WUWT reader Pethefin writes:
Finally someone addresses the really big elephant in the room: the ocean vents and their role in climate modelling:
I covered this possibility in a previous post: Do underwater volcanoes have an effect on ENSO? and I have updated that post with this animation showing a heat plume disconnected from the ENSO pattern and Google Earth graphic showing possible subaqueous volcanism sources (you may have to click the top graphic to get it to animate).
This excerpt from an essay published on Quadrant Online by John Reid also explores the question.
It hardly needs to be said that climate modelling is a far-from-settled science, despite what its practitioners would have us believe. Just how flawed becomes even more apparent when you consider that massive heat sources on the ocean floor have been entirely omitted from the warmists’ calculations
THE TOTAL power expended in volcanic heating of the ocean is well in excess of the power dissipated by wind stress and tidal friction. There is growing evidence for the existence of volcanically generated megaplumes both from satellite imagery and from direct observation. Although the physical detail remains to be explored there is growing evidence that megaplumes are, at times, responsible for variations in climate, ocean productivity and ocean export of CO2.
There is a vast amount of CO2 stored in the ocean: 38,000 gigatonnes compared with 380 gigatonnes generated by human activity since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is doubtful whether mankind’s modest one percent contribution has made very much difference. Nevertheless oceanographers seem quite reluctant to acknowledge the role of subaqueous volcanism in influencing ocean circulation, ocean ecology, climate variation and CO2 flux. Why should this be so?
One possible explanation is that oceanography and climate science have come to be heavily dependent on numerical fluid dynamic modelling. “Ocean-atmosphere general circulation models” or OAGCMs have become the preferred means of investigating ocean circulation. The ocean-atmosphere model is tuned to settle down, after “spin-up”, to a steady state where it remains until deliberately perturbed by some external factor such as changing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. According to these models the ocean in its natural state is a sort of machine, a conveyor belt steadily carrying heat, salt and dissolved gases around the planet’s oceans in the same unvarying manner until it is disturbed by humankind.
Volcanic activity does not fit this neat picture. Volcanic behaviour is random, i.e. it is “stochastic” meaning “governed by the laws of probability”. For fluid dynamic modellers stochastic behaviour is the spectre at the feast. They do not want to deal with it because their models cannot handle it. We cannot predict the future behaviour of subaqueous volcanoes so we cannot predict future behaviour of the ocean-atmosphere system when this extra random forcing is included.
To some extent, chaos theory is called in as a substitute, but modellers are very reticent about describing and locating (in phase space) the strange attractors of chaos theory which supposedly give their models a stochastic character. They prefer to avoid stochastic descriptions of the real world in favour of the more precise but unrealistic determinism of the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics.
This explains the reluctance of oceanographers to acknowledge subaqueous volcanism as a forcing of ocean circulation. Unlike tidal forcing, wind stress and thermohaline forcing, volcanism constitutes a major, external, random forcing which cannot be generated from within the model. It has therefore been ignored.
Well worth reading the entire story here:
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2014/05/ocean-vents-faulty-models/
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Fascinating reading. Well worth much research.
maccassar says:
May 4, 2014 at 10:11 am
Yes, much research needs to be done. And perhaps an acknowledgement, especially from the ocean acidification goons, that 40,000 miles of coughing mid-ocean ridges and a similar amount of subduction-arc volcanics are doing their thing…whether they like it or not.
If there are 5 or 6 “Supervolcanoes” on the land surfaces of the earth, wouldn’t it stand to reason there are 3 times as many under the sea? What effect might they have to ocean tempatures?
I have been saying this for at leaast two years now. YES, it is the elephant in the room.
All that heat, and in a concentrated area of the East Pacific Rise and the Galapagos RIft – right where El Niño effects are seen over and over. But we don’t even KNOW most of the vent locations. HUGE amounts of earth entering the ocean-atmosphere system, and they don’t account for it in any way at ALL in the climate models or climate THINKING.
There is actually a strong correlation between solar activity and vulcanism. There’s been quite a bit of research on how an electromagnetic earth interacts with cosmic rays and how this has an effect on telluric currents which, in turn, drives ohmic heating and earthquakes/volcanoes. http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/st07500u.html
This is an excellent corollary to what I find in building energy use. Operator actions cannot be input into an energy model, therefore the model cannot predict energy usage based on original design, or modifications. Commercial office buildings use ~30% of the electricity generated in the US. Based on my experience, poor operations and maintenance can account for up to 30% of that 30%, so 9% of total generation. An amazing number no one looks at….because they would have to stop modeling altogether and get into every building to find out what is going on.
