A team meant to challenge climate change is instead confirming it

No sailors here? I'll ditto what you say. This is why the ocean is blue. Blue, not green. It's only green near the shore (or, I guess, at those points of upwelling). In the US mid-Atlantic area, once you cross the Gulf Stream, the water changes color. My first blue-water trip, I literally could not believe the color of the water. It looks fake, its so blue. If you go swimming mid-ocean, it's as clear as a swimming pool, which leads me to guess it's not supporting much more life than the average swimming pool. That said, the productive areas of the ocean are so large that I think the estimate is that they account for half the photosynthesis on earth.

Edit: And a nice picture, too:

 

Chogan, you're making me wish that my review manuscript were complete. It's not. I need to abandon PC for a few weeks and bear down

The world's living forest biomass is imperfectly known. The satellites are helping but...

Dead wood in the global forest (my topic of extreme interest) is very uncertain, hence the rate at which its decomposition returns CO2 to the atmosphere is also. The low end is 3 Pg C y-1. High is 9 Pg, equal to the global fossil fuel burn. As usual with such huge uncertainty ranges, we are sorta drawn to the midpoint.

I am working on slowing wood decompostion in situ. And in fact, termites are a big factor wherever the average temperature is above 13 oC.

Others (as you say) have proposed dry storage and even wet (anaerobic) storage to keep wood C out of the atmosphere. Looks to be costly.

But yeah, trees have been more or less temporary C storage ever since fungi figured out how to decompose wood. Before then, trees (more like tree ferns actually) tended to become coal. Prior to about 1850 AD, coal was a permanent repository of carbon. Not it's not. And there you go.

The ocean nutrient input pathway I would add to this discussion is dust. Both African dust (blowing west at low latitude) and Asian dust (blowing east at high latitude) tend to fertilize the oceans downwind. Previously mentioned, terrestrial runoff and upwelling.

There have been several ocean fertilization experiments so far and the results as I say have been mixed. Asa minimum it may be necessary to add silica and perhaps a few other nutrients as well. If it seems needed to add phosphorus, 1 say we can forget the idea. All available P wll be needed for increased agriculture in the near future. People are already researching how to reclaim P from your pee.

Another topic for another day...

 

The Great Lakes are like that too, with the exception of Lake Erie. Very blue water and not much life. This photo is of Northport Bay. Note how blue the water becomes once it gets deeper.



Tom

 

Chogan's picture is from SeaWiFS, I reckon. A great mission that breathed its last this February. Thirteen years of data from a 5-year planned mission. One of Orbital Sciences great successes I'm bound to say

It was SeaWiFS taught us that marine and terrestrial ecosystems played an equal role in 'pulling down' new CO2 from fossil fuel burn. Ony half of that is now staying in the atmosphere, the rest is "ecosystem services". I think we have gone over that previously at PC.

 

That's very high concept. Never even considered that as a possibility, but now that you say it, it makes a lot of sense. A whole new vista.

What do you think of the guys who want to convert wood to charcoal, then bury the charcoal? (The name for that escapes me at the moment). Up until I saw your figures I had thought that the quantities involved were too small to matter. Maybe not.

 

One of the main biochar-guys is Lehmann at Cornell. It is a very interesting approach. It is proposed to 'sink' 1 Pg C per year if done on large scale. Cost might not be high among the options, and it offers some other pluses concerning soil fertility and N2O gas release.

Discussions of more terrestrial C trapping seem mostly stuck on the tropical deforestation/afforestation rates. This gets into 'money' because some of the wood being extracted is ... well ... beautiful for building.

Meanwhile (and I pick on Indonesia for this) tropical forests are being replaced by 'quick trees' for paper (for Japan) and oil palm (for everybody who wants oil). Other examples exist, but the net is that tropics are still rapidly losing trapped biological C.

It looks like reversing that will require some amount of countervaling money. If C not released to the atmosphere is universally recognized to have some monetary value, then we can begin to make progress on that path.

Otherwise, CO2 will continue to increase, and we shall no doubt discover if that is a bad mistake. Mght not be so bad.y'know

Still hopin'...

 

Does anyone have more info on the toxic sardines that killed a bunch of people in Madagascar and how that's been attributed to Climate Change?

 

I do not agree with the blame, but here goes. In 1998 there was a large amount of bleached coral this includes the reefs of madagascar. Bleached coral can recover but this did not. These bleaching are associated with the el nino of that year, and the theory goes that hotter water caused by global warming made the event worse than it would have been without the co2 in the atmosphere. The warmer water has also been blamed with the reefs not being able to recover.

Now I am fine with the theory that agw has affected the coral. But divers, agriculture, pollution are often more direct human events that kill large parts of nature. We do not even know if the toxic seaweed eaten by the fish was caused by the bleached coral. Further the toxic sardines being eaten is a food safety problem, there are many toxins that enter the food system having nothing to do with AGW.

So there you have it. Feel free to blame AGW for toxic sardines, but it is just one part of the contribution. Getting the toxic sardines from the ocean to the table is a far easier task than preventing toxic wild life, but both are good goals.

 

Just got Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents (2008). It's timely for 2011 due to much info about nuclear and the nature of radiation hazards.

His take on EV's is negative due to high battery cost and he feels battery replacement costs will come into play for plug-ins. Current Prius he says is tuned to maximize the battery life by using gasoline mostly. I had been expecting wrongly that he was negative due to high energy use.

He says: "Global warming is real. It is likely caused by humans."

 

I hope he knows his car a little better than that. It is 100% petrol.