Australian jewel Joanne Nova has the story:
A new nature paper shows how little we know about the oceans and the whole carbon cycle. A paper (with 64 names!) suggests that phytoplankton might be sucking out extra CO2 from the sky and dumping it in Davy Jones’ Locker at the bottom of the deep blue sea. It’s more evidence that carbon trading, carbon sequestration, and mitigation are a worthless waste of money. All those windmills just got a bit more pointless.Lots of living things absorb carbon, but phytoplankton seem to be more important than the others. The best predictors of sinking carbon were viruses of certain cyanobacteria. Few of the “thousands of phytoplankton species have been studied in this way”.
Apparently, this has been quietly understood for a while now:
Mar. 17, 2013 — Models of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans need to be revised, according to new work by UC Irvine and other scientists published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Trillions of plankton near the surface of warm waters are far more carbon-rich than has long been thought, they found. Global marine temperature fluctuations could mean that tiny Prochlorococcus and other microbes digest double the carbon previously calculated....In making their findings, the researchers have upended a decades-old core principle of marine science known as the Redfield ratio, named for famed oceanographer Alfred Redfield. He concluded in 1934 that from the top of the world’s oceans to their cool, dark depths, both plankton and the materials they excrete contain the same ratio (106:16:1) of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.
But as any gardener who has done a soil test knows, amounts of those elements can vary widely. The new study’s authors found dramatically different ratios at a variety of marine locations. What matters more than depth, they concluded, is latitude. In particular, the researchers detected far higher levels of carbon in warm, nutrient-starved areas (195:28:1) near the equator than in cold, nutrient-rich polar zones (78:13:1).
An assumption disproved! Fancy that.
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it – no matter if I have said it! – except it agree with your own reason and your own common sense.” -- Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha,
3 comments:
Most findings about the environment start we the words "We have found that such and such is true." When you read the paper you find they made a computer model and that this model predicts their conclusion. Need I say more?
I read somewhere the Half-Life of scientific knowledge is 35 years if I remember correctly. I am old enough to know that is awfully near the mark.
It has been a source of amusement and amazement to me since... 7th grade... that what science calls 'theory' - whether global warming, evolution... what. ever. - is then grabbed by the willingly ignorant and run with as their thought football. No matter that they do nothing to test, refute, analyze, or research. Nope. "It's science!" They spend the blind faith they should reserve for God, and place it in the hands of man.
And this is the greatest 'end times' argument I have... if this isn't the end times, a well thrown stone should be able to hit it from where we are. - Grandpa
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