If you want the TRUTH about the global warming con...

[dcraig1]

So what?

You are kidding aren't you?

The food web: The big fish eat the little fish and so on, right down to the basis of the food web. At the basis of the food web are the phytoplankton. Much less phytoplankton means far fewer fish, shellfish, squid, crayfish and just about anything that lives in the oceans. Phytoplankton represent something like 50% of life on earth by mass.

Layer this on top of damage from ocean acidification, increasing temperature, over fishing, pollution in coastal regions from things like nitrates from fertilizer in runoff, the huge amounts of plastic garbage decomposing to toxic hydrocarbons and things look grim for the oceans by any reasonable assessment.

If the study in Nature is a reasonably accurate assessment and the trend continues, this is very, very serious. The implications for future human food supply should be obvious.

Furthermore, it is a big disruption to the natural carbon cycle resulting in faster build up of atmospheric CO2 leading to accelerated warming. It may well be that oceans are losing their ability to absorb CO2 far sooner than anybody thought. It is a very strong positive feedback and very bad news.

 

[Splitlink]

You are kidding aren't you?

The food web: The big fish eat the little fish and so on, right down to the basis of the food web. At the basis of the food web are the phytoplankton. Much less phytoplankton means far fewer fish, shellfish, squid, crayfish and just about anything that lives in the oceans. Phytoplankton represent something like 50% of life on earth by mass.

Layer this on top of damage from ocean acidification, increasing temperature, over fishing, pollution in coastal regions from things like nitrates from fertilizer in runoff, the huge amounts of plastic garbage decomposing to toxic hydrocarbons and things look grim for the oceans by any reasonable assessment.

If the study in Nature is a reasonably accurate assessment and the trend continues, this is very, very serious. The implications for future human food supply should be obvious.

Furthermore, it is a big disruption to the natural carbon cycle resulting in faster build up of atmospheric CO2 leading to accelerated warming. It may well be that oceans are losing their ability to absorb CO2 far sooner than anybody thought. It is a very strong positive feedback and very bad news.

I have got to the stage where I no longer worry about the inevitable. In any case, I won't be around when it happens- I hope - because ,if I am wrong, it will be devastating.

I think that we are going to wipe ourselves out over a relatively long space of time, several generations, a flash in the universal scheme of things, but that it will happen. I do not read these technical, professorial , papers because the evidence is happening every day, right before our eyes.

Lots of people, MrGecko is not alone, in believing that there is little importance to the elimination of plankton. The oxygen loss to the planet and its life is devastating, added to the destruction of the rain forests.

In some of the river deltas in Spain, we have tropical weed floating bank to bank and starving all the fish of its oxygen supply.

Where do we look for optimism? You tell me!

That climatic change is a natural process, I'll go along with, but humankind is contributing in an absolutely suicidal way, as well.

 

[Mornington Crescent]

just let me know when all this agw melts the ice which then switches off the gulf stream

 

[Splitlink]

just let me know when all this agw melts the ice which then switches off the gulf stream

Don't you think that that is happening? I read a few weeks ago that polar bears were mating with the brown bears because of the ability of both to now enter the zones of the other.

Plus, of course, the agreement between Canada and Russia necessary for the passage of ships between their countries.

 

[William Waller]

A new study published in Nature estimates that phytoplankton in the world's oceans have declined 40% in the last 100 years and continue to decline at 1% per year.

http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/29/nature-decline-ocean-phytoplankton-global-warming-boris-worm/

Phytoplankton are the basis of the ocean food web, provide over 50% of the world's oxygen and drawn down large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis. They are pretty much the basis of life on earth.

The principle cause is thought to be the warming of the ocean surface, leading to slower overturning of the ocean surface layer which in turn causes fewer nutrients necessary for the phytoplankton growth to be brought to the surface.

If this study is confirmed by further research, this is bordering on the catastrophic in terms of both major damage to ocean ecosystems and to accelerated warming due to the lowered capacity of the oceans to take up CO2.

This is a major wakeup call. We may be closer to the edge than anybody knew.

A plethora of media articles this morning claim global warming is killing off phytoplankton, which forms the base of the oceans' food chain. The problem with these articles is they are all based on a single, very shaky study that is contradicted by many more rigorous studies that have reached the opposite conclusion.

To reach the conclusion that global warming is harming phytoplankton, researchers had to rely on indirect indicators of past phytoplankton populations, spotty and geographically incomplete samples for current phytoplankton populations, and speculative theories tying the alleged reduction in phytoplankton populations to global warming.

