A team meant to challenge climate change is instead confirming it

I'm surprised the denialists were able to find academic scientists of repute willing to waste their time.

 

I just saw this in the news a few minutes ago. It's on Google News's most popular news list right now.
Global warming: Critics' review unexpectedly supports scientific consensus on climate change - latimes.com

 

For some reason, I have a hard time believing some UC Berkely Scientists ever had a right-leaning agenda disputing the fact of a left-leaning agenda.

Now, if these were Texas scientists who were out to make a point and were shone the light.. that'd be a different story.

 

Waiting for the paper, which is in review in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).

Gobux, in this group, both Muller and Curry have 'cred' as climate skeptics. The other names are not familiar.

In fact Watts also has a temp trends paper in review, but I've not found out which journal.

 

Thats fine I just found it humorous upon initial reading

 

interesting. Well, at least that $150K the Kock brothers don't have anymore.

 

Muller drives a Prius.

 

...and, according to the video posted, he is an EV-skeptic. He said he wrote the book "Physics for Future Presidents" where he says why EV's do not make sense. He got an earful on that from the EV crowd, he acknowledged. I must get the book.

His main position seems to be that global warming is over-hyped, but could actually be a huge problem in the longer term future. He said our Prius's (Prii?) are useless because USA is not a significant contributor to CO2 (China+ is the whole problem in the future, he says).

 

NYT editorial about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/opinion/04krugman.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Wjtracy, China and India both intend to emit more CO2 over the next several decades. Russia also I imagine, but cannot recall reading anything official about that.

Following current trends the US will as well. Europe seems a toss-up. Anyway, all that being the case, it is sensible to look at biological and geological carbon sequestration. At least, this biological sequestration researcher thinks so and I am doing my best to use a tiny portion of China's wealth to do so.

Sequestration will cost some amount of money, and a logical source is from monetizing (some of) the external costs of fossil fuels. This notion brings some of the most horrified responses. In particular, it sems to me, from those who believe that the old way of doing things (I mean, pricing and using fossil C) is the best way.

I am not surprised they feel that way (the world's largest cash cow after all), but it is surprising that more people with an eye towards future realities, likelihoods, and unpleasant possibilities are not winning the debate. Which brings me to the editorialist's last sentence.

Today's attempted thread-jacking by yours truly. Just waiting for that BAMS article...

 

Atmospheric CO2 is increasing at the rate of about 10 billion tonnes per year. Sequestering all of that biologically would require growing the equivalent of an additional 10^10 m^3 (10 km^3) of wood (or more) annually, true? How much is really feasible?

 

If each human planted one tree today, I wonder what effect that would have when measured ten years from now. Plant it in your front yard, back yard, courtyard, local park, school, wherever - just imagine the impact if every human planted one tree.

Also, keep in mind what is below the surface of the ocean. Gazillions of plants that are suffering from toxic chemicals, waste (soda cans and plastic bags), fertilizer runoff, deepwater horizon oil spills, air pollution that settles in the ocean. Just image if those gazillion plants under the oceans' surface were more healthy. Now imagine the trillions of fish and other marine life that feed off of those plants and the entire ecosystem in the OCEANS. Imagine the CO2 that would be absorbed by a healthier oceanic ecosystem.

 

Most of the ocean, any ocean, is a lifeless desert, and not because of pollution. Lack of nutrients is the chief cause. In particular, much of the ocean lacks iron, which is essential for most life. Perversely, iron is one of the materials most easily recycled, so we don't end up dumping it into the sea.

One of the problems with bio-sequestration of CO2 is getting it to stay sequestered. Living organisms have a tendency to end up back in play after they die. Perhaps we need another ice age to bury the trees for awhile.

Tom

 

So phytoplankton don't float on the surface and photosynthesize throughout the entire ocean?

Why do they (books, television, National Geographic, Nature, Discovery Channel) refer to the oceans as "the lungs of the earth" ?

The Wikipedia page for Marine Biology says "Marine organisms contribute significantly to the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_cycle"]oxygen cycle[/ame], and are involved in the regulation of the Earth's [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate"]climate[/ame].[1] "

I've heard that the oceans are largely "desert" but at the same time I have seen expeditions on National Geographic etc. where they go deep into the ocean and they say "we always thought there was nothing down here, but it is teeming with life down here."

And even if parts of the oceans are like deserts, aren't there still "gazillions" of plants in the oceans of Earth?

