Credit: Robert Spencer/Florida State
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As the Earth warms and glaciers all over the world begin to melt, researchers and public policy experts have focused largely on how all of that extra water will contribute to sea level rise.
But another impact lurking in that inevitable scenario is carbon.
More specifically, what happens to all of the organic carbon found in those glaciers when they melt?
That’s the focus of a new paper by a research team that includes Florida State University assistant professor Robert Spencer. The study, published in Nature Geoscience, is the first global estimate by scientists at what happens when major ice sheets break down.
“This is the first attempt to figure out how much organic carbon is in glaciers and how much will be released when they melt,” Spencer said. “It could change the whole food web. We do not know how different ecological systems will react to a new influx of carbon.”
Glaciers and ice sheets contain about 70 percent of the Earth’s freshwater and ongoing melting is a major contributor to sea level rise. But, glaciers also store organic carbon derived from both primary production on the glaciers and deposition of materials such as soot or other fossil fuel combustion byproducts.
Spencer, along with colleagues from Alaska and Switzerland, studied measurements from ice sheets in mountain glaciers globally, the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet to measure the total amount of organic carbon stored in the global ice reservoir.
It’s a lot.
Specifically, as glaciers melt, the amount of organic carbon exported in glacier outflow will increase 50 percent over the next 35 years. To put that in context, that’s about the amount of organic carbon in half of the Mississippi River being added each year to the ocean from melting glaciers.
“This research makes it clear that glaciers represent a substantial reservoir of organic carbon,” said Eran Hood, the lead author on the paper and a scientist with the University of Alaska Southeast. “As a result, the loss of glacier mass worldwide, along with the corresponding release of carbon, will affect high-latitude marine ecosystems, particularly those surrounding the major ice sheets that now receive fairly limited land-to-ocean fluxes of organic carbon.”
Spencer said he and his colleagues are continuing on this line of research and will do additional studies to try to determine exactly what the impact will be when that carbon is released into existing bodies of water.
“The thing people have to think about is what this means for the Earth,” Spencer said. “We know we’re losing glaciers, but what does that mean for marine life, fisheries, things downstream that we care about? There’s a whole host of issues besides the water issue.”
###
[UPDATE by Willis Eschenbach] Thanks for pointing out this nonsense, Anthony. I can’t express how much I despise this kind of “half the Mississippi” alarmism. Let’s put this all into some kind of context.
The Mississippi contributes only about 1.5% of the total global river discharge. So their “half the Mississippi”, which sounds so alarming, is actually less than 1% of the total organic carbon flowing every year into the world oceans. The idea that this is worth worrying about is a sick joke.
My regards to all, and don’t believe everything you read,
w.
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Martin van Etten,
Since all empirical evidence contradicts your belief, you appear to be the one emitting nonsense. On all time scales, CO2 follows temperature. No exceptions.
CO2 is simply not a problem. It has no cause-and-effect connection to temperature:
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/alexepstein/files/2015/01/4warming_color2.png
might be true, dbs, but how does the graph demonstrate that?
mothcatcher,
Do you see a corellation?
I don’t. I see a coincidence.
dbstealey says:
“On all time scales, CO2 follows temperature. No exceptions.”
And goes on to show a graph where with steady CO2 increase while the temperature alternates between increasing temperature and decreasing temperature.
Perhaps that was meant as a joke?
In that case, that is almost as good as this one:
“CO2 is simply not a problem. It has no cause-and-effect connection to temperature:”
dbstealey did not notice that he just had stated that CO2 follows temperature. Temperature causes CO2 to rise. That is after all cause-and-effect connection to temperature.
I always thought CO2 changes ( either up or down) followed temperature, but in most cases they lagged by some time period.
The problem is that indeed CO2 changes always follows temperature changes, except for the past 160 years, as the above graph shows: CO2 goes up independent of temperature, because humans have added a lot of CO2 beyond what the “normal” CO2 level is for the current temperature…
CO2 variability still follows temperature variability over short term: seasons and 2-3 years (El Niño / La Niña), but that doesn’t influence the current increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, neither does the small increase in temperature since the LIA (maximum 8 ppmv) and certainly not what comes from glaciers…
And there is more:
” On all time scales, CO2 follows temperature. No exceptions.”
Followed by another comment:
“Do you see a corellation?
I don’t. I see a coincidence.”
