Scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre have just returned from a 10-week survey of the Australian Antarctic Territory where, according to Dr Nathan Bindoff, they saw lots of krill and whales in warmer and saltier than expected waters, click here and here for some of the news stories.
Dr Bindoff said the ocean had warmed 0.05C in two-thirds of the area studied, and he considered this significant.
There was lots and lots of krill, to the extent that Dr Bindoff suggested some of these aggregations must be the largest aggregations of animal life on earth. Krill are a main food sources for some whales and some seabirds and the survey showed whales were widely distributed throughout the area, not just close to shore.
And according to Dr Bindoff, the phytoplankton were clearly having an impact on the carbon dioxide exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere with a lot of Co2 being consumed by the phytoplankton.
Sounds like all good news to me.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I was wondering if the eco-wackos would all die of an attack of paradox if we were to propose setting free in the oceans a batch of genetically modified phytoplankton as a way to save the whales, heal the planet and halt global warming.
Dr. Bindoff will probably now be called a ‘denier’ and a ‘skeptic’ and a ‘shill.’
Well that’s all very interesting given Dr Bindoff’s long association with climate change research. You guys .. .. ..
Phil, I thought they had been predicting a fall off in Krill numbers with warming – but can’t find a link or reference?
Phil’s upset with this report. It just doesn’t fit into his dooms day scenario. Stop crying, Phil, there’s plenty of bad news around if you look for it. There’s always the Greenpeace site!
Jen – no information personally. Certainly a quick Google would have many eco groups suggesting such things. From an off-the-cuff response – I would have thought that krill would have a temperature range – a small increase might be beneficial, but too much would cause thermal stress – but speculation is always dangerous. We can get into ecological trouble with “surely warmer is nicer” type thoughts as Joe now knows 🙂 Need to think about whole systems.
Would not an email to Nathan be quickest? His speciality. It’s all very interesting and exciting though.
It says “it was known that krill were abundant in Antarctic coastal waters, but the jury was out on what would be found in deeper ocean waters” and “it was really good to be able to go out there and confirm that they do exist and to get the first really good quantitative results on how much krill is out there”. ie there is no time-series comparison, this is simply a single-point measurement. ie this isn’t showing an increase in plankton, simply that there’s a lot in that area. (NB: brainless irrelevant comment from joe the troll again)
Robert there has been talk, including the new-greens (how should I refer to them? ‘Flexibly-minded greens’, ‘shallow-dry-greens’?) about possibilities of fertilising the oceans to encourage phytoplankton growth.
“Sounds like all good news to me.” Hey comrades, I reckon Jennifer is defecting to the mitigate-AGW side! This is not the 1st time Jennifer has commented enthusiastically on a potential mitigating effect. 8)
Thicksy
You are starting to remind of the Glenn Close character who becomes so obsessed with Michael Douglas she boils alive his kid’s pet rabbit. Tell me your not like that! Please!
So Joe – what is my doomsday scenario – inform us? For the readers.
Thinksy,
Not migrating. It seems you just don’t understand my position/choose not to – and please don’t ask me to explain it again. I’ve done so heaps of times at this blog.
It is also good new that they found lots of krill and whales.
I seem to recall that this was one of the predicted outcomes of a (relatively) slight rise in atmospheric CO2 and water temperatures … both being positively connected to plankton growth – and thence the ‘predators’ that graze upon the bounty.
Any dicussion of (research into) the upper bounds – what conditions might reverse the growth trend? Either for the microflora, or any of the downstream members of the food chain?
Back in the early 90s we (biologists and others) predicted that rising temperatures and CO2 would have a positive effect on certain parts of the ecosystem, but that there would be points where conditions would become either ‘suboptimal’ or directly deleterious for others. [in short, too hot, or too much CO2]
Certain crop plants ought to do well as CO2 is easier to get, but temperatures will change weather patterns – not so good. As things change more, the balance for different species will tip, and we’ll see many familiar plants and animals thrive, while others will disappear.
That, at least, was the expectations in the models we were using as undergrads and postgrads.
The other part of the krill story is that numbers have actually been kept in check by a vastly expanded Crabeater Seal, Minke whale and Penguin populations, which has, in turn, boosted Orca numbers.
The seals and penguins may actually be limiting the recovery of Blue whales because the Blues only feed on the largest concentrations of krill but these may not be as prevalent as in the past because the less travelled seals and penguins are feeding on younger stocks. In the original equilibrium the major krill feeders migrated north to give birth and this allowed the young krill to grow larger before being eaten.
