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Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#61

Post by pvaldes »

hanniabu wrote: post #30
Gibbon1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep coming back to the idea that over fishing --> pulling micro nutrients from the ocean --> plankton collapse.

Not only that, but the oceans are already at capacity with CO2 absorption and now with the plankton collapse the oxygenation of the ocean is also being reduced. The entire ocean ecosystem is going to suffocate, species after species.

Not necessarily. First of all ocean is not a continuous; is layered. Water masses sink and travel. I bet that we could find artic water (rich in oxigen) in the african coast for example. Oxygen content is strongly related with salinity and temperature.

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#62

Post by pvaldes »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #14

> The tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, also gobble up carbon dioxide to produce half the world's oxygen output—equaling that of trees and plants on land. So does this mean there's been a significant drop in oxygen (produced)? And if so, how much? If 100% of phytoplankton produces 50% of the oxygen and 100% is now 60% that mean 50% of oxygen is down to 30%. In other words, sans a drop in non phytoplankton, tota…

The idea of a study covering all oceans to find if "phytoplancton" (thousands of species) is vanishing is just ridiculously difficult. There are strong stationalities, different for each species. There are competition and predation, there are different water masses... In the same zone you can find void areas and reunion areas.

You would need huge resources and deploy a really fine "mesh" of stations for a very long time to study that.

Is the job of oceanographers, and do this all the time at local small scale. But extrapolating to a global scale is a really ambitious project, prone to came with the wrong answers.

Not to mention that aren't even doing plankton taxonomy. Is a collection of secchi disks data. To point to just one of the major problems with the study, Secchi disks aren't used at night normally. Let suppose that we would visit google headquarters at 4am for example, we could wrongly assume that is a mostly deserted area. Is the same problem.

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#63

Post by coldtea »

ridewinter wrote: post #59
coldtea wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The explanations in the doomsday articles here assume no technological progress. If part of your house is on fire, it will burn completely in, say, 5 hours, and you don't have the technology to stop the fire, assuming that "all will be OK" because you'll invent something in the meantime is idiotic. It's also not science (science is actively working on a problem). Optimism of this kind is just wishful thinking that…

Not “technology will save us” - human creativity can save us. It has in the past and survival will require our creativity infinitely into the future. You may laugh but let’s tslk again in 30 years. When avg temps rise more than the 1 degree they have so far, political attitudes will change. Overpopulation prophesy from 50 years ago. At the time 1 in 4 people globally were in famine and author prophecized it would onl…

>Not “technology will save us” - human creativity can save us. It has in the past and survival will require our creativity infinitely into the future.

Well, when discussing practical solutions to problems, creativity/technology is more or less same thing.

>You may laugh but let’s tslk again in 30 years. When avg temps rise more than the 1 degree they have so far, political attitudes will change.

They could very well change for the inverse: people/countries being more selfish, fiercely fighting to save their own (and why not? In a world of fewer resources / access to good stuff / areas with declining climate, that could be a wining move).

"Human creativity" didn't save the huge Babylonian empire from being reduced to dust, the huge Roman empire from declining (and entering centuries of "dark ages"), and so on. And those were just political issues, not political + environmental, like today.

And of course there's also the inverse argument: we haven't signed any contract that something that worked in the past (e.g. creativity solving some problem) will work in the future too.

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#64

Post by titzer »

mikro2nd wrote: post #55
pygy_ wrote: post #4

[2010], here's the paper referenced in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268 I knew we had fucked up the oceans with plastics and overfishing, but I didn't know that phytoplankton was down as well, at such a scale. Per TFA, it provided 50% of the Earth's photosynthesis (in 2010). If it kept on dwindling that fast, that share is even lower now (down ~45%, with a half-life of 81 years, assuming the d…

Plastics and overfishing are the least of our worries (though not to be dismissed) -- we know how to stop those (though we might find the means to do so unpalatable). The elephant in the room (whale in the fish pond?) is ocean acidification which will continue to increase for at least a century or so even if we stop using any and all fossil fuels immediately (and how likely does that look?)

Anything that causes mass die-offs that lead to loss of biodiversity is a cause for major concern. The system can be forced to crash multiple different ways. Currently it looks like the warm water heat waves have been killing corals en masse, which leads to collapse of shallow-water ecosystems, which is pancaking everything else. But plastics and overfishing are body blows being delivered at the same time as jabs and uppercuts.

