Deoxygenation due to climate change threatens marine life
From the NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH/UNIVERSITY CORPORATION FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH
BOULDER — A reduction in the amount of oxygen dissolved in the oceans due to climate change is already discernible in some parts of the world and should be evident across large regions of the oceans between 2030 and 2040, according to a new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Scientists know that a warming climate can be expected to gradually sap oceans of oxygen, leaving fish, crabs, squid, sea stars, and other marine life struggling to breathe. But it’s been difficult to determine whether this anticipated oxygen drain is already having a noticeable impact.
“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 NCAR scientist Matthew Long, lead author of the study. “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.”
The study is published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.
Cutting through the natural variability
The entire ocean–from the depths to the shallows–gets its oxygen supply from the surface, either directly from the atmosphere or from phytoplankton, which release oxygen into the water through photosynthesis.
Warming surface waters, however, absorb less oxygen. And in a double whammy, the oxygen that is absorbed has a more difficult time traveling deeper into the ocean. That’s because as water heats up, it expands, becoming lighter than the water below it and less likely to sink.
Thanks to natural warming and cooling, oxygen concentrations at the sea surface are constantly changing–and those changes can linger for years or even decades deeper in the ocean.
For example, an exceptionally cold winter in the North Pacific would allow the ocean surface to soak up a large amount of oxygen. Thanks to the natural circulation pattern, that oxygen would then be carried deeper into the ocean interior, where it might still be detectable years later as it travels along its flow path. On the flip side, unusually hot weather could lead to natural “dead zones” in the ocean, where fish and other marine life cannot survive.
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.
The scientists used output from a project that ran the model more than two dozen times for the years 1920 to 2100 on the Yellowstone supercomputer, which is operated by NCAR. Each individual run was started with miniscule variations in air temperature. As the model runs progressed, those tiny differences grew and expanded, producing a set of climate simulations useful for studying questions about variability and change.
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.
The research team found that deoxygenation caused by climate change could already be detected in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins. They also determined that more widespread detection of deoxygenation caused by climate change would be possible between 2030 and 2040. However, in some parts of the ocean, including areas off the east coasts of Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia, deoxygenation caused by climate change was not evident even by 2100.
Picking out a global pattern
The researchers also created a visual way to distinguish between deoxygenation caused by natural processes and deoxygenation caused by climate change.
Using the same model dataset, the scientists created maps of oxygen levels in the ocean, showing which waters were oxygen-rich at the same time that others were oxygen-poor. They found they could distinguish between oxygenation patterns caused by natural weather phenomena and the pattern caused by climate change.
The pattern caused by climate change also became evident in the model runs around 2030, adding confidence to the conclusion that widespread deoxygenation due to climate change will become detectable around that time.
The maps could also be useful resources for deciding where to place instruments to monitor ocean oxygen levels in the future to get the best picture of climate change impacts. Currently ocean oxygen measurements are relatively sparse.
“We need comprehensive and sustained observations of what’s going on in the ocean to compare with what we’re learning from our models and to understand the full impact of a changing climate,” Long said.
###
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So it was said about ocean oxygen: “either directly from the atmosphere or from phytoplankton, which release oxygen into the water through photosynthesis”.
That article the other day that says the Earh is greener because of more CO2 theses past decades, means more plants and a greener Earth which also means more plants take in more CO2, and expel what? MORE oxygen !….meaning MORE oxygen to seep from the atmosphere into the ocean…
Hmmm…what am I missing? Oh, that’s right! they have a super computer ! They modeled it! … two dozen times ! And the U.S. and European forcast for me here in Las Vegas said it would MAYBE rain Thursday (20%) and this coming Sunday….but oops, it rained Wednesday (pretty heavy) and now they say Saturday (my daughter’s prom night), instead of Sunday. Great! And Accuweather, Weather Underground and the NOAA all disagreed as to when and how much rain we might have. Every model has screwed up every forecast for the past three months here in Vegas where all the cocktail servers in bikinis have been freezing their *&^s off on weekends since March when the pools opened.. If they can’t model all the weather that shows up here from the Pacific (and you can see it coming), then how the h%ll can they model oxygen in the ocean a dozen years from now?!
