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Oceans Could Soon Not Have Enough Oxygen To Support Marine Life (iflscience.com)

An anonymous reader writes: As the climate continues to change in response to the increasing amount of carbon humans pump into the atmosphere, the oceans are being particularly hard hit from melting Arctic sea ice, acidification, and warming surface temperatures. Yet those are not the only difficulties that marine life has to deal with, as a new study reports that the oceans are also losing oxygen. As the majority of marine life relies on the oxygen dissolved in the oceans, it is worrying that noticeable differences have been observed in the gas concentrations in the world's waters. The reduction in oxygen will have profound effects on ocean biodiversity, though as the study published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles shows, not all regions will be affected in the same way or over the same period of time."Loss of oxygen in the ocean is one of the serious side effects of a warming atmosphere, and a major threat to marine life," said lead author Matthew Long of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "Since oxygen concentrations in the ocean naturally vary depending on variations in winds and temperature at the surface, it's been challenging to attribute any deoxygenation to climate change. This new study tells us when we can expect the impact from climate change to overwhelm the natural variability."

12 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Cue the Tired Old White Men... by The+Bloooated · · Score: 0, Insightful

    ... with beachfront property to sell, bleating: "Quit talking about globular warming! I got beachfront property to sell!!!"

    1. Re:Cue the Tired Old White Men... by CajunArson · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How to tell if your post is racist: Replace the politically correct racial target with a politically incorrect one making the exact same statement and wait for SJWs to attack.

      Racist much?

      --
      AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  2. Some perspective here... by Hussman32 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    -The ocean is alkaline, which means that stronger base electrolytes (as compared to the weak carbonic acid) still dominate the charge balance.
    -This is an El Nino year, the higher surface temperature will release more oxygen from the ocean because gas solubility decreases with increasing temperature.
    -Most of the world's oxygen comes from the phytoplankton, and their population dynamics are remarkably challenging to model. However, if they are not dying en masse, then the oxygen production will remain about the same; some may be redistributed.
    -The sky indeed is remaining above us, and not falling.

    --
    "Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
    1. Re:Some perspective here... by cats-paw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      -The ocean is alkaline, which means that stronger base electrolytes (as compared to the weak carbonic acid) still dominate the charge balance.

      however the ocean is becoming more acidic, and that trend will continue. saying it's still basic is not reassuring in the least.

      -This is an El Nino year, the higher surface temperature will release more oxygen from the ocean because gas solubility decreases with increasing temperature.

      chances are good that El Nino year's will become more common, in part because the oceans' average temperatures will contiune to rise. so we can expect the ocean to continue to lose more oxygen.

      -Most of the world's oxygen comes from the phytoplankton [earthsky.org], and their population dynamics are remarkably challenging to model. However, if they are not dying en masse, then the oxygen production will remain about the same; some may be redistributed.

      what is en masse ? do you think we could detect a population drop of 5% or 10% ? is that en masse ? would it affect ocean oxygen levels ? yes, yes it would.

      -The sky indeed is remaining above us, and not falling.

      oh it absolutely is falling. slowly perhaps, maybe it will take 1 or 2 centuries. maybe a lot less.
      And your point is that I shouldn't listen to the warnings from scientists, because they're all hysterical, but i should listen you ?
      so we should do nothing until we're sure we're all going to die or something ?

      --
      Absolute statements are never true
  3. Re:Yikes by prefec2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I would have rated that funny, but I am not sure whether the author knows dolphins are mammals which would make this a humorous remark or the author is normal internet idiot, which would make this a face palm post.

  4. Re:Polar ice caps might all melt away too... by prefec2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The polar caps are melting. They are melting even faster than anticipated. However, if you do not trust scientists you can just measure the CO2 levels of your ocean next to you. It is not really difficult. You can google how to build a proper probe. Beside that you could trust the scientists, as they would all keep their jobs in case of no global warming, because we would still want to know how the atmosphere works, how the see works etc.

