@19. Blargh : Fair enough then. I’ve only very occassionally been on Greenman3610′s blog as opposed to his Youtube channel & I don’t recall seeing anything too outrageous. His climate stuff is excellent though I think – I love his youtube ‘Climate Crocks’ series & nobody’s perfect. I can think of quite a few brilliant entertaining people with major blind spots – eg. Richard Dawkins with sexism, Randi, Penn & Teller with AGW etc .. & so while we may disagree with those on some things I’ll still appreciate what they’ve done in other areas. Similar case here maybe?

Still I’ll try and keep that in mind in future.

I don’t remember Twilight Zone doing an episode like this. Though they did a lot of strange UFO episodes. (e.g. the tiny flying saucer and the giant “hill billy” woman — the flying saucer was from the USA)

@ David in England
Ah yes. Her legs. Which helped get puberty going…

While what I’ve seen of his actual climate change videos has been good… he also posts some absolutely apalling pseudoscience on his blog. When it comes to anything nuclear or radiation-related, the guy uncritically posts stuff that’s made me literally spit coffee on my monitor when I saw it (followed by what can only be described as the Morbo “WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!” reaction).

Indeed, as I was enduring Puberty at the time, that scene, for many reasons, is etched into me.

I even recall that Gerry Anderson’s puppetry helped me differentiate between Vertical and Horizontal by Thunderbird One’s launch procedure…..Scott Tracy saying “switching to horizontal flight…”.

Unfortunately, as for the “canary in the coal mine” thing, we seem to live in a world littered with dead canaries, but the people in charge just close their eyes and hold their noses against the stench.

Yep the evidence is continuing to build up getting ever more overwhelmingly conclusive that Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating (HIRGO) is a stark reality. See for example :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHrVOnLKjuQ&list=PL029130BFDC78FA33&index=1&feature=plpp_video

For the latest climate crock interviewing climatologists on sea level rise and the emerging hockey stick there.

Then there’s the worrying permafrost melting in the Arctic region and the inflammable consequences as dramatically shown here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Wofv9o0j1Ew

Plus it should be hitting home in the USA too when you look at this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VMpes8EyIw&feature=related

among other things.

But who *is* in charge in nations run for the the people by the people?

Our leaders are elected – and when the evidence finally makes climate denialism impossible will it be too late? Reminds me of HG Wells quote on our future being a race between education and catastrophe.

BTW. Would that “70′s UFo show” be a Twilight Zone episode by any chance? Sounds like one a bit.

@6. Cassie : “Not going to get all ‘sciency”

Um, isn’t there more you were going to say? Oh & what’s wrong with getting sciencey? Far as I’m concerned I’m happy for folks to go all sciencey anytime they want!

@9. ceramicfundamentalist : “kind of looks like the swirls in jupiter’s atmosphere ..”

Jupiter – or Neptune or Ouranos given the respective planetary colours?

Good pic there – anyone else getting the pareidolia effect with the figure 8 and ) curve on the centre left making a phytoplankon emoticon?

You’ve posted several interesting ground shots of blooms and other ocean phenomenon. All without scale. Same with some of the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and other shots.

To apply an old SF story to this… We all remember the ’70s UFO show. In one episode they had a spy satellite follow an alien home. And for some reason (don’t remember the details) they lost the distance information. So it had all sorts of photographs and they couldn’t be interpreted. I remember the denouement had a camera zoomed in one one of the women’s stockings and you couldn’t identify them until given a scale.

Scale helps. Otherwise it’s just a pretty abstract picture. So PLEASE try to give us a scale on these photos.

Dan

There are two ways a phytoplanktonic bloom can affect negatively the oxygen concentration: First of all, the high concentration on the surface prevents the sunlight from going through the water, so there is less photosyntesis (which is the process that produces oxygen) in the lower layers of water. Also, and most important, the excess of organic matter enhances the activity of decomposing organisms, and those use oxygen in their methabolism, so the oxygen concentration in the end is lower than it should be.

Hope it helps!

@#3, Renee, all too true. At least they don’t behave like Vlad the impaler when someone complains about the smell!

@4, dcortesi, perhaps vortices are formed by opposing flows of currents? Rayleigh-Taylor instability due to differing salinity of the water at that location? Hard to tell without knowledge of the conditions in that area…

I’m curious why the figure-8 form? Per the link from the link, this is “about 600km East of the Falkland Islands,” where, according to google maps, there is no land at all. So it isn’t swirling around two islands as it appears. Around under-sea peaks?

Unfortunately, as for the “canary in the coal mine” thing, we seem to live in a world littered with dead canaries, but the people in charge just close their eyes and hold their noses against the stench.