The link for our meeting is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89101098507?pwd=TlhaVFgvR2RKbk1HRU1wd254cXBSZz09
8pm Monday UK = Noon Monday California = 7am Australia AEDT
Look forward to seeing you then. I am interested to discuss John’s agenda points against the theme of Cooling Credits. I have written the attached rough notes on this.
Regards
Robert Tulip
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Hi all,
A few weeks ago there was a discussion on appropriate analogies/metaphors/similes to convey the global warming issue and the measures we could undertake against it to the public and politicians. I prefer the analogy/metaphor/simile of our planet as a leaking passenger ship beginning to list with 3 independent, mutually inclusive choices facing its inhabitants, the passengers and crew: a) plugging the leak (stopping emissions), b) bailing out the water already in the ship (negative emissions), and c) keeping the ship afloat with external means (SRM etc.). The leaks can be stopped by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and the water in the ship can be removed by various techniques ranging from handing out buckets to the passengers, to installing pipes and pumps of various diameter and strength respectively. Albedo enhancement (geoengineering) would then be the equivalent of propping up the ship by attaching buoys/barges to the outside, or, to introduce an element of danger, have hydrogen balloons pulling up the ship to keep it from sinking further and bringing it to the horizontal – for a while. The other GHGs could be illustrated with dissolved salts of different densities in the water flowing in.
The analogy/metaphor/simile of the sinking ship, (we are all in the same boat, the rats fleeing the ship for Mars, etc.) is already anchored in the public consciousness and can be related to global warming – we are “drowning” in heat, floods, and sea level rise – in a quantitative manner. It can be conveyed in language ranging from vernacular to poetic and depicted in cartoons. Poorer people living in lower decks and the rich higher up. It will also be clear why waiting for the crew to stop the leak before the passengers are allowed to start bailing out the water already inside the ship is so absurd. Since the ship is listing, propping it to the horizontal would benefit everyone on board. I can see cartoonists having fun here.
The amount of fossil carbon burnt to CO2 is reaching 600 Gt C soon. This number cannot be grasped but can be visualised by converting elemental mass into living volume: biomass, the stuff of organisms, is 80 % water and 20 % dry weight of which half is carbon (the other half is oxygen, nitrogen etc.). So, the volume of biomass in which 1 tonne of carbon is embedded will occupy roughly 10 m3 and 1 Gt carbon would be 10 cubic km biomass. So, 600 Gt C is 6,000 km3 of say, compressed seaweed. It also happens to be 50 Gt C more than the total amount of carbon in the biosphere, including the deep biosphere.
Now imagine a wall of compressed seaweed biomass or any plant material 1 km high, 1 km broad and 6,000 km long to visualise the dimensions of the legacy CO2.
BTW a meteorologist from my institute checked the website Windy (thanks Stephen!) and found that it was warmer over Greenland than in the US during the December "bomb cyclone".
Best wishes, see you all later today,
Victor
Important discussion on cooling credits. Here's my quick and dirty (hopefully not too dirty) input.
In brief, claims that cooling credits are the way forward will not succeed until there is an unequivocal message from the scientific community that cooling is now on the critical path to avoiding climate catastrophe, and that message has been received and understood by the majority of the political incumbents in the leading 20 global economies.
By the time that happens the likelihood is that market driven responses to climate change will be wholly inadequate and a truly war-time footing will be required, again, by those leading economies. The role that cooling credits might have in that regime can be left to emerge in response to the needs of the moment.
Ergo: let’s not get too lost in the weeds of designing a coherent cooling credit system now, rather let’s set out its broad parameters and devote most of our energy to getting the scientific community to get behind cooling and then getting that message through to the world’s political and economic elite.
Regards
Robert
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Important discussion on cooling credits. Here's my quick and dirty (hopefully not too dirty) input.
In brief, claims that cooling credits are the way forward will not succeed until there is an unequivocal message from the scientific community that cooling is now on the critical path to avoiding climate catastrophe, and that message has been received and understood by the majority of the political incumbents in the leading 20 global economies.
By the time that happens the likelihood is that market driven responses to climate change will be wholly inadequate and a truly war-time footing will be required, again, by those leading economies. The role that cooling credits might have in that regime can be left to emerge in response to the needs of the moment.
Ergo: let’s not get too lost in the weeds of designing a coherent cooling credit system now, rather let’s set out its broad parameters and devote most of our energy to getting the scientific community to get behind cooling and then getting that message through to the world’s political and economic elite.
