Dear Gene,
RE: About Conversion of Former Carbon Sinks to Methane Craters About your statement to Geoengineering group: "the global average surface temperature has been increasing for many thousands of years, as much as 3 to 5 degrees C from the minimum of the last ice age, in the face of no anthropogenic emission." Over and over again Group B of Nations have been complaining that the ice age associated sea level drop of 126 metres depressurised immense methane clathrate fields on the Russian sea bed that must have released CH4 in copious amounts to the atmosphere. These emissions were not anthropogenic GHGs, but millions of years old fossil methane emissions, that all ended up in the air (until they were gradually mopped up by the stable biosphere during the course of the early Holocene). This is the "Wally Broecker syndrome" that comes from the America: the ancient carbon from thawing Arctic permafrost and the sunlight-exposed sea beds must have released billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases when the sea levels fell low enough to destabilise methane clathrate: this induced climatic warming towards the ending of the last ice age. I have seen 5,000 extra carbon-14 years appear in ancient texts written on biomaterials that come from the northern Asia. It is to do with melting permafrost releases of carbon-12 and carbon-13 while the cold oceans kept mopping carbon-14 out of air. This squeezed the carbon-14 out from the biomaterials to produce "10,000-year old writing" - total nonsense. Wally Broecker and Stephen Mithen are totally simplistic in accounting the effects of sea level drop and melting permafrost putting back into air fossil carbon from destabilised former carbon sinks. Broecker and Mithen think that stable Holocene like sea levels (=> stable sea floor pressurisations) prevailed through LGM to keep old sea-floor methane locked out. This is utterly wrong! The Arctic Ocean's sea floor is pock-marked by countless methane clathrate craters that pumped carbon-12 and carbon-13 to air when clathrate destabilised. I have seen figures somewhere around 22,000 off-shore craters in the Arctic Ocean that collapsed due to sea level drop and warming of sunlight exposed former or shallow sea floor. The largest crater alone is 750 square kilometres in area with considerable depth as well. There are many kilometre scale craters that are volume-wise comparable to man made coal pits dotting the Earth that have produced most GHGs since the onset of industrial age. We can volumetrically count all holes and estimate how much methane they have held until they all collapsed. None of the carbon that came out contained carbon-14 which only survives shortly due to its half-life being just about ~5,770 years. "the global average surface temperature has been increasing for many thousands of years ... in the face of no anthropogenic emission. AGHG is not the only factor influencing the surface temperature; only the one receiving the most attention ... keeping the climate science community well supported." In FIPC view the post-LGM warming resulted from the nature-built (& well-tested) safety valve mechanism, methane clatrates, that prevented the earth being flipped to full snowball earth from the point of the LGM due to the greenhouse effect these carbon wells produced. As Broecker wrongly discounts (or is unaware?) of carbon-14 dilution effect due to fossil carbon emissions from the carbon wells (carbon-12 and carbon-13) from melting permafrost and sea bed carbon wells (methane clatrahate, decaying sediments). In conclusion, result is unhappy optimism and underestimation of GHG gases like CH4 and CO2 to warm climate. I think, your doubts on the effects of carbon dioxide and methane as driver of the present climate change arise from this prevailing and unfortunate misunderstanding in the West. The problem is that we all like to go with crowd, and Broecker has done many good things, but he is not perfect and trusting too much him or Mithen will take you to doubt very causes of the present day climate change that is very dangerous anthropogenic warming. The quantification of depleted geo-carbon emissions and resulting carbon-14 dilution since LGM are vitally important for us to understand how the Arctic permafrost and sea bed methane clatrathes behave now as the renewed (anthropogenic addition of old carbon) occurs in the climatic system. It does not matter if the fossil carbon is man made or not. Statistically the volume of lost methane ice should be studied to quantify what was the amount of methane laden ice in the 22,000 craters and the amount of silt decay on the sunlight exposed sea beds plus other melting permafrost at the time LGM and after. The sum cumulative carbon-14 dilution in biomaterials can be seen from old texts that can be alternatively dated. I have good examples of 8,700 year old radio carbon aged writings