From a British Antarctic Survey Press Release. Next time some alarmist wails about ice melt in Antarctica, point them to this story that shows nature has self regulating features for our planet. (h/t to Hu McCullough)
Antarctica glacier retreat creates new carbon dioxide store
Issue date: 09 Nov 2009
Number: 11/2009
Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years. Reporting this week in the journal Global Change Biology, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) estimate that this new natural ‘sink’ is taking an estimated 3.5 million tonnes* of carbon from the ocean and atmosphere each year.
Lead author, Professor Lloyd Peck from BAS says,
“Although this is a small amount of carbon compared to global emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere it is nevertheless an important discovery. It shows nature’s ability to thrive in the face of adversity. We need to factor this natural carbon-absorption into our calculations and models to predict future climate change. So far we don’t know if we will see more events like this around the rest of Antarctica’s coast but it’s something we’ll be keeping a close eye on.”
Professor Peck and his colleagues compared records of coastal glacial retreat with records of the amount of chlorophyll (green plant pigment essential for photosynthesis) in the ocean. They found that over the past 50 years, melting ice has opened up at least 24,000 km2 of new open water (an area similar to the size of Wales) – and this has been colonised by carbon-absorbing phytoplankton. According to the authors this new bloom is the second largest factor acting against climate change so far discovered on Earth (the largest is new forest growth on land in the Arctic).Professor Peck continues, “Elsewhere in the world human activity is undermining the ability of oceans and marine ecosystems to capture and store carbon. At present, there is little change in ice shelves and coastal glaciers away from the Antarctic Peninsula, but if more Antarctic ice is lost as a result of climate change then these new blooms have the potential to be a significant biological sink for carbon.”
ENDS
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Nick (15:18:32) :
Now that you’ve gotten up to speed,Martin,you need to look at what kind of ice-shelf Wilkins is,and the timeline of its disintegration. It is not like one of the super shelves fed by very large catchments on continental Antarctica,which actively calve large fragments. It is very sensitive to regional temperature change compared to the high throughput shelves.
Yes Nick it is by it’s nature “very sensitive to regional temperature change” and we know the southern ocean and therefore the peninsular has warmed
since 92/95 (satellite). The peninsular is a small part of the Antarctic that juts up toward the equator. The temperature of the southern ocean has plateaued since then. It doesn’t change the fact that the Wilkins ice loss is trivial when you consider the overall gain in ice at the Antarctic over a similar period of time.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
Get your concerns into perspective. Look at the stupidly small area you are making such a fuss about.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/antarctic.seaice.color.001.png
Why is sea-ice trending up in area around Antarctica? A shorthand attribution;there are a lot of papers on the facets of this trend.
I’m sure there are many papers produced by pseudo scientists trying to explain away what is an inconvenience for the AGW proponents. They will no doubt be peer reviewed by pseudo scientists who are also AGW proponents.
Bart,
Since the emissions due to humans far exceed the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere by humans, and natural systems remove about 1/2 of what is emitted by humans, one can draw the conclusion that humans are responsible for 100% of the net increase in CO2 observed by the Mauna Loa measurement station.
To pretend otherwise is self deception.
Bart, from your various comments I’m guessing you might be a control systems engineer. Which is all well and good, but unless you are invoking a God or a Gaia, the Earth simply isn’t designed/engineered to regulate itself in the manner of the systems you would study.
There are positive feedbacks that would amplify a perturbation. There are negative feedbacks that would counteract that amplification. Ahead of time, you won’t know how it all works out – you have to physically describe the feedbacks, their magnitudes and timescales. There’s isn’t some designed control loop that brings you back to the original setpoint within 100 years – the Earth does go through ice age cycles, after all. It’s not as if something on the Earth responds to the orbital wobble and keeps the temperature from going down for thousands of years.
What I am responding to is commenters here who seem to think we can actually count on unpredicted and currently unknown negative feedbacks to arise, to keep the temperature anomaly below whatever level. It’s this idea that I’m saying is religious. Yes, maybe there will be some major new negative feedback that nobody ever thought of, and hasn’t been observed in action yet. But you can’t assume there will be one.
