If you believe the climate is changing and that human activties are the cause, then you can probably go back to cleaning your house or whatever you were doing when you took a break to check in with SeaMonster.

But, if you are one of the hundred million or so Americans that still don't believe in this scientific reality, well then you better read on.  

A new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97% consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming.

Start here at the new Climate Conensus page.  

Yes, John Skvarla the third, there is indeed a clear, well-establish, well-documented consensus.  

The state of North Carolina's new Secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources is a climate change denier.  In a recent interveiw with Laura Leslie, he argued (wrongly);

"There is a great divergence of opinion on the science of climate. More dialogue is needed.  We must engage the very best minds with diverse opinions to make conclusions on policy that will be driven by fact but simply to say that climate change is settled … science is fluid.”

When Leslie pointed out that 97 percent of qualified scientists agree on the science of climate change, Skvarla said, “I think that’s [the proportion of scientists] misleading. I have studied this every day for 10 years and there is a great divergence of opinion on this. I’m not ready to say which is right or wrong.”

John, it isn't up to you.  Thousands of scientists have already done the work and concluded that climate change is real. Your job is to implement the best policies to mitigate the economic and environmental impacts of climate change on the state.  

I was last in Fiji many years ago (I spent a year diving and travelling around the world before starting University) and you have no idea how thrilled I am to have the chance to go back.

I've been flipping through my old dive log book (I'm a total geek when it comes to logging dives. I write them like detailed diary entries describing as much as I can about the dives and also getting nerdily statistical with facts like my accumulated time underwater).

According to my log, the first time I dived in Fiji was my 116th dive (after 62 hours 40 minutes total time underwater). I was diving on the Great Astrolobe Reef that runs past island of Kadavu and it was apparently the first time I'd ever seen an emperor angelfish (Pomacanthus imperator). One of these beauties:

Isn't it stunning?  I know it's big show off but it is without doubt one of my favourite coral reef fish.

Those blue and yellow stripes are the reason I ride around Cambridge on a blue and yellow bicycle (I have a Pashley Tube Rider in a colour combo no longer available that they called Tropical Fish).

I'm suprised I don't remember that it took me so long to see one. By the time I got to Fiji that first time I'd already spent a long time diving in Belize (okay, no emperors there) and Australia. And when I did finally see it, my log entry went:

I finally saw my EMPEROR ANGELFISH – cool! Beautiful fish - Big for an angelfish. Thank you! I love it.

As juveniles they have a completely different but equally elegant look:

One theory about why they undergo such a transformation is that by painting themselves in young 'un colours the juveniles can swim into the adults' territories without getting chased off (they eat different food so aren't competing with grown ups for dinner).

The adults' dark eye band makes them look like a fishy racoon and by hiding their eyes potentially confuses predators who won't know which end is which.

Hopefully I'll get to see plenty more emperors this time.

#CUinFiji

Photos by Philippe Guillaume, Derek Keats and Nick Hobgood.

Here is how much the land ocean surface has warmed since 1998 (1999-2012, from NASA):

Most the warming is obviously in the Arctic, which is why Arctic sea ice is being lost so rapidly.

This is Lindsey Carr’s field site on Fernandina.  In this bay a crazy diversity of critters coexist, including hermatypic corals and penguins, orcas and white tip sharks, sea lions, marine iguanas and many-a-sea cucumber.  This is one of the few places I’ve been in the Galapagos that is truly protected and not overfished. You can see the northern end of Isabella island in the background.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out all 5 in the playlist here.

The link between human-caused global warming and extreme weather is often difficult to pin down, particularly with regards to hurricanes.  As Kevin Trenberth has discussed, all weather now occurs in a climate that humans have altered.

“it is important to recognize that we have a “new normal,” whereby the environment in which all storms form is simply different than it was just a few decades ago.  Global climate change has contributed to the higher sea surface and sub-surface ocean temperatures, a warmer and moisteratmosphere above the ocean, higher water levels around the globe, and perhaps more precipitation in storms.”

In a new paper, Grinsted et al. (2013) constructed a storm surge index beginning in 1923 from six long tide gauge records in the southeastern USA.  The idea is that surges in sea level recorded at tide gauge stations can tell us about strong hurricane events.  Consistent with their 2012 results, the authors found:

“The strong winds and intense low pressure associated with tropical cyclones generate storm surges. These storm surges are the most harmful aspect of tropical cyclones in the current climate, and wherever tropical cyclones prevail they are the primary cause of storm surges.”

