Why did the Tasmanians Stop Eating Fish?
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I could also imagine there might have been a time when there was a group who fished which where eventually wiped out. The non-fishing group may have demonized them so much that when they got rid of them, they just weren't able to overcome the view that fishing was inherently evil. This is, of course, just speculation.
> Did they just become inundated by the sea, perhaps living as the people of XXX live today, on a very low island in the middle of the sea, ....
There is a reference to an endnote at the end of the sentence, but the note talks about tidal waves, not this mysterious "XXX".
Most recent example was a paper I was writing on purchasing brand over product - I wrote about "buying a 'Rolex' over a XXX", where XXX later became "an Oyster Perpetual Milgauss" - my guess is the author meant to replace XXX with some global-warming concerned island nation, but forgot.
About your carbon dioxide non-sequitur, as carbon dioxide gets absorbed in the ocean it forms carbonic acid, which changes ph levels. A relative modest change in ph level causes problems for animals that use calcium carbonate as a building material. (You cannot lay down calcium carbonate structures when the water is even slightly acidic.) A prime example is coral, and ocean acidification has already been blamed for large coral die-offs in the great barrier reef of Australia.
Therefore whether or not global warming is man-made, more carbon dioxide is the last thing that coral reefs need right now.
CO2 + H20 + CaCO3 yields Ca(HCO3)2 + energy. This reaction turns calcium carbonate into calcium bicarbonate, which is water soluble and floats off.
HC03 is unstable, and only exists in a stable form when combined with a metal ion. Such as happened above in a reaction that came out of destroying calcium carbonate.
C03 is unstable, and only exists in a stable form when combined with a metal ion. The supply of such metal ions at the present time is relatively stable and is uncorrelated with temperature.
And when you dissolve CO2 in H2O, there is an equilibrium balance between C02 + H2O and H2CO3.
So half the compounds you list don't exist on their own. And even high school chemistry is enough to tell you that adding CO2 to a marine environment with lots of CaCO3 is going to have an inevitable net effect of dissolving some of the CaCO3 that is there.
You'd have been better off falling back on the fact that the oceans are large, and that ph is locally more affected by ocean currents and upwelling from the deep ocean than it is by anything in the atmosphere. Because it is true that the yearly variation at any given location exceeds the total rise in the 20th century, and also exceeds the projected rise in the 21st century. (That said, the problem appears at the peaks, and high peaks can cause die-offs even though ph levels spend most of their time in a good range.)