From the University of Southern California
Geologic cycles act as a climate control, releasing and absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide in a balance that helps keep the planet not too hot and not too cold
Researchers from USC and Nanjing University in China have documented evidence suggesting that part of the reason that the Earth has become neither sweltering like Venus nor frigid like Mars lies with a built-in atmospheric carbon dioxide regulator – the geologic cycles that churn up the planet’s rocky surface.
Scientists have long known that “fresh” rock pushed to the surface via mountain formation effectively acts as a kind of sponge, soaking up the greenhouse gas CO2. Left unchecked, however, that process would simply deplete atmospheric CO2 levels to a point that would plunge the Earth into an eternal winter within a few million years during the formation of large mountain ranges like the Himalayas – which has clearly not happened.
And while volcanoes have long been pointed to as a source of carbon dioxide, alone they cannot balance out the excess uptake of carbon dioxide by large mountain ranges. Instead, it turns out that “fresh” rock exposed by uplift also emits carbon through a chemical weathering process, which replenishes the atmospheric carbon dioxide at a comparable rate.
“Our presence on Earth is dependent upon this carbon cycle. This is why life is able to survive,” said Mark Torres, lead author of a study disclosing the findings that appears in Nature on March 20. Torres, a doctoral fellow at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), collaborated with Joshua West, professor of Earth Sciences at USC Dornsife, and Gaojun Li of Nanjing University in China.
While human-made atmospheric carbon dioxide increases are currently driving significant changes in the Earth’s climate, the geologic system has kept things balanced for million of years.
“The Earth is a bit like a big, natural recycler,” West said. Torres and West studied rocks taken from the Andes mountain range in Peru and found that weathering processes affecting rocks released far more carbon than previously estimated, which motivated them to consider the global implications of CO2 release during mountain formation.
The researchers noted that rapid erosion in the Andes unearths abundant pyrite — the shiny mineral known as “fool’s gold” because of its deceptive appearance — and its chemical breakdown produces acids that release CO2 from other minerals. These observations motivated them to consider the global implications of CO2 release during mountain formation.
Like many other large mountain ranges, such as the great Himalayas, the Andes began to form during the Cenozoic period, which began about 60 million years ago and happened to coincide with a major perturbation in the cycling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Using marine records of the long-term carbon cycle, Torres, West, and Li reconstructed the balance between CO2 release and uptake caused by the uplift of large mountain ranges and found that the release of CO2 release by rock weathering may have played a large, but thus far unrecognized, role in regulating the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last roughly 60 million years.
This research was supported by USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and C-DEBI Graduate Fellowships to M.T., NSF funding (NSF-EAR/GLD-1053504 and EAR/GLTG-1227192) to A.J.W., and National Natural Science Foundation of China funding (Grant Nos. 41173105, 91 41102103 and 41321062) to G.L.
Apologies for being pretentious but duh. Obvious otherwise we’d all be dead long time ago LOL
Quoted for truth.
The only thing I do not agree with is where you say “a few articles” Actually, there are a lot of articles with the boilerplate statement in. But that could be that you say “a few” but you mean “a lot” and do not get it because English is not my mother tongue.
The entire global warming/CO2 centric/Climate change movement was designed to blame the “problem” on humans. This study implies that the “rock/CO2” cycle would achieve balance were it not for human activity spewing enough CO2 to prevent equilibrium. This study isn’t even entertaining.
Yeah, so what’s the explanation for the cold temperatures during the Precambrian and the early Silurian periods when CO2 levels were several times higher than modern levels?
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/co2_temperature_historical.png
the reason that the Earth has become neither sweltering like Venus nor frigid like Mars lies with a built-in atmospheric carbon dioxide regulator
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Then why does CO2 follow temperature in the geological records? How can CO2 be the regulator if it changes to exaggerate temperature changes? That would make it an anti-regulator. An exaggerator.
For example, the planet warms naturally. This releases CO2 from the oceans. If the CO2 theory is correct, this extra CO2 will create more warming, releasing even more CO2, creating more warming, releasing more CO2, etc., etc.
According to climate science, CO2 from the oceans behaves like a reverse Goldilocks. Finding the porridge too cold, she puts it in the fridge to cool it down; and finding the porridge to hot, she sets it on the stove to warm it up.
The whole planet, from 30 meters below ground to the top of the atmosphere, is a product of the biosphere. The idea that lucky chemical processes are responsible for atmospheric CO2 levels, in light of the biotic through-put, is simply stupid.
The point is reversed. The planet is not ideal for us by chance, but rather we (we the biosphere, that is) evolved to suit the conditions on this planet. If conditions were different, some other biosphere would be blogging here and noting how those conditions were ideal. They would probably never have heard of Goldilocks.
Why do they have to be so obsessed with CO2? Why can’t they see that there are a dozen other potential negative feedbacks, water being the most likely. It beggars belief.
Just a reminder Global Sea ice is 100% normal and trending that way for some time now (years)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
perhaps the quote attributed to rutherford is the most descriptive. “Physics is science, all else is stamp collecting.”