They compared their storm surge index to changes in global surface temperature, to temperatures in the Main Development Region (MDR; a part of the Atlantic Ocean where most hurricanes form), and to MDR warming relative to the tropical mean temperatures (rMDR).  They found that averaged sea surface temperatures over the MDR are the best predictor of Atlantic cyclone activity, followed by global average surface temperature, with MDR warming relative to the tropics being the worst predictor of hurricane activity (Figure 1).

rinsted et al. then used the relationships between hurricane storm surges and global and MDR temperatures to predict how storm surges will change in the future.  They used the Representative Concentrations Pathway (RCP) 4.5 scenario, which represents a future in which we slowly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions such that they peak around the year 2040.  In this scenario, there is approximately 2.4°C global surface warming over the 21st century.  The results are shown in Figure 2.

“The response to a 1°C warming is consistently an increase [in Katrina-levelstorm surges] by a factor of 2–7 … This increase does not include the additional increasing surge threat from sea level rise”

Figure 2: Number of Katrina magnitude surge events per decade (B) hindcast and projected changes in temperatures from climate model BNU-ESM under for RCP4.5 (A).  The thick blue line shows the projection using the full spatial gridded temperatures andconfidence interval (5–16–84–95%); magenta and black show the projections using only Main Development Region (MDR) and global average surface temperature.

Also see a nice summary of Grinsted et al 2012 by Tamino here.

For more on the basics of Ocean Acidification (OA) go here or download the awesome OA booklet (Mackie et al 2012) here.

Individual- and population-level effects of ocean acidification

Over the last ten years there has been a rapidly growing appreciation and understanding of the threat of OA to marine communities.  The OA literature now includes hundreds of experiments measuring effects of OA on a wide range of marine taxa and variables.  A meta-analysis (Fig. 8) concluded that OA had “a significant negative effect on survival, calcification, growth, development and abundance. Overall, survival and calcification are the responses most affected by acidification, with 27% reductions in both responses, while growth and development are reduced by approximately 11 to 19%, respectively, for conditions roughly representing year 2100 scenarios” (Kroeker et al. 2013).  Additionally, although OA negatively affects many taxa, some such as certain sea stars (Gooding et al. 2009) and some coccolithophores (Iglesias-Rodriguez et al. 2008) benefit from it.  These finding indicate that the impact of OA on organisms, populations, and communities could be large, although not uniform and catastrophic as once assumed.

Figure 8. Effect sizes of experimental reduction of pH by 0.5 units from a meta-analysis (Kroeker et al. 2013) for different taxa and responses.  Plotted values are means are from a weighted, random-effects model with bootstrapped bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals. The number of experiments used to calculate the means is given in parentheses. * denotes a significant difference from zero.

The well-developed mechanistic understanding of how OA affects calcification and the ecological implications of losing calcifying foundation species like oysters and corals has focused attention on this process of the many that OA could influence.   The reduction in carbonate availability caused by OA has the to potential to directly affect organisms that use calcium carbonate to build their shell or skeleton.  Indeed, in numerous laboratory experiments, carbonate ion concentration has been shown to affect rates of calcification and/or skeletal growth in taxa including single-celled crustose coralline algae, crustaceans, corals, molluscs, and echinoderms (Kroeker et al. 2013).

One striking feature of this literature is a high degree of variability in responses to reduced pH among species, higher order taxonomic groupings, life stages, and even among individuals from the same population.  Ries et al. (2009) quantified a variety of functional responses to experimental OA, e.g., positive, negative, linear, hump-shaped, etc., based presumably on how well different organisms are able to protect their shells and regulate local pH at the calcification surface (Ries et al. 2009).  Scleractinian corals, for example, appear to have substantial pH buffering capacity that enables them to maintain calcification despite reduced external reductions (i.e., in ambient seawater) of carbonate ion concentration (McCulloch et al. 2012).  This ability to up-regulate pH at the calcification site by as much as 0.6 pH units, varies among species and does not appear to be present in all taxa (McCulloch et al. 2012).

