Forget the 2 degrees Celsius target... 

 

...and the bad case for abiotic (abiogenic) methane, oil and coal. 

We know that some planets and some moons in the solar system are covered with frozen methane. 

We know the same of comets:

 

Results from the Rosetta and Philae spacecraft show that the nucleus of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has no magnetic field, which suggests that magnetism may not have played a role in the early formation of planetesimals. Further, the ALICE spectrograph on Rosetta determined that electrons (within 1 km (0.62 mi) above the comet nucleus) produced from photoionization of water molecules by solar radiation, and not photons from the Sun as thought earlier, are responsible for the degradation of water and carbon dioxide molecules released from the comet nucleus into its coma. On 30 July 2015, scientists reported that the Philae spacecraft, that landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014, detected at least 16 organic compounds, of which four (including acetamide, acetone, methyl isocyanate and propionaldehyde) were detected for the first time on a comet.

 

So, how come we believe methane and other biotic compounds on planet earth have been generated by fossilisation of dead life, when we know that these chemicals exist in the interstellar space?

 

This is a good question that feeds the frenzy of many global warming denialists. Because they think that methane and other chemical compounds are "primordial" in space, this proves that fossil fuels are not "really fossil fuels" therefore they cannot be the culprits that are warming the planet. 

 

I tilt my lid. One could be swindled by the argument. Methane and carbon dioxide exist without life having been present in space as far as we know. Venus' atmosphere for example is made mostly of CO2 and its temperature hovers around 440 degrees Celsius daily, in the dark and at the poles. As far as we know Venus never had life on Venus like life on Earth. So where does all this CO2 comes from? 

 

For example, the atmosphere on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has a dense atmosphere of nitrogen, hydrocarbons and some methane-ethane. No life there to generate such gases, is there? 

 

Triton, the largest moon of Neptune is covered in frozen nitrogen, frozen water and has traces of CO2 and methane. I rest this half-baked case....

 

Back to earth.

 

The primordial methane and some sub-biotic or abiotic compounds would have existed and/or assembled at the formation of the Earth, 4.5 billion years ago, like on other planets and their moons from elementary associations. So far so good. But most of the elements necessary for the formation of hydrocarbons are surface elements. They only exist in the thickness of the crust, oceans and atmosphere of the planet. There is little, if none, of them that is stored in the mantle and the core of planet earth. That is to say that, after 4.5 billions years of transformation, none of these chemicals apart from possibly a few rare places are still in a "primordial" state on Earth. 

 

By now, most of the hydrocarbon have been recycled by "life". What we extract as fossil fuels are not "primordials", but recycled compounds from the decay of life. 

 

This is why there is so little studies made of the abiotic hydrocarbons on earth. 99.999 per cent of what we dig and pump from the planet comes from the depths and shallows of the crust of the earth, stuff that has accumulated like detritus at the bottom of a pit, comes from life recycling itself. Example of the process are peats, bogs and shales.

 

And we know this fact via the analysis of the compounds, by the appearances of what are FOSSILISED within and by the analysis of impurities in the products.

 

Fossil fuels ARE fossil fuels. That is to say they are the stored decay of previous life forms, be it plants (coal) or animals (oil). Present methane is mostly a product of this decomposition in the circumstances in which the decomposition occurs. The decomposition turns mostly into hydrocarbon products which have been stripped of oxygen before being buried by geological upheavals. 

 

The hydrocarbon cycle has gone in slow burst, booms and bust since the early living soup in the oceans. The coal cycle is far more recent since it needs land plants to generate the big pits of coal deposits. Land plants have only existed on the planet for less than 500 million years. 

 

The only exploitable hydrocarbons are those deposited on continental shelves, then covered by other muds that in time solidified. Most of the other hydrocarbons in the oceans are recycled as nutrients to create "more life" by deep sea currents back to surface. 

 

Beneath the complex crust composed of various elements, the molten mantle of the earth is mostly silicate rocks rich in magnesium and iron in hot liquid form. No hydrocarbon can form or survive in this environment.

 

 

Conclusion: 

 

The status of the atmosphere is thus regulated by the gases such as oxygen, nitrogen and water vapour. Its interaction with life forms (dead — fossil fuels — and alive — respiration and photosynthesis) and the oceans adds some gases such as methane and CO2 in smaller quantities. 

 

Photosynthesis is the biggest contributor to the cycle between oxygen and CO2. 

 

We know that the great variability of water vapour, the main warming gas in the atmosphere, is self-balancing at most times, despite being "erratic" due to various level of "humidity". 

