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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Anyone who thinks stopping the swimming pool going green in Summer is a battle is mistaken. According to a recent study, warming reduces the growth rate of plankton, and starves animals up the food chain.
Global warming poses threat to food chains
MARCH 2, 2021 4:14 AM AEDT
Scientists measured the transfer of energy from single-celled algae (phytoplankton) to small animals that eat them (zooplankton).
The study – by Queen Mary University of London and the University of Exeter, and published in the journal Nature – found that 4°C of warming reduced energy transfer in the plankton food webs by up to 56 per cent.
“These findings shine a light on an under-appreciated consequence of global warming,” said Professor Gabriel Yvon-Durocher, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
“Phytoplankton and zooplankton are the foundation of food webs that support freshwater and marine ecosystems that humans depend on. Our study is the first direct evidence that the cost of growth increases in higher temperatures, limiting the transfer of energy up a food chain.”
…
Read more: https://www.miragenews.com/global-warming-poses-threat-to-food-521387/
The abstract of the study;
Warming impairs trophic transfer efficiency in a long-term field experiment
Diego R. Barneche, Chris J. Hulatt, Matteo Dossena, Daniel Padfield, Guy Woodward, Mark Trimmer & Gabriel Yvon-Durocher
In natural ecosystems, the efficiency of energy transfer from resources to consumers determines the biomass structure of food webs. As a general rule, about 10% of the energy produced in one trophic level makes it up to the next1–3. Recent theory suggests this energy transfer could be further constrained if rising temperatures increase metabolic growth costs4, although experimental confirmation in whole ecosystems is lacking. We quantified nitrogen transfer efficiency (a proxy for overall energy transfer) in freshwater plankton in artificial ponds exposed to 7 years of experimental warming. We provide the first direct experimental evidence that, relative to ambient conditions, 4 °C of warming can decrease trophic transfer efficiency by up to 56%. In addition, both phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass were lower in the warmed ponds, indicating major shifts in energy uptake, transformation and transfer5,6. These new findings reconcile observed warming-driven changes in individual-level growth costs and carbon-use efficiency across diverse taxa4,7–10with increases in the ratio of total respiration to gross primary production at the ecosystem level11–13. Our results imply that an increasing proportion of the carbon fixed by photosynthesis will be lost to the atmosphere as the planet warms, impairing energy flux through food chains, with negative implications for larger consumers and the functioning of entire ecosystems.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03352-2
I’d love to know what their secret is. Because the one thing that annoys me about living in the tropics is the the annual battle in Summer to stop the swimming pool turning bright green. I’ll wager my biological battleground tropical swimming pool is a great deal warmer than any pool of gently warmed water in Britain.
It’s worse than we thot!! (sarc)
Entire eco-systems will be imperiled – we’re doomed…again.
Yeah. If one had very cold adapted and sensitive algae, one could get that effect. I would doubt the effect for algae in general.
Only briefly.
These biologists will be shocked when they learn of Darwin.
I’m with you, Tom. I spent a lot of summers on a ranch in Oregon, which had two large ponds for irrigation of alfalfa fields. As the summer went along, and the ponds heated up the algae content rose dramatically. We fished for catfish and bullfrogs in the ponds and by August you couldn’t see anything.
Yes, but the zooplankton won’t eat the phytoplankton if it is too hot.
Another Goldilocks effect apparently.
An excess of plant food material would logically decrease the relative uptake by animals, by the relative size ratio of the two populations. This should continue until, the resources available to the plant life decrease as a result of the overpopulation, the relative population of animal increases due to better nutrition, or some fool steps in and tries to adjust the natural order. I’m wondering how long the period of the study was, but it sounds like a natural life cycle from what little is in the article. I also wonder what were the comparisons and controls — my money would be that there was an increase in both populations over the control groups, and that seasonal and variations in annual weather cycles were not accounted for. If there was actually a decreas over the controls, then the rest of the food chain also need to be accounted for.
The thing about fossil fuels is that they are fossils — the results from leftover remains of living things due to a long period of excess production. An overage of any form of plant or animal life means that there’s natural carbon capture going on there. Great news! Except maybe for the wadded panty part.
