Proterozoic

“Even if expense were no object, none of these [biosphere] services could be performed at such scales and with such efficacy by any anthropogenic means. Our dependence on biosphere services is literally a matter of survival, and that’s why the integrity of the biosphere matters.” Vaclav Smil.

“[T]he accumulation of atmospheric oxygen paved the way for significant leaps in biological evolution in the Paleoproterozoic with the rise of macroscopic oxygen-breathing organisms and in the Neoproterozoic-Cambrian with the emergence of animals.” Dominic Papineau

When economists try to put a value on the biosphere, they are kidding themselves and us. As Vaclav Smil points out without a healthy biosphere, humans cannot survive [1]. Our dependence is existential. Nor is this dependence limited to the current biosphere. We owe our existence to the biosphere extending back through deep time.

The Earth is 4.55 billion years old and its history is divided into four eons. The earliest the Hadean Eon ended 3800 million years ago. The Hadean Earth was dominated by the kinetic energy of constant collisions as it swept up debris scattered along its orbit in the young solar system. A magma ocean bubbled on its surface, a frightening uninhabitable place. The Archean Eon lasted from 3800 million years ago until 2500 million years ago. The Archean Earth climate was temperate despite the faint young sun we’ve discussed in a previous article [2]. James Kasting proposed that it was moderated by carbon dioxide and the methane produced by methanogenic Archaea [3]. These methane-producing microorganisms kept the Earth from freezing solid, while the sun’s fusion reactor gradually intensified through the Archean, giving the rest of life a chance.

The Proterozoic Eon began where the Archean left off and ran until the Cambrian Explosion 544 million years ago, the start of the present Eon, the Phanerozic. But we are interested today in two remarkably similar events which bookend the Proterozoic. These events have in common the breakup of a supercontinent, several snowball Earth episodes, where the Earth’s oceans may have frozen to the equator, interspersed between hothouse climates, a rise in atmospheric oxygen and a leap in biological evolution as described by Papineau [4].

As the Archean Eon gave way to the Paleoproterozoic nickel isotope sedimentary deposits suggest that the productivity of the methanogens were winding down [5]. Methanogens use nickel in their metabolism to produce the atmospheric methane which along with the principle greenhouse gas carbon dioxide was keeping the Earth warm. At the same time the supercontinent Kenorland was breaking up. Rifting of supercontinents is accompanied by increased weathering of the newly exposed surfaces. When the most recent supercontinent Pangaea broke up 200 million years ago the rift valley forming between South America and Africa became the Atlantic Ocean which is still spreading. The rifting of the supercontinent Rodinia during the Neoproterozoic, about 700 million years ago gave rise to the Iapetus Ocean.

Increased weathering released phosphorus into the seas. Phosphorus is the most limiting element in the biosphere presently, as discussed by Dave Vaccari in a recent Sustainable Planet article [6, see also 4 and 11]. Even today plants concentrate phosphorus and can contain up to seven times the concentrations in the surrounding soils. At the same time methanogens were becoming less productive at the end of the Archean, ancestors to present day cyanobacteria bloomed as a consequence of increased phosphorus which these microbes need for oxygen photosynthesis. From Susan Gaines remarkable textbook on molecular fossils Echoes of Life [7] and from Plaxco and Gross’ Astrobiology [8] text book we learn that these bacteria may have been around for several hundred million years waiting for this opportunity.

Oxygen photosynthesis increased the level of atmospheric oxygen after the breakup of Kenorland from essentially zero to about two percent of the atmosphere. Oxygen is poisonous to methanogens so this turn of events created the opportunity for an entirely new biological regime. But it also drew down the atmospheric carbon dioxide. As a consequence of the loss of methane and carbon dioxide the Earth froze over. Since the ice and snow which now blanketed the planet reflects most incoming short wave solar radiation rather than absorbing it, there is no known way which the Earth could have recovered except for volcanic activity and the release of carbon dioxide. Enough carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere over millions of years to melt back the ice and snow by trapping long wave heat radiation from the Earth surface. Once the ice melted away completely, the huge quantity of carbon dioxide necessary to melt it in the first place now created a superheated greenhouse effect. The subsequent increased weathering of silicate rocks [9] and additional bacterial blooms kick started the process all over again, drawing down the carbon dioxide leading to yet another snowball earth episode. Each cycle may have pumped more oxygen into the atmosphere.

Essentially two chemical reactions take place which draw down carbon dioxide in a hot house climate. The first is inorganic and involves the weathering of silicate rocks. This is the Earth’s thermostat [9] and is given by the following simplified equation.

CO2 + CaSiO3 -> CaCO3 + SiO2

In a hot house climate more water evaporates off the oceans and forms carbonic acid with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This weak acid rains out onto rocks weathering them. Note that in this equation carbon dioxide is drawn down when the calcium carbonate and silica are “buried in marine sediments and eventually into the geological record [9].” This process extracts excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but does not create free oxygen.

However, oxygenic photosynthesis performed by the bacterial blooms, encouraged by the newly releases phosphorus performs the following reaction.

CO2 + H2O -> CH2O + O2

When organic compounds, here represented by CH2O, are buried as sediment without being oxidized and consumed by other organisms there is a net draw down of carbon dioxide and atmospheric oxygen is created. Note that while rock weathering can act as the Earth’s thermostat by controlling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it cannot create atmospheric oxygen. We need life for that. The free oxygen created an opportunity for heterotrophic bacteria and eukaryotes to exploit and they did. It also relegated methanogens, the heroes of the Archean, to anoxic hideouts such as deep ocean sediment, swamps and cow stomachs.

The Neoproterozic rifting resulting in the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia about 750 million years ago had the same effect. This rifting forming the Iapetus Ocean is recorded in the geological record of Loudoun County [10]. The sun was much warmer now, about 94 percent of today’s sun and the Earth was kept warm by its blanket of carbon dioxide. With the breakup of Rodinia, the events of the Paleoproterozic were repeated. Increased weathering of the continents increased burial of both inorganic and organic carbon with a subsequent rise in atmospheric oxygen, this time from about two percent to 20 percent of the atmosphere. Again the Earth’s climate oscillated between a snowball and a hothouse several times between 750 and 580 million years ago [4]. While Eukaryotes were certainly already around, it was this rise in oxygen, due to photosynthesis, which allowed the evolution and radiation of metazoans; complex life.

So we are alive today, not just because of the other inhabitants of our biosphere, the Earth’s environment but we also owe a debt of gratitude to the biospheres in Earth’s past.

Tony Noerpel

[1] Vaclav Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends, the next fifty years, 2008

[2] http://brleader.com/?p=1414

[3] Kastings, J., “When Methane made Climate”, Scientific American, 2004.

[4] Papineau, D., “Global Biogeochemical Changes at Both Ends of the Proterozoic: Insights from Phosphorites,” Astrobiology, Vol 10, Number2, 2010.

[5] Konhauser, O., et al. “Ocean nickel depletion and a methaogen famine before the Great Oxidation Event,” Nature vol 458, April 9, 2009.

[6] http://brleader.com/?p=1217

[7] Gaines, S., Eglinton, G. and J. Rullkotter, Echoes of Life, Oxford, 2009.

[8] Plaxco, K., and Gross, M., Astrobiology, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

[9] Berner, R., The Phanerozic Carbon Cycle, Oxford University Press, 2004.

[10] Southworth, S. et al. Geologic map of Loudoun County, Virginia, U.S. Department of the Interior, to accompany map OF-99-150 U. S. Geological Survey.

[11] Filippelli, G., “The global phosphorus cycle: past, present and future,” Elements, Vol. 4, pp 97-104

Flooding and Global Warming

Today’s column is a guest column by Dr. Jeff Masters. Masters is founder of the web site weather underground [1]. This is one of the best sources of information about weather. To learn more about Masters see [2].

I asked Jeff if I could republish this particular column because he explains the impact of anthropogenic global warming on our weather. We cannot blame any individual hurricane or flood on global warming any more than one cold day in December, when it is supposed to be cold anyway, refutes global warming. Instead one has to look at the predictions that anthropogenic global warming makes about the statistics of weather and observe whether or not these predictions of the theory hold. Indeed they do.

Jeff’s columns are well researched and contain verifiable references. This is a site I recommend. A reader can learn a great deal. If you have folks living on the Florida panhandle, as I do, this is the best place to be informed about any danger.

Dr. Jeff Masters

Groisman et al. (2004) [3] found that in the U.S. during the 20th century, there was a 16 percent increase in cold season (October – April) “heavy” precipitation events (greater than 2 inches in one day), a 25 percent increase in “very heavy” precipitation events (greater than 4 inches in one day), and a 36 percent rise in “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9 percent percentile–1 in 1000 events.) A sharp rise in extreme precipitation is what is predicted by global warming models in the scientific literature Hegerl et al. (2004) [4] . According the landmark 2009 U.S. Climate Impact Report [5] from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, “the amount of rain falling in the heaviest downpours has increased approximately 20 percent on average in the past century, and this trend is very likely to continue, with the largest increases in the wettest places.” Most of this increase came since 1970, due to the approximate 1°F increase in U.S. average temperature since 1970. That 1°F increase in temperature means that there is 4 percent more moisture in the atmosphere, on average. According to the 2007 IPCC report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5 percent over the 20th century, and 4 percent since 1970. Satellite measurements (Trenberth et al., 2005) have shown a 1.3 percent per decade increase in water vapor over the global oceans since 1988. Santer et al. (2007) used a climate model to study the relative contribution of natural and human-caused effects on increasing water vapor, and concluded that this increase was “primarily due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases”. This was also the conclusion of Willet et al. (2007).

Dr. Joe Romm over at climateprogress.org [6] has an excellent interview with Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center of Atmospheric Research on the subject of heavy precipitation events and global warming. Dr. Trenberth is the world’s leading expert on water vapor in the atmosphere, and he comments that “since the 1970s, on average, there’s about a 4 percent increase in water vapor over the Atlantic Ocean, and when that gets caught into a storm, it invigorates the storm so the storm itself changes, and that can easily double the influence of that water vapor and so you can get up to an 8 percent increase, straight from the amount of water vapor that’s sort of hanging around in the atmosphere. This is reasonably well established.” Dr. Trenberth further comments, “Now the physical cause for this is very much related to the water vapor that flows into these storms. And these kinds of storms, well all storms for that matter, reach out on average–this is very much a gross average–about 4 times the radius or 16 times the area of the region that’s precipitating, the rain. And for these kinds of storms a lot of the moisture is coming out of the sub-tropical Atlantic and even the tropical Atlantic; some of it comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. And so the moisture actually travels about 2000 miles where it gets caught up in these storms and then it rains down. And the key thing is, that in the tropical and sub-tropical Atlantic the sea temperatures are at very high levels and in fact they’re the highest on record at the moment right in the eastern tropical Atlantic. It’s going to be interesting to see what that does for this hurricane season coming up.”

We cannot say that any of this year’s flooding disasters were definitely due to global warming, and part of the reason for this year’s numerous U.S. flooding disasters is simply bad luck. However, higher temperatures do cause an increased chance of heavy precipitation events, and it is likely that the flooding in some of this year’s U.S. flooding disasters were significantly enhanced by the presence of more water vapor in the air due to global warming. We can expect a large increase in flooding disasters in the U.S. and worldwide if the climate continues to warm as expected.

Funding issues threaten hundreds of streamgages

According to the USGS web site [7], river stage data from 292 streamgages has been discontinued recently, or is scheduled for elimination in the near future due to budget cuts. In Tennessee, 16 streamflow gages with records going back up to 85 years will stop collecting data on July 1 because of budget cuts. Five gages in Arkansas are slated for elimination this year. Hardest hit will be Pennsylvania, which will lose 30 of its 258 streamgages. With over 50 people dead from two flooding disasters already this year, now hardly seems to be the time to be skimping on monitoring river flow levels by cutting funding for hundreds of streamgages. These gages are critical for proper issuance of flood warnings to people in harm’s way. Furthermore, most of the northern 2/3 of the U.S. can expect a much higher incidence of record flooding in coming decades. This will be driven by two factors: increased urban development causing faster run-off, and an increase in very heavy precipitation events due to global warming.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Streamgages that have been discontinued or are being considered for discontinuation or for conversion from continuous record discharge to stage-only stations. Funds for these 292 threatened streamgages are from the U.S. Geological Survey and other Federal, State, Tribal, and local agencies. For those streamgages that have already been discontinued, extensive efforts were made to find another funding source; however, when no funding was made available the streamgages had to be discontinued. If you have questions about specific streamgages, click on the state of concern on the USGS web page [8] of threatened stream gages.

[1] http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

[2] from http://www.wunderground.com/about/jmasters.asp

[3] http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/papers/2002pg05.pdf

[4] http://www.env.duke.edu/people/faculty/hegerl/hegerlextremesresub.pdf

[5] http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/full-report/national-climate-change

[6] http://water.usgs.gov/osw/lost_streamgages.html

[8] http://water.usgs.gov/osw/lost_streamgages.html

Figure 1 [cid:image001.png@01CB0D25.7FC29240]

Edible Landscaping: One Transition Step from Peak Oil

This is a guest column by Will Stewart, a Loudoun County resident. This article appeared originally on TheOilDrum web site.

We are told that in the US, the food on our table has traveled an average of 1500 miles and consumed nine calories of energy for each food calorie on our plate. In a time when “oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil prices have the potential to destabilize economic, political and social activity”[1], we need a way to mitigate the near certain risks of much higher impending food costs.