By contrast, many studies in the peer-reviewed scientific literature have shown that higher temperatures and/or higher amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide benefit rather than harm phytoplankton. For example:

In 2005, Journal of Geophysical Research published a paper by scientists who examined trends in chlorophyll concentrations, which are the building blocks of ocean life. The French and American scientists reported “an overall increase of the world ocean average chlorophyll concentration by about 22 percent” during the prior two decades of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.

In 2007, Global Change Biology published a paper by scientists who observed that higher carbon dioxide levels correlate with better growth conditions for oceanic life. The highest carbon dioxide concentrations produced “higher growth rates and biomass yields” than the lower carbon dioxide conditions. Higher carbon dioxide levels may well fuel “subsequent primary production, phytoplankton blooms, and sustaining oceanic food-webs,” the scientists reported.

In 2008, Biogeosciences published a paper by scientists who had subjected marine organisms to varying concentrations of carbon dioxide, including abrupt changes of carbon dioxide concentration. The ecosystems were “surprisingly resilient” to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and “the ecosystem composition, bacterial and phytoplankton abundances and productivity, grazing rates and total grazer abundance and reproduction were not significantly affected by CO2-induced effects.”

For some strange reason, the media largely ignored these peer-reviewed studies showing global warming is benefiting phytoplankton, but are running amuck with articles claiming the sky is falling based on the single, more speculative claims of phytoplankton harm.

http://www.globalwarmingheartland.o...rt_Carbon_Dioxide_Benefits_Phytoplankton.html

 

[William Waller]

Now it’s a Phytoplanktonic panic
Posted on July 30, 2010 by Anthony Watts

Borrowing a phrase from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze, Phytoplankton are now apparently in a “Death Spiral”. See Death spiral of the oceans and the original press release about an article in Nature from a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University, which started all this. I’m a bit skeptical of the method which they describe in the PR here:

A simple tool known as a Secchi disk as been used by scientists since 1899 to determine the transparency of the world’s oceans. The Secchi disk is a round disk, about the size of a dinner plate, marked with a black and white alternating pattern. It’s attached to a long string of rope which researchers slowly lower into the water. The depth at which the pattern is no longer visible is recorded and scientists use the data to determine the amount of algae present in the water.

Hmmm. A Secchi disk is a proxy, not a direct measurement of phytoplankton. It measures turbidity, which can be due to quite a number of factors, including but not limited to Phytoplankton. While they claim to also do chlorophyll measurements, the accuracy of a SD measurements made by thousands of observers is the central question.

From the literature: The Secchi disk transparency measurement is perhaps one of the oldest and simplest of all measurements. But there is grave danger of errors in such measurements where a water telescope is not utilized, as well as in the presence of water color and inorganic turbidity (source: Vollenweider and Kerekes, 1982). I’ll have more on this later. – Anthony

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/30/now-its-phytoplankton-panic/

 

[William Waller]

Walking the Plank-ton
Posted on July 31, 2010 by Willis Eschenbach

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Following on from Anthony’s article, here are my thoughts about the phytoplankton paper “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century”, by Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis & Boris Worm.

I started to write about this earlier, but I decided to wait until I had the actual paper. The paper in question is behind a paywall at Nature Magazine, but through my sub-oceanic channels (h/t to WS) I have obtained a copy. The paper makes two main claims, that: a) the numbers of phytoplankton have been cut by more than half since 1900, and b) the general warming of the global oceans is the reason for the declining numbers of phytoplankton.

First, what are phytoplankton when they are at home, and where is their home? Plankton are the ubiquitous soup of microscopic life in the ocean. Phytoplankon are the plant-like members of the plankton, the ones that contain chlorophyll and feed on sunshine. Phytoplankton are to the ocean what plant life is to the land. Almost all oceanic life depends on phytoplankton. Other than a thin strip of seaweeds and sea grasses along the coasts, phytoplankton are the microscopic plants that are the foundation of the vast entire oceanic food chain. Without phytoplankton there would be no deep water oceanic life to speak of. Figure 1 shows where you find phytoplankton:

Figure 1. Global distribution of phytoplankton. Lowest concentration is purple and blue, middle concentration is green, highest concentration is yellow and red. Source http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/0702_planktoncloud.html

So where did the Nature paper go wrong?

The short answer is that I don’t know … but I don’t believe their results. The paper is very detailed, in particular the Supplementary Online Information (SOI). It all seems well thought out and investigated … but I don’t believe their results. They have noted and discussed various sources of error. They have compared the use of Secchi disks as a proxy, and covered most of the ground clearly … and I still don’t believe their results. Here’s exactly why I don’t believe them.

This is their abstract (emphasis mine):

In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends.

Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures. We conclude that global phytoplankton concentration has declined over the past century; this decline will need to be considered in future studies of marine ecosystems, geochemical cycling, ocean circulation and fisheries.

The first clue to where they went wrong is visible in Fig. 1. Although as you can see there is more phytoplankton in the cooler regions of the north, the same is not true in the corresponding regions in the south despite the ocean temperatures being very similar. In addition, there are many places where the ocean is warm (e.g. tropical coasts) that have lots of phytoplankton, while in other warm areas there is very little phytoplankton.

The rude truth of phytoplankton is this: phytoplankton growth is generally not limited by temperature. Instead, it is limited by nutrients. Where nutrients are plentiful, the phytoplankton grow regardless of temperature. Nutrients are more common along the coastline, where sub-oceanic currents come to the surface bringing nutrients from the deep ocean floor, and rivers bring nutrients from inland. For example, in Fig. 1 you can see the nutrients from the Amazon river causing the red area at the river mouth (north-east South American coast).

Indeed, the fact that phytoplankton are generally nutrient limited rather than temperature limited has been demonstrated in the “ocean fertilization” experiments using rust. If you spread a shipload of rust (iron oxide) out into the tropical ocean, you generally get an immediate bloom of phytoplankton. Temperature is not the problem.

So to start with, the idea that increasing temperature automatically leads to decreasing phytoplankton is not generally true. There are vast areas of the ocean where higher temperatures are correlated with more phytoplankton. For example, the warmer deep tropics generally have more phytoplankton than the cooler adjacent subtropics.

The paper’s most unbelievable claim, however, is their calculation that since 1899, the density of phytoplankon has been decreasing annually by 0.006 milligrams per cubic metre (mg m-3). They give the current global density of phytoplankton as being 0.56 mg m-3. Thus they are claiming that globally the concentration of phytoplankton has dropped by more than 50% over the last century.

Now, a half century ago I learned to sail on San Francisco Bay. Since then I’ve spent a good chunk of my lifetime at sea, as a commercial fisherman from California to the Bering Sea, as a sailboat delivery crewman, as a commercial and sport diver, and as a surfer. And call me crazy, but I simply don’t believe that the sea only has half the phytoplankton that it had in 1900. If that were true, it would not take satellites and complex mathematical analysis to show it. People would have noticed it many years ago.

I say this because phytoplankton are the base of almost the entire mass of oceanic life. They are what almost all other life in the ocean ultimately feeds on, predators and prey as well. The authors of the study do not seem to realize that if the total amount of phytoplankton were cut by more than half as they claim, the total mass of almost all living creatures in the open ocean would be cut about in half as well. No way around it, every farmer knows the equation. Half the feed means half the weight of the animals.

And I see no evidence of that having happened over the last century. It certainly does not accord with my own extensive practical experience of the ocean. And I see no one else making the claim that we only have half the total mass of deep-water oceanic life that we had a century ago..

The other thing that makes their claimed temperature/phytoplankton link very doubtful is that according to the HadISST dataset, the global ocean surface temperature has only increased by four tenths of a degree C in the last hundred years.

Four tenths of a degree … an almost un-noticeable amount. Yet their paper says (emphasis mine):

Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.

These kinds of claims drive me nuts. Is there anyone out there that truly believes that a change of global average ocean temperature of four tenths of a degree C over the last hundred years has cut the total mass of phytoplankton, and thus the total mass of all oceanic creatures, in half? Really?

So that’s why I say I don’t know where their math went wrong, but I don’t believe their results. I don’t believe we’ve lost about half the total mass of all oceanic creatures. Half the planet’s open ocean dwellers? Where is the evidence to support that outrageous claim? And I don’t believe that an ocean temperature change of four tenths of a degree over a century has made much difference to phytoplankton levels, as they grow at all temperatures.

Why don’t I know where their math went wrong? Unfortunately, they have not posted up the data that they actually used. Nor have they shown any of their data in the form of graphs or tables. Instead, they have shown model results, and merely pointed to general websites where a variety of datasets are maintained. So we don’t know, for example, whether they used the 1° grid version or the 2.5° grid version of a given dataset. Nor have they posted the computer code that they used in the analysis. Plus, the very first link in their paper to the first and most important data source is dead.

Grrrr … but dead link or not, pointing to a website as the data source in their kind of paper is meaningless. To do the analysis, they must have created a database of all of the observations, with the meta data, and the details for the type etc. for each observation. If they would include that database and their code in the SOI, then someone might be able to figure out where their math went wrong … my guess is that it may be due to overfitting or misfitting of their GAM model, but that’s just a wild guess.