Also one wonders whether the CO2 concentrations were also increased to compensate for the fact that warmer water doesn’t hold as much CO2 and therefore is likely to inhibit growth.
But that’s another control we dont get to know about from their abstract.
4C of air warming would result in 0.001C sea water maybe. Do these bubble heads understand thermodynamics?
No. They depend on the ignorant public to think air and water have the same heat capacity and thus warming rate. The “researchers” are just rent-seekers hoping no one actually goes and reads the science sections of the WG1 Assessment reports on SST ocean warming versus surface air temperatures. IOW, they depend on people being stupid to pull off their con game. Confidence games like the climate rent seekers are playing are as old as humnsity probably, this time with a climate scam twist.
I took their paper to refer to 4 deg of water warming which is one hell of a lot given the heat capacity of theoceans. That is a bit difficukt even for a demonic molecule like CO 2to achieve
While I bet CO2 science already has studies that debunk this, I am quiet convinced that in our present condition the atmospheric balance between sea surface T and atmospheric T is somewhat constrained. In other words I do not think the oceans will allow plus 4 C atmospheric warming.
Intial search shows CO2 primed the oceans biological carbon pump.
http://co2science.org/articles/V11/N3/B1.php
“During the period of their study, Riebesell et al. report that “net community carbon consumption under increased CO2 exceeded present rates by 27% (2 x CO2) and 39% (3 x CO2),” and they state that continuous oxygen measurements in the mesocosms indicated “enhanced net photosynthesis to be the source of the observed CO2 effect.”
“What it means
Noting that “the phytoplankton groups dominating in the mesocosm studies — diatoms and coccolithophores — are also the main primary producers in high productivity areas and are the principal drivers of biologically induced carbon export to the deep sea,” the eleven researchers say their findings “underscore the importance of biologically driven feedbacks in the ocean to global change.”
Further noting that “increased CO2 has been shown to enhance fixation of free nitrogen, thereby relaxing nutrient limitation by nitrogen availability and increasing CO2 uptake (Barcelos e Ramos et al., 2007),” Arrigo (2007) states in a News & Views discussion of Riebesell et al.’s paper that “neither these, nor other possible non-steady-state biological feedbacks, are currently accounted for in models of global climate — a potentially serious omission, given that the biological pump is responsible for much of the vertical CO2 gradient in the ocean.” And in this regard they additionally indicate that the phytoplankton growth-promoting effect of CO2 described and measured by Riebesell et al. has probably been responsible for limiting the rise in atmospheric CO2 experienced since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to approximately 90% of what it likely would have been in its absence.”
Dang, they did no research. It appears they increased water T in freshwater lakes, yet gave no corresponding increase in C02. From overheating freshwater lakes sans any C02 increase, they appear to have assumed global Armageddon.
No details yet on starting T, yet 4 C is a major increase. In general CO2 increases nitrogen efficiency.
Here is a freshwater study that should ease their panic…
http://co2science.org/articles/V9/N47/B2.php
“What was learned
For the algae whose atmospheric CO2 concentration had been continuously maintained at 430 ppm, abruptly increasing it to a value of 1050 ppm led to a 143% increase in steady-state CO2 uptake rate, while for the algae that had experienced the gradual CO2 increase from 430 to 1050 ppm, there was a 550% increase in CO2 uptake rate when the rate in the 1050-ppm air was compared to the rate that prevailed when the air’s CO2 concentration was abruptly lowered to 430 ppm. For the algae experiencing the most realistic scenario of all, however, i.e., gradually going from a state of continuous 430-ppm CO2 exposure to one of 1050-ppm exposure over a period of 600 generations and then maintaining that higher CO2 level for a further 400 generations, the increase in steady-state CO2 uptake rate due to the long-term 620-ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration was a more modest 50%, which roughly translates to a 25% increase in growth for the more typical 300-ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration that is employed in numerous CO2 enrichment studies of terrestrial plants.
What it means
If the results obtained by Collins et al. for the freshwater Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are typical of what to expect of marine microalgae – which Field et al. suggest may provide nearly half of the primary production of the planet – the totality of earth’s plant life may well provide a significant brake upon the rate at which the air’s CO2 content may increase in the future, as well as the ultimate level to which it may rise.”
