In the interest of fairness about climate change

POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Thursday, February 23, 2012 00:43
VIEWED: 2732
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SIGNYM

Monday, February 20, 2012 5:56 PM

TONY- Yes, those dang decimal points! I misplace them all the time too! THANK YOU for doing the research and calculation. It provides context for our current reality.

1KIKI

Monday, February 20, 2012 5:58 PM

Oh hey Anthony, back in physics we used to joke that along with conservation of mass and energy, there was also conservation of decimal places. If you lost or found one in your calculation, someone else was experiencing the opposite. No worries.

SIGNYM

Monday, February 20, 2012 7:37 PM

Yes, we used to joke about those decimal places. pretending to shake off off a hand and saying "Now I have 0.5 fingers!" or picking one up, like an imaginary paper dot, and saying "Now I have 50 fingers!" Decimal errors were so common in class that if you got the right numbers, albeit an order of magnitude ... or two, or three... off, you figured you got the right answer. In my very first real job at a pharmaceutical company, I was so impressed with my supervisor, Rosie Gubbins, when she got the right numbers but wrong order of magnitude. She would not let that calculation go until she had found and killed the error.

The funny thing was, back in the day, I asked her what her husband did and she said he was a "stack tester". When I asked her want THAT meant she said "He climbs smokestacks and gets dirty". I think I gave her a very blank look. Little did I know that about three years later, I TOO would be a "stack tester". And yes, I climbed smokestacks and got dirty! I should post some pictures some day of me in my stack testing years.

That was a nice trip down memory lane!
------------------

Anyway, I checked the calculations using a spreadsheet (my calc skills are so enfeebled!), and you've got the right estimate.

So, I don't know whether to be happy or sad. You could look at it ONE way and say: Yippee! We've got about 500 years to Armageddon! Lot's of time to figure things out!

OTOH you could look at it another way and say that our RATE of release is about 200,000 times FASTER than during the Siberian Trap formation, and that we have already passed the tipping point.

Needs more thought. **thinking**

ANTHONYT

Monday, February 20, 2012 7:57 PM

Hello,

As long as we have a working biosphere, we're not past the tipping point.

Quote:

The Colorado River Commission of Nevada estimates that we will run out of petroleum in 98 years, natural gas in 166 years and coal in 230 years (Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/179884-fossil-fuels-information/#ixz
z1mxB4mQRw)

Based on this estimate from I don't know who they are, we will run out of fossil fuels and be forced into renewable energy sources whether we like it or not, and well before 500 years have passed. In fact, absolute depletion estimates mean little, because economy will force us to switch off of fossil fuels before we have absolute depletion.

But I actually think the way things are going, the 22nd century will be almost totally powered by renewable energy sources. This will happen not just out of environmental concerns, but for practical reasons.

--Anthony

_______________________________________________

"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

KPO

Monday, February 20, 2012 8:00 PM

Quote:
Thus the prehistoric coal burning event described is equivalent to 521 (modern) years of fuel burning.

I agree with that. But remember that:

"The massive eruptive event which formed the traps, one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth's geological history, continued for a million years"

So our current fossil fuel burning is releasing carbon at a much faster rate - 2000 times as fast (it works out).

I suspect the volcanic event released much more carbon directly, than it did via the lava flowing through coal fields.

It's not personal. It's just war.

ANTHONYT

Monday, February 20, 2012 8:12 PM

Quote:
So our current fossil fuel burning is releasing carbon at a much faster rate - 2000 times as fast (it works out).

Hello,

Well... maybe. But probably not. We don't know how long the coal took to burn. We only know how long the entire eruption took. The actual burning of the coal may have occurred over a much shorter span of time.

Quote:
I suspect the volcanic event released much more carbon directly, than it did via the lava flowing through coal fields.

I absolutely agree with you, based on things I've read about the carbon contamination caused by modern volcanic events. The coal burning in this scenario may have been the cherry on top, and not the Sundae.

--Anthony

_______________________________________________

"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

SIGNYM

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 4:50 PM

Tony, normal volcanoes don't emit much carbon, either as carbon dioxide or as methane, so.... what have you been reading??? It doesn't square with what I know. (OTOH volcanoes are notorious emitters of sulfur. Different thing altogether)

Quote:
Human activities emit roughly 135 times as much climate-warming carbon dioxide as volcanoes each year.
Volcanoes emit less than cars and trucks, and less, even, than cement production.
Climate change skeptics have claimed the opposite.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate
-110627.html

ETA

But, interesting point, so I looked it up. This paper says that during the formation of the Deccan (Indian) plateau the basaltic flood was

