1. They are no longer in power.

2. They want to get back in power.

3. They feel this is an issue they can gain politically with by scaring the American public. They desperately want to get a political victory against Obama, which is running a very effective administration so far, and they see this as a way to do it.

There is a problem in recovering oil from shale reservoirs since even though the oil is present in large quantities the permeability of the reservoir makes it very difficult to extract.

Recent advances in horizontal drilling and “fracing” are allowing more of this oil to be produced.

That said, the paper remains useful for its neat summary of how the chemistry works:

“When a CO2 change occurs over a short time interval (that is, less than about 10^4 yr), ocean pH is relatively sensitive to added CO2. However, when a CO2 change occurs over a long time interval (longer than about 10^5 yr), ocean chemistry is buffered by interactions with carbonate minerals, thereby reducing sensitivity to pH changes.

“Based on the record of atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 300 Myr and our geochemical model, there is no evidence that ocean pH was more than 0.6 units lower than today. Our general circulation model results indicate that continued release of fossil-fuel CO2 into the atmosphere could lead to a pH reduction of 0.7 units. We conclude that unabated CO2 emissions over the coming centuries may produce changes in ocean pH that are greater than any experienced in the past 300 Myr, with the possible exception of those resulting from rare, catastrophic events in Earth’s history.”

(See this paper for a more detailed discussion of the chemistry.)

Bear in mind that pH is a measure of the balance of negative and positive ions and *not* the quantity of ions, which is why it can and has stayed close to (slightly positive) present levels regardless of atmospheric CO2 levels (so long as the latter hasn’t changed too quickly). But of course it is changing much too quickly.

As the paper says, other than a few brief catastrophic events (when marine life was hammered by pulses of CO2 and CO2-generating methane), variation in CO2 levels has had little connection to pH. Doubtless Newt would be interested to know that one of those catastrophic events (the end-Permian) was bad enough to wipe out the then-existing corals, although after ten million years or so the ones we have now evolved to take their place.

So Newt is comprehensively wrong on this as well.

Newt also spoke about the “bakken formation”. Isn’t that the famed ‘oil shale’ which was much discussed in the 70’s? Worse than the canadian tar sands is what i’ve heard about it.

[JR: It's natural gas. Obama campaigned on developing it.]

http://www.nature.com/ nature/ journal/ v425/ n6956/ full/ 425365a.html