It’s less about total amounts and much more about rate of change. The actual issue is the rate of change acceleration that the industrial era has seen. The rate of change is the fastest in recorded human history.
Obviously the screeching freak outs over this issue are absurd, but that doesn’t change the fact that accelerating rate of change of most systems is generally hard to manage for biological entities.
I can intuitively take this at face value, except that coldest areas are the ones most affected, and are generally “life deserts.” I think largely the most reliable connection to higher CO2 levels post industrial age is what NASA terms, “the great greening.” The earth is literally visibly greener, and if you test this in any controlled environment with slightly higher CO2 levels, plants grow faster, healthier, and a deeper green.
I can agree with all that. The only issue is that the rates we are seeing are estimated at 100-200x faster than during the great greening. So there are issues with how a system adapts. The ocean acidification can outpace the ability for marine life to adapt which can create a cascade of failures.
Current estimates put the rate of change of ocean PH at roughly10x faster than any period in the past 300 million years. Functioning ocean ecosystems are critical to human flourishing. 20% of the protein humans eat come from the oceans.
If the corals and scavenger animals of the seas can’t cope with the ph changes and being shell based there is evidence that they can’t it could be a rough century for the seas.
As a non-scientific layman, I’m geniunely curious.. how can we deduce what the pH rate of change of the ocean was 250 million years ago?
Only way I know is ice cores. But I doubt the precision claimed. There may be other means they do in tandem but I don’t know them specifically.
They study fossilized plankton. It is possible that the acidification can be adapted to quickly enough or that plankton that can handle it flourishes and helps to bring down the acid levels. We really don’t know.
The issue isn’t that the oceans can’t handle more co2 it’s that the life in the ocean may not be able to handle the rapid influx of co2 and moves in ph. The ph scale is logarithmic so minimal changes could mean a mass die off of critical animals.
