The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Titanic Oceans: Daniel Pauly, Antonio Turiel, Peter Ward | Reality Roundtable #04

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

On this Reality Roundtable, marine biologist Daniel Pauly, ocean physicist Antonio Turiel, and paleobiologist Peter Ward join Nate to discuss the numerous oft-overlooked threats to the Earth's great oceans. From overfishing and plastic pollution to climate change and acidification, the human system is assaulting one of the most important regulators for our climate and the largest habitat for life - anywhere. What early indicators of climate impacts are these great bodies of water showing us as we hit record heat across the oceans, fish populations dwindle, and major currents slow? Why are concerns for the ocean so overlooked and what further research needs to be done? Will we learn to value these high seas for all the priceless value they give us, or will we take them for granted until it's too late? About Daniel Pauly Dr. Daniel Pauly is a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 1999, Daniel Pauly founded, and since leads, a large research project, Sea Around Us, devoted to identifying and quantifying global fisheries trends. Daniel Pauly is also co-founder of FishBase.org, the online encyclopedia of more than 30,000 fish species, and he has helped develop the widely-used Ecopath modeling software. He is the author or co-author of over 1000 scientific and other articles, books and book chapters on fish, fisheries and related topics. About Antonio Turiel Antonio Turiel Martínez is a scientist and activist with a degree in Physics and Mathematics and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid. He works as a senior scientist at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the CSIC specializing in remote sensing, turbulence, sea surface salinity, water cycle, sea surface temperature, sea surface currents, and chlorophyll concentration. He has written more than 80 scientific articles, but he is better known as an online activist and editor of The Oil Crash blog, where he addresses sensitive issues about the depletion of conventional fossil fuel resources, such as the peak of oil and its possible implications on a world scale. About Peter Ward Peter Ward is a Professor of Biology and Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. He is author of over a dozen books on Earth's natural history including On Methuselah's Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions; Under a Green Sky; and The Medea Hypothesis, 2009, (listed by the New York Times as one of the "100 most important ideas of 2009"). Ward gave a TED talk in 2008 about mass extinctions. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tSgPQyq_jyE More information & show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/rr04-pauly-turiel-ward 

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Humans have had a long and complex relationship with the ocean, but one that is ultimately dependent on the deep blue mysterious water that covers most of the surface of our planet. The effects of industrial pollution on Earth's seas and oceans, including but not limited to CO2 pollution, are not typically discussed in mainstream environmental discourse, despite the

critical role that oceans play in creating sustaining life on Earth. Joining me to today to discuss the future systemic risk to Earth's ocean, our professor Daniel Pauley from the University of British Columbia and also the head of the ocean fisheries research and activist portal, the sea around us. Antonio Turiel, a theoretical physicist and a marine systems expert from the autonomy University of Madrid, Spain, and Professor Peter Ward, a paleobiologist, an author of 17 books on prior mass extinctions linking Earth's ocean to historical events. All three of these scientists were previous guests on the Great Simplification. This conversation was intense

and dark, but I feel it is important one. Without further ado, here's reality round Table number four on oceans. Welcome, bienvenitos, to another episode of Reality Roundtable here with me today. Our ocean scientist Antonio Turiel, a paleobiologist and ocean expert Peter Ward, and ocean fisheries scientist who runs the project Sea, the Sea around us, Daniel Polly. And you three, to my knowledge, have never met. each other before right now. So you have in common that you are friends of Nate and you care deeply about the oceans

and what is happening. And that's why we're here today to discuss what the heck is happening. Great to see the three of you. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. Thanks. So we're still kind of feeling out the format of these little roundtables. What I asked you each to come up with is a.

five or six minute opening statement on what is the most pressing issue in dealing with the world's oceans that you as a lifetime scientist studying the oceans would like the general public to understand. And then the others will ask questions and then we'll have an open discussion. And Professor Pauley in British Columbia, let's start with you, sir. All right. So I have a standard lecture give to lots of people from specialists to non-specialists about how human conquest of the ocean, the earth and the ocean. And basically, human came out of Africa 70,000 years ago, and at least some, and became spread all over the place. And this spread was accompanied with the killing of the megafauna in all continent and all islands where humans reached.

Then agriculture was invented and also the plants that suffered and desertification spread. And now it is continuing and frightening. Then fisheries. And fisheries, we have traditionally fished since ever, since forever. But with the launching of the first steam-driven trawlers, a new episode in the story of fishing came, and this was equivalent to the hunting of the large mammals. in our continent.

And this steam trolleers were the civilian equivalent of the warships that were developed at the time, the first steam-driven and steel-hulled warships. And they made a short drift of the fish that were accumulated

around the British Isles. And then, spread throughout the world. And this spread, I participated in it because in 74 and 75, or rather 75, 76, I was in Indonesia helping to introduce trawling into Indonesia. And basically, industrial fishing has replaced artisanal fishing or supplemented and competing against it throughout the world. And this boats and the device they use to find fish and to locate themselves have been developed for wars warfare, then submarine, for example, by the British Navy during World War I and World War II. And this industrial fishing is equivalent to a war against the fish, and we were winning it.

So the fish are declining everywhere, especially big ones. And this decline of the fish have spread from industrial areas, from industrialized countries, to now to the whole world. And what maintains it is not necessarily the demand, the demand that is increasing because our numbers increase, but it is subsidies and subsidies, government subsidies that are given to fleets even when they don't work profitably. See, industrial vessels fish a resource within 10 years, 15 years it is essentially gone. And from 100% it would be reduced to 5, 10% of what it was before. And at that point, the fishery becomes uneconomical, but it is maintained by subsidies. And so about one third of the income derived from fisheries, is subsidies and industrial fisheries.

And these subsidies maintain the overfishing situation and maintain an industry which compete against small-scale fishes, which are by some notion sustainable. So industrial fisheries are inherently unsustainable and they can operate and continue. to fish devastated collapse stocks because of subsidies. So we have to get rid of them if we want to have any chance of release, of release, establish something that is sustainable.

Then the big problem of our time though is global warming and climate change. And the small population that we have, we have reduced, the stock to 5, 10% of what they were before has created the situation of the genetic variability that was there in the stocks is not there anymore. So the result of this is that the stocks and the ecosystem as a whole have little resilience. So we will not be able to handle all the stocks rather than ecosystem. will be endangered practically by climate change because the genetic diversity that would allow, would have allowed some of the adaptation to Davenian mechanism isn't there.