It has also been shown that corals can use bicarbonate ions (the concentration of which increases with OA) for calcification when the concentration of carbonate ions is reduced (Comeau et al. 2012).  Differential ability to employ these and other adaptive mechanisms for coping with changes in pH likely explain both the smaller than expected effects of OA on coral calcification as well as observed variance in responses to experimental OA among coral species (Edmunds et al. 2012).  In fact, experimental OA has no measurable effect on some corals such as Pacific massive Porities species (Edmunds et al. 2012) yet substantially reduces calcification of others such as Porities rus (Edmunds et al. 2012).  Such differential responses, even within genera, to OA, temperature, and other stressors emphasizes that climate change impacts are more about the changing fortunes of winners and losers (Loya et al. 2001) and altered species composition and community function, than outright community disappearance (see more on altered composition below). It is important to note that although such variability is surprising, it probably shouldn’t have been and it is certainly not unique: organismal and population responses to many other climate change-related factors vary, probably as much as responses to OA.

A meta-analysis of the response of scleractinian corals to experimental acidification (Chan and Connelly 2013) concluded that “under business as usual conditions, declines in coral calcification by end-of-century will be ~22%.”  This outcome is similar to the meta-analysis by Kroeker et al. 2013, but contrasts with Edmunds et al (2012), who found little evidence of a general relationship between seawater pH and coral calcification.  Such variable outcomes and interpretations unfortunately characterize even the synthetic literature on OA experiments (e.g., see Hendriks et al. 2010 versus Kroeker 2010), obscuring simple take home lessons relevant to policy makers and non-specialists.

The experimental OA literature is also equivocal about whether OA could act additively or synergistically with other stressors, particularly rising temperature.  Kroeker et al. (2013) found interactions between these two stressors for some taxa, but no general synergistic effect.  There is also substantial ambiguity over the relative sensitivity of different life stages; calcification and survival of some early larval stages appear more sensitive to OA in some taxa such as corals and molluscs (Doropoulos et al. 2012, Talmage 2012) but not in others such as echinoderms or crustaceans and not in general (Kroeker et al. 2013). Interestingly, larval settlement and recruitment appears to be influenced by OA through multiple independent ecological mechanisms.  For example, Doropoulos et al. (2012) found that OA can influence coral recruitment by reducing the cover of crustose coralline algal species that facilitate settlement and by altering the settlement behavior and substrate choices of coral larvae.  Recent work is also examing “carry-over” effects of larval exposure to OA.  For instance, negative effects of OA on larvae of the Pacific Olympia oyster Ostrea lurida appear to carry over and affect settled juveniles long after pH has returned to normal levels (Hettinger et al. 2012). This work highlights the potential long-lasting effects of early and short-term exposure to lowered pH.

Regarding the overall state of the field, a crucial caveat is that very few acidification experiments measure effects on reproduction, overall fitness, susceptibility to other stressors (i.e., in multi-factorial designs) or otherwise attempt to put the results into an ecologically meaningful context – thus we could very well be over- or underestimating the potential impacts of ocean acidification.  In fact, we know next to nothing about how or whether the documented effects of acidification scale up to population dynamics.  In other words, at this point, we have no idea what the population-level significance of a 25% reduction in calcification would be (Hendriks and Duarte 2010).

We also do not understand the potential costs of mechanisms that enable calcification in low pH environments, although theoretical work suggests such energetic costs are minimal (McCulloch et al. 2012).  And it is important to note that even species that show no response to OA for one response variable, often respond substantially for another.  For instance, although OA does not affect the calcification of massive Porities species it does reduce respiration and photochemical efficiency (Edmunds 2012).  Finally, the near complete absence of field data on both natural patterns of seawater pH variability and changes due to carbon emissions has greatly hampered the field of OA.  New instrumentation (Hofmann et al. 2011) has recently made fine scale and long term field measurements possible and has revealed a huge range of surprisingly variability (Fig. 9).  Such variability of pH across space and time could be used to parameterize lab experiments and as treatments in natural field experiments to better understand responses including acclimatization to OA.  There is clearly a need to fill in numerous gaps in this rapidly progressing field and developing a better understanding of seawater pH in nature is certainly one of them.

The literature Cited for the entire chapter is here as a PDF

Why old(er) dogs can and should learn new tricks:  My 300-day (and counting) journey through the world of social media

I describe myself generically as a marine scientist.  If pressed for more detail, I might say that I’m a marine ecologist, or a coral reef ecologist, or increasingly often, a marine conservation ecologist.  I’ve been at it for a while.  I’m a tenured professor, I’ve written a good number of scientific papers, have been cited a fair few times, and have a decent h index.  I could sit back in my swivel chair and gently sail into retirement.  But about a year ago, I decided that that wasn’t enough.  I felt that my ‘applied’ papers, almost all of which have some mention of relevance to managers and decision-makers in the final paragraph, were not having the wished-for effect.  The catalyst was probably watching the government of my country (Canada) making a hash of every decision that touches the environment.  Time to speak out.  Call it a mid-life crisis.  I see it more as a mid-life opportunity.

