When somebody looks at the ocean they see just the surface of the ocean.
It’s just a beautiful sunset over the ocean. Unless you’re sitting in a
very polluted area of the ocean, you don’t really notice it that much.
So most of the stuff that’s going on is beyond our eyesight. it’s
underneath. And so there’s a real challenge, I think, in communicating
why this ocean is important to you, personally, and particularly to the
farmer in Kansas. And it’s hard to talk about or show the impact that
you’ve had on it.
— Susan Avery, Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
In a rare burst of environmental news, there was lots of press coverage of the IPCC's latest climate summary for policymakers, the first such report since 2007. In the United States, the new release was not deemed sufficiently important to kick the latest government shutdown threat off the front pages, but environmentalists have learned—or need to learn—to be happy with less.
In the midst of the climate coverage there appeared a quotation and question from Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Tim Barnett which raises some interesting questions about the typical human stance toward the biosphere. Barnett was a reviewer for the latest IPCC release.
“Temperatures measured over the short term are just one parameter,” said
Dr Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in an
interview. “There are far more critical things going on; the
acidification of the ocean is happening a lot faster than anybody
thought that it would, it’s sucking up more CO2; plankton, the basic
food chain of the planet, are dying, it’s such a hugely important
signal.
Why aren’t people using that as a measure of what is going on?”
Excellent question, Tim!
Today I will attempt to answer Tim's question. In so far as it is possible to do so with all things psychological, I shall try to establish the truth of the proposition below.
Regarding the environment, and with respect to humanity's shared, collective psyche, life in the oceans, which forms the basis for all life on Earth, lies almost entirely outside human awareness, i.e., it resides in the human unconscious.
Marine ecosystems are literally out of sight and out of mind.
Here's some stuff to keep in mind as you read this essay.
The world's oceans, which comprise nearly 70% of the planet's surface, often function as a waste dump for human activities. Enormous amounts of plastic and other garbage flow into the sea, as does nutrient run-off from human animal and plant production. About 26% of current CO2 emissions (another waste product of human activity) are absorbed by the oceans, which has led over time to a 30% increase in sea water acidity (lower pH) in the last few centuries.
And you may be surprised to learn something even more alarming. This text is from What ocean heating reveals about global warming, published on RealClimate on September 25, 2013 in anticipation of the new IPCC summary.
The amount of heat stored in the oceans is one of the most important diagnostics for global warming, because about 90% of the additional heat is stored there (you can read more about this in the last IPCC report
from 2007).
The atmosphere stores only about 2% because of its small
heat capacity. The surface (including the continental ice masses) can
only absorb heat slowly because it is a poor heat conductor. Thus, heat
absorbed by the oceans accounts for almost all of the planet’s
radiative imbalance.
Ninety per cent! I shall have more to say about physicist and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf's article below.
And then there is this the more metaphorical approach I took in my June 10, 2013 post The Last Fish — Our Exhausted Seas.
Out of sight, out of mind. What do you see when you stand on the beach
and look out at the ocean? You see a broad expanse of blue water — you
see the surface of the sea. It is probably wishful thinking to
believe that humans might care about marine ecosystems if they could see
the carnage below the surface, but if they could see it, the damage
done from overfishing would certainly make an impression on them.
My comment echos Woods Hole director Susan Avery's opening quotation. I shall return to this theme later on. This essay is a follow-up to Science Is Hard, Time Is Short. Let's start with a few public reports on the IPCC's latest summary for policymakers.
The Warming "Hiatus" Controversy
Climate change "skeptics" have pointed to a hiatus (or pause) in surface warming of the Earth since 1998. This National Geographic story summarizes what's been going on.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) is meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, this week to iron out the final
details of a widely anticipated report on the current state of global
warming science. There has been much speculation about how the report
will address an apparent decrease in the rate of warming over the past
few years, dubbed a "global warming pause."
Prominent
climate scientists say that discussion misses the bigger picture. The
suggestion that global warming has stopped, says Richard Alley of Penn State, is "nonsense."
A recent paper
by climate modelers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography argues
that the supposed pause in global warming can be explained entirely by
recent variations in the El Nino-La Nina cycle in the tropical Pacific...
Global Warming Hiatus?
Although
climate models have been predicting increasing average global
temperatures over the next century or so, the past decade has not shown
as much warming as most scientists had expected. The year 2012 was no
warmer than 2002. The IPCC draft report acknowledges a "global warming
hiatus," according to media reports [the BBC, see the graph below].