So that's why, and that will be my concluding point, that's why there is a strong push to create marine protected areas throughout the world where the stocks could rebuild themselves. So the big challenge is temperature that is too warm for the fish. They have a big problem getting enough oxygen in their body when it's warmer, both because there is less oxygen in the water and because the metabolic rate increase. they need for oxygen increase. So we have a real problem on our hand, and it can be solved only really by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

Sol is the same story. But for fishery specifically, subsidies have to go. I think this conversation may go from slightly depressing to moderately depressing to indefinitely depressing to incredibly depressing. I'm taking the initiative here that rather than to ask follow-up calls of Daniel, let's just go to the next one of the scientific panelists,

and then we'll have follow-up questions after. Antonio, would you like to go next? If I'm going next, this is going to be very depressing, actually. Well, but you haven't met Peter yet. Okay, okay. I am a physical ozonographer, So I'm working on the physics of the oceans. And I think that currently our concerns,

the problem is that we have many different concerns. Some of them seem to be really accelerating, especially this year, even if those things have been in March, I mean, has been going on since a long ago. The first question has been also raised by Professor Paoli regarding temperature. The ocean temperature now is arriving to incredible highs. We have observed this year the sea surface temperature,

the average of the sea surface temperature all over the world is completely off chart. We are now almost one degree above the typical values for this time of the year. And there are specific zones at which this value is incredibly high. For instance, in the Mediterranean, it is three degrees above, three degrees above the Celsius above the average. And in the case of the North Atlantic, it is now 1.4 above the average, which is very large.

Thinking in the account that we are discussing about a very large area. And this, of course, is affecting sea life in general because the increase of thermal stress for the species and also because it is decreasing the solubility

of the oxygen in the water, so they have less oxygen. and also more thermal stress and this is causing a great mortality of species. But for us, which is something for us a physical sonographer, one of our main concerns regards the effects on climate on the large and the possibility of attaining some tipping points in the climate change. So something that has been discussed very extensively during the last days is the possibility of a sudden interruption. of the AMOC, of the Atlantic branch of the meridian alberturning current, which is a huge system of currents that goes around all the world and redistributes heat and moisture all over the world.

And what we are observing is compatible with slowing down and even eventually the tension, interruption of the Atlantic branch of the Mediterranean and overturning current. If this happens, it would imply that all the northern hemisphere will be colder and drier, especially in Europe. At the same time, the accumulation of heat on the ocean surface will make more likely to have huge storms. Something that, by the way, is what is happening in Europe this summer. We are observing unusual phenomena. We could not say this has not happened before.

This has happened. but the question is that we have increasing recurrence of tornadoes or very large tempest, almost hurricanes, that is not so usual, especially in this big amount in Europe. The problem with the possibility of an interruption of AMOC

is that this is at one of the tipping points in climate change, something that will unchain a process in which the climate of the earth would radically change and make it not. recognizable not equalizable according to our current standards but the problem is that this also could pull other tipping points and may force the change of other parts of the climate system for instance accelerating the deforestation in the Amazon's or forcing also change in the in the range all over the world so we

are very worried because this situation seems to be more and more likely. Something that also we have recently discovered is that the climate models by IPCC are too conservative regarding this possibility and the succession of events that we have seen during the last year, and particularly this year, are indicating that the models are not too conservative and are not able to describe the situation. And right now, the possibility of having the sudden change in the climate seems to be very likely during this same century. Just to start with, I think this is enough. Thank you. Thank you. Peter?

Well, yeah, we have major changes. Well, the Earth and the history has always been about major changes. Clearly, past is prelude. And referring to the AMOC, which I'm not. I love that term because the Atlantic Maridional Ocean Circulation or Amok, it really is running amok, if you will, by slowing down. So we have seen this in the past, which is the sad thing, as recently as near the end of the placidine 10 to 12,000 years ago,

this particular current shut down. But this isn't something that is just a Johnny come recently effect on the planet. We have seen the changes of what they called conveyor belt currents. And think about what a conveyor belt is. Ocean currents, we think of as something like clouds. We can see them sweeping over the top. They seem to be working in a flat dimension. But think of what an escalator does.

An escalator will carry you up or carry you down. But those steps, after they dive back down, go all the way down below again before they come up again. So think of the planet's ocean not just as a flat series of currents, but also as vertical currents. And this is the type of current that we're looking at and fearing will stop. It does very important things. The AMOC takes oxygen from very cold surface water, drops it down near Greenland, where it is carried back along the bottom of the Atlantic, back towards the tropics. This particular conveyor belt carrying stuff down below is taking the oxygen necessary to keep marine communities on the deep sea and in midwater alive. When this current stops, oxygen no longer makes it to the bottom.

The worst case of this happening coincides with some of the greatest mass stations in history. The most recent was at the end of the Paleocene, the P-E-T-M, Paliocene E is seen thermal maximum when planetary temperatures went up 6 to 8 degrees globally. And the ocean's lost most of their oxygen on the bottom, mass extinction. But even bigger effects happened at the end of the permeant and several times in the Mesozoid. When these currents stop, it leads to the formation of hydrogen sulfide-rich bottom waters, which begin to rise to the surface, killing marine life on the way up, and then extruding into the atmosphere. So this really is to me one of the most dangerous aspects of the coming censure.

Why is it stopping? It's stopping because Greenland, well, for many reasons, but one of the major reasons we think is that Greenland is melting because of higher temperatures. It is dumping fresh water into the North Atlantic. So why would a surface current that's going to go down as an escalator sink in the first place? This is part of the Gulf Stream. warm, warm tropical water. And as we've seen, going by Florida, we're seeing a hundred degree Fahrenheit water off the Florida Keys, unheard of. Well, this stuff was carried up the coast, east coast to North America. It makes places, beaches in New Jersey, tropically warm. So unlike my west coast or even down to the middle part of California, if you jump in

the water, it's really cold. That's an Alaskan surface current coming south. Well, this current goes up and then it leaves North America and heads towards Europe. As it does so, it gets to the colder and colder climates. The water, as it gets colder, starts picking up more oxygen. Warm water

carries less oxygen than cold water. So this gets ever colder water, picks up ever more oxygen. It gets heavier and heavier and it finally sinks. And this is the conveyorate belt part. The vertical aspect, sinking down,

oxygen-rich water hits the bottom of the Atlantic and works its way back again, conveyor belt over and over. Every time this particular on a global scale set of currents, and it's not the only one, the other really scary one is off Antarctica. The same thing is happening. And when you're having enormous land-based ice sheets melting, you're dumping fresh water in. that reduces the density of this cold North Atlantic water. Greenland is melting. It's causing the cessation of this current. The warming of the planet is going to shut off these currents.

And there will be literally hell to pay. There's a lot of ways I could go with this. But let me ask you three, particularly this follow-up question. It seems like a lot of people are suddenly aware of climate change, not as many as need to be to make effective socioeconomic changes. Why do the ocean issues seem to not be addressed? What the three of you just said is rarely shown in the media, yet the ocean represents the vast majority of livable habitat on this planet. Why is the ocean just such a distant thought in our scientific and public discourse? Yes, it's

changing. But given what the three of you said, it's hell of important. This needs to be heard and understood by lots more people. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Well, my thought on this is that we are a terrestrial species, and that's the basic reason why we don't understand the ocean. The relationship of most people to the ocean, is on beaches and on goose ship maybe. But the depth and its dynamics I are not understood. Another point is, and this reflects my present work and work not so much on fisheries, but on a physiology of fish.

