Guest Post by Steven Goddard
We have all seen lots of pictures of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption now, with steam and ash billowing up in the air. The eruption started one month ago, and as the Guardian reports, The eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano is unlikely to have any significant impact on climate but has caused a small fall in carbon emissions, experts say.
The Guardian editors seem to have forgotten that the volcano itself is spewing massive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Perhaps their kinship with Plane Stupid is having an impact? Plane Stupid’s goal is to stop plane traffic in the UK, and they must be thrilled by the flight ban and the damage to the economy.
Added:
Volcano CO2 budget (CO2 is emitted independent of ash) ~200,000 tons per day X 30 days of eruption = 6,000,000 tons of CO2.
Plane CO2 Budget – assumes half of EU planes haven’t flown for the past six days 340,000 EU tons per day X 0.5 EU shutdown X 6 days = ~1,000,000 tons of savings.
People using alternative transportation (as Anthony and the BBC pointed out) as a replacement for aircraft – cars, trains, battleships , etc. ~1,000,000 tons of extra CO2 Is a battleship more “green” than a jumbo jet?
The total gain is 6,000,000 – 1,000,000 + 1,000,000 = 6,000,000 tons of excess CO2 from the volcano. The temporary aircraft shutdown has little or no net impact on CO2 emissions, but the volcano has a large impact.
Video and reader poll follow.
Below is a video chronology of the glacier and volcano, giving a feel of the events of the past month. First video shows what the glacier looked like prior to the eruption.
The next video shows the first night of the eruption – March 21. Note the similarity to Hawaiian volcanoes – lava fountains and little steam or ash.
By March 24, some steam and ash is starting to appear as glacial meltwater begins to mix with the magma.
By April 14, flash flooding from glacial melt began to pour down the side of the glacier.
The flooding was widespread and devastating downstream.
By April 17, the eruption was primarily steam, CO2 and ash.
Should climate modelers start differentiating between man made CO2 and “organic” natural CO2?
Reader Poll :
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http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1852153/volcano_co2_output_could_be_150300000_tons_daily/
Bill Hartree (14:05:32) :
The ratio of positive numbers <15/<3 is a number somewhere between 0 and infinity.
Steve:
I get it. They don’t really know, do they?
Ferdinand Engelbeen: earlier you linked to your graph:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_emiss_increase.jpg
how do you explain the divergence between the cumulative emissions exponential curve and the co2 level linear trend?
“”” bubbagyro (16:57:20) :
Hooked a tarpon last year on light tackle from the shoreline, using shrimp, but of course he snapped the line.
Fairchild? I used Fairchild people in the 80s. I patented an electronic CMOS device for dosing medicine automatically for cattle in the 3rd world, so people would not have to round them up to dose once a month. The fellow who actually designed the chip to my specs, was the one who developed the deep channel CMOS chip for musical greeting cards. The rest of the solid state and mechanical components was built by a group called I2P. “””
Interesting; I was hired into Fairchild by Dr Victor Grinich, who was the only EE amongst that founding fabulous eight, that included Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore; in mid 1967. He managed the Test Instrumentation division of the Company. Odd thing is that he later left Fairchild and was a principal investor and consultant to a company called Identronix (I think that is correct) that made implantable devices to put inside cows to keep track of them.
Fairchild was actually out in front of most people in the MOS technology; I actually saw samples of some of their very early prototypes at Tektronix in about 1965-6. Problem was they had about four different R&D groups each working on a different MOS technology; p-channel, n-channel, 4-phase dynamic and some others. Instead of co-operating to figure out the most logical technology to proceed with, they all worked at pulling the rug out from under the other groups, to try and grab their R&D funds for themselves. The result was that Fairchild never did become a significant factor in MOS; Bob Noyce got frustrated with the whole thing, but was too nice to fire people; and his solution was to leave and found Intel, and then hire the good people there. I was also there during the great Hogan’s Heroes raid on Motorola; which also never panned out for Fairchild.
But it certainly was a hive of some bloody smart people, in those early days; and it really was the true source of Silicon Valley. I left in 1970 to help found an early and mildly successful LED startup Company.
But to me; the ultimate Irony, was when Bill Shockley at Shockley Transistor, looked at the proposed planar process for making a transistor; that John Hoerni, Moore and Noyce came up with; and then told them; “If you guys think that is the way to make transistors; why don’t you go and start your own company, and do it !” Well they took him up on it, and Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp, decided to take the risk and fund them.
That maybe the origin of the saying; “Some of MY best decisions, were made by somebody else !”
Hockey Schtick (22:02:54) :
how do you explain the divergence between the cumulative emissions exponential curve and the co2 level linear trend?
The CO2 level is not linear either, but is going slower up than the emissions, with a rather fixed percentage of the emissions. If you plot the accumulated emissions vs. the accumulation in the atmosphere, it is a straight line:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
where the first halve of the accumulation is from ice cores and firn, the second halve from Mauna Loa for atmospheric measurements.
The reaction of the CO2 cycle on disturbances mainly is by the oceans, which act quite linear on an increase in the atmosphere: if the CO2 (partial) pressure difference between atmosphere and oceans doubles, the uptake by the oceans doubles too, but that is only possible if the CO2 pressure in the atmosphere increases, as the CO2 pressure in the oceans only changes with a (relative) small amount with temperature.
bubbagyro (15:39:48) :
I do not think that the last paragraph is true. In accordance with the geologically slow diffusion rate, the recent CO2 levels, measured by different proxies, are very low. We are IMHO in a CO2 starved state compared to the dinosaur era, certainly, and maybe in the last couple hundred thousand years. The “back diffusion” conditions you mentioned would not have existed except for thousands year times. Not enough time, IMO, for the high CO2 content in the ice to have diffused out in equilibration with the very recent concentration.
According to diffusion physics, any putative high CO2 concentrations in the past would be long lost to our measurement. We do know that high concentrations of CO2 did exist in the past, the question is when. We certainly could not see that by current methodologies.
I agree that any “short” lived higher CO2 level of a few hundred years wouldn’t be measured in the oldest ice cores, because the resolution is too wide. But either a long period of slightly higher levels or a short period with very high levels would have been noticed. As each interglacial was some 10,000 years (or longer), and the glacials were 100,000 years, any noteworthy diffusion would have leveled off inside and outside CO2 concentrations and between the higher (280 ppmv) and lower (180 ppmv) CO2 concentration layers. Thus indeed, the CO2 levels over the last 800,000 years in average were much lower than we see nowadays (and in most of earth’s history).
Diffusion always goes 2-ways (except if one uses reverse osmosis, but that is not at order here), but the net result is from the higher level to the lower level. Thus if we see lower levels in ice cores and there was (any) diffusion, that means that past levels were even lower in the atmosphere than measured in the ice core… But I don’t think that diffusion played any role at all.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (11:11:56) : I just plotted the Mauna Loa data over the past 30 years and a linear fit R^2=.9941 vs. a 2nd order polynomial fit R^2=.9983 so the exponential component is very small. What is the source of your cumulative emissions data and what is the uncertainty in that data?
Hockey Schtick (11:47:36) :
I just plotted the Mauna Loa data over the past 30 years and a linear fit R^2=.9941 vs. a 2nd order polynomial fit R^2=.9983 so the exponential component is very small. What is the source of your cumulative emissions data and what is the uncertainty in that data?
The difference increases over longer periods: for the full period (1959-2009) of Mauna Loa data the linear fit R^2=.9876 while the quadratic fit R^2=.9992.
The emissions data comes from IEA/DOE:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/carbon.html
the Excel file (1750-2006) can be downloaded from:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls
One need to recalculate CO2 to carbon (12/44), Mt to Gt and Gt to ppmv (1 ppmv = 2.1 GtC).
But there are several others on line.
Here the one of CDIAC:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2006.ems
They all slightly differ, depending what they include besides fossil fuel use: cement manufacturing, gas flaring, gas losses,… and larger differences are found if one includes land use changes.
Emissions are based on fossil fuel sales inventories from individual countries by the statistics departments, which are often part of the ministeries of economics. Accuracy somewhere -10/+20% real emissions over the inventories, as sales are probably more underestimated than overestimated. And for some countries (China…) the figures may be largely underestimated…
I have not included land use changes, as these estimates are quite uncertain, but may add substantially to the emissions.
I voted for “no difference” but would have voted for “Mother Earth is angry, due to its’ life-giving C02 being disparaged and demonized, and it will be necessary to toss 5 of Gore’s Inconvenient Dupes into the volcano in order to assuage her,” had it been available.
Sorry I put that badly. I was just making sure less scientifically literate people understood what was going on. That was a very interesting site you referenced, and the 90deg planes of the two double bonds would seem to modify their diagram for the bending oscillation, I would have thought.
