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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..."
Not only this, but the Arctic ice melting decreases Earth's albedo, thus melting more ice and releasing more greenhouse gases.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Except that there is also the posibility that the open seas that replace the ice will absorb more carbon dioxide than the ice itself did, regulating the whole mess and stopping any runaway effect. Of course it's only a theory, and not one I'd bet the farm on. More research is needed (when isn't it?).
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...
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.
It has been suggested that we sequester liquid CO2 in abandoned natural gas mines and seal them up. Perhaps that is what an ancient civilization did in the Artic. ;)
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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.
You can listen to the interview online. I may be remembering a different interview, but I am quite sure that the similarities between Homer and Krusty was intentional.
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> 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.
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Perhaps warmer ocean temperatures will encourage the growth of plankton, which are the largest consumers of CO2 gas in the atmosphere.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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...
Are you sure you're a scientist? Most scientific theories are continually debated and the debates are never finished. There will never be certainty on this issue. That's the nature of scientific theories. Playing the uncertainty card is the tactic of corporate spin-meisters who are content to drag this issue out while they continue to sell our future livelihood away.
What is certain, though, is that we are changing the composition of our atmosphere. There's no uncertainty about that. The effects of those atmospheric changes are up for debate, so maybe in the meantime we should try not to experiment on the only atmosphere we have.
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Playing the "playing the card" is the tactic of far too many people.
Some science is better understood than others. Tobacco causes cancer: pretty solid. It's a good idea to spend billions of dollars figuring out ways to get people to stop smoking.
Other science is a bit more uncertain. Do Head Start programs really produce lasting educational benefits for underpriviledged children? Not sure. We should keep going with it, but if something better comes along we should not be afraid to put our resources in a different kind of program with different methodology.
The science in this article is exciting, but tentative. Have you considered the vast economic disruption that would be caused by stopping all CO2 emissions instantly? OK, you say, I didn't mean that, I only meant that we should pull back a little. How much is reasonable? How much should we burden the world (most of whom, unlike me and presumably you, don't have a slush fund of resources to absorb increased costs)?
Rational decisions on those matters can only be made when we really enter the debates and look at what is going on. My purpose in my comment was to point out that everyone running to conclusion (A) suggested in this article is ignoring conclusion (B). If conclusion (A) is true, we might want to burden people more with CO2 regulations -- but consider the demand you're making.
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