Another Questionable Condemnation of Carbon Dioxide

The January 10 Issue of C&E News had an article entitled, "Monitoring a Troubling Trend". The article is on ocean acidification and assumes acidification has been occurring and is still in progress.

The Federal Ocean Acidification Research & Monitoring (FOARAM) Act was signed into law in March 2009. The law created a program to monitor and research ocean acidification and inspire him greater investigation by federal agencies of the phenomenon's effect on ecosystems and strategies to conserve Marine life.

I was not even aware that this law was being considered, but now that we have the law I am seriously concerned about its justification. It appears to me that this is another boondoggle operation on which to spend large sums of money. The National Science Foundation, which is a major supporter of such work, announced last fall $24 million in special grants for ocean acidification research. The National Research Council report says that the key element is a broad and integrated monitoring program which would measure ocean temperature, salinity, oxygen, certain critical nutrients, dissolved inorganic carbon, pC02, total alkalinity and pH.

With that background, I am wondering how this program ever got started. Not knowing its exact origin, I can only speculate. As a scientist and a human being, I am endowed with a certain sense of curiosity. There is always something to pique one's curiosity. The C&E News article says that the present pH of the ocean is 8.1 and that it has risen from 8.2. This leads to a couple of obvious questions. How was it determined that the pH is now 8.1? Did someone have a new pH meter and ran around taking the pHs of anything he saw? When and where were these measurements of 8.1 and 8.2 made? Did someone run down to the beach and grab a sea water sample or is this a collection of pH data from samples taken at various locations in the world, including the Mississippi Delta, the Indian Ocean, the Coast of Labrador etc.,? We can also what the sensitivity of the pH determination is. Is it 1/100 of a pH unit? If so, why do we only report it to 1/10?

All this adds up to my suspicion that no one was ever significantly concerned about the pH of the ocean, until someone decided to relate it to carbon dioxide, which was part of the ideology of the present Obama Administration. In other words, the Administration may have questioned whether carbon carbon dioxide could be condemned for some atrocities other than just global warming. How about ocean acidification? Power plants burning coal have previously been shown to contribute significant quantities of sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere, which is later later oxidized to sulfur trioxide and forms sulfuric acid when mixed with rain. Acidification of lakes and ponds and possibly rivers has been noticed from this affect. Surface waters routinely drain into the ocean. Would this be enough to affect pH of ocean waters? Since that thought does not do anything to condemn carbon dioxide, perhaps the Administration has ignored it.

We can also consider motivations for actual investigative work in this area. Again, it is a matter of federal funds being used for research and particularly in private grants, wherein one is obligated to come up with an answer which fits the ideology of the search background.

I'm also critical of C&E News with the title "Monitoring A Troubling Trend". Is the "Troubling Trend" a matter of the pH apparently dropping from 8.2 to 8.1? It does trouble me that C&E News could leap to this conclusion, especially without considering the obvious questions concerning pH determination accuracy and water samples from various locations.

My bottom line is a suggestion that Congress take another look at that law, in these times of budget tightening, and consider whether it should be eliminated.