Climate-driven changes in phytoplankton communities will intensify the blue and green regions of the world’s oceans
From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Climate change is causing significant changes to phytoplankton in the world’s oceans, and a new MIT study finds that over the coming decades these changes will affect the ocean’s color, intensifying its blue regions and its green ones. Satellites should detect these changes in hue, providing early warning of wide-scale changes to marine ecosystems.
Writing in Nature Communications, researchers report that they have developed a global model that simulates the growth and interaction of different species of phytoplankton, or algae, and how the mix of species in various locations will change as temperatures rise around the world. The researchers also simulated the way phytoplankton absorb and reflect light, and how the ocean’s color changes as global warming affects the makeup of phytoplankton communities.
The researchers ran the model through the end of the 21st century and found that, by the year 2100, more than 50 percent of the world’s oceans will shift in color, due to climate change.
The study suggests that blue regions, such as the subtropics, will become even more blue, reflecting even less phytoplankton — and life in general — in those waters, compared with today. Some regions that are greener today, such as near the poles, may turn even deeper green, as warmer temperatures brew up larger blooms of more diverse phytoplankton.
“The model suggests the changes won’t appear huge to the naked eye, and the ocean will still look like it has blue regions in the subtropics and greener regions near the equator and poles,” says lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “That basic pattern will still be there. But it’ll be enough different that it will affect the rest of the food web that phytoplankton supports.”
Dutkiewicz’s co-authors include Oliver Jahn of MIT, Anna Hickman of the University of Southhampton, Stephanie Henson of the National Oceanography Centre Southampton, Claudie Beaulieu of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Erwan Monier of the University of California at Davis.
Chlorophyll count
The ocean’s color depends on how sunlight interacts with whatever is in the water. Water molecules alone absorb almost all sunlight except for the blue part of the spectrum, which is reflected back out. Hence, relatively barren open-ocean regions appear as deep blue from space. If there are any organisms in the ocean, they can absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light, depending on their individual properties.
Phytoplankton, for instance, contain chlorophyll, a pigment which absorbs mostly in the blue portions of sunlight to produce carbon for photosynthesis, and less in the green portions. As a result, more green light is reflected back out of the ocean, giving algae-rich regions a greenish hue.
Since the late 1990s, satellites have taken continuous measurements of the ocean’s color. Scientists have used these measurements to derive the amount of chlorophyll, and by extension, phytoplankton, in a given ocean region. But Dutkiewicz says chlorophyll doesn’t necessarily have reflect the sensitive signal of climate change. Any significant swings in chlorophyll could very well be due to global warming, but they could also be due to “natural variability” — normal, periodic upticks in chlorophyll due to natural, weather-related phenomena.
“An El Niño or La Niña event will throw up a very large change in chlorophyll because it’s changing the amount of nutrients that are coming into the system,” Dutkiewicz says. “Because of these big, natural changes that happen every few years, it’s hard to see if things are changing due to climate change, if you’re just looking at chlorophyll.”
Modeling ocean light
Instead of looking to derived estimates of chlorophyll, the team wondered whether they could see a clear signal of climate change’s effect on phytoplankton by looking at satellite measurements of reflected light alone.
The group tweaked a computer model that it has used in the past to predict phytoplankton changes with rising temperatures and ocean acidification. This model takes information about phytoplankton, such as what they consume and how they grow, and incorporates this information into a physical model that simulates the ocean’s currents and mixing.
This time around, the researchers added a new element to the model, that has not been included in other ocean modeling techniques: the ability to estimate the specific wavelengths of light that are absorbed and reflected by the ocean, depending on the amount and type of organisms in a given region.
“Sunlight will come into the ocean, and anything that’s in the ocean will absorb it, like chlorophyll,” Dutkiewicz says. “Other things will absorb or scatter it, like something with a hard shell. So it’s a complicated process, how light is reflected back out of the ocean to give it its color.”
