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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."
I propose the installation of a giant aquarium bubbler at the bottom of the ocean.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I wouldn't want to be a dolphin right now.
-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."
Abstract: "ABSTRACT: Cyanobacteria make significant contributions to global carbon and nitrogen cycling, particularly in the oligotrophic subtropical and tropical gyres. The present study examined short-term (days) physiological and acclimation responses of natural cyanobacterial populations to changes in pH/pCO2 spanning the last glacial minimum, ~8.4/~150 ppm, to projected year 2100 values of ~7.8/~800 ppm. Fe- and P-replete colonies of Trichodesmium increased N2-fixation rates (nmol N colony1 h1) at pH 7.8 by 54% (range 6 to 156%) over ambient pH/pCO2 conditions, while N2-fixation at pH/pCO2 8.4 was 21% (range 6 to 65%) lower than at ambient pH/pCO2; a similar pattern was observed when the rates were normalized to colony C. C-fixation rates were on average 13% (range 72 to 112%) greater at low pH than at ambient pH and 37% (53 to 23%) greater than at high pH. Whole community assemblages dominated by Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus (47 to 95% of autotrophic biomass), whether nutrient-replete or P-limited, did not show a clear response of C-fixation rates to changes in pH/pCO2. Comparison of initial and final C-fixation responses across pH/pCO2 treatments suggests rapid acclimation of cellular physiology to new pH/pCO2 conditions. Changes in cell size and pigment content for Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus were minor and did not vary in a consistent manner with changes in pH/pCO2. These results for natural populations of all 3 cyanobacteria concur with previous research and suggest that one important response to changes in ocean pH and pCO2 might be an increase in N2 and C fixation by Trichodesmium under nutrient-replete conditions. The response of single-cell cyanobacteria to changes in pH/pCO2 will likely be indirect and controlled by the response to other variables, such as nutrients."
Source: http://www.int-res.com/article...
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.
They were wrong about the ice caps melting,
The arctic ice cap is melting much faster than predicted: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicen...
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.
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
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.
Actually they're not. You might want to look up dead zones sometime.
Get Billy Mays to use his stuff, it'll fix it. You may also get your clothes cleaned at the same time.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
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.
Look at the paper. It doesn't say that oxygen is decreasing to dangerous levels. It says that computers think that by 2030 it might be possible to measure a certain decrease in oxygen in certain places. The change is too small to measure at present, if that change is happening.
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.
I just got this package delivered fedex...
It's a kind of vase thingy with the words 'So long, and thanks for all the fish.' etched into it.
Really pretty, but I think it means that the dolphins are going to be OK.
Al Gore
DRINK!
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
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.
Simple fact: Most of the oxygen you breath comes from the ocean.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
On geological scales, 14 years isn't soon. 14 years is now.
14 years for detection. No timeline for when this becomes a threat to marine life. The editor wanted an attention grabbing headline that is not supported by the paper or even the article.
not so extraordinary once you consider that water holds less dissolved oxygen the warmer it gets.
there are multiple die offs in the fossil record of marine life likely tied to oxygen depletion of the oceans.
why do folks always ignore that the life that exists now is not the same as the life that existed then?
with several hundred million years in between life adapts for -current- conditions.
and when those conditions change, they die and get replaced by life adapted for the changed conditions.
the assumption that because its colder now, or Co2 is lower now, that current life wont go extinct or be threatened by an increase in temperature is simply not valid. the whole of your point is essentially a variation on the "it was warmer before" argument.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
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.