Oceans could not be more important, and time is running out

The new paper that was published in Science this week will, hopefully, be a wake up call that it's not just global warming that is of great concern, it's the changes in the oceans. When people talk about the ocean and CO2, mostly it's in terms of ocean acidification. However the changes we are causing to the oceans go way beyond changes in pH. It's not just shellfish and other pH sensitive species that are affected by the changes we are bringing about. The oceans are crucial to climate (think ENSO), to our food supply, and to biodiversity.

The paper was from a large international team of scientists led by Jean-Pierre Gattuso of the Observatoire Océanologique de Villefranche-sur-Mer. It concludes by summarising four critical messages - the main one being that we must immediately make substantial reductions to CO2 emissions (my emphasis):

1. The ocean strongly influences the climate system and provides important services to humans. 
2. Impacts on key marine and coastal organisms, ecosystems, and services from anthropogenic CO2 emissions are already detectable, and several will face high risk of impacts well before 2100, even with the stringent CO2 emissions scenario (RCP2.6). These impacts are occurring across all latitudes and have become a global concern that spans the traditional north/south divide. 
3. The analysis shows that immediate and substantial reduction of CO2 emissions is required in order to prevent the massive and effectively irreversible impacts on ocean ecosystems and their services that are projected with emissions scenarios more severe than RCP2.6. Limiting emissions to below this level is necessary to meet UNFCCC's stated objectives. Management options that overlook CO2, such as solar radiation management and control of methane emission, will only minimize impacts of ocean warming and not those of ocean acidification. 
4. As CO2 increases, the protection, adaptation, and repair options for the ocean become fewer and less effective.

CO2 and the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction Events

There is not much happening in deniersville right now. Anthony Watts has another alarmist article by Paul Driessen from the denier lobby group CFACT. It starts off talking about ISIS (I guess WUWT is branching out) and he's trying to link ISIS to both President Obama and climate change - and re the latter, not in the way that most people do.

Judith Curry is asking her denier readers to critique an "essay" she's written. It reads as if it's written hastily for a first term, first year, undergrad Phil101 class. She waffles and meanders from pillar to post in a most unacademic manner, so I don't think she'll get a very good grade. (Her denier fans fawn as usual.)

Given the relative quiet, I figured I'd let you know of two new papers I came across about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. This was the biggest extinction period in the history of Earth - with different stages, or pulses.

Defamation tricks: "Slur and Slurp"

WUWT is one of the main disseminators of lies about scientists in the climate blogosphere. Anthony Watts has, at times, tried the defense that he doesn't read what goes up on his blog. As publisher, I doubt would hold up in court. In any case, he also is a source of some of the lies about science and scientists.

Today he provides another illustration of how climate disinformers try to cement a lie as "fact" in the minds of their readers. Anthony Watts published an article by Tim Ball (archived here). In it he tells so many lies and misrepresents so many people I reckon it could almost form the basis of a class action suit, if scientists decided to do so.

Tim Ball can't even get his lies right!

Let me add, that Tim Ball can't even keep his lies straight. His opening sentence is:

The most recent aberration of climate science is the apparent cherry picking of ocean temperature data by government scientists, Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine. 

Except the lie about Drs Feely and Sabine related to pH not temperature.

"Slur and Slurp" strategy

This article isn't about ocean acidification. It's about how climate disinformers spread lies. In particular, the use of the "slur and slurp" strategy, which is quite simple:

1. The slur: Plant the seed of the lie in enough places
2. Eventually someone will water the seed and it will grow and bear fruit
3. Sit back smugly and slurp the fruits of your sins.

Why aren't all the fish dead? Willis Eschenbach on marine biology

See also Update 2 below.

Deniers at WUWT are busy protesting ocean acidification right now. Since 23 December there have now been five protest articles, four of which were arguably defamatory.  That's not including the silly WUWT articles on OCO-2, some of which are of peripheral relevance to the subject.

I've written a couple of articles about this latest spate of protests already (here and here), and at the risk of overloading on one topic, I couldn't resist another. Wondering Willis Eschenbach is so full of it.

Today Willis goes berserk. He's written one of the silliest articles I've read in a while at WUWT. He's pretending to be an expert on marine biology. His qualifications? He goes fishing sometimes. Well one thing is for sure, he might be able to catch and kill fish, but he certainly knows nothing about the biology and chemistry of the oceans.

Know your data - ocean acidification again

There's been another article (archived here) on the World Ocean Database (WOD) pH data, which was previously the subject of a wrong and malicious article alleging fraud. (Levitis et al (2013) provides an introduction and background to the database.)

