Climate scientists have alleged Phytoplankton decline had hit an astonishing 40 percent. Media hype was built up around the claims of researcher, Daniel Boyce and friends who released a paper seemingly proving a decline over a century long measurement set of chlorophyll levels in the oceans. The paper appeared in Nature. Yet in the very same edition of the journal another study had made contradictory claims. So guess which story the mainstream media ran with?
Boyce’s sensational scientific claims took centre stage – it supported the monotnous global warming narrative still popular in mainstream media.
More or less chlorophyll serves as an indicator of the amount of photosynthesis from phytoplankton that is occurring in bodies of water. In samples chlorophyll being produced during photosynthesis. The alarmist authors assert their findings help prove “global warming.”
The paper titled “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century” is being further contradicted as evidence mounts that it is a hyped scientific scare story from Boyce which runs counter to oceanographic scientific consensus. So let’s look at the facts:
The researchers state…
“These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.” (Nature; Volume 466)
Contrary Peer-reviewed Study Indicates Sampling Bias
Meanwhile, in another research paper in Nature (Volume 472) titled “A measured look at ocean chlorophyll trends” the authors find that the alleged one percent a year decline alleged by Boyce in phytoplankton biomass over four decades has not occurred. Authors dispute Boyce’s key finding stating that:
“Our results indicate that much, if not all, of the century-long decline reported by Boyce et al.1 is attributable to this temporal sampling bias and not to a global decrease in phytoplankton biomass.”