The importance of the oceans, their wildlife and ecosystems

A study just came out with former NASA climate scientist James Hansen. Therein, he warns that a reduction in the amount of atmospheric pollution could lead to an acceleration in climate warming. When it comes to cloud albedo, pollution and seabirds both have a role to play. But the animals rarely rate a mention.

Hansen warns that scientists are dangerously underestimating the impact of aerosol pollution. The way this works is that pollutants create chemicals over the ocean. These form droplets that are the basis for cloud seeding. Brighter clouds reflect more of the Sun’s heat and that’s part of the reason Earth stays cool.

while shipping only accounts for about one-tenth of total global sulfur dioxide emissions, it represents nearly 100 percent of those emissions over oceans, which absorb more than 90 percent of all the heat trapped by greenhouse gases.

Inside Climate News

Seabirds increase cloud albedo by propagating clouds

But this is also a natural process. Seabirds are one conspicuous source of ammonia that has been shown to create rainfall on a continental scale [1, 2, 3]. Read more here.

The scale of natural seabird processes and cloud albedo

The aforementioned article skips over this component. It says aerosols come from ‘from natural and human sources, including smoke, pollen, fine minerals, volcanoes and even plankton-laced sea spray’. Why downplay the role of the natural planktonA soup of micro-organisms. Usually refers to all the zooplankton and algae in the ocean but can also be used to describe tiny insects in the atmosphere (see aerial plankton). More processes? These are, after all, the ones most in keeping with our habitation of global ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More. They are the ones driven by seabirds.

All scientists struggle to conceive the scale and intensity of animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More. It’s difficult to measure. A recent study in Greenland [4] did look at seabirds and concluded, for the island’s east coast at least, that the effect was minimal. However, the geographic range of these impacts can be across whole continents and oceans. These effects are planetary, not isolated.

We need to be very careful. I believe what Hansen is telling us. Nature has shown us how sensitive our climate is to these types of chemical reactions. What he’s really saying, however, is that our pollution has shielded us against a worse problem. That underneath the blanket of pollution, there are clearer, warmer skies.

The reason for this?

Perhaps, it’s because we have killed all the seabirds. Is that too much to believe? After all, they were the major components of this process before industrialisation. Why is this fact not being discussed by conservationists worldwide?

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The danger of declining seabirds and declining pollution

What of the seabirds and other marine animals? They have declined by over 70% in the last 50 or so years. We have killed the animals that form natural processes to shield us once we clean up our air pollution.

But anyone who goes out to study these effects today only measures a small proportion of what came before. And then, researchers tend to document linear effects. Birds produce a certain amount of guano but what of the transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More, amplificationAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More and concentration of nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More? These ecosystem-level processes are poorly understood.

Others will jump to geoengineering solutions but these will be catastrophic. They replace complex ecosystem processes using a sledgehammer approach and still, the underlying seabird-driven effects are ignored. As described in Kolbert’s book Under a White Sky, we might create the illusion of fixing climate, and enable more carbon consumption. It only takes a global economic downturn to remove the manmade shield and descend once more, into climate chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More.

Isn’t this what Hansen is explaining to us right now? That by cleaning up pollution (which inadvertently protected us), we are unleashing the monster? When will we start to learn that the solution means rapidly restoring wildlife populations?

We have to start protecting and rebuilding seabird populations

When it comes to cloud albedo, pollution and seabirds fulfil the same role. But the latter do it in a more measured way that connects with our survival.

How are we going to rebuild the natural life support systems that came before all this? Unless we prioritise radical conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More outcomes, other efforts we make, will fail. This is a brilliant example of where wildlife is essential for human survival. Yet, it’s rarely talked about.

Let’s change the conversation, and explain why we cannot survive on Earth without rebuilding wildlife populations.

References

1. Blackall, T., et al., Ammonia emissions from seabird colonies. Geophysical Research Letters – GEOPHYS RES LETT, 2007. 341.
2. Riddick, S., et al., Measurement of ammonia emissions from tropical seabird colonies. Atmospheric Environment, 2014. 89: p. 35–42.
3. Otero, X., et al., Seabird colonies as important global drivers in the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Nature Communications, 2018. 9.
4. Dall´osto, Manuel & Geels, C. & Beddows, D. & Boertmann, David & Lange, Robert & Nøjgaard, J. & Harrison, Roy & Simo, R. & Skov, H. & Massling, A.. (2018). Regions of open water and melting sea ice drive new particle formation in North East Greenland. Scientific Reports. 8. 10.1038/s41598-018-24426-8.