LONDON — New research suggests that by 2100 there will be no sea water left with the chemical properties that have supported coral reef growth in the past.

Without deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, the planet’s coral reefs could be in serious trouble. In a world in which humans continue to burn fossil fuels unchecked, ocean conditions will become ultimately inhospitable, according to US scientists.

Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution in Washington and colleagues make their sombre prediction in Environmental Research Letters. Their argument on the face of it seems inconsistent with other recent research on reef response to climate change, which in one case suggests that some corals could vanish, and in another that some corals might adapt, very slowly.

But the debate in all three cases is about the rate of warming, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the ultimate impact of changes in the pH levels of the seas.

Ricke and Caldeira looked not so much at the warming of the seas – tropical corals are very sensitive to temperature – nor at the levels of acidification as such (because rain dissolves carbon dioxide to form a weak carbonic acid and inevitably affects […]