If that is the case (I have not read the paper), then it’s fairly obvious that there is a huge confounding factor because the solubility of gas declines with water temperature. That would reduce the productivity of the plankton and the amount of O2 it produces. Unsurprisingly the consumers (with higher respiration rates and lower O2 levels) would not thrive.
Of course, you don’t need mesocosm experiments to prove this sort of thing. You just need to look at bodies of standing water in warm places and compare them with cooler places. (Caveat: there will be seasonal differences in insolation.)
A further query is re: the effect of the wind. One presumes that there is no wind above a mesocosm so that the body of water is allowed to stratify, thus the surface is stripped of nutrients. In normal circumstances this leads to a change in the phytoplankton community (one reason you get blue-green algal blooms in summer).
Well the ocean mean T has not and will not rise 4 C.
Thanks for these comments. I always thought since it is very hard to get published papers in Nature, papers like this mentioned one
Barneche, D.R., Hulatt, C.J., Dossena, M. et al. Warming impairs trophic transfer efficiency in a long-term field experiment. Nature (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03352-2
just have to be very high quality. Well, kind of yes, but it doesn’t mean the abstract is useful for anything else that spinning the Harmageddon.
There are so many variables even when you do an experiment with one, the results are applicable only to the chosen conditions.
I’m sure you could get increasing total trophic transfer with warming; or that you can get a decreasing transfer, but it will depend on everything.
Side note: warm summers (thanks to climate change, they say) lead to algae growth herewards, I guess the trophic transfer efficiency gets down, but overall, the problem is algae growth, no lack of growth. I’m sure the scientists know this so well, but then, the money ain’t in telling the obvious.
*syntax* sorry for lack of it.
No, by and large they have been educated to think they are intelligent, but have never had an Original Thought in their lives. It’s all memorised and parotted received wisdom.
They Cant Do Even Small Sums.
The generic term for them is Art Students.
“Art Students”
Leo, you missed the ‘F’ off the first word
This simply doesn’t pass the smell test.
The claim is that a 4C increase in temperature decreases that ability of zooplankton to eat phytoplankton by 56%.
Going from winter to summer, water temperatures go up by a lot more than 4C. More like 20 to 30C.
If 4C means a 56% decrease, wouldn’t a 20C increase decrease the ability of zooplankton to eat by something like 280%?
Mark,
The claim is not about a decrease in the ability to eat but rather a decrease in the ability to
store energy due to increased metabolic activities at elevated temperatures. They measured
elevated rates of Nitrogen absorption and elimination in the zooplankton suggesting that the zooplankton were eating more but not enough to compenstate.
Still fails the smell test.
If a 4C temperature increase was this bad, these critters would die out every summer.
Yeah well I’d like to see the actual paper because this….”The study measured nitrogen transfer efficiency (a proxy for overall energy transfer) in freshwater plankton that had been exposed to a seven-year-long outdoor warming experiment in the UK”…..sounds questionable
My wife slipped and fell over on the algae on our fore shore. It’s hot, it’s summer. The water is 28.1 Deg C, wonderful for swimming in.
There is more algae this year, not less.
Algae is not phytoplankton or zooplankton though.
Actually, algae *is* phytoplankton (not zooplankton). Phytoplankton includes cyanobacteria, diatoms, dinoflagellates, green algae and coccolithophores, all of which are generally considered algae. (Cyanobacteria, also called blue-green algae, are more closely related to bacteria than they are to other single celled organisms, including the other kinds of algae.)
Zooplankton, on the other hand, are not algae.
Yes, but n.b. not all algae are planktonic.Those in the title photo, for instance, are not. Those are fibrous, growing attached to hard substrate, or as mats at the surface. THey won´t be eaten by zooplankton.
LOL indeed ROTFL!
We have the replication crisis in which the large majority of published research findings are wrong and can’t be replicated. In a dismaying number of cases, the original scientists can’t even reproduce their own experiments.
It is absolutely routine that research results are contradicted by well known facts.
There is a desperation to publish. Editors are looking for novel, or interesting results. There’s no punishment if your results are wrong. Guess what’s going to happen as surely as night follows day.
