An Unsettling Removal of Atmospheric CO2 by Plankton

Adam C. Martiny and a crew of mostly researchers from the University of California - Irvine have just published a study in Nature Geoscience that indicates that phytoplankton in warm ocean waters use up far more of the so-called greenhouse gas CO2 than had been previously thought.  The overall result is that about twice as much CO2 is taken up by plant life in the oceans as had been previously thought.

Many textbooks and practitioners of ocean biogeochemistry have long thought that phytoplankton, their excretions, and dissolved nutrients in the ocean interior maintained a ratio of carbon to nitrogen to phosphorus of 106:16:1.  This is known as the Redfield ratio, which Alfred Redfield established in 1934.

Martiny, et al., showed experimentally that this ratio varies considerably in the oceans, mostly as a function of latitude.  They observed carbon enrichment in the phytoplankton as high as 195:28:1 in warm, nutrient-deprived low-latitude areas with closed-loop circular currents.  In warm, nutrient-rich upwelling areas, the ratio was 137:18:1.  In cold, nutrient-rich high-latitude areas, the ratio was 78:13:1.

Some models had shown the possibility of such variations of the Redfield ratio and some field and laboratory measurements had shown differences with the Redfield ratio.  But, this large sample study should put that persistent ratio into retirement.  The settled science has another unsettling reality check!

I am of the opinion that while the first little bit of CO2 may contribute to warming, additional CO2 with common water vapor concentrations, does not cause significant Earth surface temperature change.  Insofar as it does, it is likely to act as a coolant to the surface, even as it raises the temperature of air at altitudes above the main water vapor concentration top.  This is because the much ignored absorption of solar insolation by added CO2 is greater than is appreciated and this cools the surface.

The IPCC claim of catastrophic CO2-induced warming depended upon an assumption that increased CO2 had caused all of the warming since the end of the Little Ice Age (or the dawn of the Industrial Age) and a posited positive feedback by increased water vapor due to the warming said to be caused by increased CO2.  The assumption that CO2 had caused all the warming since the Little Ice Age was extremely questionable and therefor a likely exaggeration.  The positive feedback due to increased water vapor due to warming is looking more and more to be a mild negative feedback, making the Earth's climate a lot less unstable.

Increasing the partial pressure of CO2 over the oceans will cause them to absorb more CO2, which is another negative feedback mechanism.  Now we find out that increased CO2 is used up by ocean phytoplankton in greater quantities than previously thought and that the warmer the ocean the more CO2 is used up.  This again is a negative feedback mechanism.

The Earth and its ecosystems do not seem to want to cooperate with the catastrophic predictions of the settled science of the Earth's climate based on man-made global warming.  It appears they have a proclivity toward much more stability.  Although we must note that this means that a more stable climate creates a most unstable status for the settled science!

The Ocean Acidification Myth

Professor Cliff Ollier of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Western Australia has written an interesting and entertaining article on the myth of ocean acidification.  The oceans are always alkaline or basic, not acidic.  The acidity or alkalinity of water is measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 14, with 7 being neutral.  This is the pH scale and basic pH is greater than 7, while acidic pH is less than 7.  The oceans are commonly about pH 8.2 and it is very difficult to reduce the basic water even to neutral water because this is a logarithmic measurement.  Through at least the last 600 million years the oceans have not been acidic.  The most added dissolved CO2 does to the oceans is make them less basic or alkaline.

Among Professor Ollier's interesting comments:

• CO2 is critically needed by coral, shellfish, and marine plants.
• A volcanic vent bubbling huge amounts of CO2 to the surface is a favorite of divers because of the thriving life there, including corals.  The water there is fully saturated with CO2.
• Ocean pH varies by 0.3 by region and seasonally by 0.3 in a given area.
• The day to night variation in a coral pool was found to be 9.4 to 7.5, making claimed variations due to atmospheric CO2 look very inconsequential.
• Marine life evolved at much higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 than we have now or would have if CO2 atmospheric concentrations doubled.  As is the case with land plants, it appears that marine life is better served by higher CO2 concentrations.
• Under good conditions, a coral reef can grow by 2 cm a year and added CO2 helps.  [From 1870 to 200, the average rate of sea level rise is claimed to be 1.5 mm a year.  Faster rates of as high as 3.3 mm a year have been claimed for 1993 to 2009, but coral reef islands can keep up.  Indeed, they have to have had this capability to deal with past climate changes over the last few hundred million years.]  Most atoll islands are doing well in keeping up.
• Human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere compared to what some plants and animals have removed in making limestone are trivial.  There is far more CO2 in limestone than there is in the oceans and the atmosphere combined.  Because the oceans remain alkaline, this stored CO2 in the form of limestone is not released and the result is a CO2 deprived planet.

Oceans are Source of CO2

According to an article entitled "Hemispheric Timing Shows Oceans are Source of CO2" by Dennis T. Avery, there are a number of badly flawed assertions in the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming claims based on CO2 emissions from man's use of fossil fuels.

Tom Quirk, an Oxford-trained Australian research physicist has observed that the carbon 14 isotope generated by nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s took several years to travel from the northern to the southern hemispheres. Since 95% of the use of fossil fuels is in the northern hemisphere, northern hemisphere CO2 atmospheric concentrations should be higher than southern hemisphere concentrations, but they are not. Tom Quirk says:

“The seasonal variations in CO2 and the lack of time delays between the hemispheres suggest fossil-fuel-derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted,” he says. “This implies that natural variability of the climate is the prime cause of increased CO2, not the emissions of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.”

