Putting another nail in the coffin of the mantra that “the science is settled on climate change,” researchers in Spain have found that global emissions of a sulfur gas produced by marine life have a hitherto unknown cooling effect on temperatures.
It has long been known that oceans capture and redistribute the sun’s heat. But there is more to the story. A study published Nov. 29 in the journal Science Advances noted that oceans, notably in the Southern Hemisphere, produce gases known as marine sulfur. And one of these gases, methanethiol, influences the climate in a way that has gone unnoticed.
Microscopic plankton living on the surface of the oceans “produce sulfur in the form of a gas, dimethyl sulphide, that once in the atmosphere, oxidizes and forms small particles called aerosols,” the University of East Anglia (UEA) said in a news release.
“Aerosols reflect part of the solar radiation back into space and therefore reduce the heat retained by the Earth,” UEA explained. “Their cooling effect is magnified when they become involved in making clouds, with an effect opposite to, but of the same magnitude as, that of the well-known warming greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide or methane.”
The study is “Marine Emissions of Methanethiol Increase Aerosol Cooling in the Southern Ocean.” It is, UEA noted, based on measurements of methanethiol the researchers gathered in seawater, added those they had made in the Southern Ocean and the Mediterranean coast, “and statistically related them to seawater temperature, obtained from satellites.”
“Climate models have greatly overstated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds,” Charel Wohl, of UEA’s Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Science and one of the study’s lead authors, said. “The work here largely closes the longstanding knowledge gap between models and observations.” Wohl acknowledged that scientists knew that “methanethiol was coming out of the ocean, but we had no idea about how much and where. We also did not know it had such an impact on climate.” That effect is more visible in the Southern Hemisphere, UEA points out, where there is more ocean and less human activity.
“Until now we thought that the oceans emitted sulfur into the atmosphere only in the form of dimethyl sulphide, a residue of plankton that is largely responsible for the evocative smell of shellfish,” said Dr. Marti Gali, one of the study’s authors.
UEA is no stranger when it comes to breaking climate news. In November 2009, the university was embroiled in a scandal known as “Climategate.” UEA’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) was the source of a trove of emails “suggesting,” in the words of climatologist Patrick Michaels, “some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called ‘a nice, tidy story’ of climate history.” It was never determined whether the emails were leaked or hacked, but they showed climate scientists colluding to suppress scientific findings questioning the narrative of manmade global warming. An investigation launched by UEA reached no definitive conclusions. But, as Michaels noted, the British university received generous climate-research grant money that gave it a disincentive to investigate the matter too closely.
UEA is still in the business of spreading climate alarm. While its press release on the Spanish study accurately summarizes its findings, it claims the study highlights “the magnitude of the impact of human activity on the climate and that the planet will continue to warm if no action is taken.” Yet it is the action that UEA insists be taken that that has crippled economies in the United Kingdom, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and has led to soaring energy costs and undermined the stability of the electric grid in California, New York, Illinois and other states, where climate-centric energy policies have been adopted.
At the same time, the acknowledgement that there still are gaps in our understanding of the myriad variables that lie behind fluctuations in the Earth’s climate should give pause to those intent on imposing life-changing policies on the rest of us. Policies based on a still-evolving understanding of the climate and adopted with little regard for their consequences for ordinary people are an open invitation to calamity.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
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