WUWT reader Pethefin writes:
Finally someone addresses the really big elephant in the room: the ocean vents and their role in climate modelling:
I covered this possibility in a previous post: Do underwater volcanoes have an effect on ENSO? and I have updated that post with this animation showing a heat plume disconnected from the ENSO pattern and Google Earth graphic showing possible subaqueous volcanism sources (you may have to click the top graphic to get it to animate).
This excerpt from an essay published on Quadrant Online by John Reid also explores the question.
It hardly needs to be said that climate modelling is a far-from-settled science, despite what its practitioners would have us believe. Just how flawed becomes even more apparent when you consider that massive heat sources on the ocean floor have been entirely omitted from the warmists’ calculations
THE TOTAL power expended in volcanic heating of the ocean is well in excess of the power dissipated by wind stress and tidal friction. There is growing evidence for the existence of volcanically generated megaplumes both from satellite imagery and from direct observation. Although the physical detail remains to be explored there is growing evidence that megaplumes are, at times, responsible for variations in climate, ocean productivity and ocean export of CO2.
There is a vast amount of CO2 stored in the ocean: 38,000 gigatonnes compared with 380 gigatonnes generated by human activity since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is doubtful whether mankind’s modest one percent contribution has made very much difference. Nevertheless oceanographers seem quite reluctant to acknowledge the role of subaqueous volcanism in influencing ocean circulation, ocean ecology, climate variation and CO2 flux. Why should this be so?
One possible explanation is that oceanography and climate science have come to be heavily dependent on numerical fluid dynamic modelling. “Ocean-atmosphere general circulation models” or OAGCMs have become the preferred means of investigating ocean circulation. The ocean-atmosphere model is tuned to settle down, after “spin-up”, to a steady state where it remains until deliberately perturbed by some external factor such as changing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. According to these models the ocean in its natural state is a sort of machine, a conveyor belt steadily carrying heat, salt and dissolved gases around the planet’s oceans in the same unvarying manner until it is disturbed by humankind.
Volcanic activity does not fit this neat picture. Volcanic behaviour is random, i.e. it is “stochastic” meaning “governed by the laws of probability”. For fluid dynamic modellers stochastic behaviour is the spectre at the feast. They do not want to deal with it because their models cannot handle it. We cannot predict the future behaviour of subaqueous volcanoes so we cannot predict future behaviour of the ocean-atmosphere system when this extra random forcing is included.
To some extent, chaos theory is called in as a substitute, but modellers are very reticent about describing and locating (in phase space) the strange attractors of chaos theory which supposedly give their models a stochastic character. They prefer to avoid stochastic descriptions of the real world in favour of the more precise but unrealistic determinism of the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics.
This explains the reluctance of oceanographers to acknowledge subaqueous volcanism as a forcing of ocean circulation. Unlike tidal forcing, wind stress and thermohaline forcing, volcanism constitutes a major, external, random forcing which cannot be generated from within the model. It has therefore been ignored.
Well worth reading the entire story here:
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2014/05/ocean-vents-faulty-models/
Also, geothermal heat flux is enormous in the South-Eastern Pacific, much higher than global average, it is some 300 mW/m² at the Western margin of Nazca plate.
Brad says…”Commercial office buildings use ~30% of the electricity generated in the US. Based on my experience, poor operations and maintenance can account for up to 30% of that 30%, so 9% of total generation. An amazing number no one looks at””
——————————————————————————————————-
Imagine if all of the wasted billions spent on cagw had instead gone into retrofitting these same commercial buildings and probably government buildings as well. That would have been an economic boost, instead of being a drain on the economy. Then there would also be the benefit of surplus energy to aid in future development and growth.
I noticed in reading business news yesterday that a lot of money has been going into energy related stocks. There will be a lot of money to be made if the climate scare tactic works, coming from the ensuing higher costs through new regulations and taxes on the consumer.
Goldminor,
The energy service industry would have to lose maybe half it’s capacity, no longer selling projects with low realization rates. Savings persistence would be much greater, and the operations industry could easily add over a million good paying jobs(~10 million bldgs in the US), maintaining the asset value.
Bob…the article states-
“Known HTV’s release 17 terawatts of power into the ocean as heat, about the same as global human usage of energy.” (JUST the ones we know of)
So what is the yearly amount of power “dissipated by wind stress and tidal friction”?
