Actually, depending on the process efficiency (the article claims 70%), this is a great complement to renewables. Whenever there is a surplus of renewable energy (and we do have this situation now regularly in Germany, not a country particularly blessed with sunshine), it can be turned into storable fuel. This makes larger capacities more economical, and in a pinch you could even use the fuel to power diesel generators when there is a lull in the renewable supply.

That's nonsense. It's probably based on the legal principle "assumed innocent until proven guilty", but that fails in two ways. First, it's only a legal principle about how to treat suspects. It's not reality - guilt begins at the act, not at the conviction. And secondly, there is indeed plenty of proof of Goebbels crimes. There is no conviction (because he died before that), but that is also true for Bonnie and Clyde, Jack the Ripper, Richard Nixon, and even, as far as I know, Osama bin Laden.

You do understand that a) Maslowski was speaking about the possibility, not the certainty, and b), that he did not represent the mainstream, but deviated from it significantly? Indeed, this is the very opposite of "group think" - it's a range of different opinions.

pH measures the concentration of H3O+, or, in simpler terms, the availability of free protons for reactions. Acids are substances that like losing a proton. The acid that causes acidification of our oceans (and sparkle in sodas and sparkling water) is carbonic acid, or CO2 dissolved in water. More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more CO2 dissolved in the water, which equals more carbonic acid and a lower pH. How you measure pH is an independent question.

I think you misread my comment. I'm trying hard to avoid an ad-hominem attack on you while pointing out that the level of understanding you exhibit does not give the impression that you understand the principles of the issue.

See what above?

Who is "they"? The authors of the original paper or the operators of Junk Science? The original paper is here, and looking at the abstract, you can see that the interpretation at Hockeyschtick parroted at Junk Science is completely misleading, and basically has nothing to do with the paper.

Most of those links are to political propagandists, few of which have even a formal scientific qualification. And they don't seem to even mention a good reference to the original article they do whine about. Sabine and Feely have several articles on the topic, e.g. The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2 (2004), or The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2 since the mid 1990s (2014), but I could not find one with those as the only authors. Google Scholar shows the first with over 2000 citations - if it is so bad, I would expect some serious criticism in the scientific literature, not just in the denialist echo chamber.

Since when is a web site a hominus?

I'm sorry, but the above is a very basic result from chemistry - typically something taught in high school. It's also something you experience in everyday live - a warm coke will go flat faster, but you also need some way to get the sparkle into the coke (by exposing it to CO2 at a very high partial pressure). This is not magic, it's basic physics and chemistry.

I'm very hard trying to avoid ad-hominem. I do read scientific papers for a living (well, part of it). I do write reasonably well-regarded papers, and I frequently are asked to formally review papers (which I usually do). I find it quite hard to fully comprehend papers that are within my general area of science (computer science) and even my specialty (logic and deduction) if they are not within my area of micro-specialisation (first-order reasoning). Above, you admit that you do not fully understand basic high-school level chemistry. What makes you think that you can understand graduate-level climate science papers?

Your Junk Science link discusses and mentions only one paper. It takes the results out of context and misrepresents the paper by conflating temperature-driven processes (including e.g. seasonal changes) with CO2 driven processes (which increase the base level the pH varies around. Junk Science also take results from one inland lake in Japan and extrapolates that to the worlds ocean - talk about unjustified extrapolation.

At your second link, Sustainable Oregon , I fail to find a single link to a peer-reviewed paper. There may well be one, but if so it's carefully hidden among links to so-called think tank publications, denier blogs, and self-published (as opposed to scientific) opinion pieces.

Actually, JunkScience is, well, junk science. Yes, all things being equal, warmer water holds less dissolved CO2, i.e. it becomes less acidic. But all things are not equal. The equilibrium CO2 concentration also depends on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and as that increases, so does the acidity of the ocean. And that is something we can actually observe, both in the lab and in nature.

It's a bad idea to take one's science from most blogs or propaganda outfits. Check Google Scholar for peer-reviewed scientific papers.

You mean the section that says "It is important to note that none of this research suggests that global warming and climate change are not affecting the ice sheets of Antarctica but they do imply that any melting due to global warming is being exacerbated by geothermal heating from beneath the ice cap"? Yes, I read that. I also read that "A survey of the thickness of the Earth's crust in Antarctica found a particularly thin zone under Marie Byrd Land, where the Thwaites Glacier is located, which is consistent with the presence of a 'major volcanic dome'", which indicates that this is a long-term effect and should not affect the net rate of melting - it would be part of the steady state if we had one.

Again, what is increasing is the maximum sea ice extend. The ice mass balance is strictly negative - i.e. there is more ice melting than water freezing year over year. The amount of ice is going down, by about 70 Gt per year (albeit with large uncertainties), and accelerating.

From your source: "Antarctica as a whole has been shrinking in volume by 125 cubic kilometres a year." Do you read those sources, or do you just google for confirmation using bad search terms?

And your point is? Because one non-scientist made an ambiguous claim about a possible outcome, all scientific claims are invalid? We've started commercial shipping through the Arctic, and "Antarctic ice" is shrinking, what is growing slightly is maximum Antarctic sea ice extend.

Actually, the full quote is "...and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean..." (emphasis mine). The source of the claim, Berndt Balchen certainly had an interesting biography, but neither was he trained as a scientist, nor what the statement in a scientific publication.

I'm sorry, but that is simply unscientific nonsense. Human emissions are about 2 orders of magnitude greater than all volcanic emissions combined. None of the major volcanic eruptions of the last decades have left a significant blip in the CO2 curves. See e.g. the USGS on the issue.

Sadly, not.

Well, I can order an iMac from Apple, plug in the keyboard and the mouse, and say "I build a computer". Or I start with a shovel of sand and make my own silicon. I don't know how many computer users understand flip-flops, or nand-gates, or FETs. I think some of that should be in the general understanding of science. And for computer scientists, knowing about things like cache size and organisation, register set, and ALU capabilities does make a significant difference if coding for performance. I was once bitten during the transition from SPARC to Intel when I found out that SPARC's fantastically thought out register windows (meant to sped up function calls) actually slowed down function calls once your calling depth became great enough that you ran through the register file and had to start putting those large register windows on the stack. Register-starved Intel did better in that case. So benchmarking on SPARC indicated "no recursion", while in Intel recursion was actually faster than iteration with a dedicated stack in software.

That particular converter is called an inverter, and is pretty standard today. There are some good reasons for using more DC (in particular high-voltage DC for long-distance transmission).

Methinks you need to take your sarcasmometer back to the shop for readjustment...