gradual changes to stay adapted and to optimize what isn't already optimized. And be ready to reverse them if they don't work out. (I think Hayek said this.)
That argument cuts both ways in the climate case. Climate change is change, although not rapid. Policies adopted to slow climate change, such as biofuels and pushing to reduce the use of fossil fuels are also change — and more rapid.
I hope a topic you cover in your book is the motivations of so many people to exaggerate the consequences of climate change and to blame it on people. It's obvious for businesses making solar panels and such, but for academics and journalists? There's the idea that funding comes to researchers with the right questions (and conclusions), but that just raises the question why government wants this to be a problem in the first place. Naively, if you can prove it's not a problem you can put funding on other priorities, which would seem like a win.
It's the same reason news media covers only Man bites dog instead of Dog bites man.
Bureaucrats measure success by number of underlings, size of budgets, and how many new regulations and reports they write. Any bureaucracy which produces no new regulations or reports has condemned itself as past its use-by date. No bureaucrat ever wants to solve the problem which created their job. And politicians are bureaucrats.
Hence government bureaucracies want to regulate more and spend more. The more money they distribute, the more they show how important they are.
No one wants money to prove the climate is not changing. That idiotic "the science is settled" was a big stupid mistake, because it implies they need no more money for any more research. So they have to gin up new existential crises. "Coral reefs are disappearing because the oceans are acidifying" is just the latest in a long string of existential crises.
That's all the motivation and incentive needed to understand the climate catastrophists. Money, and lots of it.
That all may be true but it sort of relies on a "prior" of cynicism to all things government to be convincing. Why did they pick climate change and why has it gotten so much traction? The scale of spending and regulatory cost is historically unique as far as I'm aware. They could have chosen to worry about building an asteroid impact defense system or any number of other potential existential threats.
I'm pretty cynical about government, but I still think most bad effects come about organically, not because people set out with the intention of protecting their jobs, fooling the public or making the government bigger for its own sake. Well, most of the time anyway...
One possibility is that being an environmentalist of this sort fills a void left by religion. Or that it's a luxury signaling belief. These are more psychological in nature, not easily analyzed in normal economic terms.
You might think about the same question applied to the overpopulation scare 50+ years ago, which was similar. One part of it is that people want an excuse to have the government do things it wasn't doing, and a looming catastrophe beats most arguments against. Once one gets started, with some plausible arguments, it may make more sense to join on that than to offer a different one, even one with better arguments.
I don't think most bureaucrats spend all day thinking about how to expand. I do think that's the innate incentive to all bureaucrats, just as engineers' natural instinct is perfection and accountants' natural instinct is saving money.
As to why climate change, that's just what was handy. You may as well ask why you picked the three of hearts when cutting a deck of cards. It has superb qualifications for bureaucrats, especially "researchers" who have gotten used to a steady diet of government funding. Vague, long term, lots and lots of nebulous points just begging to cloak in mind-numbing jargon. The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact had collapsed, the alarm mongers in politics and the media needed some new scare, and the climate alarm had just recently switched from global cooling to global warming.
I think that's where woke came from too. Global warming was running into political headwinds, the crackdown after 9-11 awakened concern about rights, especially bigotry against the 9-11 attackers' religion and the pointless Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and then gay marriage and its natural extension into LGBQWERTY rights. Why not condense it down to the oppressed and oppressors?
None of it requires any planning. It's just spontaneous.
“Naively, if you can prove it's not a problem you can put funding on other priorities, which would seem like a win.”
‘Climate change is a problem” is a compelling reason to elect leftists who will enact authoritarian policies to prevent the problem.
This really is somewhere between 80% and 99% of the explanation, despite the fact that this explanation is denied by all on the left and many in the center.
And despite the fact that too few on the right call it out as the truth, but instead insist on playing on the leftists’ preferred playing field and largely by their rules.
