Back To The Jurassic In A Hurry: 500 Part Per Million Of Greenhouse Gases

Greenhouse gases (GHG) used to be 280 parts per million. Now they are around 500 ppm (including CH4, Nitrogen oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, etc.). This is more GHG than in at least thirty  million years, when the Earth was much warmer, and it is similar to CO2 densities during the Jurassic.

So we are presently transiting to a Jurassic climate. The transition to the Jurassic climate is happening at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than changes in the past. This implies that most forests of the Earth , desiccating and incapable to adapt fast enough, are going to burn… worldwide. This generalized combustion has a drastic potential consequence: generalized hypoxia.

So we should talk about climate catastrophe rather than climate change, and global heating rather than global warming: recent fires got helped by temperatures dozen of degrees higher than normal, in part from compression of the air due to record breaking winds. This is why parts of the Pacific Northwest which never burn are now burning. This will extend to Canada, Alaska, Siberia and already did in recent years. The catastrophic massive release of frozen methane hydrates could happen any time (it already does, but not as bad as it is going to get). It has up to one hundred times more warming power than CO2 (fires release it by billions of tons).

What is the way out? Well, hydrogen is the solution, in two ways, but has not been deployed as it could be. A decade ago, thermonuclear fusion, on the verge of becoming a solution, was starved for funding, and so was green hydrogen (the then energy secretary, Obama’s Steven Chu, prefered investing in batteries, it was more lucrative for his little greedy self).

Green hydrogen enables to store energy for renewables, avoiding blackouts which cut electricity to pumps to fight fires

We, Spaceship Earth, went from 275 ppm of GreenHouse Gases (GHG) in 1750 CE to 500 ppm in 2020. That doesn’t mean we double the Greenhouse, because the main GHG gas is… water vapor (H2O). What we can guess the best at this point is the EXCESS radiative forcing since 1750 CE, and that’s already nearly 3 Watts per square meter… Equivalent to a million and a half nuclear reactors at full power…

Climate forcing is a fascinating subject, with vast areas without a high level of scientific understanding (LOSU). However we know enough to realize forceful mitigation has to be engaged in immediately.

Joan Katsareas from Philadelphia, PA wrote back: “Thank you @Patrice Ayme for sharing your knowledge of the causes and extent of the climate crisis. I will be seeking out more information on hydrogen as a solution.”

@Joan Katsareas Thank you for thanking me, that is much appreciated. Hydrogen is indeed the overall solution we need at this point. Actually Australia, in collaboration with Japan, is building a gigantic, 15 Gigawatts, project in north west Australia, AREH, the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, to convert renewables from sun and wind into hydrogen products which will then be shipped to Japan. The same needs to be done all over, it would collapse the price of “green hydrogen” (99% of the US hydrogen is from fossil fuels).

In the case of thermonuclear fusion, the  international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) being built in France was slowed down by ten years, from reduced funding, and uses obsolete magnets (superconducting, but not High Temperature Superconductors, which can now be engineered with more compact and powerful fields). A massive effort would bring a positive energy thermonuclear reactor within 10 years… But that effort has not been made… except in China, the usual suspect, where a project, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), aims at an energy gain of 12 and a total power equivalent to a fission nuclear reactor. Its detailed engineering has been launched for a while (it’s supposedly symbiotic with the European DEMO project, which will produced as much as a large power station and will be connected to the grid. That too has been delayed, to the 2050s, although it’s feasible now).  The USA needs to launch a similar project, right away.

We face ecological constraints incomparably more severe than those of the Roman state. Rome did not solve its paltry problems, and let them fester: they had to do mostly with a dearth of metals, and the Franks solved them readily. This hindered the Roman economy. The situation we are facing, the threat of a runaway greenhouse is a terminal existential threat.

Look at Venus, we can look at our sparkling neighbor when the forests have finished burning, and the smoke dissipates (we were told it could be months). Once Venus probably had a vast ocean, and probably, life. But it died from a brutal greenhouse generated by Large Igneous Provinces (LIP). The same happened on Earth, on a smaller scale, more than once, in particular with the Permian Triassic mass extinction, which destroyed 95% of known species..

Now the rumor has it that indeed some life may have survived in the atmosphere.  This is not a joke. Consider: Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds. The detection of a gas in the planet’s atmosphere could turn scientists’ gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Life on Venus? Ah, science, all those possibilities… We never imagined we would ever think possible.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: I argued in the past, before anybody else, that the dinosaur-pterosaurs-plesiosaurs extinction, and extinction of anything bigger than 20 kilograms was due to volcanism (I was at UC Berkeley when the two Alvarez were, and they seemed too full of themselves with the iridium layer, and I like to contradict certainties…)

How would LIP volcanism set forests on fire? Well, by the same exact mechanism as now: through a massive CO2 driven greenhouse, what may have terminated the Venusians…

In this perspective climate cooling, for millions of years, visible in the graph above, would have disrupted those species which were not equipped to generate enough heat, and then the LIP accelerated into a vast holocaust…

The end with general burning and acidic oceans is hard to duplicate with a bolide, so the impactophiles have argued that the bolide magically impacted the most CO2 generating rock imaginable… Maybe. But an enormous LIP does all that CO2 production/destruction of the oceans, effortlessly… A friend of mine who is the biggest of the big in this academic domain, he decides who publishes, replied to me that the 66 million year old Dekkan LIP is too small… To which I replied that we don’t know what lays below the ocean… 

“Bleak” Climate Catastrophe Better Than Non CO2-Wall Street Energy (Says Pluto!)