It's kept some of the deniers at WUWT busy examining the data - and some who aren't deniers, too. While others just transferred via keyboard whatever random thought popped into their head.

My apologies in advance. This is another too long article - I got carried away playing with a new toy I found. Click read more if you want.

Where has all the CO2 gone? WUWT fails arithmetic & science, so cries pHraud!

Update: I've added some older papers - meant to do this earlier. (Sou - a bit later)

See also a new HW article on the same topic, with some interesting bits and pieces about pH data. (Sou - 2 January 2015)

---

In two very, very dumb articles at WUWT, one of which is a mainly a copy of a CFACT monstrosity elsewhere - there are foolish accusations of fraud about ocean acidification.

Now anyone who is taken in by this nonsense should go stand in the corner and put on a dunce cap. Then they ought to enrol in a remedial arithmetic class.

Thing is, experts have calculated how much extra CO2 humans have put in the atmosphere. It comes from burning fossil fuel, from land use changes, particularly deforestation, and from the making of cement. Only around half of what humans have emitted has stayed in the atmosphere. The rest is absorbed in the oceans and on land - with plants absorbing something like 30% of the extra and the oceans absorbing around 25%.

If you look at it from another perspective, you'll see that the oceans must be absorbing more CO2. That other perspective is that the increase in atmospheric CO2 means an increase in the partial pressure of CO2. When partial pressure of a gas in contact with a solution rises, the solution dissolves more of the gas. If temperature increases, then all else being equal, the solution will give up the gas. However right now, even though the temperature is rising, the increase in partial pressure outstrips this rise - so the oceans are taking CO2 from the air.

Warmer oceans matter

Some people might argue that oceans aren't warming much and so we've lots of time to mitigate global warming. (See recent article.)

Thing is oceans are warming quickly, and it does matter. It matters to the creatures that live in the oceans for a start. Anyone who has had an aquarium knows that some fish are very sensitive to temperature. Sure, they can swim to where it's cooler if it gets too hot for comfort but there's no guarantee they'll find a source of food there that they like. Many fish have been moving to cooler waters as fishers have known for a while. The fish in the coolest waters don't have any such luck. They've run out of options. Add warming oceans to increasing acidification and marine life is getting a double whammy. (Which reminds me, I must finish that promised article soon.)

It also matters to species like us who live on the surface. That's not just because it affects a major source of food (fish) but because of the ocean-atmosphere connections. Warmer oceans means a warmer ocean surface, which has an impact on surface temperatures on the land as well. Plus there are impacts on ocean currents (with consequences for the atmosphere) and melting ice, which are not insignificant.

WUWT trips over p's and H's in the ocean

Here's another teaser on oceans and acidification. I've got another article in train but have been busy, so it won't be up for a while longer. Meanwhile, WUWT has another "claim" article (archived here) about a not so new paper on ocean acidification,  total CO₂ concentration and the degree of CaCO₃ saturation (from June this year).

The paper itself is by a team led by Professor Taro Takahashi and has been published in Marine Chemistry. Anthony copied and pasted the press release but didn't have time to link to the source :) Never mind. It wasn't hard to find. The press release is on the website of the Earth Institute of Columbia University. I don't know why it has just been released. The paper itself has been out for a while. It looks to be a continuation of the work discussed in this paper from 2010, which itself built on work done prior. In fact, as stated in the press release, Taro Takahashi has been doing this research for four decades.

Taro Takahashi has spent more than four decades measuring the changing chemistry of the world’s oceans. Here, aboard the R/V Melville, he celebrates after sampling waters near the bottom of the Japan Trench in 1973. (Lamont-Doherty archives)

In a nutshell, the scientists have published maps of the world's oceans, showing:

... a monthly look at how ocean acidity rises and falls by season and geographic location, along with saturation levels of calcium carbonate minerals used by shell-building organisms. The maps use 2005 as a reference year and draw on four decades of measurements by Lamont-Doherty scientists and others. 

Fizzy denier weirdness upwelling at WUWT

This is just a little teaser, ahead of another article in the works, which I plan to finish sooner rather than later - but no promises.

This comment was seen today under a video which in part is about how upwelling waters are more acidic than surface waters in the ocean (which is true, they are). What I'll leave you to chew on is the magical thinking, the leaps of illogic that is so typical of WUWT. You don't need to know anything about ocean science or climate science to see how wrong it is. All you need is some high school chemistry and physics. Bart wrote:

November 6, 2014 at 7:01 pm
Very interesting. This increase in upwelling may be what is driving atmospheric CO2 increase, whose rate of change is manifestly a temperature modulated process, and not substantially affected by human release of latent CO2 locked away in fossil fuels.

