Observation O’ The Day
The problem with the climate cult isn’t even trying to fix a car while it’s running. It’s trying to fix a car while it’s running and they have no idea how a car runs to begin with. We don’t know enough to “fix” anything. We don’t even know enough to know if anything is wrong. And chances are our influence on the climate is much smaller than they wish to think.–Sarah Hoyt
The Ocean Is Still Sucking Up Carbon—Maybe More Than We Think.
Recent studies looking at carbon-sequestering microbes suggest we still have a lot to learn about the ocean’s biological carbon pump.
By Nancy Averett 3 May 2022

The ocean plays a critical role in carbon sequestration. Phytoplankton, which live on the warm, light-filled surface, suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for food. They also need nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen from colder, heavier, saltier water that upwells into warmer layers. When phytoplankton die, they sink, bringing some of the carbon and other nutrients they consumed with them back to the ocean depths.
Key to this circular process, known as the ocean’s biological carbon pump, is the vertical mixing of the surface and deeper water layers, which occurs through such mechanisms as currents, winds, and tides. However, because higher ocean temperatures cause greater stratification of these layers, traditional scientific models have long predicted that as the planet warms, this process would be disrupted, phytoplankton would be unable to thrive, and the ocean would sequester less carbon.
Now, two studies have shown the limits of such models. One found evidence that phytoplankton may become more efficient as the ocean warms. The other reported the discovery of a new, widely distributed ocean microbe species that also has the potential to sequester carbon.
“We often view the response of ocean carbon cycling to global warming as an on-off switch, but these results show it’s a dimmer switch and has some flexibility to take care of itself,” said Mike Lomas, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine and lead author of the first study, published in Nature Communications.



