Good information. Thanks. Ocean acidification is another negative aspect of the burning of fossil fuels that the fossil fuel industry sponsored 'cult of denial' prefers to ignore and/or reject, along with all of the effects of the current abrupt global warming and fast climate changes that are also being driven by the excess carbon dioxide we've burned into the atmosphere. The evidence is clear, the enormous amounts of data the scientists have gathered about both the current ocean acidification and some of the prior natural periods of acidification all indicate that our world is headed for some serious ecological disasters that may once again result in mass extinctions of a wide variety of marine life, as some much slower but somewhat similar natural acidification events have in the past. This acidification is one more thing that will very probably seriously diminish mankind's ability to feed the world population with seafood protein in the coming decades and centuries.
I am not surprised that the denier cultists are staying away from this thread. This is some scary stuff for anyone who can understand what the scientists are saying so it's a lot more comfortable for some folks to just keep their heads in the sand. Also this acidification event is a lot less complex than the whole anthropogenic global warming/climate changes issue and so it is harder for them to even try to realistically counter the scientific evidence ('though they do try, of course, in a sort of scientifically illiterate way, citing denier cult blogs or Rush). The pH in the world's oceans has gone down a bit overall and you can't really argue with those simple measurements. Evidence of the early effects on certain types of marine organisms is already being studied by the marine biologists. These effects will get worse and then the whole thing will start to snowball as critical parts of the marine food chains disappear. No one really knows just how this will work out but the evidence of other past extinctions triggered by rising CO2 levels paints a grim picture of our future as Earth's CO2 levels continue to rapidly climb, driven by our current planetary addiction to the incessant burning every year of millions of years worth of naturally sequestered carbon now in the form of oil, coal and natural gas.
I think our world is in for a very rough ride and I fear for our children and grandchildren and the generations to come (hopefully 'to come', unless we really screw it up, in which case the human race itself may end up being one of the tragically ironic casualties of the looming Great Anthropocene Extinction Event).
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy;
that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
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Originally Posted by Taxcutter
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