Regards
Robert
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Hi Victor--If I am not mistaken, 600 GtC is roughly the amount of above ground terrestrial biosphere--so all the forests, grasslands, shrublands, etc. in the world. Below ground amount is think is a bit over twice that amount. That is, 600 GtC is a huge amount.
Mike
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Here is the link to the recording of the PRAG meeting.
The chat is attached.
Thanks all who attended, very good discussion.
By the way, I will be in the UK in May-June and would like to catch up with people then.
Regards
Robert Tulip
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Hi Mike
Victor said “The amount of fossil carbon burnt to CO2 is reaching 600 Gt C soon.”
Atmospheric weight of 5.15×1018 kg and CO2 of 420 ppm gives 589 Gt C now in the air, plus 3 Gt C in methane, assuming ppm and weight are the same.
As you point out, that total anthropogenic carbon still in the atmosphere is a bit more than total planetary biomass weight.
The site below puts the running total of CO2 emissions to date at 677 Gt C. If that is total emissions, would you need to factor in the half life of CO2, which I have read is 120 years, to get the current amount in the air?
Thanks, Robert
https://www.globalwarmingindex.org/ run by Oxford University says
What contributes to human-induced global warming?
Total Carbon Dioxide emissions: 2.482303958 trillion tonnes
(Equivalent tonnes of Carbon: 676,991,988,480 tonnes)
This number shows an up-to-the second assessment of total global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). CO2 emissions are the biggest contributor to human-induced climate change.
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Hi Robert,
One ppm CO2 is equivalent to 2.12 Gt C.
I am always worried about exaggeration, since I did not have the exact figure at hand, I wrote "reaching 600 Gt C". I was also trying to account for the carbon left in the active pool which is in the atmosphere, the surface ocean and the biosphere and which needs to be sequestered. There might be estimates of how much CO2 has entered the deep ocean via downwelling of surface water in the N. Atlantic and around Antarctica, but since I did not have them I was being cautious. The remaining emissions have entered the active C cycle and the amount is around 600 Gt C, I guessed.
What people are not talking about is that the biosphere has taken up 200 Gt C in just 150 years (called the land sink by carbon budgeteers), the equivalent of the glacial/ interglacial difference. If this uptake were not related to atmospheric increase via
CO2 fertilization and was just the result of anthropogenic N fixation and deposition via rain, we would be shivering in an ice age. The N input is definitely also important.
BTW this extra carbon is feeding the brush fires all around the globe. I can see this increase in woody undergrowth through direct comparison between the hunting grounds of my youth compared to now in the Himalayan foothills where I grew up and which I visited in October. Huge deer (called sambar) can now hide close to our house. The ban on hunting in India also helps of course;-)
Best wishes
Victor
Hi Bruce and Mike,
Yes the Bar-On et al paper is the most recent and presumably reliable estimate. Here is a quote from their text:
Aboveground biomass (≈320
Gt C) represents
≈60% of global biomass, with belowground biomass composed
mainly of plant roots (≈130
Gt C) and microbes residing in the
soil and deep subsurface (≈100
Gt C). Plant biomass includes
≈70% stems and tree trunks, which are mostly woody, and thus
relatively metabolically inert.
If 320 GtC is the aboveground biomass then it would be hardpressed to accommodate the 200 Gt C it has taken up according to the Global carbon budget (GCB) in the last 150 years (https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4811/2022/).
Interestingly, this is also the total amount released due to land-use changes. However, on an annual basis the land sink has overtaken the land-use release. How much longer the sink can increase and where the carbon is being deposited seems to be open.
When emissions are stopped, the oceans will also more or less stop taking up CO2 via the solubility pump because acidifcation equilibrium will have been reached. But the CO2 fertilization effect on the biosphere will continue, so space and fires will become the constraining factor. Strangely, my GCB contacts don't seem to worry where the missing 200 GtC actually is in their vegetation models.
With regard to marine biomass changes, I doubt the amounts would be significant to the global C budget.
With my best wishes,
Victor
Hi Mike and Victor,
As far as I'm aware this paper represents the most up-to-date estimate of the total amount of carbon in living biomass. Although I strongly suspect the marine biomass is underestimated. What to me is interesting is when you read into the paper they recognise that more than 50% has been lost as compared to 10,000 years ago.
Best wishes,
Bru Pearce
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Hi Robert--First, I think there is an error in your calculation.
The 420 ppm is by volume (you will often see this indicated by use
of ppmv)--so that means one has to adjust for different weights of
atoms as each atmospheric molecule is assumed to take up same
volume (as I understand it).
So, I think that means to calculate the mass of CO2 in the
atmosphere, you need to multiply by 44/29 (so molecular weight of
CO2 to average molecular weight of all types of molecules in the
air. Then, of this mass, multiply by 12/44 as molecular wight of C
to CO2. So, the 44 cancels out so, multiplying by 12 over 29.
Doing this, I get 895 GtC (I think you took 12/44 rather than
12/29). Now, this is the total amount of C in the atmosphere as
CO2. The baseline was 280 ppmv, so 2/3 of the 420 ppmv, so the
human increment to the atmospheric CO2 concentration is 1/3 of
895, or about 300 GtC. If total emissions have been 677 GtC, then
this is where one, roughly, gets the airborne fraction of about
one-half.
By the way, doing a similar molecular adjustment for methane, the amount of C in methane ends up about half your number, and I'll ignore that for the moment.
On the natural sink of CO2, there is a formula somewhere that
IPCC that is made of several separate exponentials (I think the
formula that I say may actually have come from one of the simple
carbon cycle models--e.g., by Oeschger, if I recall). One term is
uptake rate by upper ocean that has a few-year uptake, but the
constant out front is something like a quarter--that is, were the
atmosphere and the upper ocean the only reservoirs, this would
lower the amount in the atmosphere by a quarter--and that is as
much as that term can reduce the atmospheric loading. There is
then another sort of similarly sized term that reflects uptake by
the living terrestrial biosphere, and again, it can ultimately
(and quite quickly) only take up a quarter. Then the next term
reflects uptake to the deep ocean, which has a time constant of
order a thousand years (I don't recall the multiplier) and then a
similar term for take up to long term terrestrial biosphere. Then
there is a term for uptake on ocean sediments as well--and this
has a very long time constant.
So as to your question, there is not just one lifetime. The first half of an atmospheric injection is taken up quite quickly, but the next time scale is of order thousands of years (e.g., ocean mixing time) and then a time constant of 10**5 years for ocean sediments (assuming life in ocean continues, of course). So, all of this is not a single exponential and thus a single lifetime is not something one can properly state.
Best, Mike
Hi Mike and Victor,
As far as I'm aware this paper represents the most up-to-date estimate of the total amount of carbon in living biomass. Although I strongly suspect the marine biomass is underestimated. What to me is interesting is when you read into the paper they recognise that more than 50% has been lost as compared to 10,000 years ago.
Best wishes,
Bru Pearce
E-mail b...@envisionation.org
Skype brupearce
Work +44 20 8144 0431 Mobile +44 7740 854713
Salcombe, Devon, UK
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From: healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Michael MacCracken
Sent: 17 January 2023 02:49
To: Victor Smetacek <Victor....@awi.de>; rob...@rtulip.net; 'John Nissen' <johnnis...@gmail.com>; 'Planetary Restoration' <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>
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Dear Peter,
Thanks for attending the PRAG meeting. One of the agreed actions was a response to the AGU draft position statement which is required by Friday.
We feel strongly that the AGU is too focussed on analysing and modelling the Earth System and needs to be more active in exploring methods of dealing with the climate crisis other than just emissions reduction.
There were keynote speeches at the AGU
conference demanding a more proactive approach from the AGU. For example,
the Amazon is liable to revert to savannah if global temperatures rise above 2.3
to 2.4C (with respect to IPCC’s 1900 baseline). This was a plea for help
from the scientific community for dealing with one particular tipping point but
there are many other tipping points to be addressed, particularly in the Arctic, which received only scant attention at the
conference.
If the situation in the Amazon, Arctic and some other regions demands urgent SRM
cooling, as seems increasingly likely, is the scientific community ready with
appropriate modelling to optimise deployment, minimise side-effects, and
support monitoring from satellite? Have the cooling parameters been
established: how much cooling power is required and in which places?
We believe that the AGU needs to expand its remit and its ambition. Practical means of cooling intervention and its huge potential benefits are surely worthy of research, as well as continued research on CO2 removal and other technologies to help reverse climate change. In this respect, the AGU could complement the work of IPCC which is almost entirely focussed on emissions reduction. We would welcome this more proactive approach from the AGU in the future.
Cheers, John