  5. The oceans died eighteen years ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As predicted by Ted Danson. But it doesn't matter now because the rest of the planet was destroyed earlier this year, just as Al Gore predicted.

  6. Doom and Gloom by BitZtream · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Before we talk about how we're going to destroy 'biodiversity' can we remember that iron ... pulling oxygen OUT of the oceans is theorized to be one of the events for the way life evolved on this planet?

    You gotta stop with the doom and gloom crap, we already know the path between the beginning of time and this point in time had points that were FAR fucking worse than ANY prediction about global warming ... and yet ... here we are.

    Now I'm certainly not saying that humans will do well or survive the changes to come, we most certainly won't survive forever, thats just one of the more depressing facts about the universe as we know it.

    But the 'threat' of 'climate change' doesn't sound nearly as big bad ass scary when you look around and say 'no ... this isn't really anything new, we just haven't actually been here for the previous times its been like this'

    Human civilization 10,000 years old
    Earth: 4,500,000,000 years old

    Get some perspective.

    If you want people to listen, you're story has to be one that isn't obviously an attention grab. You can make the attention grab, you just gotta be a little more subtle about it.

    If you were working on Wall Street, the same version of your story would be 'Amazon from running the smaller businesses and competition out of the market .. we'll have another great depression!!@#~!@$~!$@~'

    And people respond with 'yea, okay, well thats not really that big of a deal and we've been there done that, we'll enjoy the benefits until then and deal with the bad parts at that point, and then we'll move on and life will be good again'.

    Do you understand the problem with your delivery now maybe?

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  7. Crazed alarmism DOESN'T HELP! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This over-the-top alarmism over climate change doesn't help - because credibility is permanently lost when the crazed predictions fail to come true.

    The average temperature of the Earth in geological terms has been about 25C, or a helluva lot warmer than now - and life did fine.

  8. The use of "could" invalidates the entire post by mi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oceans Could Soon Not Have Enough Oxygen To Support Marine Life

    The use of "could" makes the entire statement unfalsifiable and therefor non-scientific. We get these in popular press — /. included — about weekly.

    For several decades now such doom-sayers have been predicting disasters "soon" without a single one of them getting anywhere close. When the predicted time passes and anyone still has the attention span to ask: "Hey, was that wrong?" — the answer, if any, is: "We never said, it will happen, only that it could."

    Basing public policy on these "predictions" is completely bogus. Geico's "promise" of "15 minutes could save you 15%" is as reliable — and more fun too.

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  9. Oh, it's just a simulation by mbeckman · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Secure from battle stations, environmental joiners. Nobody has actually _measured_ a depletion trend for O2 in the Earth's oceans. It's all based on dodgy climate simulations:

    To cut through this natural variability and investigate the impact of climate change, the research team—including Curtis Deutsch of the University of Washington and Taka Ito of Georgia Tech—relied on the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy...Using the simulations to study dissolved oxygen gave the researchers guidance on how much concentrations may have varied naturally in the past. With this information, they could determine when ocean deoxygenation due to climate change is likely to become more severe than at any point in the modeled historic range.

    Note to readers of research papers: phrases such as "relied on", "gave the researchers guidance", and "is likely to become" are all code words for "we don't have any real data."

    Let us know when you do. Otherwise, file this report in the fiction section.

  10. Re: Stupid To Seek Proofs by mbeckman · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Climate change alarmists are always using false analogies to dismiss the questions of climate change skeptics. There is actually zero relationship between the questions posed by climate skeptics and the tobacco industry. And see how easily you slide into another long-belabored alarmism: population overgrowth. The whole "populution" cry has been soundly debunked ever since Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne predicted mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s. While famine exists, its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage. Nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines. Which is why the alarmists switched their sirens to climate change: how better to sap the productivity of free people than to tax their self-generated wealth through baseless fear mongering?