Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Hmm. What is also interesting is that, according to the NOAA:

"During the period from 1910 thru 1988 the most common method for measuring pH was the potentiometric method using hydrogen ion sensitive glass electrodes coupled with a reference electrode (Dickson, 1993a)."

The data collected prior to 1989 are typically not well documented and their metadata is incomplete; therefore, such data are of unknown and probably variable quality. The reasons for this are manifold (see next section). The uncertainty of these older pH measurements is rarely likely to be less than 0.03 in pH, and could easily be as large as 0.2 in pH. This data set is thus not at all well-suited to showing a change of 0.1 in pH over the last 100 years — the amount of pH change that would be expected to occur over the 100 years since the first seawater pH measurements, as a result of the documented increase in atmospheric CO2 levels and assuming that the surface ocean composition remains in approximate equilibrium with respect to the atmosphere.

It is only since the 1990s that it has been possible to discern small pH changes in the ocean with reasonable confidence.

While seawater pH measurements have been made on some oceanographic expeditions starting with the first measurements that were made by Sørensen and Palitzsch (1910), most of the earlier data have proven to be problematic for a number of reasons that we will describe below. In addition, there is the added problem of data sparseness in any given year for the earlier data sets, which makes the determination of a global annual mean value for a particular time period to be quite challenging, necessarily increasing its likely uncertainty.

During the period from 1910 thru 1988 the most common method for measuring pH was the potentiometric method using hydrogen ion sensitive glass electrodes coupled with a reference electrode (Dickson, 1993a). This method suffers from a number of measurement and calibration issues (i.e., temperature of measurement and conversion to in situ temperature, calibration for use in a high ionic strength medium, glass electrode drift, reference electrode drift, and liquid junction potential issues) that have led to significant measurement uncertainties that are difficult to quantify adequately. In recent years the spectrophotometric pH method described by Byrne and Breland (1989) has been shown to be about one order of magnitude more precise. Its accuracy has been improved over the years since then.

What's the pH of the ocean today?

Well, if you had quoted all from the NOAA:

To what part of which of the world's oceans are you referring?

And if, as you believe, there were no dependable means of determining the pH of the oceans prior to the 80s, how did the NOAA determine what it was?

I see . . .

It is interesting that the first pH meter was constructed in 1934 by Arnold Beckman

"During the period from 1910 thru 1988 the most common method for measuring pH was the potentiometric method using hydrogen ion sensitive glass electrodes coupled with a reference electrode (Dickson, 1993a)."

And have you decided which ocean you are going to give us the pH level for?

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Specifically, “Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050.” Since then, many advocates and policy makers have proposed that target as a political goal.

Here I’ll show you the simple mathematics of what achieving the 2030 target entails. The evidence shows clearly that the world is far from being on a path that will come anywhere close to that goal. That is not an opinion, it is just math.

Of course, climate change poses risks to our future, and aggressive mitigation and adaptation policies make good sense. So getting policy making right is important.

Let’s begin with a few key numbers as starting points. According to the 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2018 the world consumed in total almost 14,000 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe). That energy supports the lives, hopes, aspirations of more than 7 billion people.

Like wealth, energy consumption is deeply unequal around the world, and many who do not have access to a full range of energy products and services are working hard to secure that access. So we should expect energy demand to continue to grow over the next decade. From 2000 to 2018, according to BP, consumption grew at about 2.2% per year, and ranged from a drop of 1.4% in 2009 to an increase of 4.9% in 2004. In the analysis below, I use an assumed 2.2% growth per year to 2030.

