Climate & Climate Change

Aviation generates about 5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions but their warming effect is up to four times greater at high altitudes according to Jonathan Leake writing last weekend in The Sunday Times.

The article entitle, ‘A green snag they emitted to mention…’ suggests that environmental leaders are amongst the highest greenhouse gas emitters in the world because they like flying to exotic locations for their holidays and conferences. According to the article:

“Among those with the highest air miles is Bob Napier, chief executive of WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, one of the best-known environment groups. In the past 12 months he has visited Spitsbergen, Borneo, Washington, Geneva, and Beijing on business trips and taken a holiday in the Falklands, generating more than 11 tons of carbon dioxide. A typical British household creates about six tons of CO2 a year.”

And did anyone notice how many planes Al Gore got on and off, and how many places he boasted he had visited to give that lecture, in that movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. I lost count.

Anyway, someone sent me this link to a piece published by USA Today entitled ‘Gore isn’t quite as green as he’s led the world to believe’.

It doesn’t add up the plane trips, but it does suggest that Mr Gore is another one of those environmental leader who doesn’t practice what he preaches.

For photographs visit www.whalephoto.com.

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I’ve a series running on that movie, the last post, part 3 can be read by clicking here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/001641.html .

Luke Walker reminds us that geological history includes evidence of mass extinctions from “killer greenhouse conditions”:

“Readers of this blog are often witness to accusations of alarmism by those opposed to scenario projections using contemporary anthropogenic global warming theory.

Comfort is often taken in the world having survived substantial climate swings in geological time and that some species such as reef building corals have come through that turmoil.

So it is with some irony that the October 2006 issue of Scientific American has a major article by Professor Peter Ward at the University of Washington suggests that extinction events in geological history have been caused by killer greenhouse conditions. What’s this – geological alarmism? Is nothing sacred?

“More than half life on the earth has been wiped out, repeatedly, in mass extinctions over the past 500 million years. One such disaster, which includes disappearance of the dinosaurs, is widely attributed to an asteroid impact, but others remain inadequately explained.

New fossil and geochemical evidence points to a shocking environmental mechanism for the largest of the ancient mass extinctions and possibly several more: an oxygen depleted ocean spewing poisonous gas as a result of global warming”

Apparently five times over the last 500 million years most of the world’s life forms have ceased to exist. End of the Ordovician 443 My ago; close of the Devonian 374 My; the Great Dying at the end of the Permian 251 My where 90% of ocean dwellers and 70% of land dwellers were obliterated; the end of the Triassic 201 My; and the end of the Cretaceous at 65 My with a likely asteroid impact.

However, new analyses are showing that some sudden extinctions were not that sudden lasting several hundred thousands of years.

It theoretically works something like this:

1. Volcanic activity releases carbon dioxide and methane

2. Rapid global warming occurs

3. Warm ocean absorbs less oxygen

4. Anoxia destabilises the chemocline where oxygenated surface waters meet H2S permeated waters in the ocean, anaerobic bacteria flourish

5. Hydrogen sulphide gas (H2S) gas upwells through the ocean as the chemocline rises to the ocean surface

6. Green and purple sulphur bacteria in the surface ocean thrive while oxygen breathers suffocate

7. H2S gas kills land animals and plants.

8. H2S destroys the ozone shield

9. Ultra violet radiation from the sun kills remaining life.

“A minor extinction at the end of the Palaeocene 54My ago was already – presciently – attributed to an interval of oceanic anoxia somehow triggered by short-term global warming.” Evidence is also present at the end of Triassic, middle Cretaceous, and late Devonian.

So are these extreme greenhouse effect extinctions possibly a recurring phenomenon in the earth’s history. Atmospheric CO2 was 1000ppm when extinctions began in the Palaeocene. “

So if the modern earth got close to 1000ppm this might represent something for our children to deal with. But maybe that’s just geological alarmism for you.

I’m getting a Lotto syndicate going called “Killer Greenhouse”.

More reading:

Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for mass extinction by Jeffrey T. Kiehl & Christine A. Shields Climate Change Research Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, Colorado 80305, USA

Abrupt and Gradual Extinction Among Late Permian Land Vertebrates in the Karoo Basin, South Africa
Science 4 February 2005:Vol. 307. no. 5710, pp. 709 – 714 by Peter D. Ward,1* Jennifer Botha,3 Roger Buick,2 Michiel O. De Kock,5 Douglas H. Erwin,6 Geoffrey H. Garrison,2 Joseph L. Kirschvink,4 Roger Smith3

Photic Zone Euxinia During the Permian-Triassic Superanoxic Event, Science 4 February 2005:
Vol. 307. no. 5710, pp. 706 – 709 by Kliti Grice, Changqun Cao, Gordon D. Love, Michael E. Böttcher, Richard J. Twitchett, Emmanuelle Grosjean, Roger E. Summons, Steven C. Turgeon, William Dunning,Yugan Jin

Massive Release of Hydrogen Sulphide to the Surface Ocean and Atmosphere during intervals of Oceanic Anoxia. Kump, L.R., Pavlov, A., Arthur, M.A. Geology: 33:5:397-400. May 2005.”

