Guest Post by Caleb Shaw
My last layman’s paper generated a wonderful and polite peer-review from WUWT readers, teaching me a great deal, not the least of which was that I should avoid using the word “pneumatic” when I mean “hydraulic.” It is in the hopes of receiving a similar polite response that I will venture to ask some questions about a Climate Gospel, even though it is a Climate Gospel that earns most questioners a severe pummeling.
I will attempt to be cheerfully naïve, however in some situations that is not enough. A Texan can be cheerful and naïve all he wants, but, when he is making cheeseburgers out of a Holy Cow in a Hindu village, he is liable to find he has a riot on his hands. There are some things Thou Shall Not Do. Sometimes Thou Shall Not Even Question.
My questions involve those little bubbles in ice cores. It may seem a harmless subject, but those little bubbles are a basement upon which a great many papers have been written, and upon which a great many grants depend. Dare you question the little bubbles, and all sorts of hell breaks lose.
In fact if you poke around the subject of those little bubbles your don’t-go-there alarm will start to go off, along with your I-don’t-have-time-for-this alarm, (if you have one.) However sometimes a man’s got to do what he least wants to do.
As anyone who has raised teenaged daughters understands, there are times when you have “to go there,” despite the fact your don’t-go-there alarm is blaring, and times you have to make time, even though your I-don’t-have-time-for-this alarm is howling.
Daughters teach a man that, despite all efforts to ban bullying and legislate spirituality, ostracism remains mysteriously crucial to schoolgirl adolescence, and the same daughter who was sobbing about being ostracized on Monday may be gleaming with glee over a nemesis being ostracized on Tuesday. Fathers often have to make sense of this emotional and blatant hypocrisy, even if it means turning off the TV just before the big game.
You may be wondering what this has to do with little bubbles in ice caps. I don’t blame you, but bear with me.
Please notice that, in the above example, it is the daughters doing the teaching. They are teaching their fathers about wild swings of emotion involved with having a non-scientific and supposedly irrational thing called “a heart.”
Scientists don’t like being compared with schoolgirls, because, in humanity’s constant battle to balance the heart and head, Science represents the purified essence of the head. However just because Science focuses on the head does not mean Scientists have no hearts. “If you prick them, do they not bleed?”
The only thing a scientist is suppose to be passionate about is being dispassionate, however in their quieter moments most will confess there have been times they’ve failed to be totally objective, and have slapped themselves on the forehead because they were blind to some obvious truth staring them in the face. However even this humbleness underscores an egotism they have about being more objective than most people. Also, if anyone is going to slap their forehead, they prefer it to be themselves. They don’t like it one bit when you compare them with schoolgirls. They get all emotional if you accuse them of being emotional.
Nothing makes people angry faster than accusing them of being angry when they’re not. A calm, peaceful soul can be reduced to frothing and to spitting snakes, because no one likes being falsely accused. You can get them even madder if , after you have angered them by accusing them of being angry when they weren’t, you look smug and say, “See? I told you that you were angry.”
Scientists are no different, and if you tweak them in the right way, then they, who are so focused on the head, will lose their heads and demonstrate they have tremendous hearts. Sometimes the revealed heart is tremendously good, but sometimes it is tremendously otherwise.
Scientists do not like being tweaked in this manner, because that is not what science is all about. Raving is beneath the dignity of science. However, when politics enters the hallowed halls of science, scientists get tweaked plenty, for study is no longer funded for its intrinsic value. A scientist may abruptly be defunded due to an election. Men are jarred awake in their Ivory Towers, as they are confronted by a mentality befitting thirteen-year-old schoolgirls: It matters who is “in” and who is “out.”
Therefore, despite all my shortcoming concerning Physics classes I never took, (or preferred to spend dreaming out the window during,) I do have an understanding others lack, as I approach the delicate subject of little bubbles in an icecap’s ice, because I have been the father of schoolgirls, and know the politics of ostracization and marginalization, and what such things do to the human heart and to human tempers.
