Characterising the climate change response of marine ecosystems

Understanding how, where and when the marine ecosystem will respond to climate change is a pressing issue.  In this talk, I will use output from IPCC models to explore the space and time scales of climate change response.  I will first explore whether the current network of ocean observing stations is adequate to detect the impacts of climate change on ocean biogeochemistry.  The time and space scales required to detect trends mean that the current observing network is found to be inadequate to detect climate change effects at the global scale.  However, locally some effects are likely to be already detectable.  In the second part of the talk, I will investigate further the time scales of climate change response and in particular the development of multiple coincident drivers of ecosystem stress.  The results show that within the next 15 years ~ 55% of the ocean will experience stress by multiple factors.  However, climate change mitigation efforts are found to have a significant positive influence, reducing the area of the ocean experiencing multiple stress in the near future to just 34% and slowing the pace of climate change by ~25 years.