From the University of Gothenburg , another head exploder for Joe Romm and company.
Carbon dioxide – our salvation from a future ice age?
Mankind’s emissions of fossil carbon and the resulting increase in temperature could prove to be our salvation from the next ice age. According to new research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, the current increase in the extent of peatland is having the opposite effect.
“We are probably entering a new ice age right now. However, we’re not noticing it due to the effects of carbon dioxide”, says researcher Professor Lars Franzén.
Looking back over the past three million years, the earth has experienced at least 30 periods of ice age, known as ice age pulses. The periods in between are called interglacials. The researchers believe that the Little Ice Age of the 16th to 18th centuries may have been halted as a result of human activity. Increased felling of woodlands and growing areas of agricultural land, combined with the early stages of industrialisation, resulted in increased emissions of carbon dioxide which probably slowed down, or even reversed, the cooling trend.
“It is certainly possible that mankind’s various activities contributed towards extending our ice age interval by keeping carbon dioxide levels high enough,” explains Lars Franzén, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Gothenburg.
“Without the human impact, the inevitable progression towards an ice age would have continued. The spread of peatlands is an important factor.”
Peatlands act as carbon sinks, meaning that they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are a dynamic landscape element and currently cover around four percent of the earth’s land area. Most peatlands are found in temperate areas north and south of the 45th parallel.
Around 16 percent of Sweden is covered by peatland. Peatlands grow in height and spread across their surroundings by waterlogging woodlands. They are also one of the biggest terrestrial sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Each year, around 20 grams of carbon are absorbed by every square metre of peatland.
“By using the National Land Survey of Sweden’s altitude database, we have calculated how much of Sweden could be covered by peatlands during an interglacial. We have taken a maximum terrain incline of three degrees as our upper limit, and have also excluded all lakes and areas with substrata that are unsuitable for peatland formation.”
The researchers found that around half of Sweden’s surface could be covered by peat. In such a case, the carbon dioxide sink would increase by a factor of between six and ten compared with the current situation.
“If we accept that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to an increase in global temperature, the logical conclusion must be that reduced levels lead to a drop in temperature.”
The relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature is not linear. Instead, lower levels result in a greater degree of cooling than the degree of warming achieved by a corresponding increase.
“There have been no emissions of fossil carbon during earlier interglacials. Carbon sequestration in peatland may therefore be one of the main reasons why ice age conditions have occurred time after time.”
Using calculations for Swedish conditions, the researchers are also producing a rough estimate of the global carbon sink effect if all temperate peatlands were to grow in the same way.
“Our calculations show that the peatlands could contribute towards global cooling equivalent to five watts per square metre. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are near the end of the current interglacial.”
Professor Franzén and three other researchers have published their findings in the journal Mires and Peat.
1. Franzén, L.G., F. Lindberg, V. Viklander & A. Walther (2012) The potential peatland extent and carbon sink in Sweden, as related to the Peatland / Ice Age Hypothesis.
FULL PAPER HERE:
Mires and Peat 10(8):1-19. http://www.mires-and-peat.net/map10/map_10_08.pdf
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Peatland may be a carbon sink but they also produce methane.
If these gallant people in Sweden think that out 3-4% of the total annual CO2 budget will make a difference to an ice age then they do not live on the same planet as me.
Great minds run in great circles.
“If we accept that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to an increase in global temperature, the logical conclusion must be that reduced levels lead to a drop in temperature.”
There are those amongst us who realise that CO2 is very good at converting themal energy into radiation, the only form in which enegy can leave the planet. Thus increasing CO2 levels increases radiative loss and decreases the Earth’s temperature. The effect is subject to the inverse logarithmic relationship and obvious negative feedbacks (e.g. reduced water vapour and cloud formation) so for this minor greenhouse gas the cooling effect is small wrt increases in CO2 levels.
If we invoke the unwritten law of tipping points however it is theoretically possible that the forthcoming Gleisberg minimum around 2035 might indeed trigger the next major glaciation a little earlier than is suggested by the Earth’s collapsing magnetic field, otherwise we can probably wait until 2240 for mamoth hunting to become a recognised Olymic Event.
In the meantime many congratulations to Briffa et al for getting honest and shame on you skeptics for not exploiting this major fissure in the collapsing ice field of warmism.
Stay cool!
We can see that CO2 will save the world from cooling down and
the bad climate villains are the ones who save CO2-emissions.
..its getting clearer from year to year….
I’m surprised nobody here has mentioned Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by William F. Ruddiman.
Ruddiman is not at all alarmist in tone and he writes well. His view is, essentialy, that we
should be entering an ice age by now except for the slow accretion of methane, which he
claims is a byproduct of our agricultural practices (not cow flatulence, or thawing permafrost feedback, but standing water for irrigation purposes producing “swamp gas”.) It’s an interesting take on paleoclimatology.
The usual shallow nonsense based on religious co2 preconceptions.