When the group compared results of their model to actual measurements of reflected light that satellites had taken in the past, they found the two agreed well enough that the model could be used to predict the ocean’s color as environmental conditions change in the future.
“The nice thing about this model is, we can use it as a laboratory, a place where we can experiment, to see how our planet is going to change,” Dutkiewicz says.
A signal in blues and greens
As the researchers cranked up global temperatures in the model, by up to 3 degrees Celsius by 2100 — what most scientists predict will occur under a business-as-usual scenario of relatively no action to reduce greenhouse gases — they found that wavelengths of light in the blue/green waveband responded the fastest.
What’s more, Dutkiewicz observed that this blue/green waveband showed a very clear signal, or shift, due specifically to climate change, taking place much earlier than what scientists have previously found when they looked to chlorophyll, which they projected would exhibit a climate-driven change by 2055.
“Chlorophyll is changing, but you can’t really see it because of its incredible natural variability,” Dutkiewicz says. “But you can see a significant, climate-related shift in some of these wavebands, in the signal being sent out to the satellites. So that’s where we should be looking in satellite measurements, for a real signal of change.”
According to their model, climate change is already changing the makeup of phytoplankton, and by extension, the color of the oceans. By the end of the century, our blue planet may look visibly altered.
“There will be a noticeable difference in the color of 50 percent of the ocean by the end of the 21st century,” Dutkiewicz says. “It could be potentially quite serious. Different types of phytoplankton absorb light differently, and if climate change shifts one community of phytoplankton to another, that will also change the types of food webs they can support. ”
###
From EurekAlert!
Public Release: 4-Feb-2019
This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the Department of Energy.
Related links
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Ocean acidification may cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton
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So the algal blooms won’t increase the populations of those who feed upon them? One might expect increased phytoplankton with improved living conditions, but then so would one expect the food chain to respond accordingly as well. Only examining one effect is poor accounting indeed.
reflecting even less phytoplankton,,,,,
I must be getting old….I remember when they were exploding because of man made pollution
..well, at least we’ve cleaned up the oceans
/snark
Stopped reading at models.
No, it won’t. I’ve already added this to the list of failed predictions… Oh wait, I’m getting my semantics wrong… Projections.
Added to the list of failed projections.
There is no consideration in the discussion regarding the fact that the cold water from the bottom and warmer (supposedly) surface waters can lead to more mixing. Upwelling cold, nutrient laden waters perforce have to mix with the warmer, more oxygenated waters as they try to descend again.
It makes no sense that warmer climate would cause a delineation between the nutrient-laden bottom waters and surface waters. Wow. Very limited thinking and lack to real science.
The article is actually more stupid than that and the irony is nature did an article on one of these organisms just this month.
The findings
So why would you bother to make a model based on current static observations and behaviour unless you are very stupid. The probability of this garbage being correct is very low.
I believe your last line was actually the last sentence in the paper!
Its even more stupid than that LDB.
Please tell me if I’m wrong but if the atmosphere warms by 3 degrees wont it take the oceans 1000s of years to catch up to that temperature and the same for changes in Ph.
How on earth do Universities crank out people more stupid than they went in………oh I know study on a contemporary course of climate change theology!
YouReekAlert!
Pretending to simulate such systems over long time is incredibly stupid. Already very simple models of very few species exhibit chaos and cannot predict on the long term… for the real world with all its complexities, such ‘studies’ are pure lunacy. https://compphys.go.ro/chaos/
An increasing amount of “news” today is nothing more than scare-mongering speculation about things that are completely unknowable. Obviously, someone noticed that high cortisol levels cause people to max their credit cards, or something. Is it any wonder that many people now completely dismiss the MSM?
No “computer model” massaged to spit out a desired conclusion is any kind of crystal ball on the future. The future will include variables unknown, indeed unimaginable at present. Those of us who came of age before the Internet arrived know this well. Rank speculation is a waste of ink and pixels, and should be ignored as the agit-prop. BS it is.