which cannot be older than 3,700 years because the caligraphy of the letters of era is well known. It is equally unlikely that people would have found 5,000 year old biomaterial to write on and then us having the immense luck of finding just those items. My question is: How often do you find 5,000 year old perishable materials to write on? So, its all back to square one and the difference, 5,000 years, coming from the release of geocarbon sources. Because you have been following the ideas of Broecker or Mithen, you end up doubting the role of GHG's (methane clathrate problem). During ice age, the melt-back of ice sheets from LGM mitigated and controlled the size of methane clathrate release driven GHG forcing, today we do not have that luxury unless melting of ice sheets massively raise the sea level. When, during the recent Podznan conference, His Excellency President Evo Morales Ava and the Government of Bolivia draw attention to the simultaneous disappearance of the Patagonian, Weischelian and Laurentide ice sheets despite their large spatial separations of 10,000 kilometres and more, the position of Group B of Nations remains that all ice may go. Geoengineering can tilt the balance if it can be engineered to be stronger that the GHG forcing feed and the possible curtailment if the sea floor pressures increase and water temperatures drop if the ice sheets destabilise. In my short life time I have seen the six large Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves to collapse and remain awaiting Ronne and Ross to go next as the process seems to be escalating there with ice shelves being lost ever faster. I must also draw your attention to the large explosion in the North West Passage last July. 2008/2009 winter was cold, but there are possibility that sea has stored enough heat and more methane explosions occur, possibly rendering some areas unsuitable for the ships. This is Group B/FIPC/Indianice view about the warming of climate thousands of years from the LGM and About Conversion of Former Carbon Sinks to Methane Craters in Arctic Ocean. Kind regards, Albert From: euggor...@comcast.net To: j...@cloudworld.co.uk; albert_kal...@hotmail.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com; ke...@ucalgary.ca CC: john.do...@ec.europa.eu; p.johns...@ex.ac.uk; vicky.p...@metoffice.gov.uk Subject: RE: [geo] The GREAT LIE about emissions reduction Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:22:45 -0400 John, extremely well stated. I concur 100% and have been stating the same for some time. Geoengineering is essential and inevitable to avoid future warming independent of what emission reduction is achieved. You could further strengthen the argument by noting that the global average surface temperature has been increasing for many thousands of years, as much as 3 to 5 degrees C from the minimum of the last ice age, in the face of no anthropogenic emission. AGHG is not the only factor influencing the surface temperature; only the one receiving the most attention for profit and political reasons and keeping the climate science community well supported. Keep banging away! The planet needs geoengineering. -gene From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengineer...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Nissen Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 7:56 AM To: albert_kal...@hotmail.com; Geoengineering; ke...@ucalgary.ca Cc: John Doyle; paul johnston; Pope, Vicky Subject: [geo] The GREAT LIE about emissions reduction Hi Albert, That paper (on recovery from global warming) nicely illustrates a point about denial: "Abstract. Climate models provide compelling evidence that IF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS CONTINUE AT PRESENT RATES, then key global temperature thresholds (such as the European Union limit of two degrees of warming since pre-industrial times) are very likely to be crossed in the next few decades." [my capitalisation] However, global temperature thresholds will be crossed in the next few decades, whatever happens to emissions. This first sentence of the abstract illustrates the GREAT LIE being perpetrated by experts: THAT EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS CAN HALT GLOBAL WARMING. The simple truth, as clearly shown by David Keith in his talk to RGS [1], is that there is so much excess CO2 in the atmosphere, and it has such a long effective lifetime, that global warming will continue for thousands of years, unless it is actively taken out of the air. Even if global emissions were to stop overnight, global warming would continue for thousands of years. I believe the reason for perpetrating this lie are threefold: 1) nobody is prepared to face up to the implications, which are indeed terrifying; 2) nobody wants to be the messenger of bad news, for risk of their own reputation; 3) nobody wants to be seen to say anything which might