Eric A (06:42:53) : [SNIP]
carrot eater (08:40:03) : you just do not have the experience I do, and you do not understand feedback systems.
CE: let me give you a little more meat to chew on.
“the Earth simply isn’t designed/engineered to regulate itself in the manner of the systems you would study. “
Even if you do not believe in a god or gods or any other conscious designer entity, you do not have to go very far to see complex control regulation occurring in nature. As you read these words, your brain is sending a signal to your eyes to move to the next word, and your eyes are responding with precision to rotate and settle with negligible overshoot, to the point you are hardly aware of the amazing functionality being expressed.
But, there are other, more subtle, less complex principles which enforce robust regulation in nature. One very simple one is the minimum energy principle. Energy wants to flee, at every opportunity it can, and join the vast sea of entropy expanding throughout the universe. Spacecraft utilize this principle regularly to perform seemingly impossible tasks with guaranteed assurance conferred by the inexorable forces of nature.
Systems naturally move into an equilibrium position which is determined by the minimum energy state. And, when they do so, it takes a lot of energy (relatively speaking) to get them out of it. The Earth has had many eons to converge to its present state. It will naturally resist being moved out of it. It is wedged into that state, like a knot in your shoelaces, or a thatch of debris lodged in a crevice.
It is like a ball rolling down a hill. It encounters obstacles along the way, and briefly is caught by them, before other events joggle it free and it moves farther down the hill. The farther down the hill it goes, the harder it is to move it back up to the top. Eventually, it is at the bottom of the pit, and it isn’t going anywhere without a major push upward.
If the Earth’s climate system is so finely balanced that a paltry few percent of extra CO2 a year would be enough to send it back up over the figurative hill, then I am convinced we would be done for, and actually would be living on borrowed time already.
“It’s this idea that I’m saying is religious.”
For my money, the religiosity on display is on the other side, and is akin to the savage tribes which sacrificed virgins to appease the volcano because their crops had failed. The AGW bandwagon is chock full of the kind of people who believe we have angered their abstract, immanent God, and must make sacrifices to appease it.
“”” Eric A (06:42:53) :
Bart,
Since the emissions due to humans far exceed the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere by humans, and natural systems remove about 1/2 of what is emitted by humans, one can draw the conclusion that humans are responsible for 100% of the net increase in CO2 observed by the Mauna Loa measurement station.
To pretend otherwise is self deception. “””
So how exactly do humans go about removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
At 388 ppm by volume (your Mauna Loa measure) the atmosphere does NOT represent a very effective source for raw CO2; it would be extremely inefficient to obtain CO2 for dry ice and Coca Cola by extracting it from the atmosphere.
So exactly what human operations are you familiar with that go about extracting CO2 from the atmosphere. We Don’t extract Helium from the atmosphere either, even thoguh there is some to be had; but oil and gas wells provide a much better source for Helium. I wonder what we are going to use in place of Helium, when all the oil and gas operations are shut down for environmental reasons.
So we’ll give you that we emit more to the atmosphere than we extract (CO2); that’s a no brainer.
The rest of your thesis could use some supporting evidence.
If North America is a net carbon sink, as is claimed in the peer reviewed scientific literature; that would imply that your statement regarding the removal of only half of our emitted CO2, would seem to not apply to at least North America. So what is everybody else doing wrong, that makes them net carbon emitters ?
MartinGAtkins (00:36:52) :
Phil. (09:55:27) :
So the bridge broke up at the time maximum ice melt. There is nothing remarkable about a narrow strip of ice joining an island and an ice shelf breaking up.
Indeed, but it is only recently that it became ‘a narrow strip of ice’, previously it was a stable ice sheet without a history (~ a century) of calving events.
