CO2 - The MOST Important Greenhouse Gas

As far as greenhouse gases go, CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas needing to be controlled because of the huge quantities of it being emitted, AND because of its long life in the atmosphere. Yes methane is far more potent a greenhouse gas, but it is short-lived in the atmosphere, as it naturally oxidizes to CO2 and water vapor. Ozone and soot are two other culprits in global warming, but they too are short-lived. For an excellent summary of this subject, see the title link (excerpt follows):

"Given the recent push on other substances, many of the scientists most deeply immersed in charted human-driven heating of the planet have become increasingly concerned that carbon dioxide’s primacy is under-appreciated.

This group includes Susan Solomon, the federal climate scientist  who led the 2007 science review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,  Kenneth Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University and Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago and (on occasion) Realclimate.org."

....and from Pierrehumbert in the linked article:
"Every year that action on CO2 emissions is delayed is another year that CO2 emissions continue to grow unabated, and each passing year inexorably ratchets up the warming to which the Earth is committed. In contrast, reducing emissions of a short-lived forcing like soot or methane will have almost exactly the same climate benefit a hundred years from now as it would if done immediately."

A Smart Grid - What is it?

The title link is to a short PBS video about Smart Grids, how they work, and why they make so much sense from an energy conservation perspective. Of course energy conservation equates to lower carbon emissions. At the end of the video is a segment on how Italy is already most of the way to a smart grid.

Sen. Carper Votes in Favor of Climate Science

The title link is to a very interesting and gratifying speech by Senator Carper. As most of you who follow this blog are Delawareans with interests in climate change and climate science, I thought you might like to view this 8 minute video of a speech he made on the Senate floor.

The lead in to the video is: "June 10, 2010 - Listen to Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) speak on the U.S. Senate floor against Senator Lisa Murkowski's (R-Alaska) legislation that would have prevented the U.S. EPA from regulating harmful air pollution under the Clean Air Act. The legislation, S. J. RES. 26, was defeated by a vote of 47 to 53."

Also, as you are probably aware, there is new legislation in the works to take away the EPA's power to regulate pollution 'that only degrades the climate on Earth' (my quotes).

Tipping Point in the Making???

Arctic sea ice is now at its lowest WINTER extent in satellite recorded history. This means there is more dark ocean to absorb solar radiation, and less sea ice to reflect solar radiation back into space. Will this lead to the lowest arctic sea ice extent ever by the end of summer 2011?

Additionally, will this continue on for several years of positive feed-backs to become a major climate change tipping point? It certainly seems to have that potential.

For a Washington Post report on this winter sea ice reduction, click here. The Post article also covers the effects on Polar Bears, such as a significant reduction in body weight since 1980, because the bears have had to spend more time hunting on land, which is less productive than hunting on sea ice.

The EPA, CO2 Regulation and Climate Change

"Was the Clean air act intended to cover CO2?" This is a hugely complicated and hotly contested issue, but the title link to a ScienceInsider article by Eli Kintisch does a very nice job at clarifying the differing positions. Most interesting to me is that when the Clean Air Act of 1970 was being considered, climate effects due to pollutants were part of the considerations. From the article:

"There’s evidence that during the drafting of the act and its subsequent amendments that climate was one of the dangers Congress was thinking about. In 1970, as mentioned here, Senator Caleb Boggs (R-DE) said during debate on the law that “Air pollution alters climate and may produce global changes in temperature.” As laid out here, in 1977 a report by the House that accompanied an update to the law mentioned “possible weather and climate modifications” among the risks to particulate matter it was seeking to regulate."

As a side note, Eli Kintisch is author of the book, HACK THE PLANET. This is a book about geoengineering, which as he puts it, may be "Science's best hope - or worst nightmare - for averting climate catastrophe". Future posts on this blog will explore some of his thought provoking entries in this excellent book.

Stormier Weather, Evidence Mounting, Yasi Approaching Queensland

It may be decades before the evidence is conclusive, but the evidence that global warming (a measured fact) is causing more severe weather events certainly seems to be mounting. As of 2/1/11, poised just off Queensland, Australia, is Category 4 tropical cyclone Yasi.

"In a globally warmed world, the saying will be rewritten:  When it rains, it deluges. The warmest sea surface temperatures in Australian records have been fueling floods called ‘biblical’ — floods covering an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” ABC News has explained “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming."

Queensland faces the threats of torrential rains, highly destructive winds up to 140 mph, and a tidal surge of up to 10 feet as Yasi comes ashore sometime Feb 2.

At the bottom of the article are many other links related to the probable connection between recent severe weather events and global warming.

Ocean Fertilization as a Geoengineering Approach

Geoengineering can be divided into two broad approaches. The first is to deflect sunlight back into space through such techniques as, mimicking volcanoes by dispersing sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere, making ocean clouds more reflective, painting roofs white, etc. The second broad approach is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

In this second category, fertilizing the oceans with iron to enhance algae growth is an approach that has received a lot of attention for many years. Algae presently absorbs large quantities of CO2, converting it to additional plant material which then becomes part of the ocean food chain. The portion of ocean life which dies and sinks to the ocean depths becomes permanently sequestered carbon. Iron is a limiting nutrient in most sea water, so adding more iron does increase algae growth, which in turn consumes more CO2. The main questions are: How much of this CO2 will become permanently sequestered? and, What are the side effects on other ocean processes?

