An illustration that CO2 won't roast the Earth in a runaway tipping point…

“Greenhouse Gas” theory disproved right there …

C3 plant CO2 starvation…..people do not seem to realize our planet was evolving…and C4 plants evolved from a lack of CO2 and high temps
Raise hell about something going extinct…and not realize what was happening
…talk about changing and not being able to adapt

Bill_W – are you daft? Can you not use Google? It looks like the red dotted line is the line of best fit for the Berner Geocarb III (Orange line). Robert A. Berner from Yale University produced and published this data in 2001. I am not sure what Expon. (Not Exxon) means. Exponential?

I have presented similar information to CAGWers before. Their response was, “but the world was much different then, and you can not compare the present period with past periods when it comes to CO2.”
I have also seen a chart done graphing very old CO2 levels with temperature. There is some correlation, but not much. See the link below:
http://rogerfromnewzealand.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/global-temp-co2-over-geological-time.jpg

OK thank you. Looks like in the past when CO2 concentrations were higher than current, it was also warmer, when they were lower, it was cooler. Generally speaking, of course, and temperatures seem to plateau at 22C avg. It would have been good if Anthony Watts had been open about this in his post, rather than simply showing CO2 concentrations and somehow leaving it up to the reader’s imagination/intuition/prejudice to deduce what he’s trying to show!

Pedantic old Fart says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:15 pm
Reply; the problem as I see it is there is way too much calcium buffering mass in the earth planetary body, and it is slowly absorbing all of the CO2, we need to find a way to geoengineer a release of CO2 from the rock, shell, and coral sequestration that is starving the green plants in the long run.

Eric says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:03 pm
Bill_W – are you daft? Can you not use Google? It looks like the red dotted line is the line of best fit for the Berner Geocarb III (Orange line). Robert A. Berner from Yale University produced and published this data in 2001. I am not sure what Expon. (Not Exxon) means. Exponential?
greymouser70 says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:04 pm
Bill W. You need to get your eyeglasses checked. That last source reads Expon. The red dashed line is the exponential plot of the CO2 trend.
Guys,
I think Bill was being funny.
Richard

s/funny/sarcastic/p

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:39 pm
“Uh-oh, the CO₂ level is dropping fast. Won’t be much longer until the plants shut down, then all life expires except a few small critters not using oxygen-based respiration.”
I hope you are not serious and that you just neglected to mark the comment as being snark.

Richard Holle says:
Reply; the problem as I see it is there is way too much calcium buffering mass in the earth planetary body, and it is slowly absorbing all of the CO2, we need to find a way to geoengineer a release of CO2 from the rock, shell, and coral sequestration that is starving the green plants in the long run.
A lime kiln does exactly that and has been in use by man since prehistory. It needs a heat source though.

The CO2 production from cement making process is temporary, the fresh concrete re absorbs as much CO2 as was released in the slaking process, was the problem with the sealed biosphere building experiment, organic matter decomposed into methane and CO2 then was sequestered back into the concrete, taking the oxygen with it till it got low oxygen content life threatening.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html
Lots more links in Google.

Interesting that the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, aka “Carboniferous” is very low in CO2 but this was the era when almost all global coal seams were laid down! This means that the very high CO2 previously created these enormous tropical swamps which died down in the Carboniferous sequestering all the C as coal without any help from us. It is just mind boggling that we have spent $2 trillion because of the pathetic CO2 problem illustrated in this graph. It seems as if the Climategate scandal, which put CAGW into a downward spiral, allowed shackled, closeted scientists to come out of the woodwork and release a pent up store of scientific papers.
Kit Carruthers says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:00 pm
“Your graphs show nothing about temperature, so where does the assertion come that CO2 won’t affect temperature? A more meaningful (not to mention honest) illustration would be to show palaeo temperatures plotted with CO2 concentrations.”
True, but it is well known anyway that the swings from min to max throughout the last billion years has only been 8-10 degrees. Note the high (lets give it ~+6 degree C higher to be generous) coincides with 7000 ppm CO2, that’s ~20 times present CO2, that’s just over 4 doublings so Climate sensitivity is 1.5C per doubling, that’s a nice generous figure. Compare this with 5 or 6 degrees by 2100 and you will see why non-members of the club are crying foul with IPCC and the Hockey Team.