And I encountered a complete failure to understand that it is extremely difficult to breathe water. the biologists even have problems with that. Because to us breathing and moving in a medium that is very light, very easy, is a natural thing. And it's very difficult for us to imagine how it is to breathe water. There is far less oxygen in the water as you would get two times the height of the Everest. So we know what it is to ascend a mountain and not be able to breathe. Well, there is very little oxygen.

It's far less than on top of Everest, but it's in water. And water has to be moved across the gills of fish for them to be able to breathe. So the big problem is that they cannot breathe. And they are problem breathing. And so you mess up a little bit of the requirement, or they demand or they supply, they supply because it's warmer, is less oxygen, or they demand because the water is warmer. And they are in deep trouble. And that's the reason why the fish move to the north on the northern hemisphere and to the south and southern hemisphere, because they cannot handle the temperature in the place where they lived before.

And so they move. They move toward the poles on both hemispheres. And this is the documentation of this, a presentation of this, was 20 years ago you could demonstrate that, you got a paper in science. And now you don't because it's trivial. Everybody knows that fish are now moving north in the northern hemisphere. And in BC we have fish that we didn't have before. We have even Mexico. We have even giant squid from Mexico.

stranded people freak out. So it's very difficult to imagine to to to know for the public at large what the ocean is. And it's unfair to expect, I think, to expect the public at large to know and to care because to our neoliberal politics, we have a problem that most people, even in rich countries are struggling to end the month and they have to have two, three jobs. And because of this, and in a background of increased productivity, there is, we produce more and yet people have no money to end up the month and pay the rent and pay the, so I don't, I'm not surprised that people shouldn't be concerned about the ocean because they are forced to have other problems. And the forces that make people have problems are the same forces that pollute our world.

That's the problem. Peter Antonio, would you like to add anything there? Yeah, I have my own take on this subject. I think that there are several reasons for which maybe we have not paid as much attention as always. as we should have. First, well, the oceanography community is not the largest community in the scientific world. So we are, let's say, a minority.

And there are several reasons for this, apart from tradition, and so what I am talking mainly from a European perspective, which is probably different than that from American wine. So the question is we are not that many, we are not few, but we are not that many first. Second, the ocean has always been very hard to sample by obvious reasons because it's very hard to take measurements. It's but easier to take measurements on the air

about the atmosphere that on the ocean you need to install systems that can be destroyed, can be lost, whatever, and you can just sample for a limited amount of time. And then something that I know well by working with the European Centre for Middle East. range weather forecast is that the typical approach to oceans in meteorological models, in operational models, is quite simplistic. So many physical processes which are important are oversimplified.

And for instance, something which is crucial in the case of the slowdown or even interruption of the AMOC is a variable that is not very well described. It is well known for sure, but it's not where they will describe, which is salinity. In polar regions, sanity is having a very huge role. The problem is to have in measurements of the sanity, and typically, meteorological models tend to underestimate the role of salinity, the concentration of salt in ocean water, and this is affecting also climate models.

So overall, we have been paying attention more probably to the atmospheric part on one hand, and also the question that oceans have sound to be, much more complex that we thought or were in the public procession of them. And then for sure, there is the same point that we have with climate change in general, because at the end, when you are reporting that there are problems, that the human activity is affecting our environment, and this can have consequences. So there is a tendency to try to move out from the topic,

to not want me very willing to discuss this, because of the consequences that will have in the economy of large, But this is very similar to what happens with other, many other topics that overlap, that concerns the arrival of the limits, or the physical limits of the planet. So at the end, we will need to organize ourselves in a different way. And this is very hard to be heard by, in general, politicians, authorities, administrations, also big enterprises. and for the people, as Professor Pavarra has said,

for the people that has probably just to pay the rent, you cannot go there and talk them about the difficulties by the slowdown of the EMOC because they are going to say, okay, I have many more pressing matters right now, and I know that's interested in what you are talking about. I think it's a mixture of all those things. Yeah, this is an interesting topic.

And for instance, to me, growing up, I was raised on a fabulous. book brought my mother for me by Rachel Carson to see around us. And it was Rachel Carson, of course, who then later began really telling us how badly we are polluted the ocean and therefore nature. But the problem with understanding and getting the public to worry much more about the ocean is, as my colleagues have alluded to, the visibility aspect. Everything seems to be going on down there. It's very difficult to see anything going on there. We can see rapid climate change. We can see Arizona and Phoenix going through a month of over 110 degrees.

We can't see the raised temperatures in the ocean where even a three or four degree rise in temperature is just as catastrophic or morsel. We can't see it. Secondly, I think we all have this belief that the ocean will save our collective bacon in some way. Yes, there are changes coming, but we have the sense that for sea level change,

everyone I think recognizes this would be a bad thing. But look, we have these estimates where a meter in maybe 70 years, well, that doesn't sound so bad. That's just any little bit per year. But what the ocean does that I think people don't appreciate, it undergoes enormous state changes in ways that are very non-intuitive. Now, perhaps the most common one that we might think about are La Nina and El Nino. these big current changes that affect global climate.

They happen relatively quickly. Within a year or less, we've changed the state from one to another. And it doesn't happen over centuries. It's a very quick change. This is the greatest danger facing us. The ocean is going to go, is going to undergo a state change from what we are now seeing as the state change that we are used to in a very cold climate. We have ice sheets. We have lots of ice in the water to a change where

they're gone and they go relatively rapidly to an entirely different type of ocean, a stratified ocean, where we don't have oxygen everywhere, where we only have oxygen in the very top surface area. Look at the Black Sea. There's not a great fishery. There isn't a lot of food coming out at the bottom of the Black Sea. It is undergone a state change to a state change to a sea. stratified system that cannot, as my colleague said, it's hard to breathe underwater. It's even harder to breathe underwater when your oxygen is completely gone. So we have a sense that the things are going to unfold slowly. As we go from a day to a night, we can see a hot day slowly recede into coolness and then a cool night slowly turn into warmth. But what we don't recognize, how quickly

on a global scale, major climate regimes can transition one to another. This to me is what the public needs to know, that slow and gradual is not how major climate change works. And we have already put so much heat into the ocean that it's now a sense of what can we save. Rather, can we go back to the state that we were in? I said that I don't know Peter Ward, but I was wrong. I use your book all the time. I just didn't connect. Yeah, well, he has like 17 books, Daniel.

