We are in a CO2 drought – Not much time left for life on planet Earth
The circle of life on planet Earth
Oxygen O2, Carbon Dioxide CO2, water H2O and Sun light form the circle of life on our planet Earth. All of our food comes either directly or indirectly from plants. All the protein grain crops we eat directly. Cattle eat grass and we eat cattle. All our food is processed CO2. Without plants there is no life of any form on Earth.
When plants grow they are fed with water. They breath in CO2 and, through a process of photosynthesis with the Sun, they breath out O2. Animals and humans breath in that O2 and breath out CO2. We humans breath out 40,000 ppm of CO2.
Plants need a minimum of 150ppm of CO2 to grow.
The more CO2 they get the less water they need and visa versa.
Commercial greenhouses up the amount of CO2 in the greenhouse to 1,000 – 2,000 ppm for optimal plant growth.
Without CO2 we are all extinct.
Sequestration
During ice ages the cold oceans sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere and into the oceans.During the last ice age which ended just 12,000 years ago, CO2 dropped to 180 ppm.
Plants do not grow with CO2 at 150 ppm or less. There is evidence of plant stress during this last ice age period.All our food comes from plants.
Without CO2 there will be no plants and therefore no life on planet Earth at all. We were a mere 30 ppm short of the total extinction of all life on Earth.
Further, CO2 is outgassed back into the atmosphere during interglacial warm periods. But it is also sequestered out of the oceans and into limestone. This is a permanent sequestration out of the ocean/atmosphere system.
CO2 has been gradually taken out of the system for the past 500 million years. We are now in a severe CO2 drought.
We are only a few more ice ages away from there being not enough CO2 to sustain life on Earth.
Types of Limestone
There are two different types of limestone. Biological Limestone where organisms capable of forming calcium carbonate, crushed coral, shells and skeletons, can thrive and easily extract the needed ingredients from ocean water. Coral reefs become limestone the moment that the living polyp builds the calcium carbonate chamber in which it lives. And Chemical Limestone formed from the weathering materials of calcium carbonate and calcium from limestone and igneous rock.
The materials in biological limestone already contain carbon in the form of calcium carbonate CaCO3. The weathering products of igneous rocks capture carbon by reactions with seawater
and ground waters to form limestone. The capture of the CO3 ion is the main process, and that comes from the breakdown of carbonic acid.
Weathered limestone contains some carbon as CO3 and captures CO2 from the ocean. Most limestone is biological and comes from coral reefs. Chemical limestones are thought to be less abundant than biological limestones.
Of the two chemical types marine water oolites are the dominate deposit and account for 1/3 of the total carbonate record the other 2/3 is biological.
Most Limestone is essentially what used to be coral reefs.
The term ‘sand’ means a clastic (broken reef debris) grain size of about 0.1mm to 1mm. Most sandstones consist of quartzose clastic material, but some limestones are also composed of sand-sized grains of carbonate; these latter rocks are called calcarenites.
When defining limestone and sandstone, the scientists at the time decided that all rocks containing Calcium Carbonate CaCO3 were classified as limestone.
Then there is sedimentary limestone formed from Urey’s reaction which is both a recycling of limestone previously sequestered from the atmosphere along with the weathering components of igneous rocks.
Coral is an animal. It’s food source is algae called zooxanthellae which lives in the tissues of coral. The algae use sunlight and carbon dioxide (from the ocean waters) to make sugars in the process of photosynthesis which make up 98 per cent of the food for the coral.
Limestone masses accumulate from coralline debris in mainly shallow waters in all oceans of the world, and are transformed by time and by plate tectonic processes into major outcrops on land and in the highest of mountains. For a geology lesson on the make up and formation of limestone from a geologist, see the following short video.
“Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas, which is another 270 million year old limestone formation. It’s an ancient coral reef which is thousands of feet thick. As sea levels rose, the coral reef grew with it. . . . Coral reefs adjust to whatever the current sea level is.
The sea levels have always been moving up and down so long as there has been oceans on the Earth. Yet coral reefs have thrived and prospered despite changes in sea level, changes in temperature and changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
Below is another example of an ancient coral reef, the Winjana Gorge in the Canning Basin of Western Australia.
