- Climate
Analysis of "Scientists are exaggerating carbon threat to marine life"
Reviewed content
Published in The Australian, The Times, by Ben Webster, on 2016-03-01.
Scientists’ Feedback
SUMMARY
Ben Webster reports that the threat posed by ocean acidification to marine life is “exaggerated”. The article, written for The Times and republished in The Australian, is based on an interview by Dr Howard Browman, editor of a special issue on ocean acidification, who claims that Webster quotes him in a misleading way. The article is not representative of the state of scientific knowledge.
See all the scientists’ annotations in context
GUEST COMMENTS
The Times article is not representative of the message that I tried to give the journalist during the interview – that is, the message presented my introduction to the special issue in which I state clearly and explicitly that ocean acidification IS happening and WILL have effects. After reading my introduction, and the articles in the special issue, readers can come to their their own conclusion about whether the journalist worked carefully, conscientiously and impartially to help me accurately spread its messages.
I spoke with Ben Webster of The Times in a 30-minute phone call and explained that the objective of the special issue he was reporting on was to introduce more balance into the topic of Ocean Acidification. He cherry-picked our conversation and presented phrases out of context – seemingly in order to be sensational – despite the fact that I told him that the press was part of the “exaggeration” problem. For example, the quoted phrase “inherent bias” in the first paragraph is not the same as the “publication bias” that I refer to in my introduction. Further, my introduction does not say that the existing literature is “exaggerating” the effects of ocean acidification, but that more careful interpretation is required. Finally, I am not saying that the special issue overturns previous literature on the topic, as the Times suggests, but that they should be taken together, in balance. Very disappointing.
REVIEWERS’ OVERALL FEEDBACK
These comments are the overall opinion of scientists on the article, they are substantiated by their knowledge in the field and by the content of the analysis in the annotations on the article.
Senior Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science
The main problem with this article is that it quotes a single source (Dr. Browman) who has views that differ from much of the scientific community. The author of this article did not interview anyone that Dr Browman is criticizing.
Note: “my comments were made before I learned that Dr Howard Browman felt his views were misrepresented in the article”. (added on Mar. 4 2016)
This article brings together a series of inaccurate and misleading statements on the science of ocean acidification.
This article misses some major intellectual points about ocean acidification, thanks to what seems to be a willful misunderstanding and misquoting of an interview with Dr. Browman on an Ocean Acidification special issue journal.
Scientist, Coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The reporter uses inflammatory language and cherry-picks parts of the paper to create a story that is basically untrue.
Notes:
[1] See the rating guidelines used for article evaluations.
[2] Each evaluation is independent. Scientists’ comments are all published at the same time.
Key Take-aways
“More than half of the 44 studies selected for publication found that raised levels of CO2 had little or no impact on marine life, including crabs, limpets, sea urchins and sponges”
This is meaningless… it is not unexpected that several papers published in the issue showed little or no impact because the call for papers specifically welcomed such contributions. The bias is therefore very high. I recommend using the unbiased dataset investigated by Kroeker et al. (2013). It does demonstrate negative impacts on some processes and groups of organisms.
Kroeker K. et al., 2013. Impacts of ocean acidification on marine organisms: quantifying sensitivities and interaction with warming. Global Change Biology 19:1884-1896.
It is crucial to understand exactly which species are and aren’t affected by Ocean Acidification, as that will determine how ecosystems will change through time. I will also point out that if this figure is correct, and 50% of organisms are unaffected by Ocean Acidification, 50% of organisms are affected by Ocean Acidification, which is a HUGE amount of marine life. It also neglects the fact that reefs themselves are most definitely affected, which creates and maintains the habitat for many of these other organisms in the first place.
“The term ocean acidification was also a misnomer, he said, because it suggested that the oceans could become acidic instead of alkaline.”
Senior Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science
This is like saying that it is wrong to say the Arctic is warming because it is still cold. ‘Warming’ and ‘acidifying’ both refer to a direction of change and do not specify the state of the system. This claim about a misnomer is based on a misunderstanding of how words are used.
“The oceans will never become acid because there is such a huge buffering capacity in the oceans. We simply could never release enough CO2 into the atmosphere to cause the pH to go below 7 [the point in the pH scale at which a solution becomes acidic].”