🌱 Hi David! Arshiya (Arsh) here. I launched a Substack to make sustainability easy for beginners: short, simple updates on key concepts, news, and what’s happening globally in climate 🌍 If you’d like to stay in the loop, subscribe and share your thoughts! I’m new here and excited to start so your support and feedback mean a lot! Let’s #SUSitOut
If global fish production has tripled (or more?) since 1997, aren't we removing more and more alkalinity from the ocean and dumping it (the fish bones and shells) into landfills?
"However, as ocean acidification increases, available carbonate ions (CO3^2-) bond with excess hydrogen, resulting in fewer carbonate ions available for calcifying organisms to build and maintain their shells, skeletons, and other calcium carbonate structures."
From my understanding of Chemistry, and someone can maybe correct or elaborate on this; the way CO2 decreases the pH of the ocean is because CO2 is in an equilibrium between the water and the air, meaning between dissolved and on a gaseous form. Which depends on the concentration of CO2 in each state and the partial pressure of CO2 in the air. And where the dissolved form is by becoming carbonic acid (H2CO3).
Like a soda, where the CO2 is (partly along with added citric acid) what makes it acid, and by opening it, you reduce the CO2 concentration in the air connected to the liquid (by having the soda connected to ambient air instead of a small trapped volume of air/CO2 in the can), and the carbonic acid concentration goes down.
But my point is, if you make the ocean more acidic by adding H2CO3, by increasing CO2 in the air, then of course the concentration of H2CO3 will go up, but some of it will also react with water (and thereby decrease the pH) and become CO3^2-. This means the concentration of both CO3^2- and H2CO3 will increase. Even though the ratio of H2CO3/CO3^2- may decrease due to adding the acid form and decreasing pH, the concentration of both will increase.
Meaning more CO3^2- for calcifying animals; and thereby maybe making it easier for them to make their shell.
This is how I see casual relation; but I would be happy to hear someone confirm it or someone explain why I am wrong.
Our pattern of accepting repetitive reports without examining evidence for and against the message is essentially a habit of laziness. It takes work to find, study, and arrive at some judgement, just as David has done here. But a conclusion clashing against the tide of popular opinion isn't easy, since doom and destruction sway media and those who benefit from the arm-waving.
My confusion. The article I was quoting is about the Triassic-Jurassic boundary not the PETM. So my argument was wrong — that's at the end of the Triassic, and oysters appeared in early Triassic. Thanks.
And almost as by magic, one of the most respected dailies in the Netherland is running a front page article in complete and total opposition to what you just wrote: "Coral Reefs reach tipping point and will continue to die - all large coral reefs will die until only small refuges are left. this will be the first global climate tipping point"
They base themselves on the "Global Tipping Points Report 2025".
Among skeptical circles there's been an anecdote for a long time that a study that acidified a tank found reduced shell formation, while one that actually added CO2 had higher shell formation.
Looking it up on ChatGPT it first lists several CO2 tests that found reduced shellfish health when I asked a neutral question. It provided one 2022 study, with caveats, when I asked about positive results from increased CO2. I don't know how to assess the field, as ChatGPT is as strongly biased as the highest quality and most numerous training sources are biased.
Leftists learned long ago never to let facts stand in the way of a good narrative.
On a substantive point, surely your chart on aquaculture has far more to do with the recent decades’ increases in seafood farming than anything else, does it not? I know that prices for farm-raised salmon have plummeted and farm-raised shrimp have declined; I have to believe this is because supply of each of these has increased substantially. My anecdotal evidence as a long-time seafood shopper is that prices for wild shrimp and wild salmon have gone up; whether that is due to decreased supply or increased demand, or both, I cannot say.
The comment was mostly because you asked for feedback re: publishing the piece in a book. IMO that chart and argument are far weaker than the rest, and detract from your point rather than strengthen it.
