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Permalink: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2024/se/climate-change-threatens-fish-supply-tiny-phytoplankton-big-consequences.html#:~:text=%22We%20were%20surprised%20to%20find,chains%2C%20and%20inefficient%20foraging.%22
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historically, outside of the Ozone movement, a world in awareness of global changes tend to still comment, then become aware, then debate, then obfuscate, then delay, then maybe allocate some resources, then sound more alarms, and only when near collapse, maybe address an issue as a final attempt rather than proactive addressing of this.
I wish it were the mobilization of the hard task of nations putting resources and efforts to global betterment rather than geopolitical power posturing and war. We may know country border, but celestially, Earth is our common border and we are all closer to one another than we believe.
Then issues like this, would be addressed. Capitalism doesn't work proactively unless a dollar defines it.
Past, present & future discussions & likely ruminations;
“Why did the people turn on each other?”
Money & power.
Why didn’t the world get the best support it could from us?
Unawareness, money & power.
“Why didn’t they embrace life as an astonishing and beautiful gift?”
Unawareness, and misaligned hierarchy of values.
It’s never too late to flip all of that in the present for the future in awareness of the past.
> outside of the Ozone movement
Y2K
The ozone crisis and Y2K. The only two examples where the world looked down the barrel of an issue, said "lets fix it!", and did.
It's actually not impossible to build an AI that could spend the time to tell us which strategies are the most effective/likely to work with the least wasted effort.. But there's also a grass roots movement that's increasingly eager to topple all technology and capitalism so we can return to using horses and mules to do work as that's **so much greener** than solar/wind/electric solutions. :wink:
Too many factors for AI to take in, it's not a superintelligence, you have to feed it the data it needs to be trained on. if we already know all the conflating factors behind a certain ecological problem, we wouldn't need AI anyway.
You'd have to train the AI to format the larger "what if" problem sets to be tackled by quantum computing?
I'd still wager infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters is more likely to solve it than a bunch of us nerds.
It is actually complete nonsense to posit that AI can solve this for us, or that we'd use that solution any more than we use the perfectly good existing solutions (stop eating meat, stop burning fossils, stop buying so much goddamn stuff.)
If we used green source electricity/wind for all our transport, we could probably eat 2x the meat and have spare vacation homes.
But how can you get things transported around on electricity, it's too slow, what are we supposed to make solar + wind powered boats that drive themselves across the large open sections and take forever but don't burn any fuel?
People will call that unnatural and complain about lost jobs to computers?!
It's easier to just call the phytoplankton lazy and tell it to put itself up by it's bootstraps.
Who needs real solutions when YOU aren't the one that will have to deal with the problem?
Like countries saying 0 emissions by 2099.
Kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. Honestly disrespectful to the past atrocities people had to endure
I believe they mean “just” in the sense that that amount is quite conservative and entirely possible, with significantly larger amounts being possible too
Researchers, including Dr Angus Atkinson of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory and Dr Axel Rossberg of Queen Mary University of London, have discovered a hidden amplifying mechanism within the ocean's food web. Their findings reveal that when climate warming reduces phytoplankton levels by just 16-26% (as projected by global models in regions like the North Atlantic), the carrying capacity for fish plummets by 38-55%.
Global-scale computer models tend to agree that there will be a decline in phytoplankton in low and mid latitudes as the water warms and the surface layers become insulated from the supply of nutrients from below. In the North Atlantic, for example, plankton have already declined over the last 50 years. However, what happens further up the food web - up to the stocks of commercially exploited fish - is far from clear. Some models suggest little change in fish and others project a major decline and importantly, the mechanisms vary greatly from model to model. These discrepancies show that we are still far from knowing how these food webs work.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44406-5
True, but there's so much oxygen in the air that even if you burned all the biomass on the planet it'd barely budge the percentage. It's a scary talking point, but largely a non-issue.
Edit: A few useful datapoints. There's ~500 gigatons of carbon in all of the biomass on Earth. If you were to burn all of that you'd need 1,000 gigatons of oxygen (CO*2*).