Super computers: garbage in, garbage out. Grant money to government scientists and universities = wasted funding in, garbage out. Keep those papers and computer models coming. It’s sort of like cell phones and social media. If you are looking down at your screen all the time, you miss the world around you and get run over by a car.
But What you’re missing is that supercomputers can efficiently produce garbage at a rate that provides an economy of scale.
GIGO
It’s always a good idea when selling politically correct junk science to make your predictions decades away so that by the time you are shown wrong you will be safely retired.
(Yawn) Start measuring oxygen levels throughout the world’s oceans and get back to me in 20 years.
These people must know NOTHING about earth history You’d think that they would have……………………
Oh, never mind, if they had looked at paleoclimate data and the marine fossil record, they would have found a way to spin them into their story.
Is gray the new burnt orange for alarmist model mapping?
“Warming surface waters, however, absorb less oxygen. And in a double whammy, the oxygen that is absorbed has a more difficult time traveling deeper into the ocean. That’s because as water heats up, it expands, becoming lighter than the water below it and less likely to sink.”
We have been told that the “missing heat” is deep in the ocean, and that’s why we can’t find it.
I’m not sure Mann, Trenberth, Schmidt could understand this….
On the flip side, unusually hot weather could lead to natural “dead zones” in the ocean, where fish and other marine life cannot survive.
=========================
name one place in the ocean where it is so hot that “fish and other marine life cannot survive”
they don’t exist. even 600 C thermal vents are surrounded by life.
the notion that a small warming on the surface, which leaves the vast bulk of the ocean unchanged to within the nearest 1/100’th of a degree, that this will wipe out life in the oceans is so absurd that one must question the motives behind this study.
You have all underestimated the brilliance of these guys
Part 1 of the project consists of modelling , with conclusions that scare the pants off the man in the White House who asks them to name a figure that will allow them to cruise the Med , Caribean and other endangered tropical areas to actually obtain data to substantiate the computer predictions , because as they say – the data is sparse.
Part 2 of the project , when the plan comes together , they hire a modified yacht , equip it with all essentials and sail off for 2 years .
Whatever they are , they are certainly not fools.
The climate change we are experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans and Man does not have the power to change it. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. Other warm periods during the Holocene have been warmer than this one yet life in the oceans survived. The previous interglacial period, the Eemian was warmer than this one with more ice cap melting and higher sea levels yet life in the oceans survived. If their models have anything to do the climate models supported by the IPCC then their models must be suspect because to date the IPCC supported climate models have all been wrong.
In a related development, Widespread Loss of Climate Science Credibility to Become (more) Noticeable in 2030.
In a closed system, with progressive processes, maybe.
Among the many other things the “Scientists Know” Cultists, Totalitarians, and their Crony Throngs don’t know or have never even heard of – including real science – is Hemoglobin [Hgb]; which in the Human body and others is a molecular mechanism developed over time and conditions to carry very much more O2 in red blood cells than when it’s merely dissolved in plasma, saline or H2O. Even when a Human breathes 100% O2 [normal=21% Atmospheric] Hemoglobin still carries ~9/1 more O2 than is only dissolved. And even at an internal body pO2 of only 60 [normal=100] Hgb is still 90% saturated with O2; so that it can then release enough O2 to the cells of tissues and organs with a lower pO2 [often ~40] resulting from their life-sustaining metabolic activities. Additionally at lower than pO2=60, Human Hgb starts unloading its O2 much more readily than it does above 60.
Yet the “Scientists” are obsessing and disasterizing about the fate of every living thing that has some kind of Hgb in it for the same purpose a Human body does, to stay alive at various internal and Oceanic or Atmospheric O2 concentrations, which the “Scientists Know” have never gotten as “bad” as they will in a few decades – or hundreds of years , whichever comes last – if we don’t go back to the Stone Age Utopia “before it’s too late!”
But alas, I guess we’ll just have to wait for these “Scientists” to somehow think it up before Hgb will even exist! Don’t hold your breath.
