Two reports about the die offs in our oceans: Study: Fish die-off linked to ocean warming in the Cape Cod Times and Goodbye, oceans! Study finds ecosystems headed toward a major collapsein grist. By now none of this should be a surprise except for the reality of how our world is really constructed as opposed to the reductionist view modern science is forced to give us because it is all it has. Read on below and I'll try to give you a complex systems perspective. You won't like it.
The grist article says it bluntly:
Researchers from the University of Adelaide analyzed 632 recent papers on ocean ecosystems and found that the ability of these systems to acclimate to warmer water and increased acidification is “limited.” As both continue unabated, few marine species will be able to survive the cascading effects of global climate change, and food chains will start to collapse. The one exception? Microorganisms.
Let me rephrase that for you: FISH ARE DYING. CORAL ARE DYING. WHALES ARE DYING. WE’RE ALL DYING. Except for bacteria, that is, which will be just fine.
The problem I have had talking about this is a product of our times. The warnings and studies have been coming to us for some time but they are both incomplete and misleading because they look at parts of a complex system with no real way of tying the whole thing together.
If we take the Cape Cod Times article as an example:
It’s commonly accepted that fish off the New England coastline are on the move, headed north or offshore to deeper waters to find relief from a warming ocean.
In the case of Gulf of Maine cod, the fish weren’t just packing up and leaving, they were dying, according to a study released Thursday in the online journal Science. The study criticized fishery managers for not taking higher mortality levels into account when formulating fishing plans over the past decade that they hoped would restore cod to healthy population levels.
The effects of global warming are accounted for in other fisheries such as Pacific sardines when regulators try to decide on management measures to rebuild or maintain fish stocks, said Andrew Pershing, the chief scientific officer for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, headquartered in Bangor, Maine.
You must have noticed by now that every report we get tells us that things are much worse than expected, they are happening sooner, and they are connected to so many other important things. This is not because of republican hype it is because the science our best scientists have been using is flawed in an important way. It is based on the philosophy of reductionism and reductionism is a bad way to model complex interacting systems because it destroys the processes and links that make the system what it is.
If I were to be pretentious I would claim to be able to tell you what they have missed by doing things this way. Clearly that is ridiculous because they have not given us the information they destroyed or neglected when they reduced complex systems to their parts in order to study them. Instead we rely upon nature to teach us what science has missed and the lesson comes too late.
Things are much worse than anyone realizes. There is not much more to say.
5:27 PM PT: thanks for the rec list...I hope it gets taken seriously