Don't know if this site or its analysis of this study are reliable, this is just something I saw on Twitter. In fact I don't know if the study itself is reliable. I just think it would be morbidly funny if human driven climate changed wiped out enough of the major oxygen producing organisms to cause a reverse Great Oxidation Event.
God talking to humankind:
"Heyy you loving that oxygen? Pretty sweet isn't it? Wanna know how I did it? It's really clever, you're going to love this. See, at the beginning I crafted the rules that underpin everything, yadda yadda yadda, some bacteria in an anaerobic world gain crude photosynthesis and BAM, complex multicellular life is possible. Those godless scientists call it the G-O-E, it even kinda sounds like my name. You must be pretty grateful. I mean, without, you wouldn't exist or be around to ponder the nature of the universe and we wouldn't be talking. Ha ha—
Hey, what the fuck? Don't do that. Do not do that. No. You can't kill those. You cannot kill- well there they fucking go. Now I have to wait another six billion years for complex life to evolve somewhere else. This game sucks. It should be way more hands on. Can we re-enable divine intervention?"
The analysis is robust from my brief skim but comes to a different conclusion than "plankton face extinction", specifically:
[Some plankton] are projected to migrate polewards and reduce their global carbon biomass by 5.7–15.1% (depending on the warming) by 2100 relative to 1900–1950.
With a warming of 1.5, 2, 3, and 4 °C by 2100, foraminifera biomass is projected to reduce further by 5.7, 7.2, 10.6 and 15.1%, respectively
That's still quite bad when 4 degrees of warming hits ecosystems all at once - for example this study didn't account for bleaching impacts on symbiotic foraminifera
Don't know if this site or its analysis of this study are reliable, this is just something I saw on Twitter. In fact I don't know if the study itself is reliable.
I did a quickie google and I found this...
Researchers Parse the Future of Plankton in an Ever-Warmer World - Yale E360
Published at the Yale School of the Environment
October 14, 2024
[...]
And, in the long term, plankton numbers may plummet as climate change starves them of nutrients. Scientists are now struggling to work out what the net effect will be.
[pull quote] Scientists are shocked by the knowledge gaps. “I always find it surprising how little is known about plankton,” says one expert.
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Rant. It makes me infuriated the the US media doesn't cover this. And when I use Google News - I get shit like this...
How dead stuff at the bottom of the ocean helps slow the pace of climate change
NPR
“I always find it surprising how little is known about plankton,” says one expert.
It's not that surprising given plankton is just the term for a range of organisms that drift in the ocean
The "plankton" category differentiates these organisms from those that float on the water's surface, called neuston, those that can swim against a current, called nekton, and those that live on the deep sea floor, called benthos.
How dead stuff at the bottom of the ocean helps slow the pace of climate change
I believe it was dead stuff (azolla) at the bottom of the ocean (actually a sea, when the Artic was enclosed by land) that brought the Earth out of the Eocene thermal maximum ~50 million years ago, a time when the Earth had a temperature and humidity exceeding what humans can survive at.
So there's some solace in that even if we continue to go mad on fossil fuels and drill the huge reserves in the Artic, we'll just kill ourselves before we kill the planet.
well shit runs over for humanity gg wp hopefully the next intelligent species that evolves has their version of the USSR win so this shit doesn't happen, brutal