JPeden April 28, 2016 at 1:15 pm
Among the many other things the “Scientists Know” Cultists, Totalitarians, and their Crony Throngs don’t know or have never even heard of – including real science – is Hemoglobin [Hgb]; which in the Human body and others is a molecular mechanism developed over time and conditions to carry very much more O2 in red blood cells than when it’s merely dissolved in plasma, saline or H2O. Even when a Human breathes 100% O2 [normal=21% Atmospheric] Hemoglobin still carries ~9/1 more O2 than is only dissolved. And even at an internal body pO2 of only 60 [normal=100] Hgb is still 90% saturated with O2; so that it can then release enough O2 to the cells of tissues and organs with a lower pO2 [often ~40] resulting from their life-sustaining metabolic activities. Additionally at lower than pO2=60, Human Hgb starts unloading its O2 much more readily than it does above 60.
You left out an important factor, the red blood cells absorb CO2 from the tissue and consequently the pH in the cell goes down which causes more O2 to be released (it’s called the Bohr effect).
Here we have a classic contradiction within climate science.
The equation for this, demands CO2 absorption also decreases and emission increases.
But this is ignored as a cause of CO2 growth. It is ignored in the chemistry and physics of OA claims.
Now it is relevant for oxygen?
No science out of Boulder can be trusted, it is a center of fr4ud
The very process they use to claim this is the very process they deny is an influence on CO2 growth.
This is stunning delusion
No, Henry’s Law defines the ratio between the atmospheric partial pressure and the dissolved concentration. In the case of O2 the pO2 is decreasing and the Henry’s Law coefficient for O2 changes in the same way with temperature leading to a decrease in [O2].
However, in the case of CO2, pCO2 in the atmosphere is increasing at a faster rate than the Henry’s Law coefficient changes with temperature so the change in temperature is inadequate to explain the growth in pCO2. pCO2 is increasing so fast as a result of combustion that the net flux is still into the ocean according to Henry’s Law.
Best of all the arrogance, to say we know how much oxygen is in the oceans. How much is cycled and so on, we are utterly in the dark on that one, I just dont accept models on something that cannot be confirmed in any real way.
They are saying there is no oxygen cycle? Surely they are not saying that. Otherwise the oceans would have little oxygen.
For the oceans to eventually “deplete” in the real sense of the word in Oxygen two requirements need to be met, no oxygen producing Algae and aquatic plants, and the moon needs to disappear to stop ocean water moving, oh and you need to stop ice melting while you are at it, stop storms, rain and… it’s impossible.
and apparently the tropical fish I’ve been keeping for donkeys are not real either.
There is also a whole industry spanning around the globe based on fish that dont exist 😀
A starting point could be a question of how many trillions of tonnes of oxygen is there in all of the earth’s oceans.
It’s known that there is far more CO2 in Earth’s ocean than in the atmosphere- thousands of times more.
One can find loose guesses of the amount of CO2. Let’s see:
“The ocean stores 50 times more carbon dioxide than does the atmosphere;”
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/carboncycle.htm
And:
Of the three places where carbon is stored—atmosphere, oceans, and land biosphere—approximately 93 percent of the CO 2 is found in the oceans. The atmosphere, at about 750 petagrams of carbon (a petagram [Pg] is 10 15 grams), has the smallest amount of carbon.
…
The oceans contain about 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere and 19 times more than the land biosphere.”
Read more: http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Bi-Ca/Carbon-Dioxide-in-the-Ocean-and-Atmosphere.html#ixzz479aG94u8
Hmm so I guess the guess is instead 50 times, I thought it was more.
But anyhow oxygen:
“….My estimate for the total mass of O2 in the atmosphere is 1.2 million billion metric tons, which agrees with this reference. So overall the analysis is pretty close.
The stromatolites alone produced 20 million billion tons (possibly more, see Appendix). The majority of the oxygen produced by stromatolites has apparently gone somewhere other than the atmosphere. In fact, there are enormous amounts of atmospheric oxygen that ended up chemically tied up in rocks.”
http://mathscinotes.com/2011/04/oxygen-on-earth/
So 1.2 million billion metric tons O2 in atmosphere and how much in the oceans?
