Archives par mot-clé : pH

Most Published Studies Exaggerated the Effects of Ocean Acidification – and Covid, Etc.

by J. Marohasy’sBlog, Feb 20, 2022


The concept of ocean acidification, and human-caused global warming more generally, could be described as containing a grain of truth embedded in a mountain of nonsense. Indeed, the projected large increase in atmospheric CO2 will at most cause a small reduction in pH – it will not turn the ocean acidic. Yet this is what is implied by the term ocean acidification. True acidification would require average pH to be reduced below 7.0, at which point seashells would indeed begin to dissolve. This is an impossible scenario, however, because of the ocean’s effectively limitless buffering capacity.

There is a newly published study by Jeff Clements and team that concludes many of the published studies on ocean acidification, especially those studies published in high impact journals and accompanied by sensational media reporting, have turned-out to be wrong, or at least exaggerated.

My colleague Peter Ridd describes the situation:

This problem with exaggeration of threats applies to many areas of science and has a name: The Decline Effect.

The Decline Effect goes like this: an early report, usually attracting huge media interest, predicts some sort of catastrophe. But when follow up work is done, usually with far better experimental procedure and far greater numbers of samples, the original report turns out to be wrong.

Jeff Clements’ team included Timothy Clark, Josefin Sundin and Frederik Jutfelt who were involved in a study last year proving that numerous reports by James Cook University’s coral reef centres on reef fish was totally wrong.

I co-authored a book chapter with John Abbot some years ago that explained:

Podcast: Why the Oceans Really Aren’t “Acidifying” but the Term Is Being Abused by Science and Media

by A. Watts, June 11, 2020 in WUWT


Science and media outlets claim ocean acidification is happening due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But objective data show the ocean is far from acidic according to Dr. Caleb Rossiter, executive director of the CO2 Coalition and a statistician who has studied climate change closely.

Host Anthony Watts and Rossiter talk about how a pH of 7 is considered neutral, with anything below 7 considered acidic. Ocean pH averages 8.1, which is alkaline rather than acidic. Although climate models suggest the ocean’s surface pH may have dropped from pH 8.2 to 8.1 since 1750, that change was never actually measured.

The pH drop from 1850 is merely a modeled conjecture. The concept of pH was first introduced by in 1909, and agriculturalists first developed field instruments to measure pH in the 1930s.

The End Of The Ocean Acidification Scare For Corals

by McCulloch et al., 2017, October 2017,  in co2science


Paper Reviewed: McCulloch, M.T., D’Olivo, J.P., Falter, J., Holcomb, M. and Trotter, J.A. 2017. Coral calcification in a changing world and the interactive dynamics of pH and DIC upregulation. Nature Communications 8: 15686, DOI:10.1038/ncomms15686

(…) The implications of the above findings are enormous, for they reveal that “pHcf upregulation occurs largely independent of changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, and hence ocean acidification,” demonstrating “the ability of the coral to ‘control’ what is arguably one of its most fundamental physiological processes, the growth of its skeleton within which it lives.

See also here