I wonder if the Japanese could do us all a favour and acquire a taste for seal and penguin meat.
I was waiting for it. Took 12 posts to get that one.
Jennifer this is where I remind you to have a sense of fun! ;D
Ok I’ll get my rabbit fur hat & leave now.
Why would the Japanese be “doing us all a favour” if they acquired a taste for penguins and seals? Please don’t speak on behalf on me Ian. I was wondering where the reference for boosted orca numbers is.
Jennifer, I have a reference somewhere re possible krill fluctuations and warmer weather. I will be attending a talk Dr Nicol will be presenting on krill and whales early next month. By that stage they should have a good idea of what the results mean. It seems like good news, but as everyone who comments on this blog will agree, wait until all the facts are in. Hopefully it will stay good news.
Phil
Everytime you write soemthing when it isn’t attacking Louis is that we are going to hell in a basket.
I can’t remember if it was Ender or yourself who said that you were moving to Alice buying some land and expected it to turn into beach/ shore side residence in a few years.
joe – no that was you mate
Phil:
“We can get into ecological trouble with “surely warmer is nicer” type thoughts as Joe now knows 🙂 Need to think about whole systems.”
Ah, no Phil, we actually don’t get into trouble. We only get into trouble when the white death hits us with all it’s got.
By some good luck and more Co2 we may actually avert the next big strike from the white death. I want to take off the converter in my cars if the law allowed to make sure I’m doing my bit to stop Hitler dressed up as “mother Nature” taking us out again.
Remember what I said in an earlier post Phil. Not only do I not deny AGW, I am an avid supporter of pushing up more C02 into the atmosphere because by a strike of luck we may actually prevent the next overdue glaciations.
Unlike you, Phil, I don’t go off to the Greenpeace site and accept all they say.
Unlike you, I try to think it through and figure out odds.
In other words with the earth tending towards the white death, which is the bigger risk of killing us glaciations or sunstroke?
I’ll take my chances with sunstroke any day seeing that the earth has been under white powder 90% of the time for the last 3 million years. We may just luck out unless dimwits stop us.
And Phil the reason why life thrives in the tropics compared to the Sahara is because of water principally (of course soil type etc. plays a part).
You see Phil, reading lot’s of material on the subject is pretty useless if all you do is regurgitate the stuff, linking it and then asking people to do some homework. If you can’t write what you want to say then don’t link it because it means you don’t really understand it.
Ender
Lying is not the way to get out of something. Apologizing is and you still haven’t apologized for the silly comment you made about picking up stumps moving to Alice and hoping to buy up some cheap (future) water front land.
ooooo – who’s done his nana then. Now don’t you be a big sooky wooky – who’s had a hard day at worky works – you tell us all about it. We know it’s hard graphing all those lines and making all that money.
If you’re removing your catalytic convertor off your Mercedes may Ender and I have it as we’re into platinum. Once we’ve got the platinum out you can have it back.
I can see Joe there with his crucifix denying AGW – “AGW I cast thee out, I curse you devil spawn, I deny you thrice. I call on all the powers of the Lavoisier Society to damn you into eternity.”
Anyway – obviously you’re not into links as you know it all. Like knowing that there’s lots of life in the Sahara desert. Bit of a blue there. But hey we’re all human (well some of us). And have you noticed what post you’re on – lots of life in the old polar region too. But of course those who us who have not researched every subject on the planet may sometimes refer to what we adults call “reference material”. You see “reference material” is used as it becomes obvious that when you grow up that you find it hard to reproduce the last 2,000 years of human knowledge in one lifetime. This is why baboons don’t drive cars, work in stockbroker’s offices and go to the ballet.
You may wish to refer to some literature on the subject of orbital mechanisms. This is also called a “reference”. I didn’t write it but my specialty is walking on water so it’s not my field.
It says in part:
What does The Milankovitch Theory say about future climate change?
Orbital changes occur over thousands of years, and the climate system may also take thousands of years to respond to orbital forcing. Theory suggests that the primary driver of ice ages is the total summer radiation received in northern latitude zones where major ice sheets have formed in the past, near 65 degrees north. Past ice ages correlate well to 65N summer insolation (Imbrie 1982). Astronomical calculations show that 65N summer insolation should increase gradually over the next 25,000 years, and that no 65N summer insolation declines sufficient to cause an ice age are expected in the next 50,000 – 100,000 years ( Hollan 2000, Berger 2002).
