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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."
Our current CO2 concentrations are about the lowest they've been in Earth's history. Granted, industrialization has increased it from a low of about 180 ppm to over 400 ppm in an alarmingly short span of time. But over the last few hundred million years, it's averaged a couple thousand ppm, with an estimated high around 7000 ppm. Temperatures are also currently some of the coldest they've ever been (we are just coming off an ice age after all). Throughout much of Earth's history, it's been about 6-8 C hotter than our current climate.
If CO2 levels a little higher than the current 400 ppm and elevated temperatures were enough to wipe out higher forms of marine life, we would've seen it in the fossil record. Unless they're hypothesizing that it's the rapidness of the current change which causes the problem, not the high CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures themselves. (This doesn't diminish the danger of global warming, since sea levels were also much higher during those times. High enough to be catastrophic to our current civilization. But a hypothesis that rising temperatures alone will wipe out marine life is an extraordinary claim.)
Al Gore's prediction was the ice would be gone in 2014. That doesn't square with "much faster."
Isn't it about time to throw Al Gore and his movie under the bus on behalf of ..... umm ..... less easily refuted alarmism?
Yes, you're right, the deniers were wrong about the ice caps not melting. They are melting. We're making the a mess out of our planet and you'll take your chances on just moving forward down the same path and think nothing will happen.
Please get educated and hopefully a little tiny bit of intelligence. Maybe then you'll actually open your eyes and ears and look and listen instead of burying your head in the sand.
Climate change is real, and something needs to be done about it, but this chicken little "the sky is falling" articles hurt rather than help the cause. They give specific worst case targets that are unlikely to be true just to get a headline. These can then be used by climate deniers to minimize the real impacts of climate change.