Another ICE AGE coming

[Mech]

www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Ice_Age.html

Is a New Ice Age Under Way?

by Laurence Hecht

“Watch out, Al Gore. The glaciers will get you!” With that appended note, my friend, retired field geologist Jack Sauers, forwarded to me a report that should have been a lead item in every newspaper in the world. It was the news that the best-measured glacier in North America, the Nisqually on Mount Rainier, has been growing since 1931.

The significance of the fact, immediately grasped by any competent climatologist, is that glacial advance is an early warning sign of Northern Hemisphere chilling of the sort that can bring on an Ice Age. The last Little Ice Age continued from about 1400 to 1850. It was followed by a period of slight warming. There are a growing number of signs that we may be descending into another Little Ice Age—all the mountains of “global warming” propaganda aside.

Our current understanding of the long-term climate cycles shows that for the past 800,000 years, periods of approximately 100,000 years’ duration, called Ice Ages, have been interrupted by periods of approximately 10,000 years, known as Interglacials. (We are now about 10,500 years into the present Interglacial.)

What Causes Ice Ages
These cycles are not mere statistical correlations, as some Wall Street prognosticator working at the modern PC version of a ouija board might spin out. They are determined, with great scientific precision, to correlate with long-term, cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbital relationship to the Sun. Three fundamental orbital relationships are involved, each of which contributes to the amount of sunlight received in high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. When these cycles combine to reduce the incoming solar radiation (insolation) during summer months, over a number of years, the ice sheets which permanently cover Greenland, parts of Alaska, northern Canada, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, begin to advance.

At a certain point, the growth process becomes self-feeding, partly because the high reflectivity of ice and snow reduces the local temperature, partly for reasons that are not fully understood. The glaciers thicken and expand until they become continental ice sheets, one to two miles thick, creeping ever southward. Geological evidence shows that in the last Ice Age, the southern boundary of the continental ice sheet, known as a terminal moraine, stretched down the center of Long Island, through New York City, across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Southern Illinois and Missouri, then up the Plains States through Montana and Washington State. All of this real estate was buried under one to two miles of ice.

Geologically and climatologically speaking, we are due for another such glacial advance. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but radical shifts in the climate of northern regions can take place suddenly, and in some places may already be taking place.

How to Look at ‘Global Warming’
A very important thing to understand in interpreting all the swill that issues daily from the Global Warming mill (really the anti-industry, anti-population lobby, headed and pumped with money by the Royal Consort Prince Philip, and former Nazi Party member Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands), is that the onset of an Ice Age is not marked by global cooling. In fact, the very same astronomical conditions which cause a cooling at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, produce the opposite effect in the Southern Hemisphere, where there is much more ocean to absorb and retain the incoming solar radiation. Thus the global average temperature does not tell us anything of importance.

[Mech]

The geological requirements for an Ice Age are the presence of a large landmass around the Polar Circle and extending southward. A look at the globe, or world map, shows that those conditions exist in the Northern Hemisphere, but not in the Southern. Therefore, the important thing to look at is the climate conditions in northern and far northern regions. Some of the indicators:

• Since 1980, there has been an advance of more than 55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring group in Zurich. (From 1926 to 1960, some 70-95% of these glaciers were in retreat.)

• A comparison of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 1965 and 1990 Plant Hardiness Zone Maps, shows a southward change of one zone, or 10°F, between 1965 and 1990.

• Careful measurements of the oxygen isotope ratios in German oaks, which are rigorously calibrated to temperature data, show a 1°C temperature decline from 1350 to 1800 (the lowpoint of the Little Ice Age). Temperature thereafter increased by 1°C from 1800 to 1930, and has been declining since then.

• From weather stations in the Alps, and in the Nordic countries, we find the temperature decline since 1930 is also 1°C.

• Satellite measurements have shown growth in the height and breadth of the huge Greenland ice sheet, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere

On Nisqually
That brings us to the Nisqually glacier, up on the 14,410-foot Mount Rainier, near Tacoma, Wash. Just 85 feet shy of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states, Mount Rainier has 26 glaciers, and is the largest single peak system in the United States.

In 1931, fearful that the receding glacier would provide insufficient runoff for their newly completed hydroelectric facility, Tacoma City Light began careful measurements of the glacier. Since the mid-1800s, the glacier had receded about 1 kilometer. Annual to semi-annual measurements, continued by the U.S. Geological Survey and private contractors for the National Park Service, provide the longest continuous series of glacier measurements in North America.