On all time scales CO2 follows temperature by coincidence?
Aah, but there is a cause and effect correlation. Just not at the scale you are looking at. On the millennial scale we see temperatures rise some hundreds of years before CO2 rises. At the end of an interglacial, temperatures fall some hundreds of years after glacial onset. The causality seems reasonably straightforward. Temperatures falling leads to die-off of large amounts of plant life that lock up CO2 since the bacteria and fungi responsible for decomposition become less and less active. At interglacial onset, bacteria and fungi that have lain dormant become increasingly active in decomposing plants that were preserved by the previous cold episode. Investigating the variables in this latter process is one of my hobbies. It’s called composting.
even some sceptics ‘believe’ CO2 has a warming effect;
I would like to refer to the closing conclusion of Lewis and Crok ( http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/02/A-Sensitive-Matter-Foreword-inc.pdf )
where they write:
“…that the best evidence suggests climate sensitivity is close to the reduced, 1.5◦C, lower bound…” (for doubling CO2);
Martin van Etten,
L&C are getting closer. But they make the same old mistake of assuming that sensitivity is the same always and everywhere. It isn’t.
At 20 – 100 ppm, sensitivity was very high. But at 400 ppm, sensitivity is too minuscule to even measure.
That is what Planet Earth is telling us. You can cite your discredited authorities, who are paid to come to a particular conclusion… or you can pay attention to the real world, which debunks climate alarmism. Your choice.
your temperature anomaly starts at minus 0,4 and ends at plus 0,4 degree Celsius
it goes more or less parallel with the ambient CO2 record in ppm as you demonstrate
This definition is from Dictionary.com,
“Organic Carbon” is a redundant term.
Anything “organic” is by definition, Carbon based.
Above is the definition of “organic”.
That is not “the” definition of organic. It is the lazy man’s half-assed google search definition.
For your own edification re-search!
Snarky Ad Homs are the product of a shallow thinker.
Is two sources enough for you?
As for being lazy, I’m at work, were are you?
( I boycott Google)
Okay, RobRoy,
Try a “chemistry” definition. You’ll find why sodium bicarbonate and diamond and iron cyanide are not considered organic. Or, refer to joelobryan’s (corrected) post for a hint that it might be a little more complicated than how popular dictionaries perceive it.
Organic has many definitions (doncha love English?). From the OED:
[Emphasis in original]
Organic as used in connexion with farming is usually not clearly understood by either its proponents or opponents. The first use of the term “organic farming” is by Lord Northbourne (aka Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne). The term derives from his concept of “the farm as organism”, which he expounds in his book, Look to the Land (1940). Here organic clearly follows the OED’s definition 6.
Within the book Northbourne describes a holistic, ecologically balanced approach to farming. True, he wrote of “chemical farming versus organic farming” but this had little if anything to do with the chemical definition of organic. Mainstream farming in the 1940s (called “scientific farming at the time) had become reliant on not just synthesised inorganic fertilsers, but also an increasing raft of synthesised organic biocides.
Northbourne’s promotion of the organic farming concept was preceded by Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamic farming that bears a close resemblance to organic farming. Unsurprisingly as Northbourne was an early advocate of Steiner’s methods. Ehrenfried E. Pfeiffer, Biodynamics advocate in the USA, was advocating the use of 2-4-D amine (a component of Agent Orange) as a herbicide in the 1940s in a book he wrote called Weeds and What They Tell”.
Probably more than you wanted to know…
Mr Git,
I, for one, do hold the English language in high regard,(especially since we colonists took it over!) but this is more a matter of concept, rather than terminology. We can make up words to our hearts’ content but defining what they should apply to is the challenge.
Typically, organic chemists (that is chemists that are made out of hydrocarbon radicals!) probably don’t refuse to include CO2 in their considerations, merely because it’s not organic. There might be some that eschew it because it’s so very dangerous.
Plants, of course, have relied on inorganic fertilizers since first there were plants. It’s their job to make them organic.
I heard of Steiner some years ago; bury an ox skull filled with manure in your field to make for a bountiful crop! Harmless except for the ox.
mebbe
As it happens I studied chemistry at the tertiary level in 1969 along with mathematics, biology and physics. However, this does not make me old enough to have devised the definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary I provided. Quoting from Chemistry: Experimental Foundations, Prentice Hall 1970:
Thanks for displaying your ignorance about Biodynamics, thus making my point about both advocates and opponents being pretty much equally ignorant. Horn manure (preparation 500) is made with cow manure inserted into cow horns and buried over winter, not ox skulls. You also omitted the requirement to stir 25 gm of 500 in 13 l of water in alternating directions for 60 minutes to introduce chaos. That’s sufficient to spray on an acre.