 

My understanding is that a rise in temp drives a rise in CO2 .
Co2 is driven out of the oceans, 800 years after temps rise.
So the oceans do definitely sequester CO2,naturally .

 

Schumacher: Current fossil C burn is about 9 petagrams (Pg C) per year. An agressive afforestation program could pull down 1 Pg C yr-1 but not in the first few years. Takes a while for trees to spin up. See Liski. Managing agricultural lands better for more C storage, about the same. See Lal. Burning biomass semi-aerobically and burying the charcoal produced, another Pg annually. See Lehmann.

These are the big 3 terrestrial already advanced, and I am kicking in another one, to slow wood decomposition. The research is not advanced enough to claim another 1 Pg. but I'll keep you posted.

The point is that there is not one thing that is going to do it all. We need to do lots of things. Er, because the fuel burn is not gonna stop soon.

Fertilizing oceans such that they net trap much more C has been kicked around for a long time. The large-scale experiments have shown mixed results. Whether any can do the job as pH 8.1 oceans go to 8.0 or bit less seems questionable. There are other geochemical (non-biological) things we could do with oceans, so keep that line open.

Rybold: the life teeming deep in oceans are heterotrophs. Groovy that they are there, but net effect is to reduce the C that gets trapped deep. Marine plants trap CO2, for a while at least. Fish do the opposite. Not wishing ill towards fish (because I eat them) but it could be argued that a uber-healthy marine ecosystem might not net trap the maximal CO2. We need to table this until a Real Marine Ecologist chimes in. So far the net C trapping of oceans seems to be holding constant. Increased temperature and reduced pH could trim that in the future. Question is, how fast? Just between us, I don't think the phytoplankton are at all affected by plastic bags etc. Heterotrophs; you betcha. And we like to eat those.

Qbee: Not enough C in trees that get buried in the Ice Zone to power a stadial/glacial transition. In the absence of magic CO2 emissions (like now), transitions seem to be about mineral weathering on land and ocean circulation patterns. It is not well understood, and actually I rag on the paleoglacialogists about it. You'd have to hack my emails...

Mojo: So right! When oceans warm they degas dissolved CO2. This is the first phase of exiting a glacial stage. It may be that you know the later stages, or not. Have you viewed Richard Alley's AGU presentation as previously advised? Could clear up a lot of questions that may remain in your mind.

 

Q: has anyone heard of or read this book? What's your take?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312614624/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/185-2537304-7264246?ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&qid=1302094613&sr=1-1

 

The oceans do indeed contribute mightily to the oxygen cycle and weather. It is also true that life can be found almost everywhere in the ocean, but in most areas the density of life is very low. Only in places where minerals are introduced is life abundant. Generally the minerals come from deep water upwelling or runoff. It is the shear size of the oceans that make them so influential, not the density of life that they contain.

I am going to quote a passage from an excellent book called Nature's Building Blocks, written by John Emsley. It's a great reference for anyone interested in the elements and physical science. This quote comes from the entry for Iron:

Tom

 

Here's the calculation for the US, non-metric:

We put out about 2.5B tons of carbon per year.
An acre of southern pine forest sequesters about a ton of carbon, per year, over its lifetime. Frequent Questions | Carbon Sequestration in Agriculture and Forestry | Climate Change | U.S. EPA
The land area of the US is about 2.2B acres.

Planting a tree, then planning for the eventual harvest and permanent storage of the resulting wood will, in fact, sequester carbon. You have to plan for the permanent storage, otherwise the wood turns back into C02, and you've just shifted the problem to a future generation.

Sequestering all US carbon emissions this way would require finding an area of potentially arable (but currently unused) land larger than the US. And the facilities for storing the tree trunks permanently once the forest matures.

If you want to sequester a fraction, pro-rate accordingly. I doubt that additional trees (and the dry, termite-free places to store them) could be used to sequester even a tiny fraction of our output.

You can also take the same story to the level of a single family and see how plausible it sounds. Just by long division, the US emissions work out to about 8 tons of carbon per person. Again, by simple multiplication, call that 32 tons of carbon per family of four, per year. So, a small family would need to find 32 acres of farmland or pasture, buy it, eliminate its current productive use, convert it to forest, then plan for the eventual harvest and storage of the resulting wood. That might be a plan for an individual to assuage his or her conscience. That's not a realistic plan for the US as a whole.

It all boils down to the fact that we burn a crapload of carbon-based fuels, and there's no easy way to sequester that much carbon. At present, IMHO, by a large margin, the most cost-effective thing to do is burn less fuel in the first place.