One can study both the little bubbles, and also the path to marginalization, by taking a hard look at the travails of Zbigniew Jaworowski.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6&p=3
And also looking at a paper he wrote:
http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/Jaworowski%20CO2%20EIR%202007.pdf
A quick perusal of Jaworoski’s paper taught me that all sorts of complex chemistry may (or may not) being going on in those innocent little bubbles, but most of the chemistry was over my head. Not that I couldn’t understand, if I put my mind to it, but I actually had some simple questions, and, until I got those simple questions answered, it seemed I’d be getting ahead of myself if I tackled the complex chemistry.
Therefore I headed to Wikipedia. Not that I trust it as a source, but it often has links to truer sources, and one hopes Wikipedia gets the most basic facts right.
However even in terms of the most basic facts I seemed to be getting a wide variety of answers. For example, how long does it take fluffy snow to be compacted to ice with little bubbles in it? The answers I got ranged from sixty to five-thousand years.
Likely this variance occurred due to the fact Antarctica includes some areas of very dry desert, where snow accumulates very slowly, whereas Greenland is subject to Atlantic gales, and snow can accumulate very quickly. However it was unclear which data-set was being referred to, and that made things rough for a layman like myself. I had to keep switching back and forth from source to source, and then, when I went back to find an important link at the Wikipedia source, “Greenland ice cores,” just a week ago, I found it had vanished, and instead there was this message:
06, 12 September 2011 Timothy’s Cannes (talk | contrib.) deleted “Greenland ice cores” (Mass deletion of pages created by Marshallsumter: questionable creation by now-indeffed editor: see
As a scientific researcher, my conclusion at this point was, “Oh, Drat.”
Unless you are the sort who rushes in where angels fear to tread, do not, I repeat, DO NOT go to that Wikipedia message board. I only went because I wanted to see what ice core data “Mashallsumter” got wrong. As far as I could tell from the morass I waded out into, the reason “Greenland ice cores” was deleted had nothing to do with the data on that page, but rather had to do with some strange beliefs “Mashallsumter” was expressing, and strange research he was involved with, elsewhere in the Wiki-world.
I didn’t much want to know about the fellow’s beliefs and activities, as it seemed to have very little to do with little bubbles in ice, but I couldn’t help notice the marvelous effort that was made to throw “Mashallsumter” from the hallowed halls of Wiki. He was found guilty of both the crime of being original, and the crime of copying. (What is the third alternative?) In any case, “Greenland ice cores” was history, and was history in a hurry, and was deleted history, which hardly counts as history because you can’t find it.
At this point I almost gave up my research, because it occurred to me that something about the study of little bubbles in ice cores makes people weird. I did not want to become weird. However my wife reassured me I had nothing to fear, because I already am weird, and that gave me the courage to forge onwards.
part two tomorrow…
Good story. I’ll see you tomorrow.
I wonder who this marshallsumter dude is. What’s he done to the mainsteam?
Like the old saying: You know your over the target if your getting flak.
Holds true if you get shot down too.
Richard S Courtney says:
November 1, 2011 at 3:04 am
Your claim of “physically impossible” demonstrates your willful ignorance. Surfaces of ice and ice crystals are coated in a liquid phase (i.e. water) at all temperatures down to -40 deg. C (incidentally, this is why ice is slippery). And CO2 dissolves in water. So, CO2 certainly will migrate out of bubbles: it will dissolve and then experience ionic diffusion through the intergranular (i.e. between crystal) zones.
Richard, CO2 dissolves in water. Right. But that is as good for CO2 from outside the core as from inside. Thus with an outside CO2 level for some periods more than twice the inside CO2 level, CO2 would migrate from outside to inside via water vains, ultimately pushing the inside CO2 level equal to the outside if that mechanism was at work at all.
But even the influence of any hiding of CO2 in water veins is proven wrong: the newer method sublimates all ice at very low temperature under vacuum, where ALL CO2 present is measured quantitatively, no matter if that was originally in the bubbles or in liquid veins. But that doesn’t indicate higher CO2 levels than the standard method where only CO2 from the bubbles is measured by crushing the ice under vacuum.
