Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
|
|
|
Mar 17, 2012 - 10:23pm PT
|
Another thing. A lot of information about paleoclimate can also be found in isotope ratios of certain types of fossils. That work also is very long lived and predates any of the modern controversy.
Rocks all tell a story.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Mar 18, 2012 - 09:11am PT
|
You're welcome to jump in the middle, BASE!
At AGU and elsewhere, I'm hearing more these days about greenhouse/ocean chemistry changes around some of the big extinctions.
|
|
BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
|
|
|
Mar 18, 2012 - 01:51pm PT
|
If organic carbon in the form of a plant or plankton or whatever dies, it is devoured by bacteria and not preserved as it rains to the sea bottom. If oxygen rich conditions exist, then it just keeps getting eaten and farted out over and over again. It is actually hard to preserve carbon. Coals are formed in stagnant anoxic swamps, for example.
If anoxic conditions exist, the carbon from the tiny sea critters just piles up, and you will have shales that have a very high TOC(Total Organic Carbon). These get buried and squashed. A shale is 90% water when it starts out, so a 300 foot thick organic shale started out several thousand feet thick. 10 or 15% TOC doesn't sound like much, but if you have a rock that is 300 feet thick and covers an entire basin, it can generate hundreds of billions of bbls of oil. Or natural gas if it is heated more.
That is where oil comes from. Shales formed under anoxic conditions.
There have been some real big ones. On the onshore U.S., much of it is from Devonian shales. These are the shales that are now being drilled horizontally and fracked. There is a lot of oil and gas in these shales, but gas molecules are small enough to make it through the pore throats and produce. It is pretty rare to have a shale that will give up much oil, which is just longer hydrocarbon chains. It is easy to do over time, but not in the timeframe of a typical well. It works in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota as a famous example.
The best example of a CO2 hothouse is the mid Mesozoic. We know it was hot because of plant assemblages at certain latitudes. It isn't that difficult to tell the latitude where a rock was deposited these days because any magnetic mineral oriented itself at the time of deposition. That is how continental drift is all pieced together, and it is scary accurate.
We know that Mars had a strong magnetic field because Martian meteorites have a highly directional paleomagnetic signature. Mars was too small and its core cooled, so it lost its magnetic field and that allowed its atmosphere to be scavenged by the solar wind, as well as allowing it to be bombarded by nasty radiation. Earth still has a nice molten core around a solid iron nickle core that is spinning, giving us our magnetic field. Without it, Earth would be a dead planet.
There is no doubt that the big mesozoic hothouse was a result of high atmospheric C02 levels. Some of the cool data comes from the density of fossil leaf stomata density as mentioned above.
A stomata is just a "breathing" hole in a leaf. They are easy to see under any low power microscope. The Gingko is the favorite, because it is a living fossil and can be grown today under differing C02 partial pressures to see how C02 concentrations affect the density of the stomata.
It looks like pre-industrial C02 levels were about 1/4 of the level during the mesozoic. We have now doubled that and are pumping C02 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate.
I have read that to achieve the co2 level of the mesozoic, we will have to finish off the oil and make a dent in the coal, but nevertheless, we have already sort of cooked our goose.
This has happened in the past with C02 is what I am saying. We do have a couple of analogies. The vast Devonian anoxic events have a poor fossil record because that was around the time that land plants first appeared, and the assemblage is poor. The shales are everywhere, though.
It took the planet many millions of years to recover to a more "normal" level. That occurred because the ocean acidification from high C02 levels allowed the carbon to be slowly sequestered in the organic rich shales....which if buried to the right pressure and temperature conditions now give us our petroleum today. Kind of ironic.
There are many other anoxic events, but the best and strongest example is from the mesozoic.
My field is sequence stratigraphy. I study distribution of rocks and their depositional environments. This is largely based on high and low stands of sea water. About the only way that you can get worldwide eustatic sea level rise and fall is through it being locked up in ice when sea level falls, and the ice melts causing sea level rise. It is very rhythmic during certain times.