"Governments
are demanding a clear explanation of what are the possible causes of
this factor," Arthur Petersen, chief scientist at the Netherlands
Environmental Assessment Agency and part of the Dutch delegation that is
reviewing the IPCC report, told BBC News.
The Associated Press reported that "several governments that reviewed the draft objected to how the issue was tackled." Der Spiegel online called the supposed global warming pause
an "Inconvenient Truth for climatologists" —an allusion to the climate
change movie made by former U.S. vice president Al Gore, who in 2007
shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC for his work on the issue.
Global warming skeptics have seized on the news of a potential pause...
A graph showing the global warming "pause". The key phrase is "upper ocean heat uptake". Source: the U.K. Met Office, as cited by the BBC story linked-in above.
I have no interest in the "politicization" of climate science as I made clear in my recent essay Science Is Hard, Time Is Short. I can not find the specific language the IPCC used to address the hiatus, nor do I care about it. We do not need a politicized, bureaucratic U.N. organization to tell us what the climate science says. Their report is meant to present a consensus view of the science for people who will steadfastly ignore it (policymakers).
There is some uncertainty about the cause(s) of the pause in surface warming because science is hard. The best explanations center around the increasing heat content of the world's oceans and El Nino/La Nina (ENSO) variability in the Pacific noted by National Geographic.
Thus the psychological truth regarding how humans view the oceans and the warming pause are related subjects. To see why, let's take a deeper look at the RealClimate article quoted in the introduction.
The heat content of the oceans is growing and growing. That means that the greenhouse effect has not taken a pause and the cold sun is not noticeably slowing global warming. NOAA posts regularly updated measurements
of the amount of heat stored in the bulk of the oceans. For the upper
2000 m (deeper than that not much happens) it looks like this:
You can easily see that there's been no pause in heat absorption by the oceans up to a depth of 2000 meters . However, consistent with the Met Office graph above, there has been a hiatus in heating of the upper 700 meters of the oceans.
Changes in the heat content of the oceans. Source: Abraham et al., 2013. The 2-sigma uncertainty for 1980 is 2 x 1022 J and for recent years 0.5 x 1022 J
We see two very interesting things.
First: Roughly two thirds of the warming since 1980
occurred in the upper ocean. The heat content of the upper layer has
gone up twice as much as in the lower layer (700 – 2000 m). The average
temperature of the upper layer has increased more than three times as
much as the lower (because the upper layer is only 700 m thick, and the
lower one 1300 m). That is not surprising, as after all the ocean is
heated from above and it takes time for the heat to penetrate deeper.
Second: In the last ten years the upper layer has
warmed more slowly than before. In spite of this the temperature still
is changing as rapidly there as in the lower layer. This recent slower
warming in the upper ocean is closely related to the slower warming of
the global surface temperature, because the temperature of the
overlaying atmosphere is strongly coupled to the temperature of the
ocean surface.
That the heat absorption of the ocean as a whole (at least to 2000 m)
has not significantly slowed makes it clear that the reduced warming of
the upper layer is not (at least not much) due to decreasing heating
from above, but rather mostly due to greater heat loss to lower down:
through the 700 m level, from the upper to the lower layer. (The
transition from solar maximum to solar minimum probably also contributed
a small part as planetary heat absorption decreased by about 15%, Abraham, et al., 2013).
It is difficult to establish the exact mechanism for this stronger
heat flux to deeper water, given the diverse internal variability in the
oceans.
I will skip the El Nino/La Nina hypothesis, which argues that a greater prevalance of cold water (La Nina) events in the tropical Pacific over the last decade have caused the flatter warming trend in surface waters (the first 700 meters). This hypothesis is consistent with (does not contradict) the ocean heat content observations made above (see Rahmstorf's post for the details).
Thus, the ocean warming data supports the hypothesis that global
warming has not paused at all. Instead, for reasons which are not
altogether clear, most of the excess heat caused by radiative forcing by
greenhouse gases has ended up in the deep ocean.
Rahmstorf writes that we see "two very interesting things" in this ocean temperature data. That's true as far it goes. But there is a third very interesting thing which he does not mention at all. Let's look at that one.
Because That's Where The Humans Live...
It is striking to those with the awareness to see it that neither Rahmstorf's text nor any of the 111 responses to it (as of this writing) mentions the possible effects of all this ocean warming on life in the oceans, or marine ecosystems. That is the third interesting thing. Nor does the word acidification occur in the text or comments. Comment #47 and climate modeler Gavin Schmidt's response to it are very informative this regard.
KK Aw says:
26 Sep 2013 at 7:05 AM
According to this article, “The amount of heat stored in the oceans
is one of the most important diagnostics for global warming, because
about 90% of the additional heat is stored there (you can read more
about this in the last IPCC report from 2007). The atmosphere stores
only about 2% because of its small heat capacity…”
If the atmosphere accounts for only 2% of the energy, why are we so preoccupied with the global average temperature?
[Response: Because that's where we live. - gavin]
Exactly!
RealClimate reported on the IPCC summary in a separate post. And now it's time to have some fun, for that post does mention acidification of the oceans because the IPCC does. The oceans are the last topic Stefan Rahmstorf mentions in the post before concluding.
Oceans
At high emissions (red scenario above), the IPCC expects a weakening of the Atlantic Ocean circulation (commonly known as the Gulf Stream system) by 12% to 54% by the end of the century.
Last but not least, our CO2 emissions not only cause climate change,
but also an increase in the CO2 concentration in sea water, and the oceans acidify due to the carbonic acid that forms. This is shown by the measured data in the graph below.
Figure 5 Measured CO2 concentration and pH in seawater. Low pH means higher acidity.
Last but not least?
The phrase "last but not least" is a standard way of saying "oh, yeah, here's some other shit going on which we don't really care much about." I know this because I've done it myself in my own writing. And no one thought to consider life in the oceans in the 104 comments on that post either.
Lest you think I am making a mountain out of a molehill, you need to understand that this sin of omission regarding the effect of global warming on life in the oceans is quite common. Here is a general rule for you to consider.
Articles on global warming which fail to mention (1) warming of the oceans or (2) acidification of the oceans outnumber articles which focus on terrestrial surface warming and its consequences by a ratio of at least 100 : 1, but the ratio may be as high as 250 : 1 or 500 : 1.
Moreover, articles which do mention (1) or (2) are usually published by the much, much smaller community of specialists who study marine ecosystems.
Climate science is Big Business. Marine ecology is a small niche market.
You can confirm this observation for yourself as I have over the years. (You've got to read lots of global warming articles to spot the trend.) The reason RealClimate's Rahmstorf talked about the ocean in the first post I quoted is because there has been an apparent pause in surface warming, especially in terrestrial surface warming. Talking about deep ocean warming (to 2000 meters) was merely the vehicle by which climate "skeptics" could be shown to be dummies in denial (which they are).
If life in the oceans is off the radar for climate scientists and the (mostly) knowledgeable readers of RealClimate, you can easily imagine just how much worse the situation must be in non-science press articles written for the General Public. And believe me, it is
As I write this on September 30, 2013, the IPCC release (on Friday the 27th) is still fairly fresh in the public mind. Wait a few days and this environmental news will disappear; the government shutdown is scheduled for tomorrow. If you had searched Google News for "marine ecosystems" or "life in the oceans" as I just did, you will find exactly one article on these subjects. (There are literally thousands of articles on the new IPCC report.) It is called Oceans are taking the brunt of climate change, and it was published by The Ecologist (U.K.) on Saturday the 28th.
I will quote that article at length. I did some minor editing and added a few links.
As politicians, scientists and the world's media begin
to respond to the latest IPCC report, Jack Wilson reminds us of the
critical role that oceans play in mitigating the impacts of climate
change and explains just how detrimental this role is to many marine
ecosystems...
Following
the latest IPCC report released yesterday, the urgency for unified
world action regarding climate change is at its foremost. Introducing
the report from a high level UN panel of climate scientists, Ban Ki-moon
said, "The heat is on. We must act" ...
A significant yet often underemphasized issue raised by the IPCC report is that the oceans are shielding humanity from climate change impacts at significant cost to their own health, and have already absorbed more than 90% of the warming so far. Our atmosphere holds only one two per cent of the extra heat that our greenhouse gas emissions are trapping on Earth, the ocean more than 90 per cent — so by focusing on atmospheric temperatures we have been missing a huge part of the story.
The ocean is the dominant life support system on the planet and is central to our quality of life on earth.
Unfortunately, there is a profound, widespread ignorance about the ocean and its vital importance to everyone, everywhere, all of the time. Even what is known to scientists is not widely appreciated by the public, and certainly not by most policymaking officials. You can rarely prove something to someone who does not want to see it proven, or has financial or ideological reasons to not see it proven.
90% of many fish species are now gone from the oceans and the disappearance of fish species has recently been accelerating.
