[ale] Way OT: In case you missed this in the news... Climategate

[Greg Freemyer]

I decided to look it up.

It appears the ocean's PH has gone from about 8.2 to 8.1 in the last
200 years.  ie. a .1 change has already occurred.

I did not see anything that said at what point ocean life dies, but I
did not look very hard.

As to the arctic ice melt potentially helping, isn't it fresh water?
ie. Frozen rain?  If so, it's actually got a PH below 7 already, so it
melting will just make the problem worse.  (See, I don't refuse to use
my brain! (but I'm still not anywhere near convinced.))

That made me wonder about the current local PH levels in the ocean.

http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/oceanph.jpg

Looks like it varies from 7.9 to 8.2

Are we seeing a die-off in the current 7.9 areas?  I don't know, but
if so I expect I would have read about it in this little research
project.

Greg

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:
> Recall that pH is a logarithm of a ratio...
>
> On 5/10/10 6:05 AM, Paul Cartwright wrote:
>> On Sun May 9 2010, Jim Kinney wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not positive on the total impacts but I pretty sure that a shift of 0.1
>>> in pH will be a huge change in what lives and what dies in the oceans. It's
>>> that level of change that allows the red algae blooms that  spell death to
>>> hundreds of square miles of oceans at a time. That's a localized event.
>>> Imagine the fishing that will be available if the only place left that has
>>> a pH in the range to not allow red algae blooms is the arctic ice melt
>>> current.
>>>
>> not to pick nits here, but a 0.1 shift in ph?
>> I could find no reference to ph in any red tide listing, but I did find a
>> reference to massive ph level changes that killed fish here:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_environmental_quality_parameters
>>
>> Atmospheric inputs
>>   <snip>
>>    In parts of Scandinavia and West Wales and Scotland many rivers became so
>> acidic from oxides of sulphur that most fish life was destroyed and pHs as
>> low as pH4 were recorded during critical weather conditions.[2]
>>
>> --------------
>>
>>
>>
>
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-- 
Greg Freemyer
Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team
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