Paper Reviewed
Irwin, A.J., Finkel, Z.V., Muller-Karger, F.E. and Ghinaglia, L.T. 2015. Phytoplankton adapt to changing ocean environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112: 5762-5766.

Introducing their work, Irwin et al. (2015) write that "most ecosystem models used to predict changes in community composition with climate change assume species' responses to environmental conditions are genetically fixed on the century scale." However, they indicate that "this hypothesis has not been tested." And, therefore, they proceeded to test it themselves.

Based on a real-world "oceanographic time series with directional environmental changes," they discovered that many phytoplankton species are actually able to track, on average, modest changes in temperature on decadal time scales. And in light of this finding, they conclude that "community ecosystem models can no longer assume that phytoplankton cannot adapt" to the temperature changes (dramatic warming) that are predicted to occur by climate alarmists in response to climate-model-projected increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

In closing, therefore, and in describing the significance of their observations, the four researchers state that their observations suggest that "models that use genetically fixed traits may not provide reasonable projections for changes in biological communities in response to climate change over decadal to longer timescales."