If this long term trend continues, all fish species are projected to collapse by 2048. By then, around 4 billion of the projected 9.3 billion people on the planet could be without their primary source of protein, creating a global food security problem.
The oceans are home to the greatest diversity of life. As the oceans are changing, the character of the planet will change. It took about 4 billion years for living systems, mostly in the sea, to transform the lifeless ingredients of early Earth into the climate which makes our lives possible. It has taken less than 100 years for us to destabilize these ancient rhythms.
We are witnessing a complete re-organization of ocean ecosystems, with unknown global consequences. The stability of the system is declining. Losing species changes the predictability of the oceans. The ability of the system to absorb shocks and disasters and deal with climate change is diminishing at a rapid rate...
Before turning to the main hypothesis of this essay, let's summarize what we know so far about the human relationship with life in the oceans based on what we've seen so far.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes it is true.
Identifying The Contents Of The Unconscious
"Nearly two-thirds of the world’s population now lives within 40 miles of the [ocean] coast," writes the author of The Ecologist article. And it's true, humans have a great affinity for coastal regions.
Humankind is in the process of annihilating coastal
and ocean ecosystems.
At the root of the problem are
burgeoning human numbers and their ever-growing
needs. Population distribution is increasingly
skewed.
Recent studies have shown that
the overwhelming bulk of humanity is
concentrated along or near coasts on just
10% of the earth’s land surface. As of
1998, over half the population of the
planet — about 3.2 billion people —
lives and works in a coastal strip just 200
kilometers wide (120 miles), while a full
two-thirds, 4 billion, are found within
400 kilometers of a coast.
Even if humans love living near the ocean ecoystems they are annihilating, it is no small thing in this context to say that humans live on the land. And that explains a lot.
I love it when life among the humans turns out be far simpler than it might appear at first blush. Thus we begin to see why humans are completely preoccupied (when they think about it at all) with how global warming will affect terrestrial life (farming, rainforests, city life, temperate forests, mountain snowfall, ice sheet and glacial melt, freshwater, floods, droughts, heat waves, you name it).
Embarrassing, isn't it?
Yet, life in the oceans forms the basis for all life on Earth as I discussed in Science Is Hard, Time Is Short. Let's revisit Woods Hole director Susan Avery's remarks with fresh eyes.
When somebody looks at the ocean they see just the surface of the ocean.
It’s just a beautiful sunset over the ocean. Unless you’re sitting in a
very polluted area of the ocean, you don’t really notice it that much.
So most of the stuff that’s going on is beyond our eyesight. it’s
underneath. And so there’s a real challenge, I think, in communicating
why this ocean is important to you, personally, and particularly to the
farmer in Kansas. And it’s hard to talk about or show the impact that
you’ve had on it.
Wise words—so most of the stuff that’s going on is beyond our eyesight. it’s
underneath. And so there’s a real challenge. Not only are humans blind to what goes on beneath the surface of the ocean, but they are also unaware (by definition) of the cognitive processes (or lack thereof ) which create that glaring blind spot. In both senses, what goes on underneath is beyond our sight.
Now we see that life in the oceans is literally out of sight and out of mind, unless you're a former cod fisherman in the Gulf of Maine or a marine ecologist studying coral reefs. And never mind that farmer in Kansas. What about the Happy People of Malibu, California or Ocean City, Maryland? Same problem—all they see is the beautiful sunset.
How do we identify an unconscious process at work? As I attempted to demonstrate daily on Decline Of The Empire, we do so by
observing typical (highly generalized, nearly universal) human behavior, and then
identifying and examining the important information which is always omitted, including unstated but crucial assumptions.
What is omitted constitutes the "blind spot" in human cognition, or what Carl Jung would have called "the human shadow." This is the stuff which lies outside human awareness. Obviously it is very difficult to train yourself to see what typically isn't there.
Examples of unconscious processes abound. Consider Figure 2 from RealClimate's summary of the recent IPCC report.
Figure 2 The future temperature development in the highest emissions scenario (red) and in a scenario with successful climate mitigation (blue) – the “4-degree world” and the “2-degree world.”
I took the liberty of examining the IPCC scenarios in my recent essay Your Next Stop, The Twilight Zone. You can review it at your leisure if you have not already done so.