Defund the universities.
Is there a central repository that tracks all these studies, which were repeatable, which were disproven by follow up study or observation and which no one even though worth attempting to replicate?
As far as I know, there is no such repository. There is, however, a movement towards pre-registering experiments. There is also Retraction Watch for the real baddies.
There is only one field where replication is routinely attempted. Drug companies scan the literature and, when they find something that might be turned into a profitable drug, their first step is to attempt replication. They have found that as many as 9 out of 10 experiments can’t be replicated. That’s how we know just how bad the replication crisis is.
One can’t get tenure based on replication of other’s studies, so no one in academia bothers with that. It’s a waste of resources if it doesn’t secure your place at the trough.
You can’t even get your PhD based on replicating other peoples’ studies.
link
How about a requirement for Master’s degree students that they reproduce the work of other researchers? Extra points could be given for finding flaws in the original work. Of course, granting agencies would have to change their focus so that half their budget would be devoted to attempts at reproduction or replication.
The granting agencies would likely howl that replication and reproduction would mean that they wouldn’t get as big a bang for their bucks. I say it’s the opposite. Right now, 9/10 of research funding is wasted on producing published results that are wrong.
What would happen to the quality of original research if the researchers knew that someone would attempt to replicate their work? How about a rule that you can’t get tenure until someone successfully reproduces your results? My guess is that the quality of the original work would at least double.
If you cut the budget for original work by half, it is certainly possible and maybe even probable that the amount of valid research results would increase.
Where does one start…. Did the study control for atmospheric CO2? it is known that this gas of life makes plants more heat tolerant and improves plant water use efficiency.
Did this study show the results for likely increases in global mean surface temperature?. How did the authors handle the increase of net primary productivity of plants, including plankton in ocean waters, due to increases in CO2-induced photosynthesis? I shall now read the paper to see how many of these issues were addressed, but I suspect that most were at best given superficial treatment.
Martin,
Perhaps you should read the paper before making such superficial comments. The study was done on 20 artifical ponds in the open over 15 years and atmospheric CO2 is unlikely to have made any significant difference over that time period. The question of plankton in ocean waters is irrelevant since the study was done in 20 fresh water ponds. And furthermore the issue of increased primary productivity is irrelevant since the study looked at what happened after that, i.e. how much of the energy produced by phytoplankton got stored at the next trophic level.
Of course CO2 increase would have made a dramatic difference. Studies have demonstrated thus over many hundreds of generations.
Also the “next level” was dependent on a supposed reduction in plankton, the bottom link of the chain.
“In addition, both phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass were lower in the warmed ponds, indicating major shifts in energy uptake, transformation and transfer5,6.”
As to the CO2 uptake, real world increased CO2 studies indicate the opposite happens…
http://co2science.org/articles/V8/N18/B2.php
”
Pasquer et al. say their results “show that at all tested latitudes the prescribed increase of atmospheric CO2 enhances the carbon uptake by the ocean.” Indeed, we calculate from their graphical presentations that (1) at the NABE site a sustained atmospheric CO2 increase of 1.2 ppm per year over a period of eleven years increases the air-sea CO2 flux in the last year of that period by approximately 17%, (2) at the AESOPS site the same protocol applied over a period of six years increases the air-sea CO2 flux by about 45%, and (3) at the KERFIX site it increases the air-sea CO2 flux after nine years by about 78%.
What it means
The results of this interesting study based on the complex SWAMCO model of Lancelot et al. (2000), as modified by Hannon et al. (2001), seem overly large. At the very least, however, they highlight the likelihood that the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content may be having a significant positive impact on ocean productivity and the magnitude of the ocean carbon sink!
“Studies have demonstrated thus over many hundreds of generations.” (thus = this ?)
Generations of diatoms ? of water fleas ? of researchers ? of studies ?
Your further arguments refer to CO2 uptake in oceans whereas the paper deals with energy uptake through the primary and secondary trophic level in critters in ponds.
Atmospheric CO2 has NEVER made a significant difference to climate or temperature.
Stick to things you can prove, instead of constantly displaying your brain-hosed anti-CO2 mental derangement.
