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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Paging Mr. Moss, Mr. Pete Moss….
Time to curl up by the fire with a bottle of Scotch and
watch the Mastodons and the Wooly Mammoths duke it
out across the street….
But wait….there’s a fight….and a hockey game breaks out…
It’s Michael “Hide the decline” Mann and Al “Gaia con Fritos” Gore…
There’s a lot of high-sticking going on, but a whistle, a train whistle
rings out to stop the melee….a locomotive engineer from the IPCC
whistles the play to a stop, and orders the weathered combatants
to return their “No Bull” prizes…
No energy to continue….with the new models, the “Corn Census”
has shown that all plant material must be diverted to ethanol
production…an inconvenient proof that Mann has no effect
upon climate, weather he likes it or not….
RE:
vukcevic says:
November 9, 2012 at 12:30 am
I like your idea of how to warm the arctic by removing a chunk of the Faroe Bank. It would be harder than digging the Panama Canal, but if it spared us an ice age, humanity could do it.
There is something refreshing about imagining a project where something is actually accomplished. True, it is only imagining, and no dirt is actually moved. However it is very different from climate models, and the economy of carbon credits, where intellectuals fool about with numbers and no true sweat and work is involved……and in fact businesses are bankrupted and less work occurs.
I wonder if some people are unconsciously allergic to work. It might explain why the entire Global Warming scam involves stopping so much constructive activity.
While most peat bogs are at high latitudes, the most productive (the ones that capture the most CO2) are in middle and tropical latitudes. Middle latitude bogs have been drained for centuries, and in recent decades there have been large scale draining of tropical peat bogs, ironically much of the drained bogs are used to produce palm oil for biofuels.
I wonder how much this has contributed to CO2 rises.
Caleb says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:38 pm
……
Indeed, I agree with your assessment. Ice ages onset may be rapid in geological terms, but still takes hundreds of years with plenty of warning. By removing 2m height/annum job done in 100 years. There is an advantage in a slow removal, it would be matched by gradual cooling, so net result would be hardly noticeable in the temperature change.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SNGP.htm
.
Problem is, our burn rate is peaking now. Then what?
”””New paper suggests that CO2 ‘…could prove to be our salvation from the next ice age””’
That ”New Paper” is as wrong as all the ”old” papers, and is ”intended” to insinuate that CO2 has something to do with the PHONY global warming = same diet, same smell / . differently packaged, for the B/S addicts
BUT, this lie should be used to COMPENSATE AND REWARD the big CO2 producers == reverse physiology works
Am I missing something?
As I understand it, CO2 absorbs infrared, holds onto it briefly, and then re-emits it. Spherical geometry being what it is, it’s about 50% likely that an intercepted infrared ray from the ground will be re-emitted back down (or down-ish), thus “trapping” it instead of letting it escape to space, thus “warming” or at least preventing cooling. Yes?
But isn’t that exact same CO2 equally likely to intercept an infrared ray coming in from the Sun and re-emitting it back out into space before it ever has a chance to reach and warm the ground, thus “cooling” or at least preventing warming?
So, no matter how much CO2 you have in the atmosphere and no matter how fast it builds up, it’s going to block just as much incoming infrared from getting in as it blocks outbound infrared from getting out, for a net infrared change of, well, zero? It’s the exact same atmosphere, the same molecules, whether approached from above or below.
Unless there’s some groundward directionality to the re-emission of the infrared, I can’t see how GHG-driven warming (or cooling) could occur. Only if the Sun brightened in the visible spectrum, so that the visible light bypassed the GHGs on the way in, then hit the ground and “transposed” down to infrared.
Am I missing something?
mellryn – Yes you are missing something. Only a small part of the incoming radiation is IR, but virtually all of the outgoing radiation is IR. Thus the incoming radiation gets in virtually unscathed but the outgoing radiation cops it from atmospheric CO2 The main argument is about the IPCC’s mythical “positive feedbacks” without which there would be no “C” in CAGW. A secondary argument is about whether the CO2 has reached saturation and therefore doesn’t absorb any more as concentrations increase.
Hi, Mike, and thank you for your reply. And I’m not trying to be difficult (though I may be succeeding). Only, you write “Only a small part” — well, OK, wikipedia is not the last word in human knowledge, but it says, “Sunlight’s composition at ground level, per square meter, with the sun at the zenith, is about 527 watts of infrared radiation, 445 watts of visible light, and 32 watts of ultraviolet radiation” and “Sunlight in space at the top of Earth’s atmosphere at a power of 1366 watts/m2 is composed (by total energy) of about 50% infrared light, 40% visible light, and 10% ultraviolet light”. I’d gone there first, in fact, ‘cos I didn’t even know IF the Sun shone in the infrared (I thought it should, but I couldn’t say I knew for sure). “Half” doesn’t seem like such a small part. ?
Mellryn – I confess that I thought the proportion was much lower. I usually check everything but missed this. So – we have a figure for incoming total and incoming IR. We know that in a stable situation, outgoing total must basically equal incoming total. But this outgoing total must be virtually all IR (and I haven’t checked this but hopefully I’ve got it right this time). That still seems to give man-made CO2 plenty of net outgoing IR to work on.
Hi, Mike. I can’t find the outgoing proportion anywhere. Earth is obviously visible, and obviously blue, so at least some outgoing is in the visible range. I’m hard-pressed to imagine the Earth absolutely blazing in infrared — we’re not that hot — but I also don’t know what, say, an ordinary energy-inefficient house looks like in infrared compared to visible light. And my lack of imagination is no excuse for a real argument. 🙂 But I’m not clear that it matters.
The CO2, from whatever cause, might have a lot to work on but — well, it’s like this: dirt is of course opaque to visible light, but if the dirt is very fine and very dispersed in a transparent medium like air or water, there is still some light that doesn’t get blocked. So there’s a stuff that is visibly (i.e., something I can imagine … ) opaque and yet under conditions of being dispersed, its opacity, its light-stopping power, is accordingly reduced.
There’s obviously not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to block ALL the incoming infrared, so even if there is more infrared outbound than inbound, how could it block more outbound than inbound? If we shone a light downward from the surface of a lake, and a light of twice the lumens upward from a 10-foot depth, how much light would a light sensor at the surface pick up relative to the light sensor at the depth?