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Thanks Luke. And I’m going to add to your reading list: The Past is the Key to the Present: Greenhouse and Icehouse Over Time by Prof Ian Plimer, IPA Review, Vol 55, No. 1. March 2003, pgs. 9-12.

I’ve received a few bits and pieces on global warming from readers of this blog:

Cathy sent me a link to an article explaining that the European Commission is set to roll out the first phase of a major pan-European marketing campaign to raise awareness of climate change:
http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=ViewNewsArticle&newsID=595977

Luke recommends http://www.theozonehole.com/climate.htm for everyone still wondering about the connection between ozone and global warming following the note from Helen Mahr, in particular:
“Ozone’s impact on climate consists primarily of changes in temperature. The more ozone in a given parcel of air, the more heat it retains. Ozone generates heat in the stratosphere, both by absorbing the sun’s ultraviolet radiation and by absorbing upwelling infrared radiation from the lower atmosphere (troposphere). Consequently, decreased ozone in the stratosphere results in lower temperatures. Observations show that over recent decades, the mid to upper stratosphere (from 30 to 50 km above the Earth’s surface) has cooled by 1° to 6° C (2° to 11° F). This stratospheric cooling has taken place at the same time that greenhouse gas amounts in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) have risen.”

Warwick Hughes wrote: I have been very impressed with the breaking work of E-G Beck drawing attention to many published refs to high CO2 levels since 1820 and notably in WWII years. I have a Blog post on that at:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=64#more-64
There is a 10 page summary pdf file there. It will be fascinating to see if further support can be found for Beck’s conclusions. Beck’s detailing of the depth and quality of work which found these early high CO2 numbers supports the conclusions of Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski in his ice core research where he draws attention to the suppression of inconvenient high readings to fit the IPCC line.

George McCallum has sent me a beautiful picture of sunset over mountains and glacier in Isfjorden, Spitzbergen, with the note that Spitsbergen or Svalbard as it is also known, recorded one of the warmest summers on record this year. Isfjorden is just 900km from the North pole.

For beautiful pictures visit www.whalephoto.com

Paul Biggs from the University of Birmingham, UK, sent me the following summary of a presentation by Roger Pielke Sr. There is so much interesting information on the potential human impact on climate beyond a focus on carbon dioxide:

“Roger Pielke Sr, a respected climatologist of some 30 years, gave an interesting presentation of his perspective on climate science entitled ‘Regional and Global Climate Forcings – The Need to Move Beyond a Focus of the Radiative Forcing of the Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gases’ at the The 2006 Earth’s Radiative Energy Budget Related to SORCE Meeting in Washington.

The general conclusions that I draw from Pielke’s work are as follows:

Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide.

In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment, have all overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.

Pielke calculates the fraction of global warming due to the radiative forcing of increased atmospheric CO2, using the current IPCC framework on climate forcings:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/slides/large/06.01.jpg.

This includes new findings on artic ozone, methane, albedo, and aerosols/black carbon with forcing calculated to be about 26.5%. This contrasts with the IPCC view of 48%.

He suggests new or under-recognized human climate forcings including:
biogeochemical effect of CO2, nitrogen deposition, land-use/land-cover change, glaciation effect of aerosols, thermodynamic effect of aerosols, surface energy budget effect.

Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.

A postitive feedback is required in order to significantly amplify the radiative forcing of added carbon dioxide.

There is, as of yet, no evidence that atmospheric water vapor concentrations have increased (see http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/04/03/new-global-precip-papers-trend-is-zero-or-positive/).

Moreover, water vapor also changes phase (into liquid and ice clouds and precipitation) which greater complicates the actual climate response to added CO2 and other well-mixed greenhouse gases.

Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.

The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.

It is this instrumental data that gives the plot of a hockey stick shape, grafted onto proxy data. Furthermore, if, for example, the temperature of an area of the desert were to increase from plus 40 degrees celsius to 41 degrees, while at the same time an equal area of the Antarctic decreased from minus 40 to minus 41, the average temperature of the earth would stay constant.

However, under the Stephan-Boltzman equation, more radiation would be emitted by increasing the temperature of the desert, than the radiation loss from Antarctica. Pielke will shortly have a paper published in JGR, which introduces this problem.

Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural and human climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.

The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming. Pielke examines the significant upper ocean cooling from 2003 reported by Lyman et al, 2006 (http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2704.htm) to a depth of at least 750m, which was not predicted by climate models.

He cites 2 papers which support the diagnosis: A 2004 Science article by E. Pallé, P. R. Goode, P. Montañés-Rodríguez, and S. E. Kooninentitled ‘Changes in Earth’s Reflectance Over the Past Two Decades’ and a follow-on 2005 Geophysical Research Letters paper by Pallé E., P. Montañés-Rodriguez, P. R. Goode, S. E. Koonin, M. Wild, and S. Casadio entitled ‘A multi-data comparison of shortwave climate forcing changes’ (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005…/2005GL023847.shtml ).

Finally, I must point out that Pielke says all of this is not a reason not to seek to reduce CO2 emissions.”

Thanks Paul for the summary and also to Luke, for emphasising to me the importance of getting this information up as a new post/thread.