Well, you’re wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter: the question Martin raised, and to which Izaac is replying, is rather whether CO2 made any difference to the growth of the algae, not to the climate or temperature; and more specifically, whether *changes* in the concentration of CO2 during the 15 year experiment caused significant changes to algae growth. And the answer is probably no (as Izaac says), since the change in concentration of atmospheric CO2 during those 15 years was very slight. It was therefore not necessary to control for those changes (to answer Martin’s point).
NO, I am NOT wrong.
Let’s see if you can actually produce any empirical science whatsoever showing that CO2 affects climate.
Start with the basics….
1… Do you have any empirical scientific evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2?
2… In what ways has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be of human released CO2 causation?
ANY change in atmospheric CO2 will affect growth.
The change is from a starting point of around 200ppm, a change from around 370 to 390 is a 10% change in available CO2
Stop being so ignorant.
“…improves plant water use efficiency.”…..In a pond ? But read the paper, as you promised. Next time you read before posting.
They just didn’t get the pH right sarc\
pH was much lower in the “warmed” pools
Why would the pH drop in warmer water?
Goodness knows what else they did !!
Field observation proves this wrong algae grows better when it is hot ie summer time
‘although experimental confirmation in whole ecosystems is lacking’
That would be right.
Yep, the entirety of everything in the voices of the heads of these people is severely lacking.
I believe in high stakes poker that would be called a tell!
It works fine in our carefully controlled experiment but seems oddly lacking in actual natural ecosystems somehow!
A number of terms for these sorts of people have been coined. The one that springs to mind right now is intellectual morons!
Since the heated ponds in the experiment were artificial and self contained, the plankton initially grew so quickly at the higher temperatures, that O2 levels were eventually depleted and algae growth was curtailed.
The correct conclusion is that depleted O2 levels will adversely affect plankton growth…. Not that CO2 will kill us all from CAGW…
I’d love to see the O2 levels of the ponds over the duration of the experiment to see the correlation between plankton growth and O2 levels…
Samurai,
The ponds were not self contained but open to the enviornment. Furthermore they were left in that state for 7 years before the experiment was done. Any issues concerning an initial rapid grow of plankton would have disappeared after 7 years and a natural selection of organisms adapted to that enviornment would have occured.
Izaak-san:
Even if the ponds were exposed to the environment, the ponds were artificially heated to +4C the ambient temperature…
Again, I would like to see the O2 level data of the artificially heated ponds to see the correlation between O2 levels and plankton growth…
It is clear that with lots of cyanobacteria the dying stuff will deplete oxygen in warm water; this would raise CO2 levels which allows phytoplankton still grow, but zooplankton would have trouble.
Happens every year here.
Depends much on wind, depth, currents, initial nutrients(!).
Poor Izzy, stuck with his mindless ACDS suppository imaginings , yet again!
All blather.. NO EVIDENCE. !
Yep, I was just wondering about O2 levels.
Warm water expels dissolved oxygen, so may be a problem in an enclosed tank.
Ocean water is limited to around 30C maximum around the tropics, and with constant water movement, there are very few places where DO levels could possibly drop below Phytoplankton and zooplankton use.
Would have to be stationary water for long periods.
Fred-san:
In addition, I’d like to see the data on ALL the essential minerals and gases required for plankton growth of the heated ponds throughout the duration of the experiment: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, boron, chlorine, iron, manganese, zinc, copper, molybdenum, nickel, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon to account for other variables that may have changed and affected plankton growth…
Unfortunately, conclusions of experiments related to the CAGW hypothesis are usually skewed to support the CAGW narrative…
DO (dissolved oxygen) and pH levels
DO below 100% saturation, and they wonder why growth slows down !
I wonder if they started creating methane products from anaerobic bacteria. !
D’OH !!!
Fred-san:
You are correct. Let’s add pH levels to the list of variables these pond-scum scientists (see what I did there?) should have also monitored to eliminate post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacies.
How can oceans warm 4C. The surface temperature is stuck between 30C and -2C. The deep oceans are continuously replenished with chilled water at about 2C from sea-ice/water interface due to net surface evaporation in the tropics due to rainfall on land.
