Merged Global Warming Discussion II: Heated Conversation

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R-j, as you point out volcanic emissions have always been around us, they are part of the background flux of CO2. Unless the rate or scale of eruptions change they have little long term effect. Large eruptions have a short term cooling effect due to the release of aerosols.
 
Increase in Arctic cyclones is linked to climate change, new study shows
47 minutes ago
Winter in the Arctic is not only cold and dark, it is also storm season when hurricane-like cyclones traverse the northern waters from Iceland to Alaska. These cyclones are characterized by strong localized drops in sea level pressure, and as Arctic-wide decreases in sea level pressure are one of the expected results of climate change, this could increase extreme Arctic cyclone activity, including powerful storms in the spring and fall.
A new study in Geophysical Research Letters uses historical climate model simulations to demonstrate that there has been an Arctic-wide decrease in sea level pressure since the 1800's.
"This research shows that the Arctic appears to be expressing symptoms expected from ongoing climate change," said Dr. Stephen Vavrus from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The long-term decline in atmospheric pressure over most of the Arctic is consistent with the response typically simulated by climate models to greenhouse warming, and this study finds a general corresponding increase in the frequency of extreme Arctic cyclones since the middle 19th century."
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http://phys.org/news/2014-02-arctic-cyclones-linked-climate.html
 
macdoc said:
For the less informed albedo changes like this are a primary driver of climate change tho not on the same scale as AGW changes.
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Prove it.

Nothing in the link says that. It's your claim.

The IPCC does not agree with you.
 
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Bit more on the end Permian....it happened much quicker than thought...

Giant mass extinction quicker than previously thought: End-Permian extinction happened in 60,000 years
Date:
February 10, 2014
Source:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary:
The largest mass extinction in the history of animal life occurred some 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of life on land -- including the largest insects known to have inhabited Earth. Multiple theories have aimed to explain the cause of what's now known as the end-Permian extinction, including an asteroid impact, massive volcanic eruptions, or a cataclysmic cascade of environmental events. But pinpointing the cause of the extinction requires better measurements of how long the extinction period lasted. The end-Permian extinction happened in 60,000 years -- much faster than earlier estimates, according to new research.
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more
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140210161334.htm
 
Consequences

How the Spreading Symptoms of Climate Change Can be Deadly

The hallmarks of a warming climate, heavier rains, more severe droughts, rising sea levels and longer growing seasons, are spreading a variety of pathogens throughout the world

Feb 18, 2014 |By Daniel Lippman and ClimateWire

The hallmarks of a warming climate, heavier rains, more severe droughts, rising sea levels and longer growing seasons, are spreading a variety of pathogens throughout the world. Malaria is moving to the highlands. Lyme disease is spreading across the U.S. Northeast and eastern Canada. Outbreaks of cholera will increase with more unsafe water.

Those are three of the diseases that are becoming part of a growth field in medical research amid concerns that tropical diseases are moving north and south and that progress made to improve health conditions in previous decades might be undone.
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ing-symptoms-of-climate-change-can-be-deadly/
 
r-j said:
If currently volcanoes are calculated at 1% of our emissions,
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I said less than...
r-j said:
then a huge amount of just the normal yearly volcano output from the last 10,000 years, is still in the air.
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In the very long term CO2 is sequestered in carbonate rock, this rock subducts under a plate where the rock melts relapsing the CO2. This CO2 is then spit out by the resulting volcanic activity. Volcanoes don’t create new CO2 they are just recycling it.
r-j said:
If CO2 takes thousand of years to leave the atmosphere, (doubtful, but it is claimed
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Even after 100K years some amount of anthropogenic CO2 will remain in the atmosphere.
http://melts.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.fate_co2.pdf

r-j said:
But a huge volcano puts out far more quickly. When the cooling ends, we should see warming from the CO2. I mean a really big volcano.
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The Mt Pinatubo eruption, one of the largest this century, spit out only 0.05Gt of CO2. This is insignificant beside the 40Gt humans emit each year. Even a Supervolcanic eruption like Toba or Yellowstone would be less than 10Gt.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf
 
r-j said:
How much of the "heat" the ocean has, comes from the earth itself?
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It is generally calculated that the Earth itself emits over total surface area about 44TW (4.4x1013Watts) of thermal heat continuously (half from formation energy, half from radioactives in core. The Earth intercepts about 1.8x 1017Watts from the Sun continuously. So the amount of energy intercepted from the Sun is roughly 4 orders of magnitude greater than the energy received from the Earth's interior.
 
r-j said:
I have no idea. But certainly the ocean isn't as warm as it is just from the sun. The earth itself has a temperature, that the surface doesn't effect at all.