If I'm reading him correctly (and there's no guarantee), Bart thinks that the CO2 from burning hydrocarbons disappears out of the air (and sea) by magic and is replaced by carbon brought up from the depths of the ocean, which is turned into carbon dioxide and expelled into the air.

Anthony Watts (and others) fail ocean chemistry - woefully!

I noticed Anthony Watts retweeted something the other day and wondered if he'd be dumb enough to copy and paste it at WUWT.

He is and he did.

Anthony loudly proclaims his ignorance of basic physics and chemistry, with the headline:

New paper debunks ‘ocean acidification’ scare, finds warming increases pH

He copied his article (archived here) from another denier blog that often makes scientific bloopers, the Hockeyschtick.

A Fishy Failure at WUWT - not so spectacular

Anthony Watts has a thing about fish.  Today he has an article about a new paper in Nature Climate Change. Looking at the link, Anthony originally wrote his article (archived here) under the headline:

Another sad claim about ocean acidification where researchers fool themselves into thinking they can replicate the ocean in a fish tank

Someone must have picked him up on the "fish tank" part because he changed the headline to:

Another ‘fish story’ about ocean acidification where researchers fool themselves into thinking they are actually doing science

Unfortunately for Anthony, he didn't change enough of his text.

Ocean acidification and behavioural abnormalities in fish

The scientists were investigating the impact of ocean acidification on the behaviour of fish.  This time they compared behaviour of juveniles at different sites (one control site and one CO2-seep site), observing the species:  Dascyllus aruanus (average total length: 17.0 mm), Pomacentrus moluccensis (19.8 mm), Apogon cyanosoma (22.9 mm) and Cheilodipterus quinquelineatus (22.3 mm).  These are small fish, the largest being less than an inch long. The scientists selected three reef sites where ocean water is naturally more acidic from CO2 seeps (that is, more acidic or less alkaline than the ocean as a whole) and three control sites close by, where the ocean is less acidic. (See note below.) They found that that "juvenile reef fishes at CO2 seeps exhibit behavioural abnormalities similar to those seen in laboratory experiments".

Dascyllus aruanus Credit: Danielle L. Dixson

What the scientists found was that high CO2 didn't make any difference to metabolic rate or aerobic performance, which is a bit of a surprise to me.  In regard to behaviour, the fish on the high CO2 reefs "were attracted to predator odour, did not distinguish between odours of different habitats, and exhibited bolder behaviour than fish from control reefs".

Update

The lead author, Professor Philip Munday, kindly sent me more information and suggested I clarify this article, writing - my bold italics: "while we examined the community structure of fishes at three CO2 seep sites, and paired controls (as you carefully point out), we only studied the behaviour of the fish from one of the CO2 seeps and a nearby control reef."

- Sou 4:51 pm 15 April 2014 AEST

You can read the paper (or abstract) at Nature Climate Change.  There's a press release at ScienceDaily.com and a short interview by Felicity Ogilvie with Philip Munday and Jodie Rummer on PM at ABC Australia.

Anthony's Boneheaded Blunders

It's not just Sou at HotWhopper who makes boneheaded blunders (where is Brandon Shollenberger today?).  Anthony Watts makes them from time to time as well.  He wrote:

Fish from acidic ocean waters less able to smell predators smells fishy to me. Just ask any salt-water aquariaist how hard it is to simulate the ocean in a fish tank and keep the fish from being stressed.

Yes, it can be hard to keep fish from being stressed if you don't take care of your tank.  However stress would normally affect the metabolism of fish.  If the fish being observed at high CO2 sites were stressed from being observed, it was no different to the stress response of fish at the normal CO2 sites, going by the fact that there was no difference in metabolic rate or aerobic performance between populations at the control site and at the high CO2 site.

To figure out why Anthony wrote that throwaway line, one has to go to his next few sentences. I don't know what Anthony thinks of the ocean off Papua New Guinea, but he wrote:

The failure of this claim is clear when you watch the video below, showing natural CO2 bubbles coming off the sea floor in Milne Bay, in Papua New Guinea. They use this as the “control” for the experiment, according to the caption, when they should be using a normal reef and doing the experiments in situ. 

That sentence doesn't make any sense. Anthony didn't write the full caption to his "video below", but he did provide a link to the video.  The caption read "Scientists collected fish from the coral reefs shown here and found that fish from the more acidic waters of the bubble reefs were less likely to detect the odor of predators."

