NZCLIMATE TRUTH NEWSLETTER NO 312 JUNE 4th 2013
CARBON DIOXIDE
There are two gases in the earth’s atmosphere without which living organisms could not exist.
Oxygen is the most abundant, 21% by volume, but without carbon dioxide, which is currently only about 0.04 percent (400ppm) by volume, both the oxygen itself, and most living organisms on earth could not exist at all.
This happened when the more complex of the two living cells (called “eukaryote”) evolved a process called a “chloroplast” some 3 billion years ago, which utilized a chemical called chlorophyll to capture energy from the sun and convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a range of chemical compounds and structural polymers by photosynthesis. These substances provide all the food required by the organisms not endowed with a chloroplast organelle in their cells.
This process also produced all of the oxygen in the atmosphere
The relative proportions of carbon dioxide and oxygen have varied very widely over the geological ages.
It will be seen that there is no correlation whatsoever between carbon dioxide concentration and the temperature at the earth’s surface.
During the latter part of the Carboniferous, the Permian and the first half of the Triassic period, 250-320 million years ago, carbon dioxide concentration was half what it is today but the temperature was 10ºC higher than today . Oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuated from 15 to 35% during this period
From the Cretaceous to the Eocene 35 to 100 million years ago, a high temperature went with declining carbon dioxide.
The theory that carbon dioxide concentration is related to the temperature of the earth’s surface is therefore wrong.
The growth of plants in the Carboniferous caused a reduction in atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide, forming the basis for large deposits of dead plants and other organisms. Plant debris became the basis for peat and coal., smaller organisms provided oil and gas, both after millions of years of applied heat and pressure from geological change; mountain building, erosion, deposition of sediments, volcanic eruptions, rises and fall of sea level and movement of continents. Marine organisms used carbon dioxide to build shells and coral polyps and these became the basis of limestone rocks
The idea promulgated by the IPCC that the energy received from the sun is instantly “balanced” by an equal amount returned to space, implies a dead world, from the beginning with no place for the vital role of carbon dioxide in forming the present atmosphere or for the development or maintenance of living organisms, or their ability to store energy or release it.
Increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by return to the atmosphere of some of the gas that was once there promotes the growth of forests, the yield of agricultural crops and the fish, molluscs and coral polyps in the ocean.
Increase of Carbon Dioxide is thus wholly beneficial to “the environment” There is no evidence that it causes harm.
Cheers
Vincent Gray
Wellington, New Zealand
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What a great and simple and factual explanation which even the dimmest of our politicians should understand.
However I won’t hold my breath.
kayelsea
Very nice. Very important, too. I wish they taught this is school!
The interesting context for me is how close we are to the minimum CO2 concentration (~180ppm) to support photosynthesis. So much carbon has been locked up as fossil deposits in limestone, coal, oil, gas, and etc. that we would need a program to release carbon if not for energy generation with carbon based fuels.
The CO2/temperature graph above doesn’t look much like Al Gore’s graph. Why is that? I thought the science was settled.
Please excuse quibbling and nit-picking, but a chloroplast is not a process. It’s a structure, an organelle or plastid, within some eukaryotic cells, ie those with nuclei or the ancestors of which contained nuclei & other organelles. (The other type of cell to which the good doctor refers is called prokaryotic, of which there are two kinds, the familiar bacteria & less well-known archaea, which tend to be extremophiles.)
Chloroplasts are thought to have been incorporated into eukaryotic cells via endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria, which had previously “invented” photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria (aka blue-green “algae”, which they aren’t) evolved possibly as long ago as 3.6 billion years. Eukaryotes captured them by 2.7 billion years ago.
I must have misunderstood, but to me the explanation of the function of chloroplast implies that the process generated most or all of atmospheric oxygen? In fact, the article claims “This process also produced all of the oxygen in the atmosphere”.
Obviously, atmospheric elemental oxygen did not start appearing with eukaryotes. Cyanobacteria (which are prokaryotes) had utilized sunlight as a source of energy, to convert CO2 and H2O into useful compounds while liberating O2. Cyanobacteria have existed at least since Paleo-Archean (3500 million years ago), while first eukaryotes appeared in early Proterozoic (possibly as early as 2700 mil. years ago, but probably 2100-1600 mil. years ago).