Note the classic buildup of a reef complex. There is the active reef core where much of the coralline activity takes place; basinwards one gets an active erosional foreslope of coarse clastic material (broken reef debris) cemented by secondary calcite; these deposits extend further into the basin and gradually become laminated muddy limestones.
Behind the reef core one gets more laminated limey rocks – back-reef finer grained limestones comprised of limey silts and mud.
Tony Heller makes the distinction between Earth and Venus. Venus has 96 percent CO2 in it’s atmosphere. Earth has the equivalent amount of CO2 in limestone and carbonate rocks.
The difference between the two planets is that Earth has 71 percent oceans with lots of water. That allows coral reefs and shellfish to grow and extract CO2 into what ultimately becomes limestone. Without oceans, Earth would still have 95 percent atmospheric CO2.
Limestone can be found 8,000 feet up the Grand Canyon and also at the top of Mt Everest.
“As two crustal plates collide, heavier rock is pushed back down into the earth’s mantle at the point of contact. Meanwhile, lighter rock such as limestone and sandstone is pushed upward to form the towering mountains.
At the tops of the highest peaks, like that of Mount Everest, it is possible to find 400-million-year-old fossils of sea creatures and shells that were deposited at the bottom of shallow tropical seas.
Now the fossils are exposed at the roof of the world, over 25,000 feet above sea level.
The peak of Mount Everest is made up of rock that was once submerged beneath the Tethys Sea, an open waterway that existed between the Indian subcontinent and Asia over 400 million years ago.”
“The summit of Mount Everest was actually the seafloor 470 million years ago”
Patrice Poyet wrote in his book:
“99.9618 percent of the CO2 ever present in the atmosphere has been removed by natural processes over geological times and stored in one form or another, the major storage being limestones and carbonated rocks more generally, see e.g. for a discussion of Urey’s reaction (Kellogg et al., 2019).
The reaction extracts CO2 from the atmosphere in acid rain that reacts with calcium silicates, the products are transported to the oceans where organic and inorganic processes results in the deposition of calcium carbonates.
The basic reaction combines atmospheric CO2 with a calcium silicate to generate a calcium carbonate plus silica.”
The calcium silicates that Urey refers to are the byproducts of weathering of limestone and igneous rocks.
Returning to Poyet.
“carbonate weathering is not a significant contributor to changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2 (Berner and Berner, 2012). This understanding is based on the following reaction showing that the weathering of carbonate on land is exactly compensated by the opposite precipitation reaction in the ocean 56” (Anorthite) CaAl2 Si2O8+2CO2+3H2O⇒Ca2++2 HCO3−+Al2Si2O5(OH )4(Kaolinite) (69)
In this mono-directional reaction we use 2 moles of CO2 whereas the precipitation of calcite (using Ca2++ 2 HCO3-) will just liberate one (therefore the ocean operate as a CO2 sink);”
“The carbonate reservoir (limestones and sediments) is the largest carbon reservoir at the surface of the Earth along with the fossil organic carbon reservoir. Accumulating during the Earth’s geological history (essentially during the Proterozoic era), its size is estimated as > 50,000 000 Gt-C (carbonate), in the range [66,000,000 Gt-C – 100,000,000 Gt-C] and the fossil organic is > 13,000,000 Gt-C 61 (kerogen) (Berner and Berner, 2012).
The amounts of C stored in the atmosphere and in the ocean are dwarfed in comparison at respectively 875 Gt-C (2019) and [36,000-38,000] Gt-C.
E.g. There is 75,428 to 114,286 times more CO2 in carbonate rock in the Earth’s crust than in the atmosphere}“ carbonate weathering . . . of continental surfaces consumes 0.3 Gt yr-1 of atmospheric carbon.”[Emphasis added]
Limestone and sandstone form one percent of the Earth’s crust with limestone being 0.25 percent and sandstone being 0.75 percent. The thickness of the Earth’s crust varies with different reference sites but averaging them comes to a global average of 20 Klms thick. If you were to uniformly distribute all the limestone and sandstone evenly over Earth’s surface it would be 200 metres thick with limestone being 50 metres thick.
Carbon, in all its forms, is only 0.03 percent of the Earth’s crust which, if you spread that evenly over the Earth’s surface would only be 6 metres thick.
Contained in all the limestone is calcite or calcium carbonate CaCO3, which came out of the atmosphere as CO2 millions of years ago. There are many geochemistry equations involved with all these processes.