(edit) The rather rhythmic smaller climatic cycles are not well understood. Many believe that it is simply wobbling orbital cycles. You can go Google that up. Lots of people blame current warming on that, but I don't believe that we are in that part of the orbital cycle at the present time. I need to go look that up to be sure.
Sequence stratigraphy sounds simple, but I assure you it is not.
All humans are doing is acting like lots of little volcanoes and taking the carbon that had been sequestered during past ocean acidification and now spewing it back into the atmosphere.
What will happen is not my field of expertise. I just know that we are playing a rather grand experiment, and the position of the current time in the fossil record will be extremely interesting a couple of million years in the future. We have already caused a noticeable extinction event.
|
|
BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
|
|
|
Mar 18, 2012 - 02:34pm PT
|
Oh. BASE104 is my old BASE number. You get one when you have jumped one of the four objects.
I use that because, trust me, I do not want my clients to read what I have to say on my own dime.
Mark is the name. I have quite a few old friends here, so it isn't any big secret.
No kidding. I was judging a bunch of poster sessions on Friday. Some of my co-judges were old farts, and I heard more than one snicker about "global warming".
There is a pretty intense, almost "racist," attitude among many in the oil industry that poo-poo's AGW. These dudes are old fossils, though. Climatic geology is now a very big thing, and even at the big petroleum geology schools it is a freshman requirement. So the younger crowd actually knows the state of the science.
For some reason the old farts are all Republicans, too.
No kidding. It is really that bad. That is why I don't want to get Googled on this stuff.
|
|
rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 05:23pm PT
|
Base 104...Those old farts are what..? 20 years older than you..? So they are wiser with more perspective...Ha, Ha...RJ
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 06:30pm PT
|
Supertopo Climate Change skeptics? thread exclusive
So from time to time someone here, often it's Ed or me, mentions the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). It's available free to anyone on the Internet so there's no excuse for all the fantasies about what it does or doesn't contain ... but that's not my point today.
No, I'm here to share what the report looks like physically, because I took a few minutes today to mosey up to the 5th floor of our library with a camera. The main part of AR4 is three volumes (plus a Synthesis Report kind of like the One Ring),
Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, 996 pages
Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, 976 pages
Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change, 851 pages
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 06:45pm PT
|
No, I'm here to share what the report looks like physically, because I took a few minutes today to mosey up to the 5th floor of our library with a camera. The main part of AR4 is three volumes (plus a Synthesis Report kind of like the One Ring),
Obviously the publishers are not particularly concerned about the environment or they wouldn't waste resources "publishing" (and associated distribution activities) something in voluminous paper that is available on the Internet for free.
Perhaps a small point, but it may shed some light as to the true motivations of those in the climate change trade.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 06:49pm PT
|
See my orange sticky tab? That's "glaciergate," the infamous passage claiming that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. Note that it does not occur in the WG I Physical Science volume, which has a substantial and technically solid chapter about glaciers, by glacier experts. But glaciergate is all about two godawful sentences written by a non-expert and dropped onto page 493 of the WG II report. Here they are:
And up close:
So that's it folks, now you've seen the real glaciergate. Two grammatically incoherent and mutually contradictory sentences that are false in many ways, credited to a WWF report but not really from there either; they're just a mess. These two sentences don't agree with each other or anything else in the 2,823 page AR4, and the glacier scientists sure wish one of them had reviewed this paragraph and caught the obvious confusion.
If anyone is curious just how those two sentences did get in there, the definitive forensic analysis has been done by a couple of hard-working Yale sleuths.
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/02/anatomy-of-ipccs-himalayan-glacier-year-2035-mess/
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 07:06pm PT
|
You may notice the word "Its" is doing some heaving lifting to join those two sentences. If it refers to Himalayan glaciers, then we've gone from one sentence saying they're all gone by 2035 to the next saying they're 80% gone. But wait, Himalayan glaciers cover nowhere near 500,000 km^2 to begin with, they're closer to 33,000 km^2, so what they heck is he/she/it referring to?
