That’s the good news. The bad news is that they think it will take 30,000-40,000 years, even though they “don’t know exactly where this carbon went” (their own words from the press release) in their model. Isn’t it great when you can announce results like that and not have to worry about tracking where the main component went?
And I thought Susan Solomon’s 1000 year CO2 regime was way out there.
Purdue-led team studies Earth’s recovery from prehistoric global warming
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The Earth may be able to recover from rising carbon dioxide emissions faster than previously thought, according to evidence from a prehistoric event analyzed by a Purdue University-led team.
When faced with high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising temperatures 56 million years ago, the Earth increased its ability to pull carbon from the air. This led to a recovery that was quicker than anticipated by many models of the carbon cycle – though still on the order of tens of thousands of years, said Gabriel Bowen, the associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who led the study.
“We found that more than half of the added carbon dioxide was pulled from the atmosphere within 30,000 to 40,000 years, which is one-third of the time span previously thought,” said Bowen, who also is a member of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center. “We still don’t know exactly where this carbon went, but the evidence suggests it was a much more dynamic response than traditional models represent.”
Bowen worked with James Zachos, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to study the end of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, an approximately 170,000-year-long period of global warming that has many features in common with the world’s current situation, he said.
“During this prehistoric event billions of tons of carbon was released into the ocean, atmosphere and biosphere, causing warming of about 5 degrees Celsius,” Bowen said. “This is a good analog for the carbon being released from fossil fuels today.”
Scientists have known of this prehistoric event for 20 years, but how the system recovered and returned to normal atmospheric levels has remained a mystery.
Bowen and Zachos examined samples of marine and terrestrial sediments deposited throughout the event. The team measured the levels of two different types of carbon atoms, the isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-13. The ratio of these isotopes changes as carbon dioxide is drawn from or added to the atmosphere during the growth or decay of organic matter.
Plants prefer carbon-12 during photosynthesis, and when they accelerate their uptake of carbon dioxide it shifts the carbon isotope ratio in the atmosphere. This shift is then reflected in the carbon isotopes present in rock minerals formed by reactions involving atmospheric carbon dioxide, Bowen said.
“The rate of the carbon isotope change in rock minerals tells us how rapidly the carbon dioxide was pulled from the atmosphere,” he said. “We can see the fluxes of carbon dioxide in to and out of the atmosphere. At the beginning of the event we see a shift indicating that a lot of organic-derived carbon dioxide had been added to the atmosphere, and at the end of the event we see a shift indicating that a lot of carbon dioxide was taken up as organic carbon and thus removed from the atmosphere.”
A paper detailing the team’s National Science Foundation-funded work was published in Nature Geoscience.
It had been thought that a slow and fairly constant recovery began soon after excess carbon entered the atmosphere and that the weathering of rocks, called silicate weathering, dictated the timing of the response.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide that reacts with silicon-based minerals in rocks is pulled from the air and captured in the end product of the reaction. This mechanism has a fairly direct correlation with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and occurs relatively slowly, Bowen said.
The changes Bowen and Zachos found during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum went beyond the effects expected from silicate weathering, he said.
“It seems there was actually a long period of higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide followed by a short and rapid recovery to normal levels,” he said. “During the recovery, the rate at which carbon was pulled from the atmosphere was an order of magnitude greater than the slow drawdown of carbon expected from silicate weathering alone.”
A rapid growth of the biosphere, with a spread of forests, plants and carbon-rich soils to take in the excess carbon dioxide, could explain the quick recovery, Bowen said.
“Expansion of the biosphere is one plausible mechanism for the rapid recovery, but in order to take up this much carbon in forests and soils there must have first been a massive depletion of these carbon stocks,” he said. “We don’t currently know where all the carbon that caused this event came from, and our results suggest the troubling possibility that widespread decay or burning of large parts of the continental biosphere may have been involved.”
Release from a different source, such as volcanoes or sea floor sediments, may have started the event, he said.
“The release of carbon from the biosphere may have occurred as a positive feedback to the warming,” Bowen said. “The forests may have dried out, which can lead to die off and forest fires. If we take the Earth’s future climate to a place where that feedback starts to happen we could see accelerated rates of climate change.”
The team continues to work on new models of the carbon cycle and is also investigating changes in the water cycle during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
“We need to figure out where the carbon went all those years ago to know where it could go in the future,” he said. “These findings show that the Earth’s response is much more dynamic than we thought and highlight the importance of feedback loops in the carbon cycle.”
Related website:
Purdue Isotope Ratio Ecology and Hydrology:
http://www.eas.purdue.edu/ireh/index.htm
Press release and abstract on the research in this release is available at: http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2011/110421BowenCarbon.html
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DesertYote says:
April 22, 2011 at 9:34 am
You must cease and desist talking about your experimentation at once. This is a science blog and we don’t need to hear any more about your fantasy CO2 measurements. Surely, you would have been able to produce more accurate results by writing a computer model instead of taking actual measurements. Enough of your old-school pseudoscience…
/sarc off
Seriously, anyone who would believe the “conclusions” of this study should be issued a restraining order and forced to stay at least 100 yards from actual science. The leaps of faith and speculation that are passed off as fact in this study can only be rivaled by the claims made regularly on the Weather channel, Discovery channel, etc. about what is going on now in our environment. Pure unadulterated bull(snip).
Why is it always “faster than previously thought”, “more than expected”, “experts were shocked by” etc?
It seems that we need some new experts if these guys are always being taken by surprise.