 

We also know that the variability of (minute) quantities of CO2 will change the temperature gradients of global climate. 180 ppm of CO2 is associated with Ice Ages, while 300 ppm of CO2 is associated with the maximum "natural" variation of warmer climes for the last million years. Scientific observation tells us the average differential between 180 and 300 ppm of CO2 is 10 degrees Celsius.

 

A reduced extrapolation and observation would tell us that since the last ice age, the temperature rose by about 6 degrees Celsius from the end of the last Ice Age  (220 ppm of CO2) to the start of the industrial revolution (1850) when studies show CO2 level was around 280 ppm. 

 

Thus it can be deduced that a change of about 60 to 80 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere engendered a rise of about 6 degrees Celsius for the last 10,000 years, mostly between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, with small variations there after, due to mitigating factors, including volcanic activity. 

 

At this point we need to point out to many complex mostly balancing feed-back mechanisms between the atmosphere, the surface of the oceans, the depth of the oceans, the albedo, the heat lost into space and amount of photosynthesis which can change the rate of temperature variations. 

 

Since the industrial revolution, humans have burned massive amounts of fossil fuels and released about 120 ppm of CO2 into the atmosphere. Following our reduced extrapolation, we have to assume that we have ALREADY ADDED ENOUGH CO2 to warm the atmosphere by a whopping 10-12 degrees Celsius on pre-industrial temperatures. 

 

At this stage, most of the scientific global warming models are geared to exaggerate all the mitigating factors such as feed-back mechanisms, earth wobbles and sun activity. But the potential of fast increases in atmospheric and oceanic temperatures is large from the present into the very near future. This increase does not appear constant due to some feed-back mechanism, but the TREND IS VERY STRONG. We can expect massive troubles in various stepped stages WITH AN INCREASING MOMENTUM.

 

The convection currents of the atmosphere redistribute the added heat in various quantities to various places as shown the NASA map for the January temperature gradients increases, including a whopping 4 to 12.9 degrees Celsius above average at the north pole FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH OF JANUARY 2016. This should stir something frightening in your pants.

 

From various models we can conclude with a high degree of certainty that when the maximum heat generated by the extra CO2 from the burning of CO2 till the present, is reached, the poles would have experienced a rise of about 20 degrees Celsius (the south pole taking four/five times longer than the north pole due to its albedo and the size of its ice sheet), the temperate regions would have had an increase of about 6 to 8 degrees on present temperatures and the equatorial region will rise by about 3 to 4 degrees Celsius. sea level would have risen by more than 10 metres.

 

This is the ugly prognostic at present values of CO2. Considering humans are still adding 3 to 4 ppm of CO2 per annum into the atmosphere, it is not inconceivable that, even when all the mitigating factors are counted, the rise of temperature in the temperate regions will go beyond 9 up to 12 degrees Celsius before we realise we've really cooked ourselves.  

 

The situation is very serious. We need to stop the usage of fossil fuels today and find ways to capture most of the extra CO2 we have added into the system including the oceans that are becoming "acidic".

 

We need another urgent new conference of all countries on this planet to stop farting around the edges. We need the CSIRO to lead the way to study the changes as well as find solutions. 

 

Malcolm, don't be a dork. This is more serious than you can imagine. Sack Dr Larry Marshall — pay him out as required by industrial compensation — and pay the CSIRO to carry on what it was designed to do: carry on pure research, pure data collection and proper computation of such data to make more accurate predictions in order to find better solutions. 

 

Malcolm, don't be a politician. Be the bravest person on this planet, the man who has just discovered his arse will be on fire tomorrow, no matter what — and will stop politicking for self-aggrandisement. 

 

The entire population of humans and of other life-forms will be grateful to you, for the next 20,000 years.

 

 

Gus Leonisky

 

your local average expert on global warming

Climate change could kill more than 500,000 people a year globally by 2050 by making their diets less healthy, according to new research published in the Lancet.

The research is the first to assess how the impacts of global warming could affect the quality of the diets available to people and found fewer fruit and vegetables would be available as a result of climatic changes. These are vital in curbing heart disease, strokes and diet-related cancers, leading the study to conclude that the health risks of climate change are far greater than thought.

Climate change is already judged by doctors as the greatest threat to health in the 21st century, due to floods, droughts and increased infectious diseases, with the potential to roll back 50 years of progress.