I'm disconnected most of the time, so it's perfectly fun. Peter, let me ask a follow-up to that, and all of you can speculate on this. I'm not an ocean scientist, but I've seen a lot of graphs. Today's July 31st, and we see the sea temperatures are like five degrees, five standard deviations of the typical anomaly. One of you mentioned the temperatures off the coast of Florida are 100 degrees. There have been some explanations. El Nino is causing some outgassing of heat.

Maybe the Saharan dust storms have something to do with it. But is it possible that we are undergoing one of those state changes right now? Can you speculate on that? Does anyone have any clue? But things seem different. And maybe that's my availability cascade because I care about the oceans and climate. And so I'm emotionally applying what I'm seeing to my own priors. But what do you think?

Start with you, Peter. Well, I'm glad I have a colleague for British Columbia here because we both, I think, Two years ago, underwent one of the most surprising climate effects that I've ever known. I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. I did my PhD in Ontario, but I've lived most of my life on the West Coast of North America in this northwest corner. And we have seen temperatures over the last couple of years, unlike anything, over my pretty 74 years of life. You know, as a Seattle resident, there every year, I've never seen anything like this. change of that magnitude where parts of BC were so unbelievably hot, as was Seattle in the entire

northwest, and yet we're seeing this all over the planet. We are seeing these crazy temperature changes, and it's even more concentrated in many cases in the oceans. I've had the good luck of using baited remote underwater video systems for the last 20 years in the South Pacific, we put down these camera systems of 300 meters. What has happened to the oceans down there is a combination of very oxygen-poor water, very warm water, but the complete disappearance of big fish. I've been diving in those waters. I used to be afraid for my life in Papua New Guinea for sharks.

The last 10 years, I haven't seen a big shark. So we've denuded the world of its fish, which has rapidly changed it, but it's in hand-in-hand with the temperature and oxygen changes down there. I remember very well the heat wave that happened two years ago. And interestingly, while in Seattle, which is about the size, the Seattle area, the size of Washington, oh, sorry, of Vancouver, while they were about 50 people dead, They were 5 to 600 in Vancouver because people don't have air conditioning here. And they were surprised at the social services and stuff, old people like us,

being stuck in the apartment and being surprised by the heat. And I just worked a number of travel in Belize. I was in Belize and I were almost choked. in the fieldwork and the Belizeans who are used to the heat and most of them of African ancestry, they said they had never seen anything like that. I was in China in Hong Kong and in Chin Tao and in Xiamen and it was intolerable and the people in China were saying we never seen anything like this. So it is happening on a grand scale. I cannot imagine that this. these temperatures can keep on increasing creeping up without massive death.

Because I'm old, and I could see that I was at the edge when I walked out in the sun. And I can imagine that it is not in 20 years or even in 10 years, I'd be in deep trouble, but in a few years. Antonio, do you have any comments on this? Yes. Well, regarding the question of what is happening, especially this year, because this year seems to be a bit special, I recently prepared a report for the Spanish Ministry on this. There are several possible explanations, causes that maybe, well, probably they are influencing the situation right now.

but the question is that we don't know yet to which extent which is a relative impact of each one of them there is something which is clear is that the eruption of the Ungatonga volcano past year that projected a lot of water vapor in the stratosphere may have had an influence because it has increases in difficulty the amount of whatever vapor in the stratosphere, but also it should be recalled that the

Satisfir is not a place at which the majority of the water vapor is so the variation is relatively small when you look at the whole of the atmosphere but this may be causing an increasing of the energy which has been trapped in the greenhouse effect and the soul leading to an increase of the temperature I don't think this is very large but there is something that needs to be examined for sure. There are the reasons that could be could explain part of the things that are happening. Something that we have observed, particularly in the case of North Atlantic,

is that there is a significant anomaly with winds, with wind stress. So winds are blowing less in the North Atlantic, and this is leading to an increase of stratification, less mixing of ocean waters. and so this could lead to the forming of a warm, a relatively thin, warm layer of warm water on the surface, but in case that these winds are established, they could mix again,

and then the temperature will not be so dramatic in the case of the ocean water, in the case of Atlantic specifically. But the problem is that then the question is why the winds have decreased so much in speed, no? Regarding El Nino, I don't think the El Nino is a leading course, because first, it doesn't seem that this L'Ino is going to be as large as, for instance, the 2015-2016 El Nino. It seems it is going to be relatively normal. And also we are in the starting in the onset of El Nino that will pick by December.

So it doesn't, of course, it has an influence, but it doesn't seem to be one-leading influence. But I would like to point out something that was puzzling a scientist some years ago. By the beginning of this century, we observed that climate models were forecasting an increase of temperatures of air temperature, which was not really according to what we were observing. So the increase in the temperature of the air was not as fast as foreseen in the models. and some years later we discovered that all this extra heat which will be accumulating in the first 600 meters of the ocean. And so the question was that this heat is being trapped there. Something that may be happening and something which is also a matter of concern is that either we are saturating the ability of the oceans to accumulate heat in the first 600 meters,

because of course it is large but it is not infinite and also it depends on some processes that have given efficiency so the amount of heat that you can accumulate depends on the ability of this process to store the heat inside the ocean and also our problem that may be happening is that we also know that there is some cyclicity

in the processes of pumping heat into the ocean and bumping out from the ocean So the problem is that maybe we are changing this cycle that seems to have a predictor of about, I don't remember, I don't remember, 20, 40 years, I don't remember actually. And maybe we are in the opposite side of the cycle. And in this case, the ocean is retarding us, the extra heat that he has been accumulating. So there are several things that can be influencing this particular year. But as they have said, which is quite worrisome, is that it's not a lot of,

local phenomenon. It's a real global phenomenon. It's a global phenomenon that is accompanied also by other things which are very worrying, as for instance droughts, because the prevalence of droughts all over the world is leading to a failure of the crops in many parts of the world. So this is leading for sure to a diminution of the amount of grain or cereals of weight of all the things that are the basic staple for human and cattle food

and this is going to be very bad actually and this force should combine with all the other problems that we have for instance in Europe we are very concerned with the problem that now Ukrainian grains cannot exit Ukraine and this is going to affect many countries especially in Africa and other places

so well everything that said conspires for the worst in that case. But just to see that there are several causes that could explain what is happening this year, we are going to examine all of them in detail. We are going to try to determine what is really going on, but we cannot rule out the possibility that we are starting a process that can last for several years. And the problem is that if we go ahead increasing the temperatures, this is going to be very tough for many people in many parts of the world for sure.

