Who has more of an impact on earth: Man or Plankton?

Question

Thats it I would appreciate your thoughts.

Answer 1

Plankton  by far.

Before plankton started pumping oxygen into the air, earth had a 'reducing' atmosphere. That's WAY beyond 'climate change'!

With all the iron sunk into the oceans during WW I and II, it's just a matter of time before we get algae blooms unparalleled in recorded history.

Answer 2

Larry, what you have there is a radical Right web page ragging against Global Warming.  So?  Isn't that expected from somebody like that?  Do you imagine a thing like that has anything to do with anything except Right-wing politics?  Or did you have a point?

Dan, I'd say plankton.  It took hundreds of millions of years for plankton to begin the job of removing CO2 from the atmosphere and replacing it with oxygen and get things to the point where diatoms and other higher forms of life could develop.  The diatoms ate the plankton and their tiny calcium carbonate skeletons began to accumulate on the ocean floor in unimaginable numbers, storing the carbon that had moved from the air to the algae to them.  As the oxygen levels rose and the temperatures dropped, Higher forms of animal life evolved and more Carbon was removed from the air until eventually human life became possible.  Storing the carbon in solid forms like calcium carbonate and coal prevented its easy return to the air.

Humans are now aggressively reversing that process, and making significant strides while doing so.  What took nature hundreds of millions of years to accomplish we can reverse in a few hundred at most.  The beautiful ways of nature allow that to proceed only as far as our own extinction.  Then the plankton will return to their business and start reversing the changes we made, just as we first reversed the changes made by the plankton.

Our role in things is great enough to destroy ourselves, but the plankton's role has been greater, up to now at least.

Answer 3

Plankton make most of the oxygen we breathe, but our activities have huge effects on them as well. A ranking of which has more of an impact is meaningless when the two are so dependent on each other. It's like asking if the heart or the lungs are more important in the body.

Answer 4

I'm not sure you can really separate the two.  Our entire ecosystem is far more connected that people used to realize.  Human activities impact plankton (through ocean chemical changes), so humans are thus partly responsible for any impact of plankton on the earth.  And those impacts, in turn, effect humans.

Answer 5

This is a very simple question to answer. Since the entire biosphere has been balanced around the existence of plankton for many millions of years, and the massive output of CO2 by humans altering this balance in a geological blink of an eye, the obvious answer is man.

Answer 6

PLANKTON!!!!

Otherwise, with the recent fires in Southern California, the CO2 should be retaining all that heat for at least another couple of years.... However, in Southern California, I recently scraped ice off of my windshield...  So, where is it warming and where did all of that heat go????

Answer 7

If plankton are more important, which I am guessing you believe is true, and anthropogenic CO2 is damaging plankton communities through ocean acidification, doesn't that give you just a little pause for concern?

Or are you in the camp that CO2 doesn't affect ocean acidity as well?