What are the views today of James Lovelock?

I am James Lovelock, scientist and author, known as the originator of Gaia theory, a view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating entity that keeps the surface environment always fit for life… I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilization. – Bishop Hill, James Lovelock, 12 December 2012 (in a letter noted by Phillip Bratby) via (WUWT 1/26/2013)

Lovelock was not so much recanting Climate Change alarmism, but taking issue with some of solutions proposed by the Greens.
There is an NBC report: ‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate from April 23, 2012 that where he is definitely slowing down his alarmism.

The new book will discuss how humanity can change the way it acts in order to help regulate the Earth’s natural systems, performing a role similar to the harmonious one played by plants when they absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
[The book] will also reflect his new opinion that global warming has not occurred as he had expected. “The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,”..
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now. ,,, The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,”…
Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”
He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, … “It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.
“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.
…he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” ….
Lovelock said he would not take back a word of his seminal work “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,” published in 1979. But of “Revenge of Gaia,” published in 2006, he said he had gone too far in describing what the warming Earth would see over the next century. “I would be a little more cautious — but then that would have spoilt the book,” he quipped.

His 1979 book made the crucial observation that the Sun has gradually warmed as it aged. What kept the Earth comfortable was life’s net consumption of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A negative feedback loop to keep life from using up too much carbon dioxide and thus making the climate cool and slow life down. If it warmed, life would use up more carbon dioxide and restore the balance. The drama of Gaia is that the planet is nearly out of carbon dioxide buffer. Carbon dioxide cannot go down much more without starving plants and we are at a sensitive portion of the logaritmic curve, so ice ages can easily happen. I believed the theory then and it is still a live hypothesis.
There seems little doubt that Lovelock still believes that rising CO2 levels will result in warming and that humans must do something to stop it. Buy I was struck by this statement:
“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age” This is an important rejoinder to any claims of “Precautionary Principle” because there are TWO possibilities to try to avoid.

If the whole premise was true that CO2, sunlight and water vapour created a run away warming effect then we have just discovered a free perpetual energy source more powerful than PV cells, wind etc combined. based on that why is it that we havent built reactors to take advantage of such a powerfull free energy source??

Scott says:
August 8, 2013 at 6:13 pm

If the whole premise was true that CO2, sunlight and water vapour created a run away warming effect then we have just discovered a free perpetual energy source more powerful than PV cells, wind etc combined. based on that why is it that we havent built reactors to take advantage of such a powerfull free energy source??

We have–they’re called “forests”.
Now the Greens don’t want us cutting down and burning anything.
Are they trying to drive CO2 even lower?
Are they setting up such a devastating array of CO2-hungry monsters that when fossil fuels are finally outlawed, foodstuff plants will die out, taking us with them?
Are people with too much time and evil thoughts on their hands going to destroy most of us in their quest for a Green Nirvana?
Rather looks like it.

And there was a proliferation of biodiversity and rapid evolution in the Cambrian….

I wonder what happened to ocean acidification when CO2 content was more than 1000ppm.
Did all the coral reef vanish then? AGW is not only global surface temperature rise.

Damn those flowering plants for making the world safe for primate evolution !

Poor old trilobites, having their world destroyed by rising sea levels and increasing temperatures as a result of all that CO2. No, hang on a minute. It is humans that have adapted our world, cities, agriculture, etc, to the low CO2 world and it is that world which is likely to be changed by rising CO2 levels. Pretty graphs showing CO2 in the geological past posted like this are leading the faithful away from the real point. Or is that the point?