The details are described in a report by government specialists, which appeared in the September 2000 issue of Washington Geology:

“The greatest thickening during the period of measurement occurred between 1931 and 1945, when the glacier thickened by about 50% near 2,800 meters of altitude. This and subsequent thickenings during the mid-1970s to mid-1980s produced waves that advanced its terminus. Glacier thinning occured during intervening periods. Between 1994 and 1997, the glacier thickened by 17 meters at 2,800-m altitude, indicating probable glacier advance during the first decade of the 21st century.”

That’s the story from Mount Rainier. Retired geologist Sauers, who has been observing conditions in the Cascade Mountains of western Washington for a lifetime, says “I’m preparing for an Ice Age.” Perhaps we all should.

Laurence Hecht is Editor-in-Chief of 21st Century.

[Mech]

WILLIAM COOPER: Ex Naval intellignce, NWO researcher,Former Holder of Top Secret Military Clearance....

" Global warming is a hoax. It is easier for the public to deal with and will give the ruling elite more time before panic and anarchy replace government. The reality is that overall global temperatures are becoming lower. Storms are becoming more violent and less predictable..."

From BEHOLD A PALE HORSE

[Mech]

MYTHS OF GLOBAL WARMING

www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Lagoon/1780/green.html



Global Warming is a much publicized subject which concerns many in the world right now. A United Nations summit in Kyoto Japan last December addressed the so called threat to mankind of global warming. The President of the United States has already committed himself to finalizing a treaty that would impose legally binding, internationally enforceable limits on the production of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2). That decision was based on the belief that global warming is significant, that humans are its primary cause and that only immediate government action can avert disaster. It is now stated fact that President Clinton will use Executive Privilege to implement the United Nations environmental agenda.

Yet there is no scientific consensus that global warming is a problem or that humans are its cause. Even if current predictions of warming are correct, delaying drastic government actions by up to 25 years will make little difference in global temperature 100 years from now. Proposed treaty restrictions would do little environmental good and great economic harm. By contrast, putting off action until we have more evidence of human-caused global warming and better technology to mitigate it is both environmentally and economically sound.

Much of the environmental policy now proposed is based on myths. Let's look at the four most common.

Myth #1: Scientists Agree the Earth Is Warming. While ground-level temperature measurements suggest the earth has warmed between 0.3 and 0.6 degrees Celsius since 1850, global satellite data, the most reliable of climate measurements, show no evidence of warming during the past 18 years.

Even if the earth's temperature has increased slightly, the increase is well within the natural range of known temperature variation over the last several thousand years years. Indeed, the earth experienced greater warming between the 10th and 15th centuries - a time when vineyards thrived in England and Vikings colonized Greenland and built settlements in Canada.

Myth #2: Humans Are Causing Global Warming. Scientists do not agree that humans discernibly influence global climate because the evidence supporting that theory is weak. The scientific experts most directly concerned with climate conditions reject the theory by a wide margin.

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A Gallup poll found that only 17 percent of the members of the Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Society think that the warming of the 20th century has been a result of greenhouse gas emissions - principally CO2 from burning fossil fuels.



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Only 13 percent of the scientists responding to a survey conducted by the environmental organization Greenpeace believe catastrophic climate change will result from continuing current patterns of energy use.
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More than 100 noted scientists, including the former president of the National Academy of Sciences, signed a letter declaring that costly actions to reduce greenhouse gases are not justified by the best available evidence.

While atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 28 percent over the past 150 years, human-generated carbon dioxide could have played only a small part in any warming, since most of the warming occurred prior to 1940 - before most human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.

Myth #3: The Government Must Act Now to Halt Global Warming. The belief underlying this myth is that the consequences of near-term inaction could be catastrophic and, thus, prudence supports immediate government action.

However, a 1995 analysis by proponents of global warming theory concluded that the world's governments can wait up to 25 years to take action with no appreciable negative effect on the environment. T.M.L. Wigley, R. Richels and J.A. Edmonds followed the common scientific assumption that a realistic goal of global warming policy would be to stabilize the concentration of atmospheric CO2 at approximately twice pre-industrial levels, or 550 parts per million by volume. Given that economic growth will continue with a concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists agreed that stabilization at this level is environmentally sound as well as politically and economically feasible. They also concluded that:
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Governments can cut emissions now to approximately 9 billion tons per year or wait until 2020 and cut emissions by 12 billion tons per year.
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Either scenario would result in the desired CO2 concentration of 550 parts per million.
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Delaying action until 2020 would yield an insignificant temperature rise of 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

In short, our policymakers need not act in haste and ignorance. The government has time to gather more data, and industry has time to devise new ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Myth # 4: Human-Caused Global Warming Will Cause Cataclysmic Environmental Problems. Proponents of the theory of human-caused global warming argue that it is causing and will continue to cause all manner of environmental catastrophes, including higher ocean levels and increased hurricane activity. Reputable scientists, including those working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations organization created to study the causes and effects of global climate warming, reject these beliefs.

Sea levels are rising around the globe, though not uniformly. In fact, sea levels have been rising for thousands of years- far predating any possible human impact.

Periodic media reports link human-caused climate changes to more frequent tropical cyclones or more intense hurricanes. Tropical storms depend on warm ocean surface temperatures (at least 26 degrees Celsius) and an unlimited supply of moisture. Therefore, the reasoning goes, global warming leads to increased ocean surface temperatures, a greater uptake of moisture and destructive hurricanes. But recent data show no increase in the number or severity of tropical storms, and the latest climate models suggest that earlier models making such connections were simplistic and thus inaccurate.
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Since the 1940s the National Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory has documented a decrease in both the intensity and number of hurricanes.
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From 1991 through 1995, relatively few hurricanes occurred, and even the unusually intense 1995 hurricane season did not reverse the downward trend.
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The 1996 IPCC report on climate change found a worldwide significant increase in tropical storms unlikely; some regions may experience increased activity while others will see fewer, less severe storms.

Since factors other than ocean temperature such as wind speeds at various altitudes seem to play a larger role than scientists previously understood, most agree that any regional changes in hurricane activity will continue to occur against a backdrop of large yearly natural variations.

What about other effects of warming? If a slight atmospheric warming occurred, it would primarily affect nighttime temperatures, lessening the number of frosty nights and extending the growing season. Thus some scientists think a global warming trend would be an agricultural boon. Moreover, historically warm periods have been the most conducive to life. Previously earth's plant life has thrived in a much warmer, carbon dioxide-filled atmosphere.

When all the evidence is taken in to account it is clearly evident that there is warming around the globe, but when it comes to the planet as a whole the planet has in fact cooled down over the previous twenty years. It is also clearly evident that what is claimed as 'global warming' is not due to mankind but rather due to volcanoes and other natural phenomena. It is estimated that humans have contributed about two percent of some local climate warming. Many scientists are currently exposing the myths of global warming. So rather than legislating in haste and ignorance and repenting at leisure, governments should maintain rational policies, based on science and adaptable to future discoveries. This may be so but for the agenda that is in reality underlying the global warming threat. Let us not forget the Hegelian Dialectic.

[Swamp Gas]

www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0615-07.htm

Digging In

Exxon Chief Makes A Cold Calculation On Global Warming

by Jeffrey Ball

ANNANDALE, N.J. -- At Exxon Mobil Corp.'s laboratories here, there isn't a solar panel or windmill in sight. About the closest Exxon's scientists get to "renewable" energy is perfecting an oil that Exxon could sell to companies operating wind turbines.

Oil giants such as BP PLC and Royal Dutch/Shell Group are trumpeting a better-safe-than-sorry approach to global warming. They accept a growing scientific consensus that fossil fuels are a main contributor to the problem and endorse the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which caps emissions from developed nations that have ratified it. BP and Shell also have begun to invest in alternatives to fossil fuels.



What particularly riles the green movement is Exxon's funding of several groups that continue to argue that the science doesn't justify caps. Among them is the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which received a total of $465,000 in 2003 from Exxon and the company's charitable foundation, according to a corporate-giving report that Exxon posts on its Web site.


Not Exxon. Openly and unapologetically, the world's No. 1 oil company disputes the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming. Along with the Bush administration, Exxon opposes the Kyoto accord and the very idea of capping global-warming emissions. Congress is debating an energy bill that may be amended to include a cap, but the administration and Exxon say the costs would be huge and the benefits uncertain. Exxon also contributes money to think tanks and other groups that agree with its stance.

Exxon publicly predicts that solar and wind energy will continue to provide less than 1% of the world's energy supply in 2025, a subject that others shy away from. Even if fossil fuels are the chief global-warming culprit, Exxon argues, the sensible response is to figure out how to burn them more efficiently.

"We're not playing the issue. I'm not sure I can say that about others," Lee Raymond, Exxon's chairman and chief executive, said in a recent interview at Exxon headquarters in Irving, Texas. "I get this question a lot of times: 'Why don't you just go spend $50 million on solar cells? Charge it off to the public-affairs budget and just say it's like another dry hole?' The answer is: That's not the way we do things."

The 66-year-old Mr. Raymond has emerged as the tallest lightning rod in the debate over global warming. At a London oil-industry dinner in February where he was the guest of honor, Greenpeace protesters poured red wine onto tables and called Mr. Raymond the "No. 1 climate criminal." Mr. Raymond, speaking on the same day the Kyoto treaty took effect, stuck by his prepared speech and called for a "reality check" on the treaty.

Exxon's approach to global warming typifies the bottom-line focus of its entire business. It is slogging away to improve the energy efficiency of its refineries -- primarily to cut costs, although this is also shaving global-warming emissions. But it says the business case for making more sweeping changes is still weak. It's a conservative, hard-nosed approach that has helped make Exxon the most profitable oil company in the world, with 2004 net income of $25 billion.

Even at its Annandale research lab, Exxon's focus is on adapting and improving fossil fuels -- not replacing them. Its researchers are trying to make cars burn fuel more efficiently and reduce emissions. Some futurists, and the Bush administration, think cars could run on hydrogen some day. Exxon is looking into the idea but puts its research dollars into extracting hydrogen from petroleum, not from water.

A growing chorus of critics says Exxon's strategy is short-sighted. As nations crack down on global-warming emissions, they argue, the foundation of the oil business is threatened because carbon dioxide, the chief suspected global-warming gas, is produced whenever fossil fuel is burned.

"There are two possible scenarios. One is that all the scientists in the world are wrong, in which case there's no climate change, in which case Exxon will do well," says Andrew Logan of Ceres, a Boston-based environmental group that's trying to put shareholder pressure on Exxon to go greener. "But if the scientists are correct and we have to find a way to transform the way we use energy, then Exxon is going to lag significantly behind its competitors."

Exxon isn't ignoring global warming. Besides its research in New Jersey, it has pledged $100 million over a decade for research at Stanford University into what it calls breakthrough "mega-technologies." Among them: capturing carbon dioxide after it's emitted and burying it deep underground. The Stanford researchers are also looking at ways to slash the cost of renewable energy. Exxon believes that if global warming really is a significant environmental problem, the only serious answer will be simple alternatives that even developing nations such as China and India can afford.

Though Exxon is touting the size of its Stanford investment in a new ad campaign, $100 million represents less than two days of Exxon's earnings. Shell says it has spent about $1.5 billion since 1999 building a business in renewable energy, mostly solar and wind power. BP says it has spent $500 million on solar since 2000 and about $30 million on wind over the past three years. Both Shell and BP continue to invest the overwhelming majority of their money in finding and pumping oil and gas.

Their renewable-energy investments are hardly big money makers. BP says its solar business has turned a profit but not its wind business. Shell says wind makes money but not solar. Both say short-term profits aren't the point. Enough is known about the likely contribution of fossil fuels to global warming, they reason, that it's prudent to start diversifying now as a kind of insurance policy. It's "all about growing a business," says Robert Wine, a BP spokesman.

Mr. Raymond disagrees. Spending shareholders' money to diversify into businesses that aren't yet profitable -- and that aim to solve a problem his scientists believe may not be significant -- strikes the Exxon chief as a sloppy way to run a company. "If I were to ask you if you want to buy an insurance policy, you've got to ask yourself a couple questions. No. 1, what are you trying to insure against? And No. 2, what are you willing to pay on the premium? And I haven't heard a very good answer to either one of those," he says.

In the late 1970s, as oil prices skyrocketed, Exxon diversified into an array of fossil-fuel alternatives, including nuclear and solar energy. In 1983 it opened the lab here in Annandale, a sprawling brick complex with 19 acres of interior space.

But after several years, Exxon still couldn't see prospects for renewable energy turning into a money-maker, especially since oil prices were falling in the 1980s. In the mid-1980s, the company decided to get out of the business and tapped Mr. Raymond, a South Dakota native then in his 40s, to oversee the retrenchment. "I was sent to clean it all up," he recalls. "What all these people are thinking about doing, we did 20 years ago -- and spent $1 billion, in dollars of that day, to find out that none of these were economic," he says. "That's why I feel so strongly about it -- because I've been there and I've done that."

In 1988, the United Nations established a panel of scientists to study whether the science justified clamping down on greenhouse-gas emissions, so called because they are thought to create a blanket in the atmosphere that traps reflected heat from the Earth's surface just as a greenhouse locks in heat. The panel's conclusions helped spawn the Kyoto treaty.

Exxon had already hired a Harvard astrophysicist named Brian Flannery in 1980 to look into global warming using mathematical models. In 1987, he was joined in the climate-science group by Haroon Kheshgi, a chemical engineer who had come to Exxon the previous year and had earlier worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Over the next several years the pair dug deeper into global-warming research and Exxon made grants to several prestigious universities, starting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Flannery says he told the MIT researchers: "Embrace the uncertainty in all of this."

On Mr. Kheshgi's office wall are pictures of a climbing trip he took to a Peruvian glacier in 1987. He has also climbed glaciers in New Zealand, where he notes glaciers are receding. But he insists it's not clear that human-induced emissions are the explanation. The link is "not that simple," he says.

Messrs. Flannery and Kheshgi were among the scores of scientists who helped write the U.N. panel's latest broad assessment of climate science, published in 2001. It said atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had jumped by 31% since the start of the industrial age and the 1990s were "very likely the warmest decade in instrumental record." Most of the observed warming of the past 50 years, it said, is "likely" the result of "human activities." Still, the panel said, models of climate change remain a work in progress. Among the remaining uncertainties it cited is to what extent "natural factors" unrelated to human activity play a role.

The Exxon scientists say they agree with much of the assessment. But they argue that policy makers often disregard the uncertainties noted in it. In 2003, Mr. Kheshgi and a University of Illinois scientist published a paper in an American Geophysical Union journal arguing that oceans, plants and soil suck up more of the carbon dioxide emitted from fossil-fuel burning than previously thought. As a result, the paper said, models that predict a big buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere need to be rethought.

That's the kind of research Mr. Raymond, himself a chemical engineer, likes to cite. "Our view is it's yet to be shown how much of this is really related to the activities of man," he says. "The world has gone through many cycles of climate change that man had nothing to do with, because man didn't exist."

Messrs. Flannery and Kheshgi argue in their papers for more research into how the world can live with, rather than avoid, the effects of global warming. That concept, known as "adaptation," worries some environmentalists because they fear it will deflect attention from reducing fossil-fuel emissions. But it's one of the subjects that the U.N. climate-change panel has studied, and Mr. Kheshgi argues it's only prudent. "Climate change might pose serious risks," he says. "But it might not."

Even some who advocate stricter curbs on emissions profess respect for Exxon's scientific work. "These are smart guys who shoot straight. I'm generally pretty impressed that their science is above-board and serious," says David Victor, who heads an energy-policy research program at Stanford. The program receives money from BP but isn't part of Stanford's Exxon-funded program.

But most scientists take an approach to global warming that is fundamentally different from Exxon's: They choose to emphasize what is known, rather than what isn't. They believe it's clear by now that fossil-fuel emissions are warming the earth and leading to dangerous consequences -- or clear enough, anyway, that it's more prudent to act than to wait until the science is airtight.

Last week representatives of scientific societies from 11 countries, including the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., released an open letter saying global warming is prompting changes "such as rising sea levels, retreating glaciers, and changes to many physical and biological systems." The letter said humans are likely to blame and called the science "sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."

What particularly riles the green movement is Exxon's funding of several groups that continue to argue that the science doesn't justify caps. Among them is the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which received a total of $465,000 in 2003 from Exxon and the company's charitable foundation, according to a corporate-giving report that Exxon posts on its Web site.

The antiregulatory Washington think tank has long opposed calls for a cap. Last week, one of its senior fellows, Iain Murray, wrote a column on a Web site calling the recent letter by the science academies an example of "climate alarmism" that has "needlessly thrown away the academies' reputations for unbiased information."

Several years ago, the institute filed a lawsuit against the Clinton administration challenging a report the administration had released highlighting concerns about global warming. Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe also was among the parties to the suit. Sen. Inhofe has called the idea that fossil fuels are contributing to global warming a "hoax."

What does Exxon's Mr. Flannery think about that? "If they're expressing a view that there's no risk that needs to be addressed, then yes, we would disagree with that," he says.

For his part, Mr. Raymond downplays the importance of the money Exxon spends on groups that talk up doubts about climate science and climate caps. "The facts are you don't have to spend a lot of money to aggravate the proponents," he says. But he doesn't apologize for Exxon's role in keeping the debate alive.

"We think we have a responsibility," he says. "If we think people are about to make some bad policy decisions that are going to have a big impact for a long period of time, somebody's got to say something."

[Swamp Gas]

" Global warming is a hoax. It is easier for the public to deal with and will give the ruling elite more time before panic and anarchy replace government. The reality is that overall global temperatures are becoming lower. Storms are becoming more violent and less predictable..."

Cooper was only telling half the story. An Ice Age is always preceded by higher carbon dioxide levels caused by increased cloud cover. We have increased cloud cover now by higher CO2 levels. Also, deforestation, especially in South America, where thousands of acres are being cleared for MacDonald's and Burger King grazing of cattle, is decreasing oxygen levels, and increasing CO2 levels. In addition to the natural fluxes of carbon through the Earth system, anthropogenic (human) activities, particularly fossil fuel burning and deforestation, are also releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. When we mine coal and extract oil from the Earth’s crust, and then burn these fossil fuels for transportation, heating, cooking, electricity, and manufacturing, we are effectively moving carbon more rapidly into the atmosphere than is being removed naturally through the sedimentation of carbon, ultimately causing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to increase. Also, by clearing forests to support agriculture, we are transferring carbon from living biomass into the atmosphere (dry wood is about 50 percent carbon). The result is that humans are adding ever-increasing amounts of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because of this, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are higher today than they have been over the last half-million years or longer.

Not all of the carbon dioxide that has been emitted by human activities remains in the atmosphere. The oceans have absorbed some of it because as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases it drives diffusion of carbon dioxide into the oceans. However, when we try to account for sources and sinks for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we uncover some mysteries. For example, notice in Figure 1 (schematic of the carbon cycle) that fossil fuel burning releases roughly 5.5 gigatons of carbon (GtC [giga=1 billion]) per year into the atmosphere and that land-use changes such as deforestation contribute roughly 1.6 GtC per year. Measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (going on since 1957) suggest that of the approximate total amount of 7.1 GtC released per year by human activities, approximately 3.2 GtC remain in the atmosphere, resulting in an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In addition, approximately 2 GtC diffuses into the world’s oceans, thus leaving 1.9 GtC unaccounted for.

What happens to the leftover 1.9 GtC? Scientists don’t know for sure, but evidence points to the land surface. However, at this time, scientists do not agree on which processes dominate, or in what regions of the Earth this missing carbon flux occurs. Several scenarios could cause the land to take up more carbon dioxide than is released each year. For example, re-growth of forests since the massive deforestation in the Northern Hemisphere over the last century could account for some of the missing carbon while changing climate could also contribute to greater uptake than release. The missing carbon problem illustrates the complexity of biogeochemical cycles, especially those in which living organisms play an important role. It is critically important that we understand the processes that control these sources and sinks so that we can predict their behavior in the future. Will these sinks continue to help soak up the carbon dioxide that we are producing? Or will they stop or even reverse and aggravate the atmospheric increases? With the use of satellites and field studies, NASA scientists will help to obtain crucial information on the carbon cycle.

earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.html

[Swamp Gas]

uanews.opi.arizona.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/UANews.woa/wa/SRStoryDetails?ArticleID=3670

New Research Documents Extremely High Atmospheric Carbon 14 During Last Ice Age

By Lori Stiles

May 10, 2001

A team of American and British scientists report that radiocarbon levels in Earth's atmosphere during the last Ice Age were more than twice as high as today, higher even than the nuclear weapons tests of nearly half a century ago. They also reported in the May 11 issue of the journal Science of having extended the record for atmospheric radiocarbon more than 45,000 years.

The researchers, who come from the University of Arizona, University of Bristol (U.K.) and the University of Minnesota, were able to extract a precise and near-continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in a half-meter-long stalagmite that formed during the last glacial period in a cave that now lies underwater in the Bahamas.


Marking time with carbon 14 requires an accurate record of atmospheric radiocarbon through time. Archaeologists, for example, use the radiocarbon time scale to date artifacts, but dates were only accurate as far back as 16,000 years. The information contained in the stalagmite effectively triples the calibration period.

University of Arizona physicist J. Warren Beck and his colleagues also discovered that atmospheric carbon 14 levels soared dramatically between 45,000 and 33,000 years ago. Beck says even more interesting was a dramatic spike in radiocarbon levels during a millennium that began 44,300 years ago, nearly twice as high as the "bomb pulse" produced during nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 60s.

The radiocarbon peak Beck and his colleagues found correlates to other peaks for other radioactive isotopes - beryllium 10 and chlorine 36 - found in polar ice cores and lake sediments. All three isotopes are produced when cosmic rays bombard Earth's upper atmosphere. Beck says this suggests much higher levels of cosmic rays were striking the atmosphere during the Ice Age.

While scientists have known for some time that atmospheric carbon 14 levels were higher and more variable in the Ice Age atmosphere than today, "the magnitude of variation revealed by our stalagmite is surprising," Beck and the others write in Science.


J. Warren Beck of the University of Arizona and David A. Richards of the University of Bristol, U.K, collaborated in the 3-year study with R. Lawrence Edwards of the University of Minnesota, Bernard W. Silverman and Peter L. Smart of the University of Bristol, and Beck's colleagues at the UA National Science Foundation Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility -- Douglas J. Donahue, Sofia Hererra-Osterheld, George S. Burr, Leal Calsoyas, A.J. Timothy Jull, and Dana Biddulph.

The team dedicated the article to the memory of Robert Palmer and Robert Parker, who made "invaluable contributions to exploration and fieldwork in the Blue Holes of the Bahamas" and who died in separate diving incidents in 1997.


The researchers used mathematical simulations to examine which of four possible factors might have produced high concentrations of radiocarbon in the atmosphere.

Three phenomena that affect the rate at which cosmogenic isotopes are produced in Earth's stratosphere. One is cosmic ray flux, the intensity of very high-energy "galactic" radiation coming from beyond the solar system. Two others are the strength of the sun's electromagnetic field and Earth's own magnetic field, both of which deflect cosmic radiation.

From rigorous theoretical modeling, Beck and the others conclude that variations in the strength of the solar electromagnetic field and in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field alone aren't enough to explain the fluctuations in radioisotope levels found in their stalagmite.

And, Beck adds, while it is possible that a burst of galactic cosmic rays from a nearby supernova explosion dramatically increased production of cosmogenic isotopes -- as previously hypothesized in other research by UA geoscientists Alex McCord and Paul Damon -- whether a supernova explosion would be powerful enough to push aside the heliosphere that shields Earth from galactic cosmic rays "is an open question."

Any one or a combination of the three cosmogenic scenarios may have contributed to elevated CO2 levels during the Ice Age.

"But the bottom line is that Earth's carbon cycle was significantly different than it is today," Beck said.

The fourth factor is the structure of Earth's carbon cycle. Most carbon on Earth is locked up in limestone and fossil fuel. A relatively small amount of "active" carbon circulates through the atmosphere, oceans, soils and biota.

The authors concluded - based on their mathematical models - that changes in the carbon cycle must also be partly to blame for the large fluctuations in the amount of atmospheric radiocarbon they observed. In particular, they say that the carbon cycle must have operated more slowly during the last Ice Age than today.

One way the carbon cycle may have differed during the Ice Age is a slower rate of ocean organism deposition on the deep ocean floor. More organic carbon would in that case be exchanged with the surface ocean and atmosphere. Modeling that scenario comes closer to the actual evidence, "but even this doesn't match the high concentrations in the observed record," Beck said.

What had to have been going on, according to their models, is a slower rate of carbon exchange between the surface ocean and the deep ocean. "If we slow that rate by about a third of the modern exchange rate, we get a simulation that looks like the observed evidence. Ocean mixing during the glacial period must have taken longer than it is today, " Beck said.

Ocean mixing in the geological present occurs primarily at two high latitude regions, in the North Atlantic and off the shores of Antarctica. A breakup of western Antarctic ice sheets, or an increase in freshwater icebergs floating into these regions, or changes in wind that contributes to ocean mixing influence ocean mixing rates and could trigger abrupt change in the carbon cycle to produce greater concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, Beck said.

While the cause of implied changes in ocean mixing rates or carbonate sedimentation rates is unknown, the authors conclude, the observation that the carbon cycle was significantly more sluggish in the recent past "may have profound implications regarding the oceans capacity to take up anthropogenic CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning.

"We should take this as a warning that climate changes may affect the carbon cycle in previously unexpected ways," Beck said.