Rick,
Ocean temperatures are irrelevant. The study was designed to look at “mid latitude shallow standing waters”. It was not intended to be representative of oceans.
More BS from Izzy-a-dope
If you are talking phytoplankton and zooplankton as a major part of the food chain, you are talking OCEANS..
Oceans are ALL that is relevant in the discussion.
What have STAGNANT, OXYGEN-DEPRIVED land-locked ponds got to do with anything !!
Thanks for pointing out that the study is ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS and IRRELEVANT to natural food chains.
You are doing a great job. … accidentally.
Izaak, their fear mongering was not limited to lakes…
“These findings shine a light on an under-appreciated consequence of global warming,” said Professor Gabriel Yvon-Durocher, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
“Phytoplankton and zooplankton are the foundation of food webs that support freshwater and marine ecosystems that humans depend on. Our study is the first direct evidence that the cost of growth increases in higher temperatures, limiting the transfer of energy up a food chain”
Their is no evidence that I saw that CO2 was increased to levels that plus 4C would theoretically entail.
As seen in my link above, fresh or salt water, real world evidence is that base energy ( food) is increased, often dramatically.
It is limited to ponds of a tiny 1m³.
That is the size “pond” they used.
Then allowed the dissolved oxygen and pH to drop significantly
TOTALLY UN-NATURAL….. except in stagnant water…
Wow. I was wondering how they warm up a lake by 4C.
Thanks Fred, wow that big, lol. Difficult to maintain a pond that size for years.
Particularly when you are adding heat to the bottom of the pond. 🙂
This experiment is a LOSER from the start.
see my comment just above, Rick 🙂
As I have pointed out many times here thermodynamics says air can’t heat up the oceans in any significant way. At room temperature with equal volumes of water and air water has 3000+ times the heat than air.
A thank you would be nice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEP_PJXnnNs
Heck, why can’t plankton vote ??
Unbelievable. The BBC made something factual!
It’s simples, Eric Worrall. What works in a petri dish doesn’t scale up to a swimming pool.
Ergo, you need to get rid of the pool and put a petri dish in your backyard. Game, set, and match against the green slime. You win.
Oh… you just might want to get rid of the diving board.
😜
My experience with fish ponds, cattle dugouts, and swimming pools says these guys are wrong. Unpublished….
At last we have proof that increased biodiversity in the tropics is myth pushed by Big Oil; perhaps Mickey Mann’s Russian bots are directly involved!
Let me get this straight, these idjits actually spent seven years on this study!? Good thing they didn’t inadvertently take a ocean cruise through the tropics to a polar region; that could have caused one of those dangerous, heretical kind of thoughts to occur in their armor-clad skulls!
The stupid; it burns!!
Another meaningless paper. The climate is not going to warm 4 C in the long, long foreseeable future. Can’t happen with ice at the poles and since GHGs do not affect Earth’s baseline temperature.
By “baseline temperature” I mean the portion below the active part of the surface. Often called the skin. The skin is 5-100 meters thick and exchanges energy with the atmosphere. Below that the energy comes from either the core or high energy solar photons. The one exception is upwelling and downwelling in the oceans and they are likely in long term equilibrium.
The skin and the atmosphere exchange energy but they must lose energy over time. Otherwise, the deep energy could not escape and the Earth would have exploded long ago. As a result the skin-atmosphere must lose energy to space constantly, it’s likely almost every night the previous day’s energy plus a little more is lost.
Since GHGs operate in the losing energy part of this picture they cannot warm the planet. Not possible. The energy moves around between the skin and the atmosphere but eventually must end up in space.
I know, right? Either serious chlorine, ye a salt-water pool with constant pH monitoring. I have the latter, but still have to add chlorine in the summer.
I’d get enough ping pong balls to completely cover the pool surface. Black ones work best. Keeps most of the sunlight off the water. No sun, no algae. Will only need a little chlorine to keep clear. Cheaper and less hassle than a pool cover. Scoop out for pool day and put back when done.
ROFLMAO
One of the largest AGW trough-swillers in the world !!!
What did they use as the measured mechanism for “transferring up the food chain”?
Must have been something that eats Phytoplankton and zooplankton.
Their use of the the word “Nitrogen” is the clue.