Because of the high level of interest in ocean fertilization, UNESCO scientists prepared a 20 page report on the subject (released in late Jan, 2011). The report not only raises serious concerns about the side effects, such as “risk of toxic algal blooms, ....sub-surface oxygen levels, biogas production and ocean acidification”, but it also predicts that the effectiveness of CO2 removal will be no where near as great as previously estimated:

“even using the highest estimates for both carbon export ratios and atmospheric uptake efficiencies, the overall potential for ocean fertilization to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is relatively small. Thus recent calculations of cumulative sequestration for massive fertilization effort over 100 years are in the range 25-75 Gt (gigatonnes) of carbon, in comparison to cumulative emissions of around 1,500 Gt carbon from fossil fuel burning for the same period under business-as-usual scenarios.”

So the risk to benefit ratio, at least for now, seems to place ocean fertilization down in the list of possible geoengineering approaches.

Understanding the Current Cold

This is an update about the Arctic Oscillation discussed on Dec 18, 2010. The latest image from NASA Earth Observatory even more dramatically highlights the temperature anomalies of the northern hemisphere, with the arctic being up to 18 degrees warmer than the past historical average (red), and much of the US being up to 18 degrees colder (blue). The linked article describes the mechanism, but as best I read it, does not explain the cause.

And if that image is not amazing enough, check out the amazing agreement between four different sources of global mean temperature for the past century. This NASA link also explains how temperatures for areas without weather stations are arrived at through interpolation.

Note: Setting adjustments have been made to the "Comments" option on this blog to make commenting easier. Bill

Whales and Geoengineering

This link is from an April 2010 article in Nature Reports. Not real current, but as it has somewhat of a link to geoengineering, which deals with human intervention in climate processes, I wanted to point it out.

In a nutshell, feces from the great whales contain "on average, ten million times more iron than Antarctic sea water". Iron is a limiting element needed by phytoplankton. Phytoplankton consume CO2. So from a geoengineering standpoint, we humans can continue to support NOT harvesting the great whales of the world, particularly the baleen whales like Humpback, Blue, Minke, etc. And maybe the Japanese, who do support Kyoto, will cut back on their "research" harvest of whales.

Humpback Whale, Antarctic waters. Photo by Bill Fintel

Adding iron to the oceans, to increase phytoplankton growth, to capture more CO2 from the atmosphere, is an oft discussed geoengineering approach to reducing atmospheric CO2. It does not have a lot of support because of the potential side effects of human introduction (from ships), which leads to poor distribution, both time-wise and spatially. So what can be more natural than turning iron (re) introduction back over to the great whales!

Note: most new iron in sea water now comes from dust blown off the land. This will continue, so with more great whales recycling it through the phytoplankton-krill-whale food chain, the CO2 absorbing rates will increase. Not the answer to achieve 350 ppm, but a healthy approach that will help!

Geoengineering - How effective is it calculated to be?

Since it unfortunately appears that CO2 emissions for the next several decades, at best will continue more or less constant, and at worst will increase, the obvious question is: If needed, could geoengineering offset the high CO2 greenhouse effect and return Earth's climate to its present state? The answer appears to be, yes, for the most part.......HOWEVER, potential adverse side effects of geoengineering are still unknown.

Following is a summary of the title link study led by Casper Ammann of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research: "Results of the study show that a major, hypothetical geoengineering project, launched in the 2020s, could indeed return Earth’s mean surface temperature to the levels of 2000.

To achieve this, however, the tropics would need to be cooled below 2000 levels in order to offset the warming at higher latitudes. This is partly because the poles by the 2020s are projected to have lost so much sea ice, which reflects solar heat, that they would not be very sensitive to the impacts of geoengineering...... 'The changes in the Arctic may be so profound in the next couple decades that trying to ‘fix’ the climate there might turn out to be futile,' Ammann says."

Bottom-line: Even if we resort to geoengineering, and even if it works, it does not appear to be able to return Earth's climate back to the way it was in 2000 for ALL regions.

Since precipitation is a very important climate factor, Ban-Weiss and Caldeira of the Stanford looked at both global temperature and precipitation in response to sulfate aerosols, and compared optimizing one versus the other using a uniform and a parabolic (more at poles) aerosol distribution. Their results also show major improvements, but they too conclude that Earth's climate can not be engineered back to exactly as it was as long as CO2 levels remain high.

In the the last sentence of their abstract they add a further qualifier: "It is important to note that this idealized study represents a first attempt at optimizing the engineering of climate using a general circulation model; uncertainties are high and not all processes that are important in reality are modeled."

Conclusion: Geoengineering needs a LOT more research before it is considered as a serious option. Of course a rapidly deteriorating climate, with rising sea levels, more intense storms, more severe and widespread droughts, will spur on research and consideration.

A World 29 degrees F Hotter!!!

The title linked article by Jeffrey Kiehl from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), states that if we continue burning fossil fuels at the current rate, atmospheric CO2 will reach 1,000 ppm by 2100. Based on studies of Earth's past, between 35 and 100 million years ago, Earth's atmosphere contained this level of CO2, and the Earth's temperature was roughly 29 degrees F warmer than pre-industrial temperatures (27 deg F above present).

Now this does NOT mean Earth's temperature is forecast to rise 27 degrees by 2100, even if CO2 rises to 1,000 ppm. The rise will take centuries longer because of delayed effects, like glaciers and ice sheets melting. Kiehl points out that as the Earth warms and ice cover melts, less of the sun's radiation is reflected back into space, and so the warming effect of more CO2 is amplified. Additional amplification comes from more water vapor (a greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere, and release of other greenhouse gases, like methane.

'If emissions continue on their current trajectory, “the human species and global ecosystems will be placed in a climate state never before experienced in human history,”..........'

Note: To learn more about UCAR and NCAR, and their broad stated goal of, Fostering a deeper understanding of the atmosphere, Earth, and Sun, click here.