Facts, Myths, and Givens in Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) 36

[zdas04]

I have been repeatedly accused of refusing to accept the basic "facts" of Anthropogenic Cimate Change (ACC nee AGW, nee Global Warming, nee Global cooling). I think we really need to define terms.

In the following I'm going to rely heavily on The Shattered Greenhouse: How Simple Physics Demolishes the "Greenhouse Effect". I've linked the article in for anyone who wants to check my interpretation of the story. It has an extensive bibliography at the end for further reading.

Greenhouse Effect
The basic idea of a greenhouse gas comes from Arrhenius' in 1896 representing (some say misrepresenting) the work of Fourier from 1827

"Fourier maintained that the atmosphere acts like the glass of a hothouse, because it lets through the light rays of the sun but retains the dark rays from the ground."

In other words, visible light can traverse the atmosphere more easily than infrared can traverse the atmosphere back into space. Fourier actually said nothing of the kind, but it has entered our collective culture that he did.

This idea ignores the fact that in greenhouses, the glass acts to prevent the heated air from mixing with the ambient air outside the box (i.e., prevents mass transfer) and has nothing to do with different wave lengths of light. The ACC concept says that the heating is due to energy absorption and disregards the fact that hot gases rise and there is no physical barrier to how far they can rise.

The linked article ends with:

In the real physics of thermodynamics, the measurable thermodynamic properties of common atmospheric gases predict little if any influence on temperature by carbon dioxide concentration and this prediction is confirmed by the inconsistency of temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations in the geological record. Moreover, when the backradiation "Greenhouse Effect" hypothesis of Arrhenius is put to a real, physical, material test, such as the Wood Experiment, there is no sign of it because the "Greenhouse Effect" simply does not exist. This is why the "Greenhouse Effect" is excluded from modern physics textbooks and why Arrhenius' theory of ice ages was so politely forgotten. It is exclusively the "Greenhouse Effect" due to carbon dioxide produced by industry that is used to underpin the claim that humans are changing the climate and causing global warming. However, without the "Greenhouse Effect", how can anyone honestly describe global warming as "anthropogenic"?

If the thermodynamic underpinning of the "Greenhouse Effect" is absolutely missing, ACC does not have a leg to stand on.

Carbon Dating
Much has been made about the "fact" that atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub] must have come from geologically old sources because of the lack of Carbon-14 in the atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub]. The idea of carbon dating is the result of very creative work in 1946 by Willard Libby at the University of Chicago. His concept is that Nitrogen-14 in the atmosphere is bombarded by solar radiation and that some proportion of the impacts will cause the stable nitrogen to lose a neutron and become radioactive Carbon-14 (radiocarbon). He further postulated that the number of collisions is relatively constant and that as animals breathed the C14 a portion of it would be absorbed into their systems and decay to Carbon 12 over time. This means that as long as the animal is breathing they will be ingesting C14. When the animal stops breathing they will stop ingesting C14 and the inventory of radiocarbon in their bodies will decay with a half life of 5730 years. So if you find a sample with 1/4 as much C14 as you expect then it is something like 11,460 years old. There are a large number of assumptions that go into this calculation, and many of them are invalid for any given biological sample, and the uncertainty in dating cam be millennia.

The big question is what sources of fuel have zero C14? Of course hydrocarbons that haven't been alive for 300 million years likely have zero C14. Same with CO[sub]2[/sub] from volcanoes. What about biological material that has been frozen under the permafrost since the last ice age (2.58 to 0.012 million years ago)? That stuff has been through a lot of half lives of C14. So if the climate is warming, and if the permafrost is retreating, then biological action on the newly thawed material would have zero C14. This means that C14-free CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere does not necessarily have to come from industrial activity.

