Ocean acidification isn't a scare

7/8/13, "Ocean acidi what?" WUWT, Guest essay by Steve Burnett

"Here are some bullet points.

1. It is Interesting to note that we somehow have an accurate measurement of ocean acidity from 200 years ago when the apparatus to measure pH was only invented in 1924 and it wasn’t conceived as a measurement until 1909. It should be impossible to conclude within .1 pH unit the actual oceanic pH 200 years ago.

2. The maximum possible change from atmospheric CO2 preindustrial to today is less than .001 pH units, it is thus impossible to measure."...via Tom Nelson

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Among comments
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"Andres Valencia says: July 8, 2013 at 8:56 pm

Thanks, Steve. Very good article.

Less alkaline is a better description for this."

 

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"Gail Combs says: July 8, 2013 at 11:30 pm

There are a couple other things that are left out of the topic of ‘ocean acidification’.

The first is volcanoes:

Thousand of new volcanoes revealed beneath the waves
Giant Underwater Volcanoes Discovered

Volcanoes not only spew CO2, they also produce 36 million tons of chlorine a year and HCl is a strong acid compared to H2CO3. link Then there are the other gases…

The most abundant gas typically released into the atmosphere from volcanic systems is water vapor (H2O), followed by carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2). Volcanoes also release smaller amounts of others gases, including hydrogen sulfide (H2S), hydrogen (H2), carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen chloride (HCL), hydrogen fluoride (HF), and helium (He).

The second is organic acids:

I dealt with two different DI water systems fed with river water. One in NH (1980s) and one in NC (2000). The pH varied depending on whether or not we had a lot of rain. Abundant rainfall meant the pH stayed in a reasonable range (slightly acidic), Drought meant we got organic sludge full of organic acids and the pH fluctuated wildly messing up the chemistry of our production batches. I titrated samples of that deionized river water every day at a minimum and the amount of KOH needed to make each batch slightly alkaline was never the same. (If you have ever had to change DI water filters you will never ever drink city water again.)

Now think of that ever changing organic soup we call oceans. If the pH stays close to 8.1 to 8.2 despite this very dynamic system, a few ppm change in atmospheric CO2 isn’t going to mean diddle-squat."

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"Gail Combs says: July 8, 2013 at 9:44 pm

“….See to do that, we would need to perform an experiment and actually collect data. Unlike global climate change these studies are comparably simple. Get a bucket and a CO2 tank add some corals and oysters and other carbonate loving critters and then set the atmospheric CO2 concentration above the water, find out what happens…..”

 

You are missing an important part of the environment – ROCKS. (or more properly the lithosphere.)

Minerals dissolve and form part of the buffer system. This is the part the scare merchants leave out.

….Furthermore, this carbonate buffer is not the only buffer active in the atmosphere / hydrosphere / lithosphere system. The Earth has a set of other buffering mineral reactions. The geochemical equilibrium system anorthite CaAl2Si2O8 – kaolinite Al2Si2O5(OH)4 has by the pH of ocean water a buffer capacity which is thousand times larger than a 0.001 M carbonate solution (Stumm & Morgan, 1970). In addition we have clay mineral buffers, and a calcium silicate + CO2 ø calcium carbonate + SiO2 buffer (MacIntyre, 1970; Krauskopf, 1979). These buffers all act as a “security net” under the most important buffer: CO2 (g) ø HCO3- (aq) ø CaCO3 (s). All together these buffers give in principle an infinite buffer capacity (Stumm & Morgan, 1970)….

http://www.co2web.info/ESEFVO1.pdf"

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