You win on this one Steven. I concede that a value in the region of 150,000 tonnes per day is at present the best guess. However, in arriving at your figure of 6 million tonnes over 30 days I believe you make an unwarranted assumption. Please have a look at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8631396.stm .
As you can see Mike Burton gives an estimate of the order of 200,000 tonnes per day in very good agreement with your original posting – but for a period lasting “less than a week”. He goes on to say that the volcano was subsequently “much quieter. SO, can we get a better estimate of the period during which it was emitting at 200,000 – 250,000 tn/day?According to the University of Iceland (See http://www2.norvol.hi.is/page/ies_EYJO_compiled) , by 21st April the activity of the volcano had declined by an order of magnitude compared with the “initial 72 hours” indicating that 72 hours or 3 days should be a first guess at the period of maximum emission. Using Burton’s model that CO2 flux varies in proportion to the level of overall activity– which appears to be similar to MacPherson’s model reported on the Breitbart blog – we could be looking at more like 20,000 tonnes per day by April 21st.
So the total CO2 emission over the 30 days since the eruption began would be a number somewhere between 3 x 200,000 and, 30 x 250,000, in other words 600,000 – 7.5 million tonnes. In choosing a value towards of 6 million in your original posting I do still feel you are cherry-picking. You may feel in return that I’m nit picking, but my concern is that a blog as influential as WUWT should maintain a high level of “data quality”. In particular the urban myths circulating in the past few years about the level of CO2 emitted by volcanoes have been no help at all in bringing about a resolution to the climate change debate.
stevengoddard (19:08:06):
Steven,
In my comment sent a couple of minutes ago I neglected to include the comment of yours to which it refers: it is “stevengoddard (19:08:06)”.
My apologies
JER0ME (07:30:10) :
I had an article of Moonbat’s sneak up on me while reading the Sydney Morning Herald today. I shall read that journal no more, just in case it happens again.
He is telling us that the current level of aviation traffic is ‘unsustainable’. Tell Al Baby, and see if he’ll stop…..
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Sounds like the new variation of the USSR regional passport system. Only those with state permission are allowed to travel.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (11:45:25):
1) CO2 concentrations HAD to be higher in the past, else dinosaurs and, later, mammoths, mastodons, camels and other animals could not have reached their massive sizes, as I have mentioned in earlier posts. Thus, your final paragraph cannot be correct, it is just a matter of when DID heating, then CO2 rising, happen. Certainly millions of years ago (dinosaurs), probably many times in the past and as recent as within 100,000 years or so (large mammals and carnivores) when the earth conditions were appropriate for this; as has been shown conclusively, earth heats up, Then CO2 is released to peak hundreds of years later.
2) The diffusion constant is so slow, that your hundreds or thousands of years is not a long enough time frame to observe such a rapid equilibration.
3) You may believe that CO2 was low in the past. Other proxies show otherwise. It is not belief, but science that is the final arbiter.
The physics of diffusion, which, BTW I have published and patented extensively over the last 30 years or so, is a physical law. The fact remains: were it true that CO2, as proxies are showing, was 10 to 30 times higher in the past, then the ice core measuring system currently used to measure it would never be able to accurately show the high concentration. And the higher the initial concentration the farther it will fall, over the tens of thousands of years we are talking about. We must find another proxy(ies) to know the true historic values.
One suggestion would be to measure isotope ratios of another fellow-traveling gas, deposited at the same time, to calculate the relative diffusion rates based on its mass and diffusion into ice. I don’t know which one to pick – CO2 has the advantage of being high concentration in the atmosphere relative to other trace gases, so maybe this is a moot idea.
However, the ball does not roll uphill. You are right in some of the bases of your argumentation, but the logic does not follow through the entire thread.
bubbagyro (09:02:32) :
Ferdinand Engelbeen (11:45:25):
1) CO2 concentrations HAD to be higher in the past, else dinosaurs and, later, mammoths, mastodons, camels and other animals could not have reached their massive sizes, as I have mentioned in earlier posts….
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Yes, there is such a thing as “stocking” rates. Here on the southeast coast of the USA with CO2 near 400 ppm, plenty of rain, fertilizer, lime and weed control, the stocking rate is about one acre for every 500lbs of body weight. You head to the southwest you start talking X cows (1000 lbs) per square mile.There is no way a planet with CO2 at 180 to 220 ppm could support huge herds of megafauna and that includes the American bison. We are in a CO2 starved era despite all the propaganda.