Igneous rocks
Igneous rock is formed through the cooling and solidification of magma or lava. Igneous and metamorphic rocks make up 90–95 percent of the top 16 kilometres (9.9mi) of the Earth’s crust by volume.
Igneous rocks form about 15 percent of the Earth’s current land surface.
Most of the Earth’s oceanic crust is made of igneous rock. There are relatively few minerals that are important in the formation of common igneous rocks, because the magma from which the minerals crystallize is rich in only certain elements: silicon, oxygen, aluminium, sodium, potassium, calcium, iron, and magnesium. These are the elements that combine to form the silicate minerals, which account for over ninety percent of all igneous rocks.
The weathering question
A particularly important form of dissolution is carbonate dissolution, in which atmospheric carbon dioxide enhances solution weathering.
Carbonate dissolution affects rocks containing calcium carbonate, such as limestone and chalk.
It takes place when rainwater combines with carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid, a weak acid, which dissolves calcium carbonate (limestone) and forms soluble calcium bicarbonate.
This source of limestone is nothing much more than recycling of limestone that has already been sequestered out of the system. There is a small amount of extra atmospheric CO2 added to it. It is certainly not the major source of limestone on Earth.
The IPCC have just 0.15 percent of CO2 being sequestered out of the atmosphere into weathering of carbonate rocks, which is quite minuscule, and all is transported by rivers into the oceans to reform once again as limestone.
A portion of this 0.15 percent reacts with the calcium from the weathering of igneous rock which captures CO2 dissolved in the rivers and oceans. This forms into limestone in the oceans.
The permanent sequestration of CO2 out of the ocean/atmosphere system via the weathering of igneous rocks into sedimentary limestone plays a reasonably significant role in the total permanent sequestration.
The mantle and core will continue to release CO2 via volcanoes, as it has done so since the beginning of planet Earth. But if you look at the concentration of atmospheric CO2 over geological timescale chart above, volcanic emissions have never been enough to prevent the decline of CO2 over time meaning the permanent sequestration via coral into limestone and weathering of igneous rocks into limestone by far outweighs volcanic release back into the system.
Not much time left
Our Sun has been burning for approximately 4.5 billion years and still has approximately another 4.5 billion years to go. Human civilization will not last that long. At the current rate that CO2
is being sequestered into limestone we will be lucky to last another 2 to 3 ice ages, 200,000 to 300,000 years before all the CO2 will be sequestered out of the ocean/atmosphere system, atmospheric levels will drop below 150 ppm and all life on Earth above sea level will be extinct.
Life below sea level will go on for another few hundred thousand years before all the oceans stocks have been sequestered into limestone and then all sea life will also go extinct. If you look at the concentration of atmospheric CO2 over geological timescales chart above and extend that down trend line, it has almost passed the 150 ppm level.
We were a mere 30 ppm short of that level in the last ice age. However we may have been given a reprieve. The warm oceans are currently outgassing and forming a new higher equilibrium with the atmosphere. That should be sufficient to see us through the next ice age.
That is not a guarantee though. There is always the error of mixing proxy with measured data. Ice core proxy data shows CO2 levels during the current Holocene not rising above 300 ppm until the 20th century.
Referring to the last ice age and Holocene periods, Dr Robert Ian Holmes says:
Why does the plant stomata record show a highly variable record for atmospheric CO2 , ranging by 250ppm, when at the same time the ice core record for the same period shows a monotonic record varying by just 20ppm? He puts the variance down to the Knudsen diffusion effect. And cites Kowalewski et al 2006, Johnsen et al 2001 & Jaworowski et al 1992
Holmes says:
the ice core record for CO2 is almost certainly wrong . If Poyet’s calculations are correct, the time for that extinction event could be even shorter. There are 38,000 Gt-C in the ocean reservoir. Poyet calculates that the weathering of continental surfaces consumes 0.3 Gt yr -1 of atmospheric carbon. To that we need to add the sequestration into coral which is 2/3 of the total 0.6 Gt yr -1 making a total of 0.9 Gt yr-1. Dividing that into the 38,000 Gt-C in the ocean we get just 42,222 years left before all the ocean CO2 reservoir is used up.
All of this means that it is entirely possible we could drop down below 150 ppm in CO2 concentrations during this coming ice age. Our time left on planet Earth could be very short, less than 1 ice age. Dr Robert Fagan is more conservative. He has a depletion rate for CO2 at 4ppm/million years. At that rate we have 100 million years left.
