Ocean Acidification

I've come across this article on SkepticalScience about people who not only disbelieve climate change, but also ocean acidification. This may not seem directly relevant to our primary issue of climate change, but a graph shown in the article suggests otherwise. Pictured in the article, it shows that as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and in the ocean rise, the pH level of the ocean lowers, becoming more acidic. The article goes into a heated examination of Mike Wallace, an ocean acidification skeptic and the chart that he creates to counter the aforementioned one (his chart is below, but see the article for that jolly content). My intention in sharing this article isn't to add fire to the flame of debate, but to think about the correlation between carbon dioxide levels and pH levels that this article brings up.

Maybe my naive interest in this is simply because I haven't heard much about it, when really it's an obvious and commonly understood concept (among those who aren't skeptics). But I find it really interesting in the chart below that the pH levels are so variable for so long (the article touches on reasons for this), and come the 1970s, the variation reduces, gaps are closed, and we start to see an actual line formed by the independent pH levels--and that line is dropping. Wallace does use mean pH values to create misleading lines on the graph, but if we look at the connected dots, it really does emphasize the parallel between CO^2 and pH levels.

Wallace's data:             /skepticalscience.com

Source: http://skepticalscience.com/not-phraud-but-phoolishness.html