Anthony said that the high CO2 reefs were the controls. They weren't. They were the experiment. The controls were nearby reefs with no CO2 seeps and higher pH.  It's all described in a table in the supplementary information.

Does Anthony think that all observations should have been made "in situ"?  Or that nearby control sites in the ocean aren't controls?  Anthony decided that:

...they transport these fish back to the the mobile lab (on a boat), perform experiments, and assume there is no difference in the environment that may contribute to behavioral differences. They apparently don’t stop to consider that BOTH groups of fish in the mobile lab might be stressed the same way.  

I don't know why Anthony decided that the researchers didn't stop to consider that both groups of fish might be stressed in the same way (ie the fish from the control area compared to the fish from the high CO2 area). He wrote:

Worse, there’s no mention of transporting fish caught at a non-bubbling reef back to the mobile lab so that they can perform the same test on them and compare differences if any. Instead they say:  “The results do show that what Dixson and colleagues found in the lab matches with what is seen in the field.”

If Anthony had bothered to stop and think he'd be asking himself how the researchers could do a comparison if they didn't have something to compare it to.  Even if he couldn't access the paper itself, controls were mentioned:

• five times in the press release Anthony copied and pasted here and here and here and here and here.
• twice in the abstract Anthony copied and pasted - here and here
• with details in the supplementary information.  

And if he'd known more about the research, like maybe reading the list of references, then he should have cottoned onto the fact that maybe, just maybe, the authors were referring to an earlier study when they say "in the lab".  A study like the one described in this 2010 paper in Ecology Letters, which is listed as a reference and was written by some of the same authors.  In that study the fish were reared in a tank in the lab, not the ocean.

For effect, Anthony repeated his claim again:

They simply ignored the most obvious control group test and did no actual in situ experiment.

But the press release and abstract Anthony copied and pasted in his own article stated there were control groups (at three control sites as it turns out - but see my update above) and while measurements were taken on the boat, the fish came from the ocean itself, not a lab.

In situ - à la Anthony Watts

Personally, I think Anthony is just taken by the words in situ. It makes him sound sort of sciency to his readers.  This is probably how Anthony thinks the measurements should have been taken - by strapping equipment onto the tiny fish:

Fish being monitored in situ wearing micro monitoring apparatus, with camera, to monitor its own behaviour and that of its predators
Credit/source: cyborgdb

The "most obvious question"

I'd say Anthony didn't read the paper, didn't read the abstract and didn't even read the press release because he then wrote:

Then there’s the most obvious question they didn’t ask: if CO2 affects the fish behavior so poorly, making them more susceptible to predators how is it that they observe “Contrary to expectations, fish diversity and community structure differed little between CO2 seeps and nearby control reefs.”. How would the fishes near CO2 bubbling reefs survive if their predator response was adversely affected. They claim there’s less predators near the CO2 bubbling reefs. Well hello! Wouldn’t that mean the fish were conditioned by their lower predator environment to be less afraid of predators to start with and CO2 may not play a role at all? 

Presumably the most obvious question he thinks the scientists "didn't ask" was the one I bolded above.  If Anthony had read what he himself copied and pasted, he would have found that not only did the scientists ask themselves the question, they provided a provisional answer to the question, writing in the abstract:

Our results suggest that recruitment of juvenile fish from outside the seeps, along with fewer predators within the seeps, is currently sufficient to offset any negative effects of high CO2 within the seeps.

It's suggested that, despite the fact the fish weren't able to detect predators, the population may be maintained by recruitment from outside the high CO2 area plus a paucity of predators within the high CO2 area.

A not so spectacular failure

Anthony decides that "It is such a spectacular failure of the scientific method I don’t know how this got past peer review."  When in fact it's Anthony who fails - not so spectacularly for him.  He's failed more spectacularly on other occasions.  His article reads as if he wrote a previous wrong version (going by his changed headline) and then, instead of admitting his error he tried to cover himself, but not well enough.

His complaints don't make sense.  Anthony seems to want the researchers to make refined observations of behaviour while leaving the fish in the reef.  Is he suggesting they strap microchips onto the tiny fish (the largest being 22 mm or 0.9 inches) and all their predators and track their movements for days on end? And how does Anthony suggest the researchers measure the metabolism of the fish while the fish are still in the ocean.  How about their respiration? Does he expect the researchers to put a teeny tiny gillmask onto the teeny tiny fish while they swim about the reef? And how does Anthony suggest they limit other differences between the control environment and the high CO2 environment so they can properly compare behaviour?


