RE: The Best "Outing" of Global Warming I have ever read!

At the crux of my position rests uncertainty. As a practical human being who embraces Science, I will accept the "facts" that you have given. Despite this, what you and those on your side have failed to understand is that it is not so much the Science that I am questioning as the impact that it is having upon policy decisions in the United States and around the world. I am not content in the deduction that human activity is the "smoking gun" on the case of global warming, but I am not so closed-minded that I would refute this as I feel that both sides of the argument lack sufficient evidence to definitively prove and defend their positions. Before we develop strategies of what to do about the "problem," I believe we need more time and a better understanding of what, exactly, the problem might be.

To address the information that you have provided, I first want to emphasize as heavily as possible that I am not saying your position is bullshit. The only reason that I am going to list some of the following information is to support the position of skepticism in how one views the debate on global warming. A lot of the information I'm going to be citing was never intended to be used as a counter-argument to global warming, and in the interest of being fair, I'm even going to discuss a few things that strongly support global warming -- yet arrive at vastly different conclusions as to what should be done about it.

First, I want to address the history of Mass Extinction Events in the history of this planet that have not (conclusively) been attributed to asteroid impact. The way you have worded your information, it comes across as though you are trying to say that the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented in the scope of history. I think that you probably know that that is not the case, but for the sake of debate I'm going to point out several other incidents of history in which the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was drastically higher. Every one of these events occurred without the benefit of human intervention. You will note that I am not offering this as a means of refuting the possibility of a primarily human-triggered rise in CO2, but merely to show that these rises *can* and *have* happened naturally in the history of Earth.

1.) At the end of the Paleocene Epoch we have the "so-called" thermal Mass Extinction Event. At that time, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was close to 1,000ppm.

2.) The Cenomanian Mass Extinction Event at the end of the Triassic shows CO2 concentrations in the neighborhood of 1,300ppm.

3.) The Toarcian Mass Extinction Event yielded atmospheric concentrations of CO2 bordering on 2,000ppm.

4.) The Triassic Mass Extinction Event shows atmospheric concentrations of CO2 around 1,200ppm.

5.) The single most cataclysmic event that we are aware of in the history of this planet occurred approximately 250 Million years ago during an incident known as the Permian Mass Extinction Event. In an unknown (yet very swift) amount of time, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere rose from levels close to what we have today to a whopping 3,000ppm, destroying most life on the planet.

In 2002, Dr. Peter Ward published "Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions." I will paraphrase some of its contents.

Several years ago, groups of geologists and organic chemists began studying environmental conditions during the earth's history. They did this by uncovering chemical "fossils" called biomarkers. In somewhat recent times, these scientists began exploring the boundaries of these Mass Extinction Events. To their surprise, they found that the data they were collecting pointed to the Earth's oceans plunging into a near-primordial state of anoxia (extremely low oxygen content). Among these biomarkers, they found a plethora of green sulfur bacteria that live on hydrogen sulfide gas, which they oxidize and turn into sulfur. Basically, their research suggests that what happened is that ancient rises in CO2 (most likely attributed to volcanism) lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, inducing global warming which makes it harder for the oceans to absorb oxygen by heating them up. Such a domino effect would create favorable conditions for the spread of deep-sea anaerobic bacteria and would generate massive upwellings of hydrogen sulfide, which would also attack the ozone layer and explain the massive extinction of plant life in addition to animal life on Earth.

Cool, right? Now, let's look at some things that are not really trickling into the mainstream media:

1.) 9 January 2006 - Professor Tamaki Ura, the director of the University of Tokyo's Underwater Technology Research Center reports the discovery of an enormous undersea lava plateau ... believed to be the largest in the Indian Ocean, and possibly one of the largest on Earth. The plateau measures about 8.8 miles by 1.7 miles, with a thickness of approximately 980 feet, and was found at a depth of 8,860 feet.

