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..."

Comments

More Info?

[Overdrive_SS]

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?

nice theory, but --

[sdedeo]

As printed in the article:

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.)

Re:Circular

[Xilman]

Ok, a brief tutorial in planetology. Very brief and glosses over much that is presently known. Discovering more is left as an exercise.

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