Temperature Record
The temperature record is not just one thing.
[ul]
[li]Data from 2005 might be from digital instruments that self-report or from satellite surrogates.[/li]
[li]Data from 1970 likely comes from analog instruments manually recorded[/li]
[li]Data from 1900 likely comes from spotty coverage at universities and on ships.[/li]
[li]Data from 1800 comes from ice cores, sea floor samples, and tree ring analysis[/li]
[li]Data from thousands of years ago to about 1.5 million years ago come from ice cores[/li]
[li]Data older than that comes from analysis of the fossil record (i.e., what kind of plants were growing? how big were they?)[/li]
[/ul]

We have no way to directly measure temperature. We can't do it today. We couldn't do it 100,000 million years ago. We can measure the impact of a given temperature on a material with very good accuracy and repeatability and very low uncertainty. That mercury thermometer that your mum stuck up your bum didn't measure your temperature, it measured the thermal expansion of the mercury in a constrained channel. All temperature data is the result of an evaluation of the impact on something physical to a temperature change. To turn ice core data into temperatures the scientist melts the ice then boils the water in a tightly controlled space and evaluates the gasses that come out of the sample. A computer model is used to convert the mix of gases into a temperature. These models are very clever and quite involved. If you assume that CO[sub]2[/sub] forces temperature change, you get one set of temperature numbers. If you assume that changes in CO[sub]2[/sub] are a result of temperature change you get a very different set of temperature numbers. When people plot CO[sub]2[/sub] concentration on the same graph as "temperature" data they are being purposely misleading since everyone with the ability to run this calculation knows that they have selected "cause" or "effect" before they generated the temperature numbers and in spite of having different scales they are actually the same number.

The oldest data has a temporal uncertainty of no less than ±10,000 years. The Ice core data is probably ±200 years. Data from the 1800's is certainly ±1-2 years. Data from the early 1900's is around ±6 months. More contemporary data has a better temporal uncertainty.

Contemporary data is collected from thousands of weather stations and stored in a database. The database (actually there are several, each its own format) contains one record per station per time period. No indication that the data is anything but true and accurate like scientific data is supposed to be. It is anything but that. "Everyone" understands that temperature on a blacktop surface is higher than temperature on a grassy field. As urban populations have expanded to formerly rural spaces, many weather stations have shifted from rural to urban. If you look at the data for the station, there is a step change in the output. To be able to compare a station that is currently urban to data from when it was rural, requires some "adjustments". These adjustments are done destructively without even a flag in the database. Also many of the stations have been broken for months or years and just receive "estimates", without any explicit definition of the estimating technique.

Finally, the historical record can be modified. Luckily several "outsiders" made copies of the databases at various times. Comparing those copies to the "official" records indicates some distinct trends. Several warm periods from the past are no longer included in the historical record. Data from 2000, show the 1930's to have been as much as 5°F warmer than the current string of "warmest on record years". Many of those record-breaking years were warmer by less than 0.05°F when the contemporary records have an uncertainty of ±0.1°F, but "Warmest Year on Record" gets headlines.

Impact of Climate Change
The list of things that ACC is going to cause has been widely published. It includes wildfires, more hurricanes, more tornadoes, floods, droughts, more deserts, reduced biodiversity, rising sea level, etc. This list was generated by a group of grad students sitting around a table throwing out ideas. Things like "when it is hotter it feels like the desert, I bet deserts will grow". In fact the geological record shows that in general during a warm epoch there is additional moisture in the atmosphere and deserts shrink--this is happening today all over the world. The list of consequences is not part of the "science" of ACC, but the scientists involved have rarely spoken out against the list. The scientific theories of ACC talk about physical reactions, but they can't even predict clouds or rotating systems let alone wildfires.

Consensus
Before you say you "believe" in ACC remember:

Belief is the acceptance of a theory in the absence of data

For every Michael Mann there is a Judith Curry. For every Al Gore there is a Jim Imhoff (U.S. Senator from Oklahoma). For every David Suzuki there is a Lord Monkton. For every Bill Nye there is a Jack-in-the-Box Clown. For every IPCC report there are contributors who claim their statements were misrepresented. The 97% consensus was made up from whole cloth. Before this subject got so political and began having so much money thrown at it, there were frank and honest discussions among the scientific community and people of varying views could get published or get on the podium at conferences. Not today. There are a large number of scientists who have actually lost tenure for holding opinions that the ACC story does not hold up to scrutiny, and getting published with papers outside the mainstream is nearly impossible. Not the "science" of my youth.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[IRstuff]

"This idea ignores the fact that in greenhouses, the glass acts to prevent the heated air from mixing with the ambient air outside the box (i.e., prevents mass transfer) and has nothing to do with different wave lengths of light."

