"The natural pH of the ocean is determined by a need to balance the deposition and burial of on the sea floor against the influx of and into the ocean from dissolving rocks on land, called weathering. These processes stabilize the pH of the ocean, by a mechanism called compensation...The point of bringing it up again is to note that if the concentration of the atmosphere changes more slowly than this, as it always has throughout the Vostok record, the pH of the ocean will be relatively unaffected because compensation can keep up. The fossil fuel acidification is much faster than natural changes, and so the acid spike will be more intense than the earth has seen in at least 800,000 years."