What Do We Think About Climate Change

Very nice discussion, Jimbo and Thomas, your exchanging of opinions without harassment.

Congs.

 

From the graph I posted, and could be taken from any of several you can find:

1850 Anthropogenic CO2 releases about .6% of present day releases

1950 releases 8% of present day releases


Now you could argue that today's ~3.2% of total (Natural +Anthropogenic) may be climatologically significant. And 1950's level would then be >.26% of total, which is perhaps on the cusp of significance. But 1850's releases would be a mere .02% of total. Surely you don't want to argue that the 1850's releases were climatologically significant, do you? And yet as seen in the Vostok data, CO2 was already on the rise. The AGW alarm crowd tries to paint the blame brush on human activity for this rise, but how reasonable is that, given these actual numbers? And why the cooling for the 4 decades right after the 1950's, when exponentially larger releases began? Volcanic sulphates (as already covered in the thread) are a piss-poor explanation since it calls on us to believe that *Just This One Time* volcanic sulphates participated in a long-lived atmospheric interaction that lasted 40 years-then rather suddenly stopped. Obviously they are grasping for anything to keep the boat afloat.

It's the kind of thing that should be considered FATAL to the theory that CO2 is driving the present warming trend, since in this crucial instance the system has not behaved as the theory predicts.

Jimbo

 

What are you asking here?

You make the statement so would you care to describe what:

"Climatologically significant releases" are?

Are you in fact arguing for the AGW team?

 

I'm asking for a definition of a reasonable threshold. There's NO WAY you can make a credible case for the 'delicate balance' idea, given the variability of natural releases. So you MUST come up with a threshold of significance. When you attempt to do so, you will run right into the conundrum I outlined above, which is that atmospheric CO2 levels were increasing when (according to AGW theory) they really should not have been increasing since anthropogenic releases were still very small. Now, as I've said, you can make a much more credible argument for the releases since 1950, as they are more than an order of magnitude larger. But the admission that pre-20th century releases were climatologically insignificant poses problems for the theory. The threshold you would be forced to admit to account for this is unsupportable given natural variability. See the problem?

Jimbo

 

I was looking into the Kyoto Accord and see that they are denying that the oceans are net carbon sinks…
It seems to have something to do with limiting carbon credits claimed by countries with contiguous marine zones. Have you heard this? Same as net carbon sinks denied on land?

 

Not exactly the same, but the same theme. Mechanisms for carbon uptake are very different for each, but it's obvious that they don't want to admit that nature could be taking care of the 'problem' without any help from us. If that turns out to be true then you can't persuade the (now) free world to shackle themselves with the draconian measures needed to implement meaningful carbon reductions. It really comes down to the lust for political power.

This touches on the 'threshold' idea as well since if the circa 1850 anthropogenic releases really were climatologically significant, then how in the world can we ever get back below that level? Answer: WE CAN'T

I still go to the Glassman page often to try to digest some of the difficult stuff. The man knows his stuff. His theory has a far better 'fit' than any so far, with no uncomfortable 'anomalies' to try and explain away, as virtually all the others (even some I like ) seem to have.

Jimbo

 

have you run across any numbers for carbon uptake in the oceans?

 

Yeah, on the Glassman site. That's the cornerstone of his work.

Jimbo

 

Glassman concludes:
"Public policy represented by the Kyoto Accords and the efforts to reduce CO2 emissions should be scrapped as wasteful, unjustified, and futile."

Well, I have to disagree with those words said like that. To reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions is important to reduce fossil fuels energy consumption and force investigation and development on other energy sources. Fossil fuels will not last forever and their burning not only produces CO2 but a bunch of other harmful gasses and particles.

He should have added: "....wasteful, unjustified and futile from the point of view of climate impact"

Cheers.

 

Jimbo-Glassman shows a clearly demonstrated uptake of carbon into the oceans??

 

That's the whole point of his work; the oceans uptake carbon when they are cool, and release carbon when they heat up. The oceans have been heating up for the last few hundred years, so they are currently releasing CO2. He asserts that this is why CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, and that those increases have nothing to do with human activity or any other terrestrial phenomena for that matter. The oceans are the regulators of CO2 in the atmosphere, their temperature corresponding to a 'set point' for atmospheric carbon concentration. Right now that set point is rising. On the whole this makes a lot more sense than to think that this little trace gas CO2 regulates the temperature of the atmosphere through a long Rube Goldberg process with high CO2 sensitivity and a brittle, unstable equilibrium. Also gets past the 'extra carbon' problem (touched on in the above cited paper) and the 'CO2 rising at the wrong time' problem as well.


