Climate Craziness of the Week: Global Warming to cause ocean to lose its distinctive smell, and clouds, and maybe some other stuff

Reblogged this on CACA and commented:
Morano: New Warmist Fear: Global warming causing the oceans to lose their smell! Oceans unique odor is a ‘smell that’s endangered by climate change’ — ‘The real horror might be raising kids in a world where the only place you can smell the ocean is Bath & Bodyworks.’
hehe

Supper Mann has been spotted on the Arctic Ice.
http://www.dannyblas.com/2013/08/arctic-expedition-day-10-teachers-at.html
Don’t copy and paste the picture. All images, videos, and works are owned exclusively by Danny Blas, unless noted otherwise.
http://www.dannyblas.com/

At times like these, it is difficult to find an appropriate response, except to say the obvious that the CAGW crowd is getting rather desperate now that global temperatures have remained flat for the last 15 years, and they need to divert the public’s attention away from this fact as much as possible.
However, picking up from a comment to this same article elsewhere, I am still chuckling over it as it bears repeating: “Good! Perhaps the new ocean smell will cover up the stench of CAGW.”

So the ocean has gone from being described as becoming “more acidic” to “the rising acidity of the oceans”. One may be able to make the argument that the first is technically true although “less alkaline” is a more correct description, however the second directly implies that the oceans are presently acidic.

Could and If’s

Tallbloke’s Tim Channon noticed something odd; the Belgians have sense of humour.
No, I don’t think so.
SIDC is the world’s Solar Influences Data Analysis Center.
Note words Solar Influences
Could it possibly be the climate?
Now, most of us are aware of something called ‘solar polar magnetic field reversal’ subject that SIDC is currently preoccupied with.
We all also heard about plight of the polar bears and penguins in current global warming epoch.
So SIDC illustrates their front page (http://sidc.oma.be/) with an extremely happy snoozing polar bear with no shortage of snow and ice, and accompanied with an unlikely prop-powered penguin.
http://sidc.oma.be/news/211/Picture0.png
The actual article page illustration is even more intriguing, http://sidc.oma.be/news/211/Picture6.png
to me it suggest ‘snowball earth’ with polar bear greeting penguins somwhere in the mid Atlantic, holding Hansen’s model of overheated globe as a reminder of now instinct humans and their climate science folly.
SIDC and you and I know that solar activity is winding down, the Earth will cool somewhat, but ‘snowball Earth’, that is overdoing it a smidgen.
I wonder if SIDC knowws something about Solar Influences the rest of us don’t.
🙂

Steve says: @ August 28, 2013 at 9:13 am
Did he just say what I thought he said? “In the atmosphere it reacts to produce sulfuric acid, which aids in the formation of clouds.”….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is even funnier than that.
From The WUWT Hot Sheet for Monday August 26th, 2013

It’s baaaaaaack….

Eastern US water supplies threatened by a legacy of acid rain
Noted ecologist Gene Likens, founding director of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a co-discoverer of acid rain, was among the study’s authors. The extent of alkalinity change in streams and rivers exceeded his expectations: “This is another example of the widespread impact humans are having on natural systems. Policymakers and the public think that the acid rain problem has gone away, but it has not.”

So do we get to tell ecologist Gene Likens, founding director of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies that he has the WRONG Villian? After all it MUST BE TRUE if it is publist at GRIST!

Darn, fumble fingers strikes again publist = published

The unique oceanside smell that flows over your olfactory organs is loaded with sulfur — dimethylsulfide, to be exact, or DMS. (…)
…
But it’s a smell that’s endangered by climate change. Experiments have linked the rising acidity of the world’s oceans to falling levels of DMS. (…)
Dimethyl sulfide? That’s found in flatus emissions. From the cutting-edge science experts at the Australian Broadcasting Commune:
http://www.abc.net.au/spark/smelly/begone/begone04.htm

They found that the smell of flatus comes from various sulphur-containing compounds. The compounds in a typical flatus are hydrogen sulphide (1.06 micro mol/L) methanethiol (0.21 micro mol/L) and dimethyl sulphide (0.08 micro mol/L). The judges thought that hydrogen sulphide smelt like “rotten eggs” and methanethiol like “decomposing vegetables”, while dimethyl sulphide actually smelt “sweet”.

Thanks to global warming, the ocean will smell less like a sweet fart?

So, if decomposing plankton, etc. don’t give off dimethyl sulfide anymore what WILL they be off gassing?

JimS says:
August 28, 2013 at 10:13 am
“Maybe I should submit something like this to The Onion.”
The Onion has outlived its usefulness as it is no more capable of producing content that differentiates itself from mainstream news.

To be replaced by the fragrance of climatology ?
I think the ocean be much less malodorous.