Even the Yale sleuths couldn't quite figure that out, although they do note that pretty much nobody in the media has managed to accurately report this story.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 08:13pm PT
|
Bruce--thanks for the bump.
Choloe's doing one of his filibusters--bumping his own posts. Appreciate your letting me get a word in!
|
|
yosemite 5.9
climber
santa cruz
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 08:40pm PT
|
Ed, I was thinking of page 107 of the Historical Overview of Climate Change Science chapter of the 2007 UN report. It is section 1.4.3 Solar Variability and the Total Solar Irradiance. There is much more science about the solar cycles and the effect on the earth that is based on ice core samples, tree rings and other evidence. If you do a web search on solar flares you will probably find several sites about this.
The earth temperature supposedly rose more quickly in the Medieval Ages than in the last 200 years.
The Antartic ice shield is supposedly becoming increasingly deep, offsetting any potential rise is sea level so far.
The earth supposedly warmed at the same rate from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940 at the same rate as it did from 1975-1998.
Here's a site you might find interesting.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
I say supposedly for the above, cause I don't really know. Two years ago we were all still being told the Sierra Nevada rose up as one big slab, though I never believed it. Finally water vapor trapped in rocks in different parts of the Sierra indicated the Sierra Nevada range rose up first in the north and then continued south.
You are right that I haven't studied the issue of ocean acidification, but I live on Monterey Bay and I can see the effects of decreased fish and birds from overharvesting the ocean. No salmon, the bird population I see on the beaches is a tenth of what it was 25 years ago. Sea lion pups starving on the cliffs. Sea lion populations also literally decimated.
Overharvesting seems to be more pressing to me than acidification.
Good luck on your research and thanks for your posts!
|
|
dirtbag
climber
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 09:43pm PT
|
Obviously the publishers are not particularly concerned about the environment or they wouldn't waste resources "publishing" (and associated distribution activities) something in voluminous paper that is available on the Internet for free.
Perhaps a small point, but it may shed some light as to the true motivations of those in the climate change trade.
It probably took blah blah all day to squirt out that mental turd.
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 09:56pm PT
|
Chiloe, my tenuous grasp of grammer tells me the 'its' refers to the Earth's
total coverage.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 10:15pm PT
|
Reilly, it's a bad sentence but you've made a good guess. Most likely the 500,000 number refers to an estimate made in a 1996 paper discussing the world's non-polar glaciers, and whoever stitched the two sentences together here in WG II was getting hopelessly confused.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 10:17pm PT
|
I see nuance is lost somewhat over the blogosphere.
Some people are nuance-proof.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Mar 19, 2012 - 10:27pm PT
|
^ ^ ^
Way to keep bumping your own posts there.
Your momma done taught you right.
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
|
Mar 20, 2012 - 01:16pm PT
|
It's available free to anyone on the Internet so there's no excuse for all the fantasies about what it does or doesn't contain
Amen, Chiloe -- and it's got great stuff through and through. I've used the mitigation reports for some of my own research because they are kind enough to list gaps in knowledge with enough specificity to guide researchers to the lowest-hanging fruit (though much of it still seems just out of reach).
Thanks, as always, for your posts and work.
John
|
|
k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 20, 2012 - 05:23pm PT
|
Oh my, it's hot.
|
|
k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 20, 2012 - 05:23pm PT
|
And Getting HOTTER!!!
I'll be in Kingston on Friday. I don't know squat about NY, but I've been told the Gunks are a place to visit... Nice weather predicted.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Mar 20, 2012 - 05:55pm PT
|
And Getting HOTTER!!!
I'll be in Kingston on Friday. I don't know squat about NY, but I've been told the Gunks are a place to visit... Nice weather predicted.
In the 80s here today, I've never seen a March like this in New Hampshire. Forecast looks cooler in the Gunks for this weekend, though.
The bigger picture, from Mother Jones 3/17/2012:
During the past week, more than 1,200 temperature records were set. During March so far, more than 2,000 daily record-high temperatures have been set in the U.S., and warm temperature records outpaced cold records by a ratio of about 9-to-1.
Sign of the times or just one of those things?
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!