. . and ecologically important, bodies of water in the world.
If news media still had actual science reporters, and if editors were interested in educating the public, and in reporting actually important news as opposed to trivia about the latest celebrity-du-jour or shallow, misleading stories about the presidential race, maybe it would ultimately become front-page news.

Because Kim Kardashian hasn't told folks that phytoplankton are sexy. Yet.

Because:

~there's no money in it.

~the corporatists are concerned that the vast Hoi Polloi would panic.

~the 'journalists' du jour are the ignorant outcome of a corrupted system of public education.

~all of the above.

Any other ideas?

The problem is too abstract;
The effects are apparently well into the future;
The effect is just being noticed;
The fix isn't known at this time.

Humans have something called a "hyperbolic discount function", that arises from our evolved brain structure:

Communicating Future Threats

Why is it so difficult to generate concern for events that are seen as belonging to the future even though their consequences may be dire? It happens because of the way we're wired.

Millenia of natural selection favoured people who responded immediately to threats or rewards. Individuals that did not immediately run from the tiger were more likely to become the original Darwin Award winners. This selection reinforced our responses to immediate and clearly understood rewards or dangers. The further away in time the reward or danger was, the lower our response to it became, because its influence on our survival was correspondingly less. Even if we waited to run until a distant tiger got closer, the chances were good that we would escape anyway, so there was no need to leave our meal just yet.

This idea is known as the "discount rate". It's the same concept used by banks, where the present value of a future event is discounted depending on how far in the future it will happen. While banks use a linear discount rate (expressed as a percentage), there is strong evidence that human beings use a more complex function that comes from different parts of our brain. The more primitive parts (the brain stem and limbic system) are concerned with immediate survival and emotional responses. They are much less capable of long-term evaluation, but provoke the strongest reactions to pleasure or fear. The neocortex, on the other hand, is our thinking brain. It analyzes, predicts and plans for the future, but has more limited access to our emotional triggers.

As a result, immediate threats or rewards that require no deep analysis tend to activate the "older" portions of our brain and prompt very strong responses. More abstract threats and rewards identified through the analytical capability of our neocortex don't activate our limbic system, and so usually prompt a much less intense reaction. Immediate, concrete concerns always strongly outweigh distant, abstract ones. The discount function is called "hyperbolic" because it falls off very rapidly at first, then flattens out as time passes. Events that are very near term evoke a sense of urgency that falls off steeply as the time horizon passes from the domain of the limbic system to the domain of the neocortex, resulting in the characteristic shape of a hyperbolic curve:

For this article - TLDR: Like to Breathe? Too fucking bad for you.

There's a well-known problem with sound bites, though.

Even here on DU reading four whole paragraphs on an important topic can seem like soooo much work.

I enjoy posts that have real information.

Thank you for posting.
I have noticed you come up with the most interesting information.

Though I'll warn you, there is no one more annoying in the long run than an autodidact with a compulsion to share...

...you sound like me. I'm a frustrated lecturer. Should have become an academic but all that programming about being practical got the better of me. Damn!

Great post!

a run for his or her money

On Earth, combined.

And not a fucking peep from our media.

Whether they've washed beforehand or not...

or some other sensationalistic imagery on the surface of the water he might not be interested. (And he may therefore not notice the lack of phytoplankton.)

Just because something is a photosynthesizer does not make it a plant! The Kingdom Plantae is defined as Red Algae, Green Algae, and land plants. Kelp, yellow algae, Euglenids, diatoms, and cyanobacteria are not plants.

I wonder if any "intelligent" life form that evolved/evolves on other worlds would be as self-destructive as ours?

Now I'm resigned to it.

other high-level mammals will go. Dairy cows, for example, are fundamentally decent creatures, way more decent on the whole than homo sapiens. What did the genial and placid cow do to deserve this?

It depends on the degree of climate change. If we've created a world in which a +6 degree C average temperature rise is the outcome, we probably won't survive as a species. Certainly a +8C world would do us in.

We won't know for sure for a while, and if extinction is in the cards it will probably play out over the next 200 to 500 years.

I'd spend more time worrying about it, but I have to drive to Denny's for some dead cow.

But what do I know?

Pick me up a supersized meal.

Humans have proven themselves to be extremely innovative survivors in all kinds of "suboptimal" environments. Short of a massive asteroid strike, human extinction will take what seems to us to be a long time. In geological terms though, it will be the blink of an eye.

and living as high tech mole people.

might make you feel better, but in the end accomplishes almost nothing. However that energy, spent in concert with the like minded becomes a force. Because it's changing the actions of the mega-polluters (agri-biz farms, coal fired power plants, corexit using oil companies) that can actually have substantial impact.

But that means enacting laws and we know where that cul-de-sac ends up.

"Personal virtue and atomized action will not prevent disaster, because personal evil didn’t cause the problem. It’s political dysfunction that’s driving us into the ditch: Capture of our politicians, our elections, and our public discourse by those whose revenue streams depend on the continuation and expansion of a fossil fuel economy."

And yes, I realize that part of why we are here on DU.

But I often see this framed as a problem of "personal virtue", to reference the quote and it is not. Not by a long shot.

I no longer think of my actions in terms of "saving the planet" or whatever. I tried that for a while and it made me crazy. I now think of them simply as making my own life better.

I have adopted a very "Eckhart Tolle" outlook on on the future - it will unfold from the present according to its own dynamics. My role in that process is to tend my own metaphorical and physical garden. It's a lot easier to live this way, I find.

But then I'm also of those people who think that many great changes have started from a single person rising from the sea of the easily discouraged.
It may well be the proverbial "lost cause". Like Unions in early industrial America or someone stopping an old growth tree grove from being turned into a Dairy Queen or a myriad of other things. People can't sit back and say "Well, I'll change when everyone else does.". It demands much more than that. It requires an unrelenting and overriding desire to create better conditions & lives for kids & kitty cats and all the other critters on earth. That the idea of supporting that is the right way and in fact, the only way. That it may find a spark in one final person that finally tips the cart over is the only hope we really have.

as the underlying culprit.

discolouration of the water due to all the shit reaching the sea.

See here :

Though heavier water flows into the Gulf of Maine might be a major factor, Balch said it may actually be side-effects of that phenomenon — such as decreased salinity and increasing amounts of materials like rotting plant matter being swept up in the stronger currents — that are actually causing the problem. In other words, when the water is brown it’s bad for phytoplankton because the added material in the water starves the single-celled plants of sunlight.

The CNN link refers to July last year.

even though the events/discoveries described happened earlier.

Unless these thing have been publicized before, I think they are arguably LBN.

But I suppose a posting in GD or Environment might have been more appropriate regardless.

the CNN link you provided in the Environment Forum.

contrived by the leftists to rile up the masses against the corporations and the rich. Move along now...nothing here to see......

A long time ago.

that will re-energize the production of oxygen....simpler organisms like phytoplankton are capable of responding to pressure.

These organisms are nearly the oldest forms of life on the planet and they have seen alot....

Not good.

...

destruction terror and mayhem!