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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
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.
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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In order to the ice melt, temperature must be increased. A hotter liquid can hold less dissolved gasses. An increase of one degree C on the oceans means some billions of tons of CO2 more on the air.
And we simply dump too much CO2. "The average American per capita emission is 5 tons of carbon annually."> (Damn! It's TOO much!)
More CO2 on the air, plus oceans retaining less C02 means something bad will happen.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
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.
While it's true that Venus is closer to the sun than we are, and Mars is further away, that's not the whole truth. Believe it or not, more solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface than ours. The albedo (i.e. reflectivity) of Venus is so high that most sunlight is reflected back out into space before it has a chance to heat the surface. In the case of the Earth, about 50% gets through and about 50% is reflected. The difference in distance between each planet and the sun is not enough to overcome this effect.
An important reason why Mars is so much colder than the Earth is not that it's further away but that it's also much less massive. The martian atmosphere may not be heated as strongly as the terrestial atmosphere, so the atoms and molecules may not move as fast, but they don't have to move as fast to escape and over the aeons they leak away. There are other factors involved, some of them caused or influenced by the lower mass, but this is one of them. Others include the lack of a strong magnetic field (to keep the solar wind at a good distance from heating the upper atmosphere) and, perhaps, the lack of active plate tectonics in recent history.
Turning to Venus, it rotates very slowly and does not have a pernament magnetic field. In its early history it probably had an atmosphere quite like the early Earth's and was very probably at much the same sort of temperature as on the Earth today, but just a bit warmer. Venus was still closer to the sun than was the Earth, but the Sun was noticeably cooler in those days (about 75-80 percent of present luminosity). Not having a magnetic field helped to heat the upper atmosphere; water was photolysed to hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen leaked away. At some point in its history, Venus got just a little bit too warm before life had evolved enough to start stabilising the climate as it has done here on Earth for the last few billion years. No-one got around to inventing photosynthesis in a big way to mop up carbon-dioxide and replace it with much less effective (as a greenhouse gas) oxygen while the lack of plate tectonics meant that organic matter and water wasn't safely swept ip into the upper mantle. At least one important feedback mechanism was missing on Venus and the greenhouse effect ran away until we see the conditions today: less solar heating at the surface than the Earth, but a temperature high enough to melt lead.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
> Let me introduce to you the concept of
> something called "chemical bonds" and
> something called "energy."
Hey, no problem: Global warming means more
energy, right?
And we can easily exploit it, since
temperature differences are what make
engines run. Here's my plan: Take a big
wire, put one end in the cold past, and
the other end in the hot future....
Uh, nevermind.
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