Jimbo

 

There is actually good reason to believe that they will. First, you might be surprised that the reason they are even called 'fossil fuels' is that at one time it was believed that only living things could 'fix' carbon, so any fixed carbon was attributed to things that were once living. It was guessed that oil must therefore be the result of the decomposition of the dinosaurs, thus 'fossil'. But recently we have come to realize that non-living processes can fix carbon as well. For instance we have discovered that on other worlds (moons of Jupiter) there exist volcanoes spewing methane. Now we know these worlds are sterile, so this fixed carbon in the form of methane cannot be from living things, but rather planetary tectonic processes. Similar results have been found on several worlds in our solar system. We also already attributed the production of diamond to inorganic processes.

Now as far as carbonaceous molecules go, we could view them as a continuum of molecules of varying complexity, durability and difficulty of synthesis. In that continuum, we put methane at the bottom as about the simplest possible requiring the least energy to form, and diamond at the top, being the most complex, most difficult to form requiring the highest temperatures and pressures. So if we can accept that it's possible for tectonic action to produce the bottom most carbonaceous molecules, and the topmost molecules, why is it not reasonable to postulate that these processes could create all the other molecules in the middle? And if it turns out to be true, then the 'heavy' liquid hydrocarbons are being made continuously by the earth, and can NEVER run out! There is a lot of exciting new evidence that this is in fact the case. For one thing, we have discovered some 19 cubic miles of oil in the earth. Even the most wild guesstimates at the total biomass of all the dinosaurs ever to live don't even come close to this figure, and we are discovering more oil all the time. There's simply too much of the stuff for its provenance to be fossils!

I did not just invent this idea; it has been around a long time Do a web search on ''abiotic oil"

Jimbo

 

Mmmmmm,

"Though evidence exists for abiogenic creation of methane and hydrocarbon gases within the Earth, studies indicate that they are not produced in commercially significant quantities (ie a median abiogenic hydrocarbon content in extracted hydrocarbon gases of only one fiftieth of one percent). The abiogenic origin of petroleum has also recently been reviewed in detail by Glasby, who raises a number of objections, including that there is no direct evidence to date of abiogenic petroleum (liquid crude oil and long-chain hydrocarbon compounds)."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin)

Anyhow: Whatever the origin of petroleum, what's the use if we cannot reach it?

"First, digging is more expensive the deeper you go, and in practice it is nearly impossible to dig a commercial well deeper than the depth to which wells are drilled nowadays, that is, more than 10 km.

Secondly, petroleum geology is an empirical field which has evolved largely by trial and error. Petroleum geologists have learned the hard way where to drill (and where not to drill); in the process they have developed a theoretical model that WORKS. It is somewhat difficult to believe that generations of smart petroleum geologists missed huge amounts of oil."
(http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100404_abiotic_oil.shtml)


I think we do quite well keeping on investigating alternative and viable energy sources to oil, be it fossil or not.

Cheers.

 

Did someone say

ABIOTIC OIl???

Jimbo- chase that guy out of here before he causes any more trouble.


After you do that could you post the citations you are using to support that the oceans are currently releasing carbon?

Glassman says of his blog post:

"The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide analyzes one particular data record, the Vostok ice core data. It is a paleontological record, and so the reader should not expect that the resulting model would have any manmade component."

So his work can not be offered as evidence of current conditions.

 

Thomas,

Sometimes I don't know quite what to think of your posts. Anyway, in case you completely missed the point of his work, he synopsizes in the first paragraphs of his site, and I quote here:

"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the product of oceanic respiration due to the well‑known but under‑appreciated solubility pump. Carbon dioxide rises out of warm ocean waters where it is added to the atmosphere. There it is mixed with residual and accidental CO2, and circulated, to be absorbed into the sink of the cold ocean waters. Next the thermohaline circulation carries the CO2‑rich sea water deep into the ocean. A millennium later it appears at the surface in warm waters, saturated by lower pressure and higher temperature, to be exhausted back into the atmosphere.

Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation. Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases. Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause. Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase. If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere."

I mean, were you trying to be facetious or even cute? :?: Look at the parts that I've made bold. Now doesn't that gibe with my earlier post?


Jimbo