You may have noticed the drop off in our blogging. We're finding Twitter a super convenient way to convey info quickly. There's a certain ease in the short-form format; we don't feel the need to craft our language quite as carefully. And it's unbeatable for live coverage of an event. If you've been following us, you know we tweeted quite a bit at Netroots Nation last week.

But we're hearing a bit about what's not going to happen in Copenhagen in December this year and want to devote a bit more space that topic.

Two recent stories in Grist:

Game theorist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says COP-15 doomed already; 

Yvo de Boer of UN climate convention says 350 ppm is a pipe dream, that there's "no hope in hell."

Frankly, we're not relying on COP-15 anyway. Sure we're planning to show. But it's determined CITIZENS we're counting on, NOT GOVERNMENTS. Citizens are nimble; governments are ponderous—they move at the speed of old-school glaciers.

>And TIME IS JUST TOO SHORT TO DILLY DALLY and wait for someone else to save us.

We'll keep working on getting the word out about the connection between excess carbon dioxide and changing seawater chemistry. And the urgent need to cut emissions, starting at home.

We hope you'll join us.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act -- the Waxman-Markey bill, HR 2454-- represents a critical opportunity to deliver on President Obama's vision for a clean energy economy.

The bill's coming up for a vote on the House floor by Friday, June 26, the end of this week. Congress needs to hear from you, if you're an American voter.

To act immediately, go to 1Sky.org, where they've set up an easy-to-use action page.

You can fax or call your representative toll-free and urge her or him to oppose any moves to weaken this bill, support all efforts to strengthen it, and to vote to pass H.R. 2454 so it can be made even stronger in the Senate and beyond.

If you call, ask to speak to a legislative assistant in charge of energy policy. 1Sky provides a calling script you can use in talking with staffers about the bill using the calling script on the next screen.

Thanks for 1Sky for this great tool.

Thank you taking action!

Today the Center for Biological Diversity has filed the first-ever US law suit addressing ocean acidification. The Center is suing the EPA and administrator Lisa Jackson over their failure to recognize the effects of ocean acidification in water off the coast of Washington State. The case is a test of whether the Clean Water Act covers carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

"'Ocean acidification is global warming's evil twin,' said Miyoko Sakashita, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity's oceans program. 'The EPA has a duty under the Clean Water Act to protect our nation's waters from pollution, and today, CO2 is one of the biggest threats to our ocean waters.'

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, seeks to compel EPA to amend Washington's impaired waters list to include anyocean waters that are failing to attain water quality standards as a result of ocean acidification.

The Clean Water Act requires states to identify as impaired those water bodies failing to meet federal water quality standards. The Act also requires the EPA to oversee the states' impaired waters lists, approve or disapprove state-submitted lists, and add any waters failing to attain water quality standards to the impaired list when those waters are omitted by a state.

On August 15, 2007, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a letter formally requesting that Washington include ocean waters in its jurisdiction on the list of impaired waters due to ocean acidification, backed by numerous peer-reviewed reports on ocean acidification from scientific journals.

Yet, Washington's draft list failed to mention ocean acidification."

The rest of the Reuters article is available here.

"U.S. EPA is weighing a revision of standards aimed at preventing the acidification of marine waters.

The effort marks the first time EPA has invoked the Clean WaterAct to address ocean acidification, and comes in response to a 2007petition from the Center for Biological Diversity. The center notedthat EPA has failed to update the pH standard since 1976 and hasignored research published since then."

Read the complete NY Times article here.

In his testimony before the House Energy & Commerce Committee April 24, Al Gore said:

"Carbon dioxide pollution is changing the very chemistry of our oceans. Ocean acidification is already underway and is accelerating. A recentpaper published in the journal Science described how the seawater off the coast of Northern California has become so acidic from CO2 that it is now corrosive. To give some sense of perspective, for the last 44 million years, the average pH of the water has been 8.2. The scientists at Scripps measured levels off the north coast of California and Oregon at a pH of 7.75. Coral polyps that make reefs and everything that makes a shell are now beginning to suffer from a kind of osteoporosis becauseof the 25 million tons of CO2 absorbed the oceans every 24 hours."

His complete statement is available on RealClearPolitics.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responding to a petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) last year by requesting information from scientists and policy makers on ocean acidification.

The information will help the EPA decide whether to revise their current pH water criterion, a move which might lay the groundwork for regulating carbon dioxide through the Clean Water Act.

"The agency published a notice of data availability in an April 15 Federal Register notice, and asked for commenters to provide existing information about ocean acidification as well as new scientific data and policy suggestions for addressing acidification. The goal is to use the information to decide whether to grant the CBD petition, which asked the agency to revise its national marine criterion for pH to protect marine life. . . .

The ramifications of this decision are potentially expansive. EPA's decision on the pH criteria could set an ecological goal for future CO2 limits."

Read the rest of the Dake Page blog here.

A friend brought this legislation, HR 146, the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, to our attention today. It's something all US citizens can take immediate action on, to support funding for research on ocean acidification and more.

The bill will most likely be coming back before the House of Representatives this week. It needs only a simple majority to pass.

We urge you, if you're not already familiar with the bill, to learn more at:

At the bottom of this email is the helpful summary our contact provided.

The immediate action you can take is contact your Congressperson, whether via email or preferably phone, and ask them to vote in favor of HR 146, the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act. Sorry, we're not yet set up to provide you with a ready-made form; however, you can find contact information for your representative here.

The bill contains many items (hence the title "Omnibus," we're guessing), but of especial interest to us is the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act of 2009 (FOARAM), which:

• Defines "ocean acidification," for this Act, as the decrease in pH of the Earth's oceans and changes in ocean chemistry caused by chemical inputs from the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide. 
• Requires the Joint Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology of the National Science and Technology Council to develop a strategic plan for federal ocean acidification research and monitoring that provides for an assessment of ocean acidification impacts on marine organisms and ecosystems and the development of adaptation and mitigation strategies to conserve marine organisms and ecosystems. 
• Directs the Secretary of Commerce to conduct research and monitoring and authorizes the Secretary to establish an ocean acidification program in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) consistent with the strategic research plan, including: (1) providing grants for critical research projects exploring the effects of ocean acidification on ecosystems and the socioeconomic impacts of increased ocean acidification; and (2) incorporating a competitive merit-based process for awarding grants that may be conducted jointly with other participating agencies or under the National Oceanographic Partnership Program. 
• Requires the National Science Foundation (NSF) director to continue to carry out ocean acidification research supporting competitive, merit-based, peer-reviewed proposals for research and monitoring of ocean acidification and its impacts. 
• Requires the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to ensure that space-based monitoring assets are used in as productive a manner as possible for monitoring of ocean acidification and its impacts.

James Baker discusses the impact of global warming on coral reefs, ocean acidification, chemistry of the atmosphere and ocean, and growing public awareness of the issues. 

In apparent defiance of international law (and possibly commonsense), scientists are planning to start an experiment with iron fertilization. The Independent is reporting that the proposed location is the Southern Ocean. The plan: to create a plankton bloom big enough to be visible from space.

"The researchers – mainly from Germany and India, but including two Britons – plan to add some 20 tons of iron sulphate to a 186-square-mile patch of ocean about half way between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, to demonstrate a way both of combating global
warming and of saving the whale."

"Alarmed environmentalists, led by the Canada-based ETC Group, urged Germany's Environment Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, to stop the experiment. The German government suspended it while legal and environmental reviews were carried out, and the scientists expect to hear the result early this week.

Dr Richard Lampitt of the University of Southampton's National Oceanography Centre. . . says: "We desperately need to make this sort of experiment if we are going to make rational decisions in the future.""