Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum Antarctica shows no signs of warming up

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How can you possibly find so much time to expound, at length, about how you are right and the entire world of qualified PhD climatologists are wrong. How the rules of chemistry and physics must conform to your predisposition.

How can you possibly write: "Indeed, you now see a great many reports" and yet not be able to cite a single one? And not have time to find a single, credible, supporting reference.

Put down the shovel. The hole was too deep a long time ago.

There seems to be some discrepancy in the figures quoted from SciAm and this source:

?radiative forcing due to volcanic aerosols has varied by as much as 1.5 W/m2
since 1850, which can be large compared to the decadal-scale variation in
any other known forcing.? http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/emissions_0207.pdf.

I'm new here and trying to catch up with what's going on in these threads. I'm a little dismayed by the personal attacks and general lack of citations to back up statements.

It seems to me that those who inhabit the global warming camp include those with purely political/economic agenda and tend toward a panic attitude, and those who accept that position without critical anaylsis.

The GWers hold three tenants as prcious: (1) global warming is unprecedented. (2)global warming will cause all manner of calamities, and (3) global waring is largely anthropogenic.

There seems to be very little evidence supporting any of these propositions.

The Medeaval Warm period and Holocene optimum were both times of warmer temps than now.

Warmer temps support human activities. Civilizations, including arts and sciences, have florished during warmer times, and civilizations, such as the Roman, Incan, Aztec, Mayan and Han collapsed due in large part to colder times. Greenland was, in fact, green during the early part of the last millenium. Crop production goes up during warm periods.http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp

Anthropogenic CO2 production contributes only 0.5% of the annual CO2 turnover. CO2 represents only 1 in 3,000 atmospheric molecules, so its contribution to the Greenhouse Effect is actually quite small. The "special" status of certain molecules in the Greenhouse Effect is, in fact, an untruth, a perversion of the concept of specific heat content in the kinetic theory of gases. The higher the specific heat content of a molecule, the more it resists temperature change.

Other posters here have pointed out the mistakes and fallacies in the data often used to support the concept of GW: proxy data is notoriously innaccurate, direct measurements are faulty and not handled properly, and most importantly: the 1degF rise in global temps over the past century are not even statistically significant. The 1000 yr temp cycle has peaked and is about to start over.

One more thing. The limiting factor for plant growth is usually the amount of carbon dioxide. Plants grow faster when there is more of it. Is this capable of offsetting any anthropogenic CO2 production?

Ever try growing a bean in a jar after you've burned a candle in it to increase the CO2? Amazing growth. Hundreds of references from the scientific lit. on that co2science site.

The environment has a great ability to buffer changes in its constituents. A rising CO2 (assuming it really is important)may tend to push temps up, but higher temps mean more clouds, more shading, cooler temps. But any buffer system has a saturation point. Theoretically, rising temps could reach a "point of no return."

Climate follows the mathematics of chaos; there are bifurcation points, that once reached, will allow a very marked, sudden change in the system. But which way it changes is completely unpredictable. As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." ;-) Computers can't tell us what will happen, only what could happen. Big difference.

The flip side of that coin is that any "solution" to a climate problem will be equally unpredictable in its results.

Add to that the inadequacy of our knowledge of the important factors, and our solutions could be counter-productive. Cf. the ingenious solution they came up with to fight the Black Plague: kill the dogs and cats that they were "sure" were causing the disease. When they did that, the Black Death spread further. They didn't know the dogs and cats were keeping the rat population in check. Oops.

Another point I like to bring out in these CO2 discussions is that fossil fuels are only going to last another 40 - 100 years. That's not enough time/volume to do any real damage, anyways.

This little fact I love.......we've raised CO2 levels by about 100 ppm since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In doing so we've gone through a considerable amount of fossil fuels (some say half the world's supplies, but it's tough to say).

So we've raised CO2 from approximately 280 to 380 ppm, going through possibly half the world's supplies. hmmmmm

Can anybody explain where we're going to get the fossil fuels nessecary to reach that 2xCO2 target that all the GCMs are using as the future scenario? We've gone through half our supplies raising it by 100 ppm, how are we going to raise it by 380 ppm on the remaining half?


Welcome to SAGG docT. Get prepared to be attacked though. Such is the way around here it seems.
Maybe you'll even be accused of being me!

Have you heard of saturation and buffering?

You might want to explore the concepts?

Chemists are quite familiar with these terms ... as are climatologists.

Hey RicS - thought you might be interested in this.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/globaltemp/GlobTemp.JNET.pdf

Was published in Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics. "Does a Global Temperature Exist?"


And if anybody could provide me with an explanation to my previous question (sans the snide comment), as well as a reference link, it would be most appreciated.

Absolutely:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_solution

The same thing happens with CO2.

Natural systems are capable of absorbing a certain amount. For example you can put a certain amount of CO2 into the ocean and it will be buffered by calcium and precipitate as calcium carbonate or be taken up into shells.

But add more than that amount and the water becomes acidic decreasing the effectiveness of the uptake mechanism. This is what we are seeing.

Here is another example of the concept. Lets say a square meter of soil can absorb into ground water 1 liter of water per hour.
If I start dribbling water into that square meter at the rate of 1cc/min it is all absorbed. 5cc/min. 10cc/min. etc. At some point I overwhelm the ability of the ground to absorb the water and no matter how much more I add all it does it run off.

That is what is happening to the atmosphere. We have overwhelmed the ability of natural systems to sequester CO2.

Morgan - despite swearing off responding to you in a previous post, I hope I don't regret this........

I understand the concept of buffering and saturation (I do remember something from my 1st chem courses). Although the hydrology example is appreciated (can't remember if I mentioned in one of our pm's that my specialization is in water resources).

A couple of nitpicks on that example though - the only way that the entirety of the 1cc/min could be absorbed is if your initial infiltration rate was greater than 1cc/min. If it was 0.75 cc/min, you would create runoff (obviously this is what we're doing with CO2 and the atmosphere). Additionally, you would never completely overwhelm the ground's ability to accept water (assuming the groundwater levels are sufficiently deep). You would still infiltrate water, albeit at a much slower rate (would be equal to the saturated hydraulic conductivity)

As far as CO2 is concerned, the question I was getting was more directed at whether there has been any work done at understanding the future capacity of the oceans. As I understand it, the oceans are responsible for absorbing half of our emissions. So we've really emitted 200 ppm of CO2(atmospheric equivalent), and gone through half our fossil fuels.

So the question is will this absorption continue? Do oceans react similarly to the infiltration example? Do we see a high initial absorption, declining to a low rate? Is there a breakpoint in terms of CO2 absorption? Will we see a cessation of all absorption? Or will we see a constant rate of CO2 absorption? Has there been any work done on this?

This gets back to my original post on this topic. Even if we assume the oceans will cease absorbing CO2 tomorrow, and the consumption of our remaining half of global supplies of fossil fuels continue until there's nothing left - it's only going to add 200 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere. It's a far cry from the 380 ppm of additional CO2 that GCM scenarios are run under.

I suppose the additional 180 ppm of CO2 could be assumed to come from natural CO2 sources whose emissions would not be absorbed by the ocean, should the absorption cease.

Sorry if parts of this don't make sense.......got little sleep last night.

Sorry, missed this line in my first response. Are you saying we can quantify the decrease in the rate of ocean CO2 absorption, that is caused by CO2 absorption (and resulting acidicification) over the past 40 years or so? Link?

The oceans are able to buffer rising CO2 levels both physically and biologically.

But it's unlikely the saturation point can be reached easily. It's not really a closed system. Remember that the White Cliffs of Dover, the marble backbone of Italy and the amazingly vast limestone stores of the American midwest consist of CaCO3 that was once atmospheric CO2 fixed by plankton and essentially removed from the system.

Considering that the atmospheric CO2 level during the Carboniferous Period was in excess of 1500ppm, that the planet didn't evaporate, that Life not only didn't die off, but indeed flourished, suggests that the saturation point is not easily, and not likely to be reached

Canuck wrote:
"I was getting was more directed at whether there has been any work done at understanding the future capacity of the oceans."

There was an article in Scientific American indirectdly discussing it, IIRC, within the last year. The point of the article was that coastal waters have absorbed so much CO2 that they have become more acidic decreasing the ability of shellfish to make shells.

You might look it up.

Canuck wrote:
"Are you saying we can quantify the decrease in the rate of ocean CO2 absorption"

Based on what I've been reading that is precisely what I am saying.

Google the following exactly as below:
"ocean acidification" and "CO2"
some of the links are not to be trusted ... but some are such as these:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/co2-home.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/science/nature/4633681.stm

Morgan - I don't think the question is "are oceans becoming more acidic", that's fairly well accepted.

The question is (or at least my question is), will acidification of oceans have a significant negative impact on their ability to absorb CO2? Has a decrease in CO2 absorption by the oceans been detected? If so, has it been quantified? All I've been able to find is that the increased acidification of the oceans "could" have an impact, but no hard numbers, or even an attempt to quantify it. Lots of work quantifying the acidification, but I haven't been able to find anything on CO2 absorption.

It is interesting to note that your last link contains a quote from Dr Carol Turley of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

"The oceans have already taken up about 50% of the CO2 that man has produced over the last 200 years and will continue to do so."

Doesn't sound like she's expecting the oceans to stop absorbing CO2 any time soon. If the oceans do not stop absorbing CO2, then it is next to impossible to reach that 2xCO2 level, or even that really scary 3xCO2 level, that are used as scenarios in GCMs.

Makes you start to wonder why they are publishing results from scenarios that can't be reached (due to limited carbon supplies). When do you think we can expect the 4xCO2 scenario to make it's appearance?

Canuck wrote:
"will acidification of oceans have a significant negative impact on their ability to absorb CO2?"

And again the answer is yes.

Now we all know that the vastness of the ocean is such that there is no way that the current CO2 load could possibly exhaust its capability. But this framework assumes mixing and we know that there is not that much mixing in the short term.

So yes saturation is possible and is being observed.

This does not mean absorption will stop. But it does mean it can not absorb CO2 as fast as we can pump it into the atmosphere.

Think about it ... were it otherwise ... were the ocean able to keep up with us ... the atmospheric level would not be rising.

Again as I've said before ... you can not violate the laws of chemistry and physics. The level is increasing in the same way that too much water dumped onto a square meter of dirt will not be absorbed and run off.

Technically, water is not "absorbed" into soil, the correct term is "percolation", but I get your drift. We're pumping out poisons faster than our Mother Earth can ingest it.

Talking of percolation. We've just had over 300 mm rain in 24 hours. How's that?

Sigh - Morgan I was looking for quantitative proof that recent acidification has affected the CO2 absorption rate. I trust that is not the case then.


If absorption by oceans will not stop, then how will we reach CO2 concentrations predicted, when we don't have the nessecary carbon supplies?



This was never in question - of course the ocean can't keep up with our CO2 emissions (nice try to deflect the point of my post though). The question is, will that process ever come to an end, to which you've said no.

hehe - technically, it's infiltration (movement of water into soil). Percolation is movement of water through the soil

Canuck wrote:
"Sigh - Morgan I was looking for quantitative proof that recent acidification has affected the CO2 absorption rate. I trust that is not the case then."

This is the internet. I can not reference that which you can not read. Get yourself to a local university library and ask someone in the climatology department to help you find the resources in their library.

PS: The only thing I am interested in percolating at the moment is coffee.

So you have no source to back up your statement that oceans are losing their ability to absorb CO2.

Thanks for clearing that up.