Here I focus on carbon dioxide from the consumption of fossil fuels, coal, natural gas and oil, and ignore emissions from the use of land. When combusted, fossil fuels emit different amounts of carbon dioxide. Coal by far emits the most. In 2018 about 27% of total global energy consumption came from coal, but according to the Global Carbon Project, coal accounts for about 40% of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

To simplify the analysis, I assume that emissions reduction targets will be met through reductions in fossil fuel consumption which occur across all fossil fuels. That allows us to equate a reduction in fossil fuel consumption with a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. It also keeps us from misinterpreting a reduction in emissions from a switch from coal to natural gas. If the ultimate goal is net-zero carbon dioxide, then eventually all energy consumption will have to be carbon-free, meaning that carbon dioxide-emitted natural gas will have to also be eliminated.

I’ll also ignore the possibility of technologies of “negative emissions” which would allow the continued use of fossil fuels. The main reason for ignoring such technologies is that they don’t presently exist at scale, and don’t appear to be just over the horizon.

OK, with these starting points in place, let’s now look at the IPCC target for 2030. A 45% reduction in emissions from 2010, implies an allowance of about 5,950 mtoe of fossil fuel consumption for 2030, and a reduction of about 5,800 mtoe from 2018. If consumption grows by 2.2% per year to 2030, that means that the world will consume about 4,200 mtoe more in 2030 than in 2018. So the grand total of new, carbon-free consumption by 2030 needed to hit the 45% reduction target is about 10,000 mtoe.

That means that the world will need add about 1,000 mtoe of carbon-free energy every year over the next decade. Over the past decade, the world added about 64 mtoe of carbon-free energy every year, and in 2018 it added a record 114 mtoe. So the world would need to accelerate the deployment of carbon-free energy by 9 times or more the rate observed in 2018, and about 15 times greater than that of the past decade.

The deployment of new carbon-emitting energy would obviously have to cease immediately. Over the past decade fossil fuel consumption has increased annually by an average of about 150 mtoe. Last year’s record increase of 114 mtoe of carbon-free energy was dwarfed by an increase in fossil fuels of more than 275 mtoe. It is accurate to say that the world’s growing supply of carbon-free energy is additive, and not replacing fossil fuels.

Discussions of climate policy often center on the deployment of carbon-free energy supply, but rarely discussed is the corresponding requirement for the decommissioning of fossil fuel energy. As I have argued in a previous column, the magnitude of the net-zero by 2050 challenge is equivalent to the deployment of a new nuclear plant every day for the next 30 years, while retiring an equivalent amount of fossil fuel energy every day. Emissions reductions for 2030 consistent with the IPCC view of the 1.5°C temperature target require a much great rate of deployment than one nuclear power plant worth of carbon-free energy deployment every day, because about half of the required emissions reductions are squeezed into the next 10 years.

The bottom line of this analysis should be undeniable: There is simply no evidence that the world is, or is on the brink of, making “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” that would be required for the deep decarbonization associated with a 1.5°C temperature target. Anyone advocating a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 is engaging in a form of climate theater, full of drama but not much suspense. But don’t just take it from me, do the math yourself.

Despite the overwhelming evidence on the unlikelihood of meeting the 2030 target, such realism has yet to take hold in climate policy discussions. Some even go so far as to claim that presentation of this type of analysis amounts to climate denial. For those making such claims, I’ve got news for you – the world is going to miss the 2030 target whether we talk about that reality or deny it, so we had better get to work on rethinking climate policy.

Can you show me why this concern should be deemed a manifestation of religion?

So yeah, this shows how your beliefs are basically religious in nature since you don't look deep enough to find out whether or not they are true.

Consider what would happen if one simply took all available temperature data used this to estimate annual mean temperatures over the last 100 years, rather than calculating anomalies and gridding quality checked data. The result would obviously be nonsense. Changing geographical and seasonal biases in data availability, and incorrect data would corrupt the analysis. Wallace’s analysis suffers from exactly the same problems.

Geographical variability in ocean pH is large. Upwelling area have the lowest pH as the water upwelling from the deep oceans has high CO2 concentrations from decomposition of sinking organic matter. The geographical coverage of ocean pH measurement is extremely unlikely to have remained constant over the instrumental period. Any analysis that fails to take this into consideration is doomed.