Verzuring oceanen: nieuwe hype?

Nu de klimaathype verflauwt, bestaat er dringend behoefte aan een nieuw apocalyptisch schrikbeeld. Gelukkig dient de verzuring van de oceanen zich thans aan als serieuze kandidaat.

In de Wall Street Journal schreef Matt Ridley daar het volgende over:

Coral reefs around the world are suffering badly from overfishing and various forms of pollution. Yet many experts argue that the greatest threat to them is the acidification of the oceans from the dissolving of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

The effect of acidification, according to J.E.N. Veron, an Australian coral scientist, will be "nothing less than catastrophic ....

What were once thriving coral gardens that supported the greatest biodiversity of the marine realm will become red-black bacterial slime, and they will stay that way." ...

The Natural Resources Defense Council has called ocean acidification "the scariest environmental problem you've never heard of." Sigourney Weaver, who narrated a film about the issue, said that "the scientists are freaked out." The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls it global warming's "equally evil twin."

Maar is dat nu wel waar? Matt Ridley vervolgt:

But do the scientific data support such alarm? Last month scientists at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other authors published a study showing how much the pH level (measuring alkalinity versus acidity) varies naturally between parts of the ocean and at different times of the day, month and year. "On both a monthly and annual scale, even the most stable open ocean sites see pH changes many times larger than the annual rate of acidification," say the authors of the study, adding that because good instruments to measure ocean pH have only recently been deployed, "this variation has been under-appreciated."

Over coral reefs, the pH decline between dusk and dawn is almost half as much as the decrease in average pH expected over the next 100 years. The noise is greater than the signal. Another recent study, by scientists from the U.K., Hawaii and Massachusetts, concluded that "marine and freshwater assemblages have always experienced variable pH conditions," and that "in many freshwater lakes, pH changes that are orders of magnitude greater than those projected for the 22nd-century oceans can occur over periods of hours."

Lees verder hier.

Maar zullen deze geruststellende onderzoeksresultaten er de VN van kunnen weerhouden om naast het VN-klimaatpanel nu ook een VN-Oceaanpanel op te richten? Het zou mij niets verbazen als het VN-secretariaat geen weerstand kan bieden aan zijn bureaucratische territoriumdrift en inmiddels stiekem voorbereidingen daartoe treft.