Ocean acidification: the other CO2 problem

Everybody has heard of the ice core records – going back 800,000 years – showing repeat patterns of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and rising global temperatures. Climate change is a hot topic. But the other CO2 problem – the acidification of the oceans – still goes largely unrecognized. Neither the scientific literature nor the more popular variety has offered much
coverage of the issue. A quick trawl through Times online throws up more than 5,000 hits for the words ‘climate change’, but only a dozen for ‘ocean acidification’ (April 2008). This is a totally unscientific indicator, of course, but it is nonetheless a reasonable measure of what is going on in terms of our understanding, and indeed basic awareness, of this other big CO2 problem.