Javier Vinós says:
Continental silicate weathering by CO2 is a process dependent among other things on temperature.
If the planet’s temperature decreases, silicate weathering rate slows down leading to CO2 accumulation
The only way to avert life extinction is to process all that limestone and get the CO2 back into the atmosphere. We would have to do it on a much larger scale than we are currently doing it though. Total human CO2 emissions into the atmosphere from making cement from limestone and burning fossil fuels are just four to six percent of the total emissions.
The oceans are outgassing at a much faster rate that that. Once the next ice age sets in and the cold oceans sequesters the CO2 back into the oceans and further into limestone, that will likely be at a faster rate than four to six percent We would not be able to keep up. We would need to up that rate of emission to save life on planet Earth.
Strange as it may seem we have people who are trying to bury CO2 underground and remove it from the atmosphere. They seem hell bent on fast tracking the extinction of life on Earth.
We have enough Oxygen
One final point. Some of the residents of planet Earth are concerned that the removal of forests reduces the rate that CO2 is changed back to O2. Plus burning fossil fuels and manufacturing cement is increasing the rate O2 is changed back to CO2. I.e. They are concerned we will run out of O2 to breath while at the same time concerned that increasing CO2 is causing some sort of damage to the climate system.
Firstly, fossil fuels contain no CO2, they only contain carbon C. When burnt, the C reacts with the O2 in the air to produce CO2.
Burning CO2 reduces the amount of oxygen in the air. Cement on the other hand is made from limestone. Limestone contains calcite or calcium carbonate CaCO3. CO2 is a by product of cement manufacturing from Limestone in a chemical process and is released to the atmosphere during that process.
Cement manufacturing does not use any atmospheric oxygen. Over the past 500 mil years O2 levels have overall gradually risen and ranged between approx 12-25 percent. At 21 percent now it is close to it’s 500 mil year all time high. At the same time, however, CO2 concentrations have steadily fallen from several thousand ppm to just 180ppm 20,000 years ago during the last ice age.
Whilst we need O2 to breath, we also need CO2 for photosynthesis for food production. All our food comes from plants. Plants do not grow without CO2.
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Phil
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Thank you! Another excellent article supporting my feelings about our planet’s need for C02 and our survival.
The current climate change hysteria and C02 sequestration, and now the junk science about nitrogen is not so slowly going to drive us into a economic depression, at the very least – and possibility of extinction (but maybe that is “their” plan).
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Jakie
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Excellent presentation! It even held my attention, which is quite a trick.
My feels too.
Intuition resonates with this read.
Though, this natural cycle that’s essential to all life on our world, is well researched and documented. It’s even taught in grade school.
So…Why does Anyone, with even only one brain cell, Believe this massive Lie that TPTB tell the world?
So many LIES, so little time. WHOPPERS!
The Emperor has No Clothes?
THANK YOU for taking the time to present truth. Or, a part of it.
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Ken Hughes
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‘and thank you from me too.
Excellent article outlining the truth about the Earths biosphere.
The insane have taken over the asylum and are pushing their own corrupted version of real science as “THE science”.
They must be stopped.
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Chris*
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Science has become the Tower of Babel, scientists can’t or won’t talk to one another. In the 1950’s, Russians put forward a hypothesis that hydrocarbons were products created by fusion in the core- two hydrogen atoms become one helium atom, three heliums become one carbon atom. In 2008, John Hopkins University had the technology to control experiments under the same conditions of heat and pressure as in the upper mantle to examine this idea. They produced methane, toluene and even graphite from ethane (C2H6). They were also able to reverse this experiment . Their conclusion was that the upper mantle was full of renewable methane.
Also Methane is produced everywhere biotically, where carbon based life forms are decomposed in an anaerobic environment. Oceans, lakes, fjords, swamps, rice paddys etc. Methane in the atmosphere is broken down by UV light the C and H atoms rebond with oxygen to form CO2 and H2O. Our planet is self sustaining.
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VOWG
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Volcanoes cannot be capped or the CO2 sequestered in any way. Nature will out.
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Jakie
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But how low can the Lunatics make it go?
How low until a break point is reached, that then initiates a die-off chain reaction?
The Lunatics know.
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