I am still confused as to how the alarmist crowd can get away with continually ‘denying’ evolution.
More particularly the one part of Darwin’s theory that is (almost) universally accepted and completely non-controversial. I refer of course to Natural Selection, by which all life adapts, either to survive a changed ecology or to take advantage of that change (or both)
It appears to be incontrovertible that plants thrive with much higher Co2 rates than have been naturally present for many years.I am no scientist but then I don’t have to be as it is easy to find the information on this.
Plants starve under 180 ppmv and thrive best at 1-3000 ppmv. Those plants must have experienced CO2 levels at least as high as the amount they can make best use of.
So for them to say higher amounts (than the ~260ppmv which was the baseline for all the alarmism) are harmful, while most plants are still limited by Co2 much lower than optimum is to invalidate ‘Micro’ evolution, without which ‘Macro’ evolution is also invalidated.
So why are eminent persons like Richard Dawkins not screaming foul on these ‘scientist’s’?

Aiden
They don’t deny evolution. They are just not stupid enough to think that trilobites built cities next to the sea or artificially selected crops adapted to pre-industrial CO2 levels. The point Anthony makes here is totally spurious.
Margaret
REPLY: Trilobites cities? And you think MY point is spurious? LOL! – Anthony

Kit Carruthers says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:16 pm
“OK thank you. Looks like in the past when CO2 concentrations were higher than current, it was also warmer, when they were lower, it was cooler. Generally speaking, of course, and temperatures seem to plateau at 22C avg. ”
And the direction of causation (if any) is…?
Look into methods of examining time series.
Granger causality.
see Beenstock & Reingewertz – 2011 I think.

“richardscourtney says: SOMETHING SHOUTY”
Richard HERE IS A GRAPH which SHOW Internet Explorer USAGE WITH time. I will LEAVE YOU TO DRAW your own CONCLUSIONS about HOW IT AFFECTS TEMPERATURE http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/articles/internet_explorer_usage_statistics-2010-11-02.gif
Less facetiously, and to answer others, I thought Anthony Watts stood for transparency in this debate. By simply showing CO2 concentrations over different Geological periods, he relates nothing to temperature. I can see the post title is about runaway temperatures, but without containing the evidence in the post, I am having to assess what I see based on prejudice, rather than evidence.
If the evidence that links CO2 and temperature was shown, then we could at least have a proper scientific discussion about the relationship. As it stands, we can’t, because we’re not presented with all the data, therefore we revert to whatever we already believe. Which means this post is pandering to Watts’ main audience of climate sceptics, and is not transparent, unbiased, or rigorously scientific.
But that’s JUST ME DRAWING MY OWN conclusions FROM the GRAPH!!!! etc…

Stuart McL says:
“Care to name 2 or three species that have gone extinct in the last 100 years.”
These are the birds only, and in the United States only, which have gone extinct in the last 100 years:
Laysan Crake 1944
Passenger Pigeon 1914
Carolina Parakeet 1918
Ivory-billed Woodpecker 1950’s
Kamao 1983
Kauai O’o 1985
Hawaii O’o 1934
Bachmann’s Warbler 1962
Nukupuu 1998
Lanai Hookbill 1913
Kakawahie 1963
Poouli 2004
Laysan Honeyeater 1923
Kauai Akialoa 1969

Being a software engineer, the La Brea Tar Pits have an almost mythical meaning to us. (Look up the book The Mythical Man-Month, the cover image is of the tar pits in action.) I have made my pilgrimage there. Wasn’t too hard, I was in Santa Monica on business.
Ric, I have found another kin. You have read ‘The Mythical Man Month’. Brilliant Book. I was a lot of things in my career including Senior Project Manager and Software Engineering Instructor and the MMM was my bible. I was severely criticised on one occasion by a feminist loon when I used one of the inter-chapter quotes “If it takes one woman 9 months to have baby how long does it take 9 women” She really blew.