Still, you’re not as bad as the greenie who told me he preferred Biodynamic to organic because it was animal-free.
The Pompous Git,
Forgive me for not according you your full title, previously.
You appear to have three well-loved books on your shelf and likely a certificate to honour your scientific achievements upon your wall.
I didn’t realize I was locking horns (pun, get it?) with one so erudite and I freely admit that my ignorance of “biodynamics” is great, though not quite as great as I wish it were.
I think you err when you say I’m not as bad as the greenie who preferred biodynamic over organic because it was animal-free. I believe I am far worse since I consider the ox skull approach infinitely more efficacious, if only because you require fewer oxen.
Chacun à son goût, as the English say.
mebbe
There are several hundred well-loved books on my shelves (and desks, floor etc.) but sadly no degree certificates. UNE offered me a degree in agriculture if I completed one third year unit so that I could undertake a PhD, but I declined. Academe seems to need me far more than I need academe.
Feel free to prove that. What has exercised me over the 25 years ago since giving BD away (I found the stirring tedious) is answering the rather interesting question of Why does “Biodynamics work?” I suspect a skull buried in the corner of a paddock will have close to nil effect over most of the paddock.
It’s many years since I conversed in French fluently, but shouldn’t that be “à chacun son goût?” I prefer the expression de gustibus non disputandum est.
And now it’s time for me to prepare macaroni carbonara for Mrs Git’s delectation. We might just wash it down with a glass or three of Viking Grand Shiraz.
http://www.vikingwines.com/viking_awards.php
Oddly enough a Biodynamic wine.
Suggestion – McDonalds could sell glacier melt as slushies.
On a really, really, really serious note – glaciers have never, ever melted before.
Why don’t these environmental sociologists get the Florida State U’s Chemistry department to read it before it goes to press. This is exactly the kind of stuff I was referring to in a comment to joeldshore arguing about ‘impact factors’ of Nature and Nature Jr. compared to Chinese Academy of Science’s “Science Bulletin” which he was denigrating. If you don’t let your journal fill up with today’s bumpf du jour, it will have lower “impact factors”. Having switched the concern from CO2 to carbon has netted a couple of science lites that think soot is the same thing as CO2.
The actual CO2 in the glaciers is lower in concentration than is currently in the atmosphere by about a third. If released it will dilute the ocean’s CO2 content, the idiots.
But it isn’t about CO2, it’s about elemental and other forms of carbon being used as extra plant food in the ocean.
Plants do not utilize elemental carbon, neither in the oceans nor on land. They utilize CO2, as I understand.
“Plants do not utilize elemental carbon”
The Newsweek article quotes Spencer: “So the microbes at the base of the food web would use this carbon much more readily,” says Spencer. “It’s like putting a cake in front of them. The effect cascades up the food web, to insect larvae, then fish, then birds, and so on.”
Elemental carbon cannot be metabolized by any existing organism whatever this Spencer whoever he is might hve said. He probably means hydrocarbons or possibly even carbohydrates. But I suppose when carbon dioxide has degenerated to just “carbon” in the MSM anything else containing carbon is going the same way, After all a lot of jouirnalists have trouble with these sophisticated polysyllabic terms.
“Elemental carbon” refers to pure carbon, unbound in any molecule except as graphite and diamond. As such, it cannot be utilized organically. It would be like eating charcoal.
The use of the term ” carbon” as a catch-all phrase reflects the fuzziness of the thinking of the alarmists. My rule of thumb: fuzzy terms=fuzzy brains.
In fact, it is slop-over from the demonization of CO2; transfer the stigma to carbon and you have multiplied the funding opportunities.
Their measurements are of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), they claim a mean concentration of 0.97 mgC/L, so they are not referring to ‘elemental carbon’.
