Science Scientists raise alert as ocean plankton levels plummet.

Seems as if we have been here before Lanny. About Scripp's being a reliable source.

 

https://www.pnas.org/content/110/3/1000
a scientific article of long term data analysis that says there isn't enough data about jellys to come to conclusions, pretty much backing your conclusion.
acidification of the oceans concerns me more than jelly population blooms. this i believe can be linked to greenhouse gas production of the last century or so. though not all man made, we are responsible for much of it.

 

I have questions for you.

Are there new satellites that measure the amount of plankton. Or, are they using the satellites that measure chlorophyll and water temp?

I believe they are using the chlorophyll satellites to measure the amount of sunlight that is reflected and absorbed to determine plankton levels. But I am not 100% sure my info is up to date.

The reason for the question is. If they are using the chlorophyll and water temp satellites, they have been in use for at least 15 years. Which would give them a much longer time period to study then being reported in some of the articles in this thread.

I was using the chlorophyll and water temp satellite info at least 15 years ago to determine where I would fish in the ocean.

I do not know how long these satellites have been in use. But. Our Navy was using these satellites before they were available on line to the public.

My point is . NASA has these records that go back way longer than has been studied for plankton levels. Or at least the part of the study being reported.

 

NOAA is compiling this data at the present.
It turns out that somewhere around 50% of the Earths Oxygen comes from phytoplankton so it's kind of important.

 

I no longer own a shima...I gave it to Sly

 

i honestly don't know if we are using the same satellites, but like yourself i still subscribe to one of the online data compilation sights. the info i can access daily is much the same as 15 years ago,
and does measure chlorophyll as you described.
https://www.ott.com/blog/2015/07/phytoplankton-measurement-with-fluorometers/
it seems that at-sea real time measurements have improved with these arrays described in linked article.
here in hawaii, the radar telemetry satellite is more usefully to predict current direction and speed. often temperature and chlorophyll data is dated of our location, and cloud cover also limits it.
there is another sight that utilizes realtime military satellite data for its current forecast modeling and a couple of bouys that measured for chlorophyll, but the hilo one was lost in 2017. its' sensor may have been a fluorometer .
http://www.pacioos.hawaii.edu/currents/model-hawaii/
predicting the next days currents allows me to also predict the areas of greatest upwellings and, yup, plankton production through bathymetric/satellite charts. it helps, cause couple years ago diesel was $5/gallon.
as far as the data compilation from the past goes, i am unaware of where it can be accessed and not sure if 15 or even 50 years would be enough to draw real conclusions though we would certainly be able to show trends in the data if any are there.

 

Ok, we are on the same page. I also used every tool, including bath charts and bouy data.

I have a hard time considering the article in the OP as credible, for a couple of reasons.

First, it only uses 3 years of data to project future conditions. Like you said, 50 years would not be enough.

Next it uses models being taught in Universitys that support an agenda. I have not found even one of these models to project even close to the actual results, let alone being on target.

Let me give you an idea on how some of these models are used.

Once a week, for 4 hours, a marine biology student is sent to count the number of fishing boats, both commercial and sport, leaving the bay for the ocean.

From this boat count a model is used to project how many fish of each species were caught, for the entire week.

These numbers are then applied towards available fish quotas. Different models are than used to guess the impact on fish populations.

The fish population is determined by another model. Once a year, they use the one day catch, from one boat, fishing in one or maybe a couple of small areas. From this small sample, they project the fish populations for a very large area.

Models = voodoo science.

 

very interesting!

 

not sure which fisheries those were for, but all models are potentially flawed, with out pulling the plug and counting the carcasses to see if they were correct.
i personally don' know of the agenda's unless through funding their studies are meant to represent an opinion of the grantor. the pollock , hake, and cod fisheries i prosecuted as a harvestor vessel were dependant on biomass estimates, year class recruitment survival, catch sampleing, etc. etc. and we had federal observers onboard 1/3 of our days at sea. at the time because of the currency exchange rates, most of the observers that had the requisite schooling came from canada. there was certainly biased opinions involved but they had to show what they sampled and their results and we could document any problems with methodology we observed.
some observers were more conscientious about their jobs than others, so even in fisheries that were that highly monitored data was occasionally skewed. i assume that some sort of bell curve was used to throw out the data of multiple vessels fishing within 1/2 mile of one another that were way outside after averaging. any way this is how those fisheries were monitored and managed.
acoustical surveys were a large part of biomass and year class estimates for annual quotas after applying the total allowable catch as a percentage of said biomass. these estimates were available for review and had to be defended at fisheries council meetings. the process was far more transparent then the model you suggested(treaties were involved also between us and russia because the damn fish never knew where that line was, and we weren't allowed to cross over to gett'em). i hope that it never negatively impacted you from making your living.
i would be happy to take the side of false premises about when the stellar sealion was introduced as an endangered species closing fishing areas, because of candlfish stocks that we didn't impact.LOL
note how i threw in for free the reference to foreign workers willing to work for less.

 

We don't have 50 years to wait for an answer to the disappearance of plankton which are disappearing at a rate of about 1% annually.

 

I am not the least bit worried about global warming, whatever the cause. Especially this latest scare tactic in the op that we will run out of oxygen..

The earth has been through this before. All the ice melted and the mamials survived. Even those oxygen hog dinosaus survived globalwarming.

Present day deserts were forests and garden of edens. The world was a tropical paradise.

It sounds wonderful to me. Bring it on. But I will miss playing with the man eating dinosaus.

 

They still do this. I talked with the young marine biologist in most of the ports up and down the entire coast this last year.
Still counting boats and fish caught. So it must not be voodoo! It has to be modern.

 

but the biologists don't gather the data concerning landings anymore. each comercial species is/must be sorted and weighed on certified scales, the harvesters submit signed logbooks concerning area harvested to the state or federal agency responsible for that species management. the buyer of the fish issues two copies of the delivery weights, one going to the harvestor the other to the agency.(remember there is a landing tax for all species so they want their cut if nothing else). realtime data is processed, assimilated for immediate distribution concerning quota that is left to harvest/ amount of effort/boats currently prosecuting that fishery. counting boats is only a small component and because we landed fish from morro bay to dutch harbor those counts would be of extremely limited utility. so in a very broad definition of counting boats and fish caught you are correct, but is far from being symplistic or voodoo. plenty of checks and balances included. we were in contact with the canaries on a regular basis as we edged closer to our quota, and the canaries had federal observers for federally managed species.

 

The world was not a tropical paradise.
Also, what is a mamial?
Alas, I've learned that deniers will never be convinced even when facts stare them straight in the face. e.g. Glacier National Park once had 150 glaciers and it now has 23. We can measure sea level rise due to all the ice melting that's been supported by land. Our last five hottest years on record were the last five years.
I could go on to quote NASA and NOAA but I'm certain it would fall on deaf ears, so I propose we drop it.