It’s been obvious for a long time that a great deal of co2 is locked up in rocks and that there is a conveyer belt of surface crust recycling going on. These folks are talking about new sinks and sources, very likely larger than man’s sourcing of co2 (assumed to be about 4% of the total annual new co2 not including new sources). That would suggest that man’s contribution is even less than 4%.
Considering that the co2 concentrations before the advent of the industrial revolution was around 270 ppm and commercial greenhouses show plants like having much larger concentrations, that would suggest we might have been on the cusp of another great biocatastrophe where the extinction of much of the plant life would have resulted in another great die off of animal life. Life on Earth saved by man.
The previous unsubstantiated hypothesis is brought to you by a different perspective. Just as the ‘man is destroying the garden of edan’ perspective has tainted the scientific interpretation of the article research. I’m not sure that authors making such BS comments helps in ease of publication other than perhaps being secret code words to assure referees that they are part of the gang. However, they might be doing so because they perceive it makes them more important and that their mundane boring minor addition to the ‘knowledge’ of the world might be considered more important because of their proclamations of CAGW.
What seems missing from the article is an understanding of a feedback control system capable of actually regulating something. It would seem we merely have biological and nonbiological mechanisms of absorbing co2 and that sometime along the course of geological time or less, that co2 is given back to the atmosphere. It would not appear to be regulated or controlled but merely a happenstance as to the concentration.
On the other hand, the water vapor cycle appears to be a full bore setpoint control system that regulates our planet’s temperature, regardless of the concentration of minor constituents like co2 and methane or anything else.
Rhoda Klapp says:
March 20, 2014 at 4:58 am
“The point is reversed. The planet is not ideal for us by chance, but rather we (we the biosphere, that is) evolved to suit the conditions on this planet”
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Exactly.
Perhaps it is the natural evolution of our type of planet for plant life to suck so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that it eventually dies. In such a case plant life, lacking conscious intelligence, unknowingly causes it’s own destruction. Perhaps the reason we do not see any other intelligent life (as of now) is that most planets self destruct before intelligent life can evolve and we just happened by mere chance to be able to come along at the right time and in the right place.
They need to prove their unstated premise that CO2 is the control knob for climate on Earth before their conclusion even is entertained. I suspect that chemistry is fine tuning on top of a system primarily dependent on physical parameters such as the Earth’s orbital characteristics, distance from the Sun, solar output, Earth’s magnetic field, the dominance of oceans vs. land in surface area, the properties of water (including phase changes and heat capacity), etc.
A few basic points about ‘feedback”.
The ‘state’ of any system is described by the values of the numerous variables which have a unique value for that state of the system. Change any value of any variable and you will change the state of the system. How the system responds to small changes in the variables will tell you whether you have ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ feedback,
If the system tries to return to the state it was in before the variable was changed, you have negative feedback. If the system tries to move even further away from the original state, you have positive feedback. Systems with positive feedback for any variable will respond like nudging a ball from the top of a hill – once it starts rolling it will never get back to where it started on its own. This is why ‘natural’ systems rarely are found in states with positive feedback – and never stay there for very long.
Negative feedback keeps the system from wandering very far from its original state when a variable is perturbed. Systems with negative feedback for any variable will respond like nudging a ball from the center of the bottom of a bowl.
Earth’s climate system has been a ‘habitable’ state for many millions of years. It is correct to conclude that this is because the climate has no significant positive feedbacks for any of its variables, and probably a plethora of negative feedbacks – one for every variable.
It’s pretty clear what’s going on here.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s UN scientists discovered that humanity was at threat from brain sucking aliens. Not literally brain sucking aliens, of course, but aliens feeding on human high intellect. If evidence is needed, consider Einstein, Turing, Sagan, etc. All dead. That can’t be “just a coincidence”. And the abandoned space program. What was that all about really?
They came up with a plan to save humanity.
Please, please, please stop “denying”. It is of utmost importance to the future of the human race to play along with the way of “thinking” currently known as “Climate Change Warmist”. I know most of you are not stupid enough to actually believe it, but you can at least pretend.
The fact is that the alien brain suckers will look elsewhere if they think that a particular human has been soiled by stupidity. If the stupid is dense enough across the entire population, the UN scientists believe that the alien brain suckers will look to another planet and leave us alone entirely.
The threshold of leaving us alone is expected to be at least 96% of the population, the current target being a 97% figure “to be sure”. The UN has made great inroads to meet this target, their own intergovernmental panel of scientists being fully protected, ironically under the “Climate Change” guise.
What can you do to help? UN scientists have determined that pretending really hard to be stupid is (coincidentally) between 96 and 98% as effective as genuine stupidity at making the alien brain suckers look elsewhere. So please do your bit for humanity.
(Disclosure: there is a minority report that suggests that pretending has no effect, and that the current “cream of the crop” warmists have already had their intellect consumed but the aliens have excreted “waste-product” back to the host to keep it alive for reproduction purposes).