So let me ask a follow-up, Antonio, and then get also Peter's paleo perspective on this. How does the top 600 meters become saturated? And what happens if it is saturated with heat and it cannot absorb anymore? And then Peter, after he answers that, are there historical analogs when the top layers of the ocean absorbed all they could? and then there was a phase shift where it released it. Antonio, do you have any answer there? Well, the question is that at the end,

the capability of the ocean to trap heat is, while it's completely associated to the mixing at the end. I mean, you have a transfer by the ocean surface, you have a transfer of heat because, I mean, the normal processes has to have two different things in contact. You have the water, you have there. They have different temperatures. And then it depends on the ability of the wind

to generate waves to mix and take into account that when you have very intense winds you have a mixed layer so in which all the water in the column is mixed that extends for 20 meters the very least and they can have 100 meters and in some cases you have very very intense winds

the effect of the mix layer can extend up to a thousand meters this is not the usual situation but let's say to say something that in many places it depends completely in the place of the world but it typically extends several tens of meters and sometimes 100 to 100 is this is completely normal. So the ability of the ocean to gather this heat is strongly mediated by the capabilities of, it's mainly related by the mixing.

It's the main thing. It's not the only one, of course. You have convection, you have diffusion, you have many, many other processes that are important in the long run. And this saturation effect will be more related to. the changes in the global winds, I think. I'm not completely sure on that. And the currents, the AMOC, like you guys were talking about before, that too. Well, the question with EMOC, yeah, for sure, because EMOC,

the question with EMOC, as Professor Ward has explained previously, is completely related to also to wins, because winds are the main factor in order to make water dense, because they are favoring the diminution of the temperature in the water parcel. And when it is, it has reduced enough. You are still working with a very salty water parcel because these waters come from the Gulf of Mexico, from tropical areas, they are very salty. They have a lot of salt inside.

And when the temperature decreases, this makes these two get very dense, very heavy, it will say, and they sink. So you have a lot of overfloating fresh water coming from the phoning in Greenland, the sea ice and so on, but mainly of continental ice. So this very, very fresh water, so almost no salt, very low salt, is very hard to be sunk. And this, of course, also is contributing to reduce the efficiency in the release of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere and also in the

possibilities of mixing the first, the first, everything is connected. And sometimes, there's something which is typical in the climate system. Everything is coupled. So you change something in the ocean, and this has a feedback effect on the atmosphere that has a feedback effect on the ocean again and again. So sometimes it's hard to say, okay, this is starting here. No, it's something that which is initiated some part of the process, but this is a loop, and this is affecting in a cyclic way. And sometimes, unfortunately, we have these positive feedback loops that tend to increase the problem instead of solving it.

Peter, I'm going to let you weigh in on this, but in addition to the question I asked before, I'll append this part two. Can you define a Canfield Ocean? And I know you are no way capable of doing a peer review speculation on it. But just as a human, as a scientist, what are the odds you think that someday we will have a canfield ocean due to the aggregate of human activities? Well, Don Canfield was one of the really great scientists in my field, as well as in climate science. He was a great chemist.

The interesting thing that he looked at, he came out of Yale, I believe, and he was able to think clearly about deep time. And so instead of looking just at the now, and so many climate scientists today are really students of the present. And the advent of ice cores has truly revolutionized our ability to look back tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. But ice cores only go back 100,000 in most cases. And Canfield and others are able to look back millions of years. So I can't feel an ocean equivalent is let's think of what's the nastiest swamp you know of. So a swamp is someplace where we have very warm water, very little oxygen in it, big bubble. of swamp gas come out, methane, rotting material, and material stops oxidizing. You use up all the

oxygen, and the bottom starts producing these bacteria that grow only in the absence of oxygen. And one of their bright products is hydrogen sulfide, this very toxic, nasty poison. Well, Canfield others began to think, gee, maybe in the past, especially during the great mass extinctions, take that swamp model and stretch it to the global ocean. Could there be a case where we don't have overturned that we have a warm surface and a warm bottom with no oxygen throughout? Well, we have seen cases in the deep past where that has been the case, and it's come about by the study of biomarkers. One of the really great clues was the discovery that many types of bacteria in their body walls, the fat of their cell walls, leave fingerprint-like molecules.

And there are such things. There are some nasty bacteria. Well, I call them nasty bacteria that are photosynthesizers. They need to live in sunlight, but they cannot live if there's any oxygen in the ocean. And they produced a long biomarker called iso-rinaritane. This is the product of green sulfur and purple sulfur bacteria. Again, these things need light to live. So they have to be in the shallow ocean. But they can't have oxygen around them. So we have evidence now during the Permian period,

251 million years ago, of a majority of the global ocean that was also dropping sediment. So we're talking about shallow water deposits, where there were surface bacteria indicating the surface waters were without oxygen or very low concentrations. This is totally unlike anything that our planet is seeing. Even the Black Sea next to the surface,

there's enough wind, there's enough mixing, that there is a mixed layer of oxygen at the top. To get these big bacterial blooms of the Permian, you would have to have a very, very different world than today. And this is where this idea, the concept of uniformitarianism, that the president is the key to the past, totally breaks down. There's nothing in the present that can get us to understand what's going on in the Permian on a global scale. It was really different.

And of course, it led to an enormous extinction of oxygen-loving organisms. The big mass extinction killed off the oxygen breathers. The world became a global swamp. This is the direction we are moving now. So one thing that should have been mentioned up to now is that it was mentioned several times that the wind are diminishing overall globally. And the reason for this is that the pole are warming faster than tropics. And then the wind is nothing but a balancing act between these two. and therefore there is overall less wind because the gradient is less.

And it's also the reason why the jet stream, instead of being fast and straight, is now meandering around the globe, which is falsely labeled as a polar vortex in the US. The public doesn't understand what it means. It means that in California you can be cold and in the East Coast you can be very, very warm. And this is because one of the meanders goes straight to the U.S. And there is such meanders also over the Black Sea and over Asia. And I've never seen in the TV programs any explanation, any simple explanation for the this meandering, which is straightforward. You can explain it as, but because the gradient,

because it's flat, because it's flat. And the point about the Canfield Ocean that I want to say is we already have little Canfield Oceans and they are called Dead Zones in Mississippi, Delta, in Oregon, in, in, in East China Sea, in various places. of the world, they are about 500 dead zone and the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and so on, they are dead zone. But they are increasing, and they are increasing in duration, if they are seasonal, they are increasing in scope. So what is worrisome is that if they become permanent instead of being summer event, if they connect with each other, then we will have have the beginning of a Canfield

Ocean, we could have that locally in a part of the ocean, and then it would spread like a disease, because once the animals start dying, they rot and they contribute to the spread of this. So it becomes a self-feeding process. So I

I would not, I would not argue that we cannot have ever something resembling the Permian extinction. Because, because actually we are on our way and we are helping by killing the animals before they have a chance to choke to death. and and and and this warming thing it very well could become self-accelerating and the ice the ice melting can actually prevent this thinking of that Antonio talks about and the renewal of the of the deep water and so I'm I had physical oceography as a minor and I understand all of this And this is scary as hell. There's a lot of different ways, gentlemen, that I could go right now. But if you'll recall my invite to you a couple months ago, we were going to have a fourth panelist,

DJ White, who co-wrote three books with me and was one of the original founders of Greenpeace. And he wrote a question, a long one, that I'm going to read here to get reactions from each of you. This is from DJ White. my big paralyzing worry as one who has gotten to know dolphins as people, is that food web collapses occurring in the coming 1,000 years, but locked in this century, which scour the seas of most K-selected species, which are generally fairly vulnerable in food webs.

