… The Great Lakes are small potatoes compared to the ocean, however, and the ocean is in a more perilous state now than we ever thought. It’s bad enough that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today is higher than it has been at any point in the past 650,000 years, but the effects of this one fact are enormous.
When carbon dioxide dissolves, it produces carbonic acid, which in turn has altered the ocean’s pH levels enough to have increased the ocean’s “acidification” by 30 percent. Because it takes the ocean so long to “turn over,” and because carbon dioxide also has “long life” in the atmosphere, it is impossible to reverse the acidification that has already taken place in the ocean.
Nevada Appeal, 17 January 2007. Article.
