Global Warming and the Ocean
I’m always frustrated by the difficulty of getting the basic models and facts of global warming. What happens to carbon dioxide in the ocean is important. Lots of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, and lots is taken up by ocean plants. The ocean is not saturated with carbone dioxide, unlike nitrogen and oxygen. So, will the ocean soak up some large fraction of the carbon dioxide man is putting into the atmosphere?
Apparently it has been taking up something on the order of one half of it, but the writing gets unclear. Peter Dietze is a global warming skeptic who says that the IPCC and others assume some kind of nonlinear oceanic take-up when they should use a linear one. My impression is that the IPCC model for some reason limits the take-up to the surface layer of the ocean. I don’t know why that should be, especially since the colder water in the depths can dissolve more gases. There’s a lot of ocean, so why can’t it soak up all of our carbon dioxide just through diffusion?
Another ocean question involves the biological transfer between surface and depths. One global warming solution that has been proposed is to add iron to the polar oceans, because iron, not carbon dioxide, is the input limiting growth. Some field experiments have already been done on this. See here
and “The Siren Call of the Seas”. What is the limiting factor in the deeps? Is it also iron? What happens to carbonaceous shells and skeletons when surface creatures die? Does that carbon exit the system? How about the iron and other minerals in surface creatures that die and float down? Is it carried back up in the polar seas by rising cold-water currents?