
Scientists Discover Evidence of Long “Ocean Memory” - hownottowrite
https://eos.org/articles/scientists-discover-evidence-of-long-ocean-memory
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mc32
Is the implication that today’s warming surfaces of the seas will not be
expressed in the deaths of the seas for centuries to come?

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makerofspoons
Like many things climate related there is a significant lag-time, in human
terms. As stated in the article the implication is that if humanity survives
the climate crisis it could take centuries to undo the damage to the oceans.
However it is much more likely acidification will cause a trophic collapse and
kill off the sea life before that were to occur- we have already lost around
half of the base of our aquatic food chain, phytoplankton, since 1950:
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-
labrador/ocean-p...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-
labrador/ocean-phytoplankton-zooplankton-food-web-1.4927884)

There are widespread problems with sea birds dying of vitamin B1 deficiency,
for which phytoplankton are a source, indicating this collapse is already in
motion:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6196476/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6196476/)

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radford-neal
You need to read things more critically. Ask yourself, "can it really be true
that total ocean phytoplankton have declined by 50%"? If it were true, what
else would be true? It's the base of the food chain. One would see huge
effects everywhere in the oceans. It's inconceivable that this would be
reported just in some minor CBC news report. It's got to be that (at most)
there's just a local decline in some spot off Newfoundland.

You've also grossly mis-read the article on vitamin B1 deficiency.

And, you ask "if humanity survives the climate crisis"? There is no prospect
that the "climate crisis" will lead to human extinction. (Humans might manage
to go extinct for some other reason, like an out-of-control bioweapon, but not
for a reason closely linked to climate change.) You have been paying too much
attention to quasi-religious apocalyptic propaganda.

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makerofspoons
I was looking for a citation that was not paywalled- here is a Nature study
that corroborates my claim that we have lost around half of the phytoplankton
since 1950:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268)

If this is true I would expect the populations of sea birds and sea life to
plunge, which they have. The WWF published a report in 2015 that showed that
marine vertebrates have declined by 49% from 1970 to 2012:
[https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/living-blue-
plane...](https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/living-blue-planet-
report-2015)

I'm not sure how I misread the vitamin B1 article, phytoplankton is cited as a
potential cause of the problem several times in the section 'A Sea of
Possibilities'.

There is also plenty of cause for concern about human extinction- between the
insect die off and the marine die off it is unclear how we will be able to
produce food going forward.

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ghostbrainalpha
The thing I have trouble understanding is this....

How can the same people be worried about human extinction as a result of
environmental collapse, also think we might be able to develop a sustainable
colony on Mars.

I agree that climate change is a huge problem and could result in horrific
loss of life and a world wide traumatic event like we have never seen before.
But there is no way that global warming will make this planet LESS hospitable
than Mars could be possibly be in the next 200 years.

~~~
dTal
You're quite right. Let's see some habitable biodomes out in the Sahara, a
much more tractable environment than Mars. But nobody seems to be pursuing
this technology at scale, preferring to focus on the rockets.

~~~
lurquer
Agreed. I suggest all scientists/engineers working on Mars or Lunar
habitability, office exclusively in Antarctica.... once they get their offices
up and running and self-sustaining, I'll pay more attention to them.

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SubiculumCode
-a testament to open data sciences. I think the same will be true with neuroscience data of today...more informed scientists of the future will download our data off the open repositories and make novel predictions based off their better understanding.

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mistrial9
offtopic -- an article got a lot of attention recently about renewed means of
sea-level rise via heat expansion.. clicking on a few links got a pretty
exemplary set of reproducible data tables and code, and several research
publications showing years of inquiry.. as a Westerner, an interesting note is
that it all came from a China PRC lab, quite a bit in English, and out-
performing many "Nature Climate" sort of things, from an "open" standpoint..
quite the reversal, on a crucial topic.

Lijing Cheng et al International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences,
Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029,
China

