Over at Grist, where “burnt out” David Roberts just threw in the towel, the craziness continues with a new alarmist writer:
Vanishing ocean smell could also mean fewer clouds
By John Upton
Next time you’re at the beach take a deep, long sniff: That special coastal scent might not last forever. While you’re at it, put on some extra sunscreen: As that smell dwindles, cloud cover could, too.
The unique oceanside smell that flows over your olfactory organs is loaded with sulfur — dimethylsulfide, to be exact, or DMS. It’s produced when phytoplankton decompose. And it’s a fragrant compound that’s as special as it smells: In the atmosphere it reacts to produce sulfuric acid, which aids in the formation of clouds.
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.
Gosh, it’s just double plus terrifying. Marc Morano quips:
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.’
Kramer’s fragrance “The Beach” might also be a last refuge.
Sadly the smell of bullshit remains intact.
Whenever I go to the beach that beach scent is heavily compounded with the smell of the Bromide series.
Since seaweed is full of Iodine I always thought the scent was from rotting seaweed.
@tadchem
“Fragrant” is an understatement.
It has been identified as one of the primary odorants in feces
BYO nat. gas?
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
The healing of climate would proceed even without intervention of humanity.
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.
The modeling by Six et al. was based on a Norwegian experiment that showed a decrease in DMS when CO2 was increased.
“Recently, experiments in seawater enclosures (mesocosms) showed that concentrations of dimethylsulphide (DMS), a biogenic sulphur compound, were markedly lower in a low-pH environment4”
4. Hopkins, F., Nightingale, P. & Liss, P. in Ocean Acidification, 2011
However, Six did not use the result of another field experiment by Kim et al. who found enhanced DMS production. In addition to a control group, Kim used exposure conditions of 900ppm and 900ppm+3°C warmer. Total DSM production increase 80% and 60% respectively.
It would be interesting to see the results of Six’s modeling with Kim’s experimental results.
Enhanced Production of Oceanic Dimethylsulfide Resulting from CO2-Induced Grazing Activity in a High CO2 World
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es102028k
http://www.climatewiki.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfide
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.
To me the oceans, Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean, have always just smelled… fishy. How do you get rid of that smell without getting rid of the fish?
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 signicantly 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
inuence 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 inuence global climate and hydrological
cycles1,2.
Hmmm… Global Warming decreases the ocean’s scent?
That’s the exact inverse of what happens when I get warmed up…
…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.