Further, as said before, the average air composition outside the bubbles at closing depth was measured in situ by Etheridge. There was a difference of 30 years between the average air age (compared to direct measurements at the South Pole) and the ice age (measured by counting the layers) at that depth (and no difference with the air already enclosed, as measured by the standard ice crushing method). According to Jaworowski (1992 and personal correspondence in 2009) there is no difference in age of ice and gas…
Further, I don’t “belief” that the ice core CO2 measurements are right, I am pretty sure that they are right, because a lot of people from a lot of organisation of a lot of countries do measure them under the best analytical circumstances, looking for possible artefacts and avoid them or correct them… And all ice cores, taken under extremely different circumstances of temperature, precipitation and contamination show similar CO2 levels (+/- 5 ppmv) for overlapping periods.
And as you know, I don’t “belief” that the current increase of CO2 is man-made. I am pretty sure that that is the case, based on the fact that the increase fits all available evidence and that the two main possible sources: oceans and vegetation are proven sinks for CO2. And because all possible alternatives I have heard of conflict with one or more observations. For those interested:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html#The_mass_balance
I remember as a geology student in my first lecture in petrology when the professor stated that for any theory to be truly valid, three conditions must be satisfied – field observations and measurements, physical-chemical principles and laboratory experimental results (I think I have it about right!).
Also in geology, the compositions of fluid inclusions in minerals have long been used to estimate the pressures, temperatures and chemistry of fluids within the earth’s crust that were related to the nucleation and growth of certain crystals. But not any old crystals. Many crystals have weak lattices and fluid inclusions are subject to profound compositional changes related to subsequent deformational events and differential diffusion phenomena. So the post-crystallization history of the crystal’s host rock must always be assessed. The lattices of gypsum and calcite are so weak that such minerals are rarely used for fluid inclusion work; quartz, being common and much stronger, is the preferred crystal.
Ice must have by far the weakest lattice of any crystal occurring in nature so surely there must be a large body of experimental laboratory studies directed at studying changes in the gas composition of entrapped air bubbles relating to compression, deformation and other post depositional changes? Or is this a tabu subject?
Gail Combs says:
November 1, 2011 at 1:37 pm
For me the 180 ppmv was the real killer. If it actually got that low we would all be dead.
Fortunately for land plants (sea plants don’t have that problem, plenty of CO2 in the oceans), the levels of CO2 near the surface are much (30-50 ppmv, up to several 100’s in the morning hours) higher than in the rest (95%) of the atmosphere, so that they could survive even at 180 ppmv “background” CO2 levels…
why is the average northern hemisphere CO2 not higher than the south
Tom Quirk was completely wrong on this point: he used a method to determine the NH/SH CO2 lag over the months, which doesn’t make a differentiation between 2, 14 or 26 month lags or alternatively 10, 22 or… month leads. In reality, there is a near 1.5 year lag of the SH CO2 level after the NH CO2 increase and there is a 0.5 year lag with altitude:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends_1995_2004.jpg
LOL, great muse.
I can’t wait until you get to the part amount the amount of ice core, with little bubbles, that is necessary to deliver a reading.
petermue says:
November 1, 2011 at 3:14 am
Sorry, but you forgot one thing:
The only point where ice cores show the real value is at the top layer.
As soon as that layer was covered by new snow/ice and is exposed to pressure, it loses CO2 by outwashing, degassing and diffusion.
If that was true, then there wouldn’t be any change from 180-280 ppmv as seen in several ice cores of sufficient length (at least 20,000 years), as the diffusion would be at work during 800,000 years for the oldest ice of Dome C. And as Etheridge showed: the ice core record at Law Dome and the atmospherice levels overlap for the period 1960-1980:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_sp_co2.jpg
Futher, there are extreme differences in temperature (from -20 to -40°C), extreme differences in accumulation (from a few mm/year for Vostok and Dome C to 1.5 m ice equivalent at Law Dome), thus extreme differences in pressure and possible migration speed. Despite that, all ice cores show nearly the same CO2 levels (and the same HS shape) for the same time frame:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_001kyr_large.jpg
Last but not least, the theoretical migration was calculated from the Siple ice core, based on CO2 migration near remelted ice layers. That shows that the migration broadens the resolution (that is the averaging period, but that doesn’t change the average!) at middle depth from 20 to 22 years and at full depth (70,000 years old) from 20 to 40 years…
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 1, 2011 at 2:40 pm
And all ice cores, taken under extremely different circumstances of temperature, precipitation and contamination show similar CO2 levels (+/- 5 ppmv) for overlapping periods.