You can read how the measurements were taken in the supplementary information here if like me you don't have access to the paper itself.

Anthony Watts doesn't just have a "thing" about fish, he has it in for these particular researchers.  He wrote about a previous study they did on clown fish a couple of years ago, thinking it was funny that clown fish behaviour was impaired in high CO2 waters (archived here).

Maybe we could do a research study about what causes Anthony Watts faculties to be impaired when he sees scientific articles about fish.  Here's a hypothesis.  He once tried to set up a marine aquarium but messed it up and killed all his fish.

From the WUWT comments

R. Shearer says:

April 14, 2014 at 11:37 am
I suppose if those fish were thirsty, they would prefer to drink Perrier.

JimS says:

April 14, 2014 at 11:44 am
April Fool’s day is long past, so this means I must have mistakenly side-stepped to The Onion instead of WUWT.

Seriously though, if research like this was done on their own dime, it would not matter too much and it would be just good for a laugh; but it looks like this was a formal scientific study paid for by taxpayers.

njsnowfan decides it's not that the fish can't smell predators, it's that they can't see them for all the CO2 bubbles! She or he says:

April 14, 2014 at 11:51 am
Bubbling reefs would be similar to predators that use air bubbles to drive fish in circles to eat them Fish are not dumb and reef fish would get use to bubbles and lack of preditors Bubbles would make it harded for them to see predators when they do come into the area.

Their control should of included the first week of placing bubblers around the reefs, I bet the fish were scared until they got use to them.

philjourdan says:

April 14, 2014 at 11:52 am
Of course it cannot be due to the fact that they were raised without the usual predators. Nah! Every one is scared of a saber tooth tiger and area always sniffing the air for them.

Latitude doesn't know that all but one of the researchers are from James Cook University or AIMS in Australia and says:

April 14, 2014 at 11:58 am
they (georgia) keep producing this crap just to embarrass the hell out of the rest of us……..

hunter says:

April 14, 2014 at 12:13 pm
More faux science, like that from the lobster kid, designed to basically see if angels, dancing on the head of a pin in a high CO2 bell jar, prefer the can-can or the limbo.

John Robertson says:

April 14, 2014 at 12:29 pm
So, fresh water fish must be at a terrible disadvantage…we obviously need to salt the lakes and rivers to help them smell better!

Or would fish who live in areas where the CO2 content is different not be able to work out that the area is more dangerous and avoid it? If they don’t avoid it then there is no increased risk to the fish. Only to fish researchers grants…

Gary says:

April 14, 2014 at 12:40 pm
Sounds like this research is worthy of this children’s joke:
Q. How do you keep fish from smelling?
A. Cut off their noses?

Latitude decides to try the sciency approach and claims the scientists' pH readings must have been off, and says:

April 14, 2014 at 12:42 pm
Fish from acidic ocean waters less able to smell predators…
Ok, you guys have had enough time already….and not one word about the corals….in the acidic ocean water with CO2 bubbling up through them.
You can’t lower the pH until you use up all of the buffer!

kimbokrossroads might be one who prompted Anthony to change the headline and fix up the text and says:

April 14, 2014 at 3:33 pm
If you are going to debunk this study, try to write credibly. It’s hard for me to agree that this study is sloppy when you, the source, are writing like mud. You are also spelling names wrong making you even less legit. F+ for wasted time.

This comment from Pat Frank is the only one I saw that included a reasonable question:

April 14, 2014 at 4:08 pm
I thought ocean CO2 “acidification” was going to exterminate the calcifiers. So how is it that there’s a reef at all around a pH 7.8 CO2 seep, much less a thriving reef with all sorts of species diversity?

By the way, Rud, H2S is even more toxic to we mammals than is cyanide. It’s just we can smell the stuff at 1 ppb in air and get away.

Of some relevance to Pat's question, the supplementary information did state:

Nearly pure CO2 bubbles have been gassing through the seafloor for an unknown period (confirmed for approximately 70 years, but possibly much longer), locally reducing the seawater pH. No reef development is found at pH <7.7, so areas of intense seeping were not included in the surveys. 

---

Philip L. Munday, Alistair J. Cheal, Danielle L. Dixson, Jodie L. Rummer, Katharina E. Fabricius. Behavioural impairment in reef fishes caused by ocean acidification at CO2 seeps. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE2195

Dixson, D. L., Munday, P. L. & Jones, G. P. Ocean acidification disrupts the innate ability of fish to detect predator olfactory cues. Ecol. Lett. 13, 68–75 (2010). DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01400.x

Wagging the tail of the ocean at WUWT

Today some very basic climate science.  Philip Mulholland has written a long article for Anthony Watts' denier blog, wattsupwiththat.  It's all about carbonate ramps. But I'm not going to write about that.

