What Do We Think About Climate Change

How did the oil, gas and coal get below the water table? The same way the strata it's found in got there....and the same way fish fossils wind up on top of mountains: normal geological processes and time.

A competent geologist in the oil fields can tell whether a new well is likely to find oil, how close it is to hitting it, and what type it's likely to find, by looking at the microfossils being brought up. Conodonts, for example, are very useful:

This information, combined with thermal maturity studies, make conodonts a valuable exploration tool for oil and gas in basins around the world. The conodonts change colour after burial because of heating effects deep beneath the Earth’s surface. A similar process alters other organic matter into oil and gas and therefore the colour alteration index of conodonts can predict what type of hydrocarbon may be discovered.

http://www.ucalgary.ca/news/utoday/july14-09/conodont

I would say oil deposits are so closely associated with marine microfossils that there's really little doubt they have an organic basis, rather than forming from a process deep in the Earth, as some people believe. But it's an interesting subject to speculate on, and it would be nice to find out oil has an abiotic (non-living) origin.

 

Guillermo, It's no secret that I'm not literate on this topic. What do the axes represent?
Jimbo, any theories on what the source of oil may be then? I just assumed since I've been around coal quite a bit (I live in Alaska) and I have seen plenty of coal in stages that include having plant matter in it, and that coal and oil are similar(?), and that I grew up being told oil was dead dinos...
By the way, I think a large part of crude sinks like a rock but not all, obviously. I have never watched it sink but with the Exxon Valdez in '89, a vast majority of the cargo disappeared.

 

"...it would be nice to find out oil has an abiotic (non-living) origin." - it would. Then everybody would say "We better git rid of that **** before we are overwhelmed with new oil!"

 

Duh. C.temperature and date.

 

Talk about paranoia. All I have changed is my avatar, not my log on or name.
You don't like Asterix? You prefer the photo of Edgar Allan Poe?
Usanian economy? where is that?
of course I know your name, you singed some of you post Diego so I made the mental note (and conceded hasty assumption) that such might just be your name.
When you ask if I came for more, what do you mean? I never left, had some lively chat with some of the boys here. I noticed that the insults and gutter language had diminished lately...have you been on holidays?

Oh well, back to the gutter.

 

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/

Hi Troy, have a look at the link posted by Guillermo, it makes for good reading. Very clever how the graphs when taken in smaller portions can tell a completely different story. I think I'll keep on gathering firewood just in case.

 

775 falls in between 774 and 776 and as for me i don't think thats a coincidence

 

...The most inane stuff... I tried to sign on as "Mark" and could not (too short a name, already taken - I don't remember). The first number that popped into my head was my boat's official number. 775 is the last three digits thereof.

 

Yeap!
Any comment?

Cheers.

 

Well, while some GW defendant in this thread pops up with some comments, here what I understand is an interesting "comment" from the very hand of Keith Briffa himself (e-mail dated 9-22-99):

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter (IPCC's third report). For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike (Mann) appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future background variability of our climate.”

Words in italics are mine.
Bolding is mine.
Interesting, isn't it? Read the full thing at:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index....f16552a-802a-23ad-465f-8858beb85ac2&Issue_id=

Cheers.

 

Yeah, everyone's heard this before, But some geologists disagree, asserting that getting things that were once at the bottom of the ocean to the top of a mountain is no great feat; there's a simple and elegant explanation for that. But not no much for getting something ( and not just 'something', either, but the ENTIRE BIOMASS of an epoch!) down miles below the surface! And you need ALL that biomass to even get within an order of magnitude of the crude oil mass. Now we know fish and other marine fossils can be found at the tops of mountains, but we don't find ALL THE FISH that lived for 500,000 years all at the tops of mountains, now do we? That would just be weird, right? But we are supposed to believe that virtually the ALL biomass from the dino epochs essentially wound up all in the same place, way below ground.

And even then, nobody can explain how this biomass apparently underwent exponential growth in mass (in order to equal the mass of crude oil), after it got underground. After all, this stuff was all dead, right?

Jimbo

 

not all the biomass, that would be weird, just the biomass that is found in any particular place where it's found like in coal and oil deposits

 

I suspect you eventually "win" most discussions you're involved in, because you keep shoveling stuff until people just get tired of dealing with you. That hardly means you're right.

This nonsense about "the entire biomass" winding up underground is another prime example of trying to paint very questionable ideas as settled truth and science. No one's trying to claim that dinosaurs and primeval forests were somehow shoveled into a hole in the ground and covered up.

There's nothing strange about the idea that during periods when the seas were rich with life, millions of years worth of tiny decayed plants, algae, and bacteria drifting down to settle at the bottom of the sea would add up to a serious accumulation, or that it would eventually be buried by sediments.

Nothing moved the raw material from the surface to underground. Basically, ground formed on top of it over the millenia. If oil is abiotic in origin instead, why is it invariably associated with marine microfossils?

 

Now THAT would be plausible. The problem is (and it's well known and uncontested) that's not near enough biomass to account for the mass of crude oil already harvested, let alone still in reserve. So we have to assume virtually ALL that biomass suffered the same fate to even get close to the cruse oil biomass to even get close to parity, or else believe it all somehow 'grew' after it got underground. Neither seems plausible.

Remember that the idea that crude came from dinos is based on a very old assumption based on the belief that only living things could fix carbon.

No abiotic carbon fixing=no life evolving. Think about it.

Jimbo

 

There you go again: "well-known and uncontested." That's pure, unsupported baloney. No one is claiming the entire biomass that oil is created from lived at the same time. It piled up over millions of years.

Nor is anyone claiming oil was formed from dinosaurs.