I recently spent some time going through an animation like you have above, cataloguing these “fire balls” running out from the coast of Mexico. I never got to determine the cause : storms, other weather systems, ( or perhaps volcanism?).
One thing I did note was that there are runs of at least a dozen and they seem very regular in time. They come in bursts that last a month or so. The major runs I noted were:
Apr 1993 run of 3 , 15N
Jan 1995
Nov 1996 15N
Dec 1998 series of waves at equator
Oct 2003 15N
Sept-Oct 2005 , equatorial
Sept 2007 , equatorial
Sept 2010
Oct 2010 strong run 10 deg North.
Now I was just pausing the anim, labelled in months so time is approximative. However, the last five were grouped around the autumnal equinox. I didn’t get around to looking deeper. Butr if anyone is interested, there are a few periods where you should find clear examples of these hot spots running from mexico to the equatorial mid Pacific , let’s say Nino34 region 😉
Is it possible that all the molten rock from these volcanoes could be responsible for some of the observed small rise in sea level both from a volume and thermal expansion viewpoint?
Dear Pethefin,
thank you for your interesting observations!
The “giants” among sub sea mounts :
http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0718-560X2009000300017&script=sci_arttext#img01
Could some of these be of interest?
K.R. Frank Lansner
A phreatic eruption, also called a phreatic explosion or ultravulcanian eruption, occurs when magma heats ground or surface water. The extreme temperature of the magma (anywhere from 500 to 1,170 °C (932 to 2,138 °F)) causes near-instantaneous evaporation to steam, resulting in an explosion of steam, water, ash, rock, and volcanic bombs.
It is believed that the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which obliterated most of the volcanic island and created the loudest sound in recorded history, was a phreatic event.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreatic_eruption
Steam has an expansion rate of 1700 to 1. One square foot of water at
150 psi at 366F will expand to 1700 square feet of water vapor at 0 pressures.
Even a hot water heater can be dangerous. With increased pressures at the bottom of the ocean it could really go boom.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8055475/Familys-old-heater-explodes-like-bomb
Don’t tell the warmongers that there are oodles (terrajoules..) of heat coming out of the ocean floor ridges all of the time for crying out loud! They’re bad enough in their eternal ignorance as it is..
Hasn’t this already been modeled or at least guesstimated by the kidz at SkS? Isn’t it something like two Hiroshima bombs of heat per second? Admittedly, they got the direction wrong, its coming up from the bottom not into the oceans from the atmosphere… /sarc
Don’t you mean Anthropogenic Subaqueous volcanism?
A few remarks on this:
I don’t know how much CO2 the underwater volcanoes emit, but if it is of the same order as what land volcanoes do, then it is negligible. Land volcanic CO2 is estimated around 1% of human emissions. CO2 outgassing of underwater volcanoes seldom will reach the surface, because the cold deep ocean waters are undersaturated in CO2, thus most will dissolve in the bulk 38,000 GtC already present in the deep oceans.
The 3 GtC/year CO2 released near the Galapagos islands is only a small part of ~40 GtC/year that circulates between the deep ocean upwelling places and the cold polar sink places. The net balance of this part of the carbon cycle is ~3 GtC/year more sink than source. The 380 GtC released by humans indeed is only 1% of what resides in the deep oceans. The problem is that it hasn’t reached the deep oceans yet and still halve of it (in quantity) is in the atmosphere…
This article point out that hydrothermal vents add 17 terawatts worth of energy to the oceans each year. The IPCC (AR5) estimates that anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gas emissions result in approximately 2.29 watts per meter squared increase in annual radiative forcing relative to 1750. This amounts to 1167.9 terawatts of net energy per year entering the atmosphere and oceans. Even if the estimate of ocean geothermal heating is an order of magnitude higher, its still a small fraction of anthropogenic forcing. So I doubt its that significant globally, though I could certainly see significant local effects.
It will be nice to know more about how volcanism influences oceans. That won’t tell much about changing climate or global warming. If subaqueous volcanism increased by 100% or stopped the results would be interesting. Volcanism as we currently know it has been operating for several hundred thousands of years. Earth’s systems are used to this. On an ocean-wide basis significant heat and gas contributions need to change. Have they? If not a volcanic event under water is just a disturbance as is a volcanic event above water.