I don’t doubt that +/- 5ppm, however, if the initial CO2 volume has already been changed from physical and chemical processes, you still get wrong results.
The deeper layers below the locking firn layer that show i.e. 180-280 ppm, might have been at 335 +/- 40 ppm at the time of their development thousands of years ago.
You can’t substantiate it with the modern analyse methods, but those pysical and chemical processes most likely suggest that obvious changes.
Ferdinand Engelbeen and petermue:
I intend no offence to either of you but I do not intend to continue discussion of the ice cores in this thread: I shall get involved in the thread of Caleb’s next instalment. Ferdinand and I have been disputing these issues for many years and it seems unlikely that we can resolve our disagreements in the few comments of this thread before publication of Caleb’s Part 2.
Richard
cementafriend says:
November 1, 2011 at 5:42 am
It is sad to see Ferdinand Engelbeen continually deride the conscientious and ethical scientist (the late) Ernst-Georg Beck who was not paid by anyone. He analysed the work of many others including nobel prize winners, His analyses were peer reviewed. He was conscious of variations around the world.
I never derided the late Ernst Beck as person, to the contrary, I admire the tremendous
amount of work he has done to get all the old writings out of the archives. But that doesn’t mean that I do agree with his conclusions.
The main problem is that he didn’t make any differentiation between the good, the bad and the ugly measurements. As we know today, any measurements taken in the first few hundred meters over land should be discarded, as too close to local sources and sinks. Extremely variable over a day, doesn’t even present the local average, even if you take three samples a day (as only a few did over longer term). If you look at his 1942 “peak”, that is mainly based on two longer series: Poona, India and Giessen, Germany. The first did measure CO2 levels under and inbetween leaves of growing plants. Of zero value for knowing “background” CO2 levels of that time.
Giessen now has a modern continous measuring station. Here a few days out of its summer life, compared to Barrow, Mauna Loa and South Pole measurements of the same days (all raw data):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/giessen_background.jpg
The historical Giessen data were from three samples a day, of which two were at the flanks of the huge decrease/increase of CO2 levels at morning/night. The average variability of the historical CO2 data at Giessen was 68 ppmv (1 sigma), currently at Mauna Loa less than 1 ppmv (around the seasonal variation)… See further:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
The method used by Massen and Beck may be useful if one has enough reliable data at high wind speed. Unfortunately, the Giessen data have only some 20 data above 4 m/s wind speed with an enormous spread… No way to use that method for the Giessen (or other) historical data.
Gail Combs says:
November 1, 2011 at 1:37 pm
For me the 180 ppmv was the real killer. If it actually got that low we would all be dead.
____________-
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 1, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Fortunately for land plants (sea plants don’t have that problem, plenty of CO2 in the oceans), the levels of CO2 near the surface are much (30-50 ppmv, up to several 100′s in the morning hours) higher than in the rest (95%) of the atmosphere, so that they could survive even at 180 ppmv “background” CO2 levels…
____________________
The logic of that answer does not work.
If the levels of CO2 near the surface are “higher than in the rest (95%) of the atmosphere” then where the heck are the glaciers??? In the stratosphere?
And do not tell me the CO2 is lower at the poles than elsewhere because there are volcanoes at both poles.
Here is Becks information from Barrow Alaska.
Date – – – – Co2 ppm * * latitude * * longitude * * *author * * location
1947.7500 – – 407.9 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1947.8334 – – 420.6 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1947.9166 – – 412.1 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.0000 – – 385.7 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.0834 – – 424.4 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.1666 – – 452.3 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.2500 – – 448.3 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.3334 – – 429.3 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.4166 – – 394.3 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.5000 – – 386.7 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.5834 – – 398.3 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.6667 – – 414.5 * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
1948.9166 – – 500.0 * * * * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander * *Barrow
Finally Jaworowski was made an example of . He was ridiculed and fired. The rest of the
sheepscientists fell back in line. I have certainly seen several real life examples of that method of “Team Building” and Anthony has reported other cases here at WUWT.There are trillions of dollars riding on “CO2 is increasing and the Temperature is increasing and MAN CAUSED IT. ” Any hole in the “Message” is going to get plugged.
