NZCLIMATE TRUTH NEWSLETTER NO 312 JUNE 4th 2013
CARBON DIOXIDE
There are two gases in the earth’s atmosphere without which living organisms could not exist.
Oxygen is the most abundant, 21% by volume, but without carbon dioxide, which is currently only about 0.04 percent (400ppm) by volume, both the oxygen itself, and most living organisms on earth could not exist at all.
This happened when the more complex of the two living cells (called “eukaryote”) evolved a process called a “chloroplast” some 3 billion years ago, which utilized a chemical called chlorophyll to capture energy from the sun and convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a range of chemical compounds and structural polymers by photosynthesis. These substances provide all the food required by the organisms not endowed with a chloroplast organelle in their cells.
This process also produced all of the oxygen in the atmosphere
The relative proportions of carbon dioxide and oxygen have varied very widely over the geological ages.
It will be seen that there is no correlation whatsoever between carbon dioxide concentration and the temperature at the earth’s surface.
During the latter part of the Carboniferous, the Permian and the first half of the Triassic period, 250-320 million years ago, carbon dioxide concentration was half what it is today but the temperature was 10ºC higher than today . Oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuated from 15 to 35% during this period
From the Cretaceous to the Eocene 35 to 100 million years ago, a high temperature went with declining carbon dioxide.
The theory that carbon dioxide concentration is related to the temperature of the earth’s surface is therefore wrong.
The growth of plants in the Carboniferous caused a reduction in atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide, forming the basis for large deposits of dead plants and other organisms. Plant debris became the basis for peat and coal., smaller organisms provided oil and gas, both after millions of years of applied heat and pressure from geological change; mountain building, erosion, deposition of sediments, volcanic eruptions, rises and fall of sea level and movement of continents. Marine organisms used carbon dioxide to build shells and coral polyps and these became the basis of limestone rocks
The idea promulgated by the IPCC that the energy received from the sun is instantly “balanced” by an equal amount returned to space, implies a dead world, from the beginning with no place for the vital role of carbon dioxide in forming the present atmosphere or for the development or maintenance of living organisms, or their ability to store energy or release it.
Increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by return to the atmosphere of some of the gas that was once there promotes the growth of forests, the yield of agricultural crops and the fish, molluscs and coral polyps in the ocean.
Increase of Carbon Dioxide is thus wholly beneficial to “the environment” There is no evidence that it causes harm.
Cheers
Vincent Gray
Wellington, New Zealand
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Dave Wendt says (June 4, 2013 at 1:51 pm): “The Earth energy budget equation is missing a term. Life”
If Rud Istvan is right (from memory, his 1% figure is correct), then plants affect global energy balance more through albedo than through photosynthesis:
http://www.psmag.com/science-environment/keeping-cool-with-the-albedo-effect-3837/
I have to concur; anything Red/Green is not viewable as intended by the author if the audience member is R/G ‘color insensitive’. I mentioned this in a posting mos/yrs back but …
Should be some sort of ‘checklist’ an author can spin through when creating graphics, maybe prompting the author to ‘spin one’ that the small population of 5 to 8% of males can see.
.
Thanks, Dr. Gray.
We carbon-based life forms actually like CO2.
@Ian W. Sure. Continental drift moves the landmasses (continents) into more or less favorable global positions for net annual bio sequestration of carbon dioxide. Antarctica does about zero all year long, and the Arctic does a little in the summer and none in the winter. Lore Lindu National forest on Sulawese does about as much as mother nature allows all year long.
Today, roughly half of biological carbon sequestration is oceanic and half is terrestrial. Read my first book, or just Google. So mere continental position is capable of affecting up to half (more realistically maybe half of half) of natural sequestration.
Now that does not sound like a lot. But in the Carboniferous (coal) and Permian ( one of, not the only, petroleum forming era –Texas’ Permian basin got its name for a reason) there was little net ‘desequestration’ since we were not around to burn the coal and oil that was being formed. So continental position has a huge impact on the geological rate of net removal and rate of net oxygen formation, so on all the charts above.
You can probably do water vapor feedback from there yourself. Hint, transpiration is more ‘potent’ than evaporation, which is why the Amazon rain forest has so much rain.
Note the huge temperature dip between the Carboniferous and Permian, which is why I chose them for the post. That epoch is called ‘Snowball Earth’ and makes the Pleistocene look downright toasty by comparison. I recommend Prof. Uriarte’s ebook Earth’s Climate History, written by a geologist, if you have further questions.
Nice. More debunking of the CO2 climate sensitivity.
@Gary Young Hladik. The number is right for terrestrial tropical rain forest, but based on the Keeling curve CO2 seasonality, also an upper limit for the biosphere as a whole.
Missing the life term is a huge mistake. For example, the positive water vapor feedback is usually thought to be a simple question of evaporation, and that mostly from oceans covering about 70% of the planet. Wrong, because plant transpiration loses more water to the atmosphere than evaporation, so in places like the Amazon or Southeast Asia there are more thunderstorms and rain. Yes, but those same convective processes convey humidity to the upper troposphere where the positive water feedback is most important. So literally, plant distributions can affect the positive water vapor feedback and undoubtedly have over geological time. One hypothesis for the snowball earth epoch is that Gondwanaland had not yet begun to break up into the continents, the whole thing got too far south of the equator, plants did less well, and…
Is more likely than the Sun stopped shining or Earths orbit shifted. But who knows?
Regards
“Has anybody looked at whether any of the missing heat is locked up in biomass?” [Robert in Arizona at 12:18]
There is some discussion of that in this recent WUWT thread (link below). E.g., “Figure 3 outlines the primary sources of natural CO2 release in decreasing order of quantity of carbon emitted: oceanic release, microbial decay,… .” [Ronald D. Voisin]
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/04/an-engineers-take-on-major-climate-change/#more-87577
Rud Istvan says:
June 4, 2013 at 4:45 pm
———————————–
The “Snowball Earth” events did not occur in the Paleozoic Era (of which the Carboniferous & Permian are the last two periods) of our current Phanerozoic Eon, but in the preceding Neoproterozoic Era of the Precambrian or Proterozoic Eon. The Cryogenian Period (635 to 850 million years ago) takes its name from these cold events. It preceded the Ediacaran Period, last of the Neoproterozoic Era & Proterozoic Eon, which preceded the Cambrian Period, first of the Paleozoic Era.
The supercontinents of the Cryogenian and Ediacaran (Rodinia & Pannotia) were organized quite differently from the more recent Pangaea. In Rodinia, it appears that part of Gondwanaland (India, Madagascar, East Antarctica & Australia) existed, but was located north of the equator. It lacked Africa, South America & West Antarctica, but the other parts were drifting south.
A.D. Everard says:
June 4, 2013 at 11:08 am
Very nice. Very important, too. I wish they taught this is school!
###
They used to. Its amazing what they do not teach any more, and why!
@polistra. Actually, that question has been answered to reasonable certainty, which is why I objected to the conclusions of a previous guest post here earlier today. Henry’s law must be obeyed, which means generally that absent large perturbations like the Industrial revolution, CO2 lags temperature and Gore was flat wrong. But the process of reaching stasis takes several hundred years. So there is literally no way known to physics and chemistry that the Keeling curve is a result of temperature increases on a mere century time scale.
And it is also true that mainly biological processes sequester carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. That is apparent from the annual variation in the Keeling curve. Ah, but the Keeling curve slopes up anyway. That is the unmistakeable signature of anthropogenic CO2 from burning sequestered carbon, aka fossil fuels, converting photosyntheticly generated oxygen and photosyntheticly sequestered CO2 back into atmospheric CO2.
To debate that is a waste of time, you will lose, and only cheapens the powerful other arguments sceptics have against (C)AGW.
What is not settled is how much this century’s temperature increase (itself debatable, you know Anthony’s UHI and such) is caused by that increase. And how much is just natural variation. This the attribution problem. It is fundamental. Willis’ most recent post gave a pretty rock solid reason why climate models cannot sort that out like the AGW gang asserts. Trenberth’s missing heat is just the latest travesty to try to avoid the fact that the modellers themselves said 15 years of no statistical temperature increase would falsify the models. They never thought that would happen, and now it has. Such arguments ( provided as illustrations, not a complete set) carry much more weight thtry erroneously asserting CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, or that atmospheric concentrations have not increased because of the industrial revolution. Those lose.
The winner is, so what?
@ur momisugly John Tillman. I cannot say you are wrong, but will say I am certain that Prof. Uriarte’s book applied the term to roughly 290 million years ago and to the vary obvious dip in temperature in the posted graphic this thread between the Carboniferous and Permian. Because just checked.
Perhaps we are both right, and have found an area of scientific linguistic imprecision?
