[Someone]

But will they become too acidic so fast that no coral can adapt?

I know we are really good at changing the environment, but the oceans are huge.

[scarmig]

The oceans are huge, but we've already managed to decrease pH by 0.1 in the past century.

A pessimistic but plausible scenario has ocean pH decreasing by an additional 0.7-0.8 by 2300.

That's pretty fast. It's hard to predict how and how fast coral might adapt, but those are short time scales to expect evolution to act on.

[ble]

Pardon the profanity, but fuck! On a logarithmic scale, a decrease of 0.1 on the pH is a 25% increase in H+ concentration...

... and a decrease of 0.7 is a 500% increase in H+ concentration. That sounds apocalyptic, at least for ocean ecosystems.

Warming and acidification are increasing jellyfish blooms, right? Do you know any good recipes for grilled jellyfish?

[jmpe]

Complex question, but there are a few aspects that work against them:

- coral typically takes several years before reaching sexual maturity. Adaptability to a changing environment strongly depends on this.

- corals typically occupy ecological niches.

- acidification directly interferes with a key part of their metabolism and habit. It's like asking whether mammals can't evolve to a life without skeletons.

Corals are an extremely diverse group of organisms that interact with other organisms through complex relationships. Take them away (or reduce them to a select few species that fulfill a fitness) and you're going to see lots of damage to other populations.