Dennis Avery proceeds to remind us how the great "Nobel scientist" Al Gore informed us that more CO2 in the atmosphere caused the last four interglacial warmings over the last 400,000 years. But, .....more recent Antarctic studies have clearly shown that it is the CO2 atmospheric concentrations which are responding with increases to temperature increases. The oceans absorb massive amounts of CO2 from the air when they cool. The oceans hold at least 70 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere does. When oceans warm, they cannot hold as much dissolved CO2 gas. Since 1850, the climate has generally warmed as we have left the Little Ice Age behind and atmospheric CO2 concentrations slowly rose accordingly.

Avery says that we now know that the correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures over the last 150 years is 22%, while that with sunspots is 79%. So, there is a CO2 warming according to him, but it is a function of CO2 being emitted from the oceans, not the results of man's puny contribution from the combustion of fossil fuels. The rapid local absorption of CO2 indicated by the nearly identical northern and southern hemisphere concentrations, indicates that the land and oceans can hold very much more CO2 than they presently do.

The heat energy content of the oceans is about 2000 times that of the atmosphere. Because of this, it is better to make judgments about whether the earth is warming or cooling slightly based on the temperature of the ocean than based at land surface stations. This is especially true given that so many land temperature stations are disproportionately sited in population centers and are not infrequently placed near asphalt parking lots and other heating sources. The Argo diving floats have given us the most accurate ocean temperature measurements ever. These measurements show that the oceans stopped warming in 2003. The atmosphere stopped warming after 1998, but it is reasonable that it takes awhile to fully transfer heat from the atmosphere to the ocean and that the ocean itself then takes awhile to come to be in a quasi-equilibrium state. Of course there will remain large thermal gradients in the ocean for any overall heat content, but if the atmosphere is warmer than the ocean surface, the overall ocean heat content will increase until the ocean and the atmosphere achieve a new quasi-equilibrium.

Avery says "the earth is now cooling, and any drastic actions to reduce fossil fuel emissions are premature." Dr. Kanya Kusano of Japan's Earth Simulator Project is advising Japan that the man-made CO2 emissions argument for global warming is an "unproven hypothesis."

The Cooling Oceans and Unwarmed Atmosphere

When I brought up FireFox to check my e-mail this afternoon, I was greeted with a Yahoo video on the collapse of a part of the Wilkens Ice Shelf on the Western Peninsula of Antarctica of an ice area the size of Manhattan. It was said that at least one scientist said this is further proof of Global Warming. Well, there has long been a focus on this peninsular region of Antarctica due to loss of ice and, indeed, this part of Antarctica has lost ice for years. However, this area is a very small part of Antarctica and the vast majority of Antarctica has been increasing its ice mass for many years!

A couple of interesting commentaries have just surfaced which I would direct your attention to. In the first, Lorne Gunter wrote in the National Post in Canada, about the ocean temperature readings made in great proliferation by 3,000 Argo buoys since they were first deployed in 2003. They drift in the oceans at a depth of 2,000 meters and then about every 10 days they spend 6 hours rising to the surface, taking temperature data in each layer of the sea, and they broadcast their data to satellites, before sinking back to a 2000 meter depth. What have these ocean monitors found since 2003? There has been a slight cooling of the average ocean temperature! Given that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise, this is a bit of a problem for the Man-is-wrecking-the-Earth-with-greenhouse-gases crowd. Apparently, 80 to 90% of the global warming due to CO2 is supposed to be warming of the oceans, which are then supposed to heat the atmosphere. This article also notes that NASA has 8 weather satellites that take 300,000 temperature readings every day all over the earth, compared to a mere 7,000 measurements by Earth ground stations, [too often located near population centers.] The satellites over 30 years have found only a 0.14 degree Centigrade per decade temperature increase on average.

Christopher Pearson wrote an interview with Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia published in The Australian. Marohasy notes that referenced to 1998, the earths average temperature has since fallen and if you take 2002 as your reference point, the temperature has been about constant since then. Then she notes that the NASA Aqua satellite launched in 2002 has provided data on temperature, cloud cover, and water vapor which contradicts a key assumption of the global warming computer models. The models have all thought that increasing CO2 would produce warming, which would produce more water vapor, [and since 95% of all greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor,] this would lead to accelerated heating of the atmosphere. WRONG! The Aqua satellite data shows that the increase in water vapor leads to a counteracting cooling. Thus, in engineering terms, the assumed positive feedback is really a negative feedback. [This reduction of the CO2 greenhouse effect is presumably due to increased cloud cover with increased water vapor and the reflection of considerable radiation of the sun back into space by the clouds.]

[These brackets indicate my additional comments relative to the information in these articles.]

Thanks to Robert Tracinski who pointed these two articles out in his TIA Daily.

It will be fascinating to watch the process of many of the careless, and often immoral, scientists backing away from their errors and this emotional declaration that man is ruining the earth by using fuels that create CO2. The response of the politicians will be even more interesting and more important. They have so many plans to ride roughshod over the rights of the individual in the name of saving the planet and thereby some elite portion of the animal kingdom, which will largely not include the human part. Should cooling continue, we will hear that we must prepare for the coming Ice Age and that this will require fascist socialist control of all human activity by an international government! Scaremongers are very resourceful and they will not hesitate to convince the People to give up their rights as the only way to prevent one crisis or another. The fascist have long used the fears induced by crises, often made up, to mobilize the people in one common effort, while minimizing their tendency to use reason. This technique has been taught in fascist and socialist circles for more than 100 years and used by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Lenin, FDR, Hitler, Kennedy (The Missile Gap, etc.), LBJ, and Clinton (Its the economy, stupid!, even as the economy was improving already from a much smaller dip than I Feel Your Pain Clinton made it out to be.)