“The dissolved oxygen levels are higher in the summer and during daylight hours because this is when photosynthetic organisms produce oxygen.
And gives chart which includes:
0C: 14.6 mg/L
4C: 13.09 mg/L
24C: 8.4 mg/L
http://butane.chem.uiuc.edu/pshapley/GenChem1/L23/web-L23.pdf
And I suppose I can roughly assume freshwater and seawater about the same.
Most Ocean is about 3 to 4 C, so about 13 grams per cubic meter of ocean and “Total mass of hydrosphere: 1.4 x 10^21 kg or 1.4 x 10^18 tonnes.
So 18.2 x 10^18 grams, or 18.2 x 10^9 tonnes of oxygen
Hmm that does not seem right- I suppose one reason is that this doesn’t include the pressure of the
ocean.
But anyhow were it correct
Ocean: 1.8 x 10^10 to tonnes vs Atmosphere of 1.2 x 10^15 or
there would about 1/100,000th of oxygen in Ocean as compare to the Atmosphere.
I would tend to think that, rather much less, there should be much more oxygen in ocean
as compared to atmosphere.
But anyhow, how much oxygen is there suppose to be in the entire ocean?
Many years ago when I was doing stream sampling, wintertime daytime Dissolved Oxygen was frequently above saturation even though the water was just above freezing. DO was normally around saturation. This indicates to me that photosynthesis continues in very cold conditions and is likely suppressed less by cold than is respiration. The photosynthesizing organisms were a small fraction of the total organism count. This was in freshwater.
I don’t accept that climate change, which has occurred throughout geological history, is not natural.
Does a model without skill improve with multiple iterations?
“Does a model without skill improve with multiple iterations?”
Practice makes perfect.
This paper seems to assume that oxygen absorbed from the air is the primary source of dissolved oxygen in ocean water. But oxygen follows a cycle too. Biological processes produce free oxygen, and a variety of biological and non-biological processes react with free oxygen so it becomes part of another compound like CO2 as one example, and the cycle resumes. But 70% of the biological production of oxygen occurs in the oceans. So 70% of the free oxygen starts out in the oceans; the oceans aren’t some minor part of free oxygen production, they are the main site where this process takes place. And what do all biological and chemical processes do when they get a little warmer?–they speed up. And really — how can the oceans as a whole become “depleted” of oxygen when they are the prime production site for free oxygen? Depleted oxygen zones are local areas where the balance between the production and consumption of dissolved oxygen favors consumption, like areas with no algae and lots of decaying biological matter.
Just another example of one-sided cost benefit analysis from the warmists — count all the costs, ignore the benefits, like algal oxygen production speeding up.
–This paper seems to assume that oxygen absorbed from the air is the primary source of dissolved oxygen in ocean water. But oxygen follows a cycle too. Biological processes produce free oxygen, and a variety of biological and non-biological processes react with free oxygen so it becomes part of another compound like CO2 as one example, and the cycle resumes. But 70% of the biological production of oxygen occurs in the oceans. So 70% of the free oxygen starts out in the oceans; the oceans aren’t some minor part of free oxygen production, they are the main site where this process takes place. And what do all biological and chemical processes do when they get a little warmer?–they speed up. And really — how can the oceans as a whole become “depleted” of oxygen when they are the prime production site for free oxygen? Depleted oxygen zones are local areas where the balance between the production and consumption of dissolved oxygen favors consumption, like areas with no algae and lots of decaying biological matter.
Just another example of one-sided cost benefit analysis from the warmists — count all the costs, ignore the benefits, like algal oxygen production speeding up.–
Yes, this the major problem with Lefties in general- why the think the Earth could become like Venus.
Why when they get govern, they cause poverty.
Why they worry about over population. Why they imagine resources can be depleted. Or can be terrified by 8 inches of sea level rise per century
It basically due to a bias of opinion- they begin with a stupid premise, ignore anything that gets in the way of reaching the conclusions they want to reach
It’s fundamentally unscientific- and they dislike scientific details- it’s a type of labor, that they don’t want to do. They want a world where the science is finished- and science will never be finished.
