Climate scientists warned this week about another of the effects of greenhouse gas emission. The Guardian has details. "Human pollution is turning the seas into acid so quickly that the coming decades will recreate conditions not seen on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs," scientists from Bristol University announced yesterday at a conference in Italy.  Climate scientists are meeting this week to update to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and to prepare for the "international negotiations in Copenhagen in December, where officials will try to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto protocol".

A summary of the findings predicts "dangerous levels of ocean acidification and severe consequences for organisms called marine calcifiers, which form chalky shells" . . . "We find the future rate of surface ocean acidification and environmental pressure on marine calcifiers very likely unprecedented in the past 65 million years."   And, it gets scarier as the scientists share their "greater concern" that the acidification of the deep sea might set off a huge underwater release of additional greenhouse gas.  They compare "the current acidification rate with a giant prehistoric release of greenhouse gas, which geologists know caused widespread extinction of deep water species".

The Bristol study says "future deep sea acidification must be limited to 0.2 pH units to avoid the worst effects.  The pH of surface waters, where the CO2 is absorbed from the atmosphere, has fallen by about 0.1 units since the industrial revolution". 
Ocean acidification is one of the key topics at the Copenhagen summit, with a series of presentations scheduled to examine the impacts.

Ken Caldeira, an expert on ocean acidification at the Carnegie Institution in California, said, "The choice to continue emitting carbon dioxide means that we will be an agent of biological change of a force and magnitude exceeded only by the causes of the great mass extinction events. If we do not cut carbon dioxide emissions deeply and soon, the consequences of ocean acidification will stand out against the broad reaches of geologic time. Those consequences will remain embedded in the geologic record as testimony from a civilisation that had the wisdom to develop high technology, but did not develop the wisdom to use it wisely."

Are the climate scientists attending this conference aiming to scare us?  Yep!  "Katherine Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen, who organised this week's event, has described it as 'a deliberate attempt to influence policy'. She said many scientists were concerned that politicians have not grasped the seriousness of the situation, despite increasingly gloomy predictions."

This report comes after a similarly alarming warning about how fast the sea levels are rising from the same group last week when Dr. David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, commented, "It is now clear that there are going to be massive flooding disasters around the globe.  Populations are shifting to the coast, which means that more and more people are going to be threatened by sea-level rises."