The loss of coral alone would do huge damage to ocean food webs, and that is no longer even controversial, now is happening within a human life. lifetime. Loss of calcifying plankton increased energetic difficulty of animals with calcium endoskeletons to exist, all happening at the same time that human pollution messes with them and there's a tragedy of common's war against sea life. It's too much. Most of the high self-aware species of earth are not apes like us. There are maybe 50 species of pelagic cetacean peoples or more, and we're setting up their likely.

extinction. The fact that nobody is really talking about this as an immediate concern is very scary to me. Turning it around just how would a species of pelagic dolphin be expected to survive all this stuff at once with niches simultaneously being claimed by very effective opportunistic simple organisms? I think we're committing the biggest crime it is possible for a conscious being to commit. The seas represents something between 97 and 99% of Earth's living habitat. The part we care about is a rounding error. We only think about the oceans in terms of how they affect us

and what we can extract in the extreme short term. That's a pretty strong statement from my friend and colleague DJ, but do you, each of you have any thoughts on either the science or the emotion behind that? So in the med, for example, in the Mediterranean, they catch tuna, the juvenile tuna and fatten them in cages and for export to Japan. And they are fattened at the tone of 10 to 20 kilogram of fish for one kilo of tuna. and this has led to the hunt on the last sardines in the med, that sardine and similar small fish.

And they are literally taken out of the mouth of people because sardines are in Spain, for example, when I was a kid, I ate sardine in a bun, and it was the best thing in the world for kids. and they are they are not available anymore for people to buy because the mafia

and this is really a mafia operation that sells this tuna to you the Akusa in Japan other gangsters they have completely monopolized the availability of sardines now that has led to a situation

where in in eastern in the Eastern Med, the dolphin that are there, the common dolphin, this is something that I had never seen and I never thought I would see it. The dolphin that swim have nothing to eat. So you can see the ribcage like a mangied dog. And that is, I had never seen before. A dolphin, you can see the rib cage because they have nothing to eat. And that is the case in the Eastern Med, and I presume also in the Western Med, that the marine life has nothing to eat anymore because it all goes into tuna fattening operation. And that is one example of the madness of it. In West Africa, the same thing is happening.

The sardine that were eaten by people go into fishermen. meal that is exported mainly to China and to produce in aquaculture, an aquaculture form of aquaculture that actually consume fish because it produced, it used relatively cheap fish to produce expensive fish and the destruction of of large mine mammal population will will actually be accelerated by plastics because they they really suffer from from plastic that fills a gut and and so I don't know which of the of the of the of these forces will will be first the that the the plastic problem will will will cause them

to the population to be reduced or they will have no food and this is also the case for the serenian, the sea cow the manatees in Florida they have nothing to eat and there is a program

to give them lettuce to they put tons of lettuce in the water for manatees to eat because the sea grass is gone so all these things together mean that marine mammals will be, a large amount of marine mammals will be lost. Peter, Antonio, would you like to comment on the Ocean Food Web query by DJ? I would say just two things because I am not a biologist,

so probably Peter will have more interesting things to say, but just two things that I have been evoked by that question. First, about this simplification of ecosystem, and this is something that we are seeing in some parts of the Western Mediterranean right now in which we have very simplified ecosystems in which we have almost nothing on the floor. It is as a species.

I need to see how this is said in English because I don't know. And you have jellyfish on surface. So these are very, very, very simplified ecosystem. and it's something that is happening in many places because we have this overfishing and we have these factories for fattening the Tunefiz we have a couple here in Spain

and this is as he has said so the word I was looking for sea arkin so we have sea urchins in the archin exact sea urchin on the on the floor and we have jellyfish on the surface and that's it is a very simplistic ecosystem. I don't know how it is made.

It can even work. But it is something that we are observing many places in the Western Mediterranean and right now. The other thought that was coming to my mind, something that is happening is quite anecdotal, but it's also interesting, is that we have observed during the last month, a continuous series of attacks by killer whales,

against judge. So they are breaking parts of the judge, so making them not possible to navigate. And this is continuous. For some reason, probably one killer whale was hit by one of the judges, and it learned to attack it. And it has taught this to other killer whales.

So now they are devoting their force to try to interrupt the transitive of judges across the Strait so it despatched from the Matron C to Atlantic well it is a probably quite anecdotal but I think is also

a powerful message there say they're fighting back they're fighting by yeah in some sense well this is quite romantic view of the thing probably but simple than that but it is interesting anyway Peter on the trophic food web question

I guess one of my hats I sometimes where is the term astrobiologists, trying to think of Earth as just one planet that might have life. If you start thinking about it, as some of the astrobiologists have done, try to decouple diversity, the number of species from abundance of life. So we can look at life in terms of productivity, you can measure that. But what if we just had a simple measure of the number of kilograms of living matter on the planet. When would it have been highest? The idea about mass extinction is that, like a Gary Larson cartoon, you go walking in front

of all the homes of the dinosaurs and the little sign up on their doors, extinct, extinct, everybody's gone. Desert world, empty. That's totally wrong. I guess some of the calculations I've been playing with is that biomass increases in mass extinctions because you go ever lower down the food chain. You get more and more bulk. We worked in Western Australia at Windsor the Gorge, this fabulous Devonian reef, which has been left stranded without any sort of tectonic effect on it. It's a giant barrier reef that is 360 million years old,

and as you walk through the gorge cutting through it, you see beautiful coral reefs that there's a rapid extinction, you see the black water, the oxygen poor water, the sediment, the biomarkers indicate that we had one of these Canfield oceans, and then we have the reef lives. It continues, but it's no

longer produced by animals. It's a microbial reef. And they keep building, and they even build bigger reef than before. There's slime. There's slime that can produce calcium carbonate. That is the ocean we're moving towards. So one of the laughs for me, I love cephalpods.