‘Bleak’ U.N. Report Finds World Heading to Climate Catastrophes

What the United Nations doesn’t say is that the fossil fuel plutocracy is entangled with the banking and investing (“Wall Street”) plutocracy: they hold the world, and they love their fossil fuel, CO2 machine, because it intrinsically concentrate power in a few hands.

Four years after countries struck a well-advertised deal in Paris to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert the worst effects of global heating, humanity is headed toward those very same climate catastrophes, according to a United Nations report issued 11/26/2019, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, having expanded their carbon footprints last year.

“The summary findings are bleak,” the report said: countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions even after repeated warnings from scientists. The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”

Fat chance. Obviously, nuclear war is a more palatable option, according to most SUV drivers and jet-setting tourists…

The hellish energy system we use presently is used because the plutocrats in power get more power that way. And because We The Sheeple addicted to Pluto media, doesn’t know that another way was feasible, even 30 years ago.

Because CO2 Was Not Enough, We Added Mercury:

Next to San Francisco, coastal mountain lions can have lethal levels of mercury in their blood. How? Mercury rises, in a bio-absorbable form, in the coastal upwelling, and is condensed by the fog. This mercury is dropped in the ocean from smoke of coal generation, a world away. 

The rise in CO2 is brutal, most of it goes into the oceans, where it turns into carbonic acid, which kills plankton. As LIPs, Large Igneous Provinces, can do, massive CO2 production can kill oceans, collapsing food chains, worldwide, and killing oxygen production. Then, in combination with rising temperatures, massive oxydation all over (for example of permafrost and other half decomposed biomass ready to burn in tropical area), the oxygen content of the atmosphere could actually collapse. This is probably how the enormous mass extinction between Permian and Trias proceeded (form the eruption of the Siberian Traps).

We are engineering such an extinction now. When taking all the other man-made greenhouse gases in consideration, as we must, we are not far from 500 ppm of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases, a level not seen in dozens of millions of years. We are rising the CO2 at such a rate, that planetary heating is lagging, giving us a fake sense of non-emergency.

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The Road Not Taken Nuclear and H2:

Seas will rise by 20 meters, guaranteed. It could happen in decades.  This can be mitigated only by massive deployment of new safe nuclear and hydrogen (and its derivatives: ammonia, methanol) for massive green energy storage, transportation [1].  

Contrarily to what fake pseudo-ecologists have led us to believe, nuclear energy can be made perfectly safe: most reactors still deployed use 1950s technology made to maximize plutonium production. Plutonium free nuclear energy (for example from Thorium) is feasible, and could have been long massively deployed, if the effort to do so had been accomplished [2].

4,000 fourth generation, or Thorium nuclear reactors could produce all of the world’s electricity, and plenty enough “green” hydrogen to operate hydrogen trains, hydrogen ships, etc.

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Wealthy Countries Exporting Fossil Fuels Are Criminal. Why No Thorium?

Countries such as Norway and Canada or the USA, which geared their economies towards fossil fuel exports, while they could do something else, should be condemned, ostracized, vilified, etc. Them and their accomplice citizenry. (That Arabia or Indonesia, or Venezuela export oil is one thing: they have no choice to be part of the world economy; they should be encouraged to convert to green energy). Norway has actually gigantic reserves of Thorium, orders of magnitude above its fossil fuel reserves; it’s also one of the world’s wealthiest countries, per capita. The UN should order Norway to finance Thorium reactor research….  

In a further act of fossil fuel-Wall Street friendly malice, US presidential Sanders has dropped a fossil fuel tax from his government program. No time, he says. Well, that’s stupid, not to say venal. Fossil fuels have giant subsidies and kill of the order of ten million people a year (according to the WHO). A carbon tax would implicitly contain a no-subsidy provision… 

In this disaster, many noisy ecologists and scientists are actually working against their official position. For example, they would view my discourse as panicky. But I am the reasonable one, and they are the ignorant trying desperately to please the authorities while only mildly disagreeing with them (but for a few exceptions).

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Land To Go Under, Oxygen To Falter… What could go wrong?