Peter Scarborough, at the University of Oxford and part of the new research, said these direct impacts would affect tens of thousands of people at particular times: “But everyone in the world eats, so small changes in diet can quickly add up” to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“The health burden related to climate change is much bigger than we thought,” Scarborough said. But cutting carbon emissions and improving education and the availability of fruit and vegetables would reduce the number of deaths, he said.

“The Lancet [study] digs deeper, and reports the most advanced projections so far of the effects of climate change on food and health,” according to professors Alistair Woodward at the University of Auckland and John Porter at the University of Copenhagen in a commentary on the work.

 

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/03/more-than-half-a-million-could-die-as-climate-change-impacts-diet-report

 

 

Tuesday's expected top of 29 degrees will be matched or exceeded for the coming six days, according to current forecasts.

The western suburbs will heat up more, with 33 degrees expected in Penrith on Tuesday, before four days of 35-36 degrees, the Bureau of Meteorology said.

A ridge of high pressure that has hovered fairly close to the NSW will move further east in coming days, Brett Dutschke, a senior meteorologist with Weatherzone, said.

"So the winds will turn a bit more northerly," Mr Dutschke said. "This week will be warmer than last week."

While the dry, calm, and mostly sunny days are making it seem that summer will never end, its demise is in sight.

By early to next week, a cool change will finally penetrate far enough north to dislodge the blocking high that has kept Sydney warm.

The system has also lately roasted inland regions of Victoria and NSW with temperatures exceeding averages by more than 10 degrees for days on end. 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/sydney-weather-whats-going-to-break-the-heat-spell-20160307-gnd1qn.html#ixzz42HYUAZGN
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

 

In my analysis of global warming, I often mention "feed-back mechanisms". Much of our mechanical inventions have feed back mechanisms. They often make sure that, say, our car does not run out of petrol or gets too much into the carburettor or that our steam engine does not go pass a certain speed beyond which the system could explode. 

 

In nature these feed-back mechanisms are quite complex as they react to each other and change the system to an appreciable degree. The colour of the surface of the planet can change global warming. This is called Albedo. But one feed-back mechanism that has not been studied in depth so far was the change in land surface water content.

 

A new study published in Science, the mag for AAAS, comes to the rescue.

 

The new study explains how the rise in water on land is slowing down the rise of sea level as the surface of the earth is warming up.

The scientists have come up with a high degree of precision for this area of expertise. 3200 ± 900 gigatons of EXTRA water have been stored on land (surface and below), but of course not everywhere as we know about California's drought. This also follows on the melt of glaciers as well.

 

The study has narrowed the influence of this on rising sea level. The increase of ground water has slowed the rise of sea level by 0.71±0.20 millimetres per year in the last decade. 

 

There is a map of "anomalies" where ground water has increased as well as decreased. 

 

Meanwhile the sea level has increased by about 3 millimetres per year in the last decade and 4 millimetre last year. 

 

Still rising. You need to know.

The world is on track to reach dangerous levels of global warming much sooner than expected, according to new Australian research that highlights the alarming implications of rising energy demand.

University of Queensland and Griffith University researchers have developed a “global energy tracker” which predicts average world temperatures could climb 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2020.

That forecast, based on new modelling using long-term average projections on economic growth, population growth and energy use per person, points to a 2C rise by 2030.

The UN conference on climate change in Paris last year agreed to a 1.5C rise as the preferred limit to protect vulnerable island states, and a 2C rise as the absolute limit.

The new modelling is the brainchild of Ben Hankamer from UQ’s institute for molecular bioscience and Liam Wagner from Griffith University’s department of accounting, finance and economics, whose work was published in the journal PLOS ONE on Thursday.

It is the first model to include energy use per person – which has more than doubled since 1950 – alongside economic and population growth as a way of predicting carbon emissions and corresponding temperature increases.

The researchers said the earlier than expected advance of global warming revealed by their modelling added a newfound urgency to the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.

Hankamer said: “The more the economy grows, the more energy you use... the conclusion really is that economists and environmentalists are on the same side and have both come to the same conclusion: we’ve got to act now and we don’t have much time.”

Wagner said the model suggested the surge in energy consumption was not offset by improvements in energy efficiency.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/10/dangerous-global-warming-will-happen-sooner-than-thought-study

If like the denialists, we based our predictions on silly flat-lining of trends over a short period, based on the last two months, January and February 2016 (both with a "shocking spike in temperature rise), the prediction of global warming are as the following chart :

 

Unfortunately, it could soon appear that this chart is more accurate than the one at top.