More than 50% of sunlight passes through the glass on the way in, less than 1% of the radiated energy makes it back out. The difference lies in the >5000K blackbody temperature of the sun, vs. about 310K temperature within a hothouse.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[zdas04]

IRStuff,
Do the math. The energy that doesn't make it back out has increased the temperature of the mass inside the greenhouse. It feels good to think that greenhouses are radiative processes, but that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The air in the greenhouse heats up. The walls prevent the warm air from mixing with the ambient air. If you want to cool a greenhouse you open a window and let the warm air out and the cool air in, you don't pull blinds over the glass.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[IRstuff]

You do the math.

Radiation from 310K blackbody is 524W/m^2

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[zdas04]

Yeah, I know. And that radiation heats the mass inside the greenhouse.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[TehMightyEngineer]

The ACC concept says that the heating is due to energy absorption and disregards the fact that hot gases rise and there is no physical barrier to how far they can rise.

Please explain.

If you want to cool a greenhouse you open a window

But our green house hypothetical model has windows that open up to a vacuum.

Ian Riley, PE, SE
Professional Engineer (ME, NH, MA) Structural Engineer (IL)
American Concrete Industries

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanConcrete/

 

[zdas04]

TehMightyEngineer,
If the so-called "greenhouse gases" are acting as a barrier to heat leaving the planet, what is the barrier to the greenhouse gases leaving the planet? You really cannot have it both ways. Either the greenhouse gases act like the glass in the greenhouse stopping mass transfer, or the greenhouse gases themselves heat up and rise to the vacuum of space.

I'm not understanding your second point. The way a greenhouse is cooled is you allow the warm air mass to exit, drawing in ambient air. On a planetary scale, the mass of hot gases would exit to space and be replaced by water vapor from (slightly) increased evaporation from (very slightly) decreased pressure.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[TehMightyEngineer]

On a planetary scale, the mass of hot gases would exit to space and be replaced by water vapor from (slightly) increased evaporation from (very slightly) decreased pressure.

So, our atmosphere is evaporating? Wont we run out?

Ian Riley, PE, SE
Professional Engineer (ME, NH, MA) Structural Engineer (IL)
American Concrete Industries

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanConcrete/

 

[aussiejohn2]

Hard to tell if people are kidding, here.
Hot air escapes from the greenhouse window because it is displaced by the cooler hence denser air which surrounds the greenhouse. That mechanism does not apply to the atmosphere as a whole, because space is not a reservoir of cool dense air. The Jeans mechanism by which molecules escape the atmosphere is temperature dependent, but is so slow that the heat carried away, and the small increase in the escape rate due to greenhouse warming, are insignificant.

> Either the greenhouse gases act like the glass in the greenhouse stopping mass transfer

They don't. There are two mechanisms in a greenhouse, the mass transfer one you refer to, and a radiation absorbance with frequency one. It's the second effect for which the analogy between greenhouse and atmosphere applies. Incoming solar radiation has a wavelength distribution peaking at around 550 nm or 0.55 um. The atmospheric gases are transparent (low absorbance) to this range of wavelengths. The radiation passes straight through (with or without an atmosphere) and heats the earth. The warm earth re-radiates to space. Since it is cooler than the sun, its spectrum is lower in frequency or longer in wavelength, peaking around 10 um. Without an atmosphere, the earth comes to an equilibrium temperature where the incoming and outgoing radiation energy balance. The atmosphere is relatively opaque to the longer wavelengths. It absorbs much of the outgoing energy, and re-radiates it in all directions. Half returns to earth and increases the equilibrium temperature compared with the no-atmosphere case.

John.

 

[zdas04]

Please assume that no one is "kidding". I don't think the two camps like each other enough for that.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[moltenmetal]

Here's my point of view on this: the following are known, based on a high standard of evidence, with the overwhelming support of the peer-reviewed literature on the subject:

- multiple measurements which cross-check against one another
- a strong theoretical underpinning which matches the measurements

1) The mean concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased from around 280 ppm in the pre-industrial period to above 410 ppm today

2) The origin of the extra CO2 is overwhelmingly the burning of fossil fuels and the roasting of fossil carbonate rocks. Very roughly half of that extra CO2 emission has been taken up by natural processes, and the other half has ended up increasing [CO2] in the atmosphere.

