The Arctic Phytoplankton Bloom will NOT Stop Global Warming!

A NASA team just announced their observations of a large bloom of phytoplankton under the Arctic ice. It's large in terms of both size (area) and total biomass density. Everybody seems to be surprised.

Sources:

• The article abstract (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1215065)
• From NASA: the news release, feature, and media resources
• Media: Space.com^[1], the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo

The Arctic ice is thinning, which lets more sunlight through to the water below. In this water float phytoplankton, which are autotrophs like plants — they photosynthesize with chlorophyll — so they like light, and they grow in it. More light → more phytoplankton. (Of course, like everything else in the real world, it's more complicated than that^[2], but that's the basic idea.) That's what the ICESCAPE team found — more phytoplankton. Lots more. The bloom extended at least 115 km across under the ice and its chlorophyll density^[3] is around 1300 mg/m², compared with a global average around 50 mg/m² (it's a little hard to read the numbers off the charts).

More phytoplankton → more biomass and nutrients → possibly significant impact on the entire Arctic ecosystem. (They don't yet know how big an impact, but the abstract of the article suggests that existing estimates of primary production may need to be multiplied by up to 10.)

The smart people are reacting like this:

“Phytoplankton -- the basis of the marine food chain -- "are key to the whole ecosystem," [Daniel Boyce] said. "In terms of climate changes, the effect on fisheries, we don't know exactly what these effects will be." ” [from the L.A. Times link above]

“A change in the timeline of the blooms can cause disruptions for larger animals that feed either on phytoplankton or on the creatures that eat these microorganisms. "It could make it harder and harder for migratory species to time their life cycles to be in the Arctic when the bloom is at its peak," Arrigo said.” [from the first NASA link above]

We don't really know much about this phytoplankton bloom — it's been observed before, but nowhere near as big, and it's observed earlier in the year now (by 50 days — almost two months!).

Of course, as the phytoplankton photosynthesize, they convert CO₂ and other stuff into biomass and stuff. Like I said before, it's more complicated than that, but this could possibly be a small negative feedback in the global warming processes. How small? Nobody knows yet, obviously (they just discovered it!). Which leads the smart people to also say things like this:

[Question: is this good news with regard to global warming? Answer:] “ "It's premature to say if it's good news or bad news," Bontempi said.” [from the L.A. Times link above]

So, give them a few years to figure all this stuff out, and then they can tweak one of the factors in the climate equations. We do know, though, that this new discovery is only in the Arctic, which is roughly 1% of the total surface, i.e., it's not very big.

So, that's what the smart people are saying. What about the others? They're producing fetid piles of ignorant detritus such as this article in The Capitol Column:

“Thinning sea ice, plankton could slow effects of global warming: NASA — Turns out that increased amounts of CO2 could actually help the planet stave off the effects of global warming. That is the consensus of a team of NASA scientists, according to a newly published report, which finds that a growing body of microscopic plants may eventually provide the Arctic ice with additional time. NASA researchers say microscopic plants could serve as a solution to increasingly high rates of CO2, one of the key contributors to global warming. The team of scientists suggest that the large quantities of phytoplankton, recently discovered growing under sea ice, could pull in large amounts of the greenhouse gas, possibly curtailing any potential consequences of global warming. […] The results of the study could further complicate the international response to the threat poised by global warming, which has divided both the scientific community and the policy makers worldwide.”

That's the headline, beginning, and end of the article; the “[…]” is the body^[4] of the article, which is a much more accurate (by the standards of what passes as journalism today) reflection of the science. (It's worth reading; it's the only place I saw the 50 days mentioned.) Nowhere in their article did they provide any quotes from scientists supporting their claims that I excerpted. I don't think scientists said anything about “staving off”, “a solution”, or “curtailing”. One scientist, though, did say (as I already quoted) that it could be good or bad.

Think about the mechanism of the claimed “solution”: CO₂ absorbed into huge blooms of phytoplankton, made possible because of the lack of Arctic sea ice.

“Phytoplankton were thought to grow in the Arctic Ocean only after sea ice had retreated for the summer. Scientists now think that the thinning Arctic ice is allowing sunlight to reach the waters under the sea ice, catalyzing the plant blooms where they had never been observed.” [from the first NASA link above]

The same lack of sea ice which is being caused by global warming is supposedly going to stop global warming. Idiots don't understand that ‘very small negative feedback’ isn't the same as ‘fixes problem’.

It's funny how, when some of the authors of one article say, when pressed on the issue, something tentative and highly uncertain and it might be good or bad but maybe-just-maybe it'll reduce global warming by some puny amount, we have a “consensus of a team of scientists” who are saying we have “a solution” which is “possibly curtailing any potential consequences of global warming” — in other words, ‘Yay! Problem solved! Let's go burn more gas!’ (Any potential consequences!) Yet, when we have 97+% of climate scientists all saying the same thing, that global warming is real, is happening, and is being caused by humans through well-understood mechanisms, ‘the science isn't in yet’ and we ‘mustn't act hastily’.

The phytoplankton bloom is an exciting discovery. Global warming is still happening.

Notes
1. ^You have to answer a google survey question before you can read the space.com article. (I turned on “private browsing”.)
2. ^They need more than light — they need CO₂ and water and trace minerals and piles of other stuff. I'm not a phytoplanktologist, so I'm not going to try to summarize info that you can find (by following the links that I've provided) in the source articles and on wikipedia just as easily as I can. But here's one for free: according to wikipedia, “The study of plankton is termed planktology and a planktonic individual is referred to as a plankter.”
3. ^If you take a square, one metre on a side, on the surface, and then collect all the water underneath that square, down to the ocean bottom, and then filter it or whatever, you'll get 1300 mg of chlorophyll, which converts by some multiplicative factor into mass of phytoplankton, but I don't know the factor.
4. ^I would guess that some writer wrote the article, and then some editors tacked on the beginning and end without consulting the initial writer. The article didn't name the author, and neither did their second article which is identical to the first, except for the headline. The new headline is even worse: “NASA hints that thinning sea ice may slow impact of global warming”. No mention of phytoplankton.