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I can tell you from keeping a coral reef tank, that a "slight move towards neutral" from 8.1 to 7.8 means stuff starts to die. At pH at or below 7.8, coral cannot generate it's carbonate skeleton, and lots of other organisms are affected. In fact I personally have a CO2 scrubber connected to my reef tank in order to combat the high levels of CO2 from inside the house.

As other posters have pointed out, pH is logarithmic. A 0.1 drop from ph 8.2 to 8.1 corresponds to something like a 30% increase in hydrogen ion concentration.

If your blood where to drop by 0.1 pH you'd start having seizures. (it's called Acidosis, and that's a medical term, not an alarmist term) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidosis




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