3) Extra CO2 in the atmosphere results in radiative forcing (i.e. a shift in the radiative equilibrium) leading to increased global mean temperature over time

People denying any of these three things are doing so on a basis other than that of science.

We can credibly argue the extent of the resulting warming, how fast it will happen, what the consequences of it will be, how much of it has happened already, and what if any confounding factors there may be. We can also argue what is worth doing about it, what it will cost, what it will cost to adapt to the resulting changes etc.

I won't waste my time debating items 1-3, nor do I suggest that anyone else debate them. They're not at issue in the scientific community.

 

[zdas04]

And here's my point, the following are absolutely known:
[ul]
[li]The standard of evidence is not "science" but politics. The data has been destructively manipulated for decades and none of the databases is secure from tampering after the fact to fit an agenda.[/li]
[li]The only way to get a paper published on climate change in a peer-reviewed format is to agree with the IPCC, so of course the peer-reviewed literature supports the hypotheses.[/li]
[li]CO2 levels have increased in the last 150 years. On a geological time frame, CO2 is currently in a state called "starved" (up from "extremely starved"), hopefully heading towards a "normal" level of around 1000 ppm.[/li]
[li]The origin of the increasing CO[sub]2[/sub] is much more likely to be biological action on the biological mass that has thawed on the fringes of the permafrost than burning fossil fuels.[/li]
[li]"Radiative forcing" is a fancy term for "Oh we so very much want this to be man's fault".[/li]
[/ul]

My basis for denying all of these things is a decade's long professional involvement with this subject and an intense scientific interest in it. I have reviewed the data and find it manipulated to the point of being worthless. I have reviewed the models and found that there are just too many places where they computer "multiplies times zero and adds the right answer". I have reviewed the theory and find it to be shallow and facile.

You are absolutely within your rights to "not waste your time debating 1-3", but I thought you had already said that you weren't going to debate them any more about a week ago. As to "not at issue in the scientific community", you seem to have come up with your own definition of the scope of that community. The lion's share of physicists, geophysicists, astro physicists, chemists, and fluid mechanics experts absolutely do not accept your "given's", the only community of scientists who do accept them are feeding at the trough of ACC and their tenure/grant money depends on it.


[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[cswilson]

David:

Let's start with some very basic points.

The term "greenhouse effect" is just a metaphor, and like all metaphors it is not exact. The metaphor is a good one to the extent that it refers to the fact that the atmosphere is more transmissive to incoming energy from the sun than it is to outgoing energy from the earth.

Where the metaphor is not so good is in the mechanism that inhibits the outgoing transmission of energy. In a man-made glass greenhouse, this inhibition is PRIMARILY that of preventing upward convection. In the "atmospheric greenhouse effect", it is inhibiting upward radiation (by radiative absorption).

So all that the Wood experiment you cite demonstrated is that the greenhouse metaphor is not to be taken literally. (And others have done the experiment more carefully have shown that an IR-opaque cover leads to higher temperatures than an IR-transparent cover.)

And there is a huge (YUUUUGE?) difference between the existence of a radiative greenhouse effect (RGHE) in the atmosphere and the possibility of a very high sensitivity to slight changes in the composition in the atmosphere.

There really is no other explanation (and I've looked for years) than the RGHE for the power output we see from the earth's surface compared to the solar input. The earth and its atmosphere absorb ~240 W/m^2 from the sun, averaged over the surface. The surface emits ~500 W/m^2, again, averaged over the surface. These numbers are well measured, and known to within a few percent.

This is a huge discrepancy, given that not even the worst alarmist thinks the planet as a whole is more than 1 W/m^2 out of balance. The moon, without an atmosphere, has no such discrepancy. Every alternative explanation I've seen doesn't even pass the laugh test.

You ask, "what is the barrier to the greenhouse gases leaving the planet?" Fundamentally, gravity. Long before they would get to a high enough energy level to reach "escape velocity", they would radiate away much of that energy to space. (Yes, that's a little simplistic, but fundamentally correct.)

