If you want to see for yourself what happens with plants in a warmer ocean, try this: Expose a basil plant to warm air from a hair dryer for four minutes.
Actually, we are experimenting now, in the real ocean. This summer’s record ocean temperatures provided another pile of evidence why we should sound the alarm. Or, as NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus puts it: “It’s never too late to fight, but don’t be lulled by platitudes.”
Coral reefs die, phytoplankton die, oxygen content decline and ice melts. And it hurts people directly; wild fires, heat waves and extreme weather.
I read through several articles about what happens and the consequences of a warmer ocean. Wired explains it well.
First, the reason why the ocean got so warm this year is a combination of natural variability, a strong El Niño and global warming.
El Niño
El Niño is when trade winds weaken and warm surface water that is normally pushed westward by the trade winds go east. La Niña is when trade winds are stronger and the warm surface water is pushed and piled up in the Eastern Pacific.
Second, while coral reef bleaching attracts much media attention, the heat affects every aspect of the ocean well beyond the corals.
Wired asked experts about what happens with the “galaxy of organisms that makes up the base of the oceanic food web”, in a warmer ocean. “Phytoplankton will drive zooplankton, which will drive fish and feed other things,” biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute explains. “The whole ecosystem has to be impacted in some form or another under warmer sea surface temperatures.”
The basil experiment and phytoplankton
Peter Roopnarine, a paleoecologist at the California Academy of Sciences explains: A big part of the problem is we don’t know the optimal temperature ranges for probably 99 percent of the organisms out there. We know they have them, but it’s a very difficult thing to measure.
This is why I wanted to do the hair dryer experiment. What happened? After one minute I saw little change. After two minutes, the stems looked like spaghetti and the leaves looked like hanging socks. Then, after three minutes of heat exposure only one stem stood but had to surrender during the last 60 seconds.
Of course, the processes in the ocean are far more complicated. It’s actually not comparable with this experiment. The point is that heating is bad.
Multiple processes affect phytoplankton. Basically, a warmer ocean deprive them of the nutrients they need which means less production of organic material for the food chain, which feeds fish. Scientists will explain why as they do in the Wired article. The rest of us just need to act.
This is bad – anything good to report?
The answer is yes. I google “fossil fuel investments decline” and “investments in renewables”.
Experts broadly agree that we need to completely decarbonise global electricity generation by 2040 if the world is to stay on track for its climate targets.
Climate think tank Ember says that rapidly expanding renewables mean that the “phasedown” of gas as well as coal power required for this transition is “now within reach”. It forecasts that, by the end of 2023, more than 100% of the growth in electricity demand will be covered by low-carbon sources.
The World Energy Investment report 2023 (IEA) says that investment in clean energy technologies outpace spending on fossil fuels. About USD 2.8 trillion is set to be invested globally in energy in 2023. More than USD 1.7 trillion is expected to go to clean technologies.
The New York Times reports that “the nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.”
Poor plant
After I turned off the hair dryer, I watered the basil plant to see if it would recover the day after. I was hoping it would so I could report back that, even if it looks bad now, nature recovers. Well, not all nature will recover. The basil plant didn’t. It ended up as compost.