Also higher concentrations of CO2 provides plants with more drought resistance. Given colder is drier this is another big issue when it comes to supporting those huge herds. Right now I am praying for rain so my grass will grow. Despite it being spring I have not seen rain for two weeks
Thanks, Gail and Ferdinand, for continuing the discussions, pro- and con-:
Further clarification:
As for diffusion, it is certain that CO2 has increased (lagging temperature increase, of course) in the last 18,000 years, or so, through the Holocene, but beginning at a severe minimum at the end of the Pleistocene that must have threatened all life. At 180 ppm, plant life dies. At 5000 PPM, plants grow at amazing rates. It is incredible that AGW enthusiastic scientists, probably because they need to continue gainful employment, discount CO2 minima as root causes for mass extinctions. Of course other events, like the catastrophic Permian extinction was likely caused (contrary to recent “science” TV programs that blame warming) by cooling brought on by the giant Siberian volcanic fissure magma event, since a continuous eruption for 50 or 200 years would obscure most sunlight and kill most plants, but the plants would rebound with the concomitant higher CO2 produced by successive eruptions.
During the last glacial, 100,000 to 300,000 years would be more than enough time to deplete all historic high CO2 concentration core ice through diffusion, as I mentioned, if I read the Scripps diffusion result correctly. Afterward, from the Pleistocene through our Holocene, equilibration would be back and forth among very low levels, 200 to 400 PPM, for example, in accordance with what Ferdinand was saying. But once the historic Pleistocene reservoir was lost, and since the levels have been low since then, we could never reconstruct the historic high levels with our GCMS simple methods.
High plant life always equals high animal species. High CO2 = high flora. Low CO2 = extinction. What is hard to grasp about that?
bubbagyro (09:02:32) :
1) CO2 concentrations HAD to be higher in the past, else dinosaurs and, later, mammoths, mastodons, camels and other animals could not have reached their massive sizes, as I have mentioned in earlier posts. Thus, your final paragraph cannot be correct, it is just a matter of when DID heating, then CO2 rising, happen.
CO2 concentrations were 3-6 times higher during the Cretaceous, that is the time of the dinosaurs. They started to decline some 40 millions of years ago to the minimum levels seen in ice cores of the past few millions of years. See:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
That was the reason for the evolution of C4 plants (grasses), which need less CO2 and was the main food for mammoths (living in the steppes of the dry North Sea between England and the rest of Europe). 180 ppmv in the bulk of the atmosphere still gives higher concentrations near ground. And most large herds who are mentioned by you are counted in the Holocene, when temperatures were slightly higher and CO2 already back at 280 ppmv.
as has been shown conclusively, earth heats up, Then CO2 is released to peak hundreds of years later.
Yes, and at a fairly constant rate: about 8 ppmv/K. Thus an increase of 10 K between a glacial and an interglacial gives a peak of about 80 ppmv (from about 180 ppmv to 260 ppmv). The same ratio is found for the MWP-LIA drop of about 6 ppmv for 0.8 K drop in temperature and the current variability of temperature causes a variability in sink capacity of nature of about 4 ppmv/K on short term (a few years) around the trend.
2) The diffusion constant is so slow, that your hundreds or thousands of years is not a long enough time frame to observe such a rapid equilibration.
Wait a minute: the diffusion constant is fast enough to reduce the levels found in the ice cores, but not fast enough to give a flattening of the peak and low levels? Ice cores incluse CO2 in air bubbles at closing time. That may differ somewhat with the atmospheric levels (if there were fast changes in atmospheric composition), but the latest ice at a peak moment will include (near) the peak value. If there was substantial migration afterwards, the levels would go down if the ambient was lower in CO2 than the ice core, or go up if the outside world was higher in CO2. That is basic physics of diffusion. Thus either there was substantial diffusion and peaks found in the ice were much higher in reality and lows in the ice core were much lower in reality. Or there was little diffusion and the ice core record shows the real (but smoothed) CO2 levels of these periods.
3) You may believe that CO2 was low in the past. Other proxies show otherwise. It is not belief, but science that is the final arbiter.
As far as I can see, the science shows that ice cores are quite good remains of ancient air, while other proxies are… proxies. But even then, the proxies show similar levels (but with more caveats).
The fact remains: were it true that CO2, as proxies are showing, was 10 to 30 times higher in the past, then the ice core measuring system currently used to measure it would never be able to accurately show the high concentration.