John Johnston,0-2-3 exactly. I can understand the complaints of, wheres the science on WUWT, recently but realise this is not Anthonys doing, these taxpayer funded pseudo scientists and the rubbish they publish must be mocked (simple exposure to light is enough). However the retreat from AWG by the more savvy team members has left a void, the recent bafflegab is low quality and lacks the art and passion of religion those propogandists exibit.Most of the coulda woulda why don’t you trust me, pronouncements of late are by such 2nd rate actors that they barely rate comment. The silence from the Team UN is that of revealed idiots who hope that we will forget if they stay silent for a short while, or until the weather cooperates with the official religion once more.
Our interglacial will be over soon well withing 40,000 years – maybe 1000. That kind of “solving of CO2 warming problem” will kill billions.
The aquarium CO2 experiments sound elegant and simple. Too cheap for a peer-reviewed magazine, of course. Too cheap for university or government grants, too. Not flashy enough to get you tenure or as a reviewer for the IPCC.
The Paleocene-Eocene thermal and CO2 event clearly did not kill the oceans by acidification. I’ve seen the Eocene coals and estuary deposits in Oregon and have my first fossilized sand dollar from the (volcanic) muddy deposits you can see along the present day shoreline. Pretty darn healthy place. There is still snow on the Oregon hills today. Too bad this wasn’t the Paleocene or Eocene.
Pointman says:
April 22, 2011 at 7:56 am
“We look at our world and the universe with human eyes and more importantly, with a human lifespan. In terms of the latter, we see an apparently ageless and unchanging view but it’s a false impression.”
In a sense, yes, this is the Warmista (communist) problem. However, your statement suggests you might be willing to excuse them. You should not. The vast majority of human kind living and dead, 99% of them farmers, have always known that their environment is ageless for up to two weeks at a time. In other words, another aspect of the Warmista problem is hardcore, twenty-first century bubblism.
They ran a model and don’t know where the carbon went in that model? How about printing out the results? In the last timestep? What kind of clowns are they?
Richard111 says:
April 22, 2011 at 8:39 am
The poles tend to be slightly lower than the global measurements. There is a CO2 monitoring point at the South Pole.
http://tinyurl.com/3k7nw2j
Scientists have known of this prehistoric event for 20 years, but how the system recovered and returned to normal atmospheric levels has remained a mystery.
And still is!
It truly is a desperate klatsch that not only puts the theory before the data, but continually devises increasingly sillier ways of doing it, all with the idea that nobody is intelligent enough to notice. I assume the people whose intelligence is insufficient to be the same ones holding the purse strings. Yes?
>>
DirkH says:
April 22, 2011 at 10:22 am
They ran a model and don’t know where the carbon went in that model? How about printing out the results? In the last timestep?
<<
It’s possible to remove something from a mathematical model without knowing where it went. It’s a well know mathematical process called “subtraction.”
>>
What kind of clowns are they?
<<
That is something people will have to judge for themselves. 🙂
Jim
Great news! There’s hope. But only if we act now.
Clearly we need a new UN taskforce and a new 30,000 year plan. But be warned. The Committee to Restore Atmospheric Perfection will require massive support. This CRAP won’t be cheap.
DirkH says:
April 22, 2011 at 10:22 am
“What kind of clowns are they?”
Well paid professional clowns. The joke is on us.
Unless we do something to prevent the next ice age, it will be here in < 30,000 years. I can hardly wait to see what happens.
The sun get hotter, the oceans heat up, they give off CO2 and extra water vapor. Rain increases at night. The sun cools down. Rain strips CO2 from the atmosphere faster, day and night. The system goes back to more-or-less where it was. Until next time.
“1DandyTroll says:
April 22, 2011 at 7:02 am ”
Unless I am totally misreading the letters, that is not what I expected to see on Good Friday or any other day on WUWT.
[Reply: You’re right, and it has been snipped. ~dbs, mod.]
@DesertYote
“Has anyone else here besides me experiment with CO2 injection in Aquariums?”
Probably most people since most people having aquamarine environments tend to use air pumps*.
Ackos
“What is normal?”
Snails kind of melt when you dose ’em with salt?
*If the reader doesn’t get the point, here’s a hint: where is the air pump located and what tends to get concentrated at that location and elevation.
“The vast majority of human kind living and dead, 99% of them farmers, have always known that their environment is ageless for up to two weeks at a time.”
Ageless for a whole “two weeks at a time”. Why me Lord? I know you sculpted me for better things than being a looney magnet.
Pointman
“We don’t currently know where all the carbon that caused this event came from, and our results suggest the troubling possibility that widespread decay or burning of large parts of the continental biosphere may have been involved.”
Oh, are they trying to say that it was already on the surface?
How do you get widespread burning and not have a worldwide carbon-rich layer of soot? How do you get widespread massive decay all of a sudden?
Most troubling is, that after all that going on, no definative answer is to be found.
Even worse, they don’t know where it came from OR where it went.
Perhaps it even came from Outer Space.
Okay, here’s a good one: A big asteroid smacked Venus, melting it’s surface and ejecting massive quantities of CO2 that Earth sucked up down orbit.
“Expansion of the biosphere is one plausible mechanism for the rapid recovery…”
So, with all the droughts, floods, fires, rising oceans, extinction of species, and extreme weather events that are supposed to happen when CO2 rises, the biosphere still expanded? Doesn’t that mean that the net effect of increased CO2 on the biosphere is positive? Then why should we be concerned about climate change?