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html
You might get lonely waiting.
Meanwhile back at the krill .. .. ..
Actually Phil, Work’s not that hard at the moment witht he US Dollar weakening against the Euro, so I’m pretty relaxed.
Phil, you keep digging that bloody hole and pretty soon you’ll end up in China.
Of course the Sahara has life, we all know that. What we are talking about is where we find an abundance of life. And it is in warm climes. Adundance and variation of life nneds to have a warm climate. Please remember that in case you read something else at the Greenpeace website.
Joe – I don’t frequent it at all actually. But you do – coz you’re secretly a “GREENIE” who hasn’t come out. But you’re afraid to tell your mates. And your repressed anger towards things green is a symptom of the inner turmoil you feel being secretly DEEP GREEN – ALMOST BLACK GREEN in fact. We won’t tell anyone. You really want to do hug trees don’t you?
Phil
Why would I want to be greeny. I’m happy kind person and always look to the positive side of things.
Most certainly I don’t want to tell others how to live nor do I want to revert back to the stone age. However the stone age could be more appealing if it meant gals where those deer skin thingis.
joe – “Lying is not the way to get out of something.”
You accusing me of lying mate? I did not say that I was picking up and moving to Alice. I did say that my retirement plans do not include living close the ocean. I am considering towns in the south west of Western Australia that are not on the coast. Apart from climate change maybe changing sea levels, the property I am looking at is half the price of coastal land.
Ender
So now you are buying in a ” Town Alice” because its 1/2 price. I though you told us that you were buying it because sea water was gunna drive everyone inland a 1000k.
What’s going on Ender? Do you think we are like the star in Memento. You can say anything and it will be immediately erased.
So Joe’s tactic is to suggest how he remembered things and then drive you mad insisting that’s what you actually said. Mmmm clever. Probably how futures trading works.
comrades, you were WARNED not to feed the troll. You know they grow exponentially don’t you? Their appetite is incessant. They follow you home, camp in the roof, kick out the possum, and pee on your barbie.
Thinksy – shhhh .. .. I was trying to catch me one of those dang trolls with some provocative bait. Ian’s suggestion of eating wildife has got me hankering for some fresh troll.
Joe – so your grip of geography is as weak as your understanding of climate science. I say SW West OZ and you say Alice. When I was in the Alice last week it was almost slap bang in the midst of the continent. Nice place though.
Anyway as these sort of things seem to amuse you keep going by all means so we can all have a good laugh. I won’t be replying to your comments any more as you have proven to be a troll and I don’t feed trolls too long.
Ian raised an excellent point about Japanese acquiring a taste for penguins.
If we have a duty to control the environment by limiting emissions of CO2, don’t we have a duty to control the environment by limiting populations of penguins, seals, orcas, other whales and krill?
Then the question becomes, should we kill the krill to limit other populations, or should we kill krill-eaters in an effort to “save the krill?”
These populations could spin wildly out of control, with potential risks and unknown long-term consequences, while moving the ecosystem beyond ‘the tipping point’ and destroying biodiversity in the fragile web of life, etc. and so forth.
Schiller.
Phil,
Unlike you I put my capital on the line everyday against some of the shrewdest people on this good earth. I still live to tell the tale.
What this “vocation” does is to teach traders very quickly that if they are going to survive they have to possess an ability to question and figure out things for themselves. You and Ender would never be able to get past the first day because you can’t bear to be wrong and admit you are.
A good example was the desert comment. Rather than admit you made a big mistake you kept digging a bigger hole for yourself. What has also become really annoying is your frequent links or homework, as I call it. Think for yourself, dude, and post what you think is the correct theory.
What we are talking about is a probability game here. We can’t prove AGW because it is too complex to be able to do so with our meager resources. However we can infer and gamble the possibilities. AWG is likely, though not proven. However the big freeze that Gaia has experienced for 90% of the last 3 million years is a fact. Therefore with the earth tending towards the white death for most of the time you have to figure out which is the bigger risk. If the bet is the white death, which on balance is a close certainty, it must mean that we ought to be more worried about freezing to death than roasting. In other words not only are you siding withe very long odds, but if you are wrong humanity is heading towards another holocaust and this time it is mother nature dressed in a Nazi uniform.
Again, taking experts best guesses (guys who actually work in the field) and accept that a 1 to 6 degs increase on global temps is not even close to a disaster we ought to be saying that the best thing that could happen is if the world does get warmer.
