Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I took a lot of flak last year for my post saying that the global 50% drop in phytoplankton claimed by Boyce et. al was an illusion. I had said:
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.
In other words, I took my chances on my experience and went way, way out on a limb with my statements. And of course, people didn’t let me forget it.
Figure 1. Life Cycle of Phytoplankton
Now we get these two “Brief Communications Arising“, from Nature magazine (emphasis mine).
Nature Volume: 472, Pages: E6–E7
Brief Communication Arising (April, 2011) Arising from D. G. Boyce, M. R. Lewis & B. Worm Nature 466, 591–596 (2010)
Phytoplankton account for approximately 50% of global primary production, form the trophic base of nearly all marine ecosystems, are fundamental in trophic energy transfer and have key roles in climate regulation, carbon sequestration and oxygen production. Boyce et al.1 compiled a chlorophyll index by combining in situ chlorophyll and Secchi disk depth measurements that spanned a more than 100-year time period and showed a decrease in marine phytoplankton biomass of approximately 1% of the global median per year over the past century. Eight decades of data on phytoplankton biomass collected in the North Atlantic by the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey2, however, showan increase in an index of chlorophyll (Phytoplankton Colour Index) in both the Northeast and Northwest Atlantic basins3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (Fig. 1), and other long-term time series, including the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT)8, the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series (BATS)8 and the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI)9 also indicate increased phytoplankton biomass over the last 20–50 years. These findings, which were not discussed by Boyce et al.1, are not in accordance with their conclusions and illustrate the importance of using consistent observations when estimating long-term trends.
Along with this one:
Nature 472, E5–E6 (14 April 2011)
Brief Communication Arising (April, 2011) Arising from D. G. Boyce, M. R. Lewis & B. Worm Nature 466, 591–596 (2010)
… Closer examination reveals that time-dependent changes in sampling methodology combined with a consistent bias in the relationship between in situ and transparency-derived chlorophyll (Chl) measurements generate a spurious trend in the synthesis of phytoplankton estimates used by Boyce et al.1. Our results indicate that much, if not all, of the century-long decline reported by Boyce et al. is attributable to this temporal sampling bias and not to a global decrease in phytoplankton biomass.
OK, so I was right. The Boyce paper was nonsense, the claimed trend was spurious, plankton biomass is holding somewhere near steady or even increasing, and a number of independent records show that the Boyce et al. paper is garbage built on bad assumptions.
I bring this up for three reasons. The first is to show the continuing shabby quality of peer-review at scientific magazines when the subject is even peripherally related to climate. Nature magazine blew it again, and unfortunately, these days that’s no news at all. It’s just more shonky science from the AGW crowd … and people claim the reason the public doesn’t trust climate scientists is a “communications problem”? It’s not. It’s a garbage science problem, and all the communications theory in the world won’t fix garbage science.
The second reason I posted this is just because I enjoy it when it turns out that I’m right, particularly on a risky statement made with no data and in the face of opposition, and I wanted to enter that fact into the record. Childish, I know, but at least I’m adult enough to admit it.
The third reason is a bit more complex. It is to emphasize the value of actual experience. I didn’t disbelieve Boyce et al. because I had any data. I had no data at all.
What I did have was a lifetime spent on and under the ocean. Phytoplankton form the basis of all life in the ocean. If the phytoplankton had actually gone down by 50%, all life in the ocean would have gone down by 50% … and my experience said no way that was true. Fish catches haven’t gone down like that, numbers of species on the reef and along the coast haven’t gone down like that, I would have noticed, people around the world would have been screaming about it.
So I put my neck on the chopping block, and I trusted my experience … and in the end, despite the people who laughed at me and abused my claims, my experience won out over Boyce’s “science”.
Does this mean that we should always trust our experience over science? Don’t be daft. Science is hugely valuable, and often shows that our experience has misled us completely.
But far too many scientists forget to check the obvious – their own experience. Not one of the Boyce authors thought “Wait a minute … since the oceans live almost entirely off the phytoplankton, if plankton is down by half why haven’t I seen oceanic populations from krill to whales and octopuses dropping by half?” Or perhaps they just didn’t have the experience to check the obvious.
The moral of this story? Well, the moral for me is that trusting my experience over the “science” of high-powered scientists living in an ivory tower far above the ocean worked out well … this time.
But the real moral is that scientists need to pay more attention to the “laugh test”. I know when I first heard the Boyce claim, I busted out laughing … and when our experience is that strong in saying that science is wrong, it’s likely worth checking out.
w.
ADDED LATER For me, there’s a few tests that I apply regularly that seem to not be applied by far too many mainstream AGW supporting scientists. These are the smell test, the laugh test, and the eyeball test.
The laugh test weeds out the worst, like the preposterous claim that plankton had been decreasing by 1% per year for the last century. The “Rule of 70” gives the doubling time for an investment. You divide 70 by the annual interest rate, and that gives the doubling time in years.
The Rule of Seventy gives seventy years for doubling time at 1%, so that means in a hundred years the total biomass of the ocean has decreased by more than 50% … seriously, I laughed. The biomass of the ocean decreased by more than half and nobody noticed until now?
The smell test is more subtle. It depends on the provenance of the information, and the way it has been handled, whether it looks “natural”, the history of the investigators, and the like. While the smell test can’t reject anything, it shows me where to look for something wrong.
