Oil and NASA's mission statement change

Hi Peter - hope the posts were a little food for thought, but also hope I haven't caused any undue alarm. I was trying to throw some info. out there people might be unaware of, esp. given the potential impact large scale changes in our climate would definitely have on human lives.

I can't say that this concept is original (although I haven't seen it elsewhere), but I liken the Earths climate system to the bioregulatory mechanisms in a living organism, in the sense that both try and maintain a homeostasis. In a mammal, various mechanisms maintain an approximate ideal temp range despite environmental changes. If a given mammals body temp should for whatever reason get too high, the self controlling mechanisms will be overcome, resulting in a rapid cascading organ failures and eventually, death. In such a case, the changes are gradual until the capabilities of the organisms homeostatic mechanisms are exceeded, resulting in a rapid failure across several systems nearly simultaneously.... leading to death if conditions remain unchanged.

I view the Earth in the same way, maintaining (within an ideal range) an "ideal" temp. range in which the ocean and ice cover are very important. If these mechanisms operational limits are exceeded at a given point as a result of gradual warming, several feedback loops apparently kick in, accelerating the process until we have a series of cascading "failures" in the climate control - <i>as we have known it.</i> I think that various climate "excursions" for which we now have good evidence, show that the Earth has (in some cases) become very inhospitable for humans for a few thousand years -but that a true runaway scenario is very unlikely.

Unfortunately - and this is why I posted, even a small, rapid <i>and large scale change</i> would be very bad, considering the world produces barely enough food (which certainly isn't distributed as needed)to feed it's people, and the fact that so many people live in vulnerable areas of low elevation, coastal proximity and in many cases subject to large scale disruption of food supplies if this scenario happens <i>today.</i>

Which brings us to the central point -- how soon/ how bad?
If the methane scenario is even close to correct then the changes in perennial ice cover, esp. as it melts from beneath will certainly affect heat distribution and sea levels. Its been interesting over the last 10 years watching the estimates of time for the west antarctic ice sheet to break up recede almost every year - and projected sea level rises to keep moving up. Since we have nothing but estimates which can now be roughly compared with past events, we can get some idea, and in at least some cases they were large scale rapid changes, even on human timescales. The fact that the warming and consequent effects is accelerating is a huge warning sign, which is why all people need to know the risk - which might not seem that big currently - but which could become catastrophic if we do nothing. The whole deal may be nothing new on the Earth - just very bad for most people.

Rob wrote 25 Sep 2006 : ". . . I liken the Earths climate system to the bioregulatory mechanisms in a living organism" . . . I view the Earth in the same way . . . "

This is the popular Gaia belief, which is why Rob goes on to say that "a true runaway scenario is very unlikely . . ." But the Earth system has not evolved, so is not really very much like an organism, consistent with the Eocene record Rob gave us the hyperlink to. It's much more like the USA's electricity grid, stable most of the time, but ultimately more catastrophic than we'd like it to be.

Yes, we do have lots of time, probably several decades, but as I wrote, from a human systems engineering perspective, this still doesn't look good because the job, making the Earth system much less catastrophic during this period, suitably stable for Earth's present 6 billion souls let alone its future 9 billion, is so super huge.

Hi Peter, good points - the analogy regarding warming was just a rough one, not meant to be complete or accurate outside of a narrow application. As far as the rapidity of climate changes....... yes, it really does look like time is running out. Perhaps I'm an alarmist (and didn't know it), but the warming benthic zones of the oceans, melting of virtually all equatorial mountainous glaciers, as well as melting of the northern perennial ice and hemming glaciers overlying the ocean areas of the anarctic ice cap <i>from the underside</i> seems an undeniable harbringer of worse to come.

The clathrate gun scenario seems highly likely, and I too think we will see gradual changes, followed by a steep acceleration in both scale and range. I notice you post from Australia - I live in south Texas, which has a very similar climate to large parts of Australia -it will be interesting to see what changes are similar/ dissimilar in such like climes over time.