Regards
Great paper – geologic arm waving in the best traditions of the science. What fascinates me is the Oxygen Content graph. We geologists know that oxygen had a rough time in the first few billions of years of Earth’s existence – little to be had, lots to react with, particularly a world ocean full of soluble reduced iron (Fe++). Life began to take hold, generate O2, and finally enough was available to rid the oceans of its iron content in the form of massive iron formations deposited over millions of years, precipitating out iron and silica on an epic scale (that we mine today to provide most of the world’s iron and steel).
At some point, life burgeoned and the O2 content of the atmosphere zoomed up to the levels most creatures have prospered in, and even higher by a good deal (35% compared to 21% today). But according to this graph, around 260MYBP, the content of atmospheric O2 plummeted more than 50%. Imagine waking up one morning and having the air being like standing on top of Mt. Everest (I’ll let someone else do the math; I’m an exploration geologist). Imagine the chaos.
That downturn seems to correspond grossly with the Great Permian Extinction event. What the heck happened? We know that Permo-Triassic rocks exhibit “red beds” (clastic rocks in which all the iron has been oxidized from Fe++ (generally gray or green rocks) to Fe+++ (generally red and pink rocks) in profusion. There was also going on one of the largest single volcanic eruptive events that we can identify. So what caused the oxygen depletion, and how did it affect life on Earth? There is still one science that isn’t settled.
If Prof. Uriarte calls the Carboniferous-Permian glaciation a Snowball Earth incident, he is mistaken. However, as the copied material below show, at least in this version of his book available on line, he, like everyone else, refers to the Neoproterozoic glaciation as “Snowball Earth”.
While the Carboniferous glaciation was severe and lasted longer than the preceding Ordovician, its ice sheets and sea ice did not extend to the equator from both north and south, as hypothesized for the Cryogenian, either in its Snowball or Slushball Earth versions.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1186.summary
The highest latitude I have seen estimated for the Carboniferous ice sheet on Gondwana is 40 degrees South. Estimates of its extent vary, but “Snowball Earth” applies only to the Cryogenian, not the Carboniferous.
Below are relevant passages from what I assume is a summary of his book:
http://www.herbogeminis.com/IMG/pdf/historia_del_clima_de_la_tierra_anton_uriarte.pdf
As you can see, he uses the term “Snowball Earth” for the Cryogenian but not for the Carboniferous glaciation.
Glaciaciones Neoproterozoicas
Al final del Proterozoico (Neoproterozoico), en rocas datadas entre hace unos 750 y 580 millones
de años, se observan señales de nuevas glaciaciones. Y no fueron unas glaciaciones normales, sino probablemente las más intensas que ha habido nunca. Estas glaciaciones fueron probablemente varias y duraron varios millones de años cada una (Bodiselitsch, 2005; Macdonald, 2010). Hubo probalemente tres episodios glaciales importantes: Sturtiense, hace unos 710 millones de años; Marinoense, hace unos 635 millones de años y Varangiense, hace unos 600 millones de años.
Existen pruebas geológicas de que afectaron a todos los continentes, de tal forma que las regiones heladas se extendieron hasta latitudes tropicales. Lo que está aún en debate es si durante su transcurso la superficie del mar se heló por completo, o casi por completo.
Durante estas glaciaciones de mediados del Neoproterozoico, o Criogénico, el planeta casi dejó de ser apto para la vida. En muchas series sedimentarias de localidades situadas entonces en los trópicos aparecen estratos correspondientes a una fase tan fría que hace pensar que cesó la actividad biológica marina.
Los análisis muestran que el carbono de esos estratos de carbonatos inorgánicos es muy pobre en su isótopo carbono-13, lo que indica falta o pobreza de actividad biológica marina. Ocurre que los organismos fotosínteticos oceánicos prefieren absorber dióxido de carbono con carbono-12 antes que con carbono-13, por lo que, cuando la vida es prolífica, suelen hacer que en el agua sea alta la concentración isotópica del carbono-13 sobrante. En consecuencia sube también la concentración del carbono-13 en los carbonatos inorgánicos, ya que estos se forman a partir del carbono disuelto en el océano. Por eso, la concentración pequeña de carbono-13 en los sedimentos carbonatados de las última fases de las glaciaciones neoproterozoicas indican lo contrario, que la actividad fotosintética marina fue entonces mínima.
