It gets harder and harder to tell science from parody these days. According to this piece in New Scientist, which as I’ve shown before has a problem understanding science:
Saving endangered baleen whales could boost the carbon storage capacity of the Southern Ocean, suggests a new study of whale faeces. Whale faeces once provided huge quantities of iron to a now anaemic Southern Ocean, boosting the growth of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton.
Whale Poop™, now fortified with iron! So if your ocean is feeling anemic, take two shitloads every day!
So says Stephen Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division, based in Kingston, Tasmania, who has found “huge amounts of iron in whale poo”. He believes that before commercial whaling, baleen whale faeces may have accounted for some 12 per cent of the iron on the surface of the Southern Ocean.
That’s some heavy crap. Does the magnetic field of the earth make it go South?
It had already been suggested that whales recycled iron in the ocean by eating it in krill and making it available to phytoplankton in faeces. But until this study, no one had analysed whale faeces to confirm if it indeed contained significant quantities of iron.
Nicol’s team analysed 27 samples of faeces from four species of baleen whales. He found that on average whale faeces had 10 million times as much iron as Antarctic seawater.
Imagine that this guy meets some woman in a bar, and she asks him what he does for a living.
Using estimates of the whale population before commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean began early last century, Nicol predicts that baleen whales – now endangered – once consumed about 190 million tonnes of krill every year and produced 7600 tonnes of iron-rich faeces.
Holy shit. Literally.
Joking aside, does New Scientist have editors? Read that carefully. They eat 190,000,000 tonnes every year. They crap 7,600 tonnes of crap. What happens to the other 189,992,400 tonnes? They might have meant 7600 tonnes of iron; that would be my guess, but that isn’t what they said. 7600 is .004% of 190,000,000. That’s a pretty tiny fraction. Does anybody even read this stuff?
These are the same geniuses who are telling us the “science is settled” on other things.
“Allowing the great whales to recover will allow the system to slowly reset itself,” he says. And this will ultimately increase the amount of CO2 that the Southern Ocean can sequester.
I figured that even whale shit had to eventually have something to do with global warming? What doesn’t?
Peter Gill, a whale ecologist at Deakin University in Warrnambool, Victoria, Australia, calls the research “exciting stuff”.
Exciting!!! Wooohooo!!!! Whale poo! Whale poo! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Ewwwwwwww…