I was 49 years, 7 months and 14 days old when I sent my very first tweet.  It said this:

I was at the time taking a COMPASS communication and leadership training course, along with 15 or so other marine scientists from the Canadian Healthy Oceans Network.  That seemed like a good way to learn how to speak out effectively. Most were graduate students; a few of us were more ‘seasoned’. Nancy Baron and Meghan Miner extolled the virtues and values of social media, including tweeting, for communicating science, connecting with people, and effecting change.  So we all jumped in.

Now, 323 days later, I’ve sent just over 300 tweets, which makes me a regular, but not an addict.  I still don’t follow Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber (much to my youngest daughter’s despair).  Instead, I follow about 150 people and organisations – all related to science, oceans or Canadian environmental politics.  I tweet mostly about science.  I highlight current events relating to the oceans and interesting papers (mine or someone else’s),

whimsical observations about marine creatures or funky science factoids,

and I often criticise my government’s environmental positions, policies and legislation.

All of this in 140 characters or less.  It’s actually amazing how much you can say in 140 characters, and you can convey a whole lot more by including clickable links that send your followers to the papers, news articles or websites you tweeted about.

Tweeting has allowed me to broadcast my thoughts much further than I could have before (if I’d wanted to).  I have 300 or so followers, who come from all walks of life, including non-scientists, politicians and media people (see below).  The only opportunity I normally get to speak to so many people at once is when I teach introductory biology to first-year undergraduates, but most of them don’t really want to be there!

I feel that I’ve gained a tremendous amount by tweeting, and this came at very low cost. Twitter has become my tool of choice for taking the pulse of marine science and conservation.  Although I don’t spend much time on it daily (3 to 20 min – usually to kill time between lectures, meetings, etc.), I feel much more connected and much more aware of ocean research and events than I was before.  New papers get brought to my attention almost daily, and I get to them easily by clicking on links that others share in their tweets.  I also feel that it’s improved my writing, or at least my awareness of unnecessary words. And the beauty of it all is that tweets don’t ever add to my workload.  They don’t accumulate in my inbox the way emails do.  Nothing disastrous happens if I don’t check twitter for a few days or weeks.  Instead, I feel clever when somebody retweets me.  I even managed to strike a collaboration with three younger tweeps and we wrote a paper together recently on the role of social media in the lifecycle of a scientific publication!

My fledgling interest in science communication hasn’t been limited to entering the Twittersphere.  I learned to create websites soon after the workshop.  No more antiquated lab pages for me.  My shiny new lab site has attracted 13,000 views since I posted it about 300 days ago.  13,000!!! I must admit that it looks pretty spiffy, and it has some fun features too.  We have a page devoted to 60-sec plain-language podcasts of our recent papers, and another with up-to-date lab news, complete with pictures and links to media activity.  The most recent addition is a page of ‘field notes’ – short accounts of some of our field adventures.  I’ve encouraged my graduate students in these activities and most of them have caught the comm bug too.  Not everything has been successful though: I made a foray into Facebook and set up a lab page there, but I couldn’t see what this added to my other comm activities so gave it up.

The last step in my ‘conversion’ has been to stop declining requests by media people (or, more honestly, to stop not replying).  In the past 300 days, I’ve been interviewed to speak about a major report which I co-authored for the Royal Society of Canada on the impacts of fishing and climate change on marine biodiversity, appeared in an investigative documentary on the sad state of Canadian oceans, spoken at a public event on the muzzling of Canadian scientists by the federal government, ‘starred’ as an intrepid marine biologist/diver in a TV series about the Vancouver Harbour, and shared a public stage with Canada’s Environment Commissioner to explain why we need marine protected areas.

This is not about seeking the limelight.  In fact, the little flickers of publicity glare that reach me when I partake in comm events are still more scary than they are thrilling.  But the bottom line is that I believe strongly that we are doing a poor job of taking care of the oceans.  I believe equally strongly that the people who can speak out authoritatively, such as scientists (like me) who have a track record of relevant research that gives us the credentials to weigh evidence and call out decision-makers when they get it wrong, have a moral obligation to do so.  I know that I will leave a fine scientific legacy, particularly in the form of all of the wonderful students I’ve trained over the years.  But wouldn’t it be great to leave a few better-phrased laws and some marine protected areas behind too?