No specifics here, juts a lot of predictive maybes.
Small organisms could dramatically impact world’s climate
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Warmer oceans in the future could significantly alter populations of phytoplankton, tiny organisms that could have a major impact on climate change.
In the current issue of Science Express, Michigan State University researchers show that by the end of the 21st century, warmer oceans will cause populations of these marine microorganisms to thrive near the poles and may shrink in equatorial waters. Since phytoplankton play a key role in the food chain and the world’s cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and other elements, a drastic drop could have measurable consequences.
“In the tropical oceans, we are predicting a 40 percent drop in potential diversity,” said Mridul Thomas, MSU graduate student and one of the co-authors. “If the oceans continue to warm as predicted, there will be a sharp decline in the diversity of phytoplankton in tropical waters and a poleward shift in species’ thermal niches, if they don’t adapt to climate change.”
Thomas co-authored the study with fellow MSU graduate student Colin Kremer, plant biology, and their faculty mentors Elena Litchman, MSU zoologist, and Christopher Klausmeier, MSU plant biologist. The team, which conducted its research at MSU’s Kellogg Biological Station, explained that since phytoplankton play a key role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and thus, global climate, this shift could cause significant change.
The microorganisms use light, carbon dioxide and nutrients to grow. Although phytoplankton are small, they flourish in every ocean, consuming as much carbon dioxide through photosynthesis as all the terrestrial plants combined.
Water temperatures strongly influence their growth rates. In fact, phytoplankton in warmer equatorial waters can grow much faster than their cold-water cousins. With worldwide temperatures predicted to increase over the next century, it’s important to gauge phytoplankton’s reaction and what will happen to the carbon that they currently carry to the ocean floor.
The researchers were able to show that phytoplankton have adapted to local current temperatures. Based on projections of ocean temperatures in the future, however, many phytoplankton may not adapt quickly enough to changes in their current environment. Since phytoplankton can’t regulate their temperatures or migrate, they may suffer significantly limited growth and diversity, Kremer said.
Being able to forecast the impact of these changes will be a useful tool for scientists around the world, said David Garrison, program director in the National Science Foundation Division of Ocean Sciences.
“This is an important contribution to predicting plankton productivity and community structure in the oceans of the future,” he said. “The work addresses how phytoplankton species are affected by a changing environment, and the really difficult question of whether evolutionary adaptation to those changes is possible.”
This research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and MSU’s BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action.
###
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
izen says:
October 30, 2012 at 8:55 am
This is an example of the effect of AGW impacting on human food sources already because of the existing warming of the oceans. No mistake about ocean warming, there are no UHI to distort the readings out there.
First, congrats on recognizing how UHI has skewed the reported land warming upwards, meaning the actual warming that has occurred is far less. Not many fuzzy-brained Warmists get that, so, kudos. Unfortunately, you go off the deep end again with your wild and unsupported claims of AGW somehow warming the oceans, killing plankton, and depleting fish populations. Take a look:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01676766904b970b-popup
As with land warming, the correlation between increasing C02 and ocean warming is a tenuous one at best. But you Warmists have the old Peter Pan syndrome: it’s there if only you Believe hard enough.
Since phytoplankton can’t regulate their temperatures or migrate, they may suffer significantly limited growth and diversity, Kremer said.
How dumb can these people really be? As free floating organisms at the mercy of the currents, the individuals are migrating all the time except that if they move to a region that is currently too cold they will die off. If the seas poleward of their present habitat warm, then when they’re swept there, they stand a better chance of surviving.
@Bloke down the pub:
Additionally, many members of phytoplankton communities (maybe all; I just know about cyanobacteria) migrate vertically, and not necessarily with currents. They can descend and ascend at will. Many dwell where no Secchi disk can reach them. So not only the argument about the stratification of nutrients is moot; it also largely invalidates surface turbidity as a proxy (I wouldn’t mind as much if they did a 3D turbidity study, but I am not aware of any).
Since the reviewers didn’t pick this up, or the editor, the dumbness, or worse, is institutionalized. And the arrogance–they know the people who matter in their little world won’t call them on it either, and skeptics have been safely marginalized from having an influence. So far.
In about 6 minutes it will be 2pm and everybody in the USA can go and get a free Fritos Locos Tacos, at Taco Belle, courtesy of the San Francisco World Champion Giants stolen base; well Actually the North America, not counting Canada and Mexico Champions.
There’s a suggestion that this could, and actually might affect world climate, and moreover do so in entirely unpredictable ways.
So If you see some unpredctable change in the weather/climate happen remember your learned about it first at WUWT !
Bloke down the pub – You beat me to it on the migrating nonsense. I particularly liked their statement “many phytoplankton may not adapt quickly enough to changes in their current environment”.
Unfortunately, Roger Knights is correct in his assessment that the dumbness is institutionalised and sceptics have been safely marginalised. It is still going to be an enormous uphill battle.
fhhaynie:
Thankyou for your post at October 30, 2012 at 11:12 am which answers my question.
As I thought, the 40% is not justified and it is hard to imagine how it could be. Thankyou.
Richard
Shhhhhh. Don’t let the cat out of the bag. 🙂
Any news on the 100t iron oxide (?) dumping action having any effect? What’s the projected time frame on that, anyway?
Since there are many more dams worldwide now than then, much of the silt that used to flow downstream settles out behind the dams. In addition, farmers now practice erosion control plowing more widely, which also reduces silt runoff. Finally, perhaps fertilizers and other runoffs have properties that are encouraging silt particles to clump, which would speed their sinking and clarify the water.