The opening line makes a statement for which not a single supporting observation is provided, and in fact cannot be provided. Further, not a single mention of a testing of this ‘model’, aka a ‘simulation’, against the water colours as they are now.
Perhaps we should remember that Homer described the colour of the sea as red like of wine. And is not there a story in Exodus about water turning red. Between deep blue and red just take your pick.
I noticed how they slipped both the words “blue” and “green” into the sub headline. Undoubtably designed to subliminally suggest toxic blue-green algae.
“Further, not a single mention of a testing of this ‘model’, aka a ‘simulation’, against the water colours as they are now.”
But you don’t “test” data against anything – data is what it is. You test theory against data. So to do as you suggest would only make sense if one were to pretend that a computer model’s output is not actually data. But, of course climate scientists know that it is in fact data. It says so in the peer-reviewed literature. Consensus!
Geez, people, get a grip.
I’ve read other online articles saying “wine dark sea” was misinterpreted, and that a better wording would have been “foaming sea”.
I just din an online search on the spur of the moment and found this. It refers to the Argonauts rather than to Odysseus, but the same “wine dark/foaming sea” is alluded to.
https://www.theosophyonline.com/userfiles/VolIIINumber5Mar2003Supplement(1).pdf
“…..At this point I
am citing the remarks of Henriette Mertz
from her book “The Wine Dark Sea”
regarding the detailed description of the
natural phenomenon of tide by Apollonius
Rhodius, which should make researchers
think. “Apollonius Rhodius accurately
described the high tide surging through the
passage and the white-foamed spray
clashing high on cliffs of both sides — the
Cyanean Rocks. The allusion of rocks
clashing together referred to the high tide —
as the tide swelled rushing in, lower rocks
became submerged by the rising seas,
disappearing from sight and appearing to
widen the passageway giving an optical
illusion of the two headlands moving away.
When the tide receded and the water level
dropped, lower rocks again became exposed
and appeared to suddenly come together.
Thus they opened and closed. Since the vast
The Aquarian Theosophist, Vol. III, Supplement #5 March 17, 2003 Page 3
surge of foaming sea rises twice every day
with an unexpected suddenness the rocks
were said to clash together (SymplygadesClashing Rocks)”. “
“According to their model, climate change is already changing the makeup of phytoplankton, and by extension, the color of the oceans. By the end of the century, our blue planet may look visibly altered.”
Blue-Green? Wake me up when the oceans turn pink with tinges of red. That will be something to see.
” will become even more blue, reflecting even less phytoplankton “………
…and that’s what happens when papers are peer reviewed….never reproduced….and quoted a million times
and more and more papers are written building on each other
and what happens when someone actually tries to reproduce it…….this
Phytoplankton calcification in a high-CO2 world.
Abstract
Ocean acidification in response to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures is widely expected to reduce calcification by marine organisms. From the mid-Mesozoic, coccolithophores have been major calcium carbonate producers in the world’s oceans, today accounting for about a third of the total marine CaCO3 production. Here, we present laboratory evidence that calcification and net primary production in the coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi are significantly increased by high CO2 partial pressures. Field evidence from the deep ocean is consistent with these laboratory conclusions, indicating that over the past 220 years there has been a 40% increase in average coccolith mass. Our findings show that coccolithophores are already responding and will probably continue to respond to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures, which has important implications for biogeochemical modeling of future oceans and climate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18420926
The photic zone of the oceans (in offshore areas away from the influence of rivers) is essentially a desert. There’s plenty of sunlight for photosynthesis but the factor limiting the growth of phytoplankton is the availability (or lack thereof) of micronutrients like iron, phosphorus, etc. Temperature has almost nothing to do with the amount of phytoplankton in the photic zone. Lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz clearly understands this, as she says “An El Niño or La Niña event will throw up a very large change in chlorophyll because it’s changing the amount of nutrients that are coming into the system”. The only time climate change affects the phytoplankton is when/if it affects the amount of nutrients in the system.