 

[Mongrel]

What I'm not following in the whole debate, is why everyone's so excitedly focusing on ONE problem. There is a hell of a lot of other types of pollution that is definitely attributable to humanity. And definitely causing much worse ddamage in the local environment, globally speaking. So, why so much excitement about CO2, and weather systems that we don't really understand very well? Why not this level of global awareness about the Great Pacific Rubbish Patch, or the byproducts of producing the lithium-ion batteries that are apparently going to save us all from tthe dreadful CO2 monster??
Could it be simply that nobody's figured out how to monetize that yet, I wonder...

 

[zdas04]

Mongrel,
I can't answer your basic question, and I wonder about it too. When the East River caught fire, we focused on human-scale problems and fixed it. When the Chicago River smelled like an open sewer, we focused on human-scale problems and fixed it. Same with the worst of the Smog in the LA Basin. When the air in London was toxic, we changed some behaviors and fixed it. We seem to be able to clean up after ourselves once we decide we need to do that.

CO[sub]2[/sub] is the basic building block of all life, and increasing levels of CO[sub]2[/sub] are a non-trivial component in the planet's ability to feed 7.4 billion humans. This is not in dispute, but the idea of turning the earth into a greenhouse has created a perfect storm: (1) the world press has a cause that sells papers (and the click-through equivalent); (2) the e-NGOs have a cause to demonize humans; (3) the Globalist politicians have a cause that moves the world closer to a single world-government; and (4) the Socialists have a cause that is able to distribute the wealth of developed nations into their Swiss bank accounts. Just too good to pass up. Dump hundreds of billions of dollars into research departments of universities and you get a plausible story. Wrap it in complex non-linear partial differential equations that do not have a solution (and are actually not included in the models) to make it look all "sciencey" and invent a "consensus" that has never existed on this subject and you have a cause that can make intelligent people like the ones on eng-tips.com buy into it for reasons of their own.

The Great Pacific Rubbish Patch is a fascinating question. When objective scientists (i.e., folks with a desire to learn instead of conform to an agenda) look at it they find organisms that are adapting to its existence and are thriving on it. Microbes consume the plastic. Bugs eat the microbes. Birds and fish eat the bugs. Life thrives. At what point does it become an "eco system" and have people trying to protect it? People find it to be aesthetically objectionable, but the bugs love it. Once again appearance is more important than reality.

If you look at people with a profit motive, they are finding ways to turn a profit off of harvesting parts of the Great Pacific Rubbish Patch (really small scale thus far). It is when the Rubbish Patch becomes political that everything goes sideways. There is so much to learn about humanity, evolution, anthropology, and bio-diversity from the Great Rubbish Patch that it will be a shame when the e-NGO's destroy it as they end up destroying all things.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[moltenmetal]

Mongrel: you're guilty of the nirvana fallacy when you make the false equivalence between the massive global emissions of fossil CO2, all of which is ALSO accompanied by toxic emissions too (emissions obtained whenever you burn anything and dump its effluent into the atmosphere) and the comparatively small, very much more localized emissions from manufacturing lithium ion batteries. Note that the lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum and copper in those batteries doesn't evaporate while they're being used and is all still there for recycling after the battery's useful life is finished. Anything we use on earth that isn't grown, is mined from the earth. It's not meaningful to compare processes on the basis of only whether or not they have emissions associated with them, because they ALL HAVE EMISSIONS. Meaningful comparisons need to be made on the basis of the magnitude of the emissions and their comparative harms.

As to the garbage patch: the Pacific garbage patch is thought to contain some 80,000 tonnes of plastic debris- a good chunk of which is abandoned fishing gear which continues to capture and kill sea life. It's a problem for sure- a tiny indicator of a much larger problem which is primarily the result of poor waste disposal practices along the tributaries of ten rivers in Africa and Asia.

In comparison to that 80,000 tonnes total, Toronto alone diverts some 240,000 tonnes of material from landfill using its blue bin recycling program- each YEAR. That's one city, yearly.