There are a number of answers, one of which is to support local agriculture. Additionally, one can grow their own food in a pleasing, sylvan landscape. Five years ago, I decided I was going to shift from a native plantings landscaping theme to one that turned my yard into a source of sustenance. I had read about “Edible Landscaping” and “Permaculture”, and decided that approaching tough economic times could be mitigated by growing more of my own food in a manner that did not require a large degree of manual labor. After all, we are supposed to have two – five helpings of fruit each day, and nuts have been shown to be very healthy sources of protein and essential fatty acids (and even lowering cholesterol). My family likes to “pick your own” at local orchards and shop at farmer’s markets, and felt that augmenting those purchases with our own fruits and nuts meant that we would reduce the need to ship food across country. So in addition to our gardening and backyard chickens, we could effectively cover three out of five of the basic food groups in the food pyramid right in our yard.

Food Pyramid

Where to start?

So how does someone go about determining what is appropriate and manageable to grow in their yard? The following factors are the most important;

• Location: First, one needs to know what hardiness zone they are in, to eliminate candidate plants that would die from the low temperatures in their area. For the US, refer to the Hardiness Zone Map update provided by the Arbor Day Foundation (hit “Play”). Other hardiness maps are available for Canada, Europe, Australia, South America, FSU, China, Japan, and a global map . Any plant that does not grow well in the zone you are in should be removed from further consideration, unless you are prepared to go to extra measures (such as create a greenhouse, move the plant indoors seasonally, etc).
• Disease-resistance: Many popular fruit varieties (that often show up in local nurseries or hardware stores) require extensive spraying to control a wide array of diseases, many of which have been imported from other countries and attack local species that have no inherent immunity. Considerable effort has gone into creating hybrids of species with numerous immunities to produce species that are resistant to a wide variety of disease. Once you decide on the types of fruit you would like to grow, learn about the diseases that are endemic in your area. Then select varieties that are resistant to those diseases. (More on this in future articles)
• Pollination: Some species are self-pollinators and do not require a second specimen or variety to produce fruit. Many species, however, require a second specimen or even another variety to produce fruit. In this case, you must consider the other varieties that are needed, the timing of the spring bloom (which must overlap sufficiently), and an extra specimen so that the loss of one tree does not eliminate the ability to pollinate. Note how close pollinators should be to each other (e.g., “no further than 20 feet for some dwarf apple trees”). Learn how to attract and keep natural pollinating insects (e.g., Mason bees, more on this in future articles)
• Fruiting schedule: Be cognizant of the timeframes in which your fruits will ripen; the best approach is to try to cover as much of the calendar year with as diverse a harvest as possible. For example, I’ve chosen 4 varieties of apples that will provide fruit from July through November, with the later apples able to be stored through the winter (“winter-keepers”). Other choices include strawberries (May) and June berries for early fruit and Lingonberries for late fruit (December). This way, one can enjoy fresh fruits almost year around and dehydrated/canned fruit any time of year.
• Pests: The luscious pictures of fruit on the tree tags at the local nursery often turns into a nightmare of worm-eaten sickly fruit after the first couple of bearing years. Find out from your local horticulture agent which pests are likely to attack the types of fruits or nuts you’ve chosen. Often, some varieties also have some resistance to common pests. Many pheremone traps and natural pesticide products exist to keep insects from damaging your trees or fruit crop, and there are natural insect predators that can be encouraged (with their favorite habits) to take up residence in your yard (e.g., Ladybugs, who eat aphids, scale, and mites). Learn about Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in order to more efficiently target specific lifecycle vulnerabilities of the pests, either with organic or non-organic controls. (More on this in future articles)
• Size: Standard sizes of common fruits such as apples and pears are often too large for homeowners to maintain and harvest effectively. Dwarf and Semi-dwarf varieties are very popular now with home gardeners, and they also bear fruit much sooner. The size (and other attributes such as disease resistance) depends greatly upon the rootstock used. Nut trees can generally be large without much issue. (More on this in future articles)
• Harvest/Storage: When will each plant bear their crop? How long can it be stored? What are the preferred storage conditions (temperature, humidity)? Can they be dehydrated/canned/etc? (More on this in future articles)

Initial List

After performing the above analyses, I came up with the following candidate plant list based on my location in the Mid Atlantic US (the list for your specific area may differ);

Fruit Trees:
• Apple
• Asian Pear
• Plum
• Pawpaw
• Jujube (Chinese Date)
• Persimmon (American)
• Persimmon (Asian)
• Pomegranate
• Watermelonball Tree (Chinese Mulberry)

Berries:
• Blueberry
• Raspberry
• Grapes
• Ligonberry
• Juneberry
• Elderberry
• Gooseberry
• Goumi
• Aroniaberry
• Black Huckleberry
• Figs
• Kiwi

Nuts:
• English Walnut
• Heartnut (Japanese Walnut)
• Northern Pecan
• Filbert
• Chestnut

The above list is a fair number of plants, though one’s yard can be artfully planned out to yield a large amount of fruits and nuts with a thoughtful design approach. For example, Gene Yale in Chicago has a planting of 97 apple trees (and other fruits) in a 1/4 acre yard!

Our own yard is approximate 1/3 acre, though we have many acres in sheep pasture. Coincidentally, the sheep also need some relief from the summer sun, so plantings just inside the electric fence (protected by circular fence cages) serve dual purposes.

In coming articles, we’ll talk about laying out plans, the types of fruits and nuts that are doing well here, and how to put it all together to begin executing your plan early this fall. While this series will be about hardiness zone 7, most of the plants involved are suitable in at least two other zones.

References:
1. Quote from Wall Street Journal by Philip Dilley, the chairman of Arup, the consulting engineers to the UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security

Fossil Fuels

One of the strangest anthropogenic global warming denialist arguments is that there may not be enough fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) to cause the worst case scenarios described in the IPCC report [1]. It is strange for two reasons. The first is that unlike other denialist objections, there is actually credible scientific support for this argument. The second reason is that the policy solutions to problems caused by either global warming or running out of fossil fuels are the same: effecting a rapid transition to alternative sources of energy and conservation.

One of the most important figures in the resource depletion discussion is Kjell Aleklett, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil [2]. Aleklett has done as much as anybody to investigate the actual reserves of fossil fuels and inform the public about this possible crises. Curiously, Senator Inhofe quotes Aleklett [3]: “the combined volumes of these fuels are insufficient to cause the changes in climate….The world’s greatest future problem is that too many people must share too little energy.” If Inhofe’s objection to anthropogenic climate change theory were purely academic then citing Aleklett may support that position, but given his objection to the theory is policy-based, i.e., opposition to government support for a transition away from fossil fuels, his reference to resource depletion arguments clearly undermines his position.

I have previously described the impact of even the lowest credible estimates of fossil fuel resources on global warming and shared this information with Supervisor Lori Waters in December, 2008. The document I gave to Waters is publicly available on the Sustainable Loudoun webs site [4].

Aleklett’s view is articulated in several of his papers (see for example [5]). While I have great respect for Aleklett and agree in general with his pessimism regards remaining and depleting resources, I disagree with him that the impact of even the lowest estimates may not initiate a serious climate problem. Further, while I believe that when we are evaluating our potential energy problems, we need to consider the most pessimistic resource estimates in order to understand the worst case scenario, when we are evaluating potential global warming problems, we need to consider a wide range of resource estimates including the most credible optimistic estimates in order to evaluate the worst case scenarios. Therefore, I submit that while his criticism of the IPCC may have substantial scientific support, it is not a reasonable objection because there is not one hundred percent certainty in the most pessimistic resource depletion scenario. The impact on policy is the same in either case. Aleklett as an academic may be correct to criticize the IPCC for not including an additional low resource scenario. Inhofe a fossil-fuel industry sponsored politician is foolish to think that argument overturns the need for more enlightened policy.

The lowest estimate for remaining fossil fuels as measured by total carbon content is about 560 Gigatons Carbon (GtC) from Rutledge [6]. The highest credible estimate is about 5000 GtC from Rogner [7]. These represent total estimated recoverable resources and reserves of fossil fuels. The most disquieting aspect of these estimates is that we don’t have any idea how much fossil fuels was have left to within an order of magnitude. That is the most compelling argument against Inhofe’s objection to conservation and transitioning to alternative energy sources as quickly as we possibly can.

In reference [5], Aleklett presents estimates for remaining fossil fuels which may be used before 2100, assumed by the IPCC, in barrels of oil equivalent. We can convert these numbers to GtC using the conversion factors described below. Thus the IPCC report [1] analyzes several scenarios with a range of carbon emissions between 1243 to 1960 GtC during the 21st century. We observe that these estimates are far below Rogner’s high estimate (5000) but higher than the estimate of Rutledge (560). The IPCC did not use either the most pessimistic or optimistic estimates for remaining recoverable fossil fuels but instead tacked responsibly up the middle.

The best case scenario for the climate and the worst case scenario for fossil fuel depletion is Rutledge’s estimate of 560 GtC. While it is frightening to speculate on the impact to our economy if politicians like Inhofe prevail in preventing us from developing a transition plan to alternative renewable energy sources in time, it is also sobering to speculate on the human impact on climate even in this scenario. Working in our favor (for the climate and not life in the oceans, unfortunately) is the fact that land and ocean sinks currently absorb about 50 percent of our emissions, though there is evidence that these sources are becoming saturated [8]. Increasing temperatures and acidity may reduce ocean productivity and this would reduce the amount of our CO2 emissions which can be absorbed by the oceans. Thus 560 GtC may increase atmospheric carbon by as much as 134 ppmV depending on how quickly it is extracted and consumed (divide 560 GtC by 2.1 to convert to ppmV and then by 2 since 50% is absorbed by the oceans and land sinks). However, the carbon stock in the Earth’s forests (above ground) is 288 GtC [9]. This can increase atmospheric carbon by another 69 ppmV if it is burned. Imagine a world inhabited by up to 9 billion humans who have no fossil fuels left to keep themselves warm. Whatever does not get harvested may be destroyed by insects and fire. It is not hard to imagine all forests disappearing as this level of devastation has been caused by human societies locally in the past, e.g. Easter Island and Yucatan [10](Diamond, 2005).

Further, if CO2 levels remain above 350 ppmV for an extended period of time, permafrost may melt releasing carbon in the form of carbon dioxide and/or methane into the atmosphere as a consequence of increased warming of the climate. The permafrost is estimated to contain up to 1500 GtC [11, 12]. Other positive carbon cycle feedbacks have been identified but are not discussed here. The amount of permafrost melt is a function of both the temperature and thus the level of atmospheric carbon, and the length of time the temperature remains elevated. Higher levels of CO2 means the Earth warms to a higher temperature resulting in a faster melting of the permafrost.

The best case climate scenario and the worst case energy scenario assume human emissions of 560 GtC which adds 134 ppmV CO2 to the atmosphere. This brings the total to 525 ppmV. The consumption of the planet’s forests adds 69 ppmV bringing the total to 594 ppmV. This level of CO2 would accelerate the melting of the permafrost and other carbon cycle feedbacks. Eventually (over centuries) all 1500 might be emitted into the atmosphere bringing the total to 950 ppmV. An MIT report [13] projects 10 degrees F global warming and 20 degrees F warming in the arctic if the CO2 concentration reaches 866 ppmV. At these temperatures sub-ocean methane hydrate deposits may thaw adding additional carbon in the form of methane or carbon dioxide to the oceans (accelerating ocean acidification) and the atmosphere [14, 15]. The MIT study authors assume we reach 866 ppmV via human emissions but it doesn’t matter where the CO2 comes from. Current climate models do not account for melting permafrost sources.

Another important observation (and cautionary note) is that most model projections continue only up to 2100 as if our destruction of the ecosystem, upon which we depend, stops at that time. It does not. In another article, Pliocene [16] we observed that between 5 and 2 million years ago, the level of carbon in the atmosphere was the same or a little less than it already is today yet temperatures were between 2 and 4 degrees Centigrade warmer. It is suggested that this may be because the Earth was cooling off as it was losing atmospheric carbon dioxide and the oceans had already equilibrated to a higher temperature and had to cool down. Today we are recovering from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) some 20,000 years ago and oceans are cooler and have to warm before the surface does. Most of the energy imbalance in fact is warming the oceans today rather than the atmosphere or the surface. This will continue for a long time and our problems are only just beginning ninety years from now.

In conclusion, it is possible that even the most pessimistic estimates for fossil fuel resources are enough to cause disastrous global warming especially if positive carbon cycle feedbacks kick in. Human society will be trying to adapt to increasingly unlivable conditions without the benefit of fossil fuel energy.

Tony Noerpel

A note on conversion of units

Strictly speaking barrels of oil equivalent is a relative measure of the energy content of these three fuel types, coal, oil and natural gas, and not exactly proportional in their carbon emissions. But this is the case even if we consider only coal, since, for example, the quality of anthracite is superior to the quality of lignite in terms of energy available per quantity of carbon emissions. Following Aleklett we use 42 Giga Joules (GJ) as the energy content of a ton of oil equivalent and 6.12 GJ as the energy content of a barrel of oil equivalent and assume most of the mass of a ton of fossil fuels is carbon. This is accurate enough for a first order estimate and anyway we are only interested in bounding a problem which has an order of magnitude uncertainty to begin with. One important caveat is that remaining fossil fuels include a high proportion of dirty fuels such as heavy oils, lignite, kerogen and bitumen which all have higher carbon content per useable British Thermal Unit (BTU) when compared to the light sweet crude oil and anthracite coal we have been using. Remaining resources require more energy inputs for the same energy output. For example, the United States coal production as measured in tons has continued to increase but as measured by BTU, or energy content, has actually peaked in 1998 [17]. This is because the quality of remaining coal reserves is diminishing. Most of the high quality Anthracite has been mined and the remaining resources include sub-bituminous coal and lignite.

