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:
Topologic Oceans 