Life Regulates Earth’s Climate

Climate modelers did not take into account biology.
The earth has automatic methods to regulate climate.

 

The damage has been done: world leaders are panicking about the climate. Students all over are protesting what their parents have done to their planet. Coercive, draconican policies have been set, and billions of dollars are going to combat the crisis of our day: climate change! Everybody scream!

One thing we notice here at CEH, though, is that science publications keep turning up factors that were not considered when climate models were devised (e.g., 2 May 2022). Some factors automatically regulate the climate. Several new factors discovered are really quite interesting, and are considered below.

In addition, how worried should we be when evolutionists, even within their deep time scheme, tell us that the biosphere survived worse climate swings in the past without any coal mining or factories?

Get a Grip

Before global warming, was the Earth cooling down or heating up? (Northern Arizona University, 16 Feb 2023). It might be good first to get the big picture. Let’s revisit the question of what was going on before humans supposedly started pumping too much greenhouse gas into the air. The scientists at NAU examined proxies to determine what kind of trend the planet was on thousands of years before the industrial revolution.

This comprehensive assessment concludes that the global average temperature about 6,500 years ago was likely warmer and was followed by a multi-millennial cooling trend that ended in the 1800s. But, they cautioned, uncertainty still exists despite recent studies that claimed to have resolved the conundrum.

Are they telling us that climate modelers could possibly be way off interpreting the data?

This study highlighted uncertainties in the climate models. If the authors’ preferred interpretation—that recent global warming was preceded by 6,500 years of global cooling—is correct, then scientists’ understanding of natural climate forcings and feedbacks, and how they are represented in models, needs improvement. If they’re incorrect, then scientists need to improve their understanding of the temperature signal in proxy records and further develop analytical tools to capture these trends on a global scale.

The answers are inconclusive, but the questions are stunning. Why haven’t we been told about the uncertainties? The major news outlets sound extremely certain and adamant. After so much hype, taxes and warnings for two decades, what is the ordinary citizen to think?

And for the terrified, you can relax. Graham Lawton says at New Scientist (11 Jan 2023) that the worst-case scenarios that people were panicking about ten years ago are no longer plausible today. The threat still requires action, he says, but is more achievable than once thought.

Now let us consider what other factors are involved in climate that were not considered by modelers.

Biological Factors

Forest trees find a new watery ‘sweet spot’ when CO2 is high (University of Birmingham, 2 Feb 2023). Trees know how to adjust to increases in carbon dioxide. They do it automatically. And all tree species do it.

According to new findings, published by University of Birmingham researchers, the trees under increased CO₂ treatment were able to increase their water use efficiency by increasing their carbon uptake whilst, simultaneously, conserving water by adjusting the opening and closing of pores on the leaves, called stomata.

Jet-Propelled Tunicates Pump Carbon Through the Oceans (EOS, American Geophysical Union, 19 Jan 2023). Tiny marine plankton called sea salps, a form of tunicate, are daily at work pumping carbon to the bottom of the sea.

Salps are transparent, tube-shaped jellies well known for their propulsive jetting movements. According to new research, they also take quite a bit of carbon along for the ride.

They look like jellyfish but are not jellyfish, even though both clades of marine organisms have some of the most efficient forms of jet propulsion in the animal kingdom (see Illustra video about this).

The tunicates take in CO₂, use it in their metabolism, then expel the carbon in their fecal pellets that fall to the ocean floor, thus sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Not only that, these critters take it down in person. They migrate up to the surface at night to feed, then swim down to the depths during the day, expelling the carbon.

And they bloom! They reproduce in enormous numbers when carbon dioxide is plentiful, thus providing a negative feedback mechanism that automatically helps regulate carbon in the atmosphere. When they die, they carry their remaining carbon to the depths.

Have climate modelers taken this “biological carbon pump” (BCP) into account? The paper in AGU’s journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles (Jan 2023, open access) says that salp blooms “often go undetected and are rarely included in measurements or models of the BCP.” The scientists say that the small organisms play “an outsized role in carbon export.” Look how adamant they are that the world needs to study this:

Salps have unique and important effects on ocean biogeochemistry, and, especially in low flux settings, can dramatically increase the BCP efficiency and thus C sequestration. Despite the increasing realization of the key role that gelatinous zooplankton play in global carbon export, salps are mostly overlooked in less comprehensive field programs and models of the BCP. The challenge remains that salp blooms such as those we observed often go undetected, and the biogeochemical processes mediated by salps are rarely quantified, even in some of the best-studied regions of the world’s oceans. Widespread future use of new technologies, such as adding video imaging systems to autonomous profiling floats, would help detect these blooms. This study serves as a “call to arms” to better detect and quantify these processes, utilizing technology and sampling schemes that enable their inclusion in measurements and models of the BCP.

UK woodlands could store almost twice as much carbon as previously estimated (University College London, 20 Dec 2022). Scientists at UCL think that the climate modelers have seriously underestimated the carbon sequestration performed by forests.

The authors say that their study brings into question the certainty of estimates of forest carbon storage across the UK, particularly for the largest and most carbon-heavy trees, which are currently based on widely used models that estimate tree mass from the trunk diameter. It is likely that previous studies have been greatly underestimating forest biomass across the UK.

See the paper in the British Ecological Society journal, Ecological Solutions and Evidence, 19 Dec 2022. It states that trees store far more carbon than previous models said.

The urgency of this is illustrated by the fact that the UK’s biomass stock reporting to the FAO (FAO, 2020; Forestry Commission, 2014b) is still based on Bunce’s allometric models for deciduous forest (McKay et al., 2003), almost certainly resulting in significant under-reporting. The three dominant species in our Wytham Woods site contribute to more than 26% of the broadleaved tree AGB and carbon in Great Britain (Forestry Commission, 2014a, 2014b). This problem is almost certainly more widespread; significant allometric underestimates of the biomass of large trees particularly have been reported for Sequoia sempervirens (Disney et al., 2020), Eucalyptus spp. (Calders, Newnham et al., 2015) and tropical trees in Peru, Indonesia and Guyana (de Tanago Menaca et al., 2018).

Victoria Gill at the BBC News reported on this study too, saying that “UK forests lock away twice as much planet-warming carbon as previously thought.” How can the globally-trusted models be so far off? What other measurements could be in error by 100%?

New Academy Report Shows Critical Role Microbes Play in Climate Change (American Society for Microbiology, 22 April 2022). This report last year emphasizes how little is known about the role that microbes play in regulating earth’s climate. One of their recommendations was to

Increase research investments to generate knowledge and awareness of the contribution of microbes to the generation and consumption of warming gases; incorporate these findings into evidence-based policy and regulatory strategies to address climate change.

Geological Factors

Ice cores show even dormant volcanoes leak abundant sulfur into the atmosphere (University of Washington, 3 Feb 2023). Climate alarmists can’t put all the responsibility on humans when volcanoes have been influencing climate change ever since the earth began.

Volcanoes draw plenty of attention when they erupt. But new research shows that volcanoes leak a surprisingly high amount of their atmosphere- and climate-changing gases in their quiet phases. A Greenland ice core shows that volcanoes quietly release at least three times as much sulfur into the Arctic atmosphere than estimated by current climate models.

Quiet volcanoes emitting cooling aerosols? Who would have thought? The aerosols from quiet volcanoes cool the climate by altering clouds and reflecting solar radiation.

The measurements are surprising, and these were not taken into account by the IPCC and climate modelers:

“We found that on longer timescales the amount of sulfate aerosols released during passive degassing is much higher than during eruptions,” said first author Ursula Jongebloed, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. “Passive degassing releases at least 10 times more sulfur into the atmosphere, on decadal timescales, than eruptions, and it could be as much as 30 times more.”

The degassing by passive volcanoes, they say, is double the effect of phytoplankton on cooling the climate.

Climate cooling effect of volcanoes is bigger than we thought (New Scientist, 26 Jan 2023). This is New Scientist’s take on the story above.