It's by no means leftists only. Substack showed me a note recently with a dozen claims about Japan shunning Muslims. One was so blatant (the "University of Japan does not teach Muslim languages") that I looked up a few. As I expected, I could find no "University of Japan". The University of Tokyo is well known, possibly the most famous Japanese university, and does teach Arabic.
Another was that Japan has no embassies in, or diplomatic relations with, any Muslim countries. The first DuckDuckGo hit was a Wikipedia page of Japanese embassies, and sure enough, it listed a lot of Muslim countries, including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
I forget the third, but it was just as ludicrous. I called him out as a liar and posted the three I had looked up.
Then there's Trump and his tariffs ignorance, especially with his three conflicting goals (zero tariffs, tariffs high enough to block imports and generate zero revenue, tariffs high enough to replace income taxes but not blocking imports).
Politics creates liars of all stripes. Note I am not accusing you of saying only leftists lie. But a lot of people do say that, and I want to correct the record.
Question: In your post you mentioned that one of the concerns is that “as ocean acidification increases, available carbonate ions bond with excess hydrogen, resulting in fewer carbonate ions available for calcifying organisms to build and maintain their shells, skeletons, and other calcium carbonate structures.” Is that true and, if so, do the oceans have to actually have an acidic pH for the decrease in carbonate ions to have an impact? Thanks.
A good thought, but no, water self ionizes into H and OH ions, so there's always some hydrogen ions around. As it becomes less basic there are more and more
Some of the H2O molecules dissociate spontaneously, losing an H+, which leaves behind an OH-. The H+ then gloms onto another H2O, forming an H3O+. This inevitably happens in any substantial amount of liquid water. If you don't still call that mixture "pure," then pure water never occurs anywhere.
So by my naive simple idea, pure water is highly unstable, and transforms spontaneously into impure water without the addition of any impurities. This shows that my extreme idea of pure water as consisting only of H2O is impractical. Thanks for clarifying.
Yes, though the impurity is minimal: pH 7 means that there are on the order of 1/10,000,000 of the water molecules ionized, if I remember the definition right. Water is very minimally acidic. (There was some sense to the medieval custom of naming acids as "waters," aqua fortis and aqua regia and so on; they have the capacity to dissolve a lot of things more effectively than water, because they produce a lot more H+ ions.)
An improvement to my internal chemistry models has been to think of external protons (hydrogen) as easily moving components in molecules, so that in any bigger mix of molecules there will be loose protons flying around.
Yes, well, most of chemistry is based either on moving protons around (acid-base reactions) or moving electron pairs around (oxidation-reduction reactions).
Kudos for looking these things up. It is something everyone would benefit from, for the sake of amplifying the right ideas and dampening down the bad ones.
People are forwarding information from each other and then citing the sheer volume of discussion as if that is evidence. It reminds me a lot of a bad sound system for a stage production, where a mic picks up a speaker, sends a signal to an amplifier, which then drives that same speaker. The resulting feedback can be absolutely piercing.
The sound came from somewhere, originally, but the only parts you hear are the ones that hit the strongest positive feedback loops in the signal chain. It is often one single frequency, close to a sine wave, even though the original audio on stage has a broad mix of frequencies.
The way out is to add some filtering rather than just amplifying everything that comes by.
“The way out is to add some filtering rather than just amplifying everything that comes by.”
The biggest problem imo is that the media, which used to perform a semi-respectable filtering function, now has converted to being a leftist amplifier on all topics with any political connection.
I observed the same pattern fifty years ago when the terrible problem that required drastic action was overpopulation. There was an orthodox position supported by looking at only arguments for one side and almost all respectable opinion endorsed it. I was skeptical then, concluded from looking at both positive and negative effects of population increase that it wasn't clear whether the net effect was positive or negative, the same conclusion I reached this time.
Evolution can be very fast as long as you're adjusting existing mechanisms rather than needing to make new ones. 10,000 years is plenty to adjust to slight pH changes. Equally it wouldn't surprise me if sea creatures could evolve fast enough to accommodate the current pH changes. But it's still a risk. They're likely happiest at whatever the recent levels are.
