Pick a loved icon and put a gun to its head

ACM's favourite journalist, Rosslyn Beeby, tugs at the heartstrings, as "climate change" is set to wipe out another cute creature:

Nemo the clownfish will lose the ability to smell the way home, as climate change makes the world's oceans more acidic, new research says.

A team of scientists from Australia, Russia and Norway have discovered that as seawater becomes more acidic, baby clownfish the stars of the Disney cartoon Finding Nemo lose the scent cues that guide them home from the open ocean to the coastal reefs where they were born.

''This is a disturbing finding, with potentially devastating consequences for marine life. It could lead to a decline in coastal reef species,'' James Cook University marine biologist Philip Munday said.

In fact, the article uses the name "Nemo" no less than 5 times (including in the headline), just to ram home the point. And, of course, it's all our fault:

"At least 30 per cent of the human-generated carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the past 200 years has been absorbed by the oceans,'' the paper says.

This has caused the ocean to acidify at a rate about 100 times faster than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

Read it here.