More chlorophyll means more life of all kinds, right. So, even though they never admitted it, this is a good result from global warming, right? Plus, wouldn’t more chlorophyll consume more CO2? That should make greenies happy.
SR
I noticed after posting that others had picked up that the article said there would be less chlorophyll, so the oceans would be more blue.
I drew my summation of their point from the closing lines:
“some species of phytoplankton will respond well to a warmer environment and will create larger blooms of more diverse marine organisms. This is likely to show up with more green regions near the equator and the poles, the researchers say.”
Did the author’s predict both outcomes so they could say “just as we predicted” no matter what the actual outcome?
SR
It seems that they are reporting that their model can determine the reflected wavelengths of the oceans based upon the inputs to their model. What the inputs are were not listed, but it may be surmised that one of the inputs was ocean temperatures, and this is what they were tweaking to determine the reflectivity due to this change. So they presumably tweaked some areas of the ocean warmer and some colder, by what rationale or method is unknown.
How temperature would also feed into ocean flows as well as estuarine outflows with attendant nutrients, was not mentioned. (perhaps a bit too much to model?)
They are reporting to have adjusted the inputs to past dates and:
“actual measurements of reflected light that satellites had taken in the past, they found the two agreed well enough that the model could be used to predict the ocean’s color as environmental conditions change in the future.”
How many of the input variables were changed was not mentioned. Were the input variables identical to the observed and recorded data profiles for all the adjusted inputs?
I would truly like to see some independent assessment of their model, to determine its sophistication and applicability to real world events.
Here is link to MIT’s release:
http://news.mit.edu/2019/study-ocean-color-change-phytoplankton-climate-0204
PS They also say:
“What we find is that the colour will change, probably not so much that you will see by eye, but certainly sensors will be able to pick up that there’s a change,”
They will be covered even when nobody sees any difference!
SR
If greater crop yields, lusher forests and beautiful wildflower meadows dont get the greenies excited, I can’t see them caring about phytoplankton.
“More chlorophyll means more life of all kinds, right. So, even though they never admitted it, this is a good result from global warming, right? Plus, wouldn’t more chlorophyll consume more CO2? That should make greenies happy.”
Nothing makes greenies happy. The Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation conducted an ocean fertilization experiment that produced astonishingly spectacular results:
http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally-dumped-iron-pacific-salmon-catches-400/
Instead of being praised for demonstrating how to easily increase the populations of all species of salmon in the pacific NW by 400%, they were vilified, castigated, excoriated, etc… to the point they had to publically disavow the experiment.
Is this the one where the Canadian government destroyed all of the data that the people conducting the experiment had collected?
“The nice thing about this model is, we can use it as a laboratory, a place where we can experiment, to see how our planet is going to change,” Dutkiewicz says.
Yeah, right.
How about setting up an actual experiment in a laboratory.
You don’t need a lab to run a computer model, a simple office or den will suffice. And a computer simulation IS NOT A LABORATORY nor is it even a very good tool unless it has a well established record of predicting actual measurable results that can be duplicated in reality. Then, and ONLY THEN, may it be useful for conducting “sensitivity studies”.
Maybe they couldn’t get the marine phytoplankton even though you can buy it on Amazon but they don’t have an account 🙂
‘The group tweaked a computer model’. That says all we need to know.
Isnt that the nice thing about all models. They have become THE laboratory. It makes science a snap because you can do everything, experiment, collect all your empirical data without ever having to go outside. As a bonus, it proves the science is settled because however many times you run 5he models, you get the same results. Replication shmeplication, weve done it millions of times.
Yet another model. What about some real observations , but no that is far too slow, and such a announcement is not newsworthy, so far less chance of getting more funds.
Its all about money, the Climate Change myth is a real earner for the army of scientific experts that it has produced.
One wonders what would they have done if they did not have our ever changing climate to fall back on. Perhaps they would have got useful jobs and improved the world rather than worrying about the colour of the sea.
Anyway where is this rising temperature they need for the colour change ?
