Again, as it turns out I knew that and the cite did too. You do not get points for trying to make me look as an ignorant to others, because:
As pointed before that is not the mechanism that can make our situation better as it usually takes millions of years. So, then the focus of the article was on what the oceans are doing, not rocks that are weathered, and even then they point the reader to what sequestration of CO2 takes place with weathering. Perhaps you think that the article was false for they calling CO2 an essentially inert gas? Well, then you are nitpicking too much:
Of course, that “essential” part is why with some processes CO2 is not inert, and weathering is one of them, but as mentioned already, not an important factor for human time lines for the cited article as NASA points out.
Shorter term feedback effects include changes to cloud cover, moisture patterns, ocean currents, and CO2 scrubbing effects like more vegetation, increases in algae blooms, etc.
Algae blooms are interesting because they do sequester some percentage of the carbon that enters the ocean food chain and winds up at the bottom of the deep ocean. They could also be stimulated by additional minerals entering the ocean through shoreline erosion as ocean levels riise, creating a negative feedback that increases CO2 absorption when temperatures rise.
I’m willing to bet that there are very many feedbacks on many different timescales, both positive and negative, and that we don’t have a good handle on many of them, or even know they exist. We are talking about interactions between many biologcal and non-biological complex systems.
A complex system has to be dominated by negative feedbacks or it wouod be unstable. The question is whether the feedbacks will happen in time to do us any good. If a feedback oscillates around a period of 500 years, for our purposes it really does not change anything.
You know, one bit of reflection. We’ve figured out how to splice basically any gene into anything else. The math says that algae, which doubles itself in slightly over 24 hours, could feed an entire facility if flash grown in a warehouse sized plant.
So as long as we record the genes we need and retain a technologically advanced civilization, we don’t really need most of the planet to stay inhabitable. All the technologically advanced, functional societies could basically move into hundred story buildings near the poles, with all the key infrastructure supplied by far more compact equipment than we need now. Or send robots into the hot zones of the rest of the planet.
I’m just saying, it might not be the greatest of existences, but humans could survive even if they drove extinct most of the life on the planet and made most of it too hot to be inhabitable.
Of course, all of the billions of people who don’t live in technologically advanced societies? Yeah, death for most of them. In a way the consequences of global warming would be mass starvation and death mostly of people who live in countries which made very little contribution to the problem. (and since the populations of those countries trend young, as individuals they wouldn’t have had anything to do with it)
Some geologic climate excursions were rather rapid, for example the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) (55.5 million years ago) when “average global temperatures increased by approximately 6°C (11°F) within about 20,000 years.” I don’t know what theories have been presented to explain PETM. There was a coincident sharp rise in CO[sub]2[/sub] but that may have been cause, effect, or both.
That’s still far longer than the current rise in temperature is going to be. Longer than the end of the last Ice Age, too. The only changes faster than the current global warming were near instant catastrophic changes like Chicxulub.
Calcium carbonate is from the shells of animals … who eat plants … who in turn reduce carbon …
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Too lazy to multi-quote … here’s the graph of temperatures more recent (last 500,000 years) … there’s places where temperatures rose 10ºC and fell back down again within 20,000 years … I think 2,000 years is a better standard for “rapid natural temperature change” … man-kind is only making this happen forty times as fast …
One thing that’s not cyclic is the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels … once burned they are gone forever … there will be a time very soon where energy costs will rise much much faster than temperature … our entire economic system is based on cheap oil, I don’t think we have another 72 years worth … which will be worst: 3ºC higher temps or no more cars/trucks/electricity/plastic/pharms/fertilizer/KY jelly?
Stopping emissions “tomorrow” is a purely hypothetical discussion, but evidence seems to indicate that we had better do it within this half of the 21st century.
Reading this thread shows that the time frame varies from post to post, but they all seem to agree in one respect. The problem is getting worse much faster than any solution could possibly fix it.
First it was counters. Now it’s points. I have little interest in either. We don’t know what you know, just what you post. And what you posted from that article was incorrect. And if you already “knew that” before posting, however you think that makes you look is on you.