dampen efforts at emissions reduction. I further believe that, because of this great lie, the necessity for geoengineering is not appreciated or it is considered a "last resort" (even by eminent people in this group). And, because emissions reductions obviously cannot cool the Arctic, geoengineering is particularly urgent to save the Arctic sea ice and reduce risk of massive methane discharge and Greenland ice sheet disintegration - a double wammy. But I want to explore that first reason for the "great lie", because denial can a strong effect in all of us, and I've seen it in myself. There is a point when one's realisation is so terrifying (John Doyle calls it the "Oh my God!" point), that the psychological reaction is to suppress that thought. A person facing terminal cancer is liable to behave as if their life would carry on as normal. I witnessed this very behaviour in a good friend, a highly intelligent and clear-thinking man, shortly before his death. He had warned me to expect it (the denial behaviour) from himself, when he was first told that he was suffering from terminal cancer. So it was particularly heart-rending when it happened, the evening before he died. But it brought home to me the power of "Freudian denial" as it is sometimes known [2]. As another example of denial, Jared Diamond, in his excellent book "Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed", describes an experiment with people living below a dam. The nearer to the dam they lived, the more concerned, until a point at which the concern vanished. This is the point that some of us have reached, in perpetrating the great lie. And as a result of the lie, the decision makers - the political elite - are failing to perceive the true extent of the problem to be tackled [3]. So what hope have we got? One way that Homo sapiens has evolved to deal with mortal danger is through the fight reaction. If we consider global warming as the number one enemy, then we can face up to the possibility that it could kill us all, if we don't attack it with all the weapons at our disposal. And those weapons include geoengineering as well as drastic emissions cuts. Could the truth be faced, and this fighting spirit be taken to Copenhagen? I believe it can, if enough of you are prepared to expose the great lie for what it is. Cheers from Chiswick, John [1] http://www.21stcenturychallenges.org/challenges/engineering-our-climate-is-there-a-role -for-geoengineering/media-gallery/video/professor-david-keith/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IESYMFtLIis ---- Veli Albert Kallio wrote: This article provides a good reference point to argue for inevitability of geoengineering, written by non-geoengineers: How difficult is it to recover from dangerous levels of global warming? J A Lowe et al 2009 Environ. Res. Lett. 4 014012 (9pp) doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/014012 J A Lowe1, C Huntingford2, S C B Raper3, C D Jones4, S K Liddicoat4 and L K Gohar1 1 Met Office Hadley Centre (Reading Unit), Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6BB, UK 2 Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford OX10 8BB, UK 3 Centre for Air Transport and the Environment, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M1 5GD, UK 4 Met Office Hadley Centre, FitzRoy Road, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK Abstract. Climate models provide compelling evidence that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at present rates, then key global temperature thresholds (such as the European Union limit of two degrees of warming since pre-industrial times) are very likely to be crossed in the next few decades. However, there is relatively little attention paid to whether, should a dangerous temperature level be exceeded, it is feasible for the global temperature to then return to safer levels in a usefully short time. We focus on the timescales needed to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases and associated temperatures back below potentially dangerous thresholds, using a state-of-the-art general circulation model. This analysis is extended with a simple climate model to provide uncertainty bounds. We find that even for very large reductions in emissions, temperature reduction is likely to occur at a low rate. Policy-makers need to consider such very long recovery timescales implicit in the Earth system when formulating future emission pathways that have the potential to 'overshoot' particular atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and, more importantly, related temperature levels that might be considered dangerous. For more information on this article, see environmentalresearchweb.org Received 9 February 2009, accepted for publication 25 February 2009 Published 11 March 2009 Beyond Hotmail - see what else you can do with Windows Live. 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