Fig. Los geólogos Paul Hoffman y Daniel Schrag en Namibia se apoyan en una capa de sedimentos glaciales entre los que se observa una gran roca suelta que cayó al fondo del mar tras ser acarreada hasta allí por icebergs a la deriva en la fase glacial. El estrato está culminado por una capa de carbonatos sedimentados tras la glaciación (cap carbonates).
http://www-eps.harvard.edu/people/faculty/hoffman/snowball_paper.html
Otra segunda huella de las glaciaciones del Neoproterozoico son las formaciones masivas de
minerales de hierro que aparecen en los estratos geológicos de aquella época. Estas formaciones se presentan en forma de arcillas ferruginosas bandeadas, en las que se superponen capas grises de sílex y otras de material rojo, rico en hierro.
Fig. Formación de hierro en bandas con una roca suelta transportada por icebergs (“dropstone”)
incrustada entre ellas, en Mackenzie Mtns, Canada.
http://www-eps.harvard.edu/people/faculty/hoffman/snowball_paper.html
La alternancia entre sedimentos sin hierro y con hierro tendría la siguiente explicación. Durante las glaciaciones, las aguas profundas de los océanos, cubiertas y separadas del aire por una capa de hielo de varios kilómetros de espesor, no se ventilaban, y la respiración biológica de los organismos que habitaban en ellas agotaba el oxígeno disuelto en el agua. De esta forma, el hierro, que emanaba de las fuentes termales del fondo del mar, se iba disolviendo en el agua marina, sin oxidarse ni precipitar. De ahí el color gris de los sedimentos depositados durante las glaciaciones. Por el contrario, durante las desglaciaciones, el deshielo de la superficie permitía de nuevo la ventilación del agua. Entonces, el hierro disuelto que se había ido concentrando en el agua se oxidaba y precipitaba masivamente en capas de arcillas ferruginosas rojas, que sucedían a los sedimentos grises anteriores.
Grandes depósitos de dióxido de manganeso como los que hoy se explotan en el Kalahari
probablemente se formaron de la misma manera, por una oxidación brusca de los iones de
manganeso que habían permanecido disueltos en el agua marina (Kirschvink, 2002).
Sobre estas gigantescas glaciaciones persisten bastantes incógnitas. La teoría más extrema
(Snowball Earth) es que fueron glaciaciones globales o casi globales, en las que la Tierra llegó a
convertirse en una gran “bola de nieve”. Según esta teoría todos los mares, o casi, estuvieron
cubiertos por una banquisa helada que podía tener un espesor de hasta mil metros de hielo.
Pero una incógnita aún no dilucidada es cómo, a pesar del frío, los animales multicelulares, que ya habían aparecido en los océanos anteriormente, lograron sobrevivir. Quizás no se congelaba toda el agua sino solamente una fina capa superficial, que permitía la penetración de la luz solar y la continuación de la vida fotosintética bajo ella. El hielo superficial aislaría térmicamente el agua subyacente que de esta forma se habría mantenido siempre en estado líquido, sin llegar a congelarse. Además, la actividad hidrotermal en los fondos marinos seguiría funcionando, aún en los tiempos más fríos, ayudando a conservar el calor de las aguas profundas (McKay, 2000).
Otra teoría, menos radical, es que quizás las glaciaciones no fueron del todo globales y que quedaba un cordón ecuatorial oceánico sin congelar, que sirvió de refugio en los tiempos más duros a los animales multicelulares.
5. Glaciación de final del Carbonífero
Hace unos 300 millones de años, al haber sido ya secuestrado en los sedimentos una enorme
cantidad de carbono orgánico absorbido por la vegetación y procedente del CO2 atmosférico, los
niveles de este gas invernadero en el aire disminuyeron hasta un nivel muy bajo, semejante al
actual. En un proceso paralelo, la concentración de oxígeno probablemente alcanzó su nivel
máximo: un 35 % (Berner, 1999).
Hacia finales del Carbonífero y principios del Pérmico el clima se enfrió y se entró en un nuevo
período glacial, en el que un manto de hielo en las latitudes australes de Gondwana, en lo que es hoy Sudáfrica, creció y se encogió en diversas fases sucesivas. Por ese motivo el nivel del mar bajó y subió repetidamente, provocando gigantescas transgresiones y regresiones marinas durante toda esa época final del Paleozoico.
I haven’t edited the relevant sections. I can translate if anyone be interested. Apologies for such lengthy text copying in Spanish.
Sorry. I meant lowest latitude.
Must read..
