Climatide

Speaking to Inupiaq in Barrow, Alaska they speak of less ice and it’s impact on their way of life. Natives in the highlands of Peru (as reported in the NRDC magazine ON EARTH) are seeing their glaciers, that provide water to homes, irrigation, and hydro-electric providing less and less water as they melt, perhaps faster than climate change is melting ice in the Arctic. The research proving the loss of this sea and glacial ice, especially quicker than originally thought should be near the top of the list. It’s easy to prove (I believe) , hard to deny, and affecting lives as I write this.

I give my vote overwhelmingly to the Nature paper out of Boris Worm’s lab (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09268) reporting the phytoplankton biomass decrease of 1% each year globally over the last century. This has implications not only for atmospheric climate, but also for marine life from the surface to the seafloor. It’s also contrary to previous assumptions – that atmospheric and oceanic warming would increase photosynthetic rate, increasing phytoplankton biomass and creating a greater carbon sink. This changes the game, and hopefully gives a bit more credit to those little photosynthetic, oceanic microbes.

I think a few things are significant: 1. more dissemination of Richard Feely’s work about ocean acidification and observations on the Pacific West Coast upwelling water masses, 2. development of a National Ocean Policy and (for good or bad) coastal and marine spatial planning gaining some momentum, 3. publication of SEA’s marine debris findings in the Atlantic and Pacific, 4. Francisco Chavez’s findings on sea level rise – ENSO-PDO connections for the west coast and how the current stage of PDO could be suppressing SLR in the near-term but how rapidly sea level will rise when the PDO shifts, as it will.

Not really a singular one but lots of ocean activity to note this year!

I also vote for the Worm et al report of global-scale declines in oceanic phytoplankton in response to climate change, deduced from water transparency measurements. This nice analysis suggests large-scale changes at the base of the open ocean foodchain and also indicates changes in the ocean productivity regime responsible for about half of Earth’s photosynthetic carbon fixation. This report echoes and broadens an earlier report by Behrenfeld et al (Climate-driven trends in contemporary ocean productivity. Nature 444: 752-755, 2006). These trends are complex and may vary regionally, as indicated by similar research in the Antarctic Peninsula region, one of the most rapidly-warming ecosystems on the planet (Montes-Hugo, M. and others 2009. Recent Changes in Phytoplankton Communities Associated with Rapid Regional Climate Change Along the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Science 323: 1470-1473).