It shouldn't be that hard to grow some shelled molluscs in two tanks, one of which is slightly more acidic than the other, and see what happens?
If things are bad, it's totally reasonable to say they're getting better rather than saying they're getting less bad. I don't see saying the basic ocean is acidifying as being a disingenuous statement, just a concise one.
The obvious explanation why the rate of change of acidification would matter is that plants and animals can evolve to cope with new conditions in hundreds or thousands of generations, but not dozens.
You're right it would be interesting to hear a rebuttal to your arguments from an expert in the field, but either way for now these arguments are weak enough im going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I agree that the rate might be crucial, but as far as I can tell nobody so far has offered evidence — it's all speculation. The one thing sometimes offered as evidence is the large-scale extinction during the PETM, but although that involved effects on the ocean of a comparable scale to those we are in the process of producing they were much slower.
I don't think my post should convince you that lower pH isn't a long term threat — I don't know that it isn't — but it should convince you that much of the talk is either scientifically ignorant or deliberately dishonest. More generally, I think my past posts on climate provide quite a lot of evidence that the current climate orthodoxy is being pushed by arguments, made by respectable sources, bad enough so you should not trust the people making them, hence that while you do not know the conclusion is false you have little reason to believe it is true, should conclude that you don't know. I can point you at particular posts if you are curious.
I've read a lot of your past posts (probably all of them since I subscribed a couple years ago) and agree with most of them, I've just found this particular one weaker and figured I'd give the obvious rebuttals.
The posts where I think you're on the best footing (not surprisingly) are the ones where you point out that we need to consider both the large, definite, negative externalities of reducing CO2 production on the global poor, as well as account for all the potential effects of global warming, good and bad.
Your post on how science suggests increased CO2 has likely significantly increased the food supply was fascinating, and I couldn't believe the first place I'd heard it from was an economist's substack. So yeah, I have to agree there's bias in how climate change is talked about, enough to knock me off my default position to trust the experts. But I do think you may be underestimating the risk to the ecosystem, especially tail risk.
I agree. One reason to post this was to see if I could get critical responses that would point out weaknesses in my argument. I have, in the past, treated reduced pH as a negative of uncertain size. The piece I commented on a few posts back contained information suggesting that the effect was small, which made me want to see if I could write up that argument.
Long tail risk cuts both ways, as I have pointed out before. It is possible, although unlikely, that preventing climate change will have large negative effects, with the end of the current interglacial the obvious one.
A more general argument against action is that it substitutes decisions made by political mechanisms for market decisions, and political mechanisms are very bad at making decisions. The obvious example is the biofuels program, which does a great deal of damage to poor people living largely on maize and, it turns out, does nothing to reduce climate change. The climate issue provided an excuse for a policy created and maintained to benefit American farmers.
Yep, preaching to the choir on biofuels. Good luck soliciting feedback!
"Change" in ecology is always bad and "change" in politics is always good.
Or so it seems from what I read online.
The single most surprising thing about the human world is how perfected it is. Almost everything is tuned to be easy, safe, and convenient. Stores are full of goods, roads conveniently go where most people want to travel, police exist to deter crime, cinemas exist to entertain us in comfort, hospitals exist to heal us, courts exist to settle our differences fairly and peacefully, hotels exist to house us away from home, pens come in shapes and sizes perfectly fitted to the human hand. We notice the few exceptions where imperfection occurs only because it's so rare and unexpected.
This is something we should be celebrating. Instead many people think human society sucks.
And sucks compared to WHAT? Residents of first-world countries live in the wealthiest, healthiest, safest, most fair societies that have ever existed in the history of the Earth. Every other type of society that ever actually existed was vastly worse.