Congress hates carbon pricing but rest of world doesn’t. 06/04/2013
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/04/congress-hates-carbon-pricing-the-rest-of-the-world-doesnt/
The Carbon trading will Crash Governments and banks in time like sub prime did is my feeling. Remember when World bank was saying temperatures would rise 7° by 2100 well they are the ones with huge interest in Carbon Trading Scam..
Myrrh,
As Ferdinand has been at some pains to point out human combustion is distinguishable from volcanic CO2 by its preponderance of 12C as opposed to a normal isotopic distribution from volcanoes. Subduction zones in extremely carbonate rich areas have been shown to affect the isotopic composition of volcanoes, but most carbonate appears too buoyant to subduct and gets scraped off the descending ocean floor and accreted.
For a discussion of Carbon isotopes and a thesis apropos this thread please see:
http://geosciencebigpicture.com/2012/07/15/carbon-isotope…-the-biosphere/
Biologists have been examining the global carbon cycle for decades.
Earth’s current atmosphere is entirely a product of biology (except Argon).
But you still need to look at global geo-chemical (abiotic) carbon exchanges/fluxes if you want to call clouds and oceans abiotic.
Both geologists and biologists are needed to understand the atmosphere as an evolving product of very long time scales.
No physicist will ever understand the atmophere of the living Earth without consulting a biologist.
gymnosperm says:
June 4, 2013 at 9:11 pm “…most carbonate appears too buoyant to subduct and gets scraped off the descending ocean floor and accreted….” Subducted, obducted, or accreted, the fact is that CO2 is systematically being removed from the gaseous phase to a much more passive existence in the form of rocks. There has to be some of it in the atmosphere or much of life dies. That’s what really bugs me about this whole CO2/carbon witch hunt: we are close to the lower limit of livable CO2 abundance and the AGW crowd want to limit it even more. Idiocy abounds.
RICHARD CLENNEY says: June 4, 2013 at 12:04 pm
The percent of sunlight that is used by photosynthesis is about 2%.
Which oddly enough is about same efficiency as most solar panels.
bw says:
June 4, 2013 at 9:42 pm
Biologists have been examining the global carbon cycle for decades.
Earth’s current atmosphere is entirely a product of biology (except Argon).
——————————————–
Our atmosphere is still 78% nitrogen, which came originally from volcanism, rather than biological processes.
Why does the misleading and debunked graphic #2 keep appearing over and over? That graphic doesn’t include other varying forcings, particular solar irradiation, that must be considered in analysis in order to provide a more complete & accurate paleo-picture of the correlation between CO2 and surface temperature.
Royer 2006: http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2%28GCA%29.pdf
“Abstract
The correspondence between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and globally averaged surface temperatures in the recent past suggests that this coupling may be of great antiquity. Here, I compare 490 published proxy records of CO2 spanning the Ordovician to Neogene with records of global cool events to evaluate the strength of CO2-temperature coupling over the Phanerozoic (last 542 my). For periods with sufficient CO2 coverage, all cool events are associated with CO2
levels below 1000 ppm. A CO2 threshold of below 500 ppm is suggested for the initiation of widespread, continental glaciations, although this threshold was likely higher during the Paleozoic due to a lower solar luminosity at that time. Also, based on data from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, a CO2 threshold of below 1000 ppm is proposed for the initiation of cool non-glacial conditions. A pervasive, tight correlation between CO2 and temperature is found both at coarse (10 my timescales) and fine resolutions up to the temporal limits of the data set (million-year timescales), indicating that CO2, operating in combination with many other factors such as solar luminosity and paleogeography, has imparted strong control over global temperatures for much of the Phanerozoic”
@ur momisugly John@ur momisuglyEF says:
June 4, 2013 at 10:11 pm
—————————————-
Correlation is not “control”. As with Gore’s baseless claim for CO2 levels “causing” warmer & cooler cycles during Pleistocene glacial & interglacial phases, cause & effect are easily confused for the whole Phanerozoic as well.
Naturally, glacial “ice house” intervals show lower CO2 levels in reconstructions, since cooler water retains more soluble gas. “Hot house” intervals, such as during the Cretaceous Period, similarly tend to favor higher concentrations of carbon dioxide. The Cretaceous was however too hot to be explained even by rigged, GIGO climate models based on the false assumptions of the Church of CO2ology.