And this big fight, global fight, all through geological history, the fish and the cephalpods have been duking it out. Well, in 2014, a team from University of Adelaide, where I was for that year, came by a very influential paper. The cephalpods are increasing. As we wipe out fish, there's more and more cephalpods. And all you need to do is walk on one of these triassic, churassic mass-extension boundary in England or anywhere else or at the end of the Cretaceous or at the end of the Permian,

the first thing out of the gate are cephalopods. And I was, luckily enough, went off to Papua New Guinea in 2022 and spent a month at Caviang, New Ireland, and our cameras go down there. There's nautiluses everywhere down there. No fish. Lots of nautilus. There they are. Save the nautilus. Well, we're saving them by killing all the fish. There's plenty of them down there. The cephalpods are doing fine, thank you. But we are going into a case where diversity is dropping, but abundance of life on the planet

may not be. So there, well, there would be an abundance of life, just far less complex, large life. Yep, lots of microbial slime. So is this gentleman, ocean, scientists and activists, is this

the ocean version of the movie with Leonardo decapri? called Don't Look Up. That's what's happening here is we won't do anything until it's so obvious the disaster that's happening to the oceans that it'll be too late to do something.

My sense of it, this is Medea hypothesis. This is Medea. This is not Gaia. This is the black, evil twin of Gaia. This is life doing to itself. We humans are life. Well, life is

really going to constrict itself fear from complexity to simplicity. So the trouble is too many people haven't been looking. Don't look up, don't look down, don't look anywhere. The problem is people have not been looking at the ocean, as my colleagues that so eloquently said. So let me ask you guys this. A lot of the things that we would as a global culture do to help avert the worst of

climate scenarios would also. help the ocean situation. But are there things we could do separately to help the oceans that would be distinct from the climate action and mitigation? Are there things we could do to help the ocean situation? Daniel, you want to start? Yeah. I mentioned when I made my introductory speech that subsidies are one of the motors of overfishing. and overfishing is one of the causes for the lack of resilience of ecosystem, marine ecosystem. So if you could get rid of subsidies, then you would have some stocks bouncing back. We have also produced, propose, and it's not impossible to close the high sea to fishing because it's essentially a place where you can go. only when if you are subsidized. And this sounds like a crazy idea, but the suggestion that

countries should have exclusive economic zone extended 200 miles offshore was also crazy when it was proposed by some Latin American countries, Chile and Peru, and 20 years later, we had the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. So I think these two goals, could be helping, at least from removing the fisheries. Because let's face it, the various things that we talked about are not designed to kill marine biodiversity. But fisheries is. Fisheries is designed to kill marine animals

and to remove them from the ocean. So if we could get rid of subsidies and the agreement at the WTO or the World Trade Organization, is a lousy agreement, but it is possible that a better agreement come, because the right-wing market-first fanatics are also against subsidies, not only the conservationists. So we could get rid of subsidies, and maybe we could also get part of the high seas close to fishing,

and we could monitor that easily. And these are measures that have nothing to do. do with a global emission of greenhouse gases, and it would help the ocean a lot. Daniel, let me ask a follow-up question to you. I had sent you an email a few weeks ago. I didn't understand this, but there's some science that shows that totally healthy, rejuvenated ocean fish populations themselves would have a positive effect on climate change. Can you explain that, what that means? Are the chemists, I'm not a good chemist, but essentially teleost fish, bony fish, excrete in the fishes, calcium carbonate, I think, or something, that remove some of the carbon from the sea.

And so they themselves would contribute. And also, in an age, in a time when tuna were dying of natural causes, the carcasses would drop to the floor, to the floor. There's an entire community of animals that eat whales and carcass fall and tuna that fell to the floor, to the bottom of the sea. And these, we have these fluxes that remove carbon from the atmosphere. We have interrupted them and turned them around. And so if we had lots of fish in the sea, they would actually contribute a little bit to offset the effect of greenhouse gases. Peter Antonio, are there any things we could do ocean-specific, you know, leaving climate aside that would improve the ocean's chances?

Well, yeah, we do the reverse of the movie The Graduate. with our poor hero is asking an adult, what should I go into? And the answer is plastic. Well, I think we need to reverse the plastic, as my colleagues have stated, that the ocean is being strangled by plastic. One of the saddest things for my life

has been working every year in the Philippines. And of course, when you go out on a field trip, you need lots of stuff, right? Sundries, and in the Philippines, in every drugstore, every item, you buy, let's just say it's tooth mouth, toothbrush or band-aids

or whatever you get. They put every single item in its own plastic bag. So even a small shopping, Akim White's 20 or 30 or 40 plastic bags in a big plastic bag. They all end up in the ocean and they break down over that sun. And

we are now, we know, for the deepest part of the Marianas trench, plastic is everywhere. I would like to add something on top of these. We could sense because I think that something will be very useful is to reduce all the inflow of plastics going to the ocean. We know that the majority of macroplastics are coming by the rivers and there has been some interesting experiences even in California just controlling what is going down the river because typically what happens that people abandon a plastic object or

whatever and at the end by the way in this finish going to the river and from the river it goes to sea. So there are some relatively easy relatively sea waste to contain this plastic before arriving to the sea in which it will be reduced, broken up until it becomes very small. Another significant thing

that can be done for sure is to reduce the use of plastic. The plastic is too wide space is completely absurd. It makes no sense. It's not useful and in fact plastic I think is too valuable to be used the way it is used because there are some specific uses

in that industry which it will be preferable to have this plastic for that. And something also which is important has to do with clothing. The vast majority of microplastics are having to the ocean come from the microfibers that are getting out from our clothes when we are putting them in the washing machine. So this is important because these microplastics are daily entering the food wet. It's affecting all the life in the ocean.

It's affecting ourselves also. So we should change the way in which we are making closes because we should do in a very different manner maybe using more cotton, I don't know, or maybe not elaborating the way in which they are elaborated. And also to complement the things that the professor probably has said, something that we know for sure is that healthy ecosystems are very helpful in precisely in caption,

in capturing CO2 because there are many ways in which the ocean captures CO2 he has indicated several so it's not only the skeletons of the of the fishes but also in general also the exoskeletons

of algae the microscopic algae and there is a continuous balance between organic carbon dissolving the water in organic carbon dissolving the water and when you have a healthy ecosystem the ocean acts as a real trap for CO2. So just allowing the life in the oceans to thrive is also very interesting from the point of view of fighting climate change and from the carbonization. And for that reason, also is

very important when we are planning, doing some activities, some industrial activities on the ocean, that we should not be disrupting ecosystems even more. And I think in here about, for instance, some offshore wind farms that are planning places which have a lot of biodiversity. this is not a place to place, to place this kind of facility. And also especially awesome mining, which for me is a completely absurd thing because it is too energy intensive, so it's too costly.