People think change for the better is easy, but if such changes were both easy and possible, they'd have been accomplished long ago. </rant>
Yep that's why the default position should be against changing either. Chesterton's Fence and all that
Agreed. At least for large and rapid changes. We need small gradual changes to stay adapted and to optimize what isn't already optimized. And be ready to reverse them if they don't work out. (I think Hayek said this.)
That argument cuts both ways in the climate case. Climate change is change, although not rapid. Policies adopted to slow climate change, such as biofuels and pushing to reduce the use of fossil fuels are also change — and more rapid.
I hope a topic you cover in your book is the motivations of so many people to exaggerate the consequences of climate change and to blame it on people. It's obvious for businesses making solar panels and such, but for academics and journalists? There's the idea that funding comes to researchers with the right questions (and conclusions), but that just raises the question why government wants this to be a problem in the first place. Naively, if you can prove it's not a problem you can put funding on other priorities, which would seem like a win.
I discuss it a little. Here is an old blog post on part of it: https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-revealing-cartoon.html
It's the same reason news media covers only Man bites dog instead of Dog bites man.
Bureaucrats measure success by number of underlings, size of budgets, and how many new regulations and reports they write. Any bureaucracy which produces no new regulations or reports has condemned itself as past its use-by date. No bureaucrat ever wants to solve the problem which created their job. And politicians are bureaucrats.
Hence government bureaucracies want to regulate more and spend more. The more money they distribute, the more they show how important they are.
No one wants money to prove the climate is not changing. That idiotic "the science is settled" was a big stupid mistake, because it implies they need no more money for any more research. So they have to gin up new existential crises. "Coral reefs are disappearing because the oceans are acidifying" is just the latest in a long string of existential crises.
That's all the motivation and incentive needed to understand the climate catastrophists. Money, and lots of it.
That all may be true but it sort of relies on a "prior" of cynicism to all things government to be convincing. Why did they pick climate change and why has it gotten so much traction? The scale of spending and regulatory cost is historically unique as far as I'm aware. They could have chosen to worry about building an asteroid impact defense system or any number of other potential existential threats.
I'm pretty cynical about government, but I still think most bad effects come about organically, not because people set out with the intention of protecting their jobs, fooling the public or making the government bigger for its own sake. Well, most of the time anyway...
One possibility is that being an environmentalist of this sort fills a void left by religion. Or that it's a luxury signaling belief. These are more psychological in nature, not easily analyzed in normal economic terms.
You might think about the same question applied to the overpopulation scare 50+ years ago, which was similar. One part of it is that people want an excuse to have the government do things it wasn't doing, and a looming catastrophe beats most arguments against. Once one gets started, with some plausible arguments, it may make more sense to join on that than to offer a different one, even one with better arguments.
I don't think most bureaucrats spend all day thinking about how to expand. I do think that's the innate incentive to all bureaucrats, just as engineers' natural instinct is perfection and accountants' natural instinct is saving money.
As to why climate change, that's just what was handy. You may as well ask why you picked the three of hearts when cutting a deck of cards. It has superb qualifications for bureaucrats, especially "researchers" who have gotten used to a steady diet of government funding. Vague, long term, lots and lots of nebulous points just begging to cloak in mind-numbing jargon. The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact had collapsed, the alarm mongers in politics and the media needed some new scare, and the climate alarm had just recently switched from global cooling to global warming.
I think that's where woke came from too. Global warming was running into political headwinds, the crackdown after 9-11 awakened concern about rights, especially bigotry against the 9-11 attackers' religion and the pointless Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and then gay marriage and its natural extension into LGBQWERTY rights. Why not condense it down to the oppressed and oppressors?
None of it requires any planning. It's just spontaneous.
“Naively, if you can prove it's not a problem you can put funding on other priorities, which would seem like a win.”
‘Climate change is a problem” is a compelling reason to elect leftists who will enact authoritarian policies to prevent the problem.
This really is somewhere between 80% and 99% of the explanation, despite the fact that this explanation is denied by all on the left and many in the center.