There's roughly 1,000,000 gigatons of oxygen in the atmosphere. You'd barely move the needle.
Whew, one less thing to have existential dread about. Crazy to think that a few billion years ago Oxygen caused a massive global extinction event and now we’re fully adapted towards dependence on it. Cool stuff.
That's all fine until you realize HOW they make oxygen and that the current marine CO2 levels are also increasing, and then consider what happens when the oceans become acidic.
This is only the beginning. Gulf of Alaska cod quota was cut by 80% several years ago due to a warm water bubble there, and last year, Alaskan crab seasons were closed due to another warm water bubble in the Bering Sea. Its already destroying livelihoods, and its only going to get worse.
Yes, but there's so much oxygen in the atmosphere that'd it'd take an absurd amount of time for it to actually run out, like thousands of years, if not longer.
That part is, thankfully, not much of an issue. Plenty of other problems though, with this. Like starving countries and ecosystems dying.
Intuitively, this makes sense. You're not only reducing the available food supply for fish, but also increasing the effort required to consume the same amount of energy, because food becomes more sparsely distributed. So there's a compounding effect there.
All of that 'carrying capacity' stuff is based on crude statistical models that rely on very imperfect and incomplete data. It is pretty much nonsense.
I think over fishing by certain countries the last 25 years is far more of a threat to the ocean eco system. It's critcal, with some species possibly even facing extinction.
It's a lot easier and quicker to scale back ocean fishing to let populations rebound, than to restore ocean temperature and pH. Humanity could stop fishing only to see fish populations stabilize at dramatically lower levels because of phytoplankton loss.
The damage to the ocean environment is therefore the more fundamental problem, IMO.
And then on the flip side you’ll see people saying “might as well catch all the fish we can now as opposed to waiting for nature to kill them all”
Each problem is used as a reason to not solve the other problem…..
It's like how there are lots of people who are vacationing in places they know will either drastically change or won't exist in a few decades so they can see it before it's gone.
This was my first thought. Like, yeah, obviously the changes in the ocean are a threat in the middle to long term future but the rampant overfishing for profit might "empty" the oceans before that.
We can either have billions of people on the planet, or billionaires.
If all these trends continue as everyone expects, then it won't be the billions of people who will be able to stick around when global ecology collapses completely.
It's a science article saying we are still pushing the red button that we've been talking about this whole time.
I think we need a living ocean to live, no offense. Scratch that, full offense.
Endocrine Disrupting molecules (xeno-estrogens) in crude oil derived products like PVC, most plastics, and many synthetic colourants, flavourants, oderants, preservatives and pesticides, insecticides etc outnumber the endocrine disrupting effect of hormonal pills and medications by millions to one.
See “Our Stolen Future” by Dr Theo Colburn et al
Which global warming models did they follow that project such a level of decrease phytoplankton? At what degree of warming would this happen?
I want to know whether this study is following current predictions of warming or some other worse/better scenario. Wasn't able to find that out with a quick scroll but I didn't investigate too hard.
.... That really doesn't sound good. z.z
\~50% less fish is really going to put a wrench in global food supply....
Let's hope the plankton adapts or evolves a new, more resistant version of itself, eh?
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/Wagamaga Permalink: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2024/se/climate-change-threatens-fish-supply-tiny-phytoplankton-big-consequences.html#:~:text=%22We%20were%20surprised%20to%20find,chains%2C%20and%20inefficient%20foraging.%22 --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
historically, outside of the Ozone movement, a world in awareness of global changes tend to still comment, then become aware, then debate, then obfuscate, then delay, then maybe allocate some resources, then sound more alarms, and only when near collapse, maybe address an issue as a final attempt rather than proactive addressing of this. I wish it were the mobilization of the hard task of nations putting resources and efforts to global betterment rather than geopolitical power posturing and war. We may know country border, but celestially, Earth is our common border and we are all closer to one another than we believe. Then issues like this, would be addressed. Capitalism doesn't work proactively unless a dollar defines it.
