Old issues of Science, Nature, might be useful after all.
From The Weizmann Institute of Science
Some of the history preserved in old tomes and newspapers may be hiding in between the lines of print. A Weizmann Institute scientist has found that the paper in such collections contains a record of atmospheric conditions at the time the trees that went into making it were growing. By analyzing the carbon isotopes in bits of paper clipped from old magazines, Prof. Dan Yakir of the Environmental Sciences and Energy Research Department in the Faculty of Chemistry has traced the rising effects of atmospheric pollution from burning fossil fuel going back to beginnings of the industrial revolution.
Scientists generally reconstruct the record of past climate change from such sources as ice cores or tree rings. But a reliable tree ring history, says Yakir, requires an analysis of quite a few trees. “Rather than going to forests all over the world to sample trees,” says Yakir, “we went to the local library.” In the Weizmann library’s archives, Yakir found issues of the scientific journals Science, Nature and the Journal of the Royal Chemical Society going back over 100 years to the late 19th century. Removing small samples from the margins of successive volumes, he took them back to the lab for analysis.
The analysis was based on a finding that the proportion of a carbon isotope – carbon 13 (13C) – to its lighter counterpart – carbon 12 (12C) – could provide information on the CO2 added to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuel. This is based on a cycle that begins with plants taking up CO2 in photosynthesis. All plants prefer to use CO2 made with the more common version of carbon, 12C, than the slightly heavier 13C. Plant biomass from millions of years ago was transformed into reservoirs of oil, gas and coal, and so these are naturally low in 13C, as well. When we started to burn those reservoirs following the industrial revolution, we began returning the 13C-poor CO2 to the atmosphere. Now the atmospheric 13C content has become increasingly diluted, and this is reflected in the carbon ratios in the trees milled for pulp and paper. Yakir’s work shows that this continuing dilution is, indeed, clearly recorded in the archival paper and, plotted over time, it demonstrates the increasing intensity of our fossil fuel burning in the past 150 years.
This project has been ongoing for about 14 years, with figures from new issues added over time. In the process, says Yakir, he has had to learn something about the paper industry. Some early issues, for instance, had been printed on rag paper (made of cotton, flax, etc.) rather than wood pulp, while blips in the data around the time of WWII led Yakir to suspect that the paper was either recycled, or again supplemented with rag content to make up for wartime shortages.
Anomalies aside, 13C levels in the paper, especially for two of the journals, were a good match for existing atmospheric records, and even revealed some local phenomena, including differences between American and European records. In addition to alerting climate scientists to a very well organized, untapped, source of global change records, says Yakir, the technique could be used to authenticate antique paper samples.
Prof. Dan Yakir’s research is supported by the Cathy Wills and Robert Lewis Program in Environmental Science and the estate of Sanford Kaplan.
The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is one of the world’s top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions. Noted for its wide-ranging exploration of the natural and exact sciences, the Institute is home to 2,700 scientists, students, technicians and supporting staff. Institute research efforts include the search for new ways of fighting disease and hunger, examining leading questions in mathematics and computer science, probing the physics of matter and the universe, creating novel materials and developing new strategies for protecting the environment.
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Jeff (of Colorado) has an excellent point. Add where the trees were grown. Pines grown in GA grow 2 to 3 times faster than those grown in British Comlumbia. Paper made in Canada will be 20-60 years out of phase with paper made in GA. Since that represents nearly 50% of the covered period, I question the validity of these results.
Chemical reactions do not distinguish between isotopes. Isotopic determination is done by big machines called “mass spectometers.” These measure the mass of ionic particles , and from this, the ratio of C12, and C13 can be determined. The C14 is produced contiually in the atmosphere, and has been increased by the atomic age. It exists in a smaller amount that C13, and the calculation takes its existence into account. Also part of the math will be deuterium and tritium ratios.
I find what is written on that old paper to be even more revealing. Like this:
“The Greenland (Arctic) and Vostok (Antarctic) ice cores are particularly informative, offering fine temporal resolution and continuity. This has revealed surprising oscillations of climate on a millennial scale within the main 100-kyr cycle. The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) identifies some 24 interstadials through the last ice age with average temperature rising rapidly by ~7 C over just decades. Further ice and sediment cores from around the world are demonstrating the global scale of these major climatic events.”
From: Hewitt, G. 2000. The genetic legacy of the Quarternary ice ages. NATURE, Vol. 405, 22 June 2000 (www.nature.com)
Imagine. Rapid pre-SUV climate change!
Lady Life Grows says:
February 8, 2011 at 12:47 pm
We were talking about biochemical processes (trees), which are chemical reactions accelerated by enzymes, that can discriminate elemental isotopes, especially for small elements like hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, or silicon. To a very small amount, so that textbooks can say “for all intents and purposes…” chemical reactions are isotopically blind. This is especially true for fast reactions for which all isotopes have statistically similar probabilities to encounter the substrate. It is still not a zero difference, though. Physical processes can also distinguish isotopes, heavier ones moving slower. O18, for example, moves 11% slower than O16 through solids.
Chemical reactions are almost isotope blind, except for a statistically, vanishingly small preference for lighter isotopes due to enhanced speed of collisions.
So what about the carbon isotopes in the ink, used to print those peer reviewed journals; what climate history does that reveal ?
paulhan says:
February 8, 2011 at 9:11 am
“Which brings up another interesting possibility. Why not just use one tree, say 400 yrs old and check the middle earliest growth with the outermost late growth. Wouldn’t that give a proxy for C13-C12 ratios? If that wouldn’t give valid results, then neither can this study.”