If they think that the LIA was ended by mankind’s then very puny co2 input to the atmosphere, they should support that hypothesis with some numbers and calculations from sediment / ice cores. They don’t because the numbers don’t add up.
Their theory fails to explain how the LIA occurred and they make no attempt to control for the most likely cause of the LIA and compare that to the same factors influence on the end of the LIA and then see if there is still room for their tenuous hypothesis.
The paper is just another part of the avalanche of shallow co2 genuflections to the co2 religion.
co2 ended the LIA ?! A miracle gas indeed. I think not.
A recent paper (Bruce Bryson on Tallbloke’s blog, a paper worthy of the increased exposure that WUWT can bring) that examined the consequences of the effects of a simultaneous release of all the co2 in all the worlds entire known reserves of oil and gas found that that would create a temperature spike of 3C which would initially drop quite quickly. The implication of this paper is that all the warming that co2 can do has basically been done and the most we can expect with an uncontrolled increase in co2 by mankind would be at best another half degree centigrade. This will not be enough to stop the up to ten degree centigrade drop that a full blown glaciation can deliver.
Perhaps these guys have been drinking too much peat filtered Whisky.
Sophocles says, “Look up!”
In infantry school you’re taught that every animal has its weakness. For humans, it’s the inclination not to look up. To do so takes training.
You’d think that evolution amid leopards would have produced upward-looking hominid species, but I guess maybe our ground-hunting & -gathering ancestors slept in trees, so didn’t have to worry about predators from above, although eagles took their young during the day.
At infantry school you learn other valuable survival skills such as always to walk beside the trail, not on it, never to enter via a door or window, but to make your own hole (when possible) & of course, as in Roger’s Rules of Ranging, never to come out the same way you went in. Mission planners however often criminally neglect that rule, leading to needless loss of life, including my friends in Afghanistan.
So, if we accept this paper as true, explain to me again why everyone is eager to save the wetlands? It seems to me we should be draining them off just to be safe.
Well, if bogs flooding woodlands absorbs CO2 and causes ice ages then it’s got to be the dang BEAVERS!
Nature’s thermostat, the beaver. According to my theory, the increase in temperature out of the Little Ice Age was caused by the fur trade. $omebody $end me $ome money.
Eco-geek says:
November 9, 2012 at 4:26 am
There are those amongst us who realise that CO2 is very good at converting themal energy into radiation, the only form in which enegy can leave the planet. Thus increasing CO2 levels increases radiative loss and decreases the Earth’s temperature. The effect is subject to the inverse logarithmic relationship and obvious negative feedbacks (e.g. reduced water vapour and cloud formation) so for this minor greenhouse gas the cooling effect is small wrt increases in CO2 levels.
I’ve been mentioning this effect off and on for about 3 years now. I call it the cooling effect of GHGs. Keep in mind it doesn’t negate the fact that increases in GHGs do have a warming effect by retaining surface radiation. However, that is balanced by this cooling effect on the atmosphere.
I’ve often wondered why I’ve never seen a single climate scientist attempt to quantify this cooling effect. It has to be real based on the physics of radiation.
It’s also interesting that water vapor condenses at low altitudes which reduces it’s ability to cool while CO2 has concentrations pretty consistent throughout the entire troposphere. This should mean CO2 is better at cooling the upper troposphere than H2O.
Fred:
No wonder there’s so much CO2 now, with the giant beavers of the Pleistocene gone extinct!
vukcevic says:
November 9, 2012 at 12:30 am
I doubt it, with global cooling oceans will easily mop-up excess CO2, remember CO2 follows the temperature’s changes.
Glaciations will start from the poles. Antarctica is isolated by strong circumpolar currents, the problem is in the Arctic. One of the ways to stop all year round freezing of the Arctic is outlined here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SNGP.htm
If this SST map from Unisys is to be believed, there is no need to stop the Gulf Stream it’s going to be cold anyway. The SSTs around Florida are very cold (and it is cold here today in Florida too despite (or perhaps because of) clear skies.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif
No way to know, since interglacials vary in duration, but my guess is there is at least one more Bond Cycle left in the current one, although we are well into its third phase.
So far, we’ve had: 1) the deglaciation phase, with wild climate swings, ie the Dryases & the 8200 BP meltwater event, followed by 2) the Holocene Optimum down to around 5000 BP (very roughly) & its breakdown, such as the 4.2 kya event & Late Bronze Age collapse (such as the Old Kingdom of Egypt) then 3) the first of the late interglacial phase warm period spikes about 3300 BP (improperly called the Minoan, since that civilization fell c. 1500 BC). Subsequent spikes during the Roman & Medieval Warm Periods apparently peaked at lower global temperatures (depending on reconstruction, but IMO this observation is valid), also with lower trough temperatures in each succeeding, intervening Cold Period. Contrary to AGWist doctrine, the best available data suggest to me that the Modern Warm Period follows the downward trend, too, in which case the next cold spell should be worse than the LIA, but still a far cry from from conditions required for reglaciation of North America & Eurasia with ice sheets.