NJE
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Oh, humanity never seems to learn
Is there anything AGW cant do !!
We really need to tighten up on research efficiency. How much would we have saved if we just put a five year old in the water and let them do what they do.
There goes the MIT. R.I.P.
I have been continuously dismayed by the direction of my alma mater. They jumped off the deep end when they got rid of Lindzen.
Models are great, you can get whatever you ‘need’ and you never have to worry about reality getting in the way .
And, on gray days . . it will be more gray.
Models! *sigh*
That does it. I could take everything but the oceans changing color in 181 years. That’s the final straw. Zero net GHG by Saturday morning.
They “studied ” the future …
Was their crystal ball clean ?
No mention that it has all happened before. The White Cliffs of Dover and similar formations around the world are made up of coccolithispores, the calcareous bodies of plankton. Many100s of billions of tons of calcareous tests (synonym for shells) which are 44%CO2, in the Cretaceous. Hint, that’s where a huge proportion of the high CO2 in the atmosphere went to! Wow! And the land was green and lush because of the other big carbon sink on land. Com’on girls, this is good news!
This is, unwittingly, the closest support I’ve had
from the glum for my progression of the “Great Greening^тм” of the planet, toward “Garden of Eden Earth^тм” an era of plenty, food and resources, for a population that will peak at~8.5-9.0B (85% there!) after mid century. Why wouldnt they mention that the Cretaceous had green oceans and lands.
@Gary Young Pearse
This could be the beginning of something beautiful! The wedge issue to drive between the “Greens” and the “Warmers”.
On behalf of the under represented photosynthetic community, I demand the (oxidation) and release of their buried relatives!
It’s worse than I thoght…
“The group tweaked a computer model…”
Yeah! I bet all computer models in climate studies are “tweaked”!
Another EurekAlert bit of nonsense to tease the skeptics and get everyone running around in circles.
Can’t respond objectively so you respond condescendingly? Is that progress?
No Leowaj:
Just can’t be bothered to tease out the tangle of wool which describes this article.
Eurekalert is well known for producing pseudo confusion dressed up as alarmist science. Keeps us skeptics busy and everyone else in a state of tension.
I have better things to do.
Give me enough free parameters and I can model an elephant who can fly and blame it on mans CO2
If a model can’t duplicate the past and present its not very credible for predicting the future , and thats the case with most climate models. Of course, part of the problem is the lack of quality data. Even today much of the surface lacks temperature measuring stations and huge gaps are filled with estimations/interpolations. There are half as many stations as 40 years ago and many are congregated in urban areas suffering from UHI despite adjustments which are likely to be biased. And why use a mean when you can integrate over 24 hrs which is far more accurate.
You would think there would be a big push for spending on more surface data collection but in this case more quality data may not fit the agenda
Most weather stations in Australia are at airports, airfields or aerodromes. This summer just past, almost all the heat “records” were recorded at airports, airfields or aerodromes and no-one in the alarmist camp thinks that might be a problem.
Model, might, suggest, could, predict, if, tweaked (curve fitting), potentially etc.
You can have you climate cake and eat it too.
Climate-driven changes in phytoplankton communities will intensify the blue and green regions of the world’s oceans.
Any significant swings in chlorophyll could very well be due to global warming, but they could also be due to “natural variability”.
In my interactions with supporters of the climate change theory few if any ever bother to actually read any of the studies that they present as supporting evidence. Even when I quote from their own evidence and identity problems or contradictions they will go back to the headlines as if that is sufficient to counter anything which appears in the body of the studies. Their next move is always to change the subject. It gets really old but sparing with them always results in a fuller understanding of the topic for me.
I wrote up a texhnical ridicule essay on a much earlier version of this same generic phytoplankton nonsense, that paper having more bad experimental extrapolated results than as here just modeled. The experiments excluded key micronutrient constraints and resulting known phytoplankton biota shifts.
Essay ‘Good Bad News’ in ebook Blowing Smoke.