Look up NEEA nightwalks videos at http://www.betterbricks.com. 6 two minute videos showing actual conditions found in class “A” high rise buildings.
Same old same old– Climate Change has happened and is going to happen regardless of anything we do or don’t do about it because of forces we still don’t understand. Man really thinks he can control the climate, and he still hasn’t got a clue what exactly drives the climate to begin with. But, men are pretty sure– read “the science is settled”– that we’re the sole cause of climate catastrophe.
This absolutely made my day. What wonderful Sunday reading. The wealth of knowledge that can be gained from this post is only exceeded by the inspiration to pursue the answers to questions it reveals. The very essence of “Science”. The commenters, as always, bring even more knowledge to the endeavor… as well as a premier source of sarcasm and wit(current commenter excluded save the sarcasm)
As for the sarcasm.. an enjoyable example to follow….
(Sarcasm on)
There is no reason to believe volcanoes play any role in climate models .. just because it can alter geography, change oceanic currents and force the release of gigatonnes of sequestered CO2 in massive eruptions doesn’t mean if can affect the climate
(Sarcasm off)
I asked this question several years ago on here and was poo-poohed by the guest poster. Glad its getting some thought. I can only imagine how hard to model.
Who on earth could ever miss the Oceans/Seas out of an analysis of the Earths Climate ?
I remember seeing a series on TV where a woman scientist said..’ the mid-ocean ridge puts more heat into the oceans in one 24-hour period than all the sunshine and human activities do in a year’. I have not been able to find it since first seeing the program. I would hate to think a programming director deleted that part of the series due to the implication of minimal AGW influence with respect to ocean warming.
BAN TECTONISM!!!!
The article reads, “THE TOTAL power expended in volcanic heating of the ocean is well in excess of the power dissipated by wind stress and tidal friction.”
Please confirm this with data. Otherwise it is nothing more than conjecture…baseless conjecture.
wouldn’t it stand to reason there are 3 times as many under the sea?
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probably much more that 3x, because the crust under the ocean basins is quite thin as compared to under the continents.
Out of the cellar: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/25/science/hot-vents-in-the-sea-floor-may-drive-el-nino.html
This one’s been around since I was an undergraduate in the 70’s.
Much of the “climate and climate change” beliefs need a physical basis that unfortunately the text, ‘Theory of Climate’ in Advances in Geophysics did not provide and the Geographer’s “Climate and Climate Change” dovetailed into astrology driven numerology by Lotus 1-2-3 then Microsoft Excel (the “Super Computers”) of the current class of Astro-Numerologists-Druids prevailed.
😉
How can you model chaos?
The solar wind, oceanic volcanic activity and so much ‘unfathomable’ science, as yet and mankind’s puny scratchings, which leave no trace.
Indeed, how can you model anything to do with climate science when the mechanisms are barely understood and the inputs/outputs are not yet even remotely quantified?
Garbage in = Garbage out, all the same.
Video – Joel McHale’s comedic performance at the 2014 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2014/05/video-joel-mchale-at-2014-white-house.html
Please confirm this with data.
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Wikipedia puts sea floor spreading at 8 x 10^{-7} m2/sec, and the mass of the crust as 1.913×10^22 kg. While not all the crust in in motion, it still looks like quite a bit of energy to move this, even before allowing for thermal transfer.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while. I would expect subsurface volcanoes must be a vast and irregular source of heat and CO2, but I don’t think we can quantify the effects until we have a better understanding of them…and the magnitude of the effects seem to be overlooked and under appreciated at present. Without further investigation and cataloging on a monumental scale, I don’t see that changing.
8 x 10^{-7} m2/sec – hmmm, the units on this look wrong. could be the wrong value here.
Every time I bring up sub marine volcansim I get treated like a child who cannot comprehend science or told some version of “the climate modelers/researchers have proven that the influence of underwater volcanoes/vents is minimal at best.” Yet we all know there has been NO in depth mapping of even 10% of the planets ocean floor, so how could anyone possibly know??
I loved seeing this here!
A known unknown being treated as an unknown unknown.
The Obvious Answer says:
May 4, 2014 at 11:13 am
BAN TECTONISM!!!!
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No, Tax it!!
Bob, I’m sure the data you need is located the the papers footnoted in the published article.
Although poor in nutrients, the Cromwell Current is rich in dissolved inorganic carbon with the result that, when this current comes to the surface near the Galapagos, excess carbon is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. A simple calculation shows that three gigatonnes of carbon dioxide are outgassed per year, i.e. equal to about half the calculated human contribution per annum
Hmmm ….