And in further comparison, we emit some 15 gigatonnes of fossil CO2 to the atmosphere per year worldwide. That's 15,000,000,000,000 kg per year. While the natural flows of CO2 to and from the atmosphere are even larger still, this is the amount we're taking out of the earth from historical reservoirs (oil, coal, gas, fossil carbonate rocks) and dumping into the atmosphere yearly. And by present measurements, about half of that ends up in the atmosphere, with the other half mostly ending up in the oceans.

 

[FoxRox]

Another controversial CC sub-topic that seems like it belongs in this thread about facts, myths, and givens, is the greening of earth. There's no dispute it's been happening for several decades. The dispute is whether it's good or bad. I realize plants are only temporary storage of carbon, but it seems the total number of plants will track up and down directly with atmospheric CO2 concentrations, so it is something of an adaptive carbon sink. More plants means more food for every other form of life on the planet. It sounds like a crazy theory among today's conventional wisdom, but it's not a huge stretch to say burning FF now is hedging against global famine in the future.

Disclaimer: I am not condoning increasing (or not reducing) FF consumption for this reason... It's just food for thought. (pun intended)

 

[rb1957]

no, it's not crazy, its an unintended positive sideeffect; though it probably is crazy to suggest we burn more FFs to get more of this effect. Increased atmospheric CO2 and warmer temps should increase crop yields. However the reality is more complicated (wasn't it ever thus?) ... changes in weather patterns, rainfall, etc will have an significant effect of crops. And Carbon sequestration in bio-mass is actually a small portion of the Carbon flow.

Something I heard (I think it was NatGeoTV) was that all the oxygen produced by the Amazon rainforest is consumed within the rainforest eco-system

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[zdas04]

Moltenmetal
Interesting that you spell out 15 Giga Tonnes as 15,000,000,000,000 kg per year and then reluctantly admit that "While the natural flows of CO2 to and from the atmosphere are even larger still" without giving a number. Well, human additions to the global CO[sub]2[/sub] are very hard to find today. Five years ago the total was very easy to find. Today it is not. I cannot tell you why.

Five years ago human additions to the global CO[sub]2[/sub] in the atmosphere (including all agricultural sources and chattels, all transportation sources, all industrial sources, and 7.4 billion people exhaling every so often) was 0.3% of the total CO[sub]2[/sub]. That makes the total around 5,000 GT. Dang if that isn't an even bigger number. Should I spell it out?. I guess I must 5,000,000,000,000,000 kg/year. And CO[sub]2[/sub] is about 2% of the total greenhouse gas inventory which is on the order of 250,000 GT/year. I'll spell that number out too 250,000,000,000,000,000 kg/year. Man, that 15 GT number seems really really small on a global scale.

As to "taking from the earth from historical reservoirs". Do you have any concept of how much hydrocarbon leaks from the earth every day? Have you ever seen the Santa Barbara Channel seeps? La Brea Tar Pits. Athabasca Tar Sands? The hydrate fields in the Sea of Japan and in the Alaskan Permafrost? There have been several million individual methane and crude oil seeps mapped in the ocean floor. Oh yeah, and we've only mapped about 2% of the ocean in detail. All of that "historical" reserve represents hydrocarbons that are coincidentally trapped in reservoirs this epoch. Every earthquake, volcano, tsunami, or hurricane upsets some of the balance that allows the trapped hydrocarbons to remain trapped and they continue their journey to outer space. Hydrocarbon reserves are absolutely not a "bank account" that we can draw on in the future. They are held for an instant or a million years, but eventually they will leak out.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Mongrel]

Zdas - I actually wasn't aware of the extent of the ecosystem that has sprung up in the Patch. Thanks for that - it's fascinating reading!
Molten metal - why do you consider it a fallacy to equate pollution that can, in ssome cases, poison the land or water for thousands of years, with a different form of pollution that we can't even agree on a number for, let alone what the long-term effects may be? I can't recall seeing a single prediction related to CO2 that actually proved to be even close to accurate yet. It's one thing 5o accept scientific, peer-reviewed results from experts in a field, with transparent practices. It's quite anther to expect us to blindly accept predictions with a proven 100% failure rate, from a closed group who repudiate external scrutiny and has vested financial interest in producing particular results.
And this is the problem many people have with the new religion of climate change. People are tired of the rhetoric, the increased costs for imperceptible returns, and the blatant unreliability of the field.