“In February 2008 an area of about 400 km² broke off from the ice shelf, narrowing the ice bridge down to a 6 km strip. At the end of May 2008 an area of about 160 km² broke off, reducing the ice bridge to just 2.7 km. Between 30 May and 9 July 2008, the ice shelf experienced further disintegration and lost about 1 350 km².
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula, had been stable for most of the last century before it began retreating in the 1990s. ”
“There’s more to it than that, in the Antarctic sea ice is predominantly annual and thin, whereas the shelf is perennial and very thick in the case of the Wilkins it’s not being ‘pushed’ (~200m thick).”
My description of the difference between sea ice and ice shelves was a generalization and framed as such my description was correct. Even without a strong glacial influence accumulated land ice will slowly push the shelf away from the land mass.
Really, why?
This effect is somewhat restricted by the island and land formations around the Wilkins Sound. The shelfs connection with the Latady and Charcot islands has always been tenuous.
Not so, see for instance: http://www.esa.int/images/Wilkins_IceShelf_SAR_IMP_Orbit02586_19920113_inverted_H.jpg
There is nothing about the annual dance of the Wilkins ice shelf that has anything meaningful to say about the global climate.
There isn’t an ‘annual dance’, the last few years have seen its demise after many years of stability. My guess is that the main connection to Latady won’t last much longer.
Bart,
“you just do not have the experience I do, and you do not understand feedback systems.”
Spare me the appeal to your own authority. What you need to do is identify the various feedbacks, and quantify them. You’ve got ice-albedo, lapse rate, water vapor, clouds, changes in vegetation, changes in sealife, methane from the permafrost, possibly changes in the ocean’s effectiveness as a carbon sink – all these things are in the picture, and more.
All these things affect the climate response. Some are stronger than others; some will not really kick in until into the future. The question is, on a timescale relevant to us humans now – say, over the next 100 years, how much will these amplify or counteract the effect of greenhouse gas emissions?
“As you read these words, your brain is sending a signal to your eyes to move to the next word, and your eyes are responding with precision to rotate and settle with negligible overshoot, to the point you are hardly aware of the amazing functionality being expressed.”
That living things have evolved through natural selection to have complex internal systems is completely irrelevant to the question at hand. Please discuss the feedbacks actually active in the climate system.
“Systems naturally move into an equilibrium position which is determined by the minimum energy state. And, when they do so, it takes a lot of energy (relatively speaking) to get them out of it. The Earth has had many eons to converge to its present state. It will naturally resist being moved out of it. It is wedged into that state, like a knot in your shoelaces, or a thatch of debris lodged in a crevice.”
The energy is coming from the Sun, Bart. If you disrupt the radiation balance around the earth, such that more energy is coming in than going out, it will have to get warmer. This is true of anything, including the Earth. This can happen if the sun decides to start giving off more radiation. This can also happen if you change the composition of the atmosphere. It can happen if variations in the Earth’s orbit cause changes in how much solar radiation the Earth receives. The latter is what triggers the ice age cycles. In your little picture of “the Earth will resist any changes because it’s in equilibrium”, ice ages would be impossible. Yet they occur.
Your ideas are straight out of James Lovelock and Gaia. That line of thought is philosophical, not scientific.
CE: it really is no use discussing things with you. You latch onto the inconsequential pedagogical and heuristic information which I include so that you can ignore the substance of the whole. Your reasoning is circular and sloppy.
This is the second time I have engaged with you. Frankly, it is tiresome. [snip, enough of these petty insults ~ ctm] Have a nice day.
Eric A (06:42:53) : Too bad my comment got snipped. It pithily summed up the quality of your argument. If you want to go read through the thread and pay attention to it, [snip, enough of these petty insults ~ ctm]
Petty insults?
“Your ideas are straight out of James Lovelock and Gaia.”
What was that?
“To pretend otherwise is self deception.”
Or that?
Don’t worry about it. I recognize your wish to keep the discussion civil. A la Joe Pesci as “My Cousin Vinny”, I’m done these guys.