“The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it’s profits or so dependant on it’s favors, that there will be no opposition ….” — Rothschild, 1863
For those who are not interested in money “we are lying to save the environment” or “we are lying to bring about social equality” works just fine.
petermue says:
November 1, 2011 at 6:22 am
There is another method that results in the same values, 335 +/- 40 ppm.
http://www.umweltluege.de/sceptics/vostok/cvostokdiff.png
The gas age – ice age difference (which according to Jaworowski doesn’t exist) has nothing to do with CO2 levels. JJ Drake did find a correlation, but that is completely spurious. What happens is that you have a typical problem of:
A causes B (temperature changes cause changes in gas age – ice age differences)
A causes C (temperature changes cause CO2 level differences)
as both A/B and A/C show a high correlation, there is a high correlation between B and C but in fact zero causation… Thus there is not the slightest physical reason to “compensate” the CO2 levels found with the ice age – gas age difference.
petermue says:
November 1, 2011 at 1:29 pm
@Volker Doormann
You can find Earth’s temperature gradient in lots of other data, like Sun’s MUV, magnetic flux and
i.e. all the great historic Minima.
Solanki et al.
http://www.umweltluege.de/pdf/solphys-2004.pdf
(Fig. 4)
How can the Sun copy Earth’s temperature gradient? 😉
There are a storks on houses of people in Germany where are babies have come. That seems interesting. But the very point of argumentation is that there are also fresh new babies in winter in Germany, when there are absolute no storks next to the houses, they have moved to Africa.
Such a point is the fact that the variation of the terrestrial temperature anomaly in the last half century correlates with the variation of the measured temperature anomaly of the planet Neptune:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/hadcrut3_vs_neptune.gif
The same effect is known to the planets Uranus and Pluto.
Question: ‘How can the increasing CO2 content in the atmosphere of the Earth increase the temperature of Neptune?’
Answer: ‘Wrong question. The question suggests that the rising temperature on Neptune is related to the rising CO2 content on Earth. But that is an weak argument. A more strong argument is that a common variable heat source drives a heat current to both Earth and Neptune and all the other outer bodies.
But it seems this is still a taboo.
V.
RandomReal[] says:
November 1, 2011 at 10:52 am
At the -40°C of the Vostok ice core, some bacteria can survive, but that is restricted to DNA repair. For that purpose they use CO2 via an alternative cycle, using NH4 oxydation as the energy source. If one assumes that all N2O measured in the ice core was the result of that type of metabolism, then less than 1 ppmv CO2 was used for DNA repair by the concentration of bacteria found with dust at some depth in the Vostok ice core. See point 11 of
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/13/4631.full
Ferdinand Engelbeen,
saw a cool animation yesterday:
Not quite what I had been led to believe!!
Gail Combs says:
November 1, 2011 at 3:52 pm
If the levels of CO2 near the surface are “higher than in the rest (95%) of the atmosphere”then where the heck are the glaciers??? In the stratosphere?
The difference is that the poles are free from sources and sinks (not many plants or factories at the South Pole, but measurements must be done upwind from the base…), while most of the historical measurements were in the middle of towns, even then using fuel to heat their houses and after 1900 with an increasing number of cars, or in the fields and forests where measurements taken 15 minutes later can give you hundreds of ppmv difference… Measuring CO2 at the South Pole is at least 2,000 km from the nearest volcano. Even Mauna Loa at a few hundred meters of volcanic vents only shows 4 ppmv increase if the wind is downslope from the vents…
About the Barrow measurements, you need to follow the description of the apparatus. That was the micro-Schollander method to detect the health of the workers at the Barrow weather station by measuring the CO2 content of their exhaled air (at around 20,000 ppmv!). Every now and then, the apparatus was calibrated against outside air, which are the figures you did find at Beck’s site. If the measurements were between 200-500 ppmv the apparatus was deemed OK for its purpose!. Thus in other words, the accuracy of the micro-Schollander apparatus was +/- 150 ppmv! Completely useless for accurate CO2 measurements in air… Which is a pitty, because that is one of the current baseline stations for CO2 measurements (as long as the wind is not from land side in summer…).