From jai mitchell on August 28, 2013 at 10:35 am:

Here is the paper in Nature that was conveniently not referenced in the above article

You forgot to co-bitch about not providing the link to the originating Grist article, where that paper’s link is found:
http://grist.org/news/vanishing-ocean-smell-could-also-mean-fewer-clouds/
Where it’s mentioned there was also an “explainer article” in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/news/rising-ocean-acidity-will-exacerbate-global-warming-1.13602
From which was quoted:

On a global scale, a fall in DMS emissions due to acidification could have a major effect on climate, creating a positive-feedback loop and enhancing warming. …
In a ‘moderate’ scenario described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assumes no reductions in emissions of heat-trapping gases, global average temperatures will increase by 2.1 to 4.4 °C by the year 2100.
The model [used for the new research] projected that the effects of acidification on DMS could cause enough additional warming for a 0.23 to 0.48 °C increase if atmospheric CO2 concentrations double. The moderate scenario projects CO2 doubling long before 2100.

Could, positive-feedback loop, IPCC, “increase by 2.1 to 4.4 °C by the year 2100”, the model projected…
All this good juicy and obviously-truthful stuff in the main article, and you “conveniently” don’t provide the link?

Does John Upton know the “special coastal scent” is rotting vegetation, rotting fish, rotting plankton and the odd rotting dolphin?

vukcevic says August 28, 2013 at 9:47 am

So SIDC illustrates their front page (http://sidc.oma.be/) with an extremely happy snoozing polar bear with no shortage of snow and ice, and accompanied with an unlikely prop-powered penguin.

Maybe the penguin is clanging a pair of cymbals, trying to wake up the snoozing polar bear field strength. Or someone’s gorged one too many chocolate liqueurs.

Funny, I’ve always disliked that “ocean smell” along shoreline, and I’ve long associated it with “rotting seaweed” although I didn’t have a scientific knowledge of what causes it….. Anyway, I wouldn’t miss that smell one bit…. However, like many Alarmist memes, this one is probably more fragrant b.s.

You mean… in years to come, children won’t even know what a beach smells like? Just checking.

Oh, my………………….what floors me is that this stuff actually gets reported1

Ocean acidity ?
Another Carbon Di-oxymoron?
SteveT

The beaches of my northern youth were much more “ocean smelling” and that was sixty or more years ago. The reason may have been phytoplanktons but i’m more inclined to the belief that it was rotting seaweed. And of course there was less CO2 around. Last week I spent a few days on the Outer Banks of NC. No rotting seaweed and no “ocean smell” even when one actually entered the water. But there were plenty of clouds – some days 10/10ths all day (and night). I think I need a government grant to spend a lot more time on the Outer Banks to study this hypothesis as the evidence right now seems tenuous and contradictory. I’d promise to spend most of the time in or near the water…..

Another one putting the cart before the horse.
Warming occurs when cloud cover over the oceans decreases. Warming
reduces or cooling begins as cloud cover increases. It’s not the other way
around.
A good analogy is the process by which temperature in green houses is
managed by drawing curtains over the glass roof panels to cool the green
house (akin to more clouds) or drawing them back to further warm the
greenhouse (akin to fewer clouds).
Cloud cover over the oceans has been steadily increasing most of this decade,
indicating a cooling trend. Graphs of ocean cloud cover are maintained by Bob
Tisdale at his great blog

Just think. Nobody will be able to find the sea. Oh woe! This pales by comparison with the recent caterwauling about Fukushima now making its rounds….and employing (first) an NOAA tsunami-amplitude map to represent radiation and (second) a supposed satellite image of radiation plumes in the NW Pacific, all the while ignoring the mass balance by equivocating between 300 tons of contaminated water per day and 300 tons of fissionable material. Fukushima is far more nasty than ocean stink, but not by much. You might as well cancel your surfing trip to Hawaii. /sarc

Chris Moffatt says:
August 28, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Last week I spent a few days on the Outer Banks of NC. No rotting seaweed and no “ocean smell” even when one actually entered the water. But there were plenty of clouds – some days 10/10ths all day (and night). I think I need a government grant to spend a lot more time on the Outer Banks to study this hypothesis as the evidence right now seems tenuous and contradictory. I’d promise to spend most of the time in or near the water…..
————————————————————————————————————————–
I was part of a research effort studying the effects of sea level rise (and fall) on aquatic fauna on the Outer Banks in late April. Additional data collection will be done by the group in 30 days. These are very intense efforts into aquatic research and probability theory. I’m sure there is a government grant to support this volunteer effort. We can certainly add global warming and odor analysis.

Soon we will be seeing articles by warmists further down warmist the food chain that state the fact that oceans are losing their smell and how that is more proof of AGW.