Reply: It’s a tough subjective road to keep discussions civil. It gets more complex with multiple moderators in the mix. I might be snipping you while insults directed at you get through via another moderator. The intent is positive. I apologize if you feel you received the short end of the stick. ~ charles the moderator
Bart, feel free to clearly explain what the substance of your argument is. So far as I can tell, you are trying to make an a priori argument for why negative feedbacks will dominate over the positive ones. How you can make such a statement without actually examining the feedbacks, I cannot understand.
Do you at least accept that the earth must warm up, if the solar energy coming to it exceeds the energy leaving it?
I’m used to sceptics emphasizing the natural variability of the earth’s climate. Here, you seem to be saying the opposite – that there can be no variations, because the Earth is stuck in some equilibrium. I’ve heard a lot of arguments over the years, but this is a new one on me.
Bart, have a look at the Gaia hypothesis, and you’ll see a marked similarity to what you are saying here. It was not flung as a random insult. The Gaia hypothesis holds that the various geological and biological systems on earth somehow provide feedbacks to ensure that conditions on earth are maintained so as to be appropriate for life: a homeostasis of the earth, so to speak. This appears very similar to what you are saying.
Carrot eater, in the last billion years the earth has had the ice-caps meet at the equator, been smacked by asteroids, had volcanic events that covered continents in ash (Yellowstone Park) and suffered flood basalt events whose climatic effects have been disastrous.
Yet always the climate has returned to a norm within 10 C (18 F) of today’s climate.
Despite your inflated guilt complex I can assure you Man’s influence cannot compare with these events, and yes, the climate can handle it.
Sandy: Nobody has ever said that man’s influence will ever cause a change as drastic as snowball earth, or an meteor impact. Well, nobody who is properly representing the scientific position.
What is being disputed above is whether man can cause any change at all. And one person seems to think no changes are possible.
Sandy, think about all those examples you just gave. The impact of a meteor eventually passes from the climate because the dust eventually settles out, etc. In the meanwhile, there can be extinction events. Same with volcanoes – the climate recovers after the ash clears out. Not because of some magical feedback.
Or, take the ice ages. They’re caused initially by changes in the earth’s orbit; less solar radiation makes it in. The earth gets quite a bit colder. There aren’t magical feedbacks that keep this from happening; in fact, there are feedbacks that amplify it. Does the ice age stop because of some magical regulatory feedback? No, it stops when the orbit wobbles back and there is again more solar radiation.
It’s pretty simple. More energy coming into the earth than leaving it = warming.
@ur momisugly Bart (01:09:14) :
“0.00001% is ‘some portion’”. 0.00001% is not equal to “no need to hypothesize an anthropogenic driver.” 0.00001% is not even close to 200%, the “portion” we’re actually emitting. To shameless steal Wolfgang Pauli’s snark, 0.00001% is not even wrong.
“negative feedback which, despite our best efforts, is handily dealing with our output.” I’d say “handily dealing withhalf our output.” (assuming handily=acidifying the oceans) What about the other half? (Insider snark -Carrot eater, what’s the stability of a PID control loop going to be if you divide the loop coefficients in half?)
“Let me see if I have this straight. CO2 has been increasing in the atmosphere: check. The oceans have become marginally more acidic: check. Atmospheric CO2 absorbed in the oceans could contribute to ocean acidity: check. Therefore, this is independent verification that the rise in CO2 is largely manmade: …huh?”
Nope, you don’t have it straight – you left out a few things.
Humans are emitting a large amount of CO2 from fossil carbon fuels into the atmosphere with an identifiable 13C/12C ratio. (check?)
CO2 has been increasing in the atmosphere at a rate which accounts for about half the amount we are emitting, and with the same 13C/12C ratio as our emissions.
The oceans have become marginally more acidic* by 1-absorbing more CO2 from some source with 2- a 13C/13C ratio similar to fossil fuel emissions.The shortest distance between point 1 and point 2 is a straight line, not a circular argument.
Atmospheric CO2 absorbed in the oceans could contribute to ocean acidity and has the same 13C/12C isotopic signature as the observed increase in seawater carbonate acidity, unlike, for instance, Mid Ocean Ridge CO2 emissions, or GCRs which make 14C.
* William Howard and co-author Andrew Moy of the University of Tasmania in Australia in recent research published in Nature Geoscience, show shell weights of modern-day foraminifera falling between 30 and 35 percent. Howard told Reuters “We’ve already changed the pH of the ocean by about 0.1. At these levels this represents about a 30 percent increase in the acidity of the oceans,” I think the spin word you’re looking for is “significantly”, not “marginally”. Why don’t we just say “30% more acidic” and let others vote on whether its marginal or significant.
“First, Tamino starts hopping up and down and shrieking” Ad hominem. (I took Latin in high school, though I have forgotten most of it)
What do people think of a scatterplot that shows r^2=0.999880? What about 2 allegedly different scatterplots that BOTH show r^2= 0.999880?
Dr Spencer says “Let’s say the oceans are producing an extra 1 unit of CO2, mankind is producing 1 unit, and nature is absorbing an extra 1.5 units. Then we get the situation we have today, with CO2 rising at about 50% the rate of human emissions.” And if mankind weren’t producing 1 unit, then CO2 would be declining at 0.5 units per year; CO2 isn’t declining, therefore mankind’s emissions are responsible for the rising CO2.
Brian Dodge (14:57:36)
I showed you conclusively that Tamino made a stupid error and was wrong, and you are clutching on the incredibly thin straw that something I said might hurt his feelings? Is Tamino a saint who never would stoop to such depths of depravity (oh, the horror!)? Hardly. The guy’s a one man sarcastic wrecking crew. What a joke.
“What do people think of a scatterplot that shows r^2=0.999880? What about 2 allegedly different scatterplots that BOTH show r^2= 0.999880?”
That was the whole point… you know?
Really, Brian, you came in strong, but you’re just flailing now. Everything you put forward starts with the presumption that the rise in CO2 is caused by humankind, then uses the effects of a rise in CO2 to claim that the rise is due to humankind. Did your Latin include “circulus in probando”? How about “petitio principii”?
Bart (16:23:39) :
“‘What do people think of a scatterplot that shows r^2=0.999880? What about 2 allegedly different scatterplots that BOTH show r^2= 0.999880?’
That was the whole point… you know?”
I thought the point was the slope, not the correlation; as Spencer says “Significantly, note that the ratio of C13 variability to CO2 variability is EXACTLY THE SAME as that seen in the trends!”
“Everything you put forward starts with the presumption that the rise in CO2 is caused by humankind…” My starting presumption is “we know humankind is producing lotsa CO2(by looking at economic data, not Keeling data); where is that CO2 is going?” Going back to Spencer, “The slope of this line (1.0952%) represents the ratio of C13 variability to C12 variability associated with the trend signals. When we compare this to what is to be expected from pure fossil CO2 (1.0945%), it is very close indeed: 97.5% of the way from “natural” C13 content (1.12372%) to the fossil content.
At this point, one might say, ‘There it is! The anthropogenic signal!'”
IMHO, that’s a good start. Throw in the correlation in amounts, the carbonification of the oceans(which precludes them being a source of CO2), and the expert opinions of many other scientists, and it’s pretty much a slam dunk.
As far as using Latin, I tend to avoid it – makes it seem like I’m desperately trying to sound as erudite and sophisticated as Lord Christopher Monckton.
@ur momisugly Terryskinner (16:08:53) :
The luminosity of the sun increased 30 percent in the last 4 billion years. solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/presentations/20080227_UAH.ppt
500,000,000 years from now solar forcing will be ~341.5(1+5e8/4e9), or about 384 watts/m^2, assuming a continued linear increase in luminosity. I wouldn’t sweat the additional forcing from the return of subducted CO2.
Brian Dodge (18:33:14)
Brian…
…I cannot help you.
Phil. (11:34:13) :
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula, had been stable for most of the last century before it began retreating in the 1990s.
So what? It’s still a piddling little piece of ice on a Peninsula of a massive frozen continent. The world isn’t and has never been in a static state.
The Antarctic is about 14.0 million km^2. 98% is covered by ice, which averages at least 1.6 kilometres (1.0 mi) in thickness and is surrounded by countless ice shelves that make the Wilkins look like a pimple on an elephants arse.
Really, why?
Gravity.
Not so, see for instance:
http://www.esa.int/images/Wilkins_IceShelf_SAR_IMP_Orbit02586_19920113_inverted_H.jpg
Yup like I said tenuous.
There isn’t an ‘annual dance’, the last few years have seen its demise after many years of stability. My guess is that the main connection to Latady won’t last much longer.
Never mind. Try not to think of it so much as an ice loss as to it being new home for phytoplankton.
in reply to my post
“Since the emissions due to humans far exceed the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere by humans, and natural systems remove about 1/2 of what is emitted by humans, one can draw the conclusion that humans are responsible for 100% of the net increase in CO2 observed by the Mauna Loa measurement station.
To pretend otherwise is self deception.”
George E Smith wrote,
“So how exactly do humans go about removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
At 388 ppm by volume (your Mauna Loa measure) the atmosphere does NOT represent a very effective source for raw CO2; it would be extremely inefficient to obtain CO2 for dry ice and Coca Cola by extracting it from the atmosphere.
So exactly what human operations are you familiar with that go about extracting CO2 from the atmosphere. We Don’t extract Helium from the atmosphere either, even thoguh there is some to be had; but oil and gas wells provide a much better source for Helium. I wonder what we are going to use in place of Helium, when all the oil and gas operations are shut down for environmental reasons.
So we’ll give you that we emit more to the atmosphere than we extract (CO2); that’s a no brainer.
The rest of your thesis could use some supporting evidence.
If North America is a net carbon sink, as is claimed in the peer reviewed scientific literature; that would imply that your statement regarding the removal of only half of our emitted CO2, would seem to not apply to at least North America. So what is everybody else doing wrong, that makes them net carbon emitters ?.”
The answer to your first question is CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere by planting treees.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/co2_human.html
:”All land areas such as farms, grasslands and forests can be sources or sinks of CO2, depending on the particular agricultural and forestry practices on these lands. In the U.S., forests and other types of lands have been significant sinks since 1990, due in large part to forest and soil management practices. Nationally, carbon sequestration offset or removed 13 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions
in 2006. The largest share came from forest growth, increasing forest area and an increase in the amount of carbon stored in durable wood products. The rate of carbon sequestration has decreased since 1990, particularly in forests. The following links provide more information on carbon sequestration:”
There was a peer reviewed paper in 1998 that claimed North America was a net absorber of CO2.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981020074617.htm
“Ecosystems in North America are absorbing carbon dioxide at a rate that is greater than expected, according to findings by a team of scientists from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The study, which its authors said was subject to confirmation, may mean that land-based carbon-absorbing zones could play a greater role than expected in managing greenhouse warming of the atmosphere. ..
“But observations tell us otherwise. The mean atmospheric CO2 concentration on the East Coast has been observed to be lower than that over the Pacific coast. This means that more CO2 is taken up by land ecosystems over the United States than is released by industrial activities.”..”
A more recent study shows the opposite. North America emits more CO2 than it absorbs.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071114111141.htm
“First-Ever ‘State Of The Carbon Cycle Report’ Finds Troubling Imbalance
ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2007) — The first “State of the Carbon Cycle Report” for North America, released online this week by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, finds the continent’s carbon budget increasingly overwhelmed by human-caused emissions. North American sources release nearly 2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, mostly as carbon dioxide. Carbon “sinks” such as growing forests may remove up to half this amount, but these current sinks may turn into new sources as climate changes. ”
So the study which its authors said was subject to confirmation has not been confirmed, and new data says the opposite.