Quote:
capable of releasing 10,000 Tg of SO2, resulting in atmospheric loadings of
1000 Tg a− 1 during a sustained decade-long eruptive event. We apply this model of flood basalt volcanism to estimate the potential mass
of CO2 and SO2 released during formation of the ∼65 Ma Deccan province. The Deccan lava-pile contains the record of hundreds of
enormous pāhoehoe flow-fields erupted within a period of about 1 Ma. Consequently, atmospheric perturbations associated with SO2
emissions from just one of these long-lasting eruptions were likely to have been severe, and constantly augmented over a decade or
longer. By contrast, the amounts of CO2 released would have been small compared with the mass already present in the atmosphere, and
thus much more limited in effect.

seismo.berkeley.edu/~manga/LIPS/self06.pdf

ANTHONYT

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 4:58 PM

Hello,

I've been reading that Volcanoes comprise about 1% of carbon emissions, on average, each year.

This is an average. Active eruptions spike carbon levels a great deal, but Earth's volcanoes are not all actively erupting all the time.

Except this volcano was incredibly huge and it was actively erupting for an amazingly long time, so I think it very likely that it emitted more carbon than the coal did.

Surely you agree? I didn't think this opinion to be controversial.

--Anthony

_______________________________________________

"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner

SIGNYM

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:08 PM

Um... I added to my post (above), it's something I'm looking up. There was more than one basalt flood event, altho the Siberian Trappa (Traps) is the largest. One event was during the formation of the Deccan plateau, the other was during the breakup of Pangea. I don't think either of those other two events involved coal fields. Although ALL were related to extinction events, the extinction event from the Siberian Traps was unparalleled.

-----------

Quote:
Subaerial continental flood basalt volcanism is distinguished from all other volcanic activity by the repeated effusion of huge batches of basaltic magma (~102–103 km3 per eruption) over short periods of geologic time (<1 Myr). Flood basalt provinces are constructed of thick stacks of extensive pahoehoe-dominated lava flow fields and are the products of hundreds of eruptions. Each huge eruption comes from a dyke-fed fissure tens to hundreds of kilometres long and lasts about a decade or more. Such spatial and temporal patterns of lava production do not occur at any other time in Earth history, and, during eruptions, gas fluxes of ~1 Gt per year of SO2 and CO2 over periods of a decade or more are possible. Importantly, the atmospheric cooling associated with aerosols generated from the SO2 emissions of just one flood basalt eruption is likely to have been severe and would have persisted for a decade or longer. By contrast, warming due to volcanogenic CO2 released during an eruption is estimated to have been insignificant because the mass of CO2 would have been small compared to that already present in the atmosphere.

gnews.wustl.edu/elements/e1_5/e1_5_art_self.pdf

Anyway, there's all kinds of interesting papers on the topic which show that many mass extinctions are associated with large basaltic floods. (A few extinction events are associated with meteor strikes). The Siberian flood was the only one (that I know of) which involved coal fields. There should be a paper out there which looks at the terrestrial die-off versus the oceanic die-off. I expect that the extinction with the highest marine die-offs would reflect the highest carbon dioxide output due to massive long-term ocean acidification, while the extinctions with the largest terrestrial impact would reflect the relatively short-term cooling impacts from sulfur emissions.

http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=681

Either way, what I "get" out of the information is that when you put a lot of shit into the atmosphere, you will wipe out a lot of species.

BYTEMITE

Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:27 PM

I'd say it depends on the volcano.

Most of the really deep rock isn't carbonaceous at all (it's mafic - magnesium and iron), so no degassing of CO2. Ocean spreading (one of only three ways you can have any kind of volcanism) gives off no CO2. However... Organic activity at depth, and decay, can give off CO2 (and methane). This stuff tends to get trapped on the ocean floor by a layer of dead sediment crap that continually rains down from above.

A hot spot plume will give off CO2 if it erupts into dead material.

Subduction is a trickier example of volcanism - basically when you're talking continental crustal thickness, the pressure gradient doesn't actually allow this stuff to melt, unless you have a infusion of sea water associated with it. Then you get rhyolitic siliclastic volcanism... Which probably does give off CO2.

It's not an insignificant amount, because we know volcanism was sufficient to reverse snowball earth scenarios about three times. But, whether it compares to the current output of respiring species on earth and industrialism? Good question.

The worst die off was the P-T boundary, which did have significant marine die off... But then again, there wasn't exactly much non-plant terrestrial biomass at the time to talk about. So some question remains whether the stressor there really was all that marine specific. I'd heard it bantered around that it might have been the result of the Siberian methane traps being released, which would drive up the temperature. That wouldn't really be introducing more CO2 into the system, though I suppose simply driving up the temperature might increase ocean acidification without additional CO2 to sequester.

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