And despite the fact that too few on the right call it out as the truth, but instead insist on playing on the leftists’ preferred playing field and largely by their rules.
Alan Longhurst was a leading oceanographer and also a climate skeptic. He deals with this issue in his book,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8412586743/
There is a thread on Judith Curry's blog devoted to the issue of ocean acidification based on his relevant book chapters,
https://judithcurry.com/2015/09/23/ocean-acidification-discussion-thread-2/
🌱 Hi David! Arshiya (Arsh) here. I launched a Substack to make sustainability easy for beginners: short, simple updates on key concepts, news, and what’s happening globally in climate 🌍 If you’d like to stay in the loop, subscribe and share your thoughts! I’m new here and excited to start so your support and feedback mean a lot! Let’s #SUSitOut
If global fish production has tripled (or more?) since 1997, aren't we removing more and more alkalinity from the ocean and dumping it (the fish bones and shells) into landfills?
Regarding the NOAA article:
"However, as ocean acidification increases, available carbonate ions (CO3^2-) bond with excess hydrogen, resulting in fewer carbonate ions available for calcifying organisms to build and maintain their shells, skeletons, and other calcium carbonate structures."
From my understanding of Chemistry, and someone can maybe correct or elaborate on this; the way CO2 decreases the pH of the ocean is because CO2 is in an equilibrium between the water and the air, meaning between dissolved and on a gaseous form. Which depends on the concentration of CO2 in each state and the partial pressure of CO2 in the air. And where the dissolved form is by becoming carbonic acid (H2CO3).
Like a soda, where the CO2 is (partly along with added citric acid) what makes it acid, and by opening it, you reduce the CO2 concentration in the air connected to the liquid (by having the soda connected to ambient air instead of a small trapped volume of air/CO2 in the can), and the carbonic acid concentration goes down.
But my point is, if you make the ocean more acidic by adding H2CO3, by increasing CO2 in the air, then of course the concentration of H2CO3 will go up, but some of it will also react with water (and thereby decrease the pH) and become CO3^2-. This means the concentration of both CO3^2- and H2CO3 will increase. Even though the ratio of H2CO3/CO3^2- may decrease due to adding the acid form and decreasing pH, the concentration of both will increase.
Meaning more CO3^2- for calcifying animals; and thereby maybe making it easier for them to make their shell.
This is how I see casual relation; but I would be happy to hear someone confirm it or someone explain why I am wrong.
Correction: The ratio of CO3^2-/H2CO3 will decrease.
Our pattern of accepting repetitive reports without examining evidence for and against the message is essentially a habit of laziness. It takes work to find, study, and arrive at some judgement, just as David has done here. But a conclusion clashing against the tide of popular opinion isn't easy, since doom and destruction sway media and those who benefit from the arm-waving.
> the early Triassic, after the PETM extinction event
The PETM was between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs (around 55 million years ago), much later than the Triassic (about 250-200 million years ago).
My confusion. The article I was quoting is about the Triassic-Jurassic boundary not the PETM. So my argument was wrong — that's at the end of the Triassic, and oysters appeared in early Triassic. Thanks.
And almost as by magic, one of the most respected dailies in the Netherland is running a front page article in complete and total opposition to what you just wrote: "Coral Reefs reach tipping point and will continue to die - all large coral reefs will die until only small refuges are left. this will be the first global climate tipping point"
They base themselves on the "Global Tipping Points Report 2025".
Among skeptical circles there's been an anecdote for a long time that a study that acidified a tank found reduced shell formation, while one that actually added CO2 had higher shell formation.
Looking it up on ChatGPT it first lists several CO2 tests that found reduced shellfish health when I asked a neutral question. It provided one 2022 study, with caveats, when I asked about positive results from increased CO2. I don't know how to assess the field, as ChatGPT is as strongly biased as the highest quality and most numerous training sources are biased.