How much of the ocean heat content is from the earth's heat?

And if the earth stopped warming the ocean, how may millions of years would it take to cool?
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As long as the Sun was shining as it is now, that would not be an issue. Earth's internal energy emissions are ~1/5000 as strong as Sunlight.
 
r-j said:
That much volcanic activity would add 24,000,000,000,000 tons of carbon to the atmosphere. That is almost equal to all the normal volcanic output for the last 12,000 years or so.

Wait, that means in the last 12000 years there would have been the equivalent of 2 million eruptions, so maybe volcanoes ended the ice age.

Ha ha!
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How hard is it to understand " It would take 2 million Mount St. Helens scale volcanic eruptions to supply the amount of heat the oceans have accumulated over the last 50 year" ? It contains nothing about CO2 or the greenhouse effect, it is simply about heat. Heat from the Earth. The thing you asked about. It's about 1% of the heat input of the climate system.

While you are no doubt unaware of where most subsea volcanoes are, this ignorance is far from universal. Volcanoes don't just pop-up anywhere willy-nilly, they are the result of well-understood geological processes.
 
Trakar said:
As long as the Sun was shining as it is now, that would not be an issue. Earth's internal energy emissions are ~1/5000 as strong as Sunlight.
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"About 1%" may be an exaggeration then :).

The subject is certainly a red herring. Volcanoes and the Little Ice Age - that's a subject worth discussing. Volcanoes (or lack thereof) and early 20thCE warming is another. Volcanoes and current warming - no. That, as we all know, is caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect resulting from our industrious human behaviour.
 
CapelDodger said:
How hard is it to understand " It would take 2 million Mount St. Helens scale volcanic eruptions to supply the amount of heat the oceans have accumulated over the last 50 year" ? It contains nothing about CO2 or the greenhouse effect, it is simply about heat. Heat from the Earth. The thing you asked about. It's about 1% of the heat input of the climate system.

While you are no doubt unaware of where most subsea volcanoes are, this ignorance is far from universal. Volcanoes don't just pop-up anywhere willy-nilly, they are the result of well-understood geological processes.
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The Madsci Science response put the amount released by internal heat as essentially nothing of significance.

Question:
We are told that the sun is the source of life on earth, and it clearly makes a large contribution. However, the earth's core also appears to contribute. How much of a contribution does it make? Relative to the sun?

Also, does the heat from the earth's core "drive" ocean currents to any significant degree? If not, what is the source of this energy?
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Answer:
Posted By: Dan Berger, Faculty Chemistry/Science, Bluffton College
Area of science: Earth Sciences
ID: 903557017.Es

(...)
The average surface temperature of the Earth (which is another blackbody) is 287 Kelvins (14°C). This works out to an energy output of 385 watts per square meter, while we have calculated solar energy input as 353 watts per square meter (which corresponds to a surface temperature of about 281 Kelvins, or 8°C).

Given the closeness of the numbers (±32 watts < 10%), the Earth radiates little or no more energy than it receives from the Sun. In other words, there is no significant energy received at the Earth's surface from any interior source. (Contrast this with Jupiter, which radiates about 10 times the energy it receives from the Sun.)

This answers your second question: the energy which drives ocean currents comes from the Sun, not from the Earth's interior. One has to go more than 100 miles down (the boundary between the Earth's crust and upper mantle) before reaching a point where interior heat is the primary driving force for physical processes.
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CapelDodger said:
Volcanoes and current warming - no. That, as we all know, is caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect resulting from our industrious human behaviour.
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Except the increase stopped a while back. That's the really funny part.
 
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