You really should point to the main thrust of the paper which is two-faced actually saying that the extra carbon is nutritional and therefore good for more life but then attempts to parlay that idea into something bad saying it will come to a crashing halt when all the glaciers are GONE. Of course they put in the gloom and doom stuff, it’s the only way to get further funding. http://www.newsweek.com/not-just-sea-level-rise-melting-glaciers-release-vast-amounts-carbon-study-300562?piano_t=1
Mike M, I may have missed it but there was no link to the paper or abstract in the above post. I wish there was. I read the Newswek article you just posted and do see this bright spot which is similar to the iron discharge I suggested above being beneficial. It’s a pity the abstract does not explicitly say so but one of the authors says so in the Newsweek story. Since I’m fossil fuel funded I will now pay for the full paper. 😉
One is tempted to think that the organic carbon has become part of the carbon cycle. While the input is happening the biomass is increasing; once it stops, it stops. Big deal. One can imagine these researchers and gerbillists coming across a reef of gold and crying because mining it will come to an end when they’ve mined it all. “Oh, woe is me!” I hear them cry.
Norwegian archeologists in Oppland fylke has discovered arrow shafts and “runepinnar” as the local glacier retreats. The arrow shaft is some 6000 years old and the “runepinne” ( a small piece of wood inscribed with rune signs, the predecessor of our post-its ) is deemed to be 1000 year.
My conclusion is that the stone-age people had oil-fired heating, and the viking ships were diesel powered. Or maybe the freezing point of water was different that long ago.
Or, maybe, the climate was at least as warm as today.
The Newsweek article caterwauls – “The Mendenhall Glacier, a popular destination for visitors to Southeast Alaska, has retreated roughly 1.3 miles in the last 50 years.”
Of COURSE they don’t mention that the remains of a 1000 year old forest are being revealed to have been underneath the glacier that grew there during the MWP. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2451640/Mendenhall-Glacier-melting-reveals-ancient-forest.html
Sorry, I are an engineer.. The forest grew there during the MWP not the glacial.
In 1991, the 5,300 year old body of a primeval european was found partially exposed on a Tyrolean glacier. The still partially ice-encased body was at 10,500 feet, between the mountain passes Hauslabjoch and Tisenjoch, on the east ridge of the Fineilspitze in the Ötztal Alps on the Austrian–Italian border. The cadaver was knicknamed ‘Otzi’, for the region he was found in. Subsequent autopsy of the mummified remains showed he had died at the top of the pass and was subsequently buried under snow that became sessile glacial ice at the pass peak. There his body remained until the earth again warmed sufficiently 5,300 years later to reveal his mummified remains.
This is yet another well documented example of physical evidence demonstrating the earth’s regional climates have gone through repeated natural cycles of warming and cooling within the span of ‘modern’ human existence. The warming cycle since 1978 and plateau since 1998 fits well within the typical climate ranges and is otherwise unremarkable, as evidenced here. It is also supported by the proximate examples presented by Bengt Abelsson, Mike M., and repeated WUWT discussions of medieval warming period agricultural Norse settlements on Greenland that are ‘thawing out’ now.
The physical evidence refutes the climate models, the adjusted temperature data sets, and the overheated spew of climate catastrophists everywhere.
Link to the paper itself – http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2331.html (pay walled)
The first four words did it for me – ‘As the Earth warms..’ which it only seems to do in crooked temperature data from NOAA and NASA et al, and models from computer gamers.
The first sentence of the above article identifies it as fiction.
Most of the world’s glacier volume is in Antarctica.
There, all glaciers are expanding with the exception of the ones with geothermal heat underneath them.
The more relevant and interesting question is, will Antarctic sea ice surviving through summer begin to increase?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
Every so often in the NH the bipolar seesaw overdoes it and overloads the AMOC feedback resulting in a choke-off of deep water formation and interruption of the AMOC. It happens erratically but continually. This will be the next significant climate event.
Organic. What an unfortunate word if they’re trying to scare the green sheep.
Keep in mind that these “Organic Carbons” are not CO2 that could add to CAGW. I am not a bioligist, but wouldn’t organic compounds going into the ocean help furtalize the ocean?
And organic carbon is a problem because …
?w=700
I thought organic carbon plus some ground up rock was what constitutes fertile soil.
Last time I checked, soil was good for plants and the ecosystem, and loss of soil by erosion was bad.
Maybe I’m just naïve. When global warming causes erosion which reduces soil, then soil is good.
But if retreating glaciers add to fertile soil, then fertile soil becomes bad.
See – it doesn’t take long to learn post-modern climate science.
