Whether you prefer the term “ocean acidification” or the less compelling but more accurate “ocean de-alkalisation”, there’s little doubt that the addition of carbon dioxide to the seas threatens to change them fundamentally over the course of the century.
With his customary brilliant scientific insight and knowledge, Richard Black thus begins his latest blog and greenie sermon, which culminates in a cloud-cuckoo land plea that Micronesia climate nuts can force the abandonment of highly-sensible Czech plans to build coal-fired power stations in order to save shellfish from a preceived threat from the said acidification. You could not make it up; he’s hoping that political activism will stop all development of schemes that involve the use of fossil fuels.
Richard, in reaching these Mickey Mouse conclusions, claims that the science involved is “documented” (I think he means actually settled beyond further discussion) because the UN and the Royal Society have decreed it. This is his usual nicely-phrased but vicious two-fingered put-down of hated sceptics and deniers. As usual, too, he pays not one iota of attention to evidence that suggests a) that the science of so-called acidification is not settled and b) that inter-agency panels on climate change issues are invariably stuffed with eco-nuts whose sole aim is to reinforce their own prejudices and speed the manic drive towards world government.
There’s oodles of evidence that “acidification” or “de-alkalisation” is nothing more than yet another eco-nut fantasy, but Mr Black, as usual, prevents it as proven, undisputable fact.
Interesting that, in order to set up his Narrative that local initiatives can have positive effects, he uses as an example a situation where people put a project in motion which did something tangible to add a specific element which helped. Oh, hang on, that wasn’t a local initiative trying to affect something half a world a way at all: it was local university researches acting locally. Not a legal action at all trying to affect something happening on another continent.
His other example was not actually a local initiative either, but rather government enforcement of local laws already in existence. I guess that’s the same thing in Black’s mind, but it isn’t really proof that local initiatives can or should violate someone else’s national sovereignty. In fact, what Micronesia is doing isn’t a local initiative at all. Black, like seemingly all Beeboids, view national sovereignty as an obstacle to their agenda.
What you have Robin, is a new ‘code’: having been proven wrong and shred to pieces the “science is settled” brigade need new ammo; the “science is documented” sounds fine and dandy but means absolutely eff-all.
I don’t think anyone listens to Black anymore. He is an activist not a reporter and everyone knows it.
Sorry, I don’t agree. People who have looked at it all closely may regard Black as a flatulent fraud, mostly recycling press releases from alarmists, but the average person who pays the BBC for “unbiased” reporting probably swallows all the guff that Black and others at the BBC – indeed the whole BBC output – preaches to them.
Black and all of the scare-mongerers are dangerous to our economy and our freedom.
I do think he is preaching to the converted (and the ignorant).
Still better to blog on this than this:
“France: Russia, Japan and Canada told the G8 they would not join a second round of carbon cuts under the Kyoto Protocol at United Nations talks this year and the US reiterated it would remain outside the treaty, European diplomats have said.”
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/kyoto-deal-loses-four-big-nations-20110528-1f9dk.html
Just been watching Countryfile!
John Craven puts the “lack of birdsong” down to …parakeets, no less!
To be honest I wasn`t actually watching so might have missed something. My back was to the screen.
Still- hope our old chum from Newsround does understand what the scriptwriter gives him to read…maybe this is what iPlayer is for…to check on more ludicrous notions such as this
Nightingales aren`t really getting battered by gangs of budgies are they?
Is the BBC imagining a world that won`t need drugs to describe?
Didn’t see it cj, but I think there is some “documented” scientific evidence that the decline in Nightingales in the UK is a combination of the activities of Muntjac deer affecting the breeding habitat, changes in their sub-Saharan wintering quarters and having to run the gauntlet of the brave songbird trappers and shooters of various Mediterranean countries and islands. Don’t know if John Craven mentioned any of this.
The Parakeet theory is a new one on me. I wonder if it has been “documented” ?
Thanks Grant!
Learned more off you here than a week of Countryfiles.
Reckon Percy Edwards was covering for the lack of singing birds back then.I note too that since Johnny Morris died, there is a lack of talking ocelots…oh,that horrid global warming!
A nod towards the “acidification is perhaps too dramatic” so the weasel ‘de-alkalinistion’ is introduced in the first para to show how nuanced Richard would like to be perceived. And then full steam ahead with acidification.
The problem is that no one knows what is, or isn’t happening on a global scale. The baseline is untenable. The ‘pre-industrial’ figure (usually 1751) is unreliable. They dipped litmus paper in 1751 and the best accuracy at the local sampling point (very limited) had an accuracy of at best .2 ie greater than the quoted decrease in basicity upon which the whole shaky edifice rests. Models and aquariums with bubbling CO2 and hydrochloric acid (the seas got chlorides in it, hasn’t it) will not do.
The problem of the average is unsuperable. The variables, season, light, coastal run off, upwellings and gyres, blooms, volcanic ash with Fe all produce an oceanic (with its own Ph scale) value that varies between 8.3 and 7.9 depending on location and the water column.
The buffering in sea water chemistry is not well understood. Coastal regions with lower basicity (7.9/8) (soil run off from rivers and coasts) are more productive than the 8.2 pre-industrial pristinicity of the open ocean.
Then there is the C03 ion and its contribution to calcification (in corals and others) … again not addressed.
Yet on and on and on with the tired old meme.
This is all about face-saving.
As regards ocean acidification, the Litmus test is…