My Radical Blogs

I know it sounds a little radical, whaling contributing to climate change. After all, whales live in the ocean and climate change is due to the amount of carbon in the upper atmosphere. However, if you follow my line of thought, you may wonder if there isn’t at least a loose connection between the two.

Whale in full flight

Climate change is said to be caused by a number of factors. The first is the amount of CO2 that we are pumping into our atmosphere. The second is the speed at which we are cutting down forests, in particular, old forests that have been around for thousands of years. Trees can help to reduce CO2 as they use this gas as part of their photosynthesis process.

Oceans have forests too in the form of phytoplankton. When the conditions are right, phytoplankton blooms can be clearly seen from the sky and like our land based forests, phytoplankton photosynthesize converting CO2 into food. Over the last 200 years phytoplankton blooms in the southern oceans have dropped dramatically and while the amount of CO2 not now being absorbed is hard to measure, there is bound to be some impact.

Researchers are now looking at these waters in an attempt to determine why these blooms have are no longer as large as they once were. The waters are relatively rich in nutrients – bar one – iron. For some reason there is a very low concentration of iron in those waters.

Is Whaling Really Necessary

Now here comes the association with whales. Like many land creatures, whales fertilize the oceans through their waste. The waste from whales is relatively high in iron, and iron that is accessible to life such as the phytoplankton. The twist goes further since whales feed on both phytoplankton and krill, a crustacean that also feeds on phytoplankton.

The association is there – fewer whales has resulted in less iron in the water. This has led to smaller blooms of phytoplankton and fewer krill.

Is this affecting climate change? That’s for the scientists to tell us. The big problem at present is that science is taking radical sides and it’s hard to really get at the truth. From my perspective, this may only have a marginal effect on climate change, but whaling is certainly having an affect on the overall biology of our southern oceans, and that cannot be good in the long run – all the more reason to ban whaling for the next fifty years – let’s allow the stocks of whales in our southern oceans to bloom once more – the phytoplankton may well bloom with them.

Related Posts

• Where To For Climate Change – It Seems Nowhere
• Climate Change – What Climate Change? We Get 105 Everyday Here!
• Are The Greens Really Interested In Climate Change?