“A turnover of terrestrial plant biomass takes 15 years, they say, while marine turnover takes just six days, according to an Oregon statement.”
The Economic Times reports:
Climate change is warming the oceans and preventing water layers from mixing, which could upset the carbon storage capacity of microbes and plankton.
As the ocean surface warms, evidence shows that it will become more “stratified”, or confined to layers that mix less than they did in the past.
This should reduce overall ocean productivity, but so little is known about the effect on ocean microbes that the implication for carbon sequestration and global warming is less clear, said Stephen Giovannoni, professor of microbiology, Oregon State University, who led the study.
“A large portion of the carbon emitted from human activities ends up in the oceans, which with both their mass of water and biological processes act as a huge buffer against climate change. These are extremely important issues,” said Giovannoni, the journal Science reports…
The first sentence is pure Green propaganda with the word ‘could’ thrown in. The rest is garbage. “Extremely important”? Only to keep the grant money flowing.
Anthony Watts posted information just Sunday from the (~700,000) Argo measurements that *STRONGLY* supports the existence of a mechanism that caps sea surface temperatures at 32°, with most at or below 30°:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/12/argo-and-the-ocean-temperature-maximum/#more-56413