Climate change is not just about Carbon Dioxide

If the article seems mid-tier web article, it&#x27;s because it&#x27;s a summary of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dx.doi.org&#x2F;10.2139&#x2F;ssrn.4099018" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dx.doi.org&#x2F;10.2139&#x2F;ssrn.4099018</a>.<p>But even the &quot;full&quot; article seems weird.<p>I&#x27;m not a native english speaker, but these sound wrong:<p>&gt; &quot;This report will be followed by a detailed reported include the observed data from 13 sailing vessels and over 500 data points across the Atlantic Ocean.&quot;<p>&gt; &quot;We are biologists and perhaps we think differently to other professions.&quot;<p>You mean than ?<p>&gt; &quot;marine plankton form the root[...]&quot;<p>forms ?<p>&gt; The legend of figure ?? (yea not numbered) says &quot;Particles in 100ml of seawater from the middle of the Atlantic&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not ideal to reproduce the experiment, because not everyone knows where the middle is !<p>Their findings sounds alarming, especially this :<p>&gt;&quot;peer reviewed literature shows we have lost more than 50% of all life in the oceans, but from own plankton sampling activity and other observations, we consider that losses closer to 90%[...]&quot;<p>I think people on the field usualy have better insight than academics but i cannot trust such a poorly written article.

Summary:<p>The primary greenhouse gas is not CO2, its water vapour (&gt;50% of all the atmospheric greenhouse gases)<p>Marine plants keep water vapor from getting out of hand.<p>Pollution that makes its way to the ocean, like toxic waste, oil and oil-based chemicals doesn&#x27;t get &quot;diluted&quot; - it stays on the surface and emulsifies and can even be concentrated into microplastics.<p>The marine life then consumes these toxins, leading to their demise and death.<p>The decline of marine life leads to greater water vapor (greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere.

Ugh, smells like crank. Someone discovered a climatology 101 fact and then made a big fuss about it. Just ... read an introductory textbook on climate science please. It&#x27;s basically all speculation disguised as a &quot;case study&quot;. The authors should show some numbers if they are really serious about their claim, for example, how much increase in marine evaporation can be expected from an idealized sterile ocean.

The whole papers revolves around this claim:<p>&gt; Marine plants like diatoms produce omega 3 oil which acts like a cap on the surface of the water to slow down evaporation<p>There are no numbers about this, no reference, nothing. And this claim is quite extraordinary. This absolutely needs to be quantified in order to go further. How does omega 3 oil, rejected by sea life on a limited portion of the sea, a product that can be oxidized easily, be a significant barrier to evaporation.<p>Maybe this is true, I don&#x27;t know. But this is definitely counter intuitive and any counter intuitive claim should be supported by something, not just hand waived like that.

Does anyone have references for these claims? Particularly:<p>&gt; pH will drop to pH7.95 by 2045, and most marine life in our oceans dissolve.

I really wish they sourced the graph talking about the atmosphere becoming unbreathable.

&quot;pH will drop to pH7.95 by 2045, and most marine life in our oceans dissolve.&quot;<p>As someone who considers themselves an environmentalist, I find this sort of language to have a net-negative impact on our collective cause. The paper fails to provide comprehensive evidence for the idea that a pH change of 0.08 will result in all carbonate-based marine life dissolving.<p>When 2045 comes, and the coral still exists, our populace will be further trained to ignore the warnings of climate scientists.

The trouble with the climate change lobby (aside from the paid &#x2F;lobbyists&#x2F; and entrenched profit motives) is that you can only cry wolf so many times and make so many wildly hyperbolic and&#x2F;or hypocritical claims before well-intentioned people start to question the whole narrative.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong - I&#x27;d prefer not to find out what sort of negative impact climate change may have. I just think the current messaging isn&#x27;t doing them any favors.