Acidic oceans

When the wife and I went to Australia in August, we visited the Great Barrier Reef. I joked to whoever would listen that we wanted to see the reef before it bleached out due to global warming. But at the back of my mind was the belief that even if the Great Barrier Reef disappeared, coral reefs themselves would not completely disappear. There are wonderful, unspoilt reefs now in Indonesia, and those reefs would probably move a couple hundred kilometers north, to places where the ocean temperature is currently a degree or so too cold.

This article in Science disabused me of that notion. Turns out that increasing carbon dioxide will do to the oceans what pollution did to the Great Lakes. The oceans will become acidic and this side-effect of carbon pollution will kill off the coral reefs. By the end of this century, there will be no coral reefs anywhere worth seeing.

We really do need a carbon tax.