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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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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.
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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> 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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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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I thought the key issue with CO2 was that it did not have the same opacity to radiation at all frequencies. The basic scenario being as follows.
A range of solar radiation hits the Earth, a chunk of which is passed unimpeded by the CO2 in the atmosphere. This radiation hits the ground, water, whatever, gets bounced around a bit, absorbed and re-emitted preferentially at frequencies at which CO2 is more opaque. Thus CO2 in the atmosphere has a greater effect on decreasing the energy radiated part of the equation and less on the energy absorbed part.
If this picture is correct, a greater CO2 percentage in the atmosphere, other things being more or less equal, would lead to a higher steady state mean temperature.
PS: I'd wager most serious climatologists don't get a kick (or kickbacks) from scaring the population with the spectre of global warming. In fact, if you're looking for kickbacks, you're much more likely to find them on the other side of the fence. There is a real fear, backed by observed facts and admittedly primitive models, that the effect of mankind's activities on the environment will yield severe changes in climate in the not so distant future. Given how painful such changes would be, this ostritch approach towards the issue seems incredibly stupid.