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Plankton Can Make Clouds To Block UV
NotWallaceStevens writes "This article on Science Daily describes how plankton can create clouds in response to seasonal variations in UV radiation from the sun by producing a chemical called dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP). This was a long term study based on data going back to the 1950s collected in the Sargasso Sea. One of the researches theorizes that the process could slow global warming."
..that plankton are contributing to the `acid rain problem'?
They're eating our UV protection!!!
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
~Dr. Whompinstompin
Logic, macros, and more
I had a roommate in college named Dimethylsulfoniopropionate.
Sometimes I get the feeling all of chemistry is just a put-on to see who can get people to say the silliest word. I mean, how would we know? That, "It's too small to see," stuff seems awfully convenient.
... plankton make clouds, trees make clouds, yeah baby its good to have them around ...
If we help to increase the plankton population then we slow global warming and help save the earth. But instead we just pollute our oceans and destroy the plankton and other sea life contributing to the decline of plankton populations and we destroy the earth.
MonkeysKickAss
Its already known that algae on the ocean transforms 70% of the carbon dioxide produced on earth back to oxigen, and now plancton creates the remaining clouds?. We need a new army of tree huggers and convert them to ocean huggers, seriously i suggest stop coding java algorithms to enhance pr0n webcasts and put ur brains to work on saving the oceans!.
Then why do I get a sunburn even on cloudy days? I can imagine clouds block a certain amout of direct sunlight from reaching the ground which might keep temperatures cooler. Thus the claim of preventing global warming, but what impact does UV have in all this?
Earth, a planet that some say has maintained a rich biological diversity for hundreds of millions of years, has built in mechanisms to stabilize environmental conditions!
In a shocking new report, it was discovered that perhaps this global warming thing is a bunch of nonsense. The amount of damage we do to the atmosphere is nothing compared to what the variety of stellar material, volcanic eruptions, and biological processes have done in the past several million years. After each disturbance, the earth has maintained balance by compensating for disastrous change in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Some of these adaptive processes were geological, but some were also biological.
It's almost as if life on earth was designed or grew to accustom themselves to earth's natural environment. In fact, the biological organisms have even changed the environment to make it more habitable for other biological organisms.
Just like bacteria in the environment maintain a balance by consuming extra resources, or limiting growth due to the absence of resources, the earth as a whole behaves in a similar way. When there is too much of something, it gets consumed at a greater rate. When there is not enough, it gets consumed at a slower rate. In the end, everything has a balance that is maintained within precise criteria.
In other news, free markets really work, and are the most effective way for distributing resources fairly due to a similar process called "supply" and "demand". Also, it was discovered that profits weren't evil, and that by allowing corporations to own land and profit therefrom, the land is taken better care of and more efficient than wilderness.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Nothing fixes human intervention like human intervention...
Im hoping it beats out Hippo Sweat
Wow! State the obvious and get moderated as "troll". Earth is indeed a collection of self-adapting systems. Humans haven't put into the atmosphere what Krakatoa did in one eruption. Humans also tend to reduce the occurance and severity of wild fires, reducing particulate effects of that natural process, balancing some of the soot and other particulates we generate.
Don't feel bad, I said that private space launch is more efficient than NASA, and got moderated as "flamebait".
Jgardn, have you ever visited the Ludwig von Mises web site? www.mises.org You'll love it there. Or the Future of Freedom Foundation, www.fff.org
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
the plot for a new Spongebob episode
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Any hope of lessening global warming through plankton activity are about zero. As the oceans are warming the plankton are dying. It may have gone to far to rely on mother nature to help us turn this juggernaught around. And it's not just global warming that is killing the plankton but oceanic pollution as well (info at bottom of article).
Creatures as well as humans have survived through many devistating climate/environmental changes, but these changes took place over hundreds and more often thousands of years. We are at a point where we are seeing major climate change within a single generation. I don't know what the answer to the problem is, and it will undoubtedly take more that one solution to fix this mess, but something had better be done soon or we (as a civilization) are in for a bad hangover.
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
A 'stable' system was pressed out of its stability region today, prompting panic among scientists.
"The system is proven stable", CEO of Megacorp Inc. told reporters today. "No matter how much you upset a stable system, the system will return to normal. This is just a natural correction".
Others have expressed doubts. "W'RALL GUNNA DAI!" ex-hippie and hobo Jimmy was recorded as saying.
Leading scientists were unable to be reached for comment.
This has been a Fox News special report.
The actual paper is:
Toole, D. A., and D. A. Siegel (2004), Light-driven cycling of dimethylsulfide (DMS) in the Sargasso Sea: Closing the loop, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L09308, doi:10.1029/2004GL019581.
Unfortunately, you must subscribe to get more than just the abstract.
DMSP and DMS cycles are more complex than this brief article reports. DMSP is produced by algae, and some DMSP is broken down to DMS by algae as well. However, bacteria seem to have a major role in breaking down DMSP to DMS, as well as to another compound, methanethiol, that is not released into the atmosphere in large amounts.
Interestingly, the genome of a bacterium that carries out both pathways of DMSP degradation is being sequenced. Hopefully this will soon allow us to find more about these two competing fates of DMSP. If you really want more information on this bacteria, you could read a discription paper.
Krakatoa's debris was mostly dirt - large particles of silicon and carbon compounds. Only a tiny volume of that diry was either carcinogenic micro/nanoparticles, or greenhouse gases. Most of the filth spewing from coal plants is the kind poisonous to humans: short term cancer, and long term Greenhouse.
And more to the point, there's nothing we can do about Krakatoa, or the tinier volcanism since then, in which environment our ecology has evolved, and been selected as fit to survive. The coal, gas and nuclear plants, and the automobiles, are all in addition to the natural vulcanism, pushing our environment out of a balance in which we are fit to survive, and into a new one where we aren't. It's like you're saying that you don't need sunscreen on a midsummer day beach, because you're OK on a Fall afternoon.
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make install -not war
The Earth, and some life, will survive the Greenhouse. Human civilization as we know it will not. As George Carlin has put it, now that the Earth has used us to create the plastic it wanted, it doesn't need us any more, and we'll be gone soon. Ironically, those with the most inflexible attachment to the lies that are destroying us also stand less chance of surviving the collapse they're fueling.
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make install -not war
How about making this the active ingredient in sunscreen? SPF500 here we come!
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman