Weird .. and here I was naively thinking the dominant process for past increases in C02 prior to the Pleistocene+Holocene was magmatic processes and could be demonstrated by examining the isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon.
"Dominant process" implies other processes .. it's difficult to know all the details of any such complex transforms .. it's less difficult to pick out the major contributions by scale from the signature after traces.
You're correct that fossil fuels are buried sunlight from many many millions of years ago and bringing them to the surface now is the major factor contributing to our current swing against the norms of the past 800K years re: climate.
With forrest fires, unless there is burial and no regrowth, we are very much looking at the surface carbon cycle; trees grow (capturing carbon), burn (releasing carbon), cycle, repeat.
It takes a major expansion or a major reduction (significant in terms of Earths surface) of forrests to alter the over all long term balance; forrests to peat bogs, peat bogs drying out and burning is another big shift on the accounts .. but again these are the "near surface" accounts of organic carbon.
These differ (by isotope) from deep carbon bought up to the surfce (from FF) and from magma carbon.
> With forrest fires, unless there is burial and no regrowth, we are very much looking at the surface carbon cycle; trees grow (capturing carbon), burn (releasing carbon), cycle, repeat.
The point is that this cycle isn't anywhere close to 100% efficient and takes orders of magnitude more time to reverse than the time it took to burn it. On top of that, atmospheric CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere and is incredibly difficult and grotesquely inefficient to remove.
As I mention in another comment, here in SoCal we recently had a fire --one of many-- that took out over 5000 acres in a matter of two to four days. The recovery of that land, the regrowth, will likely take twenty years (how long does a mature tree take to grow?). The CO2 released in that short event will take orders of magnitude more time to be re-captured. It doesn't hang around over the burn area waiting to be absorbed.
The natural rate of change for atmospheric CO2 concentration reduction is in the order of 1 ppm per 1000 years. That figure comes out of ice core sample data, which is very accurate. Anything that claims a significant improvement to that rate of change must come with equally significant proof.
We have people claiming we can drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm in twenty years. Put a different way, they are saying they can do what nature does in 100K years in just 20. This is a rate of change with a slope 5000 times faster than the natural rate...and nobody seems interested in questioning it. It's one thing to achieve this in a lab experiment. Quite another at a planetary scale.
And so, my point, with regards to forest fires, is two fold: The net effect is the same, meaning, CO2 in the atmosphere. Second, the CO2 generated per unit time isn't recovered at the same rate. It is recovered orders of magnitude slower. Therefore, forest fires are likely just as damaging (in terms of atmospheric CO2 accumulation) as burning any other fuel.
>> Therefore, forest fires are likely just as damaging (in terms of atmospheric CO2 accumulation) as burning any other fuel.
On a natural scale (100 years as a base unit) they are distinct from the carbon dragged up and released from where it was buried millions++ of years ago.
As far as human activity goes we as a global race do need to put back forest growth we've clear felled, drop our ongoing and ever increasing emmissions, and claw back through capture the excess we have emitted in the past century.
This will take both time and significant mindset change; the myth of unlimited growth as 'good capitalis' needs to die.
On the matter of time scales, here's a nice bit of work revealing a 14 million year wet woodland mass emerging from a receding sea:
Research reveals secrets hidden in Nullarbor’s not-so-featureless plains
> On a natural scale (100 years as a base unit) they are distinct from the carbon dragged up and released from where it was buried millions++ of years ago.
Of course. Where they are no different from each other is that, once in the atmosphere, it makes no difference which one you have, you are growing a blanket over the planet. This is why I say it is just as damaging. CO2, regardless of source, "sticks" to the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. Same effect.
> As far as human activity goes we as a global race do need to put back forest growth we've clear felled
Definitely
> drop our ongoing and ever increasing emmissions
Agreed
> and claw back through capture the excess we have emitted in the past century
That would be nice. I have yet to see any evidence that we can really do this at a planetary scale. In the lab? Sure. Planet? At this stage, I don't see any evidence of that being possible. Lots of purported solutions; none seem to pass the planetary scale physics test.
> This will take both time and significant mindset change
The part where I hyperventilate is the time element. We actually have politicians pushing the idea of saving the planet in a few dozen years. That is preposterous. In a rational environment these people would be laughed off the stage. You simply can't change something like this, of planetary scale, in a few years, and likely not in even in a few centuries.
This is the paper [0] that, years ago, really got me interested in understanding what was going on; to try to separate facts from fiction. It hit me like a bucket of cold water. I was all in on renewables and everything we were being told would reverse climate change. I built a beautiful 13 kW solar array on my property (soon to expand to 20 kW). Soon after that, as I gained experience with my system and started to analyzed the performance and data, I realized we were being sold a bunch of nonsense about solar. And then I read this paper. It was a shocking revelation that launched me into research and questioning absolutely everything for about a year. This work and experience is where my position on this general topic comes from. I see a lot of hand waving and a lot of claims. I have yet to see anything that passes the physics test at a scale that is even a reasonable fraction of the planetary scale of this problem.
Note that none of this is about denying what is happening. When I get into conversations with people one of the first attacks I am subjected to is an accusation of being a denier. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This is real. What I am saying isn't real is what we are being told about what we can actually do about it.
And yet, I must clarify. This does not mean we should not clean-up our act. I agree with what you said about what we must do. My objection is that the political and money-grabbing forces behind the climate change industry are connecting one to the other as if it were a magical solution. These are lies. Nobody has shown this can be done. For obvious reasons, I would be more than happy to be proven wrong on this. We are all on the same boat.
All I want is honest conversation and for the powerful political forces to not force or otherwise compel our scientists into sticking with the chosen narrative. This paper is very unique. A university research team would commit suicide if they published something like this. Grants would evaporate and careers would be ruined. That, sadly, is the reality we live in. One that really bugs me to no end.
Of the anticipated side effects of anthro climate change increased forest fires -> more C02 in atmosphere until trees grow back to match isn't a biggie, C02 isn't the most insulative of the gases to worry about, it's the methane and water vapor that will really push this to another level .. that's just physics.
>> You simply can't change something like this, of planetary scale, in a few years, and likely not in even in a few centuries.
As a counterpoint we, as humans, got here in roughly 100 hundred years with the bulk of the damage done most recently.
Although most of that can be cast at "advanced western civilisation" and ideas of capitalism based on unlimited growth etc. Not really something that culturally had much traction with my people, but we are all the shit together.
I'm fairly optimistic that we (locally, here in W.Australia) can hit production of 15 million tonnes / per annum of green hydrogen by 2030 (that's generative from renewable eneragy with no "blue hydrogen" from natural gas).
Small beer against the petawatts required on a global scale but we act locally and ask that others make some kind of effort to match.
> As a counterpoint we, as humans, got here in roughly 100 hundred years with the bulk of the damage done most recently.
Right, of course. In the simplest possible terms, causing a mess is always easier than cleaning it up. That is true in every sense; time, energy and resources.
I tried to answer this question in my research. In other words, if we can make a mess in 100, 200 or 500 years (take your pick, we started burning oil a long time ago), why did we make such an impact and why is it that we can't clean it up just as quickly.
In the end I think it boils down to energy. It's a long topic. I'll try to summarize it as best as I can.
When we burn one liter, gallon or barrel of oil we are burning a concentrated form of energy that took mountains of plant and other matter and an unimaginable amount of time and energy to produce. I have not run the numbers at all. I would not be surprised to find out that the only energy source on earth that is denser (per unit mass) than oil is nuclear.
A loose way to think of this is that each barrel of oil burned might represent burning down a forest-load of trees. I can't calculate an accurate number because it is so hard to get reasonable estimates. Just judging from the results then: If, in 100 years, we did what normal took 100K years (a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2), then (very hand-wavy now) we are burning a thousands times more fuel per day than whatever occurred in the natural cycle.
This is, in my opinion, also why we just can't fix this without, I don't know, magic of some fundamentally incredible discovery of the scale of the Theory of Relativity. We need a ridiculous amount of energy and resources to fix this. Most people think local/laboratory, when, in reality, this has to be viewed at a planetary scale. And, at that scale, we might just need more energy and resources than exist on this planet if we claim to be able to fix this (drop it by 100 ppm) in 20 to 50 years.
I would really like to see honest scientific conversation around this reality.
Why?
Because, if it is true that we cannot fix it, we should be investing money, resources and brain-power on how to deal with it.
I don't think I am wrong. I have yet to see any proposed solution --of any kind-- prove viability at a planetary scale. If I am right, we are wasting valuable time and resources.
I just read this article this morning [0]. Quite a revelation. I am still trying to understand it. No conclusions on my part yet.
There's so much we don't know. And, again, to be repetitive, we can barely control things at a local level (coal and forest fires) and we are actually claiming to be able to fix an entire planet in two decades. At some point one has to take a moment to think that this might just not be a reasonable claim.
I'll repeat that none of what I say is to propose we do not need to cleanup our act. We definitely do, at all levels. I just don't want lies about why we should do it. And, of course, I firmly believe nuclear is the solution to energy generation. From what I've seen so far, nothing else can compare, not even close.
> I tried to answer this question in my research. In other words, if we can make a mess in 100, 200 or 500 years (take your pick, we started burning oil a long time ago),
Start from ~1880 or so, look at the records for (deep underground) oil consumption (as opposed to whale oil) and watch the consumption rates slowly ramp up with the adoption of cars, the industrialisation of WWI and WWII, and the post war boomer era ... it's not so much the "burning oil" that is the issue, it's the sheer scale of it once it really ramped up.
> .. We need a ridiculous amount of energy and resources to fix this. Most people think local/laboratory, when, in reality, this has to be viewed at a planetary scale.
Regardless of the vast base material tonnages and time to decay, compress, and transition that funnel INTO a barrel of oil, what's at issue is the percentage of that barrel that finds it way into the atmosphere as C02 and the means by which we can reduce that total and means by which we can extract C02 over the Holocene mean quantities.
I'm not sure how your hard numeracy | physics | technical paper reading is, but have a look at the mean estimate of daily global energy consumption by humans (petawatts) and the daily energy fall on earth from the sun .. now you have an order of the energy at play here.
Yes, this is "moving Mt. Fuji" scale engineering that needs to take place across the planet, yes there are existing companies that already work at this scale - the daily energy and material needs of human consumption are met by the likes of Rio Tinto, BHP, Exxon, BP, et al.
Two decades isn't the timescale for a complete fix, two decades is the time to make a hard start on getting stuck into breaking the back on attack of a hard problem .. bear in mind the problem grew exponentially over 100 years from sweet FA to ever more every day, the pullback has the advantage of already having industry at scale, the challenge is to address the solution.
Re: your [0]
This is an Oak Ridge PR release (not the core technical papers) announcing they have a better grasp on part of the preexisting "non human status quo" carbon cycle - this is good to know and useful, but isn't carbon | methane emissions that are causing the "increase over the norm" that we have seen, this is "the norm" that acts as the reference base.
The paper is linked in the Oak Ridge release. That's what I am reading. I can't say anything intelligent about it yet. I do have a full time job that consumes 12 hours a day, almost 7 days a week (the life of an entrepreneur). Posting here takes far longer than I should devote to this.
The fallacy with the commonly used argument about how much solar energy comes into the planet is one that ignores the fact that this energy isn't, for lack of a better term, doing nothing.
A silly comparison would be to say something like "look at how much energy I have in my Tesla" and then attempt to use it both to drive the car and power your home. Sure, you can theoretically do both, yet the car's range will be greatly reduced and your home will go dark in less than a day.
The assumption that we have so much energy often treats this as excess energy. Well, it isn't. We can only tap into it so much before we start to affect other things. It's Conservation of Energy at its most based: It can't be created. It is transformed. Right now, all of that energy from the sun is in use. It is being transformed into so many things it is impossible to list them.
The estimates for just how much energy is required to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at a global scale are not very accurate. This is to be expected. No technology exists today that can do this at that scale. The numbers range from a requirement of 25% of all the electrical energy produced in the world to somewhere around eight times the worlds electric power production.
Either end of that scale is a disaster of global scale waiting to happen. We can't go there. We probably have to quadruple energy production world-wide and might still be short. Not to mention the massive consequences of producing that much energy. Energy is transformed from one form to another and every time you do that. Heat, for example, is a byproduct of almost any transformation.
And yet, there's another reality. All of this is absolutely futile unless we stop generating CO2. It would be a sad joke to quadruple world power generation (not sure it is even possible) only to add more CO2 than we can extract in the process.
You don't quadruple anything at a global scale without producing an unimaginably large amount of CO2 and waste material.
Restricting this to the US. We have to convert our entire ground transportation system to electric power. Sounds great. So long as one does not run through some of the basic physics of what that would mean.
A few years ago I wrote a simulation in order to try and understand just how much more energy the US would need to go 100% electric. I divided the population into time zones, created thousands of behavioral patterns based on such things as drive distance, fast and slow charging, urban vs. rural, etc.
The simulation resulted in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW. This is additional power, over and above what the US produces today.
How much is that? We produce 1200 GW of power today. That means a vast nation like the US would need to create a full duplicate (in terms of power) of the current power system. And I do mean this in the full sense of the term. The wires we have carrying power today could not handle transporting twice as much. The entire power distribution grid needs to be rebuilt to double its transport capacity.
It is important to have a sense of proportion for things at this scale. A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. In other words, the US would need to construct over a thousand nuclear power plants just to enable electric cars.
This will not get us to zero carbon emissions. Not even close.
And then we have to produce even more power to eventually run carbon capture systems. That could very well mean adding another 500 to 1000 GW to the power grid. Nobody knows.
Once you start looking at the subject while exploring all the requisite tentacles, it is hard to avoid the thought that, at best there's a high level of hubris involved. An honest analysis of the matter includes conclusions such as the cost of oil having to come down to $20~$40 a barrel. This sounds crazy, until one looks at the cost of infrastructure and carbon capture systems at a global scale, all of which are driven by transportation and other costs that are inextricably linked to the cost of oil. Simply put, in the US alone, we cannot afford to engage in infrastructure construction at such a scale...with fuel at these prices it is impossible to pay for it.
This topic isn't simple at all. And it sure as heck does not benefit from people coming at it from a blind ideological perspective, as many (most?) do today.
> The fallacy with the commonly used argument about how much solar energy comes into the planet is one that ignores the fact that this energy isn't, for lack of a better term, doing nothing.
Whereas I merely suggested you look at the daily global human use energy numbers AND the daily mean solar fall energy.
> No technology exists today that can do this at that scale. The numbers range from a requirement of 25% of all the electrical energy produced in the world to somewhere around eight times the worlds electric power production.
Hence the need to build such tech asthere is no where to go buy it.
How long ago did humans use 25% less energy than they do today, how long ago was the total global human enrgy demand less than an eigth of what it is today?
I'm not a fan of wesetern consumption, but the ability of humans to do things at greater and great scale has expanded beyond linear .. which is a reality to factor into any modelled proposed solution.
As I mentioned we (locally) are designing and preparing to build hydrogen generation infrastructure now in the same manner in which we built mining infrastructure some 40-50 years past that put anything comparable within the USofA to shame.
> And yet, there's another reality. All of this is absolutely futile unless we stop generating CO2. It would be a sad joke to quadruple world power generation (not sure it is even possible) only to add more CO2 than we can extract in the process.
> You don't quadruple anything at a global scale without producing an unimaginably large amount of CO2 and waste material.
It's not that we can (or should) stop generating C02, it's that we need to slow and eventually stop net C02 increase while actively acquiring and deploying the means to reduce net levels; to which a multi pronged approach is required- population reduction, mean consumption reduction, tree planting, change in agricultural practices, etc.
> Restricting this to the US. We have to convert our entire ground transportation system to electric power.
Throw in * build the public transport the US allowed the Koch & Co to lobby them out of, change the "me me me" mindset that encourages oversized yank tanks and excess consumption, etc.
Point being, it's not just a "tech problem" - there are social aspects, education, lifestyle et al.
> This topic isn't simple at all.
It is rather thorny.
The other key thing about oil is we have already reached "peak oil", the Saudi fields are already on the downslop there, globally availibility will decrease and demand and extraction costs rise.
