Nauscopia and Climate Forcings

Timothy Birdnow

Old sailors have many a yarn, and many a tall tale is told on the high seas. Most - like the Flying Dutchman or mermaids - are figments of the imagination. But sometimes they are true.

Here is an old sea tale that may well turn out to be true after all.

There was a Frenchman named Etienne Bottineau who figured out a way to predict the arrival of ships. He invented what he called Nauscopia, which was a "the art of ascertaining the approach of vessels, or, being in a vessel, the approach to land, at a very great distance". Bottineau could predict the arrival of a ship days, even weeks before there was any sign of it. He could find land while out to sea.

How did he do it? His exact methods were unclear, but he argued that life in the oceans generated gas which formed a kind of envelope over the sea. Ships - or land - formed disturbances in this gaseous layer. By carefully studying the horizon and the atmosphere (particularly sunrises and sunsets) he could ascertain the arrival of ships or the nearing of land.

Bottineau worked out his "science" on Mauritus some time before 1785 (when he went public with the discovery.) It wasn't until much later that the story was remembered and chronicled

But he was a poor scientist who kept poor notes, and it was believed he was a charlatan of some sort by most modern scientists.

But was he? 

It turns out that the oceans do indeed "breathe" out benzyne and toulene over the Southern Ocean. It was thought that these were a result of pollution, but new research shows it to be a result of phytoplankton.

This immediately caught my attention as it made me think of Nauscopia.

Jo Nova observes:

This matters because these two gases increased the amount of organic aerosols by, wait for it, between 8% and up to 80% in bursts. And all that extra aerosol matters, of course, because aerosols seed clouds, which change the weather.

And the expert climate models, upon which a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry depends on for its very existence, did not know this. If hypothetically there has been less phytoplankton in the worlds oceans in the last few decades, there may also have been less cloud cover, and thus more warming. But who knows?"

End excerpt.

This alone is fascinating; another climate forcing that is unaccounted for and that shows how much we have yet to learn.

But it makes me wonder if Bauscopia wasn't in fact real.

As Shakespeare pointed out, in Hamlet "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Perhaps Nauscopia is one of them. Clearly this heretofore unknown environmental phenomenon is another.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:41 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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