The conversion of GtC to parts per million by volume (ppmV) of atmospheric carbon is straightforward. We need to compute the average molecular weight of the molecules in the atmosphere. The components are 78.08% Nitrogen with a molecular mass of 28, 20.9 percent Oxygen with a molecular mass of 32 and 0.9 percent Argon with a molecular mass of 40. Thus .7808 X 28 + .209 X 32 + 0.009 X 40 = 28.9. Carbon Dioxide has a molecular weight of 44 but the Carbon content of a CO2 molecule has a mass of 12. The mass of the Earth’s atmosphere is 5.15 106 Gt. Thus divide GtC by the factor 5.15 X 12/28.9 = 2.1 to compute ppmV. The current level of atmospheric CO2 is 392 ppmV [18] which can then be converted to 823 GtC by multiplying by 2.1.

[1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007, http://www.ipcc.ch/

[2] ASPO web site http://www.peakoil.net/

[3] Inhofe, Morano, and Dempsey, December 20, 2007, “U. S. Senate Report Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 Scientists Debunk ‘Consensus’”.

[4] sustainable Loudoun web site http://www.lccss.org/

[5] Kook, M., Sivertsson, A., Aleklett, K., “Validity of the fossil fuel production outlooks in the IPCC Emission scenarios, Natural Resources Research, Volume 19, Issue 2, June 2010, 63-81, doi:10.1007/s11053-010-9113-1.

[6] Rutledge, D., 2007, http://rutledge.caltech.edu/ presentation and excel worksheet can be downloaded here.
Rutledge, D. Hubbert’s peak, the coal question and climate change, APSO-USA World Oil Conference, 17-20 October 2007, Houston, Texas.

[7] Rogner, H. H., An assessment of world hydrocarbon resources, Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 22:217-262, 1997.

[8] Canadell, J. G. et al. 2007 Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104, 18-866-18 870.

[9] Moutinho, P. and Schwatzman, S. (eds) Tropical deforestation and climate change, Belem, Brazil: Amazon Inst. For Environmental Research.

[10] Diamond, J., 2005 Collapse, Penguin Books, London.

[11] Tarnocai, C., Canadell, P., Journal of Global Biogeochemical Cycles (GB2023,doi:10.1029/2008GB003327) American Geophysical Union.

[12] Edward A. G. Schuur, Jason G. Vogel, Kathryn G. Crummer, Hanna Lee, James O. Sickman, T. E. Osterkamp, “The effect of permafrost thaw on old carbon release and net carbon exchange from tundra,” Nature 459, 556-559 (28 May 2009) doi:10.1038/nature08031 Letter

[13] MIT: http://climateprogress.org/2009/05/20/mit-doubles-global-warming-projections-2/ , Report 169, http://globalchange.mit.edu/files/document/MITJPSPGC_Rpt169.pdf, Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions (without Policy) and Climate Parameters by Sokolov, A.P., P.H. Stone, C.E. Forest, R.G. Prinn, M.C. Sarofim, M. Webster, S. Paltsev, C.A. Schlosser, D. Kicklighter, S. Dutkiewicz, J. Reilly, C. Wang, B. Felzer, J. Melillo, H.D. Jacoby (January 2009) Joint Program Report Series, 44 pages, 2009, also http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009JCLI2863.1 Journal of Climate October 2009, Vol. 22, No. 19 : pp. 5175-5204

[14] Additional information on these carbon cycle feedbacks: http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/17/positive-methane-feedbacks-permafrost-tundra-methane-hydrates/, and http://climateprogress.org/2010/03/04/science-nsf-tundra-permafrost-methane-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-venting/#more-20446, and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630132005.htm

[15] Shakhova, N., Igor Semiletov, I., Salyuk, A., Yusupov, V., Kosmach,D., Gustafsso, O., Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, Science 5 March 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5970, pp. 1246 – 1250 DOI: 10.1126/science.1182221

[15] brleader Pliocene http://brleader.com/?p=1585

[16] Lehmann, H., et al 2007 Coal resources and future production, Energy Watch Group publication 1/2007

[17] http://co2now.org/

Science Literacy

Contributed by Jackson Harper

“What laws govern our universe? How shall we know them? How may this knowledge help us to comprehend the world and hence guide its actions to our advantage?” Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality – a complete guide to the laws of the universe, from the chapter The Roots of Science, Knopf, 2004.

Your recognition and understanding of scientific issues is vital to our democracy in an era of decision making on global warming, off-shore oil drilling, stem cell research, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and a host of other concerns. Without familiarity of scientific issues the voter is sometimes manipulated by special interests, unknowingly against her own interests.

Americans are weak in science literacy according to a nationwide study in 2009 by the California Academy of Science. Almost half of Americans did not know how long the earth revolved around the sun. More than half could not estimate the percentage the planet is covered by water. More than a third thought that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. A recent Gallup poll revealed that only 39% of Americans believed in evolution. The United States lags most developed countries in science education with American teens ranking 29th behind such countries as Croatia, Finland, Canada, and Hong Kong.

With the decline of newspapers fewer science stories are being written as science writers are laid off. Between 1998 and 2005 science sections in newspapers were reduced from 95 to 34. The CNN science, technology, and environment unit was terminated in 2008. Science writers and television personalities have been criticized for pitting prominent scientists against ideologues in debate where no debate exists in the science. Many writers, producers, and politicians do not realize that science develops through observation, research, hypothesis testing, peer review, and collegial challenge. Science is a process by which we can understand the universe, not a body of facts and conclusions.

There are so few scientists in Congress according to Representative Vernon Ehlers, PhD in physics, that they are “probably all overworked” dealing with the science-related issues before them. Representative Roscoe Bartlett, PhD in physiology, has long been a leader in Congress addressing peak world oil production. He has introduced a House Resolution to “establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the `Man on the Moon’ project to address the inevitable challenges of `Peak Oil’.” Unfortunately, Representatives and Senators have been known to enlist as “expert witnesses” non-scientists, such as fiction writer Michael Crickton and writer Christopher Monckton to bolster their positions against recognition of the serious threat of climate change. Renowned scientist Dr. Peter Gleick responds: “Are the climate deniers going to go away? No. Nothing will convince them, since science hasn’t. There are still people — a lot of people — who do not believe in evolution, or plate tectonics, or the Big Bang theory. But the longer that policymakers hesitate to act, the more the balance will shift to suffering. I believe that history will prove those delaying action to be dangerously wrong, at a time when it is urgent that society be courageously right.”

You can become science literate by carefully selecting books, web sites, and films. It is important to choose materials from top science institutions and preeminent scientists in their fields. Unfortunately, special interests have filled book shelves and the internet with half-truths and misinformation in the support of special interests. Starting out, you may want to read about current scientific issues from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), The National Academy of Sciences, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Excellent articles can also be found at web sites including Scientific American, Science Daily, and New Scientist. Don’t be afraid of science. Jump in. The water’s fine!

Jackson Harper has a PhD in Environmental Biology / Public Policy and received the 2008 Environmental Justice award from Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice. He blogs at www.jacksonharper.org.

Cuccinelli Verses Everybody Else

“Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.” Richard Feynman Lectures in Physics [1].

Our Humanity

Both whales and elephants have larger brains than Homo sapiens. They have larger memories and faster processing capabilities [2]. Our accomplishments are not due to our intellectual superiority to these animals with whom we’ve co-evolved but to our thumbs. We can write things down and store information, first on cave walls and clay tablets and more recently on flash drives, so that we have access to the sum of human knowledge and not just the information we carry in our own brains. Whales and elephants are individually limited to what each animal can memorize and pass on verbally. Homo neanderthalensis also may have had a larger brain. Our superiority over Neanderthals may be due to our capacity for complex language, a lucky evolutionary happenstance. It is not to superior individual intellectual gifts to which we owe our success as a species but to our ability to accumulate, communicate and share information and scientific knowledge.

The sum of human knowledge, documented by our science, includes the periodic table of elements, the human genome, the catalogue of celestial objects, the geologic time scale, the theory of gravity, electromagnetic fields, quantum electrodynamics, evolution, how to build a car, how to cook, agricultural sciences and the taxonomy of life and much more. Not everybody knows all of this stuff but it is all written down and we can pass it on. Occasionally, some humans have set themselves up as judges of what knowledge is proper and have destroyed libraries such as the library of Alexandria in 391 AD and the Iraq National Library in Baghdad in 2003. Throughout history scientists have been attacked, imprisoned and beheaded, the fate of Antoine Lavoisier, discoverer of oxygen.

Global warming denier attacks on climate scientists are therefore attacks on all science and really attacks on our humanity. We’ve observed the Heartland Institute’s Diane Bast, and the pundit Alexander Cockburn presume to judge scientists they disagree with [3] and I cannot think of anybody less competent than these two unless it is Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

Scientists Make Mistakes

Scientists do make mistakes and often publish results which are later found to be in error, or simply incomplete. Often they make assumptions which are later shown to be wrong. That’s fine. Science progresses by such fits and starts. I give two relevant examples below where scientists published papers which contain major mistakes.

We’ve seen previously [4] that denier Richard Lindzen [5] published a mistaken hypothesis regarding a possible negative feedback mechanism which he suggested might mitigate global warming. Even the technical team for the now-defunct industry funded misinformation group Global Climate Coalition concluded [6]:

“Lindzen’s hypothesis that any warming would create more rain which would cool and dry the upper troposphere did offer a mechanism for balancing the effect of increased greenhouse gases. However, the data supporting this hypothesis is weak, and even Lindzen has stopped presenting it as an alternative to the conventional model of climate change.”

No Attorney General subpoenaed Lindzen or his university and in fact he did nothing wrong other than make a mistake.

In another example, deniers Roy Spencer and John Christy wrote a paper in 1990 [7] which attempted to reconcile weather balloon measurements of atmospheric temperature with satellite-based measurements. Satellite measurements began in 1978 but weather balloon data had existed for decades. In their paper the authors postulate that though the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere) had warmed, it had not warmed as fast as the surface temperature. Their results showed a warming trend of 0.09°C per decade, below the surface temperature trend of 0.17°C per decade.

There has never been a scientific paper written that suggested that the troposphere had not warmed at all by the way. The importance of the paper to denier arguments was that climate models predict that the troposphere would warm faster than the Earth’s surface when CO2 was increased. In other words, if the results from Spencer and Christy held, then either the models were wrong or the cause of the observed Earth’s surface temperature increase might not be atmospheric CO2.

In November 2005, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz [8] at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) [9] performed an independent analysis of the satellite data. In the process, they found an algebraic error in the Spencer and Christy analysis [8] which Christy and Spencer later acknowledged [10] which adjusted their estimate of the atmospheric warming upwards to 0.12°C per decade. Furthermore, Mears and Wentz performed their own data analysis and showed a trend of 0.19°C per decade, in line with the climate model predictions.

Since this was such an important foundation stone in the denier argument, the issue was adjudicated by the U. S. Climate Change Science Program in a paper [11] co-authored by John Christy, which concludes:

“Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human induced global warming. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. While these data are consistent with the results from climate models at the global scale, discrepancies in the tropics remain to be resolved.

“This difference between models and observations may arise from errors that are common to all models, from errors in the observational data sets, or from a combination of these factors. The second explanation is favored, but the issue is still open.” [11]

Though deniers still cite Spencer and Christy, we note that the discrepancy they reported no longer exists and the most likely explanation for differences between climate models and observations were in fact errors in the observational data sets made by Spencer and Christy. We see that an important argument for global warming denial was in fact wrong. Nobody accused Christy and Spencer of lying or falsifying their data to agree with their ideology. Christy and Spencer made a few mistakes. Those mistakes were corrected when other scientists attempted to duplicate their results further strengthening the scientific support for anthropogenic global warming theory. Since the Mears paper, scientists from Yale have shown by making more accurate measurements that even the discrepancy between climate models and measured temperature in the tropics referred to by the NAS study no longer exists [12].

The Case against Michael Mann

The IPCC AR-3 published in 2001 [13], contained a curve produced by Michael Mann showing the temperature anomaly during the last 1000 years as measured by proxies. This is his famous hockey stick curve. Had Mann’s results contained mistakes then Mann would have been no guiltier than deniers Lindzen, Spencer and Christy of anything more than having been wrong. But Mann’s results are correct and have been validated many times.

Mann’s curve shows a relatively constant temperature, which solar scientists such as Usoskin [14] have shown to be consistent with solar radiation and other natural forcing functions, until the latter part of the twentieth century, when the Earth surface temperature rose dramatically, as a result of human emissions of greenhouse gases, resembling a hockey stick shape.

The study by Usoskin et al. [14] finds that “the solar series shows a ‘Hockey Stick’ shape” except for the blade confirming the Mann Hockey Stick. As an aside we note that two popular denier arguments actually contradict each other, one that the Hockey Stick has been debunked and the other that the warming is due to solar energy and not greenhouse gas emissions. Recently Mann [15] further strengthened the proxy evidence and extends the reconstruction back nearly 2000 years (see figure 1).

Figure 1 shows the latest Holocene climate reconstructions from several proxies [15]. The Medieval Warm Period, roughly centered about 1000 A. D., and the Little Ice Age, roughly centered about 1700 A. D., are visible. These events are generally attributed to a variation of solar irradiation of about +/- 0.2 W/m2. Note that this figure includes the results from Moberg [16] which as we’ve seen [4] deniers cite in support of the denial view. From this figure we observe that the recent warming is unprecedented in both amount and rate of change. Note that it is the rate of change which is particularly frightening.