Again when something can’t be proved it becomes a theory and with theories come probability estimates. I have come to the conclusion that warming is not only a good thing but it ought to be encouraged for the future sake of humanity. Maybe, just maybe we have ducked a curve ball here and we don’t even realize it.
I guess you disagree. But please no links as I don’t do homework.
Thicksy
I don’t have a pet rabbit. Honest I don’t!
So add another to the list if you’re on a desert island – no accountants, no hair dressers and no traders. And if you’re so clever – how come you’re arguing with us? Obviously unhappy with all that money.
P.S. The reason you don’t do homework is that you’re a pig ignorant hick and like to remain so – heaven help us – light up another Cuban with a $100 note then try Tim Blair !
Libby, I have a work in progress article on krill with numerous references but it is only 75% complete and I keep getting sidetracked by the ramblings of blog stalkers.
Suffice to say that nature abhors a vacuum and when the major species that consume a particular resource are removed then the invariable beneficiaries are the species that also share that resource. And once the population of those beneficiary species has increased they do not often relinquish their place in the sun to the displaced recovering species.
But you will just have to wait for the completed article. It is 11.45pm and I have two days of tree dismemberment to look forward to.
Phil Say’s:
“Deserts are warm too and don’t seem to have near the amount of life as does the Amazon. Have a look where the world’s deserts are located – it’s usually for climatic reasons. So warm doesn’t always = more life”.
Phil can’t tell you why a desert is different from the tropics and yet calls me “pig ignorant”.
Some time ago I suggested that, apart from deserts and high mountains, life is most abundant, and diverse, in the warm tropics, and least so at the poles. So global warming should, generally, extend that abundance and diversity toward the poles. I believe shrimps are abundant in the warm water from nuclear power stations. Any experts out there got an opinion?
Yeah Davey it’s commonly recognised that there’s more diversity and productivity in the tropics, and as a generalisation, where land is warmer, wetter, less seasonality, more diverse terrain, lower, larger, historically isolated. There’s a theory that tropical diversity has survived from remnant patches during earlier ice age/s (ie epicentre). It’s also commonly recognised that diversity has chased climate changes and still is, eg boreal forests moving into tundra which itself is moving nth towards nth pole.
However these changes have inched along S-L-O-W-L-Y. The historical situation has signicant differences from the modern situation.
The concern now is the combination of the very rapid *pace* of climate change outstripping adaptive ability AND land-use pressures and habitat fragmentation (severely diminished opportunity to migrate) AND irregular weather patterns and more severe weather events AND additional pressures such as increased food requirements, introduction of exotics, pollution, etc.
For many species today, connections between viable habitats are interrupted (they can’t get from A to B) and some climatic zones are simplifying and disappearing (eg cloud forests).
All sorts of insects can start to extend their range or seasonality with a bit of warming. A little bit can cause big differences. For poikilotherms, it will depend whether they are close to their thermal optimum already or could be either assisted or hindered by some warming.
The mountain pine beetle is now devastating huge areas of North Amercian conifer forests.
‘Rapid Warming’ Spreads Havoc in Canada’s Forests
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801772.html
Tiny Beetles Destroying Pines
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; Page A01
QUESNEL, B.C. — Millions of acres of Canada’s lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.
The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.
Red trees mark the advance of the mountain pine beetle. (Leo Rankin — British Columbia Forest Service)
“It’s pretty gut-wrenching,” said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It’s now.”
Scientists fear the beetle will cross the Rocky Mountains and sweep across the northern continent into areas where it used to be killed by severe cold but where winters now are comparatively mild. Officials in neighboring Alberta are setting fires and traps and felling thousands of trees in an attempt to keep the beetle at bay.
“This is an all-out battle,” said David Coutts, Alberta’s minister of sustainable resource development. The Canadian Forest Service calls it the largest known insect infestation in North American history.
U.S. Forest Service officials say they are watching warily as the outbreak has spread. The United States is less vulnerable because it lacks the seamless forest of lodgepole pines that are a highway for the beetle in Canada. So far, U.S. officials say, the outbreaks have been mostly in isolated clumps of remote wilderness areas of northern Washington.
“It’s a rapid warming” that is increasing the beetles’ range, said Carroll. “All the data show there are significant changes over widespread areas that are going to cause us considerable amount of grief. Not only is it coming, it’s here.”
I look forward to your article on krill Ian. Do you know where you got the information on boosted Antarctic orca numbers?
Do u think there would ever be an overabundance of krill…