2015: The Year of Ocean Acidification Denial?

With deniers perhaps aware that claims of a "pause" in global warming look even more unrealistic given 2014's record heat, the final weeks of 2014 saw the emergence of a new fake controversy:  ocean acidification.  While this particular attack is far too weak to have any staying power (we hope) it may represent a new angle of denier misinformation.

The claim—which was originally published on CFACT's blog, then picked up by WUWT, discussed at Breitbart and parroted at The American Thinker—is that NOAA is ignoring over 100 years of ocean pH data and is instead focusing on model results and a recent trend as evidence for ocean acidification.  Like most denier non-troversies, this one relies on audience ignorance and bias, and crumbles when held up against even the most basic information.

As explained at QuantPaleo, the old measurements that NOAA doesn't use are unreliable for a number of reasons.  One of the reasons pointed out is that the old data only measure to 0.1 pH units, which is much too large to pick up on annual trends.  For context, the IPCC finds that ocean surface water pH has fallen by 0.1 since the beginning of the industrial revolution, with annual trends between –0.0014 and –0.0024 pH.

More importantly, the data isn't used because it is isn’t standardized.  It was only in the 1980s that the measurements became accurate and consistent enough to form a reliable record with measurements taken at the same depth, at the same time, and over a number of years.  What's more, recent measurements and analysis are made all the more reliable because the ocean-CO2 chemistry is so simple that models are very good at reconstructing ocean pH.

But because CFACT, WUWT and the rest are happy to publish before doing even a cursory amount of due diligence, they’ve started a petition to restore the world's ocean pH measurements.  So far they've garnered 329 signatures, well short of the goal of 100,000.

Read more at 2015:  The Year of Ocean Acidification Denial?