I’ve never understood why deniers are so committed to trying to debunk Michael Mann’s hockey stick. Denier’s insistence on exaggerating the cooling during the little ice age or the warming during the medieval warm period actually hurts their position because it would mean that the climate is even more sensitive to forcings than assumed in the IPCC report. The solar forcing during the little ice age was about 0.2 W/m2 [17, 18, 19] while the total current forcing is about 1.6 W/m2 or about eight times stronger [20]. You can see the problem, if natural variability is indeed stronger than expected and acts as an amplifier.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research published a paper [21] in 2009 which further confirms Michael Mann’s hockey stick temperature record. Using independent scientific techniques they’ve reconstructed the temperature record for the arctic. Their results shown in figure 2 reinforce the consensus view.

Mann has been exonerated by the Pennsylvania State University [22]. His science has been validated by one study after another including an examination by the National Academy of Sciences [23] and even by papers cited by deniers. The obvious conclusion is that Michael Mann performed important, relevant and quite accurate science that has stood the test of time. His results have been repeatedly duplicated by other researchers using different methods. His research has helped humans understand our predicament and improve our chances of survival. The case against Michael Mann has been fabricated by unscrupulous and ignorant people and doesn’t exist.

Figure 1 reconstructed surface temperature anomaly (Mann, 2008)

Figure 2 NCAR Arctic temperature reconstruction

The Case against Attorney General Cuccinelli

On April 23 Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli issued a subpoena against the University of Virginia requesting all the emails, correspondence, computer codes and other documents of Michael Mann. The subpoena does not contain any evidence of any violation of any law according to the journal Nature.

Humans have for the first time faced an existential crisis by assembling our best and most knowledgeable thinkers on the subject when the UN and the World Meteorological Association in cooperation with all governments and industry established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to examine the potential threat of anthropogenic global warming. Every single major science organization in the world has endorsed their findings and every government, including the United States, has accepted their conclusions. Most people are too busy with their lives to dedicate the large amounts of time necessary to try to understand this complex issue. All folks who accept the conclusions are behaving entirely rationally. The problem of anthropogenic global warming is so overwhelming that it cannot be solved unless humans cooperate. This means we have to have some form of regulation. Industry knows this and that is why they fund the global warming disinformation campaign.

We all know that deregulation of industry leads to disaster such as President Reagan’s savings and loan fiasco, Senator Gramm’s recent recession caused by his 1999 deregulation of the financial sector (Goldman Sachs et al) act, Massey Coal’s Upper Big Branch Mine explosion and of course British Petroleum’s disastrous Gulf oil explosion. In fact democracy and free markets do not work without good independent government regulation. We’ve seen this. We know this.

The scientific evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming is so compelling and so thorough, so entirely consistent with all human knowledge that the only recourse left to the fossil fuel industry is to attack certain climate scientists. Michael Mann has performed high quality science and his results are not convenient for the fossil fuel industry. By attacking him, presumably they hope to scare off other scientists from telling the truth. We think of this kind of thing happening in the Soviet Union or Communist China. In fact Climate Scientist Ken Caldeira slammed anti-scientific witchhunts asking: “Are American politicians following in the footsteps of Stalin?” [24] The U-VA faculty Senate averred that Cuccinelli actions threaten “our ability to generate the knowledge upon which informed public policy relies.”

The energy and natural resources industry was Cuccinelli’s largest donor sector [25] in his run for Attorney General contributing $47,465. So perhaps it is not surprising that Cuccinelli is spending taxpayer dollars on a witch hunt to persecute climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State without evidence and without cause. Cuccinelli has no basis for a law suit and any judge reading the NAS paper will throw him out of court on his derrière. Cuccinelli must know this. He is not stupid. Thus Cuccinelli’s intention may be harassment. This he achieves by his subpoena.

On May 12, 2010, the science journal Nature [26] scathingly attacked Cuccinelli’s subpoena as baseless pointing out that he gave no evidence of any wrong doing on the part of Mann.

On May 7, 2010, 255 scientist including 11 Nobel laureates published a letter in the journal Science stating that “We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular.” [27]

I do not know if Cuccinelli is just another corrupt politician doing the biding of those who paid for his election. But he would make a great petty bureaucrat in Stalinist Russia.

In other News

In other climate news, Science just published yet another report on species extinction due to global warming [28] consistent with ‘alarmist’ warnings and NASA and NOAA both report that we’ve just had the hottest April on record following the hottest January-February-March on record [29]. If 2010 turns out to be the hottest year on record which is looking likely, wait until next year when you will be hearing Cuccinelli and other deniers argue that global warming stopped in 2010. Also Jeff Masters of Weather Underground reports [30] that the Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) in the Atlantic’s Main Development Region for hurricanes had their warmest April on record being an eye-opening 1.46°C above average. This anomaly, according to Masters, foretells another record hurricane season and bears watching.

[1] Richard Feynman Lectures in Physics, The definitive Edition, Volume I, Addison Wesley, 2006.

[2] John D. Barrow, New Theories of Everything, Oxford University Press, 2007.

[3] http://brleader.com/?p=1453

[4] http://brleader.com/?p=1631

[5] Lindzen, R. S., “Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming”, American Meteorological Society, Vol. 71, No. 3, March 1990.

[6] Global Climate Coalition see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Climate_Coalition and http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Climate_Coalition

[7] Spencer, R. W., and Christy, J. R., 1990 Precise monitoring of global temperature trends from satellites, Science 247: 1558-1562.

[8] Mears, CA, FJ Wentz, 2005, The effect of drifting measurement time on satellite-derived lower tropospheric temperature, Science, 309, 1548-1551

[9] http://www.ssmi.com/about_rss/about_rss.html

[10] http://www.uah.edu/news/newsread.php?newsID=60

[11] Wigley, T. M. L., V. Ramaswamy, J.R. Christy, J.R. Lanzante, C.A. Mears, B.D. Santer, C.K. Folland, 2006 “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere – Understanding and Reconciling Differences executive summary”, US Government, April, 2006.

[12] Allen et al. Warming maximum in the tropical upper troposphere deduced from thermal winds. Nature Geoscience, 25 May 2008 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo208. See also http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080530144943.htm

[13] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001, http://www.ipcc.ch/

[14] Usoskin, I. G., Schussler, M., Solanki, S. K., and Mursula, K. 2004 Solaractivity over the last 1150 years: does it correlate with climate?, Proc. 13th Cool Stars Workshop, Hamburg, 5-9 July 2004.

[15] Mann, M., Zhang, Z., Hughes, M., Bradley, R., Miller, S., Rutherford, S., and Ni, F., 2008, , “Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

[16] Anders Moberg, Dmitry M. Sonechkin, Karin Holmgren, Nina M. Datsenko and Wibjörn Karlén, “Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data,” (Nature 433, 613-617, February 2005)

[17] Wang, Y.-M., J. L. Lean, J. L., and Sheeley, N. R. Jr , Modeling the sun’s magnetic field and irradiance since 1713, The Astrophysical Journal, 625:522–538, May 20, 2005

[18] Krivova, N. A., Balmaceda, L., and Solanki, S. K., Reconstruction of solar total irradiance since 1700 from the surface magnetic flux, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 467, Number 1, May III 2007, 335 – 346.

[19] Shindell, D. T. , Schmidt, G. A., Mann, M. E., Rind, D., and Waple, A., 2001, Solar Forcing of Regional Climate Change During the Maunder Minimum, Science, vol 294 7, December, 2001.

[20] Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for adapting to climate change: Tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27. DOI 10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001.

[21] Darrell S. Kaufman, David P. Schneider, Nicholas P. McKay, Caspar M. Ammann, Raymond S. Bradley, Keith R. Briffa, Gifford H. Miller, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, Jonathan T. Overpeck, Bo M. Vinther, and Arctic Lakes 2k Project Members, “Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling”, Science 4 September 2009 325: 1236-1239 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1173983]

[22] http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/04/penn-state-michael-mann-hockey-stick-science/

[23] National Academy of Sciences, 2005, SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECONSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LAST 2,000 YEARS Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Division on Earth and Life Studies www.nap.edu

[24] http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/09/cuccinelli-witchhunt-caldeira-stalin-lysenkoism/

[25] http://www.vpap.org/candidates/profile/money_in_industry1/45489

[26] http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/12/cuccinelli-witch-hunt-nature-mann/

[27] http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/06/national-academy-of-sciences-letter-defending-climate-science-integrity/

[28] B. Sinervo et al, “Erosion of Lizard Diversity by Climate Change and Altered Thermal Niches” Science 14 May 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5980, pp. 894 – 899 DOI: 10.1126/science.1184695, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5980/894

[29] http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/16/nasa-easily-the-hottest-january-and-hottest-jan-april-in-temperature-record/#more-25184

[30] http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1480

Biofuel Potential for Loudoun County

The recent Green Energy Partners’ power plant application and the County Energy Strategy recently adopted provide excellent stimuli for us all to begin thinking about Loudoun’s energy future. A few weeks ago, several members of the business (including GEP), agricultural, and environmental community pooled their efforts to write a briefing on the subject of bio-fuels. We have submitted it to the Board of Supervisors as a “Friend of the Board” submission [Sustainable Loudoun].

Bio-fuels have received a lot of attention in recent years, but the discussions are usually about corn-based ethanol, mid-western farmers, or massive industrial concerns like Archer-Daniels-Midland. The briefing our team submitted to the Board addresses the economic, agricultural, technical and environmental considerations of using bio-fuels as a potential component of our energy supply right here in Loudoun.

Some readers may object to the concept of using plants as a source of energy assuming it is not technically possible, or is not economically competitive with regular fossil fuels. But within a few years that may no longer be the case.

Plants are hydrocarbons, just like fossil fuels. Our coal resources were once plants which for the most part lived about 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period. Our petroleum resources were marine diatoms and coccolithophores and other phytoplankton. There are several maturing technologies for converting plants into diesel fuel, gas, lubricants, and even plastic. Some plants, such as algae, are nearly 70 percent oil by weight. Another plant that can be made into bio-fuels is switchgrass. Switchgrass looks a lot like hay, and is planted, grown, harvested, and stored just like hay – using the very same equipment, and the same types of land, and the same rainfall pattern – and less fertilizer.

There is one difference between using fossil fuels and bio-fuels: bio-fuels recycle CO2 back to the atmosphere where the plants harvested it in the first place, instead of creating new atmospheric CO2 which happens when fossil fuels are burned. If Loudoun County used bio-fuels to generate all of our electricity, our CO2 creation would drop by about 29 percent.

From an economic and agricultural perspective, the new power plant will spend nearly $140 million per year on fuel at today’s prices. If that fuel was bio-fuel instead of fossil fuel, much of that $140 million per year would go to Loudoun’s farmers. It’s worth noting that Loudoun still has 140,000 acres of highly productive farmland, of which about 40,000 acres are devoted to hay production. That may be enough farmland to provide for all of Loudoun’s current electricity consumption. We should easily make up for future demand with conservation and efficiency improvements.

In addition to fueling the power plant biofuels could be used to run our cars, our school busses, our commuter busses, and our tractors and heat our homes.

The briefing we submitted to the Board of Supervisors can be downloaded from the Sustainable Loudoun website at http://www.sustainableloudoun.org . Hopefully, you will find it entertaining reading and well-researched. Our paper discusses the pluses and minuses including most importantly the energy recovered as a function of the energy that would need to be invested, i.e., the energy cost of the fuel. We have identified the most conservative estimates as our baseline.

In a 2005 study conducted by Pimental and Patzek [Pimentel], switchgrass production was analyzed for energy recovered over energy invested (EROEI), with these results:

The average energy input per hectare for switchgrass production is only about 3.8 billion calories per year. With an excellent yield of 10 tons per hectare per year, this suggests for each one thousand calories invested as fossil energy the return is 11,000 calories — an excellent return.

If the energy recovered over the energy invested is about 11:1 for switchgrass this is promising. The next question, of course, is how much energy it takes to convert that switchgrass to fuel and to distribute that fuel to the end-user. The task of making the conversion and distribution functions cost-competitive with fossil fuels is the subject of considerable research and development at the moment [DEP, 1].

The Department of Energy is soliciting public input on proposed USDA energy plans including the use of biofuels so this is the right time for us to educate ourselves on this promising set of technologies. And President Obama gave an important speech on the subject recently [Obama].

Of course we must also consider competing uses of our farm land such as growing food and biofuels, without wind and solar, will not solve all of our energy needs and are not a substitute for conservation.

The bio-fuels briefing we prepared provides a readable, short, and very informative survey of the potential for a new bio-fuel economy here in Loudoun. You may be surprised by what you read, and get inspired to discuss it with other members of the Loudoun business, agricultural, and environmental communities. To join our list-serve e-mail discussion system, just send an e-mail to lccss-request@deciph.com. Please include the word “help” in the subject line, and we’ll send you instructions to join the list. To download the briefing from our website, just point your browser to www.sustainableloudoun.org.

Tom Pfotzer, Will Stewart and Tony Noerpel

[Sustainable Loudoun] http://www.sustainableloudoun.org

[Pimentel] Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower. Pimental and Patzek, January 2005. http://www.c4aqe.org/Economics_of_Ethanol/ethanol.2005.pdf

[DEP, 1]U.S. Department of Energy briefing on BioFuel technology methods and trends. http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/info/energy/renewable/bioenergy/kickoff/21-spaeth.pdf

[DEP, 2] http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/04/usda-20100428.html

[Obama] http://climateprogress.org/2010/04/29/taking-biofuels-to-the-next-level/

Heartland Institute Part 2

“To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Ken Caldeira, Climate Scientist [1]

“The Climategate scientists, for example, falsified temperature data to keep the warming scare alive” Diane Carol Bast, Heartland Institute [2]

“We wish to solve this equation for m. To do this we first use the mathematical trick…” Richard Feynman, Lectures in Physics, p15-10.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.” Internal technical report of industry disinformation group Global Climate Coalition, 1996 [11].