As far as engineering projects that might help alleviate - or even prevent such a serious sudden warmup - the best one I've seen was that proposed by a group of scientists to spray SO2 in the stratosphere (sorry, dont have the link right now!) to form a thin haze to reflect sunlight. This would require constant maintenance...... and a lot of planes - wonder if it would be easier to nuke a 'dirty" SO2 rich volcano like Popocatépetl? Realistically, nothing will change until the more severe effects become obvious and people wake up and understand what should be important to them - as such, a rapid correcting method like the aforementioned is appealing; yet I can't help wondering about solving the problem outright rather than just working around it. I like to play with ideas and build them (when possible!) - I've been playing around with a way to extract and store large amounts of both CH4 and CO2 simultaneously..... main problem is a very large power requirement. I'm thinking that when/ if it eventually looks workable from all angles, I will post the complete proposal online somewhere - maybe it will have enough useable ideas - or even work well enough to be useful - in whole or part it wouldn't matter, as long as it helped. So far, it "runs" quite well in Autocad 2006 simulations - so possibly something constructive will come of it one day. It would be nice to actually help <i>do</i> something, rather than just watch helplessly []

Guys, My asking about the methane is because it was deposited by the biosphere at a time when the local enviornment was not iced. The north is very changable and there is data being amassed that clearly shows the Arctic has changed from hot to cold many times in the past and mankind has not been the cause. What man has done is drain swamps and removed forests which absorb CO2. So fixing this balance in the biosphere by growing more plants can remove the excess CO2 but doing that will not stop the ice in the Arctic from melting. The linkage is bogus. The north is very changable and nothing man does or does not do will make any difference. But growing more biomass is a good idea anyway because that will restore a balance that has been lost due to the loss of forest and wetland.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Jim</i>
<br /> The north is very changable and there is data being amassed that clearly shows the Arctic has changed from hot to cold many times in the past and mankind has not been the cause. What man has done is drain swamps and removed forests which absorb CO2. So fixing this balance in the biosphere by growing more plants can remove the excess CO2 but doing that will not stop the ice in the Arctic from melting. The linkage is bogus. The north is very changable and nothing man does or does not do will make any difference.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Hi Jim - you are right of course, rapid climate change is nothing new, and has occured without man. The problem is that we haven't been around as a civilization for one of these events; given how we barely produce/ distribute enough food in the short term to feed most of the Earths people, any severe stress on the system will be bad news for a lot of people - at a minimum until we can adapt.

Regarding the reservoir of greenhouse gases in the arctic - we are helping to liberate millions of years of stored up CO2 and CH4 possibly in a very short time. If this happens rapidly, there will be a period of time of unknown length before enough plants can grow to use the CO2. Most of the methane will remain to do its work until it photodissociates in the upper atmosphere.... into more CO2 - which takes @ 9.5 years. Incidentally, for all the estimates of the thousands of gigatons of CH4 at risk of liberation, I've noticed that there are no similar estimates of the CO2 reserves in the same deposits! Most of the scientists analyzing the warming are concluding that our current computer models are seriously underestimating the amount of warming we have had - much less what we can expect in our future. The problem is the rapidity and severity - we appear to be enlarging/ enhancing a natural occurrence and have little real plan -or ability to deal with the results. Believe me, after seeing good data indicating the output of our local variable must have increased (for example, melting ice caps on Mars, solar induced thermal expansion of the atmospheres of Titan and Pluto) - I have no doubt that warming we have is largely natural - nature just cannot counterbalance this rapidly enough for our comfort. It is no coincidence that so many species died out in lockstep with several Daansgard - Oescgher events..... that we know of. Further, it is apparently fairly easy to send the Earth into a very warm time..... whatever the exact fractionation of the composite causes, the warming evidence found in the geologic record proceeds in lockstep with greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.

Rob, You seem well versed on this stuff. Have you ran across any data or estimates or even some accknowledgement it follows that energy is required to make the process of warming and cooling proceed. The greenhouse gases don't generate any energy and since a warmer planet radiates more energy than a colder one it also follows the warmer planet requires more more energy than a colder one. In the case you are following( say a 5 kelvin change in temperature) the amount of extra energy for the warmer or colder Earth is many trillions of watts. How can this extra energy be provided? You say the data shows a greenhouse gas rise and temperature rise as well as a fall in both. Can you provide a link to any data like that. Research I've done on this has not located any data that you say is available. And in fact there is reason to think the Earth was very warm and cold when more CO2 than oxygen was in the atmosphere.