The 10 to 30 times was billions of years ago, before even plants existed and before the huge calcite deposits from coccoliths. For the last 40 million of years, levels decreased below 1,000 ppmv (3 times current) and in the last 1-2 million years the levels were below 400 ppmv. The longest ice core represents 800,000 years and shows values between 180 and 300 ppmv. As the levels both go up and down in near exact ratio with temperature (proxies), without smoothing over time, that shows that there was no substantial diffusion through the ice.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (13:28:45) :
Nice try, but you are caught in a tautology:
There is no ice core for 40 million years ago, so now you use a proxy? The levels for a couple of million years ago, you use the same ice core we are debating whether accurate or not?
AND CO2 levels were 3-30 times higher, depending on the “expert” and proxy, not 3-6. The high CO2 levels were not due to the gradual rate you show, and not that high due solely to heating of the oceans, but very high due to vulcanism.
AND your last paragraph does not hold. Scripps showed that there IS diffusion in solid ice at various temperatures, so saying that there is no diffusion flies in the face of experimentation; but if models are more important to you than observation, then we have little to discuss. We can do proxy battles all day long.
The rate of trapping of the bubbles is instantaneous, and the rate of diffusion has been demonstrated to be at an appropriate rate to lose high concentrations over millennia. If you will listen to me carefully, the rate will be fast when initial concentration is high, but very slow where there is a low ∂C, such as recently. That answers your quandary how it can be at different rates – it is governed by Fick’s laws. proportional as ∂C/∂T.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (13:28:45) :
There is no ice core for 40 million years ago, so now you use a proxy?
For anything older than 800,000 years, we have only proxies. These may be as good or bad as their calibration and the models involved. But that is not the current discussion, the current discussion is if Antarctic ice cores represent the historic CO2 levels accurately, from a few decades ago to 800,000 years ago. Smoothed by gas diffusion rates in firn, but in how far the data are also smoothed (and lowered) by gas diffusion in ice.
I finally found the full article from Scripps at:
http://www.igsoc.org/journal/54/187/j07j102.pdf
Quite interesting, but… also with a lot of assumptions and modelling in it to get to the the theoretical solubility/diffusion parameters of CO2 in ice.
Some are noteworthy: the theoretical model is based on remelted layers of snow/ice, where much higher levels of CO2 are found (which is normal), but the higher levels are smoothed out over adjacent air in ice layers.
The chapter near the end is important:
“Smoothing of the CO2 record in polar ice” shows that temperature is important, where clathrate formation in the deep cores decreases the solubility/diffusion with orders of magnitude:
Ice cores from colder sites than Siple Dome would experience slower CO2 diffusion in deep ice. The formation of clathrate ice (bubble-free ice) at depths from 500 to 1200m (25–65 kyr) at other Antarctic cold-drilling sites (Vostok, Dome Fuji and EPICA Dome C) is expected to result in highly reduced gas diffusion (Salamatin and others, 1998).
Vostok at -40 C goes back some 420,000 years (and they stopped drilling far above the higher temperature zone) and Dome C goes back some 800,000 years.
Thus if there was diffusion, it was much lower in the colder ice cores and far lower back in time beyond 25-65 kyr in these cores.
More important: in the time frame of 800,000 years, there are different ice cores at different temperatures and accumulation rates, which show similar CO2 levels (less than 5 ppmv difference) for overlapping gas ages.
See: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_150kyr.jpg
According to the theoretical diffusion constants of Scripps, the lower temperature ice cores should show more smoothing for glacial vs. interglacials than the colder ones. But that doesn’t happen. And as said before: layers with lower CO2 (glacials) and higher CO2 (interglacials) should show less difference (for the same temperature -proxy- difference) each 110,000 years further back in time. But that is not observed.
You see, the real world observations don’t fit the modelled diffusion rates…
Further, I fully agree with Fick’s laws, based on ∂C. But we differ in opinion about the ∂: you assumed (in the previous messages) that the original CO2 concentration in ice was much higher, but that most of it diffused out of the ice over time. That is only possible with relative high diffusion rates AND if the outside air had (much) lower CO2 concentrations. This even lower than the 180 ppmv observed over very long periods (90% of the time over the past 800,000 years). Again, this is near impossible, as there are also periods where 280 ppmv is measured, at regular intervals.
Either we have had atmospheric CO2 levels varying between high levels (higher than 280 ppmv) during 10,000 years and low levels (lower than 180 ppmv) during 100,000 years, or there was very little migration. I suppose that it is the latter, as the ratio between CO2 levels and temperature proxy is quite constant over 800,000 years.
of course the sentence:
“the lower temperature ice cores should show more smoothing for glacials vs. interglacials” must be the higher temperature ice cores…