What I picked up on was this statement that Philip makes at the end.  He writes (archived here):

In the argument of which comes first: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or warm ocean water, the geological evidence is unequivocal: The “oceanic central heating effect” dog wags the “atmospheric greenhouse gas” tail.

First of all, there is no argument that I'm aware of.  It's all in Philip's mind.  In the past when earth climate was forced, say, towards a warmer global temperature by something other than CO2, then the oceans got warmer and released carbon dioxide, which made the world warmer still.  This kept going until something happened.  For example, when the forcing stopped then the system eventually came to equilibrium, with a new global surface temperature. The oceans, having given up CO2, would have been less acidic (and warmer) after the change than before it.

This time around we are the ones adding CO2 to the air.  The increase in CO2 is not coming from the oceans it's coming from burning fossil fuels and deforestation and similar activities.  Atmospheric CO2 acts just the same as it always has since forever.  It makes earth retain more heat and get warmer.  Because of the very high amount in the atmosphere, the oceans are absorbing more CO2 than they are releasing to the air.  The partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere is so high that on balance, the oceans are increasing the uptake of CO2 even as they warm.  If we weren't adding all that CO2, and earth were warming by some other forcing then the oceans would have released CO2.  But physics shows they can't these days, because there's already so much CO2 in the air that the oceans are absorbing it.  Eventually a time will come when we stop adding more CO2 to the air than can be absorbed by the oceans.  The oceans and atmosphere will both be warmer than at present but this time the oceans are more acidic than before industrialisation, when earth was cooler, not less acidic.

I don't know whether or not Philip thinks that burning fossil fuels doesn't produce CO2.  I'd find that hard to believe because he says he had scientific training and works as a geologist.  Similarly, it's not clear whether or not Philip is referring to the present as well as the past. It may well be that he intended his article to refer only to the past.

Doug Mackie at Skepticalscience.com did an 18 part series on ocean acidification a couple of years ago.

This brochure from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology discusses the greenhouse effect.

From the WUWT comments

Peter Miller is a conspiracy theorist of the "climate hoax" type and says:

October 20, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Doug Proctor, I agree with you about how geologists are a very sceptical group of individuals.
However, a caveat is needed; this only applies to those in the private sector. Geologists in the government sector are much less likely to be sceptic, for the very simple reason that there are obvious employment consequences if they express anything other than alarmist views. And that is the nub of the problem, CAGW is the fantasy of government, or quasi-government ‘scientists’.

Michael Moon got jumped on quickly for taking on the role of the grammar police, when he wrote:

October 20, 2013 at 9:48 pm
“A vist that, even now, I consider to have been the best field study trip of my entire geoscience career.”

Am I one of only four people on this site who attended and completed high school? Could we please have a verb in this sentence?

And, seriously to all, “its” and “it’s” are two far different words, could maybe the moderator make these posts somewhat readable? How about Spell-Check, Bueller, anyone?

That being said, hot water, cold water, salty and not-so-salty, lots of oxygen and maybe a little less oxygen, NO ONE among the great unwashed voters could possibly CARE LESS, how is this helping to undo the savagery of Gore-Hansen-Schmidt-Nuccitelli? And that clown with the column at NYT?

This is POLITICS, kids, not science. Science left the building quite some time ago.

I think I know what Michael was getting at, but is he aware that "consider" and "to have been" are verbs?  Did he mean to spell "visit" wrongly? It was spelt correctly in the main article. And what do you think of Michael Moon's own grammar and punctuation?

I confess I enjoyed the response to Michael Moon from  Keith DeHavelle, though I can't agree with his third last verse:

October 20, 2013 at 10:41 pm
I have to chuckle, Michael Moon
You hit your own ‘submit’ too soon
For in your blast of snarky slices
You’ve written several comma splices

Since punctuation gives you grief
Use semicolons for relief
And of the first of sins you note
You’ve missed a verb in what you wrote:

“And that clown with the column at NYT?”

But here’s a larger point: Go light
When dishing a grammatic slight
This might be politics to you
But science must be kept in view

We’re not just ranting and vote-getting
And this you seem to be forgetting:
This is the world’s best science site
We show the skeptic side is right!