In response to my March 3 column, Scotus [3], Diane Blas of Heartland Institute suggested that we should focus on the science of anthropogenic global warming in her letter to the editor [2]. I agree. But first it is relevant to note Bast’s unchristian, uncharitable and unequivocally false rush-to-judgment of climate scientist Phil Jones and other climate scientists over the so-called climate-gate controversy, if only because if one visits the Heartland Institute web site looking for any science, one is forced to wade through these ignorant and unjustified personal attacks, which all look rather foolish now. Since her letter Jones has been vindicated, twice [4-5]. If Bast was at all concerned for personal liberty as she claims in her letter, she will gladly apologize not only to Dr. Jones but to all the rest of us for spreading disinformation, but I’m not holding my breath.

With respect to science, each year Heartland Institute hosts a global warming denier conference. On March 2, 2008, prominent denier Pat Michaels was their keynote speaker. The focus of Michaels’ talk was the disingenuousness of the global warming denier canard that the Earth stopped warming and is now cooling. He said, addressing the room full of deniers: “You’ve all seen articles saying that global warming stopped in 1998. With all due respect, that’s being a little bit unfair to the data.” He then went on to describe why. I include a reference to the amusing and informative youtube video [6] by Peter Sinclair so you can see for yourselves.

Michaels concludes “Make an argument that you can get killed on and you kill us all.” His meaning was that if deniers make an argument that is easily debunked all global warming deniers will lose their credibility. He added: “Global warming is real and the warming in the second half of the twentieth century, people had something to do with it.”

Yet on the Heartland website [7] there is a list of denier arguments leading with:

“Temperatures have been cooling since 2002, even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise”.[7]

Why would the folks at Heartland post an argument that they were informed at their own conference by their own keynote speaker was not true? It is not surprising to find “denier” Pat Michaels and “alarmist” Ken Caldeira in agreement. We observe that Bast does not even listen to her own experts let alone real climate scientists. Peter Sinclair does a respectable job of explaining the science in his little video.

None of the talking points on Heartland’s list is supported by any reference to any science, sound or otherwise, and so from a skeptic’s perspective they are not useful since they cannot be validated or confirmed. There is no understanding or information in a list of talking points. Another argument on the Heartland list is exemplary of the kind of easy mistake a gullible ideologue might make [7].

Reconstruction of paleoclimatological CO2 concentrations demonstrates that carbon dioxide concentration today is near its lowest level since the Cambrian Era some 550 million years ago, when there was almost 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today without causing a “runaway greenhouse effect.”

That sounds like a clincher argument for the denier but it leaves some very important science out. Carbon dioxide levels were indeed higher during the early Phanerozoic [see for example Berner, 2004], but any curious person can find out easily enough that the sun was less luminous as well. This is explained in my article titled Climate Factors [8] and is discussed in every Earth sciences text book [see for example Lunine, 2000 and Kump, 2004] with which I’m familiar, so only an unreliable and uninformed person would make this argument. Briefly, the sun was cooler 550 million years ago and the Earth required much more carbon dioxide in order to maintain a suitable climate to support liquid water and life. This is not an argument against Svante Arrhenius’ anthropogenic global warming theory as erroneously portrayed by deniers but an argument in support of it. Atmospheric carbon dioxide at those levels is the only way the planet would have been habitable by complex life forms. Any skeptic reading this will get one of the books I reference to confirm this. And she will not do so simply because she wants to be convinced but also out of curiosity and the joy of learning something new.

We see straight off that two of heartland’s top arguments are specifically false, not just misleading. The rest of the arguments on their list are dubious as well. Without reference to any data or analysis all the arguments are unverifiable. The onus is on the Heartland Institute to salvage what arguments they might from the list, defend only those and drop the others. A little apology for the attempt to mislead us would be appropriate.

The Heartland institute web site contains what they claim to be three lists of peer-reviewed journal articles. I was thrilled to find these lists, even as I noted that they are just lists with no text or explanation. The references are not cross linked to the list of denier talking points [7], for example. Certainly for a denier the presumed existence of such a list is sufficient since he is not interested in the science anyway. But a skeptical person wants to actually read the articles and understand why they might support the denier view and here is where the editors at Heartland run into trouble. I have a subscription to the Journal Nature and can download those articles for free. Twelve of the references are from this journal. Obviously I did not cherry picked these twelve as my criteria was completely independent of any assumption on my part about them. Four of the twelve references are correspondences or letters to the editor [Slingo, 2007, Wunsch, 2004, Ladle, 2004, Gordon, 1996]. These in fact are opinion and are not peer-reviewed so they do not belong on this list at all. Further, there is nothing in these letters which contradicts the consensus view. Ladle’s letter, which is the only entry in Heartland’s “species extinction” category, criticizes the main stream media for misinterpreting the conclusions from a previously published peer-reviewed article [Thomas, 2004]. Thomas (and this is peer-reviewed) concludes:

“We predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15-37 percent of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be ‘committed to extinction’.”

This conclusion pointedly does not support denial. If it is the purpose of Heartland Institute to criticize main stream media why not just fill up their web site with links to clips from “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”? Nobody does that better than him.

Three of the Twelve Nature references are commentary; one of a paper by Emanuel and two are commentary on policy. These are not peer reviewed either and in any event do not contain science which supports or contradicts global warming. Prins, for example, writes [Prins, 2007]

“Kyoto has failed in several ways, not just in its lack of success in slowing global warming, but also because it has stifled discussion of alternative policy approaches that could both combat climate change and adapt to its unavoidable consequences.”

Please note that Prins completely contradicts the denier claim that global warming stopped in 1998 or 2002 or whatever, in agreement with Michaels and Caldeira and every other climate scientist. Prins commentary is opinion on policy. It is not peer-reviewed science. In any event, the commentary does not dispute in the least the science of anthropogenic global warming. Prins simply voices the opinion that there may be better ways to address the problem than the Kyoto process. We can honestly have that discussion without spreading disinformation.

Roger Pielke’s commentary on policy [Pielke, 2007] does not dispute AGW theory either but argues for adaptation in lieu of mitigation. Well that’s a reasonable discussion too, but it is not peer-reviewed science and does not belong on a list advertizing “peer-reviewed” science.

One of the five peer-reviewed journal articles starts:

“Between 34 and 15 million years (Myr) ago, when planetary temperatures were 3-4 oC warmer than at present and atmospheric CO2 concentrations were twice as high as today…” [Naish, 2001]

Just to be clear, this is actually at the high range of the consensus view which estimates equilibrium climate sensitivity (the amount the Earth would warm with a doubling a atmospheric carbon dioxide) to be between 2 to 4.5 oC. How in the world did this paper make a list of papers supposedly supporting the denier view? As I pointed out in my article titled Anjia Eichler [9], this technique is common among deniers but what else are they going to do? Deniers like Bast make a pretense of adhering to solid science so they must occasionally, albeit reluctantly, reference it and thus apparently have no choice but to contradict themselves.

Another peer-reviewed article doesn’t support the denier view either and is in fact unrelated to the discussion [Braun, 2005]. Interestingly, one of the authors is Stefan Rahmstorf, who contributes to Real Climate, perhaps the best on-line source for global warming science. In fact I cite one of Rahmstorf’s paper’s [Rahmstorf, 2008] in my Anjia Eichler article [9]. The 2008 paper is a great summary of the science behind Arrhenius’ anthropomorphic global warming theory. I recommend this paper for any skeptically minded person who wants to understand global warming and would prefer sound information and solid scientific explanation.

In another peer-reviewed paper which Heartland cites, Moberg et al,[Moberg, 2005] concludes

“We find no evidence for any earlier periods in the last two millennia with warmer conditions than the post-1990 period—in agreement with previous similar studies (my note: they are referring to agreement with Mann et al which deniers claim has been debunct, obviously not.). The main implication of our study, however, is that natural multicentennial climate variability may be larger than commonly thought, and that much of this variability could result from a response to natural changes in radiative forcings. This does not imply that the global warming in the last few decades has been caused by natural forcing factors alone, as model experiments that use natural-only forcings fail to reproduce this warming. Nevertheless, our findings underscore a need to improve scenarios for future climate change by also including forced natural variability—which could either amplify or attenuate anthropogenic climate change significantly.”

This actually is quite alarming. The authors find evidence of forced natural variability which might amplify or attenuate climate change significantly. The authors do not speculate of course but leave open the possibility that warming could be much worse. This is in agreement with a more recent paper by Swanson et al, 2009 which concludes

“If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability.” [Swanson, 2009]

Interestingly this paper was cited by the Cato institute as supporting denial as I pointed out in my Anjia Eichler [9] article. Another Swanson and Tsonas paper did make the Heartland list but I don’t have access to it. Swanson once wrote on the Real Climate web site that he is completely mystified that deniers should misinterpret his research [10]. In this article, Swanson explains his research and why it suggests that global warming might be much worse than the consensus view.

A skeptic is left to conclude that Heartland’s list of peer-reviewed papers is a deception. There are 180 papers listed and I sampled 12 or 7.5 percent. While I recognize that this is a small sample size most articles cited were not peer-reviewed journal articles, 7 of 12. And all 12 either contradict the denial view or at best are neutral. Not one of these citations supports denial. A denier sees a long list and accepts the Heartland conclusions unquestioningly. A skeptic does the homework. Ever the skeptic, myself, I view the list as a resource and will be trying to get as many of the papers as I can, certainly out of curiosity.

I’m familiar with several other references on the Heartland list such as to a paper by Lindzen [Lindzen, 1990]. This is an interesting paper, by the way, and one of perhaps a very small number which might actually be said to support the denier view. Of this paper, though, the technical team for the now-defunct industry funded misinformation group Global Climate Coalition concluded in their 1996 report [11]:

“Lindzen’s hypothesis that any warming would create more rain which would cool and dry the upper troposphere did offer a mechanism for balancing the effect of increased greenhouse gases. However, the data supporting this hypothesis is weak, and even Lindzen has stopped presenting it as an alternative to the conventional model of climate change.”

This may be the most solid science supporting denial on their list and we note that “the data supporting this hypothesis is weak”. In his paper, Lindzen points out another problem with emissions of CO2:

“…admittedly leaving us with the problem of fossil fuel depletion;” and

“It is entirely legitimate to ask whether we should be worried about increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. (The depletion of fossil fuels is another matter.)”

Lindzen recognizes as early as 1990 that we may have a more serious or acute problem if we do not reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and convert our society to alternative energy sources as soon as possible. We note that both problems: fossil fuel depletion and global warming, have the same solution. So a skeptic might be inclined to ask “why do deniers care so much about global warming to the point of making stuff up if we have to address this problem anyway?”

I do not for a minute discount the usefulness or validity of resources such as letters-to-the-editor or commentary but these references are not in fact peer-reviewed and should not be included in a list of “peer-reviewed” resources. That in itself constitutes misinformation. They could have titled the list “references that support the denier view” or some such. But even that is misleading since many of these references do not support their view.

Unfortunately, an uncritical reader of their web site would accept the “existence” of the list as “proof” that the denier view has scientific support which it doesn’t have or that there is a legitimate scientific controversy regards the IPCC consensus view which does not exist. In this regard I think the list may constitute fraud.

There are a few articles which do support the denier view, which I recognize because I’ve read them. Somebody at Heartland Institute should remove the references which are not peer-reviewed and read the remainder and eliminate the ones which don’t actually support their position. But I suspect that then heartland would be left with perhaps a dozen disputed or debunked papers supporting their view, and that list would look rather flimsy.

As to the talking points, Heartland Institute should eliminate the points which are not true or otherwise indefensible and attempt to defend the remainder. I conclude there isn’t much in the way of solid science at this web site which disputes the consensus view on anthropogenic global warming.

I recommend a video of a speech given by one of the climate-gate scientists at last year’s AGU meeting. Richard Alley does an exceptionally good job of explaining climate science [12]. This is a great resource for Bast to consider linking to on the Heartland Institute web site.

Tony Noerpel

Berner, Robert, The Phanerozoic Carbon Cycle, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Kump, L. R., Kastings, J. F., and Crane, R. G., The Earth System, 2004.

Lunine, J. I., Earth, Evolution of a Habitable World, 2000.

Dangers of crying wolf over risk of extinctions (Nature 428, 799, 22 April 2004) – Richard J. Ladle, Paul Jepson, Miguel B. Araújo & Robert J. Whittaker – correspondence

Gulf Stream safe if wind blows and Earth turns (Nature 428, 601, 8 April 2004) – Carl Wunsch – correspondence

Is global warming climate change? (Nature 380, 478, 11 April 1996) – Adrian H. Gordon, John A. T. Bye, Roland A. D. Byron-Scott – correspondence

Sea-ice decline due to more than warming alone (Nature 450, 27, 1 November 2007) – Julia Slingo, Rowan Sutton – correspondence

Naish TR, Woolfe KJ, Barrett PJ, Wilson GS, Atkins C, Bohaty SM, Bücker CJ, Claps M, Davey FJ, Dunbar GB, Dunn AG, Fielding CR, Florindo F, Hannah MJ, Harwood DM, Henrys SA, Krissek LA, Lavelle M, van Der Meer J, McIntosh WC, Niessen F, Passchier S, Powell RD, Roberts AP, Sagnotti L, Scherer RP, Strong CP, Talarico F, Verosub KL, Villa G, Watkins DK, Webb PN, Wonik T, Orbitally induced oscillations in the East Antarctic ice sheet at the Oligocene/Miocene boundary (Nature 413, 719-723, October 2001) -

Rahmstorf, S., 2008: Anthropogenic Climate Change: Revisiting the Facts. In: Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto., E. Zedillo, Ed., Brookings Institution Press, Washington, pp. 34-53

A Millennium Scale Sunspot Reconstruction: Evidence for an Unusually Active Sun Since the 1940s (Physical Review Letters 91, 2003) – Ilya G. Usoskin, Sami K. Solanki, Manfred Schüssler, Kalevi Mursula, Katja Alanko

Wang, Y.-M., J. L. Lean, J. L., and Sheeley, N. R. Jr , Modeling the sun’s magnetic field and irradiance since 1713, The Astrophysical Journal, 625:522–538, May 20, 2005
Krivova, N. A., Balmaceda, L., and Solanki, S. K., Reconstruction of solar total irradiance since 1700 from the surface magnetic flux, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 467, Number 1, May III 2007, 335 – 346.