We will eventually win this grand debate when old disproven arguments get recycled in new guise by new warmunists and then easily refuted by the old pre-existing skeptical stuff they didn’t read. They will eventually have to read ‘the literature’ to avoid rapid abject embarassment. PAGES2K v McIntyre is already exhibit A for paleoclimate. Resplandy ocean warming v Nic Lewis is new exhibit B, following on Trenberth’s previously ridiculed hiding heat papers. See essay Missing Heat in ebook Blowing Smoke for that one.
All they had to do was actually try to culture phyto….and then count how many tanks of CO2 they went through
….it’s the only thing we have to buy, everything else is free….and it costs a lot
correction….we also buy Arm and Hammer….but it’s cheap
As long as the lavatory flush does not turn pink we are good to go.
The kind of things that happen when too many research grants are recycled in politically correct quests for even more grants.
Consequence, private companies do now what NASA (National Aeronautics …) is supposed to do, namely, flying things around.
A very good example of what a high temperature and a shallow sea can produce is “The Red Sea”
For those who have never sailed through it, its near Saudi Arabia and it is very hot. And yes at times its red.
MJE
I don’t even know where to start…”Any significant swings in chlorophyll could very well be due to global warming, but they could also be due to “natural variability”…so, which is it? Well, she continues “Chlorophyll is changing, but you can’t really see it because of its incredible natural variability,”…what, so empirical evidence from observation doesn’t fit the model? Changing from Chl (a) to Chl (b) in phytoplankton or miraculous decadal mutation? But “Any significant swings in chlorophyll could very well be due to global warming, but they could also be due to “natural variability” — normal, periodic upticks in chlorophyll due to natural, weather-related phenomena.” So why is the conclusion that it is GLOBAL WARMING…oh, $$$. Models make my head ache…
Elevated CO2 in 8 diferent vegetable studies (reported in a recent meta-analysis) did show chlorophyll alteration. For chlorophyll b there was an increase on average of 42.5% (range roughly about 20 – 70%). In contrast for chlorophyll a there was a decrease on average of 8.1% (range roughly about 5 – 25%). I am not going to declare phytoplankton will replicate any of those % changes; however, it would not require “mutation”.
I should specify that not all phytoplankton have chlorophyll b. Yet the Chlorophyceae do have chlorophyll a & b. (Others have chlorophyll a, but no chlorophyll b; while others have chlorophyll c & b, but no chlorophyll a.)
The vast algal blooms that we sailed through in the tropical Pacific were never blue, green or red, but a rather unappealing shade of dirty cream instead.
Milky color we percieve is when light back-scattering increases with a lesser compensatory increase in light absorption. The ocean has inorganic particles
in suspension (naturally found of humic origin) & if the relative ratio of phyto-plankton to particles is low this causes more back-scattering.
We see the flat seas’ color as a function of refraction at air-sea interface, absorption of color wavelength & back-scattering. There is reduced surface refraction when there are large amounts of phytoplankton & the sea dies not look blue green to us, but dark green-brown. In the absence of phytoplankton & the presencce of a large amount of inorganic humic substances we percieve the sea’s color as blue-green.
Algae have different wave length absorbing pigments (other than & usually in addition to chlorophyll) arrayed to send light’s energy to processing reaction centers. Different ratios of these pigments to chlorophyll occur in different types of algae & to some extent these pigments to chlotophyll ratio changes as light intensity changes. Yellow tinge, for example, is induced by certain absorbing pigments in confluence with chlorophyll & this reduces the refraction of light spectrum blue-violet wavelengths.
Carotenoids are synthesized in phytoplankton. Carotene would augment a cream tinge to scattered red, blue & green light.
Under present funding models (sorry that horrible word model again!), nothing will change, they will continue to trot out this kind of biased research because this is how they get the funding. All the models in the world will not substitute good scientific experimentation, observed results and peer review.
These clowns have ~19 years of data on satellite picture recorded colors of the oceans. And that validates their model to next 80 years?
