In the face of irrefutably declining sea surface temperatures, a new study (by Boris Worm et al, Dalhousie University, apparently published in Nature — I have not yet been able to locate the study)  causes cries of alarm that “microscopic marine algae known as phytoplankton have declined globally by roughly 40 percent since 1950 because of rising sea surface temperatures and changing ocean conditions.” (as per an article, “Dying algae a ‘global concern’”, The Edmonton Journal, July 29, 2010, A3)

• [1] Crucial marine algae declining globally, says Canadian Study
  The Vancouver Sun

• [2] Study: Phytoplankton Population Down 40 Percent In 60 Years
  All Headline News

• [3] ‘Marine phytoplankton steadily declining over 20th century
  New Kerala

• [4] Concern over declining marine algae
  Virgin Media

• [5] New study reveals decline of marine phytoplankton over the past century
  Science Centric

• [6]  Are our oceans dying? Phytoplankton has declined 40% in 60 years as figures reveal Earth has been getting hotter since the Eighties
  Daily Mail

• [7] Phytoplankton in decline: bye bye food chain?
  New Scientist

• [8] Warmer seas put marine food chain at risk
  ABC Online

• [9] Food chain’s fuel runs low
  Scotsman

• [10] Vital ocean phytoplankton a casualty of global warming?
  The Christian Science Monitor

• [11] Base of Ocean Food Chain Is in Decline, Study Finds
  LiveScience.com

• [12] Marine Phytoplankton Declining: Striking Global Changes at the Base of the Marine Food Web Linked to Rising Ocean Temperatures
  Science Daily

I became aware of this latest scare story when checking The Edmonton Journal this morning.  It carried a similar story, taking up about half of page A3:

Dying algae a ‘global concern’

Carmen Chai
Postmedia News

As of the time of writing this, that article was not yet available on The Edmonton Journal’s website.

The media feeding frenzy with respect to this latest instance of climate change alarmism brings to mind what Conrad Black had to say about the integrity of journalists.  In “The Establishment Man” (Peter C. Newman, 1982, MacLelland & Stewart Limited, ISBN 0-7710-6785-2) his views are described as follows:

    While Black does admire a few individual journalists, he despises their profession.  “My experience of the working press,” he says, “is that they are a very degenerate group.  There is a terrible incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse.  The mental stability of large elements of the press is more open to question than that of many other comparable groups in society.  A number of them are ignorant, lazy, opiniated, intellectually dishonest, and inadequately supervised.”

    “The individual journalist, if he has any panache or talent, becomes something of a celebrity.  Much of his social life is built up on the press-circuit: bars, hangers-on, media groupies, the stifling and depraved gossip of the degenerate little media community, and the fawning of unfulfilled women, boys, and hucksters…. Journalism tends to attract the sort of person who settles whimsically on it as a calling or comes to it after disappointments elsewhere, because of the relative ease of entry into the field.  These people, discouraged and purposeless are easily influenced by their angrier colleagues.  It is by inadvertence, inexperience, the investigative nature of the press, the antithetical role of the employee, and the negligence of the employer, and not by any organized subversion, that the press veered away from being a mirror to society, and became a perverse sort of irregular and often disloyal opposition.”

     Black blames this sad state of the journalist’s craft on the decline of resident media proprietors, who might have been excentric and curmudgeonly in character but at least ran their own shops.  “With the rise of the chains,” he says, “the publisher has become a local coordinator and functionary, answerable to his absentee employer on economic matters, with a mandate to ensure that the content is sufficiently anodyne to avoid disputes with advertisers, sufficiently formless to avoid strikes in the newsrooms.  The proprietors take relatively little interest in the journalistic aspects of the business….” [page 196]

It is curious that later, when Conrad Black acquired the Canadian Southam newspaper chain, he too became an “absentee employer,” one of those whom he castigated prior to 1982 for being at least in a major part responsible for everything that is wrong with today’s quality of journalism.

To come back to the “irrefutably declining sea-surface temperatures”, you may wish to follow these links:

• Sea-Surface Temperature Anomalies
  

• [13] Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Continue their Plunge
  June 18th, 2010 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

• [14] Even doubling or tripling the amount of CO2′ will have ‘little impact’ on temps
  Posted on September 4, 2008 by Anthony Watts
  From [15] New Zealand Climate Science
  Professor Geoffrey G Duffy
  DEng, PhD, BSc, ASTC Dip., FRS NZ, FIChemE, CEng
  “It is also interesting to note that NASA’s Aqua satellite system has shown that the earth has been cooling since 1998.   This corresponds with measurements from the Argos sub-ocean probes that the ocean is cooling.”

Never let facts come in the way of a good scare story.  Instead, raise alarm on pure speculation, such as, “The study suggests…,” or “This may well be one of the largest biological changes observed in recent times,” and project from there to asserting “simply because it affects most of the biosphere,” said study co-author Boris Worm,” and there you have it, a new scare story that will without a doubt drive a long-lasting wave of unfounded and largely unsubstantiated media hype and hysteria that will take a long time to simmer down into the mundane and boring reality that the whole concern was vastly overblown.  However, when that, finally and perhaps years from now, comes to pass, it will not make the front pages, if anyone in the mainstream media even should bother to report on it.

In the meantime, the funding for the researchers that fuel such media hype and hysteria keeps rolling in, wherefore they will keep stoking the fires of climate change alarmism.

–Walter