This statement sets up a false notion about the pH balance of the oceans. In fact, the global ocean is, on weighted average, very close to (but just above) 7, which is controlled by many factors including atmospheric CO2 changes, but most importantly by the buffering from carbonate-rich sediments. This buffering timescale is slow, such that there can in fact be a decoupling of ocean pH from the main buffering capacity of seawater (see Honisch et al, Science, 2012 The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification). This statement also fails to acknowledge the thermodynamic threshold to skeleton-building (saturation state), which for corals and many other organisms falls well above pH 7.
“If they had called it something else, such as ‘lower alkalinity’, it wouldn’t have been as catchy”
CO2 has zero effect on alkalinity. “They” would have never called Ocean Acidification ‘lower alkalinity’, because that is simply an incorrect thing to say.
“The review found that many studies had used flawed methods, subjecting marine creatures to sudden increases in carbon dioxide that would never be experienced in real life.
In some cases it was levels far beyond what would ever be reached even if we burnt every molecule of carbon on the planet”
Senior Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science
It is normal in scientific investigation to study impacts of large doses as a step towards understanding impacts of smaller doses. Just because a study considered high doses, that in no way undermines the value of a study.
This is an incorrect statement which has already been debunked before, including by two of the authors of the paper this manuscript referee to.
Hurd C. L., Cornwall C. E., Dupont S., Gattuso J.-P., Hoegh-Guldberg O., Gao K. & Lagos N. A., 2015. Ocean acidification: Laboratory seawater studies are justified. Nature 525:187.
Extreme values are useful for physiologists to elucidate the cellular and molecular pathways confering susceptibility or resistance to elevated CO2. Yang et al. (2016; fig. 8d) showed that most of the data on the biological response to ocean acidification archived in a World Data Centre were collected at pCO2 values below 1000 uatm, in agreement with the business-as-usual CO2 emission scenario.
Yang Y.et al., 2016. Data compilation on the biological response to ocean acidification: an update. Earth System Science Data 8:79-87.
“An “inherent bias” in scientific journals in favour of more calamitous predictions has excluded research showing that marine creatures are not damaged by ocean acidification, which is caused by the sea absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”
A publication bias towards positive results is inherent to all fields of research. But I believe that it is far from being as bad as the article suggests. The most recent and comprehensive meta-analysis of the impact of ocean acidification shows that many processes and taxonomic groups exhibit no statistically significant response (Kroeker et al., 2013). This demonstrates that many non-calamitous papers are published.
Kroeker K. et al., 2013. Impacts of ocean acidification on marine organisms: quantifying sensitivities and interaction with warming. Global Change Biology 19:1884-1896.
Senior Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science
In all fields of research, it is much easier to publish a paper saying ‘We were able to develop convincing evidence that X affects Y’ than to publish a paper saying that ‘We were not able to develop convincing evidence that X affects Y’. That is a bias that is inherent in all of modern science and is not specific to ocean acidification research.
Scientist, Coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
This is an inflammatory twisting of the author’s words. Browman discusses the well-known bias against publication of negative results. It has nothing to do with the direction of the signal, only the inability of the researchers to demonstrate an effect in their experiments. It has nothing to do with how “calamitous” the predictions are. In fact, sometimes the negative results would have been more calamitous depending on the experimental design.
“Dr Browman, a marine scientist for 35 years, said he was not saying that ocean acidification posed no threat, but that he believed that “a higher level of academic scepticism” should be applied to the topic.
Senior Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science
By making such broad statements, Dr Browman is undermining the hard work of many people who have spent a huge amount of effort to document the effects of ocean acidification on many marine species. If Dr Browman wants to attack particular studies, he should cite particular statements from particular papers that he thinks are false. It is inappropriate to make vague accusations denigrating an entire field of inquiry.
There is a degree to which scientific skepticism should be applied to Ocean Acidification experiments. There are many “cook and look” type experiments that investigate short term, single-species effects which are often not representative of the real world, include no mechanistic or physiological explanation, and lack any sort of adaptive response from the organism itself. However, the field as a whole is moving away from this approach, thanks to the hard work of many ecologists, biologists, chemists, and oceanographers working together, generating data, and participating in the scientific method. Examples of this progress can be found in the articles Gattuso, Caldeira, and I, have cited above.
