From DMSP munching microbes to global climate

“dimethylsulfoniopropionate …”
Forgive me for say so, but the word has a really great rhythmic sound to it!

Another natural phenomenon that affects climate… Michael Mann is not going to like this.

Big fleas have little fleas,
upon their backs to bite em.
And little fleas have littler fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.

Roger Knights says:
July 16, 2010 at 4:56 am
A reminder that there exists a realm of the unknown unknown.
Well, yes. And then there’s the unknown unknown unknown, or unknown^3.

Curiousgeorge says:
July 16, 2010 at 4:58 am
Big fleas have little fleas,
upon their backs to bite em.
And little fleas have littler fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.
Geez, so many fleas!
Fleas, milli fleas, micro fleas, nano fleas, pico fleas, femto fleas, atto fleas, zepto fleas, yocto fleas …

tallbloke says:
July 16, 2010 at 5:28 am
I keep saying people need to read and understand James Lovelock’s first book, ‘Gaia: A new look at life on Earth’ and get past soundbites they’ve heard. He covered the way microorganisms have fundamentally changed Earth’s atmosphere through the Aeons, and how this affects climate 30 years ago.
A must read for anyone hoping to understand climate and the reason why Watt counting isn’t going to get you an accurate energy budget.
Kinda sorta like the ‘Goldilocks paradox’: Humans complain about weather & climate all the time, what with ‘this weather is too warm, that weather is too cold, and some other weather is too something else!’
All the while the real owners of this planet have stepped out for a breather, and are about to discover that the whole place is filled with whining, abusive, effusive and loudmouthed idiots who complain endlessly!

Charlie A says:
July 16, 2010 at 5:23 am
…..My bet is that the paper itself has no additional information on the link between the DMSP-seeking behavior and climate change.
It seems that including a reference to climate change has become both a popular way to increase chances of funding, and to increase chances of getting a paper published.
_________________________________________________
Got it in one Charlie. A mention of “climate change” in your paper is a “get out of jail free card” in the “peer reviewed” science of today. The was even a paper written on it.
Plain Prose: It’s Seldom Seen in Journals
“If you want to publish an article in some scientific or medical journal, here is some unusual advice from Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School: Choose an unimportant topic. Agree with existing beliefs. Use convoluted methods. Withhold some of your data. And write the whole thing in stilted, obtuse prose.
Armstrong, who is the editor of a new research publication called the Journal of Forecasting, offered the advice in a serious. scholarly article last month in the journal’s first issue. He said yesterday that he had studied the publication process in research journals for years.
“Although these rules clearly run counter to the goal of contributing to scientific knowledge — the professed goal of academic journals — they do increase a paper’s chance of being published,” Armstrong said….
In one study, Armstrong said, academics reading articles in scientific journals rated the authors’ competence higher when the writing was less intelligible than when it was clear.
In another study, Armstrong said, research papers were mailed to a sampling of dozens of researchers. Half the scientists received a paper that described an experiment confirming existing beliefs; the other half received a paper describing an identical experiment but with a different conclusion that challenged the consensus.
Although the methods used in the two sets of papers were identical, the scientists surveyed generally approved of the procedures used in the papers that confirmed existing beliefs and generally disapproved of the same methods when they were used to contradict what most scientists believed, Armstrong said.
“Papers with surprising results are especially important for adding significantly to what is known. Presumably, the editors of journals want to publish important papers,” Armstrong said. “On the other hand, they are concerned that the journal might look foolish — and so they reject many of the important papers.”
For young academics who wish to be published in such journals, Armstrong said, “the factors that would seem to be a deadly combination would be choosing an important problem and obtaining surprising results.”
Other studies, Armstrong said, indicate that obscure writing helps those who have little to say. And having little to say may also be an advantage, especially if the author withholds some significant data. “This will allow the researcher to continue publishing slightly different versions of the same research,” which Armstrong says is a common practice. Armstrong’s own specialty is the study of forecasting, and the new journal that published his how-to-publish article covers forecasting in many study areas, including economics, sociology, finance, psychology, and engineering. “
Is it any wonder there are so many CAGW papers out there and so few that are skeptical? The whole system is rigged to give a pass to the mediocre me-toos who regurgitate the same information ad nauseum.

I’m rather worried by the results of the climate model I’ve set up below, which clearly indicates that temperatures will be unbearable by the year 2100.

#include
#include
int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
    int       year;
    double    beasties, temperature;
    beasties = 2.0;
    temperature = 20.0;
    for (year = 2010; year <= 2100; year++) {
        beasties += 0.002 * temperature;
        temperature = 10 * beasties;
        printf ("Year %d Temperature %g\n", year, temperature);
    }
    return 0;
}

Gail Combs approvingly quotes Charlie A on of the value of mentioning CAGW in your submitted paper. This is an old technique, older than the 1982 newspaper story about Professor Armstrong that she mentions, and was used in the Soviet Union to get academic publications past the political censors. The introduction and the conclusion of a paper would mention the necessary Marxist phrases, but the paper itself would not contain a single word about them. (Reported by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, in Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present, by Samuel H. Baron & Cathy A. Frierson, page 5.) Soviet scholars regarded it as a game one must play.

Bill Tuttle says:
July 16, 2010 at 7:47 am
It wasn’t until the 1960s that marine biologists actually did *experiments* with sharks and cupric acid and discovered — much to their consternation — that sharks were *attracted* to it.
———————
Kind of like bear spray made out of capsaicin tends to attract bears if you spray it on things in hopes of using it as a deterrent rather than as it is intended to thwart attacks.

I suspect the mircobes being researched in this paper are far less than the tip of a 1cc iceberg.
“Scientists estimate that there are a billion times more microbes on Earth than there are stars in the universe —€” an estimated nonillion (one followed by thirty zeroes) microbes. A spoonful of soil can contain 2,000 to 3,000 different species (not different microbes but different species!) of microbes yet we have only described about 5,700 species. Amazingly, the total mass of all of these invisible creatures exceeds the mass of all plant or animal life on Earth, yet they are largely invisible to us.”
Courtesy Innovation-America.org, link here:
http://www.innovation-america.org/new-microbe-hunters
I wonder just how much of the suns energy is consumed and stored by the mass of these cute little critters?