Anything else simply does not make sense.
Yes. For millions of years, Gaia had control of the Earth’s thermostat via CO2. If too much “carbon” accumulated in the atmosphere, she simply started geological processes which absorbed it, and vice-versa. Then man started monkeying with the whole process, adding his own CO2, meaning he now has control over the thermostat, and has been turning it up. Right.
Climatist nonsense appears to have infected all branches of science, making a mockery of them.
Pete Olson says:
March 20, 2014 at 1:44 am
“I wonder what ‘wheatering’ is………………….”
Crop circles caused by CO2. ;^D
There, in a nutshell, is the problem. Whoever wrote that press release clearly assumes this to be the case. It’s the conventional wisdom, the unquestioned aphorism, like “the sun rises in the east.” The author would be surprised if anyone challenged it, as we might on blogs like this: “Where’s the evidence?” The answer would be, like the Geico commercial, “Everybody knows that.”
It’s not simply a matter of rote testimonial in order to get published. It’s a basic assumption underlying the whole argument: “carbon” (dioxide) controls the temperature of the Earth.
If you point out that there is in fact no evidence that “human-made atmospheric carbon dioxide increases are currently driving significant changes in the Earth’s climate,” you would be met with incredulity, or the Argument from Authority. The more knowledgeable would just conclude that you were a kook, a “d*nier.”
If we want to re-educate the people who write press releases like this, we have to do more than make esoteric arguments about the “failure of the climate models.” We have to turn the tables on CO2: It doesn’t control the Earth’s temperature, and never did. It’s the life-giving gas that drives the entire biosphere, even we oxygen-breathers. And more of it is better, not worse. Time for some bumper stickers:
CO2 IS GOOD FOR PLANTS, GOOD FOR THE EARTH, AND GOOD FOR YOU!
/Mr Lynn
So let me see if I’ve got this right. Man-made CO2 makes up the entirety of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere, except that volcanoes add even more than all of it, and natural biological processes add even more than even more of all of it… Have I missed the point here?
I am still waiting for a peer-reviewed, scientific paper to come out suggesting that when prehistoric man started burning wood which produced more CO2 into the atmosphere, that this caused the end of the last glaciation episode. If you think that is too stupid … think again.
They seem to have forgotten about carbonate sediments in the oceans. All those reefs, mollusk shells, etc. represent a fair bit of carbon.
“Our presence on Earth is dependent upon this carbon cycle. This is why life is able to survive,” said Mark Torres, lead author of a study disclosing the findings that appears in Nature on March 20.
Even were this accurate, it ignores the many, many other variables upon which our presence on Earth depends.
Every few years science finds a new fetish object that is the answer to all mysteries and the solution to all problems, real and imagined. I remember when miniature black holes were the thing. Now it’s “carbon”.
The Carbon Cycle from Vegetation alone is about 40 or 50 times larger than geologic processes.
I hate the term “weathering”. It allows the warmers to suspend rational thought about what the real numbers are and focus on their fantasy viewpoint only. It has captured many of them in this fantasy. Larry Geary calls it a “fetish object” which is an apt description.
Like the meme that increased CO2 can stay in the air for thousands of years and can only be drawn down slowly over time through “weathering”. That is just completely false. Plants and Oceans and soils will rebalance CO2 to an equilibrium level in just several decades, not thousands of years.
It is also the same in the geologic past. The Himalayas had no impact on the Carbon Cycle because the other processes in the Cycle are many orders of magnitude bigger than geologic and weathering processes. Oceans (temperature), and Plants and Soils (biologic) control the Carbon/CO2 levels. Just like plants changed the atmosphere by putting 20% of Oxygen into it despite Oxygen having a huge affinity for all kinds of other elements first before it can become free Oxygen in the atmosphere (just getting to 20% required many time more than that because Iron soaked up so much of it over time forming rust etc. Iron was just one of many other molecules and elements that did this).
Weathering equals suspending logic.
(Disclosure: there is a minority report that suggests that pretending has no effect, and that the current “cream of the crop” warmists have already had their intellect consumed but the aliens have excreted “waste-product” back to the host to keep it alive for reproduction purposes).
As the joke goes, this is a brain-sucker — starving…:-)
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The intuitive way to understand how oceans eat carbon dioxide is to appreciate that though CO2 is at the bottom of a stairway metabolically, in a world of highly reactive O2 that drives animal life all that biological oxidation using plant created O2 actually renders carbon highly reactive in turn so that its two double bonds between C and O in CO2 make it quite receptive to forming a bonded partnership with lowly old water itself:
H-O-H + O=C=O -> O=C(OH)2 -> CO3(-2)+ 2H(+)
As this newly formed mild (“carbonic”) acid presents a carbonate anion (-2) into the calcium cation (+2) rich oceans and these two unhappily raw doubly charged ions happen to fit together very well into a simple crystal that is very stable and thus insoluble, it crashes out of solution to form dense rocks that sink.