A 150,000-year climatic record from Antarctic ice (Nature 316, 591 – 596, 15 August 1985) – C. Lorius, C. Ritz, J. Jouzel, L. Merlivat, N. I. Barkov

Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model (Nature 438, 208-211, 10 November 2005) – Holger Braun, Marcus Christl, Stefan Rahmstorf, Andrey Ganopolski, Augusto Mangini, Claudia Kubatzki, Kurt Roth, Bernd Kromet

Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data (Nature 433, 613-617, February 2005) – Anders Moberg, Dmitry M. Sonechkin, Karin Holmgren, Nina M. Datsenko and Wibjörn Karlén

Are there trends in hurricane destruction? (Nature 438, E11, 22 December 2005) – Roger A. Pielke, Jr. – brief communications – commentary on a paper by K. Emanuel – the Emanuel paper is not included in the Heartland list.

Time to ditch Kyoto (Nature 449, 973-975, 25 October 2007) – Gwyn Prins, Steve Rayner – commentary

Climate change 2007: Lifting the taboo on adaptation (Nature 445, 597-598, 8 February 2007) – Roger Pielke Jr., Gwyn Prins, Steve Rayner, Daniel Sarewitz – commentary

No upward trends in the occurrence of extreme floods in central Europe (Nature 425, 166-169, 11 September 2003) – Manfred Mudelsee, Michael Börngen, Gerd Tetzlaff, Uwe Grünewald

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for adapting to climate change: Tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27. DOI 10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001.

Lindzen, R. S., “Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming”, American Meteorological Society, Vol. 71, No. 3, March 1990.

[1] Ken Caldeira http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/26/global-cooling-myth-statisticians-caldeira-superfreakonomics/

[2] Diane Carol Bast, letter-to-the-editor, Blue Ridge Leader, http://brleader.com/?p=1453

[3] Scotus, http://brleader.com/?p=1448

[4] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, “The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia” Eighth Report of Session 2009–10 http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HC387-IUEAFinalEmbargoedv21.pdf

[5] Joe Romm, Climate Progress, http://climateprogress.org/2010/04/14/climatic-research-unit-scientists-cleared-again/

[6] Sinclair http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/u/2/QwnrpwctIh4

[7] http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=970&idli=3

[8] Noerpel, http://brleader.com/?p=1414

[9] Noerpel, http://brleader.com/?p=1247

[10] Swanson, http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/

[11] Global Climate Coalition see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Climate_Coalition and http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Climate_Coalition

[12] Alley, 2009, http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml

Heartland Institute Reply– Part 1

“… a philosophy is influenced by facts. So there is a constant interplay between what do I think and why do I think it….Now, if you gather more facts and have more experience, especially with things that have gone wrong – those are especially good learning tools – then you reshape your philosophy because the facts tell you you’ve got to… Ideology is a lot easier, because you don’t have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.” Paul O’Neill (Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 2004)

“Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand…” Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics, volume 1,

“If money were driving The Heartland Institute’s work on global warming, surely we and other skeptics would be raving alarmists by now. As Alexander Cockburn has noted, ‘Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and institutes of climate change across academia. It’s where the money is.’” Diane Carol Bast

It’s not always about the money, Mr. Noerpel. Some of us have principles—common sense, sound science, individual liberty—for which we toil even when it would be more profitable to go over to the dark side. Diane Carol Bast

I thank Diane Carol Bast, Executive Editor The Heartland Institute, for reading my article and taking the time to respond. It is a pleasure to know that the Blue Ridge Leader is read as far away as Chicago. I welcome this exchange of views.

Bast takes offense at the term denier and calls me an alarmist. For my part, I don’t mind. I certainly don’t mind being called a global warming alarmist. I think it is appropriate. As a former volunteer firefighter, I’m well aware of the necessity for alarms. They save lives. We get in very serious trouble when we don’t heed them in fact. The descriptive term denier simply happens to fit the Heartland Institute folks remarkably well; no offense on my part is intended. They are not skeptics.

A skeptic is somebody who is curious, asks questions, demands justification or supporting material, is not content with mere opinion, is not afraid to be wrong and wants above all to find the right answer. These qualities are orthogonal to whether or not somebody accepts or denies Svante Arrhenius’ theory of anthropogenic global warming. In other words, within the uncertainty of the science we can assume for now a denier or an alarmist may be skeptical, provided that person is skeptical of arguments on both sides with special emphasis regards one’s own arguments, of course. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman councils:

“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman, from lecture “What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society”, Galileo Symposium in Italy, 1964

A skeptic questions a hypothesis because she thinks there is not enough supporting evidence. When enough evidence is discovered, a skeptic will concede and accept the point. An ideologue, according to Paul O’Neill, rejects a hypothesis independent of the evidence or data and therefore there will never be enough evidence. This is obviously an important distinction. To be a skeptic, one must be familiar with the evidence. In the case of global warming, one must have had to at least read the IPCC report. And one must be prepared to be wrong.

“What distinguishes science from pseudoscience is not whether your theory originated with some particular conviction about how the world works, or whether you feel an emotional attachment to it. What matters is the evidence you find to support it, and whether you are ultimately prepared to accept that it could be wrong.” Gabrielle Walker, Snowball Earth.

It is asymmetric to label just one side of this debate “skeptic”. If Bast would prefer an alternate descriptive besides “denier”, she can suggest something, and if it is reasonably accurate I will use it, happily. The science journal Nature referred to folks like Bast as denialist in an editorial on so called climate-gate.

“…denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.” Nature Editorial Staff, Vol 462 | Issue no. 7273 | 3 December 2009

If Bast prefers denialist, I’ll use that.

Bast complains about my reference to the Heartland Institute as a tobacco lobbying company but does not deny it. This information is in the public domain from Source Watch and from their Wikipedia page. I went to their web site and they have a whole section on the goodness of tobacco. Bast did not deny that the Heartland institute is funded by tobacco companies but that too is in the public domain.

Bast quotes Alexander Cockburn, without attribution, and it is instructive to examine this quote as a skeptic would. If there are no references an opinion is not verifiable and therefore not useful. This is an appropriate observation about the Cockburn quote. Skeptics ask questions. Who are the sluicers and the sluicees? What is their motivation? How much money is it really and over what period of time? Billions is rather vague. Since we really don’t have any idea what Cockburn is on about, we are free to speculate.

Climate physics is fundamentally a subfield of Earth Sciences which is a rather large and important field of science but the science that influences it or is relevant to it spans astronomy to zoology. I assume Cockburn is referring to all international funding of all scientific research which is notionally associated with climate over the last several decades. With this interpretation “billions” has some descriptive accuracy. The beneficiaries of this money, as noted by Cockburn, are universities, research institutes, professors, scientists, post-docs, graduate students and undergraduate students in hundreds of fields, and including engineers, scientists, technicians and support staff. The sources of these funds includes NIH, NIST, NASA, NSF, NOAA, USGS and other domestic government science organizations as well as many other international scientific funding organizations. This funding supports Earth monitoring satellite systems, Antarctic and Arctic research stations and ocean research vessels. None of these funding sources has a profit motive or shareholder equity which needs protecting. The principle motivation of both sluicers and sluicees is curiosity about the world around us and adding to the human trove of knowledge. Characteristic of ideologues, denialists Bast and Cockburn both criticize knowledge which disagrees with them and slide down the slippery slope, denigrating all of science and every scientist as the Nature editorial warns.

When Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil or the Koch Brothers invest in companies like the Heartland Institute there is a direct benefit to their bottom line. The payback in profits is measureable and easy to appreciate. By contrast the National Science Foundation does not make a profit on scientific funding. There is only the expectation of solid science.

Bast is misleading us and herself to suggest that Heartland Institute could easily go over to the dark side and receive any of this funding. Heartland Institute is not qualified to do scientific research of any kind. They simply do not have that expertise. Heartland Institute participates in public relations and lobbying and not scientific research.

Bast might instead be referring to the money spent by the environmental movement on lobbying and publicity as opposed to the “billions” to which Cockburn is referring. In my article on which Bast comments, I reference an article written by Dr. Jeff Masters. Masters writes:

“According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That’s five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one.”

Thus we see that Heartland is fortunate to have the principles they do because the fossil fuel industry is much more generous than environmental groups when it comes to funding companies which do the kind of work Heartland does. In other words, Bast is incorrect to suggest that Heartland would do well on the dark side. In fact they would go bankrupt. So of course it is about the money.

With respect to Bast’s complaint that Heartland is motivated by principle as well as money, I don’t entirely disagree. The second half of my article describes these principles related to the “Julian Simon” effect.

The principles to which Bast refers are: supply-side neo-classical economics, which we know to be flawed because it ignores the second law of thermodynamics (see Soddy); small governments, which statistically are disasters for their populations; and opposition to government regulation of industry and protection of citizens from predatory companies. Of course, we have direct experience with removal of government regulation of the banking industry which had stood the test of time since the Great Depression and the subsequent collapse of our economy (see Germany). So these are principles, and while lucrative for Heartland, they are just not particularly sound ones for the rest of us.

Masters described them in this way:

“These front groups received funding from manufacturers of dangerous products and produced “sound science” in support of their funders’ products, in the name of free enterprise and free markets. Think tanks such as the George C. Marshall Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Dr. Fred Singer’s SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been active for decades in the Manufactured Doubt business, generating misleading science and false controversy to protect the profits of their clients who manufacture dangerous products.”

Bast’s claim that Heartland is interested in personal liberty is also not true. They are actively and rather overtly opposed to the personal liberties of non-smokers including infants, small children, pregnant women, people with heart conditions, asthma, allergies, the elderly and rational people who chose to believe the solid science that second hand smoke is harmful.

Jeff Masters describes two exceptionally important books Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan and Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels. I recommend both.

I agree with Bast that what is important is the science. In part 2 we will visit the Heartland Institute web site and examine the scientific content with respect to global warming.

Pliocene

“The warmer climate facilitates hurricane activity. This amounts to a positive feedback, which can potentially lead to multiple climate states – one with permanent El Nino-like conditions and strong hurricane activity and the other corresponding to modern climate with a cold equatorial Pacific.” Fedorov, et al., 2010.

The Pliocene epoch spans three million years of Earth’s history between 5.4 and 2.4 million years ago. In the early Pliocene our earliest pre-human ancestors discovered so far Ardipithecus ramidus appeared. And the first humans Homo habilis and possibly even Homo erectus were around at the end of the Pliocene for the transition into the ice ages of the Pleistocene. While Homo habilis died out long before the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (us) Homo erectus was still around by the time we evolved.

At the beginning of this epoch, the Mediterranean Sea evaporated and remained dry for about 170,000 years. The African continental plate had been colliding with the European continental plate since about 85 million year ago when the ancient Mediterranean was still the Tethys Ocean. Five million years ago the African continental plate slid under Spain uplifting it and causing the Mediterranean to be cut off from the Atlantic Ocean [Govers, 2009]. Since the Mediterranean Sea loses more water to evaporation than is supplied by all the rivers which feed into it, in a few tens of years it had virtually dried up forming a deep hole some three miles below sea level at its deepest point. The average depth of the Mediterranean is about one mile. Imagine some pre-human following the edge of the Mediterranean Sea and all of its bounty a mile or so below sea level, perhaps a successful strategy for tens of thousands of years and thousands of generations. When the Atlantic finally breached the Gibraltar dam the flooding must have been dramatic catching millions of animals unaware.

But the most interesting thing about the Pliocene is its climate. It turns out that the Pliocene epoch is the best analog for the current Earth climate of all the 4.55 billion year history of our planet. The sun’s luminosity was nearly the same as it is today, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was between 300 and 400 parts per million by Volume (ppmV), and the continents were in approximately the same location. We have discussed the faint young sun in a previous article [climate factors]. And if you recall, our sun has been steadily increasing in luminosity as the original hydrogen in its core has been fusing into helium. Because of this, during the Pliocene the solar forcing may have been about 0.2 W/m2 less than today or about the same as during the little ice age [Wang, 2005, Krivova, 2007]. Despite the slightly cooler sun, the early Pliocene was 4oC warmer than today and the mid Pliocene was about 2oC warmer. The carbon dioxide forcing had to account for the warm climate and the slightly cooler sun. This is an enigma since the current estimate for the equilibrium climate sensitivity, or the amount that the temperature would increase with a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, i.e, to about 560 ppmV is about 3oC. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels today are about 390 ppmV, or at the upper end of the Pliocene values, yet the Pliocene climate was hotter than the accepted equilibrium climate sensitivity would predict.

While the continents were nearly in the positions they are in today, there were some differences. The difference which probably affected the climate the most is that the Isthmus of Panama between North and South America did not close the connection between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, the Central American Seaway, until about 3 million years ago [Murdock, 1997]. This closure impacted ocean circulation of heat.

Recently a new paper suggests another feedback mechanism associated with increased warmth in the early Pliocene. Fedorov et al propose that increased hurricane activity contributed to the warm climate as part of a positive feedback mechanism that maintained the warmth with permanent El Nino-like conditions [Fedorov, 2010]. In a review article, Ryan Sriver writes “These results may provide clues to understanding not only the climate of the early Pliocene, but also the nature of future climate change in a greenhouse world.” [Sriver, 2010]

Perhaps the most important difference, not discussed in the Fedorov paper, is that the Earth’s climate had been gradually cooling since the hot house Eocene 50 million years ago whereas our climate is recovering from an ice age. The last glacial maximum was only 20,000 years ago. I asked Kerry Emanuel of MIT and a co-author of the Fedorov paper about this and he replied to me: “Although CO2 levels were similar then to today’s, that climate had plenty of time to equilibrate to the forcing whereas ours clearly has not. It is also plausible that the climate exhibits hysteresis and multiple equilibria, so that approaching 370 ppm of CO2 from a warmer state may yield a different climate than approaching it from a colder state.”

James Hansen of NASA GISS, has suggested that the accepted value for the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate only accounts for fast feedbacks such as increasing water vapor and not very slow feedbacks. Hansen suggests that equilibrium climate sensitivity might be closer to 6oC [Hansen, 2008] when slow feedbacks are accounted for. A related aspect is that most of the trapped energy is currently warming the oceans as shown in figure 1 and it takes a very long time for these bodies of water to warm up or cool down [Murphy, 2009].

What we can appreciate from a study of the Pliocene climate is that equilibrium climate sensitivity may be higher than the consensus view and we may see an unexpected increase once the oceans warm up or equilibrate to the new higher level of carbon dioxide and further that the climate may change states from the current state where we experience an El Nino event every three-eight years to a permanent El Nino state which may be self sustaining.

To view maps of the locations of continents in the Earth’s past see Chirstopher R. Scotese’s fascinating web site.

Fedorov, A. V., Brierley, C. M., and Emanuel, K., Tropical cyclones and permanent El Nino in the early Pliocene epoch, Nature, Vol. 463, February 25, 2010, 1066-1070.

Govers et al. Choking the Mediterranean to dehydration: The Messinian salinity crisis. Geology, 2009; 37 (2): 167 DOI: 10.1130/G25141A.1

Murdock, T. Q., A. J. Weaver, and A. F. Fanning (1997), Paleoclimatic response of the closing of the Isthmus of Panama in a coupled ocean-atmosphere model, Geophys. Res. Lett., 24(3), 253–256.

Wang, Y.-M., J. L. Lean, J. L., and Sheeley, N. R. Jr , Modeling the sun’s magnetic field and irradiance since 1713, The Astrophysical Journal, 625:522–538, May 20, 2005

Krivova, N. A., Balmaceda, L., and Solanki, S. K., Reconstruction of solar total irradiance since 1700 from the surface magnetic flux, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 467, Number 1, May III 2007, 335 – 346.

Hansen, J., Sato, M., Kharechal, P., Beerling, D., Berner, R., Masson-Delmotte, V., Pagani, M., Raymo, M., Royer, D. L., and Zachos, J. C., Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?, The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2008, 2, 217-231.

Murphy, D. M., S. Solomon, R. W. Portmann, K. H. Rosenlof, P. M. Forster, and T. Wong (2009), An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D17107, doi:10.1029/2009JD012105.

Sriver, R., Tropical cyclones in the mix,” Nature, Vol 463, 25 Februrary, 2010, 1032-1033.

http://www.scotese.com/
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/ardipithecusramidus.htm
http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homohabilis.htm
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/pliocene.html
When the Mediterranean Sea dried up lat Miocene
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090211122529.htm
early hominids
http://anthro.palomar.edu/hominid/australo_1.htm

Figure 1: Total Earth Heat Content anomaly from 1950 (Murphy 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008. Land + Atmosphere includes the heat absorbed to melt ice.

Passive Solar Energy

Contributed by Will Stewart

Will Stewart is a systems engineer with an educational background in electromechanical engineering that included solar engineering, HVAC design, combustion equations, feedback control theory, among others. Mr Stewart has continued to research advances in solar techniques and building materials advances, and seeks to apply this knowledge in helping Loudoun become more energy independent.

Passive solar refers to the design and placement of a building to enable solar heating without the need for sensors, actuators, and pumps, in contrast to active solar, which utilizes pumps/blowers, sensors, and logic control units to manage collection, storage, and distribution of heat. The two techniques are not exclusive, however, and can work together effectively.

As solar radiation (insolation) is a diffuse energy source, and not at the beck and call of a thermostat, passive solar design techniques are at their best when combined with other related methods, such as energy efficiency (insulation, weatherization, building envelope minimization), daylighting, passive cooling, microclimate landscaping, and a conservation lifestyle (i.e., temperature settings, raising and lowering of insulated shades, etc). Most of these topics will be covered in other articles, though passive cooling will be addressed in this series, which is intended as an overview, as a complete engineering treatment on passive solar design would require several dozens of articles.

Even though solar insolation is diffuse, and generally weaker the further away from the equator, it can be the basis for the majority of a building’s heat energy input even in high latitude places such as Canada, Norway, Germany, the Northern US (Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington state, etc), Scotland, the Netherlands, etc. Even the US Department of Defense has a passive solar design guide. Design approaches such as Passivhaus have achieved up to 90 percent reduction in energy use over traditional building methods. In areas with reasonably consistent winter insolation, well insulated passive solar buildings with sufficient thermal mass storage can approach 100% of their space heating needs with passive solar. Enhancements can be added to existing buildings, through major or minor renovations, or through simple additions (Part 4 of the series).

History

The Greeks faced severe fuel shortages in fifth century BC, resorting to arranging their houses so that each could make maximum use of the sun’s warming rays. A standard house plan emerged, with Socrates noting, “In houses that look toward the south, the sun penetrates the portico in winter.” The great Greek playwright Aeschylus even proclaimed only primitives and barbarians “lacked knowledge of houses turned to face the winter sun”. The Romans picked up on this technique, and improved it by adding windows of mica or glass to better hold in the heat. They passed laws to protect the solar access rights of owners of solar homes from shading by new buildings. In the Americas, the Pueblo and Anazazi took advantage of solar insolation in their adobe and cave dwellings, respectively.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, solar greenhouses became popular for those of means to grow exotic tropical plantlife in temperate climes. In the 20th century, German architects such as Hannes Meyer, director of the influential Bauhaus architectural school, urged the use of passive solar design techniques that began to flourish in the 1930s, only to be pushed aside by the Nazis and WWII. Many German architects made their way to the US, and a small solar market developed. Built in 1948, Rosemont elementary school in Tuscon obtained over 80% of its heat via solar means, but in 1958, with cheap energy now available and an extensive addition planned, the school district chose to go with a gas-fired furnace. The 1970s saw more emphasis on renewable energy, and passive solar became a household word, though still only penetrating a very tiny percentage of builders’ visions for the new homes market. More in-depth passive solar history details can be found at the California Solar Center.

The Basics

Location and Orientation

To assess whether passive solar is advantageous to a location, one must first find out the amount of winter sunlight that is available. The simplest way is to find solar insolation data for the site under consideration, ideally collected over a series of decades (noting that a changing climate can mean the data may need to be extrapolated). The data can come in tabular or map form, with the latter providing a quick indicator of the amount of winter insolation in one’s area. Tabular data, however, is more precise, giving one the best information available about trends in their area. A note of caution: the data is usually an average of conditions, and does not necessarily take into consideration unusual weather years or how the climate may change in one’s area of consideration.

Accessing the Data

Most of the maps and tabular data measure solar insolation as kWh/m2/day, which is roughly the number of kilowatt hours of energy striking a square meter of surface in a day. This is also referred to as a Sun Hours on some maps, and we will refer to it as such throughout this series. You can find data for our area at National Renewable Energy Labs (select the month you are interested in and “South Facing Vertical Flat Plate”).

The orientation of the building will determine how much solar insolation is captured during the desired period of the day. For example, a passive solar house facing the equator will receive an equal amount of solar heat before and after noon. The more a building is oriented away from true south (or north in the southern hemisphere) the less winter solar insolation it will be able to capture, and it becomes more susceptible to undesirable summer solar energy that is harder to shade with a properly sized overhang. In addition to direct solar insolation beaming down from the sun, there is also diffuse radiation from the sky, and reflected radiation from the ground.

Our passive solar house is amazing warm, bright, and cheery on winter days, even when the weather is well below freezing. Adding passive solar features to a house or other building will help reduce energy costs, emissions, and in the case of propane, reduce our dependence on foreign energy supplies.

Loudoun County Regional Science and Engineering Fair

Energy and Environmental Sustainability Awards

“The goal of science is to make sense of the diversity of nature.” John Barrow, New Theories of Everything, 2007.

“The basis for the definition of taxa has progressively shifted from the organismal to the cellular to the molecular level. Molecular comparisons show that life on this planet divides into three primary groupings, commonly known as the eubacteria, the archaebacteria, and the eukaryotes.” Carl Woese, et al., Towards a natural system of organisms: Proposal for the domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya, Proc. Nati. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 87, pp. 4576-4579, June 1990, Evolution.

“Exploration of [Titan] is of high interest because much of the chemistry going on in the atmosphere and on the surface may give us insight into organic chemistry on the earliest Earth.” Jonathan Lunine, Earth, Evolution of a Habitable World, 2000.

Sustainable Loudoun launched the Energy and Environmental Sustainability Awards in 2007 using a donation from a local group. Since 2008, REHAU Corporation has financed the award and Mike Maher of REHAU and I have judged the student projects. In the last couple of years John Hunter of Lovettsville has been a third judge. Every year we have been impressed with the competence and creativity of the students. It has always been difficult to select winners from among so many deserving entries but a complete joy reviewing these projects with such promising and remarkable students. Last year we introduced an honorable mention category to acknowledge what we considered the best freshman entry.

There is an accidental or unintended theme to this year’s winning projects. Within the sustainability literature, description of opportunities for cooperation with nature as opposed to competition with nature, are plentiful. Life forms have been suggested for remediation of ocean dead zones, rebuilding damaged soils, processing sewage and generating biofuels and of course many more applications have been proposed. Many farms in Loudoun County use organic principles taking advantage of natural nitrogen fixers, dung beetles and worms and other natural composters. In order to take advantage of this technology it is necessary to understand the metabolism and evolution of critters. Our first place winner, Danyas Sarathy a Freedom High School freshman analyzed the database of cellular metabolism to construct a tree of life identical to the evolutionary tree constructed by Carl Woese, the discoverer of Archaeabacteria. Archaeabacteria are extremophiles. If life exists anywhere else in the solar system, Mars, Titan or Europa, it will need to be similar to these extremophiles. Our third place winner, Heather Quante, a Loudoun Valley High School Senior, analyzed the possibility of such organisms surviving on Saturn’s moon Titan. Our second place project is a team effort of Anita Alexander, Broad Run High School Senior and Hannah Arnold, Loudoun County High School Senior. They conducted some experiments on a possible practical application of our knowledge of organism metabolism using bacteria, Ralstonia eutropha, to produce plastic precursors.

Our honorable mention winner goes to Adithya Saikumar, a Briar Woods High School freshman. Adithya’s project demonstrates good research technique and we look forward to seeing what Adithya accomplishes next year.

Project abstracts:

First Place:

Comparative Metabolomics: Construction and Analysis of Eukaryotic and Prokaryotic Metabolomes- Danyas Sarathy 1305F09 Freedom High School Freshman

Metabolomes are comprised of cellular metabolites which are small molecules of intermediary metabolism. Biological databases like KEGG, PubChem and Metacyc contain information on human, animal, plant and microbial genomes that have been sequenced and annotated. Also, information on the functions of gene products, particularly on the enzymes of all pathways of intermediary metabolism is also provided in these public domain databases. In this study, the reactions catalyzed by the pathway enzymes in terms of reactions involving substrate and product molecules were data mined. Extraction of these metabolites and compiling them for representative organisms allowed comparative analysis of metabolomes within and among the different groups. A defined set of metabolites were found to be present in all metabolomes which could be called the core metabolome, containing mostly the basic blocks of amino acids and nucleotides for Protein and DNA synthesis. A number of correlations indicated that heterotrophs in general possess wider metabolic capabilities than the autotrophes that is reflected in the size of the metabolomes. Furthermore, clustering analysis of these metabolomes using multi-variate statistical analysis package (MVSP) enabled the construction of a tree of life that displayed the discrete segregation of diverse organisms info groups of animal, plant, fungi, protest, bacteria and archaea. This metabolome-based tree of life is a novel and alternative approach to the classical phylogenetic construction of tree based on small subunit ribosomal RNAs of diverse organisms.

Second Place:

Waste Products as Growth Media for the Accumulation of PHAs – Anita Alexander, Broad Run High School and Hannah Arnold, Loudoun County High School.

Polyhydroxyalkanotes, or PHAs, are biodegradable thermoplastics produced by certain bacteria under stressed conditions. However, the production and extraction of this polymer is currently an expensive process. The goal of the research is to lower the cost and impact on the environment of the process by using waste products for the main carbon source. The specific objective of the research was to determine which of several waste products is most effective as the carbon source to be used in the fermentation medium. Ralstonia eutropha was grown in a nitrogen-limited fermentation medium containing an excess of carbon in the form of waste products, such as a dead leaf slurry and seeds. The growth of the cells was measured, and the polymer was subsequently extracted by first treating the bacteria with methanol, and then adding 30 mL acetone for 24 hours. Comparisons were made between the growth rates of bacteria in the different media, as well as between the dry weight of the extracted polymer. Slightly lower growth rates have been observed in those trials utilizing a waste product as a carbon source, as compared to the control group, however the final product is comparable and makes use of materials that would otherwise be thrown away. By reducing the overall cost of this process, the economic viability is increased, thus giving the product potential as an environmentally beneficial replacement for petroleum-based plastics.

Third Place:

Modeling Populations of Organisms on Titan – Heather Quante, Loudoun Valley High School.

Exploration of the solar system has yielded data on many different environments that may be hospitable to life, including Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Some organisms that live in extreme environments on Earth, called extremophiles, live in conditions such as extreme cold which are similar to those on Titan. The purpose of this project is to use mathematical modeling to ascertain whether organisms that had evolved characteristic similar to extremophiles would be able to survive in Titan’s environments. Last year, data from previous studies of extremophiles were collected to quantify growth rate under different environmental conditions, and specific data on Titan’s environments were gathered using Cassini-Huygens mission data. These two data collections were then used in Excel to create a logistic population model whose equation describes how extremophiles would be affected when subjected to an environmental condition, such as temperature. This year, the project was moved into the Mathematica program to create a logistics model that would simultaneously calculate the effects of changing temperature, pressure, and pH on the growth rate of the population. Additionally, the model was made more accurate by taking into account the population’s constantly changing effects on its environment. In the end, when Titan-like environmental conditions were chosen for the model, it could determine whether an extremophile population would grow and sustain itself or die out over time. The model’s final results predicted that possibilities for life on Titan’s surface are slim, but a small, slow-growing, stable population may survive in Titan’s underground ocean environment.

SCOTUS

“Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves.” Richard Feynman.

“Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this).” David Brooks, New York Times, December 8, 2005.

David Brooks is a congenial, affable, and articulate conservative commentator. If he is right then conservatives are lying to us about global warming. I don’t know if he is right but I also have no reason to doubt him.
I receive several investment opportunity newsletter emails every day, one from Casey Research. In a recent newsletter, they document the amount of money “invested” by Goldman Sachs and other banks in the political process (see http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCdd.php?id=355). Their argument is that this money has a huge return on investment but that it borders on corruption in the Casey Research view. Now the writers at this group are avowed global warming deniers. They have stated that they believe the entire Earth should be paved over, not withstanding that if we managed to do that, we would go extinct. They do not see the irony that ExxonMobil, OPEC, API, WFA, the Koch Brothers, the National Chamber of Commerce and various coal companies also invest huge amounts of money in politicians, scientists and lobbyists (see for example http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1389), not to mention Saudi Arabia’s influence on Fox News (see for example http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/23/top-gop-investigator-rep-issa-open-to-probing-saudi-ownership-of-fox-news/ ).

These companies and their lobbyists have gotten much better at this sort of thing and it is probably true that action on CFCs, acid rain and tetraethyl lead would not be successful in today’s political climate. Lobbying companies like the Heartland institute and scientists like S. Fred Singer have since honed their skills as disinformationists as tobacco lobbyists.

This is easily understood. It is simply greed and companies have a responsibility to their shareholders to increase shareholder value. As a stock holder myself in ExxonMobil, that is what I want them to do. This problem would be easily solved (and can only be solved) by forbidding corporations from participating in the political process. Corporations are not citizens and should not be treated as such. Corporations are only tools of society and if they don’t serve the public good, we have a right to eliminate them or break them up. My own view on ExxonMobil, as a shareholder, is that they should stay out of the political process, let whatever regulation, which needs to happen to meet the requirements of society, happen and then compete fairly with other companies under whatever rules society deems necessary. This is easy because we understand the problem, but given the SCOTUS decision of the Supreme Court it pragmatically may no longer be solvable. Since corporations have to think in the short term, the long term outlook for our economy, our society and our survival is therefore in doubt. Even though global warming effects are obvious now, the real pain is further down the road and in a future heavily discounted by the corporate outlook.

Kevin Phillips wrote a wonderful book Bad Money, which takes its name from Grisham’s law that bad money drives out good money. Phillips expands this into bad capitalism drives out good capitalism but good capitalism cannot drive out bad capitalism. Just one corrupt corporation will force all others to become corrupt as well in order to compete. This is his explanation for the current economic crises.

There is another dimension to our problem which is rather more difficult to understand. I call it the Julian Simon effect. Simon is famous as a supply side neo-classical economist who made a bet with the ecologist Paul Ehrlich about the price of certain minerals. Simon won that bet but subsequently lost another. Timing is everything and the outcome of bets doesn’t really prove anything.

Simon believed that free market capitalism is making the world a better place for everybody and can solve all of our problems so long as governments stay out of the way. Simon believed that global warming, acid rain, lead poisoning, DDT poisoning, the ozone hole, mountaintop removal, overfishing the oceans, ocean acidification and tobacco smoke could not possibly be problems because there is no way that private enterprise could create problems. We could call this Reaganomics. I think critical or rational thinkers might see the flaws in this extreme view. As Herman Daly describes it, neo classical economics, of one school or another, works reasonably well so long as we are far away from any thermodynamic limits, either low entropy resource limits (peak oil being one) or high entropy waste limits (CO2 emissions being one). For free market capitalism to work for the betterment of society, it needs to be regulated by democratic governments, elected by a well-informed citizenry.

One of the amusing contradictions in Simon’s ideology is that Simon would hold out for fusion technology as a sure thing that will come along just in time when the market sends the appropriate price signals (fusion power is only limited by economics, you understand), ignoring that only governments have the resources to try to develop fusion and that there may be rather serious physical limits on our ability to develop a fusion reactor such as trying to recreate here on Earth the enormous temperatures and pressures which exist in the Sun’s core.

While Simon had absolute faith in technology he ignored the fact that technology is dependent on exactly the same science that he denies depending only on his arbitrary judgment of whether or not the science in question is convenient. It is amusing because Simon appears to have been pretty technically illiterate. He was presumably a brilliant economist but he was not exactly a reliable judge of science or technology. He believed that all human advancement is due to greed completely discounting curiosity. My own view is that curiosity is responsible for the accumulation of nearly all human knowledge, so we disagree.

This second problem may not be solvable because it is related to how we have evolved. Lots of people, all global warming deniers, think this way. That is also amusing because many of these folks are young Earth Creationists.
It is solvable by education but as Yogi Berra said: “There are some people who, if they don’t already know, you can’t tell ‘em.”

So here we are. I don’t know how accurate this explanation is nor am I unaware that it may be an oversimplification.

Climate Factors

Here is a brief summary of those physical factors which influence a planet’s climate and in the case of Earth, make life possible. These are included in the anthropogenic global warming theory presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports [IPCC, 2007].

• Solar luminosity

• Atmospheric greenhouse effect
  o Carbon dioxide
  o Methane
  o Ozone
  o Water vapor
  o Nitrous Oxide
  o Others…

• Earth orbital variation
  o Croll-Milankovic cycles
  o The fortuitous circumstance of our large moon which stabilizes Earth’s orbit.

• Earth’s oceans
• Plate tectonics
• Position of continents and oceans
• High mountains (long term weathering and winds)
• Ocean circulation
• Subduction and regeneration of CO2
• Volcanism
  o contributes CO2 (carbon cycle)
  o contributes aerosols and dust

• Plant and bacterial life via photosynthesis
  o Consumption of CO2
  o Creation of oxygen
  o Amplification of rock weathering

• Burial of organic matter in oceans
• Mountain weathering and deposition as carbonate layers in oceans
• Surface and cloud Albedo
• Glaciers and polar ice sheets
• Geothermal heating from radioactive decay
• Land use
• Air currents

This is not necessarily a complete list. These factors are not in any special order and are interrelated. Plate tectonics would not be possible without Earth’s oceans for example.

Faint Young Sun Paradox

Having observed that the Earth climate system is complex, I want to focus on the two principle components, the solar luminosity and the atmosphere. Joseph Fourier published the first energy balance for the Earth back in 1826. He calculated that in order for incoming solar radiation and outgoing heat radiation to balance, the Earth would only be about -18oC assuming the Earth is a black body radiator and absorbs all of the incoming energy. In fact, even then some of the solar energy would be reflected back out into space without warming the Earth and it would be even colder as shown in Figure 1. Fourier hypothesized in his paper that the atmosphere must have some effect which is keeping the planet warm. In 1860 John Tyndall discovered that carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane and ozone were the greenhouse gases responsible for the warming the planet. This was surprising at the time because all of these gases have very low concentrations in the atmosphere the bulk of which is nitrogen and oxygen.

Figure 1

The red curve in Figure 1 illustrates the “faint young Sun” paradox, [from Koch, 2008]. Our sun is a G2 star on the main sequence; it was only 70 percent as luminous then as now. This is because the sun was mostly low density hydrogen. As fusion takes place in the solar core, four hydrogen protons combine to form one helium nucleus releasing energy by a complex process of collisions and reactions. As hydrogen is converted to helium, the core density increases as does the temperature and pressure resulting in a higher probability of fusion reactions and more radiation. Yet since about 4 billion years ago the Earth has always had a temperature compatible with liquid surface water and life. Earth’s surface temperature is thought to have varied between about 10 and 25 degrees C throughout its history, except for the Hadean Eon as shown by the grey band in Figure 1.

The lower of the two brown curves in Figure 1 is the Earth’s temperature without an atmosphere and the upper curve shows what the temperature would have been with today’s atmospheric concentrations. We first observe the profound impact of the greenhouse gases on the Earth temperature today, warming our planet from about -18oC to about +15oC.

What mechanism kept the Earth warm before present time? And how did this mechanism constrain the Earth’s temperature to such a narrow window despite the solar luminosity changes? Why didn’t the Earth freeze and what would have happened if it did?

Possible excursions below this range are thought to have occurred in the Proterozoic about 2.25 billion years ago and again between 750 and 590 million years ago. These snowball Earth events are shown by the two grey arrows in this figure. Earth’s temperature plummeted and the oceans froze to the equator. These events are contemporaneous with the two step-wise increases in atmospheric oxygen, the first from practically no oxygen to about 2 percent of the atmosphere by volume and the second to the present level of about 20 percent of the atmosphere by volume.

Figure 2 shows the atmospheric carbon dioxide partial pressure needed to maintain a temperate climate throughout Earth’s history. Since atmospheric oxygen was low during the Archean Eon, before 2.35 billion years ago, both methane and carbon dioxide could have been dominant greenhouse gases. A possible moderating feedback mechanism, involving both these gases is described by [Kastings, 2000]. However, during the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic Eons, carbon dioxide alone would have had to keep the Earth warm and balance the increasing solar radiation. This feedback process is described by [Berner, 2004]. It is called the carbonate-silicate cycle or the long term carbon cycle. Briefly, when the Earth warms, water evaporates off the oceans increasing rainfall. The water vapor combines with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere creating carbonic acid. These acids rain onto silicate rocks increasing the rate of weathering and carbonate sediment formation, effectively leaching the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. As a result the Earth cools. A cooler Earth results in less evaporation and less rainfall and subsequently less weathering and burial. This negative feedback cycle operates over millions of years.

Figure 2 Solar luminosity and CO2 partial pressure

Berner makes the point that the principle greenhouse gas is CO2. We read that methane as a greenhouse gas is stronger than CO2 by a factor of between 21 and 33 depending on how it is measured but in all cases this only applies for up to one hundred years, a period which is entirely relevant to the current human condition but not important over geologic time. Methane reacts with atmospheric oxygen to become CO2 and water fairly quickly. The residence time of is only about ten years. During the Archean Eon when there was little to no atmospheric oxygen, methane may have been the dominant greenhouse gas. Although CH4 vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas, “it is buffered by evaporation and condensation that is driven by external factors such as solar radiation and the CO2 greenhouse effect.” [Berner, 2004]

Figure 3 [Royer, 2006] shows the combined solar forcing and the carbon dioxide forcing. Hot house climates experienced only 4 to 6 W/m2 radiative forcing above pre-industrial values. In other words, despite solar radiation which was increasing by about 5 percent over the phanerozoic, or about 12 W/m2, reduced levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide maintained the Earth’s temperate climate. This figure also illustrates the correlation between global temperature and ice ages over the entire Phanerozoic. Note that all ice ages occur when the combined solar- forcing is relatively the same as pre-industrial Holocene demonstrating a high correlation between atmospheric and global temperature including the Ordovician-Silurian boundary glaciation as described by [Young, 2009].

Figure 3 Combined radiative forcing relative to pre-industrial 280 ppmV carbon dioxide [from Royer, 2006]

According to [NASA, 2009] and [Trenberth, 2009] the total increase in radiative forcing including all factors since 1850 is about 1.8 W/m2. This increase is shown by the red line in Figure 3. We can see that the Earth’s climate is potentially being forced into a hothouse regime from the current ice house climate in a geologically short time. Often, such excursions are associated with extinction events especially when combined with other factors such as in the present case over fishing, deforestation and mountaintop removal mining [Hallam, 2004].

References

[Hoffman] http://www.snowballearth.org/week8.html

[Young, 2009] Young, Saltzman, Foland, Linder and Kump, “A major drop in seawater 87Sr/86Sr during the Middle Ordovician (Darriwilian): Links to volcanism and climate?” Geology, October, 2009.

[Hallam, 2004] Hallam, Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities, Oxford University Press.

[Royer, 2006] Royer, “CO2-forced climate thresholds during the Phanerozoic”, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 70 (2006) 5665–5675

[Berner, 2004], Robert, The Phanerozoic Carbon Cycle, Oxford University Press, 2004.

[Trenberth, 2009] Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for adapting to climate change: Tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27. DOI 10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001.

[NASA, 2009] http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/

[Koch, 2008] http://es.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/pages/classes.htm

[Kasting, 2000] Kasting, Pavlov, Brown, Rages, Freedman, “Greenhouse warming in the atmosphere of early Earth,” Journal of Geophysical research, v 105, no. E5, 11,981-11990, May 25, 2000.