What gets funded is just truly amazing. I guess they figured their approach saved them the work of finding and acquiring an old tree. Now maybe they will realize they need the tree for confirmation, since you explained the matter.
How did they determine which papermill the journal bought their paper from? It might be from Vancouver Island, Minnesota, Sweden, Finland or Siberia or a dozen other places whether the journal was printed in the US or in Europe.
I interpret the data to show that prior to the release of sequestered C as CO2 the atmosphere was in a state of CO2 deficiency. Plants were compelled to utilise the non-preferred 13C as there was not enough 12C available.
The use of fossil C has saved the Earth’s biosphere from starving to death. It’s a lot better than we thought.
And here is a totally different thought.
As a geologist I have spent many years studying the mining, processing and use of various industrial minerals.
Three specific minerals come to mind immediately. The first is kaolinite (KalSi3O8). Kaolinite has been used as a functional filler in paper for ever. In the early years it was first used to fill spaces between the wood fiber. It served to make the paper less transparent and replaced the more expensive wood fiber. In more recent years various kaolin products have been developed, many which serve as a coater on the surface of the paper. This is necessary as paper has become much thinner, and thus needs the clay to accommodate colour printing, bleed through, and to allow the type of high quality colour now found in for example, magazines. How does this relate to CO2 you ask?
Well, the kaolin always contains organic contamination. This is commonly removed (beneficiated) by bleaching with chlorine, a.k.a. Javex. Of course one never removes all of the organics. Thus, each deposit of clay has different source areas for the carbon, some very old, and some very new due to surface process. Soooo… every time the source of kaolin was varied, the carbon isotope ratios would vary. Early on the kaolin in European paper would have been (a lot of it) sourced from Cornwall, England. early on in the US clay would also have been imported fro Cornwall and other European sources. When the large kaolin deposits were found in Georgia (USA) this would have replaced (over time) much of the European imports. Also consider, that in the early days there was little paper recycling. Now paper may be de-inked, recycled from many different sources, with different clay sources and used to make new paper. To complicate things even further, kaolin from South America has come on stream replacing both European and US sources……….. a pretty muddy story!
I’ll cut this short. Calcium carbonate used as filler and coater. CaCo3 plus old organic carbon, graphite, carbon from modern hydrothermal processes, surface contamination.
CO2 in paper is a total dogs breakfast. They found different CO2 isotope ratio’s in European vs US paper. What a joke!!!! This si the real DANGER of science operating in a vacuum… to specialized.
Richard says:
February 8, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Cool. A testable hypothesis. 13CO2 is available for study.
Philip Finck says:
February 8, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Fascinating.
Kindest Regards
Paper as proxy for trees as proxy for atmospheric CO2 as proxy for temperature.
It works except for the last part. Yes, humans have increased CO2. So what?
Whoops……… my mind was thinking kaolinite but my fingers typed the formula of feldspar …my bad. Al2Si3O5 + 2H2O if I remember correctly.
This one really takes the cake. Its hard to believe that thinking humans would ever fund such “scientific” folly.
Magazine paper no more grows on trees than macaroni or plastic. Its an industrially processed product. At this point who knows what processes and materials were used, when and where this paper is supposed to have been manufactured. To say that the differences in C12 and C13 in manufactured paper were due to atmospheric influences is a naive leap of faith and unsupportable, if not deceptive and ludicrous. This paper looks like a rip off of the funders and should be rejected by the thinking scientific community even including, “climate scientists”. Another question would be who reviewed this paper and passed on it with such obvious outstanding questions. Another failure of the pal review system of “climate science”!
Its hard to accept tree ring data for multiple reasons related to sun, water and other stressors, but this review shows the current folly of “climate science”. We all could do better work in 7th grade science than this ridiculous paper.
But, of course, its been published therefore the funder has reaped its reward, a fatuous paper that has been published in their name.
Lets add this to the list of Space Junk that has to eventually be cleaned up.
From junk science to pulp fiction? Honestly, you couldn’t make this up. 😀
Philip Finck says:
February 8, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Very interesting. Is newspaper (what they sampled) clay coated as compared with glossy magazines which obviously use clay coated paper stock?
I hope that’s all wood pulp paper. Nicholson Baker’s excellent book “Double Fold” mentions a 19th century practice of making rag papers from mummy wrappings, which would mess up any dated isotope measurements…
Since they used scientific journals it would not be wood pulp (mechanically processed) paper. The more recent volumes are definitely coated journal paper. At least that is what Science and Nature are using. Reprocessed fibre is normally not used for this paper quality.
To complicate things further printing paper uses a mixture of wood fibre. For paper produced in Sweden and Finland pine ands spruce fibre is complemented by a sizable proportion of birch to improve printing quality. The pine and spruce is usually local while most of the birch is imported from the Baltic countries or Russia.
Paper might seem a very simple product. It isn’t.
Perhaps the authors should have read this first:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~hubbe/CARB.htm
Then they might have had some idea what they were measuring.
Time to bring up E.M. Smith’s excellent piece again:
The Trouble With C12 C13 Ratios
Now with added relevance.
I assume they could get similar data over a longer span of time by analyzing samples of the wood used in the original construction of old public libraries, churches, etc. …
Bloody great logs.