It is a shame that they did not post their data and code, because other than the lack of data and code it is a fascinating analysis of a very interesting dataset. I don’t accept their analysis of the data because it doesn’t pass the “reasonableness” test, but that doesn’t mean that the dataset does not contain valuable information.

[Update] An alert reader noted that the image in Figure 1 was of a particular month and not a yearly average. So I’ve made a short movie of the variations in plankton over the year.

Figure 2. Monthly movie of plankton concentrations. Click on image to see animation.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/31/walking-the-plank-ton/#more-22836

 

[Splitlink]

Walking the Plank-ton
Posted on July 31, 2010 by Willis Eschenbach

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Following on from Anthony’s article, here are my thoughts about the phytoplankton paper “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century”, by Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis & Boris Worm.

I started to write about this earlier, but I decided to wait until I had the actual paper. The paper in question is behind a paywall at Nature Magazine, but through my sub-oceanic channels (h/t to WS) I have obtained a copy. The paper makes two main claims, that: a) the numbers of phytoplankton have been cut by more than half since 1900, and b) the general warming of the global oceans is the reason for the declining numbers of phytoplankton.

First, what are phytoplankton when they are at home, and where is their home? Plankton are the ubiquitous soup of microscopic life in the ocean. Phytoplankon are the plant-like members of the plankton, the ones that contain chlorophyll and feed on sunshine. Phytoplankton are to the ocean what plant life is to the land. Almost all oceanic life depends on phytoplankton. Other than a thin strip of seaweeds and sea grasses along the coasts, phytoplankton are the microscopic plants that are the foundation of the vast entire oceanic food chain. Without phytoplankton there would be no deep water oceanic life to speak of. Figure 1 shows where you find phytoplankton:

Figure 1. Global distribution of phytoplankton. Lowest concentration is purple and blue, middle concentration is green, highest concentration is yellow and red. Source http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/0702_planktoncloud.html

So where did the Nature paper go wrong?

The short answer is that I don’t know … but I don’t believe their results. The paper is very detailed, in particular the Supplementary Online Information (SOI). It all seems well thought out and investigated … but I don’t believe their results. They have noted and discussed various sources of error. They have compared the use of Secchi disks as a proxy, and covered most of the ground clearly … and I still don’t believe their results. Here’s exactly why I don’t believe them.

This is their abstract (emphasis mine):

In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration (available since 1979) have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends.

Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures. We conclude that global phytoplankton concentration has declined over the past century; this decline will need to be considered in future studies of marine ecosystems, geochemical cycling, ocean circulation and fisheries.

The first clue to where they went wrong is visible in Fig. 1. Although as you can see there is more phytoplankton in the cooler regions of the north, the same is not true in the corresponding regions in the south despite the ocean temperatures being very similar. In addition, there are many places where the ocean is warm (e.g. tropical coasts) that have lots of phytoplankton, while in other warm areas there is very little phytoplankton.

The rude truth of phytoplankton is this: phytoplankton growth is generally not limited by temperature. Instead, it is limited by nutrients. Where nutrients are plentiful, the phytoplankton grow regardless of temperature. Nutrients are more common along the coastline, where sub-oceanic currents come to the surface bringing nutrients from the deep ocean floor, and rivers bring nutrients from inland. For example, in Fig. 1 you can see the nutrients from the Amazon river causing the red area at the river mouth (north-east South American coast).

Indeed, the fact that phytoplankton are generally nutrient limited rather than temperature limited has been demonstrated in the “ocean fertilization” experiments using rust. If you spread a shipload of rust (iron oxide) out into the tropical ocean, you generally get an immediate bloom of phytoplankton. Temperature is not the problem.

So to start with, the idea that increasing temperature automatically leads to decreasing phytoplankton is not generally true. There are vast areas of the ocean where higher temperatures are correlated with more phytoplankton. For example, the warmer deep tropics generally have more phytoplankton than the cooler adjacent subtropics.

The paper’s most unbelievable claim, however, is their calculation that since 1899, the density of phytoplankon has been decreasing annually by 0.006 milligrams per cubic metre (mg m-3). They give the current global density of phytoplankton as being 0.56 mg m-3. Thus they are claiming that globally the concentration of phytoplankton has dropped by more than 50% over the last century.

Now, a half century ago I learned to sail on San Francisco Bay. Since then I’ve spent a good chunk of my lifetime at sea, as a commercial fisherman from California to the Bering Sea, as a sailboat delivery crewman, as a commercial and sport diver, and as a surfer. And call me crazy, but I simply don’t believe that the sea only has half the phytoplankton that it had in 1900. If that were true, it would not take satellites and complex mathematical analysis to show it. People would have noticed it many years ago.

