well, Bodie, I'll discuss this a bit with you. A quote from the article:
Quote:
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and deadly acidification caused by excessive CO2 concentrations (already damaging pteropods at the base of the marine food chain) as the ocean absorbs anthropogenic CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, similar to the upper atmospheric conundrum where 400+ ppm of CO2 (anything over 350 ppm leads to serious planetary trouble over time) is already heating up the planet as the ocean absorbs 90% of that heat.
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While reading the article, I noticed that most if not all was speculation without documented evidence. Sure there are mass die offs --happen all the time, but no-one yet has figured out exactly why. Then I cam to the above quoted passage, and, none of what the writer says has any basis in real science.
First off, CO2 cannot possible cause the ocean to become acid--yes, it might reduce the alkalinity a bit--say 8.3to 8.1, or even 7.9, but that is a long way from being acidic, and natural processes buffer the ocean from ever becoming acidic. Second, the statement I bolded is just an outright lie--CO2 has been as high as 7000, PPM for millions of years, and life thrived on the planet. Commercial greenhouse growers typically bump the CO2 content of their greenhouse atmosphere to 1000- 1200 PPM. At the end of the last glacial advance, CO2 was at what is starvation levels for life (180-200PPM) dangerously close to the terminal point of about 150 PPM when all life on the planet would end. The air you exhale is at about 70,000 PPM CO2, Levels in submarines is typically around 5,000PPM--I would be glad to provide you links to all of this, but they are readily available.
In addition, CO2 cannot warm the ocean--only solar radiation can do that. The "greenhouse" effect of CO2 comes from absorbing several small bandwidths of IR radiation (which are mostly saturated by water vapor absorbing across those same bandwidths) so any possible warming additional CO2 can be responsible for would be in the atmosphere, and satellite measurements and balloon measurements just can't find it. Yes, 2016 was the warmest year "ever" by .02 degrees C well within any margin of error, and that warming was directly caused by a very powerful El Nino. If increasing CO2 was causing the atmosphere to warm, it can't explain the 15-16 years of basically flat--no rise in temperature-- between this El Nino event and the last major one in 1998. Land surface temps, and ocean surface temps records have been "adjusted" so many times by outfits like NOAA that they no longer have any real validity for scientific purposes.
Also, a warmer ocean cannot absorb CO2. CO2 dissolves easily in cold water, while warm water off gasses it. One of the reasons that in the geologic record, CO2 increase in the atmosphere follows warming by a period of about 800 years. CO2 has been much higher throughout geologic history, and the planet has been both hotter, and colder than today. There are so many things involved with climate that the doomsayers cannot possible "model" in their model predictions (GCM's), that the models are in reality fairy tales that reflect what the doomsayers want them to say. The entire ipcc is a political ploy by the globalist (one world government) and many of it's published claims based on such models have been readily disproved by real research. And, using as a base line (start of the industrial revolution) a point in time when the world was just emerging from it's coldest period in the last 10,000 years (LIA) is sort of stupid. Don't think any of us would like to go back to that period of time. Warming up to the levels of the Roman, or Medieval warm periods would be much preferable, but some in the climate community are thinking we are due for another period of cooling much like the late 40's through 70's were. (remember the doomsayers telling us to prepare for another ice age if we didn't stop burning fossil fuels??)
So, I would say that your article is mostly bunk as far as referencing CO2 as the culprit behind all these "reported" events.
Landscapes and Cycles by Jim Steele is a very good read if you are in fact interested in the real story behind many of the "global warming extinction" scare stories.
As for National Geographic---my personal history with the magazine goes back at least 60 years when when a neighbor gave me free access to her late husbands collection that was complete back to the "teens", and I have been a subscriber for most of the past 50 years. However, I've recently canceled my subscription after becoming more and more disappointed in the "politically correct" editorial agenda that has become evident over the last several years. I no longer believe it is a legitimate source when it comes to many areas of both hard and soft science.
JVC