What I did not say in that essay was that neither a "2-degree world" (RCP2.6) nor a "4-degree world" (RCP8.5, aka. Business As Usual) seems very likely to me. In fact, I can think of literally hundreds of reasons why the neither the high or low end scenarios will occur, not the least of which is the effect of climate change itself. (It's already too late for the low end scenario.) Be that as it may, the truth (what will actually happen) very likely lies within the stated range of surface temperature increases.
And there was another important point I did not discuss which speaks to unconscious processes at work in the humans making these projections. Humans concerned about global warming routinely assume that some version of Business As Usual is the path humanity will follow globally in the 21st century. This common expectation is expressed as a mindless extrapolation of 20th century and current trends. Thus you commonly see dire warnings about a "4-degree world".
Thus humans invariably take it for granted that the global economy will grow and grow (and thus emissions will likely grow and grow) over the next 50, 60 or 80 years to take us to a "4 degree world" by 2100. Crucially, this assumption is always unstated, i.e. it is always omitted from predictions of extreme surface temperature projections. If you doubt this, look at virtually any article on the subject.
I believe this near-universal omission betokens an unconscious cognitive process at work. Even those we might reasonably expect to question the "growth imperative" in human behavior assume it will be fulfilled when talking about the future. Thus I hypothesize that the "growth imperative" lies within humanity's shared, collective unconscious. This is a very subtle point, but understanding it is the key to fully understanding my writing on these subjects.
Returning to life in the oceans, consider all the discussions you've seen about "peak X" over the last 5 years or so. The variable X is usually crude oil, but humans like to generalize, so you might have also heard about peak credit or peak phosphorus or even peak everything. Humans argue vociferously and endlessly about these peak prognostications because, fundamentally, these disputes are religious in nature (faith-based).
But almost never do you see discussions about the only "peak X" which is an indisputable real-world limit and accomplished fact—peak wild-caught fish.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) projects that the world’s wild fish harvest will fall
to 90 million tons in 2012, down 2 percent from 2011. This is close to 4
percent below the all-time peak haul of nearly 94 million tons in 1996.
The wild fish catch per person has dropped even more dramatically, from
17 kilograms (37.5 pounds) per person at its height in 1988 to 13
kilograms in 2012—a 37-year low. While wild fish harvests have flattened
out during this time, the output from fish farming has soared from 24
million tons in the mid-1990s to a projected 67 million tons in 2012. Source
What are the unconscious processes going on here?
First, as I hope I've established in this essay, a consideration of life in the oceans is generally outside of human awareness. But it is equally important to note that "peak X" almost invariably refers to some economic entity—some commodity or more abstract medium of exchange having to do with money, debt & credit, etc.
These entirely anthropocentric concerns naturally exclude non-human living things like fish or other animals. What about peak large mammal species? Peak birds? Peak Amphibians? In fact, all of these "peaks" (localized in geological time) have already occurred during the 200,000 years Homo sapiens has walked the Earth, and especially the last 15,000 years. For example, consider the late Pleistocene (Quaternary) megafaunal extinctions in which humans certainly played a part.
You never read about concepts like those. Once again, for humans it is the economy über alles and other living entities, including life in the sea, be damned.
Let's finish up because I believe I have now answered Tim Barnett's question.
A New Conception Of The Unconscious
When I think about the human unconscious, which I wrote about in The Reality Of The Unconscious and Flatland — A "Good Enough" Theory Of Human Cognition, I always think back to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and the other 20th century "depth" psychologists. I struggled with what these people were saying for many years.
But over those years, it dawned on me that the conception these people had of the human unconscious was very impoverished, meaning seriously incomplete. Freud's preoccupation with psychosexual issues, Jung's preoccupation with mythology, everyone's preoccupation with the personal contents of the unconscious and psychoanalysis, family issues and so on—none of this would ever even begin to help me sort out the kind of stuff (for example "the growth imperative") which required an explanation. For example, how could someone possibly explain how humans work without considering their fascination with technology?
To be sure, I've had profound advantages which Freud, Jung and others did not have. There is the World Wide Web, which puts almost the entire human world at my fingertips. There are all these ongoing environmental crises which would have been completely invisible to people in the early 20th century. I have gotten to see the Big Picture in a way which would have been impossible in 1905 when Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Today I explained that life in the oceans is literally out of sight and out of mind, and that observation too is outside the scope of what anybody has ever had to say about the human unconscious, at least as far as I know. Humans live on the land. Thus they do no consider what they can not see. It's that simple, but that simple observation sets a profound limitation on the human future because without healthy, life-supporting oceans there is no human future.
Dave Cohen
Decline Of The Empire
October 2, 2013