I say this because phytoplankton are the base of almost the entire mass of oceanic life. They are what almost all other life in the ocean ultimately feeds on, predators and prey as well. The authors of the study do not seem to realize that if the total amount of phytoplankton were cut by more than half as they claim, the total mass of almost all living creatures in the open ocean would be cut about in half as well. No way around it, every farmer knows the equation. Half the feed means half the weight of the animals.

And I see no evidence of that having happened over the last century. It certainly does not accord with my own extensive practical experience of the ocean. And I see no one else making the claim that we only have half the total mass of deep-water oceanic life that we had a century ago..

The other thing that makes their claimed temperature/phytoplankton link very doubtful is that according to the HadISST dataset, the global ocean surface temperature has only increased by four tenths of a degree C in the last hundred years.

Four tenths of a degree … an almost un-noticeable amount. Yet their paper says (emphasis mine):

Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.

These kinds of claims drive me nuts. Is there anyone out there that truly believes that a change of global average ocean temperature of four tenths of a degree C over the last hundred years has cut the total mass of phytoplankton, and thus the total mass of all oceanic creatures, in half? Really?

So that’s why I say I don’t know where their math went wrong, but I don’t believe their results. I don’t believe we’ve lost about half the total mass of all oceanic creatures. Half the planet’s open ocean dwellers? Where is the evidence to support that outrageous claim? And I don’t believe that an ocean temperature change of four tenths of a degree over a century has made much difference to phytoplankton levels, as they grow at all temperatures.

Why don’t I know where their math went wrong? Unfortunately, they have not posted up the data that they actually used. Nor have they shown any of their data in the form of graphs or tables. Instead, they have shown model results, and merely pointed to general websites where a variety of datasets are maintained. So we don’t know, for example, whether they used the 1° grid version or the 2.5° grid version of a given dataset. Nor have they posted the computer code that they used in the analysis. Plus, the very first link in their paper to the first and most important data source is dead.

Grrrr … but dead link or not, pointing to a website as the data source in their kind of paper is meaningless. To do the analysis, they must have created a database of all of the observations, with the meta data, and the details for the type etc. for each observation. If they would include that database and their code in the SOI, then someone might be able to figure out where their math went wrong … my guess is that it may be due to overfitting or misfitting of their GAM model, but that’s just a wild guess.

It is a shame that they did not post their data and code, because other than the lack of data and code it is a fascinating analysis of a very interesting dataset. I don’t accept their analysis of the data because it doesn’t pass the “reasonableness” test, but that doesn’t mean that the dataset does not contain valuable information.

[Update] An alert reader noted that the image in Figure 1 was of a particular month and not a yearly average. So I’ve made a short movie of the variations in plankton over the year.

Figure 2. Monthly movie of plankton concentrations. Click on image to see animation.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/31/walking-the-plank-ton/#more-22836

I'm not a scientist and, therefore, I don't read the papers to which you refer. You do, and I respect the effort that you have put into your post and make no attempt to refute any of what you say.

My argument about plankton is based on the condition of the seas, to what they were fifty years ago. We are using them as a general dumping ground for all the world's waste and, IMO, although temperature may have no bearing on the disappearance of plankton, I am sure that the pollution does.

Tanker operators were as guilty as anyone. I have cleaned tankers all over the world and my company was as much to blame as I was because, if I had objected to tankcleaning I would have been out of a job. We had to arrive clean at the loading port because, in those days, we did not know what our next cargo was going to be.

I have cleaned tanks north of Palermo and in the North Sea in preparation for dry-docking (in the fifties) That has all been stopped, now, but what about the latest big polluter, the cruise ship? Heaven alone knows where all their waste goes, but I can imagine. You can go down to Barcelona port any day and see several tied up.It is a known fact that the few fish that manage to survive in these waters are full of mercury and other chenicals.

Do you think that plankton is unaffected by all the chemicals dumped into the oceans by international companies? I most certainly do not.

 

[lbranjord]

Store up food in your basement, start a militia, quit your day job, pull your money off the market, start lifting weights, read about 2012 apocolypse

jk

 

[William Waller]

Hi Split,

I have no idea what effect pollution might be having, but it seems likely that it would have some. Regardless of whether it is or not, there are any number of reasons to manage resources more carefully, reduce waste (something like a THIRD of all food purchased in the UK is thrown away FFS), and reduce pollution.

These all seem to be issues that affect the oceans and which we could make progress on immediately and with relative ease.