Science Snippets: Mass Extinction Event Targets Ocean Life

Draft script:

A story at NBC News on 28 April 2022 is titled Ocean life projected to die off in mass extinction event if emissions remain high. Never mind the peer-reviewed evidence that all life on Earth will go extinct if we remain on our current path. A notable paper on that topic appeared in Scientific Reports on 13 November 2018. Authored by Strona and Bradshaw, the paper was titled Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change. The Abstract of this paper includes this information: “Climate change and human activity are dooming species at an unprecedented rate via a plethora of direct and indirect, often synergic, mechanisms. Among these, primary extinctions driven by environmental change could be just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg. As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources — a process known as ‘co-extinction’ — is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss. … By subjecting a large set of virtual Earths to different trajectories of extreme environmental change …, and by tracking species loss up to the complete annihilation of all life either accounting or not for co-extinction processes, we show how ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times.” This paper concludes that a rate of environmental change slower than the current one Earth is experiencing will drive all life on this planet to extinction. It includes this line, as I have mentioned previously in this space: “a rogue, seemingly desert Earth wandering across the Universe could still have some tiny chance of blooming again under some lucky — and unlikely — circumstances.”

Back to the story at NBC News, the subhead tells the story: “Marine mammals could die at levels rivaling the biggest mass extinctions in history, a study found, if seas become too warm and hold too little oxygen.” It is well known, as reported even by the designed-to-fail Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that Earth is amid the fastest Mass Extinction Event in planetary history. No other event comes close to the fossil-fuel-driven disaster we, collectively, are driving. The lede for the story at NBC News reiterates the importance of this event: “Marine animals could die off at a level rivaling the biggest mass extinctions in geologic history if people don’t curb greenhouse gas emissions.” In this case, people refers to you and me, not millionaires and billionaires. After all, the wealthy folks are charged with maintaining aerosol masking while the rest of us are given the task of conservation.

The story at NBC News continues with a reference and embedded link to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper in the renowned journal, Science: “That’s the takeaway from a study published Thursday in the journal Science, which found that many ocean creatures could face conditions too warm and with too little oxygen to survive if we don’t turn things around. The more warming, the fewer species are likely to survive, the results show.”

I turn now to the peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Science. Titled Avoiding ocean mass extinction from climate warming, the paper was written by two scholars affiliated with the University of Washington and Princeton University.

The peer-reviewed paper begins with a subsection titled “Rising temperatures, rising risks.” It includes the customary information about the ongoing disaster and how the masses must conserve fossil fuels to save us: “Climate change brings with it the increasing risk of extinction across species and systems. Marine species face particular risks related to water warming and oxygen depletion. Penn and Deutsch looked at extinction risk for marine species across climate warming and as related to ecophysiological limits ... They found that under business-as-usual global temperature increases, marine systems are likely to experience mass extinctions on par with past great extinctions based on ecophysiological limits alone. Drastically reducing global emissions, however, offers substantial protection, which emphasizes a need for rapid action to prevent possibly catastrophic marine extinctions.”

That last sentence sounds familiar. It’s a call to the masses—that’s you and me—to save the living planet: “Drastically reducing global emissions, however, offers substantial protection, which emphasizes a need for rapid action to prevent possibly catastrophic marine extinctions.”

The Abstract follows, and it presents the same story we’ve heard many times. I will read a couple of choice examples: “Global warming threatens marine biota with losses of unknown severity. Here, we quantify global and local extinction risks in the ocean across a range of climate futures. … With accelerating greenhouse gas emissions, species losses from warming and oxygen depletion alone become comparable to current direct human impacts within a century and culminate in a mass extinction rivaling those in Earth’s past. … Reversing greenhouse gas emissions trends would diminish extinction risks by more than 70%, preserving marine biodiversity accumulated over the past ~50 million years of evolutionary history.”

It’s the same, old song. The masses must turn the sinking ship around. If we don’t do so, we’re in real trouble. Never mind that the designed-to-fail IPCC concluded that human actions are causing the most rapid change in planetary history. Never mind that the designed-to-fail IPCC concluded that this ongoing rate of change is irreversible. All this information from the IPCC was published long ago. Apparently, Doctors Penn and Deutsch are not keeping up with the literature.