Meschugge: Outlandish New Claims about the Half-Life of CO2
A recent paper by HJ Schellnhuber et al. from the PIK ([translated as] Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Consequences Research), also associated with the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, has put a new dimension on “climate change.” According to the study by Schellnhuber (pictured)
, carbon dioxide has a much longer half-life in the earth’s atmosphere than previously found.
Another scientist, Michel Crucifix of the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, not associated with the study, proclaimed “In fact, the mean half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is of the order of 35,000 years. Consequently, anthropogenic CO2 will still be in the atmosphere in 50,000 years’ time, and even 100,000 years, which is enough to prevent any glaciation.”
You see, the “good news” supposedly is that the presumed “climate-change” villain or evil-extraordinaire de jour, i.e., carbon dioxide (CO2) will postpone the onset of the next ice age by 50,000 to 100,000 years or more.
The Next Ice Age
You may recall, over the last 400,000 years, the earth has experienced four major ice ages, each lasting in the order of 100,000 years and separated by relatively brief interglacial periods of 10,000 or so years. With the last ice age having ended between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, the next one could be just around the corner. But now, according to the PIK study, we no longer need to worry about that for a long, long time. Well, if we were just that lucky!
To begin with, deep ice cores taken in Antarctica have clearly shown that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere rose AFTER the onset of warming, with a time lag of nearly 1,000 years. In other words, the CO2 followed, not led, the rise in temperature. In simple terms, that means that the CO2 in air is consequential for the climate. However, even if that delay were not the case worldwide, the new claim of a vastly longer half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere than previously found is totally wrong.
Half Life of CO2
The truth is substantially different from the new claim: In fact, over 30 independent studies, using different methods, have concluded that the half-life of CO2 in the air is only in the order of seven years, not in the tens, hundreds or mind-boggling ten thousands of years! My own calculations arrived at the same conclusion.
In fact, some 20,000 years ago, at the height of the last glacial period where much of the northern hemisphere was covered with a one-mile (+)-thick layer of ice, the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels had declined to around 200 ppm or 0.02{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}. The plants and oceans had been consuming so much CO2 that they sort of “ate themselves out of house and home.” At that level of 0.02{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, the partial pressure of CO2 simply is too low for nature to flourish. You can equate it with having barely enough food to survive but are still starving. If you are an otherwise healthy individual, you may be able to hang in for a good while but you would still continue to lose body mass. Weaker members of the group would soon perish from the lack of a vital nutrient.
Doubling Down
Clearly, the group around the PIK is “doubling down” by pronouncing a vastly longer half-life of CO2. In the financial markets, the action of “doubling down” may be beneficial to some people at some time but most of the time and for most people it rather leads to financial ruin; if you don’t believe me, just ask any good financial advisor about that.
Schellnhuber and associates have now proclaimed the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere to be nearly 5,000 times longer than that obtained from many other studies. Frankly, it appears to me that they are not just “doubling down” but actually are “multiplying down” on their losing proposition.
Of course, they have a little “back door” coming with their outrageous claim, namely that it’s only the “anthropogenic“ carbon dioxide (A-CO2). In other words, they claim it is only the CO2 from mankind’s burning of fossil fuels that counts for their half-life calculations. It’s akin to saying that there is good natural (N-CO2) and bad anthropogenic (A-CO2) carbon dioxide. Exactly in that claimed differentiation lies the big lie.
The Big Lie
The big lie, propagated by PIK’s and some other scientists is the claim that the A-CO2 is something different, a special subgroup of the total atmospheric CO2. This is absolutely false and the PIKsians either don’t understand nature’s chemistry or are willfully distorting and misrepresenting the facts.
So, let me repeat again: neither your houseplant, nor the trees in the forest, nor the primary producers (algae) in the water give the slightest hoot about the source of the CO2 they consume to grow. Nor could the plants differentiate between fossil fuel derived “anthropogenic” (A-CO2) and natural volcanism derived N-CO2, even if they wanted to. The corals or oysters in the water also don’t care how any of the CO2 got there; they simply combine dissolved calcium and carbonate ions to calcium carbonate that form their hard exteriors. The chemical precipitation of limestone in water is no different either.
A simple example ought to demonstrate the fallacy of the claimed CO2 dualism: If you have two identical coins in your pocket and you spend one of them to buy a loaf of bread, does it make any difference to your remaining money, or to the baker, as to which one of the two coins you actually used to pay for your purchase? The PIKsians try to sell you on the idea that it does.
But you and I know that this is not true! Nature has no different assimilation rates for N-CO2 and A-CO2. Therefore, it makes not one iota difference as to the source of the carbon dioxide that is chemically precipitated, converted into coral reefs, or assimilated by growing plants. Nature cannot differentiate between N-CO2 and A-CO2. They are identical, like the coins in the example above.
The pretense that nature could make that differentiation is idiocy, obfuscation, or worse!
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