Leftists learned long ago never to let facts stand in the way of a good narrative.
On a substantive point, surely your chart on aquaculture has far more to do with the recent decades’ increases in seafood farming than anything else, does it not? I know that prices for farm-raised salmon have plummeted and farm-raised shrimp have declined; I have to believe this is because supply of each of these has increased substantially. My anecdotal evidence as a long-time seafood shopper is that prices for wild shrimp and wild salmon have gone up; whether that is due to decreased supply or increased demand, or both, I cannot say.
That was why I qualified the argument with the point that other things might be pushing it up.
The comment was mostly because you asked for feedback re: publishing the piece in a book. IMO that chart and argument are far weaker than the rest, and detract from your point rather than strengthen it.
Yes. Possibly because the argument is wrong.
It's by no means leftists only. Substack showed me a note recently with a dozen claims about Japan shunning Muslims. One was so blatant (the "University of Japan does not teach Muslim languages") that I looked up a few. As I expected, I could find no "University of Japan". The University of Tokyo is well known, possibly the most famous Japanese university, and does teach Arabic.
Another was that Japan has no embassies in, or diplomatic relations with, any Muslim countries. The first DuckDuckGo hit was a Wikipedia page of Japanese embassies, and sure enough, it listed a lot of Muslim countries, including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
I forget the third, but it was just as ludicrous. I called him out as a liar and posted the three I had looked up.
Then there's Trump and his tariffs ignorance, especially with his three conflicting goals (zero tariffs, tariffs high enough to block imports and generate zero revenue, tariffs high enough to replace income taxes but not blocking imports).
Politics creates liars of all stripes. Note I am not accusing you of saying only leftists lie. But a lot of people do say that, and I want to correct the record.
Trump also does not appear to recognize the conflict between increasing foreign investment and reducing the trade deficit.
That level of ignorance is one of his most endearing features -- for those who admire him for refusing to listen to experts.
You should listen to experts in order to figure out whether what they say is correct.
For the connection between investment and the trade deficit, see: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ptolemaic-trade-theory
Interesting!
Question: In your post you mentioned that one of the concerns is that “as ocean acidification increases, available carbonate ions bond with excess hydrogen, resulting in fewer carbonate ions available for calcifying organisms to build and maintain their shells, skeletons, and other calcium carbonate structures.” Is that true and, if so, do the oceans have to actually have an acidic pH for the decrease in carbonate ions to have an impact? Thanks.
A good thought, but no, water self ionizes into H and OH ions, so there's always some hydrogen ions around. As it becomes less basic there are more and more
Well, technically, pure water is partly made up of hydronium ions (H3O+), which IS an acid, to a chemist. But not in the vernacular, to be sure.
What is the definition of “pure” that results in something other than H2O being in pure water?
Some of the H2O molecules dissociate spontaneously, losing an H+, which leaves behind an OH-. The H+ then gloms onto another H2O, forming an H3O+. This inevitably happens in any substantial amount of liquid water. If you don't still call that mixture "pure," then pure water never occurs anywhere.
So by my naive simple idea, pure water is highly unstable, and transforms spontaneously into impure water without the addition of any impurities. This shows that my extreme idea of pure water as consisting only of H2O is impractical. Thanks for clarifying.
Yes, though the impurity is minimal: pH 7 means that there are on the order of 1/10,000,000 of the water molecules ionized, if I remember the definition right. Water is very minimally acidic. (There was some sense to the medieval custom of naming acids as "waters," aqua fortis and aqua regia and so on; they have the capacity to dissolve a lot of things more effectively than water, because they produce a lot more H+ ions.)
An improvement to my internal chemistry models has been to think of external protons (hydrogen) as easily moving components in molecules, so that in any bigger mix of molecules there will be loose protons flying around.
Yes, well, most of chemistry is based either on moving protons around (acid-base reactions) or moving electron pairs around (oxidation-reduction reactions).