Instead of ending, science is barely begun.
‘And what do all biological and chemical processes do when they get a little warmer?–they speed up.’
But the solubility of gases in water vary inversely with temperature. So it’s not all good.
Gamecock. As the oxygen is principally produced in the oceans and outgassed to the atmosphere,, one might think warmer seas would be bad. The outgassing might be more but then so is the oxygen production which progresses around the world daily. The proof of this is that clearly life has survived just fine for 600 million years during which most of the time the climate was a good 10 deg C hotter and, notably, CO2 was not a all tied to ocean temperatures.
We live in a very cold time which happens to have very low CO2. The overwhelming majority of the last 600 million years have had CO2 three to ten times higher than now. The Cliffs of Dover were laid down by coralline life during high CO2 and high temperatures—clearly life thrived in those times.
They can’t generate fear with more CO2 so they’re trying out oxygen depletion. Oh my. They can’t seem to get it through their heads to Stop With The Doom-Mongering already! The more they continue with this nonsense the more skeptical everyone becomes. Not once have they ever admitted to being wrong, not once have they stepped down from one of their scare-stories. We’re supposed to not only believe this latest but that every other story is true too.
How did Life ever make it this far? And WHY are people still putting up with what is blatant manipulation? These people are so into their tale-telling, they don’t really see (much less understand) the shift in reception. There is anger building and they don’t see it. Now would be a really good time for them to head for the hills, but they won’t.
What’s extra pathetic is that when the crunch finally bites them on the assets, they won’t have a clue what went wrong.
Sanity Check: The surface water in the Arctic is about 28 deg F; the surface water in the tropics may be as warm as 78 deg F. Fish survive in the ocean from the Arctic to the tropics, over a 50 deg F range. Are we to believe that if the average water temperature increases a couple degrees that fish will be unable to obtain enough oxygen to survive? The authors of this ‘research’ apparently didn’t give much thought to what they claim.
The equilibrium O2 concentration in seawater is ~360 mmole/m^3 at 0ºC vs ~190mmole/m^3 at 30ºC.
I am surprised any sea life survived the catastrophic warming of the Minoan Warm Period when it was well above today’s temperature.
But there’s more: “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.”
I’ll bet! What with all the back radiation warming the oceans I will be surprised if there is any mixing of the upper ocean layer at all!
Anthony: What’s up with WUWT today? These articles present so many whacko ideas we need a new term to describe them:
“Stream of unconsciousness”
We have had the ‘don’t build where there are forests’ from UC Bizarro and now we have something flowing from a parallel universe in Colorado. I detect in this missive above the omnipresence of high mountain air. You know, a clean breeze plus a high concentration of PM2.5 with a large fraction of it being thought provoking condensible volatile compounds found only in the smouldering emissions of slightly damp biomass.
Yes, more CO2, better plantgrowth, more O2. OK. But then
DURHAM, N.C. — Political advocates who support action on climate change have long sought “the perfect message” for swaying skeptics. If the issue can be framed correctly, they believe, the battle can be won.
A new Duke University study suggests it may be more complicated than that.
“Because climate change has become polarized along party lines, it’s no longer just an issue of finding ‘the right framing’ to convey relevant facts,” said study author Jack Zhou, who will graduate with a Ph.D. in environmental politics next month from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “It has become a matter of political identity, particularly the political party we feel closest to.”
– so how to tell them partisan corals stop bleaching, wander polward and breath free –
Maybe the next study models that.
The change in oxygen concentration in seawater when the temperature changes from 12 deg C to 14 deg C (the “average world temperature” of open oceans and the expected 2 deg C change due to global warming, all other factors being equal – which they never are, of course) is 4.36%.
This small change would be swamped by the other factors affecting solubility which are never constant over time.
(Me: Heh Mum, I did it without a computer. Mum: It can’t be right then since computers never lie).
Noticeable is a weak, weak criteria. As measurement instruments and analyzers get better “Noticeabilty” is increased. And noticeable is a long, long, long way from harmful.