They are ignoring the results of studies too numerous to mention about the response of ocean algae to uv radiation (which everyone knows has been increasing slightly)
In a newer study of this phenomenon, Toole and Siegel (2004) note that it has been shown to operate as described above in the 15 percent of the world’s oceans “consisting primarily of high latitude, continental shelf, and equatorial upwelling regions,” where DMS may be accurately predicted as a function of the ratio of the amount of surface chlorophyll derived from satellite observations to the depth of the climatological mixed layer, which they refer to as the “bloom-forced regime.” For the other 85 percent of the world’s marine waters, they demonstrate that modeled surface DMS concentrations are independent of chlorophyll and are a function of the mixed layer depth alone, which they call the “stress-forced regime.” So how does the warming-induced DMS negative feedback cycle operate in these waters?
For oligotrophic regimes, Toole and Siegel find that “DMS biological production rates are negatively or insignificantly correlated with phytoplankton and bacterial indices for abundance and productivity while more than 82 percent of the variability is explained by UVR(325) [ultraviolet radiation at 325 nm].” This relationship, in their words, is “consistent with recent laboratory results (e.g., Sunda et al., 2002),” who demonstrated that intracellular DMS concentration and its biological precursors (particulate and dissolved dimethylsulfoniopro-pionate) “dramatically increase under conditions of acute oxidative stress such as exposure to high levels of UVR,” which “are a function of mixed layer depth.”
These results—which Toole and Siegel confirmed via an analysis of the Dacey et al. (1998) 1992-1994 organic sulfur time-series that was sampled in concert with the U.S. JGOFS Bermuda Atlantic Time-Series Study (Steinberg et al., 2001)—suggest, in their words, “the potential of a global change-DMS-climate feedback.” Specifically, they say that “UVR doses will increase as a result of observed decreases in stratospheric ozone and the shoaling of ocean mixed layers as a result of global warming (e.g., Boyd and Doney, 2002),” and that “in response, open-ocean phytoplankton communities should increase their DMS production and ventilation to the atmosphere, increasing cloud condensing nuclei, and potentially playing out a coupled global change-DMS-climate feedback.”
http://www.climatewiki.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfide
An antioxidant function for DMSP
and DMS in marine algae W. Sunda*, D. J. Kieber†, R. P. Kiene‡ & S. Huntsman* * Beaufort Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
Beaufort, North Carolina 28516, USA
† State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry,
Chemistry Department, 1 Forestry Drive, Syracuse, New York 13210, USA
‡ University of South Alabama, Department of Marine Sciences, Mobile, Alabama
36688, USA ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The algal osmolyte dimethylsulphoniopropionate (DMSP) and
its enzymatic cleavage product dimethylsulphide (DMS) contrib-
ute signicantly to the global sulphur cycle1–3, yet their physio-
logical functions are uncertain4. Here we report results that,
together with those in the literature5,6, show that DMSP and its
breakdown products (DMS, acrylate, dimethylsulphoxide, and
methane sulphinic acid) readily scavenge hydroxyl radicals and
other reactive oxygen species, and thus may serve as an anti-
oxidant system, regulated in part by enzymatic cleavage of DMSP .
In support of this hypothesis, we found that oxidative stressors,
solar ultraviolet radiation7, CO2 limitation8, Fe limitation, high
Cu21 (ref. 9) and H2O2 substantially increased cellular DMSP
and/or its lysis to DMS in marine algal cultures. Our results
indicate direct links between such stressors and the dynamics of
DMSP and DMS in marine phytoplankton, which probably
inuence the production of DMS and its release to the atmos-
phere. As oxidation of DMS to sulphuric acid in the atmosphere
provides a major source of sulphate aerosols and cloud conden-
sation nuclei3, oxidative stressors—including solar radiation and
Fe limitation—may be involved in complex ocean–atmosphere
feedback loops that inuence global climate and hydrological
cycles1,2.

JJ says:
August 28, 2013 at 9:24 am
But it’s a smell that’s endangered by climate change. Experiments have linked the rising acidity of the world’s oceans to falling levels of DMS.
Would somebody please tell these dip$#!^$ that ocean acidity is not climate.

…thank you for that! You beat me to it! It truly is an inaccurate description – acidification is more akin to a toxicological phenomena.
Ocean acidification has often been described as the “other problem” of climate change, or “global warming’s evil twin.” Now that the scientific case for warming is falling apart, watch for an avalanche of stories to erupt, all touting the immediate and deadly effects of ocean acidification.
To wit: http://science.time.com/2013/08/26/ocean-acidification-will-make-climate-change-worse/
Mind you, I’ve been studying this issue of acidification since about 1974 (undergrad at University of Illinois), and there could be some effects, particularly to calcium-utilizing phytoplankton in the ocean’s euphotic zone.
However, I don’t relish the thought of desperate rent-seeking academics and politicians like Al Gore wrapping themselves with the newest catastrophic effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide deposition.