Too many conflicts concerning climate change...

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You're right. Humanity is highly adaptable. So the populations living in pacific region islands at sea level now and which will be fully under water in 50 years time can just build underwater cities to live in. That they don't have the money to build underwater cities is not your problem. That's their problem for deciding to live on islands which are at sea level. And the towns and cities lying in the semi-tropics that are subject to regular hurricanes and cyclones, that now and in the future face more severe flooding, cyclones and hurricanes due to climate change, will just have to grin and bear it because the residents decided to live there in the first place, so that's their problem as well. And people who decided to build their houses on the coast line and who now find their houses collapsing due to the rising tides. Well that's their problem as well.

Eric, the issue is the difference in speed between climate change and evolutionary change.

Evolutionary change is generally slow. When the climate changes quickly, we see extinctions and few speciations (which come later, filling vacant niches).

Our pollinators are, broadly speaking, not doing too well. Some lepidoptera are undergoing range expansion and increasing in numbers, but hymenoptera are more important and are not doing well. Throw in rapid climate change on top of factors like APVs and V. destructor and you're taking a big risk.

That's quite an anthropocentric view. If you're concerned about biodiversity more generally, then there's even more reason for concern and action.

I agree with you that "greenies" who oppose nuclear power and genetic engineering are scientifically illiterate and just as damaging as climate change deniers.

Not to mention, the acidification of the oceans by the additional CO2.

If an island will be fully under water because of global warming fifty years from now, it is already far too low to be inhabitable. The waves would already be washing over it during storms.

And, for what it's worth, some of the better models for hurricanes find that there will be fewer because of Global Warming. It seems that the added high altitude wind shear would greatly reduce the number.

Furthermore, at an expected one to two feet of sea level rise per century, in the vast majority of cases, by the time that the sea level rise gets up to the point of causing houses to collapse or be inundated with seawater there will have been a point where they could rebuild the houses because of their age but will choose not to because of sea level. In any event, I'm not going to worry that a few billionaires may lose a million dollar house into the ocean.

And, for what it's worth, subsidence of the land for entirely other reasons is a much larger concern.

The reality is that the natural variation in acidity of the oceans is enormously larger than any rise in CO2 that we will likely see from Global Warming. There are places in the ocean where the acidity varies by more over the course of a year than the projected rise of CO2 from Global Warming.

Such accounts of the deterioration of the oceans stemming from the scientific community run the risk of conveying the hopeless notion to managers and the public that we are confronted with an insurmountable environmental crisis of gigantic proportions. Although emphasizing problems may be intended to propel remedial action, it may achieve the contrary, because an overly negative message may lead society into pessimism or the belief that the ocean is beyond restoration. Indeed, recent media reports on problems in the ocean do not leave much room for optimism (table 1). However, an analysis of some of the calamities reported in doom and gloom media accounts (e.g., table 1) shows some—at times, severe—disconnect with actual observations. For instance, there is no evidence that ocean acidification has killed jellyfish predators, nor that jellyfish are taking over the ocean, and predictions that the killer algae, Caulerpa taxifolia, was going to devastate the Mediterranean ecosystem have not been realized, despite claims to the contrary from the media (table 1).

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Moreover, human pressures are inherently patchy (Halpern et al. 2008), and no one calamity, even climate change, acts homogeneously at global scales.

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There has been abundant discussion on the possible drivers of the perceived global increase in jellyfish blooms, one of the calamities of the ocean (Jackson et al. 2001, 2008). The putative drivers include human activities, including global warming, eutrophication, overfishing, and coastal sprawl (Purcell 2012, Duarte et al. 2013). However, the role of these pressures should be considered hypothetical, because there has been no attempt of a rigorous attribution of either global or local jellyfish blooms to any of these anthropogenic drivers (Purcell 2012). Therefore, even if jellyfish populations were increasing globally, this trend cannot be, as yet, attributed to anthropogenic pressures with any confidence.

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The realized decline in pH attributable to ocean acidification is about 0.1 unit, compared with the 0.3 to 0.4 units expected by the end of this century, when experimental assessments indicate that ocean acidification is likely to reach levels sufficient to significantly affect marine calcifiers (Doney et al. 2009). Moreover, there are significant uncertainties in the severity of the decline of marine calcifiers due to ocean acidification even at the end of the century, as ocean-acidification experiments are considered to provide worst-case scenarios, becuase a range of mechanisms, including adaptation, evolution, facilitative interactions in the ecosystem (Hendriks et al. 2010), and physiological mechanisms to up-regulate pH (McCulloch et al. 2012) may buffer the impacts and cause differential responses among species (Pandolfi et al. 2011).

