seabirds are dying of hunger - rising temps in ocean kill their food

[donsu]

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2005-07-14-pacific-plankton_x.htm

Scientists raise alarm about ocean health

With a record number of dead seabirds washing up on West Coast beaches from Central California to British Columbia, marine biologists are raising the alarm about rising ocean temperatures and dwindling plankton populations.

-snip-

"Something big is going on out there," said Julia Parrish, an associate professor in the School of Aquatic Fisheries and Sciences at the University of Washington. "I'm left with no obvious smoking gun, but birds are a good signal because they feed high up on the food chain."
-snip-
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"Something big is going on out there,"


well, the warning canaries are all dead and now it's the warning seabirds turn to warn and die

and the part of the human food chain that comes from the ocean is dwindling

and we all go on as if

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. yes. the ocean is very unhealthy right now

[H5N1]

2. .

[H5N1]

3. I don't expect it to recover until man is long gone

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. Or until man seriously catches a clue. And even then there will be people

who wo't care and will poison the environment regardless of the harm it causes to ewvery living thing.

[wli]

5. actually

When I did some fact checking, I found there is a longer-term phenomenon involving the sun increasing its luminosity over time. The estimates range between 500M and 1000M years from now to raise the mean surface temperature to 100C, barring issues such as cloud cover and albedo as far as I know. Now, a global mean surface temperature increase of 6C is one of the leading hypotheses for the cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, and that took quite some time to recover from (during which time fungus was the dominant form of life on the planet). A global mean surface temperature increase of 10C is believed to be enough to disrupt carbon and other cycles. These things create a suspicion in my mind, at least, that there may not actually be enough time to recover from a global warming catastrophe.

On the other hand, what's going to happen 60M-100M years from now is not something I can really get very up in arms about.