Or maybe humans (or something) warmed the present WP up slightly, so that its peak global temperature equals the prior WP. In any case, people could burn all available fossil fuels over the next millennium without, IMHO, being able to forestall reglaciation by that means alone.
I should note that warmer spells occur during CPs & cooler spells during WPs, just as counter-major trend cycles occur within a secular market trend (bear or bull). A prime example is the Sui-Tang warm cycle within the CP between the Roman & Medieval WPs. Some argue that there are no cycles or trends, just random-walking fluctuations due to statistically insignificant noise, but I disagree. Bond Cycles seem to exist during interglacials, just as the much more dramatic D-O cycles (& the North Atlantic iceberg armadas called Heinrich Events) indubitably do in glacials.
So whether reglaciation lie 500, 1500 or 3000 years in the future, it’s coming & man-made carbon dioxide is unlikely going to stop it, IMHO.
Dog-gone-it! Why mess up a perfectly good thesis by using a reversed time axis???
Ian W says: November 9, 2012 at 7:24 am
…
Hi Ian
Florida seas are about 2C cooler than normal, since Sandy absorbed some of the heat, but temperature is still around 25-26C.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_new.gif
This all makes sense to me, if Gaia is truly alive, our CO2 emmisions can be our way of telling her(sorry…he/she/it) that we are all alive and really need he/she/it not to start another ice age and wipe us all off the planet. So emit away boys, I keep trying to grow coconut palms in my back yard but its still too damn cold.
While those of us living in northern areas wish for this to be true I seriously doubt doubling, or even tripling, current CO2 levels will slow much less stop the return of glaciation.
It is very interesting to note that they are still clinging to the belief that CO2 is THE climate driver but now it might be a good thing. Interesting angle from a political perspective but nothing to back up the basic assumption of CO2 being the climate driver.
Alex says:
November 8, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Agree, as Swede, fully – it doesn’t pass the laugh test! +1!
Brgds from the Bestcoast of Sweden
//TJ
CO2 in the thousands of ppm have failed to prevent ice ages, so this tiny amount compared will have no measurable affect. Lets note that rising CO2 has never prevented the next ice age ever during the record.
It is worse than you imagine. The original suggestion that CO2 might stave off the next glacial epoch was, IIRC, bruited by Arrhenius over a century ago, after he noted that CO2 in laboratory experiments absorbed LIR. That was considered a “good thing.” But, if you dig into the geological record, there are two major planetary climate states that are occasionally referred to as “ice house” and “hot house” states . There are at a minimum eight such major oscillations during the Phanerozoic (ca. 520,000,000 years) averaging about 65,000,000 million years each. Since we are currently in an “ice house” state, we might be coming up on a shift to a “hot house” state anyway, since the current phase was entered not long after the end of the Cretaceous.
However, to make matters more interesting, while the Pliocene, like the Pleistocene, was a period of alternating glacial and interglacial climate states within a planetary “ice house” climate regime, it was considerably warmer than the present. The climate oscillations were shorter and less profound, see this. That shift to larger, longer oscillations with a lower mean temperature could be taken to mean that the planetary climate is about to “chose” a new stable state.
Like taking a coin, setting on edge and spinning it, the early period is marked by fast changes (rapid spinning around a near vertical axis). As the coin slows and begins to wobble strongly, the new rest face is already chosen after the spin axis precesses away from the vertical. The spinning slows, the axial wobble increases, but won’t pass the upright state to the opposite face again. The data from the Pliocene and Pleistocene seem to point to a new cold state as the preferred rest point. This is what comes of confusing tree rings that are less than 2,000 years old with real paleoclimatogical data.
And we know this because we have closely examined how much of the surface of Mars for how long?
ossqss says: November 8, 2012 at 6:39 pm
Ironically, I just finished watching this wonderful recollection of history.
————————————————————–
You forgot to mention that that Michael Burke video about the Ice Age and steam engine is fourt years old. Not too bad for the time, and a good example of what the BBC could do before it was infected by mindless liberals and environmentalists.
.
Global warming, BAD. Cooling and Ice Age, GOOD.
What’s wrong with that picture?
One might view three fingers face-on and say these represent the pre-industrial 280 PPM CO2 concentration and let four fingers represent the current CO2 concentration near 396 PPM. Then look at the difference between these fingers viewed edge-on as in a hand salute. As each cohort of CO2 has the same narrow 15 micron blocking band, that edge-on view of the fingers represents the difference between 280 and 396 PPM CO2 concentration in the atmosphere when blocking radiation emitted from the earth.
This would suggest that it might take a near poisonous concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to avert an ice age due to the logarithmic temperature effect of CO2.
What a moronic assertion about carbon! It seems all too many people who call themselves scientists are so full of baloney they could turn Mars into a methane farm; people need to understand some basic physics before they mouth off on climate.
Atmospheric CO2 was at a concentration of 4000 ppm during the climax of the last ice age, it’s at about 350 ppm now! The proof is in now and we know that CO2 lags warming, period. It is an effect, not a cause.