They’ve built a closed system and (unwittingly we’d hope) allowed it run out of a vital nutrient. (##)
My guess would be Phosphorus. Phosphorus being the prime cause of Algal Blooms in large stretches of open, salt or fresh, water and coming off rapidly eroding farmland in either flood-water or wind-blown dust.
Also human sewage and home laundry.
Possibly nitrogen depending where they got their ‘start’ culture, water, algae or whatever from.
That is why the algae stopped growing, NOT because of temperature.
But, just like the sweet old guy with his “AMB 450” Christmas tree CO2 experiment, once they saw the experiment going the way they wanted, they didn’t even bother or want to check.
Confirmation Bias (magical thinking) took over and it became a Done Deal
This. Is. Not. Science.
Low grade Witch Doctoring and Quackery.
Some might call it a fraud, racket or scam
## They have actually and quite neatly demonstrated what I’ve been raving about since forever: Soil Erosion
It is what has destroyed every single last one of all previous attempt by humans at ‘Civilisation’
Clowns running and publishing experiments such as this are ‘Heads In Sand’ or ‘Nails in Coffins’ for this attempt.
Not just heads in sand, entire bodies.
Not even sand a lot of the time. As Texas shows, it will be ‘bodies in ice’
Peta,
They did not build a closed system. They had 20 ponds open to the enviornment for 7 years before performing the experiment, with half of the ponds at an elevated temperature. If there was a vital nuturient shortage it would have effected both set of ponds equally and so would not have changed the results.
WRONG !
Fred, nothing like presenting your case with facts to back it up.
Presented elsewhere.
You seem to be yet another ACDS inflicted empty sock.
“if here was a vital nuturient shortage it would have effected both set of ponds equally and so would not have changed the results.”
Incredibly illogical sentence. It should read…
“If there was a vital nuturient shortage it would have effected both set of ponds and so would WOULD have changed the results equally.
Utter and complete BS, and provably WRONG from their own results
Dissolved Oxygen and pH were much lower in the “artificially” warmed 1m³ stagnant “ponds”
You can also see the effect of the Nitrogen tracer as the CO2 influx increases in the “warmed” bathtubs with the “warmed” having GREATER influx of CO2 than the ambient after the addition of the tracer.
Maybe they should evaluate the deep water Brine currents impact on the same too?
Where are the Ants in the equation anyhow 🙂
Dave Matthews Band – Ants Marching – YouTube
The quote “…4 °C of warming can decrease trophic transfer efficiency by up to 56%. In addition, both phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass were lower in the warmed ponds,…”:reminds me of the ads for bargains may save you “up to” 50% .
Polar Bears are triving because:
Less ice > more sunlight in water > more algae > more fish > more ringed seals > more polar bears
Polar bears have survived everything from the last glacial maximum with frigid dried out Arctic and 100 m lower sea level, to the recent Eemian with 5 degrees warmer than today and sea level up to 10 m higher and an Arctic ice free in summer. Multiple glacial-interglacial oscillations orders of magnitude greater in their ice variation than the miniscule changes being obsessed over today. And polar bears thrived through all of that.
One suspects that their toughness and intelligence allows them to find the good side of climate changes and take advantage of them.
The alarmist-necrophiles are so brainwashed to see only death and disaster among the grandeur of nature and to always find a disaster story in every trivial observation, they must find it hard to imagine seeing the glass ever as half full rather than half empty. But polar bears are not like alarmists at all, they are glass-half-full types. Optimistic and resourceful.
Each artificial pond was only 1m³ in volume
Inoculated with “ambient” temperature organisms
Why not inoculate the “warm” pools with organisms from a +4C temperature region ?
Of course it did, you twerps.
So now they are comparing growth of totally different mixes of species. !
And yes the Dissolved Oxygen was a LOT LESS in the warmed pools, as was the pH
This is what you would expect in a stagnant pond situation.
They have CREATED a hostile environment of low oxygen and lower pH
OF COURSE THEY RESPOND DIFFERENTLY !!
