[Supermancho]

> When 2045 comes, and the coral still exists,

It won't exist in the ocean. This language is accurate, based on what we know, and appropriately conclusive.

I opened the article hoping it highlighted the most immediate problem (ocean acidification) and I was not disappointed. The plastic, yeah it's bad, but it's not going to kill off most sea life.

[300bps]

pH will drop to pH7.95 by 2045, and most marine life in our oceans dissolve.

Coral dissolving I can understand. But the article seems to be saying “most marine life” which gives me images of sharks and tuna dissolving.

I see three options:

1. The article misspoke

2. The article is wrong

3. The article is using some statistic I’m unaware of to be technically correct

Any help to assist me in understanding what he meant appreciated!

[d3m0t3p]

it might be that: if you count the mass of marine life, most of it is from the tiny animals. Just like there is more insects than humans. Therefore, most of the marine life is dead if you kill most of the plankton. And because it's the "root of the food chain", most of everything dies

[geoalchimista]

It isn't remotely true. Corals have persisted through the geological past when atmospheric CO2 was many times today's level. It could be true that _some_ coral species would go extinct, but corals as a class are likely to persist.

[Supermancho]

> Corals have persisted through the geological past when atmospheric CO2 was many times today's level.

We're heading toward something similar to the Miocene, both in CO2, temperature, and ph. You might want to look into the "Middle Miocene disruption", which refers to a wave of extinctions of terrestrial and aquatic life forms that occurred following the Miocene Climatic Optimum. There's a big oceanic fossil gap in the Miocene, because of this peak-temperature which seemed to tilt ecosystems too far. We do know the hard-coral scleractinians (same as modern corals^1) didn't appear because of this change, but likely because they were one of the few types that can survive it. Unfortunately, if the trend continues, the hardiest of the ancient species all die^2. 7.2 doesn't sound like 7.95? The ocean isn't uniformly affected^3 and will likely kick off another "disruption" of the existing ecosystems causing a collapse. ie You don't need to set fire to all the trees for the forest to burn down.

^1 https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-... ^2 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1419621112 ^3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification