Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum Tipping Point Looming?

Paul, I've been trying for 3 days to address your varied points. In general.... It's important to hold and recall several different scales in mind, simultaneously, but also not to confuse them. Speaking about the stability over billions of years can't be compared with the stability of a few hundred thousand years--plus different systems contributed to stability and change during each of those scales you compared. Very different relative stabilities existed before each of the revolutions of life, oxygen, complex life, terrestrial life, soils, biodiversity, and even stable ice caps developed; so comparisons are problematic.

So please lets not get caught up in determining the correct position for all the deck chairs on the Titanic. "Chaotic attractors" develop, and relative stability ensues; I think we can all agree on that basic physical principle.

But over the past few days, I wanted to mention:

*Level slope means stable climate, so stable climate is fairly rare--especially in warmer phases.


*Insolation at 65 N latitude, which varies due to Milankovitch cycle, is what causes the regular pattern of glaciations and retreats. Clathrates are more unstable at warmer temperatures, and stablilized by colder temperatures. Why would clathrates be released at the maximum of a glacial advance?


*Methane oxidizes into CO2 fairly quickly, within a decade or so at most....

*Do you think the clathrates operate this way to terminate every glacial cycle?
5MyrIce


*What!? If by "oxygen breathing life" you mean big animals, and not bacteria/fungus, then I think you'll find they contribute less than a percentage of so of difference. I'd like to be proved wrong, if you'll do the research; but seriously I think the availability of nutrients and water have more to do with abundance than does temperature.


*Methane or CO2 comes from all the oxidized (rotted) plant material; right. But a small percentage of that abundant plant life gets incorporated into the soil--eaten by the soil--so that the carbon content of the soil can rise up to 10% in the richer soils. Temperate soils used to have carbon richness approaching 10% globally, but over half of that has now been lost--increasingly over the past several hundred years. That is not counting actual soil erosion which simply transfers the carbon richness into the waterways and oceans to act as fertilizer for algae and diatoms.

Sure the Amazon forest produces a quarter of the world's oxygen, but the forest immediately reuses that oxygen. The nutrients washed out to sea, from the cycles of rot and oxidation in that forest, are what fertilize the growth of algae--that supply half of the world's oxygen--so we can enjoy oxygen on a global scale.


*I think, as a part of "the earths efforts," we are doing just what we are supposed to do. We are figuring out how managing soils can act as a global thermostat. Since CO2 levels affect actual heat balance over decades and centuries, whereas orbital variations mostly affect distribution of heat, managing CO2 levels can over-ride any multi-millennial scale Milankovitch influences.

A change in solar forcing of about a quarter Watt loss, over several hundred years, changed conditions from MWP to LIA. CO2 is several times that amount of forcing, but hasn't yet operated for a century or more. We haven't experienced climate change "greatly" yet, but only the beginnings of changes to weather patterns--that will cumulatively add up to climate shift eventually. If enough shift accumulates, then the climate could change into a different mode of operation--a new chaotic attractor. [if you search this neat concept "chaotic attractor," be sure to click on "images"]


*Perhaps someplace has to get colder, as heat invades and overwhelms the usual routes of escape. We could be headed into a bi-polar climate mode, with a warm N.Pole partially ringed by continental ice, and a cold E. Antarctic accompanied by a temperate W. Antarctic. It is about heat transport (especially latent heat such as snow), rather than any temperature or local weather pattern here or there.


*Put the soot in the soil, and keep the coal in the hole; and not either on the pole.



*We've been increasingly geoengineering the planetary systems for fun and profit, so why not do it to create value and enduring sustenance. Unless we do, we will need to learn how to enjoy and profit from a tropical world with temperate poles, and a greatly reduced biodiversity--not a paradise.

Paul, what you describe as "seems to us to have greatly changed the climate," are observations of the first effects derived from many simple robust chaotic systems being pushed to their limits. Nothing has yet broken, but the limits will be exceeded eventually--as "locked in" heating continues to wear away the resilience of complexity emerging from our many simple systems.

In other words, we already have enough extra heating--which will continue heating and causing changes--worked into the planet's systems, so that Milankovitch cooling has been completely overwhelmed. We are in danger of overshooting in the warming direction, so we don't need to work on ways to melt the poles; but rather ways to maintain the poles. Too many of our other critical systems depend upon the polar differentials.

~

sam



lowered pressure!
due to lowered sea levels , water pressure.





http://www.geotimes.org/nov04/feature_climate.html



http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/students/iceage/iceage1.htm


I will try to reply to the rest of your post tomorrow.
I just wanted to reply to that 1 part of your post.

Good, I'm glad you have that info.
I've long wondered about sea level and the pressure on "continental shelf" clathrates. Shifting currents could bring different temperatures too, which is another good reason to keep a source of cold deep water--the poles.

I've also wondered about coastal landslides, as glaciers advance, disrupting the clathrates. I heard Long Island is mostly glacial moraine. And... the time lag, as methane is oxidized into CO2, might also help explain how CO2 levels seem to lag slightly behind warming--in the paleo-proxies.
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http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/anthropocene.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680009238.html

I'd imagine there is a lot of research establishing these notions one way or the other, but it's an area I haven't studied. Thanks for the links. But whatever mechanism has established that regularity, we are in danger of disrupting many parts of a complex whole.

Now, instead of releasing methane at the cold end of the cycle, clathrates will be releasing methane at the hot end of the cycle--when there is already another unexpected heating being added.


http://www.uib.no/rg/quarternary

~yikes!

p.s. check out:
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/students/weather/weather3.htm
...deep ocean conveyor current source....
&
http://www.geotimes.org/july08/article.html?id=trends.html
...putting soot into the soil....

sam



I posted that info on sagg several years back.

it is something that shouldnt be overlooked and Im glad that
you now have that info also.

heres a phase diagram.


Im not certain about the degree of water temperature increase
that could be expected if the currents were to diminish that
carry cold water from the poles to cool the oceans but it looks
like it would take quite a bit of warming to affect the methane clathrates.

lets remember that with added water pressures there will be a
corresponding increase of warmer temperatures needed to change the phase as shown in the below graph.



the totals of carbon contained in various reservoirs.



http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/ees123/clathrate.htm

sam

Ok , I'm working on a reply.

I was wondering if you would explain this point a little more.



20%-25% of the worlds oxygen is produced in the amazon , but you
say that the produced oxygen is immediately used by the amazon.

how does that happen?



but wouldn't you agree that the someplace should be a place that can warm the south pole and allow the north pole to cool?

shouldn't we manipulate the south pole similar to the way we have manipulated or warmed the north pole?

this could of course remove the danger / possibility of killing the ocean currents that carry cold water south from the north pole.

Thanks for the neat pics above. I like the last one, which shows "soil" at 1400 gigatonnes. Of all those wedges, soil is the one we can most easily influence, considering it already undergoes a large yearly carbon flux. Plus it is large enough to have a significant effect; yearly, the flux is over ten times our annual emissions.

I should have also mentioned the Labrador Current previously as one we don't want disrupted, since it keeps those hydrates cool and separated (insulated) from the Gulf Stream.
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But, good questions, especially since I was vague of several points.

"...through respiration" --by plants at night--of all the sugar photosynthesized during the day, and through microbial respiration of all the biomass that falls to the forest floor and is rapidly decayed.

That decay will cycle nutrients from the biomass and back into the environment where roots immediately grab what nutrients they can, before the frequent and heavy rains leach away those recently mobilized nutrients. The Amazonian soil remains nutrient poor, between the heavy leaching and the reabsorption of nutrients by the rapidly growing biomass. Fortunately, dust from Africa provides a significant input of phosphorus and iron, which is quickly assimilated into the living biomass... or leached away.

But all those leached nutrients travel out to sea and nourish plankton, which produce lots oxygen during a growth bloom as they store carbon for more reproduction and growth. Much of that carbon gets incorporated into the food chain or sinks to the bottom where it remains sequestered, so there is a net production of oxygen from the plankton--relative to the forest. The forest's boundary layers help keep the oxygen close overnight, when the respiration needs are highest, so it is readily reused. In the ocean, oxygen becomes separated into the atmosphere away from the plankton that produced it, within the diurnal cycle, so a bloom eventually depletes, and is limited by, aquatic oxygen levels.
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Both polar cryospheres are warming excessively, on net... on average. There are large influences heating both cryospheric regions. As the polar heat-loss mechanisms are pushed with disruptions, reorganization of those mechanisms will occur... at least until too much disruption forces the mechanisms to fall into some new "stable" mode.

But during the initial reorganization period, as the long-evolved subsystems (simple robust chaotic systems) struggle to operate within their normal limits, different especially cold area will still exist... somewhere, to some extent, distributed in some pattern that derives from the progressing reorganization. I worry more about disruption of the several inversions, through the depth of our atmosphere, which normally act to maintain our warm surface temps. The polar vortex, which is maintained by long-evolved polar differentials, is important for keeping those inversions, and jet streams, stable... relatively.
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...and polar differentials also keep the oceans oxygenated, nutrient-enriched, and cold enough in the right places to keep enough of the methane hydrates sequestered. Hope that makes sense enough....

~

Paul, a few posts back you said something to the effect that you think we should be burning more fossil fuels in order to keep from going into a new glaciation. I wonder if you really mean that. You may be right, but will that actually help us stabilize the global temperature? I have been thinking about this long and interesting exchange between you and Sam and it is looking to me as though we have managed to get the temperature on an upward slope. But do we really want it to go up? I should think we would be more interested in stabilizing it, or maybe reducing it slightly.

I think our long term goal should be to stabilize the global temperature at its current level, or maybe slightly lower. The idea is that we need to keep things pretty much as they are because that is how we are used to working with them. Any significant swings will cause changes in ocean level and local climates that will require massive efforts to accommodate our life styles to compensate for them.

Either heating or cooling will require changes in our agricultural systems. Both growing seasons and the areas where specific crops can be grown will change.

Significant warming will also produce flooding of low lying areas which will require massive population shifts. Significant cooling on the other hand will produce more land at the current sea shores, and may impact global shipping because many current ports may become unusable. This of course would be more easily handled than the massive population shifts from warming.

And of course there is the biggest reason that we should be working to stabilize the climate. AS far as humans are concerned the way it is is the way it is supposed to be.

Bill Gill

bill

from sagg's verry own home page



apx 2050!

we can already see that temps are increasing at the Arctic
( twice as fast as expected )and decreasing at the Antarctic ( not sure how fast ).

bottom line is.
we could keep it the way it is.
and set a irreversible stage for a crustal shift due to the
mere mass distribution of ice located at the south pole.

also there might be methane ice located where the warming occurs in the northern hemisphere or mountains.

you seem to agree that we have been able to raise temps at the north , so why expend our efforts trying to work around the results , why not expend our efforts trying to balance the two
poles by doing what we did in the north to the south?

here's more info on the antarctic

http://www.scar.org/researchgroups/progplanning/#AntCim21

...Paul, very good link on ANDRILL, etc.
...the first picture [C], on this pdf, is very informative:
http://www.scar.org/researchgroups/progplanning/PAIS-PPG_Mtg_Jan12_upd.pdf
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Paul....
A bipolar world (a cold Antarctic with a temperate Arctic--like it was back around the Eocene) might offer more opportunity for northern-hemisphere agriculture, in the long run, once everything re-evolved to adjust. Warming both poles would reduce ocean circulation enough that anoxia would begin to predominate; as with some "oceanic anoxic events" [good phrase to search] back around the Eocene. Is this what you're suggesting, to keep things "balanced," or do you appreciate the delicate "ice-age" balance that evolved over the past few million years?

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13111


...that is back around Eocene times....

~

Bill, you make the point very well. It is unimportant if we understand the long history behind how we came to find ourselves in a relatively stable world, with robust biodiversity and resilient ecosystem services, and with a temperate climate well-suited for agriculture.

It is only important to realize how relatively rare and delicately balanced our present "interglacial" climate is. It also helps to see the evidence of how civilization's "land use" has been staving off a natural cooling trend for millennia.

Unintentionally, we have finally prevented the natural cycle of cooling and glacial advances that has been occurring over the past few million years--as our species evolved. Civilization has developed during this current, rare and brief (interglacial) window of opportunity, geologically speaking. We've learned (accidentally) to push the window and keep it open, but we need to realize how we are now in danger of breaking the "ice age" framework that created that window, if we keep pushing.

The Arctic cryosphere is the basis for many global food chains, as well as the basis of many critical climate and coupled ocean systems; and it is hard to rebuild a "basis" once it is "tipped over" and broken. Just [don't forget to also click on "images," but first] search "hysteresis of emergent phenomena" to see the risk for biodiversity and civilization, if we should lose the Arctic.
===

There is a way to keep that window of opportunity open, without constantly pushing:



...utilize and manage the rhizosphere, as a caretaker, to save the cryosphere!

~

Right, we have to recognize that we are talking about a very delicate balance and we need to study it and work carefully to keep it the way it is now. We can probably live with a very large range of climates, but the disruption caused by any significant changes will be enormous in terms of both economic cost and human lives.

I say that we can live with a very large range of climates. That is based on the fact that our ancestors lived through several cycles of glaciation, and they didn't have the technology that we have now. But living through the changes is one thing. Enjoying them is something else.

So we need to rather delicately tune our impact on the climate to try to stabilize it in a satisfactory way for the most people we can. There are going to be changes. There is no way for us to maintain the climate exactly the way it is. It would change even if we didn't do any forcing. My hope is that we will be able to figure out how to control the carbon so that we can preserve our society in the way that is best for all of us.

Bill Gill

sam



I think / believe that we should lower the warming at the north
and increase / begin warming at the south.

we should / need to balance the warming.

of course the winds directions would determine the initial right place or places to do the warming , but they will change
as the warming increases.

test can be made to determine how much soot would be carried and where the the soot would be deposited by the winds.

perhaps different colored test soot or soot with a traceable molecular signature could be used to determine where the soot originated from the varied test locations.

http://www.bigelow.org/virtual/handson/wind.html

Global Wind Currents



Global Wind Driven Ocean Surface Currents



as you can see the south pole seems to protect itself with winds , we might need to instill a warm area on the Antarctic using manufactured
black objects to get some circulation started.

...It's good you see we should cool the Arctic, but why should we balance the warming?

It's not the hemispheres we need to balance, it is the balance between the present-day cool climate state and the warmer climate states that existed millions of years ago, that we need to maintain. It took a lot of evolution (of life and geology and the climate that link them) for the planet to cool enough to create an Arctic Ice Cap. Warming the southern hemisphere won't help keep the Arctic stable, but will hasten its loss as heat transfer occurs fairly readily between the hemispheres.

Don't confuse a slight difference in temperature with a heat imbalance. Because of the relative differences in land coverage between the northern and southern hemispheres, a "perfect" balance of heat will necessarily produce a slight difference in average yearly temperature.

Though to be more specific, the isolation of the Antarctic (by winds and ocean currents) was a major factor in cooling the planet several tens of millions of years ago. Check into the opening of the Magellanic Straits, and how that changed the climate. But still, don't confuse local temperature with overall heat.

~

sam



we need to maintain differently.

our current path is leading to a colder south.

increasing the warmth in the north is decreasing the warmth in the south.

we need to increase the warmth in the south and decrease the warmth in the north.

it seems logical to me , and the records show it.

the warmth in the north doesn't seem to be global warming
it seems more regional than global , if the warming is not
to be considered local then why isn't the south also warming on an even keel with the north.

...Why? Doesn't what I won't repeat from above make sense? It is balance over time, not over the space of the hemispheres, which determines climate. Spatially, there will be lots of variability; some areas will get colder as a consequence of "global warming," but not colder on average--globally or for either hemisphere (see below).

Paul, unless you're talking about some areas in E. Antarctica, could you explain how you get your view about the Southern Hemisphere "cooling."



Sure the SH is a bit cooler, as I already indicated above. See also:
...but that is "naturally" occurring.

While there is a nice aesthetic quality to "balancing the hemispheres" as you see it, that effort would only make sense if the hemispheres had symmetrically balanced land masses. Heat gain and loss are already as balanced as can be; but because of the asymmetry, the heat is processed differently, which is reflected as the observed temperature difference. Heat and temperature are very different, especially when ice and water are invovled; so that shouldn't be surprising, right?

And since the hemispheres aren't symmetrical, we shouldn't take actions based on the notion that they are symmetric. We are stuck with many determinants of climate, such as the position of the continents and mountain ranges, as well as convective and Coriolis Effects. Albedo and ocean currents are fairly stable and determine climate also, and those can be easily changed when "forced" enough. But we shouldn't be trying to change those, as some way of compensating for other, simpler, imbalances that we've only recently introduced; and which could be easily managed--certainly much more easily and predictably than changing ocean currents or albedo.

As you note, soot is one of those forcers we can control (somewhat); but as you also note, it is usually a warming forcer--especially when it is on the ice. When soot is put into the soil, it enriches soil and "sequesters" carbon for decades or centuries, or even for millennia as the carbon richness that soot provides to the soil is incorporated into soil's "stable" organic fraction. Of course if those soils warm up and dry out, then the carbon is released as CO2; whereas if the soil remains cool or temperate, then the carbon helps retain water and nutrients, while preventing leaching and erosion, to help enrich the soil.

Putting soot onto ice in the Southern Hemisphere will only add to total warming, aka global warming. But....

To double food production over the next generation, putting soot into the soil [of both hemispheres] will solve several problems at once; by helping with improved food productivity and yield, while also helping offset newly introduced climate forcings.

~

OK , sam

lets back away from the view we have and explore the soils.

suppose we put the soot into the soils.

how much soil are you speaking about?

how will you accomplish that?

isn't the current northern soot mainly coming from Asian coal plants.

should they be forced to use scrubbers, if so good luck with that.

how will you get the soot from Asia if your not using scrubbers
on the stacks.

then suppose you are able to convince the coal plant owners to use scrubbers are they then to collect the soot and bag it up
and ship it to the rest of the world so that farmers can put
the soot in the soil.

maybe I have it all wrong ( LOL ) and we should focus on the
1,400 GT of soils carbon and overlook the 15,000 GT of fuels
carbon.

how much of the 1,400 GT can your soils product / process affect?
only 11% of the earths total land is used for crops.



25% is a long target , can your soils product / process overwhelm that number being that a new coal plant is brought online in Asia every week?

there's only a certain amount of land that can be forced into
agricultural production because most land cannot be used without some type of manipulation.

Paul, just fyi background.... ..."Agricultural land covers 33% of the world's land area...."

But of soot n' soil....

Soot is neat stuff, from a chemist's point of view. Graphene--in the form of buckyballs and other fullerenes--or mostly fragments of these--comprise a lot of soot's carbon. And carbon in the more common, graphitic form--along with small amounts of volatile and/or aromatic carbon--make up the remaining bulk of soot.

You're right about the difficulty in capturing soot; especially after the carbon is converted into soot. Whether it is fresh biomass such as ag/forestry fiber, or fossilized biomass such as oil/coal fuel, both create soot when burned inefficiently. Soot comes, as a part of smoke from the regular burning process, but soot can be minimized by more efficiently burning the fiber or fuel.

Pyrolsyis burns fiber or fuel in a way that keeps more of the carbon in the form of char, instead of releasing it as soot. The hydrogen and oxygen (and much of the carbon) is burned (via reductive pyrolysis) without producing soot, and the remaining carbon (char) can either be retained as a product, or burned further (via normal oxidation) to create more energy--along with some soot.
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The point is, we can manage biomass differently; shifting the flow of carbon between various reservoirs of oxidized and reduced carbon (to mitigate damaging imbalances and restore beneficial balances). Reductive pyrolysis is a way to "burn" biomass so that soot release is reduced and more char is produced. The char itself has value as a commodity; especially as a way of shunting the beneficial effects of soot directly into the soil, but without having to capture, process, and distribute the soot.
===

As my posted picture above (with quote about the rhizosphere) indicates, soil has recently been recognized as a major player in the carbon cycle.

Bill's excellent link from April 18, 2013:
...and we have ready access to the soils, and we are already actively managing soils.

You're right about the relative amounts; soils don't have the capacity to soak up all of the fossil fuels we could burn. But soils do have the capacity to affect the balance within certain limits.


Soils do have the capacity to soak up our past carbon emissions--if we can cut current & future emissions--while simultaneously solving several agricultural pollution and economic sustainability issues. And we don't have to wait until emission are cut; we can start soaking up those past emissions immediately, by incorporating pyrolysis/carbon management into our developing "green" economy. There doesn't seem to be a quicker, easier, or cheaper way to achieve those valuable goals, does there?

~

sam

fyi...



of the 33% of total agricultural land only 1/3 is arable , or can be used for growing crops.



so the 11% percentage I posted was a higher percentage than
the 9.3% that you posted.

that means that theres less arable land.



I dont know ! you havent explained how this is to be implemented.

burning the soil using solar? ( something I just thought up )


burning the soil using gas?


might I suggest a fuel source.



hmmm.. Black manufactured objects...these things get as hot
as 140 F in full sun in my sector.

you can get paid 2 dollars each just to take them off of the owners hands.

so your fuel is free and you get money to buy the gas to power your truck that goes to load them up.

these things can be burnt in a chamber that has no emissions
if you build it right.

and its cheaper to pump air into a burn chamber than it is to pump fuel or gas into a burn chamber.

all you do then is remove the heat via a heat exchanger.

and hot air alone can and will char the soil!

this may very well be a quicker, easier, or cheaper way to achieve those valuable goals.

as long as there are plenty of tires around to burn.

Right, except it's not about "burning the soil" as you seem to think, but about improving soil by adding carbon (a byproduct of some burning).

As you rightly note, "these things can be burnt in a chamber that has no emissions if you build it right." And the heat can be used to generate electricity (not burn the soil, please) or to facilitate other economic processes. Pyrolysis is how you burn "these things" with little or no emissions.

Reductive pyrolysis creates char as a byproduct (and can be adjusted to produce bio-oil also). Oxidative pyrolysis can then complete the burning process (of the remaining char and/or bio-oil),
OR those byproducts (char/oils, from the reductive pyrolytic process) can be captured and utilized as commodities.

Obviously the bio-oils have use as a commodity, if they can be refined, becoming a liquid fuel source. And the char itself has many uses as a commodity. Char is used as a reductant in metal processing, and many air and water purification systems use char. Char can be used to supplement animal feeds; having the beneficial effect of antibiotics, such as growth and weight gain, but without the bad side effects of breeding resistant microbes.

The char can also be used as a soil supplement, where it is called biochar. Thus the byproduct of fire is added to the soil--without the inconvenient side-effects of an on-site fire. Adding char to the 2/3 of our agricultural lands, which are no longer arable, will restore the productivity to those lands. Paul, tires would work, but the idea is to use the annual wastes from agriculture and forestry--about a billion tons of fibre per year in the U.S.--and other waste stream as a resource to produce biochar via reductive pyrolysis.

This is over-simplified, but the idea is to shunt some photosynthesized carbon fiber (biomass) into the soil instead of letting it decay or oxidize into CO2. The activity surrounding that REDUCTIVE process would create a new industrial sector for our economy. After all, it is a new way of "doing" fire. The consequences of that reductive process would restore agriculutral lands, improving productivity and yield. The benefits of that reductive process would extend to offset pollution, resource imbalance, and resource destruction--as well as the socioeconomic problems that result from those--that are caused by our current reliance on oxidative processes.
===

...but not "burning the soil" please.

~