Spirogyra is an alga, not a plankton
Not that that lends any more credibility to anything 😉
The Original Post (O.P.) synopsis of “… finding … increases in the ratio of total respiration …” as alimiter of subsequent nitrogen cycling is unclear to me. Maybe the full text is explicit, but I’ve no time to track it down.
Photo-respiration is a dynamic that releases back out CO2. However, for every CO2 sent out as a consequence of photo-respiration 1 (one) ammonia NH3 is synthesized inside.
The thing worth understanding about photo-respiration in algae is that they are very efficient at using ammonia NH3. (In fact algal blooms off coasts with nitrogen run-off get so extensive, in part, because the algae out compete with bacteria for the ammonia & the algae overtake the bacteria for the environmental niche.)
Then too, the O.P. synopsis is not clear if the “finding” is referring to what is called dark respiration. And, to further confuse the “finding” the synopsis is not clear if they are referring to what is called chloroplast respiration (enzymes catalyzing reduction & oxidation [redox of plastoquinone ] for giving a pH gradient).
Another peculiar thing about the O.P. premise is that when light (photons) hit photosynthetic units it takes longer to evolve oxygen O2 & free up H+ ions (from water splitting) at lower temperatures than at higher temperatures. This is a feature of the chemical processes involved being slower at low temperature.
Let me tell these clever guys something i have a 1500 litre hard rubber black cylinder tank in my garden i use as a fish tank, i have 4 gold fish in it.
I have seeded it with all kinds a insects 3 types of snails worms louse boatmen shrimp all kinds that i ant even name their in there, and thats without all kinds of fly larvae, i mention all that because i dont feed the fish they just live off whats in there.
I’m constantly using a deep fat fryer basket to take out blanket weed its a bloody nuisance, and the water is warm to the touch on the surface.
Everything in that tank in the summer months when that water is warm to the touch is growing like crazy all my aerating plants are bubbling away the marginals a lush green.
No matter how much of that blanket weed i take out it doesnt stop growing and yet the only thing going in the tank is rain water, so it keeps getting its nutrients from somewhere.
So i call bs on their crap because those fish are at the top of the food chain and their quite happy, quite plump and at the top of my little food chain, that i add nothing to i only take away as in the blanket weed and cutting back all the weed at the end of the summer, and that must remove alot of nutrient from the water.
Gee, I thought these bozos wanted to have a diet based on algae and other “green” biologicals.
What did I miss?
Oh god! Have those “scientists” been playing in their laboratory fish tanks again.
“… the one thing that annoys me about living in the tropics is the the annual battle in Summer”
Since when do you get summer in the tropics??
Now that’s what I call climate change!
Are these the same idi0ts who proclaimed a few years ago that global plankton primary productivity had decreased by 40%?
When in fact it has not decreased at all?
I guess as freak-shows like the Paul Ehrlich circus show is that, if you are prophesying environmental doom with an anti-capitalist agenda, you have “diplomatic immunity” from looking stupid.
As for the corals well…umm…err… it might be more like Peter Ridd said it was folks-
Coral count rethinks extinction risk (msn.com)
And in the meant time, the real world shows greening and continuously increasing biomass under conditions of trivial warming and rising atmospheric CO2. Let’s not confuse reality where life thrives with the promised end-of-times religious ecstasty found in an artificially constrained pond persistently annoyed by government grant-funded meddlers.
The transfer of propaganda from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Exeter to the public via the fake news media has increased by 56% as the whole globe cools and the Sun goes into hibernation. Cold and snow records are broken all over the Nothern Hemisphere. Cooling will continue till 2035, and the rest of the century will remain colder than today.
So willing and well-funded green (really red) ‘scientists’ are going into overdrive to tell us more lies, more distortions and more fake results of boguos experiments. Now they’re telling us that animal plankton become too lazy to feed on phytoplankton if temperature rises.
What we do know, and have known for a really long time, is that an overwhelming blossom of algae will use up all oxygen in water and thus kill off all other life. That is probably what these fraudsters re-discovered in their ‘shocking’ experiment. To the rest of us, this is not even news.
Baffle-gab masquerading as science.
Arbitrary values with enough parameters for an elephant to wiggle trunk, tail and hop on one foot.
It is another self satisfaction model…
According to these biased people, mats of algae should never form in summer… Anywhere.