Thanks Vaquero. It's more global warming crap (MGWC).
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Posted on 04/19/2016 2:48:05 PM PDT by JimSEA
For hundreds of millions of years, Earth's climate has remained on a fairly even keel, with some dramatic exceptions: Around 80 million years ago, the planet's temperature plummeted, along with carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The Earth eventually recovered, only to swing back into the present-day ice age 50 million years ago.
Now geologists at MIT have identified the likely cause of both ice ages, as well as a natural mechanism for carbon sequestration. Just prior to both periods, massive tectonic collisions took place near the Earth's equator -- a tropical zone where rocks undergo heavy weathering due to frequent rain and other environmental conditions. This weathering involves chemical reactions that absorb a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The dramatic drawdown of carbon dioxide cooled the atmosphere, the new study suggests, and set the planet up for two ice ages, 80 million and 50 million years ago.
"Everybody agrees that on geological timescales over hundreds of millions of years, tectonics control the climate, but we didn't know how to connect this," says Oliver Jagoutz, associate professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT. "I think we're the first ones to really link large-scale tectonic events to climate change."
Jagoutz and his colleagues, EAPS Professor Leigh Royden, and Francis McDonald of Harvard University, have published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Robert Hazen has commented on this at some length. Hazen’s recent research focuses on the role of minerals in the origin of life, including such processes as mineral-catalyzed organic synthesis and the selective adsorption of organic molecules on mineral surfaces. He has also developed a new approach to mineralogy, called “mineral evolution,” which explores the co-evolution of the geo- and biospheres. A part of this deals with the mineralogy of climate and fits nicely with this research. The collision of Africa and Eurasia seems to have "plugged" volcanos reducing CO2 emissions. If course the newer Mediterranean volcanos would be more recent and a result of the subduction zone beneath them.
The importance of the Himalayas to climate is undeniable.
California and Japan should work together.
Ping
I call this “Comic book science”.
Only plausible as a set up for some Comic book theory.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/continentaldrift/index
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/platetectonics/index
Thanks Vaquero. It's more global warming crap (MGWC).
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I have been at the pointy end of this process, collecting samples and trying to recreate the geologic and erosive mechanisms that craft the landscape that we see. The rocks don’t talk, and each sample presents several rationale solutions for what we see. This is a very difficult puzzle, and if you suggest some answer that is outside the conventional wisdom, you will get smacked down by people who have the power to decide the course of your career. Don’t rock the boat is the order of the day. Rock politics, which is why I left if behind years ago. The new rock politics is governed by grant revenues, which is completely controlled by the political socialist agenda. Rocks don’t care and they don’t matter anymore.
More likely it’s something deep within our sun, and our sun doesn’t care one whit if the Earth gets more or less photons from century to century. If that dials up and down, there you go. Look out for the phrase “Maunder Minimum” and pay attention to news about solar energy, sunspot activity, etc.
Read #9, please, and comment if you desire. Perhaps both, not directly related at all? Perhaps there is a relationship, but I tend to think the sun has the bigger lever than the earth.
Everyone knows that Gorgonzola, the cheese monster is responsible for the release of mass quantities of digestive gasses. This of course makes exactly as much sense as the pious pronouncements of the Climate Scientologists.
Being as how this idea of many millions of years low CO2 runs counter to the “correct conclusions” of many in climate science, I’d not expect a lot of people to look further than year to year hysterica.
As a miner, I saw my dad sent back to another mine and lower job over a heated disagreement as to where a series of fault took the “missing” half of a porphyry orebody. He was right and eventually regained what he had lost professionally but it cost the company a lot in purchasing the necessary property they had earlier passed on.
Being a miner and later a supervisor was much less stressful.
But the drop in CO2 followed the drop in temperature. Had that been the cause, it would have preceded it.
I can see where volcanic activity could loft material into the high atmosphere and cause cooling (effectively reducing insolation), and that activity is related to tectonic movement, for the most part.
I can also see how tectonic activity could interfere with ocean currents and the normal heat exchange mechanisms which let heat flow from the tropics to polar latitudes, which might bring on an increase in high albedo surface area, which could result in even more cooling (also reducing absorbtion of solar energy at the surface).
The problem I have is blaming the temperature drop on a trailing indicator. I just don't see cause/effect in that relationship, unless it is the cooling causing the drop in CO2, not vice-versa.
Earth’s climate has varied widely over its history, from ice ages characterised by large ice sheets covering many land areas, to warm periods with no ice at the poles. Several factors have affected past climate change, including solar variability, volcanic activity and changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Data from Antarctic ice cores reveals an interesting story for the past 400,000 years. During this period, CO2 and temperatures are closely correlated, which means they rise and fall together. However, based on Antarctic ice core data, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to 1000 years, as illustrated in Figure 1 below. This has led some to conclude that CO2 simply cannot be responsible for current global warming.
This statement does not tell the whole story. The initial changes in temperature during this period are explained by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which affects the amount of seasonal sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. In the case of warming, the lag between temperature and CO2 is explained as follows: as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere. In turn, this release amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released. In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both the cause and effect of further warming. This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation. Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this process include other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.
A 2012 study by Shakun et al. looked at temperature changes 20,000 years ago (the last glacial-interglacial transition) from around the world and added more detail to our understanding of the CO2-temperature change relationship. They found that:
The Earth’s orbital cycles triggered warming in the Arctic approximately 19,000 years ago, causing large amounts of ice to melt, flooding the oceans with fresh water.
This influx of fresh water then disrupted ocean current circulation, in turn causing a seesawing of heat between the hemispheres.
The Southern Hemisphere and its oceans warmed first, starting about 18,000 years ago. As the Southern Ocean warms, the solubility of CO2 in water falls. This causes the oceans to give up more CO2, releasing it into the atmosphere.
While the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occured after that atmospheric CO2 increase (Figure 2).
Taken from: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
Climate changes and it’s complicated (which is inconvenient for politicians and businessmen).
I know science can be hard, but you probably should read something other than comic books.
Gracias para el linko.
You believe in global warming?
There are significant deposits of methane hydrates on the ocean floors. When an Ice age occurs, sea levels drop as water is bound in continental ice sheets. With that drop in sea level comes a drop in hydrostatic pressure on the Methane Hydrate deposits, and subsequent degassing of deposits provides significant increases in atmospheric methane, which serves as the greenhouse gas that turns the temperature cycle around.
;-)
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