Incorporating more ocean processes into OAGCMs won’t do a thing regarding the new religion of CAGW now well entrenched in powerful houses.
I echo Bob T’s sentiment.
“THE TOTAL power expended in volcanic heating of the ocean is well in excess of the power dissipated by wind stress and tidal friction.”
I am not sure what the above means, or how it is relevant.
SIGNET
Thanks for the interesting link. It gives me a whole new puzzle to learn about. What great fun to think about.
The notion that undersea volcanism might cause or influence El Ninos was also the subject of a Feb. 2012 WUWT link:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/15/do-underwater-volcanoes-have-an-effect-on-enso/
Daniel Walker, now retired, published several articles suggesting that El Ninos were highly correlated with increased vulcanism on the sea floor in the East Pacific Rise, in particular near Easter Island, where he had installed instrumentation to measure earthquake activity, a likely proxy for increased volcanism on the sea floor. Here is a link to a 1995 article on the subject, “Hot Vents in the Sea Floor May Drive El Nino”:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/25/science/hot-vents-in-the-sea-floor-may-drive-el-nino.html?pagewanted=all
Note that Walker’s work is a correlation study. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, as so many WUWT readers understand well.
As Bob Tisdale correctly pointed out in comments to the WUWT Feb. 2012 entry, the east Pacific rise near Easter Island, where Walker put his seismographs, is thousands of miles from the coast of Costa Rica. So there is the obvious difficulty of no direct relationship that we can see between warming of very deep waters well south of the equator and warming surface waters off western Central America.
But….suppose that a large increase in warmth of deep waters rose to the surface in the areas south and east of the Galapagos. Perhaps this might in some way cut off the rise to the surface of the cold Humboldt current, which in La Nina makes waters around the Galapagos cold. In El Nino years, the Humboldt current cold area is limited to a narrow band of the Chilean and Peruvian coast.
–(from the article)
In addition to the unfactored value for submarine volcanism discussed here, there is also the additional unresolved question of the role played in Earth’s climate by the atmospheric electrical network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_electricity
Climate science is so settled, it could almost make your head spin.
This is just the Tehuantepec upwells. The ocean here has three or four very strong upwelling currents and it can be very warm water: 32C or 33C water can surface for one week followed by cold 24C upwells. There isn’t a really good explanation for it (as in where this warmth comes from) but the Pacific plate is subducting under the Americas here and there a very steep rise from 6 kms deep to the continental shelf – ie. complex ocean currents.
Animation of the last year.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycom1-12/navo/tehuansst_nowcast_anim30d.gif
38,000 gigatonnes vs 380 gigatonnes since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution sounds like only 1/10 of one percent. Even a smaller impact.
“Ocean-atmosphere general circulation models” or OAGCMs have become the preferred means of investigating ocean circulation. The ocean-atmosphere model is tuned to settle down, after “spin-up”, to a steady state where it remains until deliberately perturbed by some external factor such as changing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
This steady state Earth pops up all the time, except in reality; It never happens, has never happened. This is an ever-changing planet, from internal causes and the occasional externals, plus astronomical.
Less than two weeks ago I put up some papers on this very subject. I can’t find it in the mountain that is WUWT. So here they are again.
Some time back vulcanism in the Pacific sea floor was covered on WUWT but dismissed as being to small of an effect. I have no idea.
Not sure if this is relevant but have been watching the following ocean “anticyclonic” currents:-
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/currents/orthographic=-110.16,9.69,1348
Looking at the wind currents I wonder if the warm water in Asia is on its way back east?
cn
Willis is sceptic, Bob T, it would appear is a septic (about a significant subterranean heat source), Roy Spencer says “it is craziest idea since continental drift” (i.e. it is possible! I take from that comment) in a previous WUWT item. But there is very little real data available apart from some isolated measurements but mainly ‘tough-in-cheek’ estimates.
As I have indicated before given the billions spent on the human CO2 bogy some real extensive measurement research is definitely worthwhile to explore whether sea floor venting is indeed significant or not in affecting ENSO and beyond.
I find it interesting that we criticise the warmists for their dismissive dialogue and appears we can do the same even though there remains uncertainty about of all of the causes of ENSO and climate change.
Here is the missing heat and settled science.