[plank_time]

It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.

[steve_adams_86]

It’s not that simple. As the article mentions, if weather continues to warm and these events become more common, we could end up with seasonal die outs of intertidal species. It’s not immediately evident from that statement, but that would completely transform the biodiversity of the coastline.

Currently it’s one of vast abundance, but this transformation would very likely reduce that abundance and its diversity due to a foundation of the food chain disappearing regularly.

It’s nice to think something would just replace these species, but they’ve already reduced dramatically over the last 100 years and nothing has begun to shoehorn its way into the system.

It seems the worse this gets, the less overall abundance and diversity this coastline can support.

[morpheos137]

The world has always changed. We only have moderately good climatic records from dendrochronology for the past 1000 years or so. A meteor impact or supervolcanic eruption could disturb the climate far more rapidly than a few tens of decades burning fossil fuels. Life will go on. It always has.

[klyrs]

Life will go on, the earth will continue to orbit the sun. Even if the earth was flung away from the sun, life would go on, in the form of subterranean bacteria.

The thing we're concerned about is that humans are apex predators and depend on a functioning food chain to survive. Filter feeders eat algae. Unconstrained algal growth is toxic to fish (salmon) that we eat. Oyster and mussel farms were devastated and some won't see a rebound for at least 3 years if we don't have another event like this. Bears eat salmon, and when they can't find it, they seek other food sources like humans.

This story is a single datum. We've got freak cold snaps on the east coast and Texas. Flooding in Europe. The world is rapidly becoming more hostile to human life.

But yeah, a hot, acidic ocean will still support life -- maybe nothing we can eat for a few hundred generations, but life goes on with or without us. Hotter climes will spread tropical bugs and diseases; life goes on.

But we're still looking for intelligent life that's survived the "hold my beer" great filter. Haven't found such extraterrestrials; jury's still out on terrestrials.

[morpheos137]

often food chains are actually more of food webs. Most species, especially humans, are adaptable as their environment changes. Look at polar bears. They started out as normal brown bears. Then during the ice age they developed polar attributes, like white fur and maratime diet. If the climate in the arctic warms they will move inland again and likely merge with existing brown bear populations in the taiga. Those that don't adapt will die. That is how evolution works and always has worked.

In the past the environment has changed very rapidly at time. All life eventually dies. That which endures longer is that which adapts.

A warmer more carbon rich atmosphere has some benefits:

Expanded arable regions, fewer droughts, more rainfall, more carbon for plants to grown (try turning all your carbon in the atmosphere into rock and let me know how life fares then.)

Carbon based life needs CO2. They have done experiments where a forest is subjected to increased CO2 ppm by plumbing and nozzels. It grew faster and more robustly. Life also needs warmth. During the Eocene epoch some 50 milion years ago the Arctic was sub-tropical and teaming with life.

[plank_time]

If the waters heat up are you saying that no creatures will ever survive? That’s anti-science.

There are creatures around the world that thrive in warmer waters. The space will be reclaimed by other creatures that can survive in that environment. To think otherwise goes against basic science.

[steve_adams_86]

Well, it’s scientifically accurate that as abundance and diversity has decreased in our waters, it hasn’t been an opportunity for other species to fill in the gap so to speak.

We are seeing some warmer climate sharks moving further north, but that isn’t helpful to the foundation of our food chain. We do have invasive species of mollusks which have set up camp here permanently, but they seem to suffer and decrease in number just as the native species do. There are invasive crabs, but again, they aren’t about to patch the holes in this system.

Also, it’s important to note that our winter temperatures still hit 6 or 7 degrees Celsius. There are no warm climate creatures I know of who can move in during a hot summer and stick around for winter. That means our previously stable, temperate environment doesn’t appear to be able to be likely to host many creatures in any migratory range I know of.

I’m not a marine biologist, perhaps you know better. This ocean is a passion of mine though, these matters take up a lot of my energy and mental real estate. I want to believe it will thrive very much, but signs really aren’t positive lately.

Apart from this die out, there are a multitude of other dire situations as well. We’ve extirpated several species, caused numerous salmon population extinctions and collapses, the near extinction of a resident killer whale pod, caused the collapse of multiple species of rockfish - the list goes on.

[wizzwizz4]

> If the waters heat up are you saying that no creatures will ever survive? That’s anti-science.

• Science is a way of finding out about the world, not a list of facts.

• No, actually. Rather, these creatures will die and we might lose entire species, significantly reducing biodiversity.

> The space will be reclaimed by other creatures that can survive in that environment. To think otherwise goes against basic science.

On an evolutionary timescale, something will fill the niche (if the environment remains constant enough for long enough… not looking likely, if you extrapolate from today), but science most certainly hasn't found that this happens with animals over the course of decades.

And you know what they say about basic biology…

[eloff]

If you read the article it says in warmer places like Hong Kong the much of the intertidal life dies off every summer. So, yes, if it becomes a regular occurrence life could go from a year round habitat to a seasonal cycle.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

A forest fire kills the adults but retains the young (seeds). This just killed everything. There’s no comparison.

[magneticnorth]

The difference is that the local ecosystem has evolved for forest fires; this is a massively destabilizing event where we can't predict what the "renewal" will look like and what species will go extinct in the meantime, or how polluted the water will end up being "normally" without the mussel population to keep things in check.

And I don't think the article is implying that the oceans will be barren forever, but that things are changing rapidly, unpredictably, and to an extreme degree that we have no precedent for.

[ji0]

How comforting to know things will regenerate after we die off from our own stupidity.

[mellavora]

I fear that much of the poison we leave behind, and the extinction of so much biodiversity, will make such regeneration much slower than it would otherwise need to be.

My greatest fear -- I've seen individual animals loose the will to live. What if a biotope loses the will? What if life decides not to come back?

[dyeje]

How fast do these creatures reproduce? Are they going to generate billions in between now and the next hot season? How many more will die this hot season? Will even more die next hot season?

[plank_time]

It’s not “hot season”. It was a historically abnormal heat wave. I lived in Vancouver. You don’t normally see temperatures like that.

It doesn’t have to reproduce right away, that’s just unrealistic. But the larger amounts of free space will mean a land grab by the survivors. That’s how it works in nature.

If the climate changes and the water heats up then the ecosystem will be replaced by those animals that would survive in warmer water. That’s science.

[JoeAltmaier]

Its also called "ecological collapse" when a place has catastrophic dieoff. It can take decades to recover, even with species that can survive in the new conditions.

(Meanwhile poor humans are trying to grow crops and raise animals. We may get very hungry, for decades)

[nautilius]

Yeah, the sun and Venus for example are overrun with life because there’s essentially no competition. That’s just science!

[eloff]

That's a dumb example, there's no life in those environments.

You could look to the intertidal regions near the equator for more reasonable comparison. They are much less rich in life compared to the waters around Vancouver.

[nautilius]

Ah really, there’s no life on the sun? Hey, come to think of it — that was my point exactly!

[eloff]

Your point is pointless. Life doesn't expand to take advantage of new resources in environments where there is no life. First you need life.

[Dylan16807]

> It’s not “hot season”. It was a historically abnormal heat wave.

It's july 18. It both is hot season and was an abnormal heat wave.

So the questions are valid.