Ocean life under threat from climate change

Science Daily: “Marine ecosystems are undoubtedly under-resourced, overlooked and under threat and our collective knowledge of impacts on marine life is a mere drop in the ocean,” wrote Dr Anthony Richardson, from The University of Queensland and CSIRO, and his co-author, Dr Elvira Poloczanska from CSIRO in Hobart. “There is an overwhelming bias toward land-surface studies which arise in part because investigating the ocean realm is generally difficult, resource-intensive and expensive,” they said.

The disparity in focus on land-based compared to marine impacts was highlighted in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which included 28,500 significant biological changes in terrestrial systems but only 85 in marine systems. The paper argues that the collection of marine environment data over 20 years or more – a requirement for inclusion in IPCC assessments – suffered in the mid-1980s due to government funding cutbacks for international marine science research, just as ocean warming began accelerating….

…“While understanding impacts of climate change in the oceans is important, ultimately we need to develop adaptation options as the knowledge-base expands,” Dr Richardson said.

Waves arriving at a beach, ambassadors from an unknown country... shot by "Johntex," Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2