And if you think it’s crucial here
(Though education I hold dear)
An institution’s just one tool
I never did complete high school

I had two jobs and needed three
The time for school eluded me
So that diploma’s out of reach
My college time was just to teach
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

Anthony Watts flunks ocean chemistry at WUWT

Anthony Watts isn't too bright.  So far HotWhopper has observed that he's:

• flunked grade school arithmetic
• flunked climatology 101 - he doesn't even understand temperature anomalies
• and now he's flunked ocean chemistry (archived here).

Anthony writes on his anti-science blog, wattsupwiththat:

...What they fail to note is that the oceans still haven’t turned acidic at the end of their model projections. 

The world's oceans are acidifying but they are not "turning acidic".  That would be extremely difficult because the ocean is a buffered solution.  I came across an article that explains the chemical reactions in the ocean in terms most high school students should understand.  It explains how the pH of the ocean is falling and the ocean is losing calcium carbonate.

The equations showing CO2 reacting with water look like they generate more, not less carbonate. How does ocean acidification decrease the amount of carbonate ions in seawater?

This is a common point of confusion, because step-by-step equilibrium equations describing the carbonate system in seawater do not capture the dynamic chemical environment of seawater. There are several reactions that can occur between carbon dioxide (CO₂), water (H₂O), carbonic acid (H₂CO₃), bicarbonate ion (HCO₃^-), and carbonate ion (CO₃^2-). One of the possible reactions does create carbonate ions and lowers pH:

CO₂ + H₂O ⇔ H₂CO₃ ⇔ H⁺ + HCO₃^- ⇔ 2H⁺ + CO₃^2-

However, at the current ocean pH level, another reaction also occurs that consumes carbonate ions and does not change pH:

CO₂ + H₂O + CO₃^2- ⇔ 2HCO₃^-

The second equation describes the reaction that occurs most often in the modern oceans, but the first reaction also occurs, so the resulting overall change is a decrease in carbonate and a decrease in pH. — Christopher L. Sabine, Supervisory Oceanographer, NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, USA

One of the telltale signs of a science denier or disinformer is that they will deliberately try to confuse people who don't have any knowledge of chemistry by pretending that the word "acidification" equates to having a pH less than 7.  It doesn't.  In chemistry, the word "acidification" means becoming more acidic.  In other words, the pH is dropping.  The pH of the ocean has dropped from around 8.2 prior to industrialisation to around 8.1 today.  By the end of this century ocean pH could drop to around 7.8 or so.  That's a very large change in a very short space of time.

Anthony Watts is trying to argue that scientists don't understand the basics of ocean chemistry.  He's wrong.  His article demonstrates that it's he, Anthony Watts, who doesn't understand simple chemistry.

All about ocean acidification

SkepticalScience.com has some very good articles on ocean acidification with a recent article here and an eighteen part series here. That series covers a lot of ground, starting with some basic chemistry.

The process is happening faster than at any time in maybe the last 300 million years according to a paper in Science last year.  From Bärbel Hönisch et al (2012), The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification, Science 335.6072 (2012): 1058-1063, DOI: 10.1126/science.1208277 (my bold italics):

However, in additionally driving a strong decline in calcium carbonate saturation alongside pH, the current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 My of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.

There's more in a short article here in Scientific American and another here at Live Science.a

From the WUWT comments

Patrick's is typical of the comments on WUWT (archived here).  From his armchair reckons he knows more than all the oceanographers and marine chemists put together and he especially knows more about science than does NASA:

September 25, 2013 at 7:20 pm
When debating this subject with alarmists, they always direct me to the NASA climate change website which states the pH of the ocean, globally, has dropped to 8.1 from 8.2, or a ~30% increase in acidification (Their claim). I point out to the alarmists that that cannot be true, albeit accepted, because ocean pH levels vary greatly day to day, season to season etc etc as well as the fact there isn’t a reliable system to actually, reliably and accurately measure ocean pH levels on a global scale.

Source: ClimateProgress

Oceans and clouds are driving Anthony Watts crazy

This is just a quick heads up in case you bump into a science denier and they raise the topic - so you know what they are talking about.

