Human-induced climate change is causing a warming of the surface ocean. Due to widely differing
temperature sensitivities of key biological processes, this may have profound implications
for marine food web interactions and the biogeochemical cycling of key elements such as
carbon. Using a novel indoor-mesocosm approach, we show that rising sea surface temperature
shifts the balance between photosynthetic production and respiratory consumption of organic
carbon in a plankton community. This may weaken the ocean’s capacity to sequester atmospheric
CO2, hence providing a positive feedback to anthropogenic climate change