So what have I missed?
The chart does not seem to support the the statement that CO2 levels were 1/2 current levels 250 million years ago.
You forgot one very important point Dr. Gray.
CO2 is absolutely vital for the health of humans.
So CO2 is not only NOT a pollutant, it is vital to human health and well-being.
Malthusian thought would suggest that plants could consume most of the CO2 in the atmosphere unless something else restricted their growth.
“The idea promulgated by the IPCC that the energy received from the sun is instantly “balanced” by an equal amount returned to space, implies a dead world, from the beginning with no place for the vital role of carbon dioxide in forming the present atmosphere or for the development or maintenance of living organisms, or their ability to store energy or release it.
Could this energy being used to build plant material be Trenberth’s missing heat? Trenberth’s diagrams all assume that the heat energy either creates a rise in temperature or is radiated out to space. He has missed the locking up of energy by photosynthesis. How much energy is needed to build a tree or a blade of grass – or a forest? The more plant-life the more energy is used. Animals then use that energy to form their own bodies and we can see vast limestone and chalk deposits all required chemical energy to build as the shells of formanifera – energy which is now locked up as calcium carbonate deposits.
The Earth energy budget equation is missing a term. Life
Percentage of CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere is not enough information if the sea-level atmospheric pressure also changes over time. So Partial Pressure of CO2 might be the key component.
Some of this was discussed in “So Dinasaus Could Fly, Part I”. The size of flying dinosaurs is evidence of a thicker, more dense, atmosphere in the Mesozoic. The Power to stay aloft is inversely proportional to sqrt(air density).
Ian W has it right. I have looked and not found, what percent of sunlight is used by photosynthesis.
true, it will be recycled in time, but not on small timescales. be nice to know, as this is a negative
feedback. the hottest places on earth are the deserts, no vegetation.
tmitsss says:
June 4, 2013 at 11:24 am
“Malthusian thought would suggest that plants could consume most of the CO2 in the atmosphere unless something else restricted their growth.”
That is not Malthusian thought but Liebig’s Law.
C3 plants stop photosynthesizing below 150 ppm CO2. C4 plants (grases) are generally less efficient but have the advantage of being able to photosynthesize down to 0 ppm CO2.
Corn is for instance a C4 plant and will remove all CO2 from the surrounding air given enough sunshine, water and nutrients.
@Mišo Alkalaj says:
June 4, 2013 at 11:16 am
———————————–
Very small amounts of oxygen were generated abiotically in the primordial atmosphere by the breakdown of water vapor, but it was taken up by geologic features such as the iron-rich red beds, ie by rusting & other chemical processes, so it couldn’t build up in the air. So it might not be precisely correct to say “all” O2 is of biological origin, but effectively, this is true.
Mišo Alkalaj:
I was going to make a similar comment about chloroplasts, but now I recall that when Dr. Gray was young (and even when I was young), we were taught that cells called “eukaryote” evolved a process called a “chloroplast”, just like they evolved a nucleus and other compartmentalised processes. Back then, we knew nothing about Archaea, and only the very few of us suspected that mitochondria were symbiotically acquired.
The last 20-30 years’ update: now we know for sure that mitochondria are bacterial endosymbionts, and we also know that about chloroplasts. They are cyanobacteria:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC153454/
The origins of eukaryotes themselves are not known. One theory has it that various bits acquired by a prokaryotic cell from its endosymbionts fell together to form a nucleus. But it is just a theory, like many others.
What seems to be certain is that the atmospheric oxygen was evolved from a great variety of living cells’ photosystems, eubacterial and eukaryotic. Oxygen is too reactive to remain in the atmosphere without a constant evolution from photosynthesis.
@ur momisugly RICHARD CLENNEY says:
June 4, 2013 at 12:04 pm
About 45% of the sunlight spectrum is used for photosynthesis, which of course is a separate issue from the energetic efficiency of the process.
Hmm. Has anybody looked at whether any of the missing heat is locked up in biomass?
Curious: How did herbivores survive in Triassic period if co2 levels were half what they are today…isn’t 180ppm a cut off point for successful plant development?