The prognosis is not good. It will happen. Antarctica is going to melt. It's quite possible that within 350 to 400 years, Antarctica will be completely de-iced. By then the north pole could feel like the French Riviera. Far fetched? Not really. Depending on the trend now being defined between the chart at top and the chart above, the seriousness of our troubles is only a when, not an if. But we are lucky. We'll be dead before the shit hits the fan. Or may be not since Climatic expert, including yours truly, predict that the weather will go totally haywire before 2050. I bet for 2032. The other experts for 2038-45. It's no competition mind you.

---------------

 

East Antarctica is the world's largest area of ice and, until recently, was thought to be more stable than the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet.

The Totten Glacier, in particular, has rapidly become recognised as the most vulnerable of all the East Antarctic glaciers, with its floating ice shelf already in retreat.

"While traditional models haven't suggested this glacier can collapse, more recent models have," said Dr Alan Aitken of the University of Western Australia, co-author of a new study published today in the journal Nature.

Dr Aitken and colleagues have carried out the first study to analyse the stability of the Totten Glacier's ice sheet.

"We confirm that collapse has happened in the past, and is likely to happen again if we pass a tipping point, which would occur if we had between 3 and 6 degrees of warming above present."

Mapping reveals glacier's points of instability

The researchers studied patterns of erosion left by past ice sheet activity by mapping the topography of the land under the ice, and the thickness of its sedimentary rocks, which get eroded with glacial activity.

Beyond the ice shelf, they identified a relatively stable 100-kilometre-wide area, which slopes downwards towards the sea, allowing melting ice to be removed to the sea.

Ice sheets, glaciers, ice shelves and sea level rise

• As snow falls on the Antarctic continent it is slowly compacted over many years into vast ice sheets bigger than 50,000 square kilometres in size
• Glaciers are formed when this ice moves under gravity towards the coast
• As these glaciers flow into the sea they create permanent floating ice shelves connected to the land
• Because ice shelves are already floating in the ocean they don't contribute to sea level rise when they break up
• But, if an ice shelf collapses, the glaciers and ice sheet on land that feed it flow more quickly out to sea and do cause the sea level to rise

Beyond this was a 200-kilometre-wide unstable area that sloped down away from the sea. This would allow melted ice to pool at the bottom of the ice sheet and encourage its rapid melting.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-19/warning-on-tipping-point-for-east-antarctic-glacier/7425362

 

read also: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-19/'now-or-never'-for-the-great-barrier-reef's-fate/7427484

 

The fate of the Great Barrier Reef will be sealed in the next five years, according to scientists who say if the Government wants to save the reef it is "now or never".

Key points:

• Scientists say Government must commit $10 billion over the next decade
• Huge amount of work in next five years needed to save the reef
• Poor water quality a major threat
• Government investing $2 billion to protect the reef

 

Researchers from James Cook University are pushing for all sides of Government to commit $10 billion over the next decade to ensure its survival.

Chief research officer Jon Brodie said without the funding whoever is in power could give up on any chance of maintaining the reef's heritage status.

Mr Brodie said one of the major threats to the reef was poor water quality

 

---------------------

I give it 15 years...

 

After two years of supercomputer calculations, the researchers observed a sudden transition when the simulated CO2 in the atmosphere passed 1200 parts per million. The stratocumulous clouds broke apart and disappeared, leaving blue skies. 

This would cause a sudden spike in temperature as the heat that would have been reflected into space would be absorbed by the ocean instead.

The loss of stratocumulus clouds would add another 8C of warming on top of the amount already predicted, the researchers concluded.

Under this scenario, the Earth would warm 14C above the pre-industrial level.

That's a huge amount. Remember that a 4C increase in temperature has been described as "the end of human civilisation in its current form". 

That alone would see meters of sea-level rise, the destruction of the world's coral reefs, a massive loss of animal species, and catastrophic extreme weather events.

It is difficult to imagine what would happen then if the temperature were to jump 8C on top of the warming that had already occurred.

Maybe the best guide is the temperature on Earth 56 million years ago, when seawater was 40C in the tropics, and crocodile-like creatures were thriving in the Arctic.

When could this happen?

Atmospheric CO2 concentration could pass 1200ppm within about 100-150 years if we keep burning fossil fuels at the current rate, according to Tapio Schneider at the California Institute of Technology, who led the research.

"I don't think we will get anywhere close to it," he said in a press release.

"I think and hope that technological changes will slow carbon emissions so that we do not actually reach such high CO2 concentrations.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/stratocumulus-clouds-could-...

 

 

 

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