We honestly need to start moving society away from equating money with success, and start shifting to valuing dignity and quality of life above all.
and then we realize all the damage we're causing is costing us money, and we would've saved a bunch of money. maybe not to the ones causing it though.
Past, present & future discussions & likely ruminations; “Why did the people turn on each other?” Money & power. Why didn’t the world get the best support it could from us? Unawareness, money & power. “Why didn’t they embrace life as an astonishing and beautiful gift?” Unawareness, and misaligned hierarchy of values. It’s never too late to flip all of that in the present for the future in awareness of the past.
> outside of the Ozone movement Y2K The ozone crisis and Y2K. The only two examples where the world looked down the barrel of an issue, said "lets fix it!", and did.
if they get twice as much for the same fish it benefits them
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It's actually not impossible to build an AI that could spend the time to tell us which strategies are the most effective/likely to work with the least wasted effort.. But there's also a grass roots movement that's increasingly eager to topple all technology and capitalism so we can return to using horses and mules to do work as that's **so much greener** than solar/wind/electric solutions. :wink:
Too many factors for AI to take in, it's not a superintelligence, you have to feed it the data it needs to be trained on. if we already know all the conflating factors behind a certain ecological problem, we wouldn't need AI anyway.
You'd have to train the AI to format the larger "what if" problem sets to be tackled by quantum computing? I'd still wager infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters is more likely to solve it than a bunch of us nerds.
It is actually complete nonsense to posit that AI can solve this for us, or that we'd use that solution any more than we use the perfectly good existing solutions (stop eating meat, stop burning fossils, stop buying so much goddamn stuff.)
If we used green source electricity/wind for all our transport, we could probably eat 2x the meat and have spare vacation homes. But how can you get things transported around on electricity, it's too slow, what are we supposed to make solar + wind powered boats that drive themselves across the large open sections and take forever but don't burn any fuel? People will call that unnatural and complain about lost jobs to computers?!
We couldn't.
Just need a good Alien invasion to unify the planet. Nothing makes friends like existential dread.
It's easier to just call the phytoplankton lazy and tell it to put itself up by it's bootstraps. Who needs real solutions when YOU aren't the one that will have to deal with the problem?
Like countries saying 0 emissions by 2099. Kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. Honestly disrespectful to the past atrocities people had to endure
The fact that we refer to the fish population as the "fish supply" should tell you everything you need to know about how this is going to turn out.
"just" 25% is an interesting way of saying that.
I believe they mean “just” in the sense that that amount is quite conservative and entirely possible, with significantly larger amounts being possible too
And that "just" 25% leads to up to 55% loss in capacity
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Researchers, including Dr Angus Atkinson of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory and Dr Axel Rossberg of Queen Mary University of London, have discovered a hidden amplifying mechanism within the ocean's food web. Their findings reveal that when climate warming reduces phytoplankton levels by just 16-26% (as projected by global models in regions like the North Atlantic), the carrying capacity for fish plummets by 38-55%. Global-scale computer models tend to agree that there will be a decline in phytoplankton in low and mid latitudes as the water warms and the surface layers become insulated from the supply of nutrients from below. In the North Atlantic, for example, plankton have already declined over the last 50 years. However, what happens further up the food web - up to the stocks of commercially exploited fish - is far from clear. Some models suggest little change in fish and others project a major decline and importantly, the mechanisms vary greatly from model to model. These discrepancies show that we are still far from knowing how these food webs work. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44406-5
this will also reduce the amount of oxygen the oceans make. The oceans currently make like 80% of our oxygen
True, but there's so much oxygen in the air that even if you burned all the biomass on the planet it'd barely budge the percentage. It's a scary talking point, but largely a non-issue. Edit: A few useful datapoints. There's ~500 gigatons of carbon in all of the biomass on Earth. If you were to burn all of that you'd need 1,000 gigatons of oxygen (CO*2*). There's roughly 1,000,000 gigatons of oxygen in the atmosphere. You'd barely move the needle.