Where the draw down in CO2 is leading is probably a reprise of the P/T “boundary” (e.g. extinction event). That will liberate enough CO2 as a byproduct of decay, to milk a little more life out of the biosphere. However, it is clearly trending toward the ultimate death. The death of all life on Earth.
Well, as far as I can see from the second chart, 40-45 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch, the global temperature was approximately 23 C, as compared to the current of 14 C. That is 9 degrees C higher, and yet the oceans did not boil away which apparently is the nightmare Jim Hansen has. We have a long, long way to go before reaching such a warmer temperature state.
Another observation from the second chart, apparently for the past 600 million years of earth’s geological history, CO2 concentrations have been considerably higher than our current atmospheric levels for about 95% of the time. So what is all the fuss about, really? Did Dyno the Tyrono drive an SUV?
Excellent discussion, but one critically important point. The chart is essentially impossible to discern by those of us with genetic defects that leave us color insensitive. I have red/green color insensitivity, essentially my Red and Green receptor chromophores are too close together and I cannot distinguish 40 of the 46 color test patterns. So, pleas be aware of this when preparing charts that only use color to define the legend. Thanks from the genetically impaired.
For those above. Only about 45% of sunlight wavelengths are photosyntheticly active radiation (PAR). For a variety of reasons detailed in the world biofuels chapter of my first book, the actual net average efficiency is about 1% in the tropics. (there is a wide range depending on C3 or C4 pathway, etc). So less in temperate zones, most which are in northern latitudes, whichnis why the Keeling curve has annual seasonality with CO2 peaking in spring, just before the seasonal biological sequestration ( plant food) begins. That seasonality allows a calculation of the percentage of annual emissions being sequestered through photosynthesis.
This seems to be a day with a lot of suspect posts. The conditions of the Earth and it’s biosphere in the Carboniferous or the Permian are NOT good indicators of conditions or how they might change in the Holocene or the ‘anthropocene’. Different biome, with continents in different positions. That is at best a very weak argument against AGW. To my mind it weakens rather than strengthens the overall sceptical case. Ditto the posting on glaciers, which even if true confused them with stable ice sheets, and completely got wrong the Greenland Ice cores. Ditto the posting on temp and CO2, which took the obvious fact of Henry’s law and Gore got the sequence wrong to assert no anthropogenic CO2 last 100 years. The rate of exchange is several centuries depending on who read which ice core. So the Keeling curve represents anthropogenic CO2 from burning fossil fuels, after some additional dissolving in seawater ( proven by ‘acidification’) and some additional biological sequestration ( e.g. the recent desert greening post).
Accepting ‘bad arguments’ against AGW is not much better than those who accept bad arguments for AGW. WUWT should be about finding and strengthening good arguments.
Further to Gail’s post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/04/dr-vincent-gray-on-historical-carbon-dioxide-levels/#comment-1326044
More on carbon dioxide the basic foodstuff of carbon life – http://theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/11Phl/Sci/CO2&Health.html
We are Carbon Life Forms.
The idea that a trace real gas drives global temperatures is absurd, even if we didn’t have extensive research through ice cores, stomata to show how it lagged temperature, always an effect, never the cause, that carbon dioxide is claimed to be a “thermal blanket trapping heat” when it is practically 100% hole in atmosphere shows clearly that all the arguments about “degree of sensitivity” have lost touch with reality. But that was the object of exercise, to produce a fake fisics changing all the properties and processess in order to push the AGW narrative and to that end the argument between CAGWs and AGWs created, the protagonists on both sides so caught up in it that neither side wants to be reminded that there have never been shown any empirical science for the claims about carbon dioxide; both sides dismiss any mention of this with a general handwaving in the direction of the past garbling reposts that ‘there are countless experiments to prove it’, but never producing any. And neither side notices there is no rain in their CAGW/AGW carbon cycle.
Shrug, why should they? They haven’t even noticed their energy budget is missing the whole of the Water Cycle.
Volcanic eruptions expel large volumes of CO2, from the Earth’s interior.
Expert opinion appreciated on the following two points:
Does CO2 signature identify its origin either as of interior chemical reactions or less likely organic from subduction process ?
Are the volumes of ejected lava and CO2 related?
Thanks.
p.s. if you are in the UK, BBC4 on Voyager space probes now on.