David L. Hagen says: @ August 8, 2013 at 3:59 pm
…. Developing world farmers need all the help they can get from higher CO2 and higherer precipitation to better feed their families.
Why are “climate scientists” inverting the evidence with systemically biased unvalidated models?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
(I agree with the farmers needing the help of CO2.)
Why are “climate scientists” inverting the evidence? Because they are paid to do so. If they don’t go along with the political agenda they get the boot.

…. Zbigniew Jaworowski, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Environmental Program, and current chair of the Scientific Committee of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw…..
Dr. Jaworowski has devoted much of his professional life to the study of the composition of the atmosphere, as part of his work to understand the consequences of radioactive fallout from nuclear-weapons testing and nuclear reactor accidents….
…After taking numerous ice samples over the course of a dozen field trips to glaciers in six continents, and studying how contaminants travel through ice over time, he came to realize how fraught with error ice-core samples were in reconstructing the atmosphere. The Chernobyl accident, whose contaminants he studied in the 1990s in a Scandinavian glacier, provided the most illumination.
“This ice contained extremely high radioactivity of cesium-137 from the Chernobyl fallout, more than a thousand times higher than that found in any glacier from nuclear-weapons fallout, and more than 100 times higher than found elsewhere from the Chernobyl fallout,” he explained. “This unique contamination of glacier ice revealed how particulate contaminants migrated, and also made sense of other discoveries I made during my other glacier expeditions. It convinced me that ice is not a closed system, suitable for an exact reconstruction of the composition of the past atmosphere.”
Because of the high importance of this realization, in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be “immoral” if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research.
The refusal did not come as a surprise. Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article published by the Norwegian Polar Institute, Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute’s director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that “this is not the way one gets research projects.” Once published, the institute came under fire, especially since the report soon sold out and was reprinted. Said one prominent critic, “this paper puts the Norsk Polarinstitutt in disrepute.” Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski’s science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding.…
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6

The whole scam is political and has been from the very beginning. It was never about determining what factors control climate but providing ‘a scientific basis’ for controlling people. The IPCC even comes right out and says so.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation.
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/

Pascal Lamy Director-General of the World Trade Organization gives the reasons.

…In the same way, climate change negotiations are not just about the global environment but global economics as well — the way that technology, costs and growth are to be distributed and shared.….
Can we balance the need for a sustainable planet with the need to provide billions with decent living standards? Can we do that without questioning radically the Western way of life?….
The reality is that, so far, we have largely failed to articulate a clear and compelling vision of why a new global order matters — and where the world should be headed. Half a century ago, those who designed the post-war system — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) — were deeply influenced by the shared lessons of history….
All had lived through the chaos of the 1930s — when turning inwards led to economic depression, nationalism and war. All, including the defeated powers, agreed that the road to peace lay with building a new international order — and an approach to international relations that questioned the Westphalian, sacrosanct principle of sovereignty….
http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=9174

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” ~ H. L. Mencken
CAGW is an excellent illustration of this statement.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:39 pm
Uh-oh, the CO₂ level is dropping fast. Won’t be much longer until the plants shut down, then all life expires except a few small critters not using oxygen-based respiration….
…insane people want to capture it from power plant exhaust, so they can creatively dispose of it deep underground where they hope it will be gone forever. Don’t they understand this clearly-presented evidence? Why do they want to exterminate virtually all life on Earth? ARE THEY MAD?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
My feeling exactly! But try telling the Tree Huggers that.
Ain’t propaganda and brainwashing great. /sarc

Interesting. We are at the low end of CO2 concentration now.

Dirk H
Plants adapted, not the world. There is a spurious point being raised: no humans or their activities were affected back in the Cambrian. That is the issue now.
Margaret

The way I read that chart is that the biosphere as figured out how to exploit the overabundance of atmospheric CO2 to it’s advantage and is at the limit.