They found that volcanic sulphate emissions were much higher than expected. Even in the years without major eruptions, some two-thirds of the sulphate came from volcanoes . “This suggests that degassing from non-erupting volcanoes is far more important than we thought,” says Jongebloed.

Cli­mate archives un­der the mag­ni­fy­ing glass (University of Bremen, 22 Nov 2022). Scientists at this university studied past climate change and found evidence of another warm period 11,700 years ago, “a re­cent period of Earth’s his­tory that was char­ac­ter­ized by sig­ni­fic­ant, ab­rupt warm­ing not caused by hu­mans.” They used marine algae fossils near Venezuela as a proxy.

Clouds Less Climate-sensitive Than Assumed (University of Hamburg, 30 Nov 2022). Here’s another correction modelers need to make. How many other wrong assumptions are driving climate models that lead to government clampdowns on traditional energy sources?

Cumulus clouds in trade-wind regions cover nearly 20 percent of our planet, producing a cooling effect. Until recently, it was assumed that global warming would reduce the surface covered by these clouds, amplifying the warming. However, a team around Dr. Raphaela Vogel from Universität Hamburg was able to refute that assumption. Their study has just been released in the journal Nature.

In its report, Nature (30 Nov 2022) puts it bluntly, “Observations refute the idea that warming strongly reduces cloudiness.”

There is so much more to report. Climate articles pour across our desk weekly, and it’s hard to sort them all out. Hopefully these examples give our readers some taste of the complexity of predicting climate (9 Aug 2021). We’ve seen for years now how additional factors turn up that were unknown when the panicked forecasts were made. We’ve seen bad assumptions overturned (26 March 2020). Many of these factors sound very significant. What are the effects in combination? How much is the IPCC jumping to conclusions based on flawed inputs? How much is politically motivated? Big Science and Big Media share blame in spreading misinformation (30 July 2022).

The hypocrisy of world leaders flying on private jets to climate summits has not been lost on many conservative commentators, and even liberal ones like Bill Maher (Breitbart News), who notice that one flight on a private jet swamps the carbon footprints of many citizens. Read Bobby Bannerjee—not a conservative—at The Conversation 14 Nov 2022 remark, “Why COP27 should be the last of these pointless corporate love-ins.” And where were the climate fanatics when the US blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last year, creating one of the worst environmental disasters in history (15 Oct 2022), leaking natural gas at unprecedented levels into the atmosphere? We heard crickets from the media about that, except from conservative news sources. Then a year ago, the Hunga Tonga volcano surprised scientists with one of the strongest eruptions in recorded history (20 Jan 2022). Mauna Loa also erupted. Do scientists really understand the impacts of natural forces that powerful? One volcano can cool the climate for a year or two.

Our readers hear almost entirely from the pro-warmist sources. For a little balance, take a look at some conservative skeptics of the consensus. We will abstain from making judgments about the reliability of these sources. As with everything else, read critically and see who makes the strongest case with the best evidence and logic. Remember that Apollo astronaut and US senator Harrison Schmitt, a Harvard geologist, is a strong critic of global warming (30 July 2022). Skeptics of the climate consensus don’t get the funding poured into the coffers of institutions who tow the politically popular line.

A Moment for Critics of Anthropogenic Climate Change

4 reasons to distrust and resist the ‘climate change’ elites (WND, 19 Jan 2023). The science is questionable and politicized, argues Laura Hollis.

Consensus? Poll finds 41% of climate scientists don’t buy ‘climate change’ (WND, 22 Nov 2022). Art Moore looks at signers of the World Climate Declaration: 1,100 signers led by a Nobel laureate.

The climate change conspiracy theory is still nonsense (WND, 4 Aug 2022). Jonathon Mosely questions the science, the hype and the logic of the climate change consensus.

The Dirty Secrets inside the Black Box Climate Models (Watts Up With That, 10 Nov 2022). This is a more rigorous critique of climate models, made by Greg Chapman, someone with experience in computer modeling.

Recommended: See also Judith Curry’s “Climate Etc.” blog for news of note. Curry is a climatologist with a PhD in Geophysical Sciences and has worked with NASA and government. Recently she was interviewed by popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (YouTube, Feb 2023).