Donald Mitchell says:
June 4, 2013 at 1:23 pm
Unless I have really botched it by a few decimal places, biomass does not look like it can account for much of the energy. When I got to the 1577 kg/yr per sq meter, I knew that I was not talking about even close to what my yard produces.
Indeed, some decimal places look they’re missing. 🙂 The hardwood usually has ~15 MJ/kg not “20,000 joules per kg”…
We can check if we take into account the energy needed to split C=O bonds in the CO2 to produce carbon and O2 (which is equal to the energy of burning them back together).
The standard enthalpy of formation for CO2 is -393.5 kJ/mol, CO2 molar mass is 44.01 g/mol and the CO2/C mass ratio is 3.67 and therefore you need 393500 x (1000/44.01) x 3.67 = 32814019 Joules to get one kilogram of carbon (used then to build the carbohydrates) from the CO2 (and the 2.67 kilograms of O2).
– Just to see the relation the 32814019 Joules in the PAR (photosynthesis active radiation ~53% of the solar spectra) fraction is very roughly equivalent to 32814019 x(1/0.53) / 3600 / 238 = 72 hours/3days average 1 square meter surface insolation (1361 W/m^2 /2 [half of the Earth surface insolated] /2 [the circle-half sphere area ratio]) x (1-0.3) [albedo] = 238 W/m^2) and therefore even if the photosynthesis efficiency would be 100% in the given spectral band, you in average could yield like 365 / 3 x 2 = ~243 kilograms of wood (containing 50% of carbon) from square meter per year (a purely rule of thumb illustration example). But given the photosynthesis light energy->biomass stored energy real efficiency the biomass yield is likely at order of 50-1000 times less, which brings the possible global numbers back at orders of magnitude of the Wikipedia biomass production estimate you mentioned.
According to the Wikipedia Photosynthetic efficiency page the net leaf efficiency of the photosynthesis is 5.4% of light energy converted, however not all of it results in usable biomass, large part of the energy is lost to roots growing and other processes and generally the light energy-biomass energy conversion efficiency is in range of 0.1-2%, some effective plants as sugarcane however can yield considerably more.
This anyway shows the photosynthesis in the green flora cover is still relatively effective in converting the shortwave solar spectra light energy into chemical energy (i.e. than possibly could be the efficiency of the CO2 atmospheric content in converting the longwave radiation back in heat and return it back to the surface by a GHE backradiation), and on the well planted areas can in average yield in biomass (and other photosynthesis products as oxygen) order of several Joules per 1 square meter per second (an equivalent to W/m^2) chemical energy. This yields moreover demonstrably rise with the CO2 concentration in air. On the other hand a pollution can significantly impede the green flora growth and so the biological carbon sink.
It is nevertheless estimated that 0.84-1.26% of the total incoming solar shortwave spectra reaching the Earth’s surface is converted by photosynthesis to chemical energy.
Moreover it is also estimated that only the Cyanobacteria species are sequestering 25GtC/year – roughly 2.5 times more than are the estimated total anthropogenic carbon emissions.
All the green flora both on land and in the ocean as it is estimated can sequester as much as ~75-125 GtC/year – rougly as much as order of tenfold what the anthropogenic carbon emissions currently are!
-This estimation only, if true, would show not only that the photosynthesis is a key element in the Earth’s carbon budget, but that the cause of the observed CO2 atmospheric concentration rise could possibly be rather the rising surface temperature, especially the ocean temperature (likely due to the slight but likely very significant Total solar irradiance rise during the 20th century – see here) and other factors as volcanic eruptions or the mentioned pollution (especially of the ocean) which could impede the biological carbon sink rates in normal case well countering its natural release into the air, not vice versa.
tmitsss says:
June 4, 2013 at 11:24 am
Malthusian thought would suggest that plants could consume most of the CO2 in the atmosphere unless something else restricted their growth.
==========================================================================
Big dinosaurs?
Look at the sizes the largest grew to: 45 yards long, 25 tons.
They were all herbivores. They only grew that big because the
plant growth rates could support their grazing. The plants grew
so fast because of lots of CO2.
The size of those dinos must havehad some impact, restricting
the plants. Herbivores tend to flock in herds.
Today, the largest herbivore is that itty bitty squitty li’l elephant. There ain’t
the food to support anything larger.
Plants continuously produce CO2 through respiration. In sunlight, their production of O2 through photosynthesis dominates. Does anyone here happen to know whether the balance of these two processes is sensitive to temperature? Could it be that net CO2 contribution from plants increases fractionally with temperature? Just curious…