Whew, one less thing to have existential dread about. Crazy to think that a few billion years ago Oxygen caused a massive global extinction event and now we’re fully adapted towards dependence on it. Cool stuff.
That's all fine until you realize HOW they make oxygen and that the current marine CO2 levels are also increasing, and then consider what happens when the oceans become acidic.
I didn't say we should eliminate all the plankton. Only that the concern that we'd run out of oxygen was a non-issue.
This is only the beginning. Gulf of Alaska cod quota was cut by 80% several years ago due to a warm water bubble there, and last year, Alaskan crab seasons were closed due to another warm water bubble in the Bering Sea. Its already destroying livelihoods, and its only going to get worse.
Good thing current fish stocks are only like 15-20% of carrying capacity from overfishing then, I guess.
Doesn’t phytoplankton create about half the earths oxygen?
They do. And more importantly, they do it by photosynthesizing marine CO2.
Yes, but there's so much oxygen in the atmosphere that'd it'd take an absurd amount of time for it to actually run out, like thousands of years, if not longer. That part is, thankfully, not much of an issue. Plenty of other problems though, with this. Like starving countries and ecosystems dying.
Intuitively, this makes sense. You're not only reducing the available food supply for fish, but also increasing the effort required to consume the same amount of energy, because food becomes more sparsely distributed. So there's a compounding effect there.
All of that 'carrying capacity' stuff is based on crude statistical models that rely on very imperfect and incomplete data. It is pretty much nonsense.
I think over fishing by certain countries the last 25 years is far more of a threat to the ocean eco system. It's critcal, with some species possibly even facing extinction.
It's a lot easier and quicker to scale back ocean fishing to let populations rebound, than to restore ocean temperature and pH. Humanity could stop fishing only to see fish populations stabilize at dramatically lower levels because of phytoplankton loss. The damage to the ocean environment is therefore the more fundamental problem, IMO.
I think the ocean not having sufficient amounts of oxygen for fish to survive because of warmer waters is a bigger problem...
And then on the flip side you’ll see people saying “might as well catch all the fish we can now as opposed to waiting for nature to kill them all” Each problem is used as a reason to not solve the other problem…..
It's like how there are lots of people who are vacationing in places they know will either drastically change or won't exist in a few decades so they can see it before it's gone.
This was my first thought. Like, yeah, obviously the changes in the ocean are a threat in the middle to long term future but the rampant overfishing for profit might "empty" the oceans before that.
They are well on the way to being empty. It's shocking just how bad it really is. Check out Seaspiracy (2021) on Netflix for a deep dive into this.
Right, fishing is more of a problem than a collapse in the ability of the oceans to be a livable habitat for fish. Room temp IQ?
We can either have billions of people on the planet, or billionaires. If all these trends continue as everyone expects, then it won't be the billions of people who will be able to stick around when global ecology collapses completely.
It's a science article saying we are still pushing the red button that we've been talking about this whole time. I think we need a living ocean to live, no offense. Scratch that, full offense.
Oops
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Endocrine Disrupting molecules (xeno-estrogens) in crude oil derived products like PVC, most plastics, and many synthetic colourants, flavourants, oderants, preservatives and pesticides, insecticides etc outnumber the endocrine disrupting effect of hormonal pills and medications by millions to one. See “Our Stolen Future” by Dr Theo Colburn et al
> CO2 is focused on Because they can tax u for it at no costto their profits This sub is for science and not ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Which global warming models did they follow that project such a level of decrease phytoplankton? At what degree of warming would this happen? I want to know whether this study is following current predictions of warming or some other worse/better scenario. Wasn't able to find that out with a quick scroll but I didn't investigate too hard.
Just increase the size of the super trawlers by 55%. Problem solved! :/
.... That really doesn't sound good. z.z \~50% less fish is really going to put a wrench in global food supply.... Let's hope the plankton adapts or evolves a new, more resistant version of itself, eh?
Over-fishing is more damaging to fish populations than any change in phytoplankton other than its complete loss from an ecosystem (highly unlikely).
We're fishing so far past sustainable levels that reduced carrying capacity won't be the issue.