Make no mistake, everything is interconnected. The recent uptick in gray whales dying off with signs that look like starvation is absolutely connected to the loss of coral reefs worldwide.

We need an all-front defense of the oceans, and I don't think we should pick winners or ignore major, major problems as somehow "solved" in our imaginations.

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#65

Post by titzer »

ridewinter wrote: post #11
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: Yup, we're doomed. Read or listen to David Wallace-Wells' Uninhabitable Earth[1] and/or Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation[2] and decide for yourself. Both a couple of years old, neither will leave you the slightest bit optimistic. [1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-... [2] https://jembendell.com/category/deep-adaptation/

Earth has always been uninhabitable for the most part. It’s only technology that allows us to live where we are (unless you live in the great Rift Valley). And it will be technology that saves us in the future. Edit: downvoted for technology optimism on this site?? Please explain.

I didn't downvote you but I would be tempted to.

Imagine you were standing on the sidelines watching Notre Dame burning down and made a similar statement. Meanwhile a fire hydrant and fire hose were nearby, unused. And twenty bystanders like you were standing there facing the other way, unaware, chatting about trivia while (unknowingly) leaking gasoline out their butts right onto it. Your comment would be massively misplaced and probably overall harmful in the grand scheme of things.

We need to fight this.

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#66

Post by titzer »

patientplatypus wrote: post #28

You know there are a lot of people who think we're going to die from global warming but I always figured the food web will just collapse. Like one year all the harvests stop working. Could be the missing bees and insects or the soil exhaustion or the heat. Or just that plastic is in the water supply. Heck, we just found out a few days ago that larger amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere actually makes rice less nutritiou…

> I always figured the food web will just collapse.

I fear this too, but it won't be so dramatic. On geologic and evolutionary timescales, it will be like a flash. On human timescales, it might be a decade or a century. From our perspective it will look a lot more like a ratcheting-down of the food web, as loss of biodiversity will lead to pancaking of layers down. There will be booms and busts, as the ecological niche filled by one organism is vacated by its sudden collapse and a temporary resurgence of some aggressive species fills that gap, until that poorly adapted monoculture succumbs to something else. In a sense, the whole thing is going to come down in spasms, and we'll be arguing the whole way into the grave, because it's so complicated that gaslighters and deniers will always be able to point to something that looks like recovery, but really isn't.

I am long past accepting this. The question in my mind is really, how big is the crater left by humanity going to be?

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#67

Post by dang »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #50
radford-neal wrote: post #43

The referenced paper is from 2010. Do you suppose that the reason you haven't been hearing more about this recently is that it's just wrong? In 2011, this comment disputing it was published: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09950 The paper was discussed on HN earlier, as part of the discussion of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127911 I have a comment there pointing out that if you actually look at the da…

HN seems to more and more turn into Reddit when it comes to upvoting articles people only read the headlines for.

Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#68

Post by dang »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #17
Gibbon1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep coming back to the idea that over fishing --> pulling micro nutrients from the ocean --> plankton collapse.

We take the good stuff out (i.e., fish) and dump garbage and pollutants back in. What could go wrong? Humans fully deserve the next extinction event.

Please don't break the site guidelines by posting flamebait and getting involved in flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#69

Post by dang »

bamboozled wrote: post #21
chiefalchemist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We take the good stuff out (i.e., fish) and dump garbage and pollutants back in. What could go wrong? Humans fully deserve the next extinction event.

Yeah right, children, innocents and wildlife deserve an extinction event. Sorry but what a silly idea that is.

Please don't break the site guidelines by replying to flamebait and getting involved in flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

#70

Post by ridewinter »

titzer wrote: post #65
ridewinter wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earth has always been uninhabitable for the most part. It’s only technology that allows us to live where we are (unless you live in the great Rift Valley). And it will be technology that saves us in the future. Edit: downvoted for technology optimism on this site?? Please explain.

I didn't downvote you but I would be tempted to. Imagine you were standing on the sidelines watching Notre Dame burning down and made a similar statement. Meanwhile a fire hydrant and fire hose were nearby, unused. And twenty bystanders like you were standing there facing the other way, unaware, chatting about trivia while (unknowingly) leaking gasoline out their butts right onto it. Your comment would be massively m…

Pretty sure what I’m saying is to use the dang fire hydrant in addition to removing unnecessary wood from the cathedral.
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