And remember – our new OCO CO2 sniffing satellite shows all that bad CO2 entering the atmosphere at high latitudes due to all the melting glaciers, giving that dominant high latitude CO2 signal:
Phlogiston, careful: that graph is for 6 weeks of data only midst of one of the seasons. On need at least a full year of data to roughly know all natural ins and outs, and probably several years to have a quantitative idea of the human contribution…
Horse grunt, Englbeen.
There is _no_ source of anthropogenic CO2 identifiable in this data. You are hoping that it will show up after ten thousand more orbits around the poles. Again, horsegrunt.
Industry and human activity are not seasonal.
mpainter: as human emissions are only 3% (in fact 7%) of natural emissions and sinks, it takes some more time to show where the main human sources are (although East China is quite red already).
The seasonal change in the period of the data in the NH is +5 ppmv, the human contribution +1.2 ppmv or 0.03 ppmv/day, be it concentrated in relative small areas. I don’t know what the accuracy of the satellites is, but I think that is pretty hard to detect…
After a full year most of the seasonal natural sources and sinks compensate each other, except for the equator-poles fluxes.
All assumptions about CO2 flux from natural sources is suspect. The satellite data confirms that the human contribution is undetectable by this instrument. Will it be seen a year from now on say, Jan 15? I believe not.
Ferdinand
The Japanese already have a CO2 measuring satellite. They have year round CO2 maps posted (sorry no link to hand). I took a look – no clear human signal was there. In one month CO2 was dominated by North Africa and the Sahara desert – WUWT?
The Japanese satellite instrument was not accurate enough to detect the human signal, the OCO-2 satellite has a possibility to focus during a longer time on a fixed place of the surface, maybe sufficient. But as the satellite only measures around midday, when turbulence is increasing, I am afraid that it still is not sufficient, even when most human releases are concentrated in relative small areas…
Phlogiston, I was taught that most of the inorganic nutrients absorbed by plants come from the silt fraction of the soil. If there’s one thing glaciers are good at it’s creating silt (finely divided rock). So yes, retreating glaciers reveal some of the best farming soils. And they have the distinct advantage over the volcanic soils of not being accompanied by an object with the distinct likelihood of covering you with lava and volcanic ash every few hundred years.
GT
Good point. Glacial produced soil is hugely valuable to the biosphere. The monster Cryogenian glaciations 650-800 million years ago did a lot to “lay the ground” for the subsequent colonisation of land by multicellular plants and eventually trees. This brought moisture and the hydrological cycle onto formerly arid land in a way that algae and Cyanobacteria hadn’t been able to do. This was in large part thanks to glacial soils.
Sadly the silt in The Git’s soil is ancient and thus much has leached from it over the millennia. Australia is known as the “trace element desert”. Boron, molybdenum and even the macro element magnesium are all in short supply and thus need to be added to the soil to optimise yields and disease resistance. Still, I remain amazed at what the bacteria and fungi can do to release nutrients when their needs are catered for.
As the Earth warms and glaciers all over the world begin to melt, researchers and public policy experts have focused largely on how all of that extra water will contribute to sea level rise.
http://cmiae.org/national-park-feature-article/glaciers-lichens-and-the-history-of-the-earth/
Has anyone thought about how much carbon a human being holds. As we increase constantly, both in mass and number, we must bind an ever increasing amount of carbon.
Is the population explosion really a benefit?
Hey, why don’t I apply for carbon credits for my fat belly?
Svend asks:
Is the population explosion really a benefit?
Generally, yes. Malthus was in error. Rising populations bring about rising wealth, which in turn brings about better environmental protection.
The empirical evidence for those effects is irrefutable. The only real problem is excessive government.
I’m planning to write a paper, reporting my metaphysical theory, on the co2 and methane emissions we see, coming from termites, which inhabit wood chip piles being sent to Europe, so they can make their biofuels quotas.
1/2 a Mississippi or 20 times the combined veganfart of Green humanity.
@ur momisugly dbstealey January 21, 2015 at 4:19 am
L&C have 1,5 degree C sensitivity for doubling CO2
IPCC has something like 3 degrees
some alarmists have 6 degrees for doubling
dbstealey says its minuscule and suggests to to pay attention to the real world
so how to explain the warm times of miocene and pliocene or even the paleocene/eocene?
were we closer to the sun?
What is the difference between ‘organic’ carbon and any other sort of carbon. Is it safe to eat?