Anthony Watts at WUWT has just posted an article about this because he finds it funny.  I can see the funny side too, in the way it's written up at Grist.  Unlike Anthony I don't find it ridiculous.  I see the serious side. Anthony writes it up as Climate Craziness of the Week (archived here to save you a trip):

Over at Grist, where “burnt out” David Roberts just threw in the towel, the craziness continues with a new alarmist writer:

I'll get to the point.  There is a new paper in Nature Climate Change by Six et al called Global warming amplified by reduced sulphur fluxes as a result of ocean acidification.  Here is the abstract:

Climate change and decreasing seawater pH (ocean acidification)1 have widely been considered as uncoupled consequences of the anthropogenic CO2 perturbation2, 3. Recently, experiments in seawater enclosures (mesocosms) showed that concentrations of dimethylsulphide (DMS), a biogenic sulphur compound, were markedly lower in a low-pH environment4. Marine DMS emissions are the largest natural source of atmospheric sulphur5 and changes in their strength have the potential to alter the Earth’s radiation budget6.

Here we establish observational-based relationships between pH changes and DMS concentrations to estimate changes in future DMS emissions with Earth system model7 climate simulations.

Global DMS emissions decrease by about 18(±3)% in 2100 compared with pre-industrial times as a result of the combined effects of ocean acidification and climate change. The reduced DMS emissions induce a significant additional radiative forcing, of which 83% is attributed to the impact of ocean acidification, tantamount to an equilibrium temperature response between 0.23 and 0.48 K. Our results indicate that ocean acidification has the potential to exacerbate anthropogenic warming through a mechanism that is not considered at present in projections of future climate change.

Here's the link to the Grist article. Vanishing ocean smell could also mean fewer clouds.

Anthony Watts and his illiterati at WUWT deny ocean acidification

Anthony Watts in referring to a post in which William Connolley at Stoat expresses frustration with the uncertainty monster Judith Curry, for her lack of understanding of basic chemistry among other things:

"Is is just me, or does professionalism and f-bombs not go together? Sheesh."

Sheesh, is right, coming from Anthony Watts.  He might frown on "f-bombs" but he's not shy when it comes to ad hominems rather than science.

Not that Anthony would recognise science when he saw it.  He ridiculously quotes a sentence from this study in PLOS One (my bold, not Anthony's):

This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions".

I wonder does Anthony know what calcification means?  And I wonder why he didn't quote this sentence:

For all the marine habitats described above, one very important consideration is that the extreme range of environmental variability does not necessarily translate to extreme resistance to future OA. Instead, such a range of variation may mean that the organisms resident in tidal, estuarine, and upwelling regions are already operating at the limits of their physiological tolerances (a la the classic tolerance windows of Fox – see [68]). Thus, future acidification, whether it be atmospheric or from other sources, may drive the physiology of these organisms closer to the edges of their tolerance windows. When environmental change is layered upon their present-day range of environmental exposures, they may thereby be pushed to the “guardrails” of their tolerance [20], [68].

Or this one:

In contrast to more stochastic changes in pH that were observed in some sites, our coral reef locations displayed a strikingly consistent pattern of diel fluctuations over the 30-day recording period. Similar short-term pH time series with lower daily resolution [69], [70] have reported regular diel pH fluctuation correlated to changes in total alkalinity and oxygen levels. These environmental patterns of pH suggest that reef organisms may be acclimatized to consistent but moderate changes in the carbonate system. Coral reefs have been at the center of research regarding the effects of OA on marine ecosystems [71]–[73]. Along with the calcification biology of the dominant scleractinian corals and coralline algae, the biodiversity on coral reefs includes many other calcifying species that will likely be affected [74]–[77]. Across the existing datasets in tropical reef ecosystems, the biological response of calcifying species to variation in seawater chemistry is complex (see [78]) –all corals or calcifying algal species will not respond similarly, in part because these calcifying reef-builders are photo-autotrophs (or mixotrophs), with algal symbionts that complicate the physiological response of the animal to changes in seawater chemistry.

He seems to think the study was another "nothing to worry about" study.  He's wrong.

I won't bother with the dozens of ad homs in the WUWT comments.  Nor with the ignorant comments about acidification, pH and the like at WUWT (or Curry's blog).  It's very basic high school chemistry.  Or about the idiotic comments about corals and fish not being sensitive to pH.  That's very basic aquaculture that anyone who's owned a fish farm or home aquarium would dispute.  Sure, some species are more tolerant of a wider range of pH than others.  Some are very intolerant of any change beyond a narrow band.  Same with tolerance to temperature as has been widely observed in the ocean.  (And temperature can trigger or prevent breeding.)  An even bigger issue, which was brought out in the PLOS study quoted above, is the impact on the ecosystem as a whole, given the interdependencies.

Frankly, the more I read WUWT the more I see that what I snipe about them being illiterati is quite true. It would be hard to find more people gathering together who have such a disdain for knowledge as you'll find at WUWT.  Or such a large gathering of people who take so much pride in their ignorance.