ENSO is constantly bringing up lower-lying layers of the ocean to the surface, where it strongly affects the temperature of the atmosphere. It could be that the next layers it brings up will be cooler than the ones it’s been bringing up since the LIA.
The 40% phytoplankton decline claim is just exceptionally blatant dishonesty and evidence that dumb people in the media will believe almost anything if given a window dressing of superficially formal publication. Fish populations which feed on phytoplankton did nothing of the sort ( http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y2787e/y2787e00.htm etc). Someone about might as well claim that 99% of plants died last month and magically nobody noticed. More honest actual measurements of phytoplankton (like http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005GL022484.shtml and http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004JC002620.shtml and others) tend to find increase over recent decades. Like other photosynthetic life, phytoplankton did well during past climates when temperatures were warmer than now and during past climates when the availability of their prime food source (CO2) was higher.
Wow looks like a lot of furphies being put out there on phytoplankton numbers.
Phytoplankton numbers in the southern oceans actually increased up till the 1980’s due in part to the over fishing of baleen whales.
It’s also likely that changes in the Earths Magnetic field affect the distribution of iron based compounds that these plants use as nutrients thus affecting their growth and distribution.
So here’s the thing- the Ecosystem is a system it’s not a single process, there’s a huge number of variables that are not considered by these sorts of blinkered, temperature focused, politically driven, papers, and invariably they will be proved to not cover enough of the other real causes of what they claim to observe.
I don’t suppose a climatologist has ever seen a whale or a compass.
Phytoplankton is at the bottom of a fairly long food chain. They are vital to ocean health and any fiddling with numbers would be criminally insane.
More dancing around the may-pole. Another thinly veiled political tract dressed up as third-rate science.
“In the tropical oceans, we are predicting a 40 percent drop in potential diversity,” said Mridul Thomas
What the hell is “potential diversity”?? Is it the capacity of a system to generate new species? Is it a heterogeneity in electrical potential? Or is it some-one so psyched-up politically that they cant be bothered to write English properly, just randomly chucking in the word “potential” anywhere in the sentence to give a hypothetical mood?
This is a cheap attempt to predict ocean biosphere catastrophe based on a fictitious temperature increase in future. It is utter crap. It was obviously thought up by a politician, not a biological oceanographer. Primary production is constrained first and foremost by nutrient supply. Temperature is a relatively minor factor. (Just as CO2 is dwarfed by several much larger factors in setting global temperatures). Think about this – why is the sea in the tropics often blue, while in temperate latitudes more often green? Answer – tropical seas, being hotter, have stronger thermal stratification so nutrient recycling from below is weaker. Blue means no algae. Hot temperatures are of no value where there is no nutrient. Likewise waters in temperate and even polar regions are green and teem with rich phytoplankton production due to strong vertical mixing bringing up nutrients from below. Even near freezing temperatures do little to offset this production. The limiting factor is nutrient, not temperature.
So the only oceanographic factor which will affect primary production is the magnitude and distribution of upwelling, bringing nutrients from deep water (generated by microbial recycling of sinking biological detritus) up to the surface.
And, it turns out, ocean currents and upwelling are also probably the strongest factor determining global climate and temperatures also.
Interestingly, the appearance of phytoplankton, which can live in a high temperature range which automatically implies an increase of dissolved oxygen in water and implicitly a decrease in temperature of that short-term sea.
“we are predicting a 40 percent drop in potential diversity” How do you predict a drop in potential? That must take some doing.
izen says:
October 30, 2012 at 8:55 am
“Decreasing ph [sic] just makes things worse as many phytoplankton use forms of calcite as ridgid skeletons which become increasingly energy intensive to form as the waters warm and become less basic.”
Izen, you need to do some research instead of inventing some hypothesis to assert like a bombastic fool. Forms of calcite? Interesting. Care to elaborate? Ever hear of aragonite? Didn’t think so. Nice try with the waters becoming “less basic”, though. While technically correct (as opposed to ocean ‘acidification’), The ocean is a long way from being unable to provide the many forms of calcite that come with your hypothesis. (/sarc, just in case).
I don’t get why you would come to WUWT and try to blow smoke up our patoots, could it be that maybe you get ignored at SkS?
Calcified marine organisms have been a significant part of earth’s biota since the Cambrian explosion, 560 million years ago. And in fact further back as well, since the “small shelly fauna” existed hundreds of millions of years before that, perhaps the best documented per-Cambrian multi-cellular life. Bacterial stromatolites, with us for more than half of the earths lifespan, also left calcified deposits. All this took place in the presence of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of up to 10,000 ppm, if we take the last billion years, and much higher if we go back further. We see calcified living organisms happily living and evolving throughout all this time. Were they fizzing like Alka-Seltzer tablets the moment they appeared in an acid ocean – no. They were living normally in an ocean about the same pH as today (at least post-oxygenation event).
In this context, the bold-faced suggestion that an increase in atmospheric CO2 by a few hundred ppm will “acidify the oceans” and damage calcified marine life, borders on criminal fraud. It makes no scientific sense whatsoever.
The researchers were able to show that phytoplankton have adapted to local current temperatures
==================================================================
N.S. Sherlock. Their ancestors have been around for 1.5 billion years and the modern clades have been around since the dinosaurs. And you are seriously worried about them adapting to slightly warmer ocean temperatures during a snowcone earth?