There is still not much of a clue from you of what was incorrect. Again, it looked just to about what a nitpick can be.
Incidentally while you do report about that 18% of net land flux, the fact is that it is more complicated that it was thought, and it may not be as high as that.
Same back to you, that is not showing that it was incorrect, I showed that: it was not omitted in the cite, I showed that CO2 is an inert gas except in some conditions for the long carbon cycle; and in reality, even when taken into account, the weathering of the rocks will not be enough to save our bacon, even if you take it.
So, we are back again about what was incorrect. Give it up, it is you the one that is insisting that it was incorrect when in reality weathering of the rocks was not the focus of the article and in any case they did talk about the carbon cycle and also pointed the reader to what weathering can do for capturing CO2.
Not enough, and recent studies point that it could be a neutral factor if not a positive one. (Here we should remember that “positive” in this issue is not a good thing, it means an increase in a factor that leads to more warming in the future).
“CO2…is only removed [from the atmosphere] by biological uptake and by dissolving into the ocean.”
This is not true, because CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by other mechanisms.
And the next sentence:
Yes, the net flux is much smaller than the flux in either direction, but biological uptake is not carbon neutral. Plenty of it gets buried and stays buried. They acknowledge that some carbon that undergoes biological uptake becomes fossil fuels, but not all buried carbon becomes fossil fuels. Shale, limestone, etc. show that carbon uptake is not carbon neutral.
I think you are missing, again and again, that I already told you that it was not mention in the article, but that the article linked to the full explanation that included weathering.
And that shows that you are ignoring now what was reported more recently, and yes, not mentioned in the article because not all science articles have to report about all and the kitchen sink.
What is important to notice is that what you see as inaccurate is just really an article missing an item that was not seen as important for the subject at hand, that subject of course was the time-line for the “final” amount of extra CO2 that remains in the atmosphere will stay, and the most likely answer is still hundreds of years. And that is because the calculation reported does take weathering of rocks into account.
So, I can see why that [del]kitchen sink[/del] sink was not mentioned directly in that article. So, what we are more likely to see, in human timeline terms, is what we can get from the fast carbon cycle.
It is important to notice here that while the issue will remain with us for that long the point remains: we need to stop treating the atmosphere as a sewer to avoid worse scenarios that are bound to last longer.
That’s a bit misleading. The estimation of equilibrium climate sensitivity is essentially the study of feedbacks, and we do have a fairly good handle on all the major ones and a fairly confident estimate of climate sensitivity within admittedly a broad range. It would be very surprising indeed if there were major feedbacks that we didn’t know about in view of the extensive paleoclimate studies that have been done.
That’s not necessarily true, and indeed climate feedbacks are predominantly positive and over the long term would become even more strongly positive if we lose most of the polar ice cover. That would be a far more likely scenario than some mysterious negative feedback if we continue on the present trajectory, and it’s been estimated that this “slow feedback” would more than double climate sensitivity.
You’re technically correct about the need for negative feedbacks to dominate for the system to be stable, but the climate system has an intrinsic negative feedback, namely the fact that the earth’s outgoing IR blackbody radiation increases with temperature. Water vapor, for example, is a powerful positive feedback that is a fairly direct function of temperature in the troposphere, and one might wonder why it doesn’t create runaway climate change (more WV = higher temperature = more WV in an endless cycle). It’s because, fortunately, the radiative flux to space for each degree of temperature rise is approximately twice as much as the flux reduction due to water vapor, so rising temperature drives water vapor feedback in a stable fashion. The point I want to make is that it’s a mistake to think that there are negative feedbacks lurking in the system that are going to save us. If anything, positive feedbacks may become stronger.
You think molluscs, algae, corals, etc. secrete their calcareous bits from the food they eat? As Ruken’s link showed (but am repeating here for those who don’t read links) they secrete shells from the dissolved CO[sub]2[/sub]in the water (which, through purely chemical, not biological, means, is in the form of bicarbonate ions)
Also, by far the largest fraction of carbonate comes from plants, not animals.
