2. CLIMATE IMPACTS: PERVASIVE, COHERENT
AND FAST
In the first workshop, we discussed whether our greater
understanding of terrestrial climate impacts could be
used to fill the gap in knowledge of marine systems.
Although there are commonalities, we concluded that
many ocean responses are unique, because biology is
influenced by the contrasting temporal and spatial
scales of oceanic and atmospheric processes. For
example, ramifications of slow ocean dynamics imply
that decreases in ocean pH, which are likely to impact
calcifying organisms, from corals in the tropics to pelagic
snails in polar ecosystems, will take tens of thousands
of years to re-equilibrate to preindustrial conditions. It
also became apparent that detection and attribution
of climate change impacts in marine systems pose distinct challenges for marine ecologists. These include
sampling in a three-dimensional environment, natural
variability at decadal or longer time scales (or potentially
marine researchers have more awareness of it than their
terrestrial counterparts), cooling of large regions (about
15%, 1960–2009) of the ocean [6], and the inadequate
temperature estimates in shallow coastal waters (e.g. the
intertidal zone) from global climate models