The eyeball test is simple. Look at every single dataset. There is absolutely no substitute for the experienced human eye. You say there’s seven thousand of them? Boo hoo. You can’t just make up an algorithm and apply it without seeing what it does to every single station record. If there’s a large number, I just write a program in R that just flashes them on the screen for a second along with an ID number. I just let it roll, and jot down the numbers of the ones that stand out.
Now before anyone starts screaming about computerized checking, yes, they are extremely valuable. I’m a whiz at error-trapping, anomaly finding, and computerized checking in a variety of computer languages.
But computerized checking is only as good as the person who wrote the computerized checks. And until you understand every different way that your data might be contaminated or tainted or erroneous for a host of reasons, you will not be able to write computerized checks to identify those particular errors.
And the only way to do that is to put each and every dataset to the eyeball test. There’s an example of what I mean in my post When Good Proxies Go Bad over at ClimateAudit. (Y’all should definitely visit ClimateAudit, Steve McIntyre is continuing his amazing exposition of the never-ending revelations of the “hide the decline” fandango …)
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Willis,
Thanks for your reply and again I’m in agreement that a 50% decline doesn’t meet the smell test. My sensitivity was to drawing a linear relationship between phytoplankton biomass and total system biomass. Don’t think about this as phytoplankton efficiency- think of it as the speed of energy flow and the ability of this energy to transfer through the entire food chain. Phytoplankton can explode when grazers are reduced. The loss of grazers either by allelopathy or other factors can do several things including – shifting the species of plankton- often to the smaller more noxious pico-nano plankton which are generally a very poor food source for higher level organisms. A similar shift is seen at times when silica becomes limiting- inhibiting diatom production which is often a higher value food source. (It can also change what is showing up as chlorophyll in measurements especially as we get into the bacterial plankton) So phytoplankton can go up but higher level vertebrates and invertebrates may go down because of the quality of the food source and the non-diatom blooms often have a higher tendency to cause oxygen depletion. As a result we have high level NPP but this energy is not being transferred to the higher levels so we end up with lower total system biomass. (And what I’m trying to show with a pasture with and without sheep– or the Plains with and without buffalo. Remove the herbivores and we have high biomass of plants but lower overall system biomass. Yes -if we also depress the ability to stimulate phytoplankton production we can depress total system biomass– its all in the chaotic feedback loops–(far more chaotic than climate).
As I’ve said before and with your background you may find it interesting to watch this develop— nitrogen “pollution” may be the new CO2. There is a linear correlation being assumed by regulatory agencies between nutrient additions and productivity (as well as believing anything eutrophic is bad). Section 303D under the Clean Water Act allows them to act on both point AND non-point sources. Nitrogen limitations (TMDLs) can control every human activity from agriculture to fossil fuel use. EPA with respect to the new nitrogen restrictions for the 5 States draining into the Chesapeake not only mandated reductions but also said it has the power to decide what industry segments are allowed how much nitrogen (deciding winners and losers). Because nutrients are a sensitivity issue and the impacts are within a deterministic but chaotic system models are used. And models can give us any answer we want. (The new trophic state model allows a researcher to “calaculate” the future trophic state of the system and then adjust current data for the future and report it as current conditions!) It is a mirror of the start of CO2 and why perhaps I’m sensitive to linear correlations. Just as CO2 is not a single control knob for climate- neither is nutrients or NPP to ecosystem biomass or trophic state—its simply more complex than that.
Pat Moffitt says:
April 28, 2011 at 6:31 am
I agree that it is the “speed of the energy flow” that is important, every businessman knows that it’s the rate of turnover of your inventory that is the critical factor, not the size of the inventory.
But if your turnover factor doesn’t increase and your inventory is only a third, profits will only be third. In the ocean, this means that if the biomass has dropped to one-third (Boyce’s numbers) since 1900 and the production rate (“speed of the energy flow”) doesn’t increase, we’ll end up with a third the total production.
Now, you’re correct that the limiting factor is the speed of the energy flow … but why (if the biomass is only a third the size) would the average speed of the energy flow increase? What factors would make the biomass suddenly produce faster? I can see a variety of things that might make them produce less (e.g. increasing pollution) but not many that would make them produce more, especially three times more.
And yes, plankton can “explode when grazers are reduced” … but you’ll notice what you mean by “explode”, which is an increase in biomass (not an increase in “speed of the energy flow). But their claim is of a decrease in biomass, not an increase.
Many thanks,
w.
Willis-
I think we are saying the same thing:
“But if your turnover factor doesn’t increase and your inventory is only a third, profits will only be third.”
We agree that the turnover rate is important and I agree with your analogy that if all the disparate variables are held constant a decline in inventory by a third will produce a decline in profit. But all the variables are rarely constant.
If we continue the business analogy – we are trying to create an increase in wealth and for this we need a balance sheet. Phytoplankton may be inventory— but inventory is insufficient to say how much wealth (fisheries etc) we are or are not accumulating.
Again– I’m splitting hairs here and agree that on a global scale (which is the basis for your position) we can probably make the assumption between productivity and total biomass. However there are many local environments where the problem is “turnover”– and I’m banging my head against a few of them- so perhaps a bit sensitive.
Thanks for your time and attention and keep up the good work.
Love it.
Last February I got an e-mail from my friend, Dave, with this story posted on “The Telegraph”. I called BS for the same reason as you and was ridiculed for being anti-science (again.) I just sent him the Nature updates. No doubt I’ll be receiving another e-mail explaining what an idiot I am. Facts don’t really matter to members of the cult of Global Warming.