2.) 9 November 2006 - The crew of a sailing yacht between Neiafu, Tonga and Fiji spots the eruption of a new Pacific island approximately one mile in diameter.

http://yacht-maiken.blogspot.com/2006/08/stone-sea-and-volcano.html (Some very cool pictures on this page, even if this reference is not especially useful).

3.) 28 July 2006 - Scientists discover for the first time regions of the crust that are stretching apart to form new sea floors along detachment faults, which were previously underestimated in their scope and significance.

4.) 27 July 2006 - Reports from National Geographic that a (potentially) new type of volcano was discovered along tectonic plate boundaries in the Pacific ocean,

5.) 12 December 2005 - National Geographic reports the unprecedented discovery of a hydrothermal "Megaplume" in the Indian Ocean, described as being "10 times--or possibly 20 times--bigger than anything of its kind that's been seen before." Another remark states "a normal hydrothermal vent might produce something like 500 megawatts, while this is producing 100,000 megawatts. It's like an atom bomb down there."

6.) 31 May 2004 - Scientists working off of the Antarctic Peninsula discover a previously unknown, but very likely active major undersea volcano that rises 2300 feet above the sea floor.

7.) 18 July 2003 - Scientists participating in a German-American Arctic expedition investigate the Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean and find much higher levels of volcanic activity and hydrothermal hot springs than ever imagined.

I can post a lot more of these if requested.

It has been said that ~90% of the volcanic activity on the planet takes place underwater. Given how much of the ocean remains unexplored, and especially taking into account quotes like #5 above, I think it is perfectly reasonable for a person to maintain a degree of skepticism on the causes of global warming. I want to reiterate again, I am not saying that I believe that underwater volcanoes are the solitary cause of global warming, nor am I trying to freak out and go on some conspiracy binge ... all I am saying is that there is enough evidence out there to maintain my position, which is merely one of healthy skepticism.

William F. Ruddiman is primarily responsible for a controversial theory. He postulates that global warming is indeed real, but that rather than spiking 200 years ago, the impact of human beings on the environment began ~8,000 years ago.

To arrive at these claims, Ruddiman closely evaluated the trends of CO2 and Methane gas over the past 10,000 years and has spotted what he believes to be several anomalies that do not support the traditional belief that global warming is a relatively new thing. What he found is that CO2 began to rise 8,000 years ago when the glaciation cycle dictated that it should have continued to fall, in synch with the advent of early Europeans clearing forests to cultivate wheat, barley, and peas. In addition to that, he found that the natural decline of Methane reversed unexpectedly 5,000 years ago with the advent of rice farming in China.

Now, one of the most interesting parts of this theory is that over the past 2,000 years, the increase of CO2 that has been detected in the atmosphere rather abruptly reversed themselves. Most scientists attribute this to solar or volcanic events. What Ruddiman did was to take the figures of rises and falls of CO2 and overlay them with something interesting: human pandemics.

He found that the most devastating pandemics in human history coincide with drops in CO2 over the past 2,000 years. As an example, CO2 dropped considerably ~A.D. 540. This coincides rather nicely with the Plague of Justinian in A.D. 540-542. Another significant drop occurred ~A.D. 1350, which seems to coincide with the Black Death between 1347 and 1352. Both of these plagues killed 25-40% of the population of Europe. The single largest drop in CO2 over the past two thousand years occurred from 1550-1800, which Ruddiman attributes to the European introduction of smallpox and other diseases into the Americas, killing about 90% of the pre-Columbian population.

Now for the interesting part. Ruddiman believes that farming was responsible for greenhouse gas anomalies in the neighborhood of 250ppb (Methane) and 40ppm (CO2) before the 1700s. He remarks that the anomalies he sees would have resulted in temperatures rising 0.8 degrees C before the industrial era, compared with the 0.6 degrees C increase during the past century. He postulates that if the natural cooling trend dictated by Earth's orbital cycles had been allowed to progress unimpeded by the interjection of early farming that the net temperature change would have been approximately 2 degrees C cooler than it is now -- well on the way to the glacial maximum 20,000 yeasr ago of ~5-6 degrees C cooler.

Basically what Ruddiman is saying is that human-induced global warming is what is responsible for the deviation we have seen in glacial cycles, and that human factors are responsible for preventing the "Missing Ice Age," as it has been called.

Now, I could just leave the argument at that and adopt a position stating that human-caused global warming has indirectly saved countless millions of lives by allowing the climate of the Earth to be changed to more favorable conditions for our prosperity, but that is only one side of the equation. If this is correct, humanity could well become a cancer to the planet. We may have saved ourselves from an ice age, but as a result of the population explosion that the prevention of this ice age allowed, in combination with industrialization, we could be powering ourselves even faster toward sudden climate shift or another Mass Extinction Event. Neither of these are very promising scenarios, obviously.

In the February 2007 edition of Scientific American, Frank Keppler and Thomas Rockman explain recent findings that they have made suggesting that normal plantlife could be playing a substantial role in methane production.

The longstanding view has always been that methane is produced by anaerobic microbes. No one ever assumed that plants could release methane, much less the amount that the researchers responsible for this study are now suggesting. The findings were accidentally fallen upon when the team was researching cloromethane, which they found to be produced by aging plants. They wondered as a result of this whether or not plants might also release methane.

Thirty samples of tree leaves and grasses from tropical and temperate regions were placed in small chambers with normal concentrations of atmospheric oxygen. Every single plant produced methane. They found that usually a gram of dried plant material released between .02 and three nanograms of methane an hour.

After this experiment, they took living plants and found that the rate of methane production increased dramatically, about 10 to 100 times that of detached leaves from plants.

Using the data that they derived from the experiment, they decided to calculate how much plants might be contributing to the planet's methane totals. What they ended up with was an approximation of plants being responsible for the release of 60 million to 240 million metric tons of methane every year, constituting 10-40% of annual global emissions.

The article goes on to describe the blatant misuse of this information by the media, thus further fueling my argument that the entire field is too politicized. The authors lament over seeing newspaper titles such as "Global Warming -- Blame the Forest" and receiving emails from concerned people asking if they should cut down all their trees to fight global warming. Obviously, taken into context, this finding doesn't really "mean anything" in the context of rising global temperatures. Theoretically it should be a constant, but it does explain previously unexplained alterations of methane content in ice core samples.

So why did I include this? Simple. This finding is absolutely astounding, and completely flies in the face of decades of understanding on the subject. Yet again I will reiterate ... I am not supporting or attacking any side of this debate because I am a skeptic and I want to see better research. I honestly think that a discovery that green plants produce 10-40% of the global methane emissions on the planet is pretty substantial news and that it is something we probably shouldn't have "missed" up until now.

Finally, I want to make a practical, non-scientific observation. This entire debate is centered around fears of what is going to happen 100-200 years from now. I cannot even imagine what the world is going to look like in 2020 given the acceleration of advances in new technologies, much less predict what understandings, findings, and tech we will have invented over the next century or two. For all we know, humanity will lose a war to robots -- Hollywood tends to like that one, and theories such as the "technological singularity" actually support it as a possibility. For all we know, the next several decades will bring about the production of fusion-powered atmosphere processing stations. We may well enter into a domain of human existence where we are no longer at the mercy of our climate, or even catastrophic weather. From the beginning of this discussion, the main thing that has disturbed me is the "hype" and terror being sewn to the public on the basis of what I feel is an imprecise understanding of what is happening to our environment. I believe that this is completely counterproductive to actually figuring out what the hell is going on once and for all, and then finding ways to stop it.

I hope now that my point is clear.

In closing, farglebargle, I would like to welcome you to make constructive contributions to this conversation and appeal to the arguments being poised. In the mean time, please consider the one-sided nature of your accusations while you allow your pals to slip by unchecked. I would greatly appreciate it, Collar Chat being the scholarly place that it is, if we could limit our propaganda and accusation-slinging and keep everything peaceful and civil from now on. To further that, I would have to ask that you please relax some from your politically-motivated agenda.

Thank you in advance.