But they are still thinking about this kind of stuff. And even if they probably are not going to operate in the larger scale, this is the kind of things that you should not do if you want not to disrupt these ecosystems that are so valuable on themselves. and also for our own interest of fighting climate change. Is there anything on the geoengineering front involving oceans like green sand or things like that, olivine crushing, is there anything that is potentially viable on the horizon

or are they all Frankenstein sorts of out of the frying pan into the fire? Daniel, would you like to comment? These techniques are all dangerous. Because imagine, imagine we would put particles in the sulfur particle in the sky. We would have a fleet or plain darkening the skies, and then we would be, we would continue with emission. Obviously, the ocean would further acidified. fire and everything, and then we would have a reduction of the temperature for a few years and if it worked.

And then the whole thing would be exploding when the system is pushed to some limit. And I would like to add a little thing. I'm a friend with lots of people from the abortion communities here. And in the north of British Columbia in so-called Hadauguay, A bunch of crooks from California came and sold to the village elder the notion that they would grind up a few Volkswagen and throw them in the water and this would produce lots of salmon. And they got from these people from the tribal council, one million bucks and they went away with it. And obviously you couldn't distinguish what they have done from the normal spring bloom of zooplank. of zoep, and phaeto and zooplano.

And this was a bunch of hocksters. And this stuff, I see it as the same thing on a giant, on a global basis. Peter Antonio, on the geoengineering topic, any words? I don't know enough to know other than I certainly thought that the idea of putting sulfur in the atmosphere. as was just mentioned, is such a terrible idea. And I think it's equivalent to what people have said for trying to help out the oceans. At this stage, we don't know enough to know what these things will do.

And in all probability, they can just make it worse. Well, the question is that putting sulfur in the atmosphere, when it combines with water, it gives sulfuric acid, that this is the acid rain. And also this creates a lot of health problems in the ecosystem. And so it's a really very bad idea. And in fact, we have done the opposite experience. because since 2020 we have enforced the new maritime regulation that forces the ships to use fuels that create less SO2 emissions.

Less, well, the emissions of sulfur. And what is happening in places that were heavily contaminated at the space in Europe is that this sulfur, is that this sulfur was creating a dimming. So this was creating a scream between us and the middle layers of the atmosphere. So we were not experienced it in all this intensity, the climate change now that we have removed all the sulfur. The temperatures on land on Europe have increased probably because of that. And also in parts of the ocean for which the ships were passing continuously. So in general, it is very dangerous because you are not aware of what we're doing. you can trigger out a lot of other processes that you don't know,

all those intended consequences. The chemistry of this substances tend to create something which is very bad. And in general, I see this, it's a very bad idea. There are a kind of engineering, which is specific of the ocean that has been discussed quite frequently, is fertilizing the oceans using iron, because the product that we have in the oceans is that, there are a scarcity of several specific chemical elements and iron is one which is scarce.

So when you are disseminating iron dusts in parts of the ocean, you can generate artificial blooms of algae. And this algae will dieing in principle should be capturing this CO2 because in their exoskeletons, they are formed by carbonates. So they are capturing this and going to the floor of the ocean. So this will be good. And this is the idea behind this. The problem with this is that you can create such a big amount of blooms

that you can really kill a lot of ecosystems. This is absolutely, it's a very nasty idea. And you can at the end create a, you can create a collapse of all these ecosystems. And then even if you wanted to go ahead, fertilize those and to create more blooms, maybe this is not going to have any effect because probably you have not the algae there. So in general, these things about Jean-Gerrin, I think they are very dangerous

because we are under depression. We have in the control of the situation, but we are not. There are many unintended consequences. There are many processes that we don't know. And we wouldn't go for doing something the larger scale without having tests this before. This is very likely to happen.

This is very likely to turn on the worst side. Yeah. I mean, the arc of the story of the Twilight zone that we're living in suggests to me that once we get desperate, we will try something systemically blind, like the things you guys were just mentioning. I want to be faithful to the time estimate I gave you all because I know you're very busy. I have one final question to ask you. I could keep this going for four hours. You guys are all separately heroes of mine that you've spent your life work and life force on behalf of understanding what's going on in the oceans and

the science. So I really am grateful to you as human beings for your dedication to this. A closing question for each of you, if there was one question that as an ocean scientist, you would like to ask society, those people watching and listening to this program, for them to consider in order to solve a problem in an area of your specialty that you're working on, what would that be? What question or issue would you like listeners to consider? I was in Hong Kong and in China a few days ago, and the same question came up. And basically the question was that in Hong Kong, the people see the ocean only via food, via seafood.

This is the only way they appreciate the ocean. And the point was being made that the ocean is not a louder. It's not only a provider of food. And in fact, if we see it only as a louder, we will lose the food provisioning that the ocean provide. So we have to look, I would say, we have to learn, we have to try to get the people to see the ocean as more than a provider of food. And thus we have to rein in the fisheries, especially the overfishing,

in order to maintain the ocean doing. its own thing because its own thing is maintaining life on earth. I could say something on that. I am now thinking more on the physical part of the ocean. I think that if I should pose a question to anyone regarding the oceans and what is happening, something to make they then think about it, is do you want to fear the ocean, to be scared of the ocean? because for instance here in Spain we have a lot of population living by the ocean,

which is generally all the countries that have coasts. And the problem is that, for instance, in some areas here in Spain, the water now in the Mediterranean is so hot that it starts to be uncomfortable even to take a bath there because it's very, very hot actually. And the question is that as the amount of heat storing the ocean increases, this makes that any tempest, any storm carrying from the ocean is going to be more and more violent. And in fact, we want to live by the oceans because there are many values of living by the oceans. But we don't like, we don't want to be destroyed by the oceans.

And the kind of tempest that we're discussing are really becoming very dangerous. It's not the typical tempest that we see here. So for me the question is Do you want to be able to live by the ocean? Do you want to have the ocean as an habitat at which you can live by the side? You want to be there or you want to live a life in which you will be a scare

for anything who comes with the ocean in the form of these huge storms and so on? There is something that I think that people should think about which kind of environment we want to have even for ourselves. Yeah, I think about the greatest single threat that I see to current human civilization is going to be a lack of food, and a lack of food is going to be coming from already, as we've seen, over fishing, but also as we melt the ice sheets, the continental ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, sea level rise is taking out low-level rice fields everywhere.

I mean, salt goes sideways. hungry people are politically unstable people warfare look up we've done how much carbon dioxide has gotten into the atmosphere because Russia attacked Ukraine the US is building armaments like crazy the Russians are we have stopped the sense of a global sense of climate change is really the biggest problem now dealing with yet another global war

we've got to save the ice sheets we've got to keep ice because if we lose ice, we really lose sea level and we lose food and then we lose peace. Thank you all. I am really reluctant to end this call because you all have such scientific knowledge to contribute and also human vulnerability and honesty. And maybe we could do this again because there's a lot that we didn't cover about the importance and risks of world's oceans and seas. So thank you to the three of you. Maybe the three of you now that are introduced could write some mind and future-changing academic paper together. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future.

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