John Everett, part VII: Help, help, I’m being repressed!

Supposedly posts with images get all the clix. So here is an image. Via PictureIsUnrelated; clix for sauces.

Part VI of John Everett’s testimony is a criticism of a geoengineering approach to ocean acidification. I agree with his conclusion (that adding alkaline calcium carbonate to the oceans is not a useful approach to ocean acidification) but nevertheless find this section to be problematic. I’ll return to it once I’ve finished with the rest of his testimony.

Part VII is a collection of research suggestions “that would go a long way toward establishing the likely effects of an increased CO2 world.” On the surface, it’s hard to take issue with his suggestions, but in the context of the rest of his testimony, they ring rather hollow.

For example, his first research suggestion is the development of

“a CO2/temperature timeline based on extant research on past climates, at least back to about 600 million years before the present. This effort would provide a critical review of candidate papers and unpublished work that goes well beyond a typical peer-reviewed journal publication, or prior summary reports of the IPCC.”

I think that it would be great to have a comprehensive review of the state of paleoclimatology and paleogeochemistry. But Dr. Everett ignores what we already know about those topics– so what good would such an effort be?

Suggestion #2:

John Everett, part V: the good the bad and the elephant snot

A part of my John Everett series – read more: 0/I – II.0 – II.5 – II.75 –  III.0 – III.3 – IV.0 – IV.4 – IV.8 – V – VII – VIII – Full Report 

Part V of John Everett’s testimony (“Is this bad or good or just different?”) repeats several claims that we’ve already seen to be simply incorrect:

Little Rock Lake, site of a famous acid rain study. Image from Google Maps; sauceclick.

• That plants will be more successful in a high-CO2 world.
• That climatologists have incorrectly modelled the carbon cycle, leading to exaggerated projections of ocean acidification.
• That “the Earth has seen these conditions before, and that all the same types of animals and plants of the oceans successfully made it through far more extreme conditions.”
• That “there is nothing conclusive in the very recent scientific literature to indicate any reason for concern.”

The only new evidence he presents in this section regards a different pH problem: acid rain.

“During the acid rain issues in the 1980s, a lake basin in Wisconsin was deliberately acidified (with EPA and NSF funding) to a pH of 4.7 then allowed to recover. ‘Some species were decimated and others thrived, but the sum-total of life in the lake stayed the same.’ This is a level of acidification 1,000 X the worst-case scenario for the oceans. It provides a clue as to what a 2X change might be.”

His reference for this claim is this news item from ScienceDaily. To clarify, when Little Rock Lake was ‘allowed to recover’, acidification was halted and its pH was allowed to rise to its previous levels. The news item is reporting on the slow recovery, which only took place once the acidification ceased. Dr. Everett presents a quote from this news item, which would seem to suggest that things were just fine in the acidified lake. In fact, the quote in its entirety refers to the lake’s recovery, rather than its acidified state: