Or ocean acidification is a pHraud! (Geddit?)
My latest heap of clowns are Thomas Lifson, James Delingpole, Anthony Watts and Marita Noon for claiming that ocean pH data do not show a decline in pH. (Hide the decline? Where have I heard that before.)
If the facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts.
Human activity has added a couple of trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, about 30-40% of that has dissolved in the oceans, and dissolving CO2 in water causes acidification, so if the facts of ocean pH observations don't show acidification, it is most likely because there is some complicating factor, not because basic chemistry is wrong.
Unless you are a climate change clown, where it's evidence of a conspiracy by scientists, and never mind the implications. OK, billions of tons of CO2 have dissolved in the oceans: exactly how did that not change the pH?
The explanation I think lies in something that is commented on but passed over in the original article: "[pH] levels coincide with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation".
CO2 does dissolve in water, but more in cold water and less in warm, and ocean cycles like the PDO can bring warmer or cooler water to the surface. They also transport water from the surface to the ocean depths or vice versa. All of which mean that CO2 concentrations in the ocean water (and therefore pH) are not going to change uniformly.
Therefore pH measurements are going to vary depending on when and where they were taken, and without taking into account this complicating factor, you are not going to get an accurate picture of global ocean pH.
Which I suspect is why the scientist doing the work on pH was using a model, a reason for ridicule from the clowns: "models that don’t line up with real-world data..."
Well, that's the point. Models take into account complicating factors, to give a more accurate picture of what is really happening. In fact, they explain why the data don't match the theory.
Whereas rejecting the data without addressing the fact that this would mean overturning a very basic theory is spectacularly unintelligent.
Update: Richard Telford has an excellent analysis.