The same problem with historical measurements in Antarctica: they measured extreme high levels of CO2 at some moments, but at the same time low O2 levels. Which shows contamination of the samples (even breathing near the sampling can give false results)…
As said before, the late Ernst Beck used all available measurements, including Barrow and Antarctica, without any quality control, lumped all 90,000 datapoints together, even if one side of the earth shows 500 ppmv and the other end shows 250 ppmv for the same year. That results in a 1942 “peak” which is not seen in any other direct or indirect indication of CO2 levels, be it ice cores, stomata data, coralline sponges, sediments,… And which is physically impossible. It is theoretically possible to have a sudden outburst of 1000 Pinatubo’s at once in a short period of 7 years, even if that is very unlikely to give an increase of 80 ppmv. But there is no physically explanation that the same amount disappears again within the same time span of 7 years. At the current +100 ppmv, the oceans and vegetation only absorb 2 ppmv/year, thus it would take far longer than 7 years to remove 80 ppmv…
Last but not least, all available historical CO2 measurements taken over the oceans (seaships) or coastal with wind from the seaside give low values, around the ice core measurements for the same period…
kuhnkat says:
November 1, 2011 at 5:19 pm
saw a cool animation yesterday:
Not quite what I had been led to believe!
What you see are the changes from vegetation and oceans due to seasonal temperature changes.
Well mixed doesn’t mean that all CO2 levels at every moment are equal. It means that any change at one place is mixed within all parts of the world in a reasonable time period. An increase at sealevel in the NH of 2 ppmv/year (that is 0.5% of the total CO2 level) needs a few weeks to distribute over the same latitude and altitude, a few months for other latitudes and altitudes in the same hemisphere and a few years to level off over the hemispheres. But as there is a continuous increase mainly in one hemisphere and a cyclic change in opposite ways between the hemispheres, there still are a lot of differences visible over monthly to yearly averages, be it less than +/- 5% of the values for monthly averages and less than +/- 1% for yearly averages.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 1, 2011 at 5:57 pm
is mixed within all parts of the world in a reasonable time period
What is a “reasonable” time period in your view?
The WDCGG holds CO2 data that is somewhat curious. For example this station in the mountains of Bulgaria, far off any civilisation. If you look at the location of the instrument, you’ll see no environmental influence. There is, compared to other stations, nothing that can distort the measurement.
But where are the 390 ppm in that?
http://www.umweltluege.de/images/co2beobulgaria.png
(Data at ftp://gaw.kishou.go.jp/pub/data/current/co2/monthly/beo642n00.inrne.as.cn.co2.nl.mo.dat )
341.6 ppm declining!
Station in vodeo
That might be real values.
There are good reasons to avoid stations like Mauna Loa, or even near ocean stations, because they could give wrong measurements per se. See
http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/
(paragraph 1.2)
A reason for that might be ocean degassing.
Why?
Go ahead reading paragraph 5.0 and 6.0.
Estimated 3,500,000 submarine volcanoes, that’s also one thing noone likes to talk about as it seems.
“We can expect a higher percentage in the case of the count taken by Hillier & Watts (2007) because it includes smaller, younger seamounts; a higher proportion of which will be active. Nevertheless, in the spirit of caution and based on our minimum inference of 4% seamount activity from Batiza’s observations, I estimate 139,096 active submarine volcanoes worldwide.”
About 139,096 active submarine volcanoes, that exhaust estimated ~25 GtC/y, that is far more than assumed man-made CO2!
All I can find in literature about examination of volcanoes relates to about only 20-30 subaerial volcanoes.
So the aCO2 hypotheses sounds not very conclusive to me.
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
The difference is that the poles are free from sources and sinks…
The poles are precisely where the solubility of CO2 in water is highest:
http://docs.engineeringtoolbox.com/documents/1148/solubility-co2-water.png
In other words, “Seawater that is colder can hold more CO2”:
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/climatechange/theclimate/oceans.htm
So atmospheric CO2 should sink faster at the poles, keeping polar levels below the global average. Correct?
The killer micro-observation for me was the question, ‘How do they compensate for the rapid decompression of the core and its bubbles as it is brought to the surface?’ From tons of pressure per sq.” to 15 lbs? Pretty drastic. Unless you imagine the ice cores are perfectly rigid and infinitely strong.
Ferdinand,
Thank you for your reply. Indeed, ammonia oxidation by this one group of microbes would change CO2 concentrations by 1 ppm. But (there is always a but), you have to consider that this is one metabolic product that was measured. That is, the excess N2O is only one of several potential metabolic products that a variety of different bacteria could produce. If you could point me to papers on other metabolic products, such as acetate and formate, found in glacial ice, I certainly would appreciate it. 140,000 years of bacterial metabolism, albeit horrendously slow, could certainly affect local CO2 concentrations well above the 1 ppm, mentioned above.
In support of your implied conclusion that microbial activity does not significantly affect gas concentrations Rhode, Price, Bay & Bramall state in a follow up,
From the point of view of its value as a climate proxy, it is
fortunate that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 in the ice is so
high relative to the microbial concentration that CO2 excesses or
deficiencies caused by in situ microbial metabolism are unlikely to
be detectable except in basal ice that was formed on a highly
concentrated microbial habitat, such as was present in wetland
before glaciation.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/25/8667.full.pdf+html?with-ds=yes
While I have no evidence to the contrary and thus take ice core CO2 measurements as a good first approximation (even better with the total sublimation data), I would certainly like to see analyses of what was left over in the sublimation studies. Acetate, I suspect, would not be volatile at the temperatures and pressures for such experiments and as for formate, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. Moreover, cells that do happen to grow, even if their doubling time is measured in kyr, could in principle draw down CO2 concentrations into nonvolatile compounds.
An alternative hypothesis with regard to CO2 concentration is that during relatively dry glacial periods, there is an increase in microbial cell concentration in the glaciers. Through photosynthetic and other processes, the CO2 in the ice is fixed in a higher proportion compared with relatively wet interglacial conditions. There might be a lower bound concentration for these processes, ~200 ppm?, and thus the low CO2 concentrations, and CH4 for that matter, found during maximal glaciation periods could in part reflect a slow but persistent metabolism by a diverse microbial community. Who knows? One way to test this is to determine the total carbon content per unit volume and compare it with the CO2 concentration. If microbial metabolism has no effect, then total C should be directly proportional to CO2. Conversely, if there is a is an effect, it would show up as a lower ratio of CO2/total C.
I am not sure of your DNA repair reference. I should note that bacteria devote ~25 % of their energy production (ATP and redox) to what is referred to a maintenance energy, the amount required for survival. DNA repair is not in and of itself a large energy consumer, but for a cell to perform DNA repair, it has to maintain overall energy, synthesize the repair enzymes, and have a proper concentration of dNTP. In fact, there are several such systems that function in every cell. For a cell to survive, it must also maintain its membrane integrity and fluidity, a proton gradient across the membrane, have the proper transport and redox proteins within their membranes, the proper set of enzymes to harvest energy, carbon, nitrogen, etc., be able to detect and degrade misfolded proteins, synthesize replacements for these degraded proteins,and the list goes on. Given all that a cell requires just to stay alive, I am astounded that they can survive at all, and in some cases, thrive in what we refer to as extreme environments.
One last tidbit, I have heard, but haven’t followed up, that photosynthetic bacteria have been found in communities associated with deep sea thermal vents. What light are they harvesting? Light from neutrino/dark matter collisions? Who knows? I only bring this point up since the history of microbiology has been consistently marked by “that can’t happen”/”it would contribute nothing” statements, that are usually overturned when people actually look carefully.
Thank you for your patience and your persistent scientific grounding. It has certainly helped to keep my feet on the ground when it comes to thinking about the carbon cycle etc. Last fun fact to know and tell: there are ~10^31 bacteriophage on earth and can devour up to 50 % of a cell population per day in ocean environments.
End of a long hard day. I can’t really respond to 145 responses.
My daughters are now 31 and 28, and are in some ways now more worldly-wise than I can ever hope to be. But Lord Oh Lord, did they ever teach me a lot, when they were teens!
The worst part is when they are just barely teens, and you are expected to protect them from predators, and they are very good looking. At that point, fathers go through a spell where just about every man alive is a predator. Hair gets grey pretty fast.
It’s amazing how being a father can turn you into a prude. I’m glad I survived that time. I didn’t think I would, but you do. And you learn a lot, if you listen.
So much for daughters. On to little bubbles.