And then they cranked up the SSTs by 3 deg C to see what their model said!
Even the worst of the alarmists climate scientists know SSTs won’t rise that much even in RCP8.5. Land surface air temps by 3 deg C is the alarmist position.
Very different from the upper 100 meters of the oceans by a factor of at least 10.
Just more climate Buffoonery with a PhD.
Exactly – they ran this item on the BBC last night – probably had David Attenborough or maybe Brian Cox run the figures for them!! Guaranteed to give an alarmist approval to terrible science
Take a failed broken model.
Add in extra inputs and complexity.
Voilà!
New results that match what the researchers already expected.
Meanwhile, they ignore real world reasons and effects.
e.g. Much of the green water is where freshwater mixes with saltwater and where higher levels of food are mixed into the water.
Blue water has been considered to be food poor water. Water depth visibility is amazing out upon the deep blue sea!
More junk research based upon self satisfaction models and confirmation bias.
“researchers report that they have developed a global model that simulates the growth and interaction of different species of phytoplankton”
They took a climate model and fed its outputs into a phytoplankton model? This almost exactly fits the definition of nonsense on stilts.
I so want a “mood ring”oceans
“By the end of the century, our blue planet may look visibly altered.”
The odd thing is that the term “Blue Planet” has traditionally meant the blue imparted by the atmosphere.
Yes, I know the BBC did a series, but what do they know?
Not this: Yuck!
Rather, this: Beautiful
“Climate change is causing significant changes to phytoplankton in the world’s oceans, and a new MIT study finds that over the coming decades these changes will affect the ocean’s color, intensifying its blue regions and its green ones. Satellites should detect these changes in hue, providing early warning of wide-scale changes to marine ecosystems.”
So another bunch of ‘know little’ Phd types got paid excessively for putting ‘climate change’ in a paper of little merit. Probably paid from the public purse no doubt.
Can anyone tell me what the color of the oceans was 20, 50, 100 years ago?
I thought not.
Should the oceans stay the same color?
If they change over time what are ALL the circumstances (not more BS ‘Its Climate Change™) ?
I would wager that the vast majority is of this effect (if real ) is due to natural change.
In the future, children just wont know what blue is.
Solar radiation is the primary heat source for the oceans. Other mechanism are conduction from air at the surface, absorption of DWIR by the surface water molecules and conduction from solar heated land at the coastline.
In other words, I do not see an efficient way for global warming to warm the oceans. The heat build up in our oceans is a significant part of the alarmist case. Please, can someone enlighten me on how it gets there.
So they’re giving it the third degree?
Jeesh, I thought MIT was one of the last bastions of rationality….
But there IS no doubt that increased CO2 will increase bio-productivity.
“The model suggests the changes won’t appear huge to the naked eye”
So… it will change in color but we won’t be able to tell, and we are supposed to believe it happened anyway, once it assuredly happens? Sounds legit.
These so-called researchers don’t make the same mistake as dr. David Viner, the climate moron of the century who said “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” or Al Gore, the supreme climate charlatan, who predicted that the North Pole Ice Sea would be ice-free in some summers in five to ten years, and the years went by and the ice remained.
They get their funding now because their story fits the global warming hoax, and by the time the century ends and their predictions turn out to be untrue, very few people will even remember these predictions at all and the
so-called scientists who made these predictions will be either dead or living in a home for the elderly.
This people will strip us to our underwear
“the team wondered whether they could see a clear signal of climate change’s effect on phytoplankton by looking at satellite measurements of reflected light alone.
The group tweaked a computer model that it has used in the past to predict phytoplankton changes with rising temperatures and ocean acidification. This model takes information about phytoplankton, such as what they consume and how they grow, and incorporates this information into a physical model that simulates the ocean’s currents and mixing.”
with their “physical models”.
To no good outcome.
Stop.That. Now.
When woods hole scientists went to a reef with low ph to see the results they found a thriving reef and conceded that everything they had assumed from laboratory simulations and models was wrong .