You don't get acidification as long as CO2 levels change slowly enough that it mixes down to the bottom of the ocean and then gets buffered by calcium bicarbonate being dissolved there and mixing back to the top. But this mixing takes place on the scale of a thousand years. This is no big deal for CO2 level changes taking place over geological time. But it doesn't help shellfish with sudden increases of CO2 taking place on a scale of decades or centuries.
Start raising a tax on CO2 emissions and at the same time start paying people to put it in the ground. Raise the price on both each year and you could reach equilibrium pretty fast. Should have started 20 years ago, but now is better than never. Maybe start at increasing it at $10 dollars a ton/year. $10/ton is about $4 per barrel of oil. If people saw that sequestering CO2 would pay $100 a ton in a decade the research and excitement around the ideas would be huge and likely encourage many breakthroughs. Isolated solar and wind farms extracting CO2 from the air and pumping it underground could be a huge business.
Edit: $10/ton CO2 is more like $4 a barrel than the $2 I originally wrote. Source: https://pyrolysium.org/how-much-co2-produced-by-burning-one-...
says:
> Bivalves grown under near preindustrial CO2 levels displayed thicker, more robust shells than individuals grown at present CO2 concentrations, whereas bivalves exposed to CO2 levels expected later this century had shells that were malformed and eroded. These results suggest that the ocean acidification that has occurred during the past two centuries may be inhibiting the development and survival of larval shellfish and contributing to global declines of some bivalve populations.
i'm not sure where the claim "all of the shellfish species that currently exist lived back then too" is coming from, although it is correct that CO2 was higher in the past (https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm)
Also, we're talking about coral bleaching and it being blamed on CO2 despite absolutely no evidence, and despite the fact that some coral reefs are seeing normal growth, while others which are in major pollution streams from Asian rivers are seeing bleaching events. But it has to be CO2 because Al Gore says so! Ignore the billions of tons of toxic waste being pumped into the Ocean by China and India and Africa! Europeans and North Americans are the problem with their evil CO2! They need to become poor like everyone else to save the planet!
