Forgive me, for I have sinned

Regular readers of our newsletter will have seen the “adverts” for our official podcast - Yeah... Nah!, which we record on a fortnightly basis. Mark, Bronwyn and I discuss recent skeptical topics, usually in a sort-of pub chat format. We enjoy recording it, and we hope that listeners enjoy hearing it.

In the last episode, I committed a skeptical cardinal sin, in repeating some misinformation I'd come across. In an offhand remark, I commented that I'd heard the story about 90% of the plankton in the Atlantic Ocean being killed off. False!

Firstly, it's interesting to understand what plankton are. National Geographic gives a good explanation. They're basically a collection of tiny organisations, both animal and plant (and others) that float around beneath the surface in waterways and oceans across the planet. (And they can exist in the air too.) They're an important food source, and they also play an important role in absorbing CO2 and producing oxygen.

If 90% of them in the Atlantic Ocean disappeared, that would hugely upset a lot of ecosystems on the planet.

But, as I said, it's not true.

The scary thing about this is that such misinformation can cause anxiety about the environment to the point that people think it's not worth doing anything about, because there's nothing that can be done to save it.

The claim, shared virally (which I happened to glimpse on Twitter, but didn't follow up on), originated in a Scottish paper - The Sunday Post:

The article links to the website of a “research foundation”: the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey. The research, which it seems, is just a citizen science project. Is done by people with yachts, and advises to trawl a net behind your yacht, then take samples and look at them under a microscope to count the number of plankton.

The site is run by a Dr Howard Dryden, who has a PhD, but has published virtually no peer reviewed papers in reputable journals. He also runs several companies which provide products for filtration of water for removing plastics.

The paper that makes the claim is published on SSRN - subtitled “Tomorrow's Research Today”, which specialises in dissemination of scholarly research prior to publication - i.e. preprints. The site is owned by Elsevier, which is in the scientific publishing business, so it's not entirely disreputable.

Reading the abstract of the paper though, I encountered some fairly astounding items:

“The entire world has over-focused on greenhouse gases to the detriment of nature. Climate change is a simple equation, what goes into the atmosphere must be removed.“

“We are biologists and perhaps we think differently to other professions, but it is our view that land-based nature will benefit from extra carbon dioxide [emphasis mine] in the environment – it is after-all plant food.”

“...but from own (sic) plankton sampling activity and other observations, we consider that losses closer to 90% have occurred, and these are due to chemical pollution from, for example, wastewater and not climate change.

So, this seems to be super-dodgy, with a scientist pushing their own slant on pollution to possibly promote their own companies' products.

As it turns out, there is an organisation devoted to sampling plankton in the water: the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey. They've been doing continuous research for over 70 years, using the same methodologies. They have recorded changes in plankton populations in particular areas but fall far short of making sweeping statements about the cataclysmic decline of plankton across the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.

In particular, they see that due to warming water from climate change, some species of plankton are migrating northward to cooler waters. They also see ocean acidification, and plastic pollution happening, and while they haven't seen major impacts on plankton yet, this may become a problem in the future.

The Atlantic Ocean is a vast place (just as the Pacific Ocean is) so it would be a sweeping generalisation to declare the dangerous decline of plankton from a limited survey (just 13 yachts in Dryden's research).

So, there you have it. I was helped immensely in this by Rebecca Watson's video on the topic.

My takeaway point is to be careful with casual remarks about research I've not investigated!