On the recordApril 21, 2010
Well, I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for carrying the load here. I just want to, in closing, note tomorrow the actress Sigourney Weaver will be hosting a movie, a documentary called ``Acid Test.'' And it's a very interesting movie with some very disturbing news about our oceans, and that is that our oceans are becoming more acidic. And what this movie discloses is that our oceans are actually 30 percent more acidic than they were before we started to burn coal and oil in the industrial age. And the way this works, the way this movie that Ms. Weaver narrates, carbon goes up out of our smokestacks, out of our tailpipes, goes into the atmosphere, then falls into the ocean, goes into solution in the ocean, and creates acidic conditions. And I don't think probably many people know that our oceans are becoming actually more acidic. And the concern of course is that when you change the acidity level of the ocean what it does to life forms. And we had Jane Lubchenco, who is Dr. Jane Lubchenco, who heads NOAA, our National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the other day she showed us some time-lapse photography of what happens when you put a shell, like a clam shell, in ocean water that will be as acidic as our oceans will be by the end of the century. And it essentially melts. What we are finding is the oceans are becoming so acidic that if this trend continues, it will actually dissolve little creatures that form calcium carbonate shells.
