I don't want to get sucked into the Global Warming issue

But, it could happen. I have read a lot about methane chemistry since it is realted to the origin of life in the late Hadean.

I just wrote what was to be a short comment on the marine retention, and recyling of carbon. It was kicked out by the Real Climate nannybot as "spam." While Real Climate seems to me to be one of the best climate blogs, their nannybot is a piece of shit.

I'll just post here, and use a link at Real Climate.

Several comments in this thread have been related to ocean retention of volatiles, and ocean mixing times. In coastal archaeology we have a problem radiocarbon dating materials derived from marine carbon. Marine upwelling brings sequestered carbon in the form of carbonate, and CO2 which is incorporated into littoral fish and especially mollusk shells. We can even see a difference in contemporaneous shells from brackish water and open shore habitats. For example, Mytilus and Chione can significantly vary. When contrasted with softwood charcoal, or collagen from terrestrial animals, upwelling carbon from southern California is about 450 RC years old.

Ocean/atmospheric equilibrium of carbon 14 generated in atmospheric atomic weapons tests demonstrated a rapid mixing of surface waters of just a few years. This gives an estimate of the mixing, and retention time for the Humboldt, and California currents. Marine releases of methane might leave sooner as CO2, and carbonate are obviously heavier, and could have even undergone repeated cycles of consumption and decay.

The potential significance of marine methane releases is obviously moderated by carbon retention times. A fairly simple experiment would be to measure the C14 in modern open-coast organisms (eg Mytilus sp.), and grasses, or non-riparian soft-wood species just slightly in-land.

We're doomed- Doomed I say!!!111!!

Or so says Guy McPherson, professor emeritus in the Departments of Natural Resources, and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Actually, he said, We're Done.

For those not inclined to wander over to read his blog, he maintains that due to global climate change, humanity will be extinct. Soon. He predicts, " ... the near-term demise of Homo sapiens," adding that "I’d give us until 2020 at the latest." Personally, I cannot think of any professional biologist that I have had at least one beer with who thought we could sustain our current civilization for long. I am classically ambivalent. Is there an eminent breakthrough in nano-technology that will make energy "free," or chemosynthesis trivial? Will we soon design genes wholesale?

I doubt it. But, I'd like to be wrong.

While I agree the methane has hit the fan, I must point out that Prof. McPherson is wrong. And I am not being an optimist.

We are well and truly screwed. But, we have been here before. There have been several radical climate events in our human evolution as dire as the one we face. From genetic data, we know that humanity experienced at least one "recent" severe population bottleneck event about 70,000 years ago. Modern humans carry a small number of genes that were "salvaged"* from two Hominid populations, the Neanderthals, and the Denisovans which are now long extinct.

J. R. Stewart, B. Stringer
"Human Evolution Out of Africa: The Role of Refugia and Climate Change" Science 16 March 2012: Vol. 335 no. 6074 pp. 1317-1321
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1317.short

W. Amos, J. I. Hoffman
"Evidence that two main bottleneck events shaped modern human genetic diversity" Proc. R. Soc. B 7 January 2010 vol. 277 no. 1678 131-137
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1678/131.full

There is the possibility that few species not currently domesticated will have a "favored" position on Earth. There will soon be hundreds of millions of humans in forced migration. They will encounter people already in place, and unwilling to share. There is an ethnographic study of how people behave under highly stressed conditions; Colin M. Turnbull's "The Mountain People." This is the advantage that an anthropologist, and archaeologist has over a biologist. We recognize that humans are very nasty, and tenacious.

PS: Someone missed my point. Hundreds of millions of people will be slamming into hundreds of millions of other people. They will slaughter each other. The chaos of war favors the spread of chaos, and disease. Additional hundreds of millions of more people will be killing each other just in reaction, plus hundreds of millions more will die from famine and disease. Humanity, in a genetic sense, will be just fine with a mere few hundred thousand survivors.

*Salvaged might mean kidnapped and raped.

"No evidence of Neandertal admixture in the mitochondrial genomes of early European modern humans and contemporary Europeans" AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 146:242–252 (2011)
http://www2.webmatic.it/workO/s/113/pr-1539-file_it-Ghirotto%20AJPA.pdf

Post Script: One of Guy McPherson's blog fans wanted to know why I did not mention being a chemist in my blog profile. I was a paperboy, a janitor, and forklift driver too. I felt like focusing on my academic jobs for my blog profile.

Two good methane chemistry articles are;

R. J. Ciceron, R. S. Oreroland
1988 “BIOGEOCHEMICAL ASPECTS OF ATMOSPHERIC METHANE”
GLOBAL BIOGEOCHEMICAL CYCLES,VOL. 2, NO. 4, PAGES 299-327,
doi:10.1029/GB002i004p00299
http://www.agu.org/journals/gb/v002/i004/GB002i004p00299/GB002i004p00299.pdf

Donald J. Wuebbles, Katharine Hayhoe
2002 “Atmospheric methane and global change”
Earth-Science Reviews 57 177–210
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173.3496&rep=rep1&type=pdf

News about Climate

The other day (August 27, 2011), someone calling themselves “ThomasPaine1” was yammering abut global warming on a newspaper comment section for The Ithica Times, and citing an article in the well respected scientific journal Forbes. The article was written by James M. Taylor of the Heartland Institute. These are the same biostitutes that promised that “real science” “proved” that tobacco smoking and nicotine could never kill you. They were well paid by the tobacco industry to say that, and their lies undoubted contributed to the deaths of many people. Today they take their money from the oil and coal industry, and they promise to earn that money just like they earned the tobacco industry money.

The original article that Taylor was referring to was, Spencer, Roy W.; Braswell, William D. 2011. "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance." Remote Sensing. 3, no. 8: 1603-1613. It is available free on the Internet.

It should be needless to say, but is apparently necessary, the article does not say what Mr. Taylor claimed it did. Oh, and global warming is real, and tobacco smoking will cause your death. I propose that all conservatives become very heavy smokers to prove that the Heartland Institute is telling the truth.

Now there is a follow-up

In a very surprising action, the Editor-in-chief of Remote Sensing, Wolfgang Wagner, has resigned from the journal. In his resignation letter, Dr. Wagner observed that,

"With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011 [2], the main author’s personal homepage [3], the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism” published by Forbes [4], and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News [5], to name just a few."

True to a conspiracy theory mind set, Climate Change Denier Roy Spencer (and lead author of the disputed paper) blames the "IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] gatekeepers" for Wagner's resignation. He apparently is unfamiliar with people acting honorably.

Rep. Butt of Tennessee on Global Warming

I want to commend Brad Johnson for collecting this clip, and send him some traffic at Think Progress.

I thought that it would be fun to have a contest on how many errors of fact are in Ms. Butt's load.

The format I thought up is in three parts; a "bidding" phase where we can put up the number, 4, 5, 6, etc... The second phase will be the highest bidder listing the errors they see, and the third will be a "wild card" prize if anyone can add extra errors in addition to the high bidder. The First Place winner gets the traditional bottle of single malt Scotch (I have a brand in mind). The Wild Card prize should be a box of chocolate full of anti-oxidants.





This is SOOOOO STUPIDDDDD that I cannot bring my self to break it down. Maybe after some beers.