However, there have been a few claims for already realized impacts of ocean acidification on calcifiers, such as a decline in the number of oysters on the West Coast of North America (Barton et al. 2012) and in Chesapeake Bay (Waldbusser et al. 2011). However, the link between these declines and ocean acidification through anthropogenic CO2 is unclear. Corrosive waters affecting oysters in hatcheries along the Oregon coast were associated with upwelling (Barton et al. 2012), not anthropogenic CO2. The decline in pH affecting oysters in Chesapeake Bay (Waldbusser et al. 2011) was not attributable to anthropogenic CO2 but was likely attributable to excess respiration associated with eutrophication. Therefore, there is, as yet, no robust evidence for realized severe disruptions of marine socioecological links from ocean acidification to anthropogenic CO2, and there are significant uncertainties regarding the level of pH change that would prompt such impacts.

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However, once hypothetical problems have risen to the status of calamities in the literature, they seem to become self-perpetuating. Indeed, the marine research community seems much better endowed with the capacity to add new calamities to the list than they are to remove them following critical scrutiny. As an example, the newest calamity extends the problem of the expansion of coastal hypoxia to a concept of global ocean deoxygenation (Keeling et al. 2010). The possible explanation that the list of calamities only experiences growth because all calamities are real is inconsistent with the examples provided above that some of them may not withstand close scrutiny. The alternative explanation is that there are flaws in the processes in place to sanction scientific evidence, such as organized skepticism, that need to be addressed to help weed out robust from weak cases for ocean calamities.

We argue that there are mechanisms, embedded both within the social dynamics of the research process and external to the research community, that tend to perpetuate the perception of the occurrence of ocean calamities, even in cases in which the evidence for these is equivocal or weak. ...

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In turn, the appetite of the media for particular headlines can influence the contents of top scientific journals. For instance, following a series of high-profile publications on overfishing and the collapse of the oceans, Hilborn (2006) became alarmed at the existence of what he termed a faith-based fisheries movement based on a faith-based acceptance of ideas and a search for data that support these ideas, rather than critical and skeptical analysis of the evidence. Hilborn (2006, p. 554) asserted that “the two journals with the highest profile, Science and Nature, clearly publish articles on fisheries not for their scientific merit, but for their publicity value… and their potential newsworthiness.” This issue continues to resonate in the scientific community, as, in a recent commentary in The Guardian, Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman (2013) asserted that the incentives offered by top journals—namely, Science, Nature, and Cell—can act to distort science. Schekman stated, “The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best.” Alternatively, it may be that the perception by the scientific community that top journals select for articles containing newsworthy messages drives a selective submission of articles on ocean calamities and collapse, which results in high academic rewards for authors of these type of papers in these journals.

Have you heard about what's been happening with the coral reefs? Those are a victim of the acidification of the oceans.

One major threat to coral reefs is tourists.

From what I understand, coral reefs are affected by depth -- they die out if the water gets too deep. Over a period of time, as sea level rises, coral reefs would die but would generaly be replaced by newer coral reefs in the new shallows. That is, of course, not a big issue -- it has happened many time over history. Remember that sea level is approximatey 100 meters higher today than it was 15,000 years ago.

As we burn fossil fuels - we're talking about oil, gas and coal - carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere. Now, there are debates about how quickly that is changing the global climate, but there is no question that billions of tons of carbon dioxide have soaked into the ocean. That's making waters more acidic, which puts some ocean ecosystems at risk, particularly coral reefs. We sent NPR science correspondent Richard Harris to Australia's Great Barrier Reef to look into these consequences. His first stop was a research station on Heron Island.

In one AP poll, 86% of those polled said that they believed in Santa Claus as a child.

Looked at it from that perspective, that 97% "consensus" for Global Warming doesn't look so great.

Hmm so 97% of climate scientists have the mind of a child? Or are you arguing that since scientists were at one time children, their arguments as adults should be discounted?
The ridiculousness of such an "argument" is obvious.