Surely, they say, we won’t run out of oxygen. Hey, it never happened before. Well, that’s not true: it did happen before, but there were no monkeys around. Surely, they say, seas won’t go up twenty meters. But it did happen before, and not so long ago. In the Jurassic, seas were 70 meters higher.

More than three million years ago, in the mid-Pliocene era, before the apparition of the genus Homo, the planet’s mean surface temperature was between 2°C and 3.5°C higher than pre-industrial levels while the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was about 400 parts per million [3] – a figure we have already surpassed as greenhouse gas emissions continue rising.

New methods of analysing marine geological sediments to construct a global sea-level record have brought ominous news in 2019: the West Antarctic ice shield melted around 450K BP… under an “atmospheric forcing” milder than what we are already experiencing now (it was around 400 ppm CO2). And the rain of ominous news is getting worse. 

A study by recent PhD, Dr Georgia Grant from New Zealand, confirms that one third of Antarctica’s ice sheets melted during the Pliocene era (she has advisers older than her). Thus seas rose up to 25 metres above today’s level. The era experienced sea level fluctuations between 5 and 25 meters above the present, with an average of 13 metres.

My own opinion, long published, is that the two giant basins of East Antarctica Wilkes and Aurora, may also collapse soon. The scenario is clear: the mouths of said basins is at polar circle latitude. Once warm water sneaks below,collapse could be a matter of decades, even years; By themselves, they would rise seas by more than 15 meters… All real estate less than 30 meter high should be sold. Of course, few serious people would believe this… because they are uninformed fools, and they bleat: didn’t happen before…

Yes, it did: go watch the Jurassic. Maybe in a theater near you, oh simple minds… The Jurassic was the Jurassic because of high seas, high CO2, high temperatures. There may have been a little glacier up high somewhere on the high mountains in Antarctica.

Antarctica Friis Hills. Yes, Antarctica will melt. Completely. Soon. Brace for impact. Present mathematical predictions pertaining to the human impact on climate are purely linear. Reality is generally linear only in first approximation; reality in full tends to be nonlinear (yes, I use the same meta argument in the foundations of Quantum Physics)

Ninety (90) percent of the heat from global warming to date has gone into the ocean, and much of it into the Southern Ocean which bathes the Antarctic ice sheet. Said sheet has been protected by a curtain of freezing cold water. Soon it will fray. At least one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet, and perhaps as much as half—equivalent to up to 20 metres sea-level rise—sits below sea-level and is vulnerable to widespread and catastrophic collapse from ocean heating. Consider the map in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/runaway-antarctica/ 

… and look carefully how much of Antarctica is underwater. Much of it, it turns out is already covered with lakes (below the ice!)

Much of Antarctica melted in the past when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 400 ppm… And, as I said above, we are not at 400 ppm… We are already at 500 ppm. 

(OK, right, I am exaggerating, we will reach 466 ppm, all greenhouse gases forcing in 2020… Extrapolating slightly from: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/atmospheric-greenhouse-gas-concentrations-6/assessment)

As I said, long ago, more than a decade ago, a rise of two degrees Centigrade is too much, because it will trigger massive polar melting:

2 DEGREE CELSIUS RISE IS TOO MUCH!

I have explained the problem in detail… it is a nonlinear story.

Some will scoff. They have linear minds, and live to please the establishment. Typically they live in universities to please The Man, Pluto.

OK, right now, hundreds of people have been shot in Iran, secretly, and 200 have been hanged, even more secretly (I just talked to an Iranian friend who escaped Iran… yesterday. Nov 25, 2019…). Ah, and also 13 French soldiers died in desiccating Mali, yesterday: the French Republic is fighting the savage Islamists, rendered mad by the greenhouse, in places I used to know. Two helicopters apparently collided, during combat…  

When the greenhouse heating has become a daily catastrophe juggernaut, expect more of the same lethal fighting of man against man, and, if we are not careful, with nukes. Even Trump has to get used to the idea: all well considered, after all, the US is also back fighting in Syria (where the French are also engaged in combat against the Islamists…).

As the rats destroy their cage, as humans destroy their planet, they will fight each other. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Thorium reactors were made to work inside labs in the 1960s. To deploy them in a massive energy production program would have required a much less great effort than the Manhattan project (first, because we know they can be made). It’s a question of knowing what sorts of pipes to use, etc: tech details… Thorium produces little and not long lasting nuclear waste.

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[2] Once we have enormous thermonuclear reactors, to mechanically extract the CO2 from the atmosphere, we will be able to stabilize the heating of the planet to a Jurassic state, by lowering the CO2 ppm. 

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[3] The lowering of temperatures is associated to the rise of Homo. We don’t know if that’s causal, but a reasoning is easily done: lowering temps opened giant parts of the Earth to the sort of savannah park favorable to humans (by opposition to tropical forests)… In particular in Eurasia, augmenting enormously the niche favorable to the social killer ape.