The Next Big Thing

Remember you read it here first: The Next Big Thing in environmental politics will be “ocean acidification.”
 
That was assured this month when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency caved in to to the bullying tactics of enviro pressure groups, and proclaimed that EPA regulators will use the Clean Water Act to remedy a problem that doesn’t exist.
 
The EPA’s decision came in response to a lawsuit alleging the agency should have required the state of Washington to designate its marine waters as impaired by rising acidity. But in doing so, the EPA ignored sound science and did a disservice to Washington citizens.

Faced with the inconvenient truths that global temperatures have not been rising during the past decade, and that most of the warming of the twentieth century occurred before 1945 (when human greenhouse gas emissions were minimal), global warming alarmists are pushing ocean acidification as their new justification for restricting oil, coal, and natural gas production. They claim that as the world’s oceans absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, ocean water becomes harmfully acidic to marine life.
 
The real-world evidence for an ocean acidification crisis, however, is even less persuasive than the real-world evidence for a global warming crisis.
 
The world’s oceans are not acidic and are in no danger of becoming so. Acidity and alkalinity are measured by pH balance, on a scale of 1 to 14. Water with a pH of 7 is neutral. A pH below 7 is acidic, and above 7 is alkaline. The pH of the world’s oceans is slightly higher than 8.1—safely alkaline.
 
Regardless of human carbon dioxide emissions, the world’s oceans are in no danger of becoming acidic any time in the foreseeable future. A 2005 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature reports ocean pH was between 8.1 and 8.2 at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution—before humans began emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide—and remains between 8.1 and 8.2 today. The past 250 years of carbon dioxide emissions have had no significant effect on ocean pH, and there is little reason to believe that will suddenly, catastrophically change.
 
On the contrary, peer-reviewed scientific studies confirm higher carbon dioxide content will benefit rather than harm marine life.
 
A 2009 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, found sea star growth rates increased, rather than decreased, in water with double the carbon dioxide of current oceanic conditions. The study was particularly noteworthy because alarmists claim ocean acidification will take its greatest toll on marine invertebrates such as sea stars, which will allegedly have more difficulty calcifying their external skeletons in water with more carbon dioxide. A full doubling of carbon dioxide content, however, actually helped the sea stars.
 
In a 2007 study published in Global Change Biology, scientists observed higher carbon dioxide levels correlated with better growth conditions for oceanic life, producing higher growth rates and biomass yields than lower CO2 conditions.
 
A 2005 study in Journal of Geophysical Research reported rising oceanic carbon dioxide concentrations in the prior two decades correlate with a 22 percent increase in oceanic chlorophyll concentrations. Chlorophyll concentrations are the building blocks of marine life.
 
And in a 2008 study published in Biogeosciences, scientists subjected marine organisms to varying and often-abrupt changes in carbon dioxide concentrations. The study found marine ecosystems were “surprisingly resilient” to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and “the ecosystem composition, bacterial, and phytoplankton abundances and productivity, grazing rates and total grazer abundance and reproduction were not significantly affected by CO2-induced effects.”
 
These scientific studies show quite clearly that higher carbon dioxide levels substantially benefit marine life. This is similar to the effect of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on terrestrial life, where plants convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into more biomass and higher growth rates.
 
Study after study shows most marine creatures, from phytoplankton on up the food chain, thrive and flourish when more carbon dioxide is added to the environment. It defies reason for environmental activists to assert a need to designate marine waters as impaired due to higher concentrations of life-assisting carbon dioxide.
 
James M. Taylor (jtaylor@heartland.org) is a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute.