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Arctic Ice Holds Much CO2
scottie2shoes writes "The Edmonton Journal is reporting fascinating research on the role of arctic ice in absorbing carbon dioxide. It seems that (contrary to what was previously thought) arctic ice actually absorbs significant quantites of CO2 and is thus a key player in the 'greenhouse gas game'. So melting the ice caps won't just flood thousands of square miles of land and wipe out thousands of species, now it is is starting to sound serious..."
So greenhouse gases cause global warming which melt the ice caps and then releases greenhouse gases?
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But couldn't we do something useful with all that carbon, say, make artificial diamonds out of it, thus preventing it from forming C02? More O2 and less C02 would be a good thing, wouldn't it? (Unless you're a plant.)
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Oh, wait.....
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The article seemed pretty light on the details. How do they go about measuring these things? Is it possible that there was just more CO2 in the atmosphere when the ice formed?
Is there anything new with this? I thought this was something known for quite a while.
Another nasty factor contributing to the runaway positive feedback loop is the warming of bogs. The strip of bogs around the northern part of the world holds 25% of all of the world's carbon- it's one helluva sink. As the climate warms up, the bogs start warming up, which will start releasing a lot of methane and CO2. A professor here at my school (John Pastor) has been doing work measuring this. Spooky stuff.
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If passing the CO2 down to the ocean, I think it would be beneficial to have less ice to allow more plankton in the open water to convert CO2 to O2.
If absorbing in the ice, are there huge bubbles? What is the capacity? Has the ice not reached it's capacity over the last several thousand years? If not, then when would it reach it's storage capacity anyway?
What is the mechanism for the transmission of CO2 through solid ice?
How did the earth get rid of CO2 before man started generating it by burning fossil fuels?
Did someone say caps?
Plural?
Remember that melting the north polar ice cap will not raise sea level...
Does this add to the non-linear and chaotic nature of the atmosphere? In particular, does it cause the earth to swing between states where it is cold and the generated ice is storing CO2, stopping any greenhouse effect and keeping the earth cold, and vice versa?
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?a rticle=272&category=56
this gives a decent overview of the issue. effectively it states that co2 levels were much higher in the past, and as the climate turned a significant portion of it was locked in the ice sheets that up until recently were pretty stable. not any more. other concerns are methane gas pockets from rotted plant deposits that were eventually covered by the oceans or ice as well as bacteria colonies (http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-04/cover/) and could cause some pretty serious problems from a bunch of different angles. things like- you can't breathe co2 or methane with much success, so, like the big bubble that rose out of the lake in south africa
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issue s03/sep03/killer_lakes.html
and killed a bunch of people in the immediate vicinity. or tsunami activity. heck, a bubble coming up under a carrier battlegroup would probably swallow it whole and start another war, which would keep our minds and mouths occupied with everything but the selfextinction of man.
Unless people are actually dying at an alarming rate, no amount of evidence is going to change anything. The US is not focused on being "earth happy" is any way. Be superpower, stay superpower, alone. Through economic and military might now, but perhaps scientific or educational might on a better day.
However, until the Atlantic currents slow to a crawl and we have another Ice Age, we're going to have to just deal with freakish weather and high insurance premiums.
I'm more worried about ANTARCTIC ice. You know, the big ice cap stuck on top of a field of active volcanoes, down South? A little bit of extra activity could really ruin our millennium.
Here is where today's science becomes guesswork, however. Less ice could actually be better. Scientists still know very little about how the Arctic Ocean processes carbon, and a competing theory holds that open water could actually pick up more greenhouse gases.
If human activity is turning "much of the Arctic into a polynya (a body of water that doesn't freeze in winter), then the Arctic or polar seas may become much more effective at removing the atmospheric carbon than they currently are," Papakyriakou said.
The poster of this article (and those discussing the potential positive feedback mechanism that kicks in if ice is a greater sink than open water) are really smudging the issue here, and smudging it for political effect without regard either for the necessarily tentative nature of science at the margins (here, the untested margins of modelling an entire planetary ecosystem) or for the consequences of making scientists look like ridiculous Chicken Littles.
I ride a bicycle to work, take the train, and am generally supportive of environmentally friendly living and governance. But, as a scientist, I am severely disappointed when other scientists (let alone journalists or Greenpeace) take an unfinished scientific debate and use it to propose sweeping changes in our lives -- changes that woud plunge a huge number of people into poverty (I live an environmentally sustainable life, but it does cost a lot more and I wouldn't demand that a single mother of two do it as well -- hey, you driving that pickup! shell out $50,000 for an electric car.)
This is turning into a bit of a rant, but if you want to learn what other enivronmentalists -- who are also scientists -- think about the current fights over the greenhouse effect, GMOs, etc, you should read Patrick Moore's recent article (Moore was the cofounder of Greenpeace.)
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>> How come Homer and Krusty look like clones?
> This is way off topic, but it was in your signature line. I was listening to an interview with Matt Groening on Fresh Air (I think) and he explained this point. He was trying to make it a point that Bart hates his father but loves this clone that looks exactly like his father.
Thanks. Several other people have answered, and I just haven't gotten around to changing my
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Unless people are actually dying at an alarming rate, no amount of evidence is going to change anything.
I think the Great Melt is already upon us. Just look at the news of the past few years: Glacier National Park is becoming Bare Rock National Park; unprecedented signs of melt in the Artic last year; signs of instability in Antartic ice; predator-prey relationships getting out of whack due to an earlier spring melt. A few years earlier, Otzi melting out of the Alpine snow for the first time in 5000 years.
Places like New Orleans and Venice, already having trouble due to subsidence, are going to be in "deep" trouble, and the cost is going to be phenomenal.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In an interesting twist on the question of global warming, many and various recent scientific studies show that Research into Global Warming leads to additional releases of Greenhouse Gasses (most notoriously, scientists blowing smoke and being full of hot air)
In a most impressive statement of The Blindingly Obvious, Professor Julian Something-Thriller was heard commenting that
"See-oh-two is a GreenHouse Gas, every conference and research project on Global Warming involves vast amounts of rather heated debate greatly increasing the output of said GreenHouse Gas due to the aspirations of the entire scientific community"
When asked why nobody had seen this coming he retorted that "Even a bumbling fool knows that most GreenHouse gases are invisible to the naked eye."
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if the whole global warming/greenhouse effect is not merely a cycle since we know that at several points in history the earth has been much warmer or much colder than it is at present. now I am not saying humanity has played its part in this warming trend but what we need is good hard evidence that the process is not completely natural. since I am not an ecologist this is just mumbling
What we need is some higher order statistical processing... We should take data such as industrialization, CO2 production, ice cap area, etc and calculate such features as Bicoherence, Tricorrelation, etc... . Let some real math show the real story.
And the journalists can all go to hell...
mount to nothing when you don't know all the variables.
So really, don't get your panties in a know every time a new alarm sounds.
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There is the trap of killing the messenger, upon hearing bad news. You aren't falling into this trap, are you?
So, what are these carbon sinks that you want us to gamble on?
It seems to me that most carbon sinks that are put forward only work in the short term. Can we lock carbon up in forests? Temporarily, maybe. Forests burn. Or trees fall down, and decay, and their carbon is released as CO2 as they rot. If we harvest the wood, and build something out of it, like a house, well that house gets burned down, pulled down, termite infestation, dry rot. What is the average life-time of a house built today?
This is not a long term solution.
In other words, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere may be unstable, meaning that a small perturbation can result in a huge change in state. That means, if global warming actually were occurring, that it quite possibly would be (a) not our fault, but something that has been happening over the past several hundred, thousand, or ten thousand years, and is accelerating as the state of the system moves away from an unstable equilibrium point; and (b) impossible to stop, no matter what we do.
What happens if ... humanity exhales a huge collective sigh of relief?!?
According to some "back of the envelope" math that I found on Google, the breaths of human beings contribute 0.000036% of the worlds carbon dioxide supply per day (which balances out with the fact that all the carbon they exhale comes from eating plants or things that eat plants).
If you drop that down to a single collective simultenous breath, we all put out about 2.9 million liters of carbon dioxide or about the amount equal to the emissions from burning a little over 2 metric tonnes of coal which I believe is worth ~2 hours of running a megawatt capacity coal power plant.
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The US is actually doing a lot more than other countries such as Russia and China, regarding pollution and other environmental issues.
Fact is, I've always seen "Global Warming" as a bunch of balony... the Earth goes through Cycles. Ice ages, warmer periods, etc. There are a lot of paranoid people out there.
Yes, pollution harms the environment, but it happens slowly. People like Green Gore that want to eliminate the Internal Combustion engine overnight are just nuts. This technology needs to Develop properly.
That said, I think that oil companies are doing harm to the process of switching to alternative energy sources (can you guess why?). I would really like to see this recent fuel cell/ethanol technology make it into affordable vehicles.
There are extremists to every camp. Unfortunately, they are usually the loudest. Greepeace is ridiculous, as is most of the NRA. Some open source people are just plain zealots with no restraint. It is not representative of the majority.
The ground that is most sound is in the middle.
I will feel so much more comfortable knowing that the global warming is completely natural.
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Oh, please stop it. I am so sick and tired of this global warming whining and hyperbole. As if the forces of nature were were in any way under mankind's control, and as if it would even be possible to significantly reduce carbon emissions without reducing the Earth's population accordingly. What about this thing that's ready to wipe out civilization as we know it (a bit overdue)? Or the old favorite, the big rock from the sky? Oh, and here's my new personal favorite: EVERYTHING goes boom... the whole of Creation jumps to another energy state, just like an electron orbiting an atom... just as it's probably done before. Why, there are countless ways in which this meaningless speck of dust that we inhabit might just shake itself out of its current human infestation. Why focus on just one that's out of our control?
Paul, are you a Venusian? If so, your .sig ("abandon all hope, ye who enter here") had better be posted some way up in orbit in case you're expecting any of us to drop by...
Now i know that all the evidence that we have at the moment says that global warming is bad, and its caused by human influence and whole heap of stuff, but could it be that we are just altering the cycle only slightly?
We all know of iceages, and other such global weather events in the past that take multiples of thousands of years to develop and deteriorate, could it be that we are just getting close to the upper limit of a cycle, and we are headed back down in a couple of millenia?
I remember seeing something on the layers in sandstone saying that the different bands (as sandstone is famous for) are caused by differing atmospheric conditions causing different things to wash down rivers etc. onto the deposition banks.
Now, all this scientific fact. We have known of Chemicals such as oxygen and carbon for a few hundred years. how long we have actually been studying the percentage composition of large areas of the earth i do not know, but surely the picture that we have, assuming that it is reliable is only a short snippet of the whole cycle.
I would think that, for all the horrible effects of human industrialisation and technological development, that we are observing at the moment, many of them are being, or will be countered by natural systems that would be necessary for us to exist at the moment. The chaotic nature of the world, although allowing for the possibility of an apocolyptic event, doesnt suggest towards it.
just my musings on this topic