Only at WUWT could I learn about carbonated ice-cream invented at MIT.
I was glad Ferdinand showed up to defend the holy cow. After all, what’s the use of offending a holy cow, and talking about how pummeled you get if you do so, if no one shows up to pummel you?
However I think we can safely say the science is not settled, even concerning a cornerstone like the icecore records.
No one came close to guessing what part 2 holds.
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RE: petermue says:
November 1, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Watch it. You are meddling with a sacred cow even more sacred than the ice core records.
petermue says:
November 1, 2011 at 6:23 pm
If you look at the location of the instrument, you’ll see no environmental influence. There is, compared to other stations, nothing that can distort the measurement.
Take a better look at the film: there is grass around the site. That means photosynthesis and thus higher CO2 levels at night (although probably not in this case, because over the inversion layer at night) and lower during the day. From the noisy monthly averages, it is already clear that the continuous measurements are very noisy, thus not well mixed and thus not background. Compare that to the Mauna Loa data, which have irregular downwind extra CO2 from volcanic vents and upwind lower CO2 from vegetation (mainly in the afternoon), and the South Pole measurements where there are no nearby sources or sinks. Raw data (hourly averages) compared to selected daily and monthly averages:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_mlo_spo_raw_select_2008.jpg
The fact that the data are noisy is the best indication that the CO2 from nearby sources and sinks is not mixed in and that the station can’t be used for background CO2 measurements…
petermue says:
November 1, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Some more comments on:
There are good reasons to avoid stations like Mauna Loa, or even near ocean stations, because they could give wrong measurements per se. See
http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/ (paragraph 1.2)
I had read that some time ago.
It would be very interesting to see that volcanic vents are the cause of the increase, as that would imply some teleconnection between human emissions and volcanoes, as the increase in the atmosphere is average halve of the emissions in the past 160 years. Moreover, the yearly average trends at Barrow, Mauna Loa, South Pole and 70 other stations are similar, only with a lag for altitude and a NH/SH lag:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends.jpg
where it is clear that Barrow is leading (better visible in detail), far from any known volcano…
About 139,096 active submarine volcanoes, that exhaust estimated ~25 GtC/y, that is far more than assumed man-made CO2!
Land based volcanoes and vents emit less than 1% of what humans emit (based on several measurements around volcanoes), sea floor vents may emit (much) more, but that is not of interest: they emit under great seawater pressure, thus most is absorbed in the deep oceans. The deep oceans have some limited exchange with the atmosphere via the THC (and other) sinks and upwellings, but more important, both near all volcanic vents and the (deep) ocean waters have a high 13C/12C ratio, compared to the atmosphere. If the (deep) oceans and/or volcanic vents were responsible for the increase in the atmosphere, then the 13C/12C ratio of CO2 in the atmosphere would increase, but we see a steady decrease in ratio, as well as in the atmosphere as in the ocean surface:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif
Thimoty Casey is wrong about the 13C/12C ratio of volcanoes: all volcanoes I have read of were between -7 and +7 per mil d13C, where deep mantle volcanoes are at the low side and subduction volcanoes at the high side. But in every case, the volcanic vents were all above the current -8 per mil of the atmosphere. Fossil fuels are average at -24 per mil…
RandomReal[] says:
November 1, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Indeed it is very interesting stuff that microbacterial life can even survive 400,000 years at -40°C… I don’t think it matters that much for CO2, but other less abundant stuff like CH4 and NH4/N2O could be more affected. Anyway, if there are real influences, that would be visible in the data series as some extra up or down where much dust and bacteria are found. That is the case near the bottom of the cores, where the temperature (due to isolation and earth warmth) is near melting the ice and thus much more water veins allow foodstuff exchanges and higher metabolism.
An alternative hypothesis with regard to CO2 concentration is that during relatively dry glacial periods, there is an increase in microbial cell concentration in the glaciers.
Indeed during glacial periods, there is less water vapour which gives less clouds and rain and, which brings more dust and bacteria even until far inland cores. But as the coastal cores always show much higher salt/dust/bacterial contamination and higher temperatures (-20°C vs. -40°C), that should reflect in the CO2 (and other) levels, but that is very limited: all ice cores are within 5 ppmv for the same periods in time…