Chronic Ocean Heating Fuels 'Staggering' Loss of Marine Life, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 30
Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy shared this report from the Guardian:
Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a "staggering and deeply concerning" loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade. Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year.
"To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish," said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study's lead author. "A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small," he added. "But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life."
"To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish," said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study's lead author. "A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small," he added. "But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life."
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. . . no. Please no. That's a terrible idea.
Re: aerosole cooling (Score:3)
We could also try not pumping crude oil out of the ground only to burn it.
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Of course, the solar wind is going to push those into the earth, so we'll need something to keep them in place. Maybe some nuclear-powered ion rockets. The cool thing is when the nuclear fuel runs out, we can shoot it into the sun!
Flawless.
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under 2% less light is all it will take to reduce temperature, absolutely irrelevant for agriculture but may be 100% necessary for the survival of the marine life and of all life on this planet. If marine life gets kicked in the nuts, so to speak, so will we as civilization.
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We can use mirrors to bounce the desired amount of light around our nuclear-powered rocket sails! Just ask AI to build it. We got this!
Passing through the dark ages (Score:2)
I fear that we are not capable of taking action based on the results of scientific studies - even a scientific consensus. We are not convinced until it hits us directly, and even then we refuse to believe until it gets serious.
If this is true, then we'll take action when either:
(a) McDonalds takes the fillet o' fish off its menu, or
(b) we move into more enlightened political times
The Intellectual Dark Ages. (Score:2)
If this is true, then we'll take action when..McDonalds takes the fillet o' fish off its menu..
..to find the actual red flag warning when we discover that’s not made out of actual fish.
..because McDonalds found supply waning decades ago.
Someone have a presser about how this isn't true! (Score:2)
Someone needs to get their press secretary or some other trusted person in front of a microphone to say that this isn't true, and we don't have to do anything, and it would cost business too much to fix. Think of the poor stock market!
Eh, what's the big deal? (Score:2)
What have fish ever done for us? /s
Re: Eh, what's the big deal? (Score:2)
Going to be a lot of empty plates and sad faces on Fish Friday.
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Fish are friends, not food. https://media.tenor.com/eTVPYF... [tenor.com]
It's not heating, it's China overfishing the ocean (Score:4, Informative)
China’s Fishing Offensive: How China’s Fishing Fleet Monopolizes Food Around the World [house.gov]
Time to put China on the hook for overfishing [asiatimes.com]
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Yeah was gonna say the same thing. All they've shown is a correlation. Humans are overfishing the oceans pretty badly. China is encroaching on territorial waters of other nations (see: Peru) to fish out their oceanic preserves.
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Not bloody likely, but keep screaming about it.
The math (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone who knows a bit of statistics:
As of Feb. 20, 2026, global sea-surface temperatures are 4.23 sigma above the 1982-2011 mean.
The year 2024 was around 4.5-5 sigma.
That's about a 0.7C difference.
Think about how much energy is needed to warm the world's oceans by that amount...
the rolling tragedy (Score:4, Interesting)
"A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small," he added. "But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life."
That's a massive die-off. And then there's the huge reductions of bird and insect populations. It sounds like ecosystem collapse and if that happens we are screwed.
Warming or commercial fishing? (Score:3)
China has been massively trawling the oceans across the globe for years now to feed a billion fish hungry mouths. China consumes fish like the US consumes beef.
I have to believe the "staggering loses" are due in no small part to the massive commercial over fishing from China and other nations.
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That aged like milk. (Score:1)
What happens to unused ecosystems? (Score:2)
I mean assuming humans don't keep them unused... Mutants will still be created periodically, and some will survive there and eventually thrive where others can't.
Does this mean nothing will need to change? Nope. Just that "life" has this funny habit of filling in the gaps, where possible.
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> Nope. Just that "life" has this funny habit of filling in the gaps, where possible.
Where possible indeed...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Commercial fishing? (Score:3)
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Of course, any disruption of sea life is due to global warming. It has nothing at all to do with massive commercial fishing fleets destroying fish stocks, with knock-on effects throughout the food chain.
That's why actual researchers did a study.
Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year.
I mean the method they used to isolate the effects of temperature is literally in the first paragraph of the summary.
overfishing (Score:1)
Guardian is a left wing rag. They are reporting on a publication in a sub-journal of Nature, a left-wing-peer-reviewed left wing journal. That makes the reported results suspect, since it is a statistical analysis that has to be adjusted for various factors.
The vast decrease in fisheries has long been known to be caused primarily by overfishing, and mainly by Asian countries, though pretty much everyone is to blame.