Anthony
I rather think the LOL is on you. My point, any AGW realist’s point, is that the changes now will adversely affect human populations. Of course trilobites didn’t build cities and I thought you would spot that joke for what it was. The dissimulation, though, is clear – it doesn’t matter to those people likely to be affected by climate change what the level of CO2 was in the Ordovician, it matters how it changes now and what the effects of that change will be. I thought my main point was clear – there are humans around now and they have built cities by the sea.

REPLY: “the changes now will adversely affect human populations” Riiight, humans, like trilobites, are incapable of adapting to different a climate. Check. Point out a place on this climate map of the Earth where people have not settled and adapted to the climate there. (Hint: there’s only one place, can you guess it?)
Your logic is about as good as Bill Mckibben’s, i.e. emotionally based.- Anthony

Margaret Hardman says:
August 9, 2013 at 5:12 am
“Dirk H
Plants adapted, not the world.”
The world.
The atmosphere has been made by plants.
I don’t want to sound like Lovelock but the Earth is a homeostatic system with life as part of the governing loop.

@Margaret Hardman
The earth is just around the corner to move from this short 12,000-year interglacial period into another 90,000-year glaciation period. This seesawing has occurred with relative regularity for the last 2.6 million years. There is really nothing going on at the present time to suggest this will change in the future. This brings about a good news-bad news scenario for our coastal cities.
First, the good news: all of our coastal cities will be saved from flooding as sea levels will lower considerably.
Second, the bad news: most of our coastal cities north of the 40th parallel will be under at least 2000 metres of an ice sheet near the end of this glaciation period.

very good post, charts are incredible

For me the most informative graph of CO2 and palaeo temps over the last 600 million years is this one.
The blue dots are the data. The lines are for political corectness and the reader can asssess for themselves their correspondence to reality.
In general this figure supports statements here that we are close to the low, not the high, end of the range of CO2 levels safe for the biosphere.

JimS says we are in for renewed glaciation. Ox AO says the current interglacial is about to end. We’ve got plenty of time, in the order of 20,000 years to worry about that. Since you and others don’t get my point, I am currently looking across the Bay of Naples at Vesuvius. When it erupted in 79ad, thousands died. A similar eruption today would kill tens of thousands. Our modern world is predicated on a continuation of what we have now. Many changes will be good, many neutral and many bad. No one here denies that climates change. Ameliorating those changes is not a bad idea. It doesn’t matter what causes them, if the climate changes too rapidly, there will be human suffering. End of story. Now do you get t?

policycritic at 8:21 pm
Is this a common plate tectonics formula?
No, it is not.
Neither it is a commonly accepted formula for the creation of hydrocarbons.
It isn’t even a formula for the creation of “rock”, as “rock” requires copious amounts of Silicon, Potassium, Aluminum, Magnesium, Manganese, Phosphorous, In addition to the iron in the formula (which comes from where, btw?) and the Calcium and Oxygen that could come from limestone and water.
Even then, these are not enough. In some rocks or there must be minor amounts of Chlorine, Fluorine, Lithium, Sulphur, Titanium, Boron, or Beryllium, and sporadically there must be concentrations of nearly all other metals with atomic numbers from 22 to 92 (except for 43) into rocks we call “ores”
http://www.mineralseducationcoalition.org/periodic-table-elements
See also the Bowens Reaction Series (by convention the hottest is on top the coolest on the bottom)
The vast majority of hydrocarbons in known deposits come from organic matter that is buried, heated, under pressure, and molecularly “cracks” large organic molecules into smaller ones. Plate Tectonics is the mechanism for bending rock and focused migration and trapping of hydrocarbons into commercial accumulations, or “fields”
That said, there could be a separate, abiogenic process to source light hydrocarbons, principally methane, from the deep crust or mantle.

The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth’s crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of the core. — Science Daily July 27,

Wikipedia: Abiogenic Petroleum Origin

is a hypothesis that was proposed as an alternative mechanism of petroleum origin. It was popular in the past, but most geologists now consider it obsolete, and favor instead the biological origin of petroleum.

This is really too kind. We have produced and know the locations of many trillions of barrels of oil and many quadrillions of cubic feet of natural gas (methane + minor amounts of ethane, propane, butane). For the vast majority of these hydrocarbon deposits, we know the age and approximate locations of the rocks containing the original organic material. All these hydrocarbons are most easily explained by from a biologic source.

Geologists now consider the abiogenic formation of petroleum scientifically unsupported, and they agree that petroleum is formed from organic material.[1] However, the abiogenic theory can’t be dismissed yet because the mainstream theory still has to be established conclusively.[3]

This last sentence is fundamentally and logically wrong! Even if we conclusively prove the mainstream theory, that does not preclude a second parallel abiogenic process, even if in trivial, non-commercial amounts. Since Wiki has this logical error, let me posit the Wiki has another: that the mainstream theory is now proved.
The shale oil and shale gas revolutions today proves a biologic source of hydrocarbons. Oil and gas are being produced directly from the source rock, of known age, thermal history, and organic content. Instead of waiting for the hydrocarbons to migrate to a trap over millions of years, we have gone straight to the “source” and produce these from the “kitchen”. These hydrocarbons could not possibly be abiogenic for there is no way they could be created in the mantle and work their way into impermeable shales and not found elsewhere. This case is closed. The vast majority of all oil and gas is biogenic. The theory has worked for 100 years and quadrillions of dollars.
In today’s shale gas revolution, nothing changed in our theory for the source of hydrocarbons. What changed was our techniques for getting hydrocarbons our theories knew were there out of those tight rocks.
That doesn’t mean there are no abiogenic hydrocarbons. An theory of abiogenic source for hydrocarbons has to stand on its own. And it has to earn its keep. It would help if some hydrocarbons could be found on earth where a biological source was unlikely, much less impossible.

Stephen Rasey says:
August 10, 2013 at 11:03 pm

Thanks for your reply. Have you ever heard this interview? It’s Dr. J.F. Kenney on NPR a few years ago. He makes the point that there are 4,000 Russian articles in the scientific literature and “hundreds of books and many, many monographs” about abiotic oil that haven’t been translated into English. In this NPR interview, Kenney discusses the abiotic mantle origin of petroleum, and makes the point that biological molecules cannot exist at temperatures higher than the critical temperature of salt water, which he says is reached at 3-5 km down depending on whether you’re in continental or marine environment. He said the Russian scientists found CaCO3 was of mantle origin from isotope tests on carbonitite formations in the mantle. And they were able to create oil i the lab with CaCO3, iron oxide, and triple-wet distilled water brought up to pressures of the mantle of the earth.
http://web.archive.org/web/20111025151824/http://www.gasresources.net/Kenney-NPR.mp3
The website with all Kenney’s scientific papers doesn’t seem to exist anymore; he may have died.
But I found these:
http://www.studien-von-zeitfragen.net/Zeitfragen/Petroleum/petroleum.html
A list of Russian papers with English names is at the end.
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html
Thanks, Stephen

A slight correction to Stephen Rasey 8/13 12:00 am
b. That unconventional hydrocarbon sources (shale oil, shale gas) prove at least these hydrocarbons cannot have be abiotically derived in the mantle.
Make that:
b. That unconventional hydrocarbon reservoirs (shale oil, shale gas) prove at least these hydrocarbons cannot have been abiotically derived in the mantle.
These hydrocarbons are created in conventional source rocks. It is the same type of source rocks, sometimes the very same rocks, that create hydrocarbons that migrate into conventional, higher permiabile, reservoirs. What is unconventional is that we are horizontally drilling directly through the source rock kitchen. With hydraulic fracturing, we increase the effective surface area of the well bore, shortening the hydrocarbon migration path from miles to inches, and turn the source rock into a commercial reservoir.
Conventional source rocks with immovable hydrocarbons turned into unconventional reservoirs by fracking. That is why it proves these hydrocarbons are not derived from the mantle.