Ian Bradford: Underwater Thermal Activities – an Overlooked Factor in Climate Change

In my last article I suggested that the increase in Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere was coming from natural sources, NOT from human sources.  Humans supply a very meagre 4% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, whereas 96% comes from natural sources.  The oceans hold most of the natural CO2.  The oceans are warming and warm water holds less CO2 than cold water.  So as the oceans warm, more CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere. 

While the sun is the main contributor of the earth’s heat, the oceans could also be warmed by the underwater thermal activities. More than 70% of all volcanic eruptions occur underwater.  At this point in time the exact number of undersea events in unknown, but it is a very large number.  When considering climate change, the heat coming from the deep earth has a significant long term impact and can’t be ignored due to the water in the oceans having a large specific heat capacity.  The specific heat of a substance is the amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of 1gm of the substance by 1 deg C. The heat capacity of water is 4.186 Joules which is quite high. It means too that a certain mass of water will take longer time to cool once it is heated. 

Many scientists are now beginning to look back and see how the earth’s climate system has changed in the past in order to improve their understanding of how it may behave in the future.  It is now clear from these studies that abrupt warming events are built into Earth’s climate system.  

In a recently published study, Professor Lowell Scott, Katie Harazin and Nadine Krupinski discovered that at the end of the last glacial era about 20,000 years ago, Carbon Dioxide was released into the ocean from geologic reservoirs located on the sea floor when oceans began to warm. Note that the warming came first, then the release of Carbon Dioxide. Naturally occurring reservoirs of Carbon Dioxide in the modern oceans could be disturbed again. 

One of the best known examples of rapid warming causing the release of geologic Carbon Dioxide is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a major global warming event that occurred about 55 million years ago. During this time, the Earth warmed by between 5 and 9 deg C within about 10,000 years.  Climate scientists now consider the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum to be an analog for environmental changes taking place today. The PETM happened over a longer period without human involvement, but it shows there is inherent instability in the climate system.

Hundreds of scientific studies have failed to establish  what caused the rapid Carbon Dioxide increases that ended the ice age. Researchers agree that the ocean must be involved because it is a large Carbon Dioxide storage system regulating the amount of Carbon Dioxide that resides in the atmosphere. 

Climate alarmists claim that human emissions of Carbon Dioxide have warmed the Earth’s oceans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. However, overwhelming amounts of reliable information taken from hundreds of research studies, show that emissions of superheated fluids and gases from the estimated 10 million ocean floor geological features including hydrothermal vents, are responsible for warming Earth’s oceans-not human activities. 

In 1977 scientists exploring the Galapagos rift along the mid-ocean ridge in the Eastern Pacific, noticed a number of temperature spikes. Temperatures changing from near freezing to 400 deg C in a short distance. They had discovered deep-sea hydrothermal  vents. These are like geysers on the sea floor. Along mid ocean ridges where tectonic plates spread apart, magma (molten lava), rises out of these vents. This magma is superheated at temperatures which can melt metal. Further, these vents have been found to be active in quite shallow water. Hydrothermal vents have been found all over the oceans, including regions of the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Southern and Arctic oceans. 

Over the past two decades, ocean scientists have discovered that there are reservoirs of liquid and solid Carbon Dioxide accumulating at the bottom of the ocean, within the rocks and sediments on the margins of active hydrothermal vents. At these sites, volcanic magma from within the Earth meets superheated water producing plumes of Carbon Dioxide rich fluids that filter through crevices in the Earth’s crust, migrating upwards towards the surface. 

When a plume of this fluid meets cold seawater, the Carbon Dioxide can solidify into a form called hydrate. The hydrate forms a cap which prevents further Carbon Dioxide from entering the ocean. But at temperatures above approximately 9 Deg C, hydrate will melt releasing liquid or gaseous Carbon Dioxide into the water. So warming come first, then release of CO2. Reservoirs of hydrate have been documented in the Western Pacific and in the Aegean Sea. In shallower water where ocean temperatures are warmer and pressure is lower, researchers have observed pure Carbon Dioxide emanating directly from sediments as a gas and rising to the ocean’s surface. 

So here we are with Carbon Dioxide in shallow water being released from sediments and rising to the ocean surface and then into the atmosphere. As the oceans warm, more and more Carbon Dioxide will be released. There is virtually no data as to how much Carbon Dioxide is released from these reservoirs in the ocean. But these types of reservoir have the capacity to release vast amounts of Carbon Dioxide when they are disturbed. 

The oceans are warming. As these warm water sink into the oceans interior they transport excess heat towards sites of Carbon Dioxide reservoirs. These warmer waters will eventually destabilise the hydrate seals that keep liquid Carbon Dioxide trapped. Earth’s pre-historic record clearly demonstrates that geologic reservoirs can be destabilised and that when they are, it leads to rapid increases in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.

Here’s something interesting. There’s a headline in Nature Climate Change, dated 12^th June 2017, written by four presumably Chinese scientists, Yao et al, and the headline says:

Distinct global warming rate tied to multiple ocean surface temperatures.  

The globally averaged surface temperatures have shown multi-decadal fluctuations since 1900, characterised by two weaker slowdowns and two stronger accelerations. The recent global warming hiatus has been ascribed to the mid Eastern Pacific cooling but the causes    for the previous coolings are unclear. 

There is a cooling at the start of 1900 then another from the mid 1940’s to about 1960 then finally entering the hiatus and slight cooling from about 2000.  This slight cooling may still be going. 

In the research summary they say this:  Our results reveal distinct impacts of individual basin sea surface temperature changes on the global warming rates between the acceleration and slowdown periods. In the acceleration cases the sea surface temperature warming in all the oceans acts jointly to generate strong global warming rates. In contrast, in the slowdown cases the global cooling induced by the tropical Pacific cooling is reduced or negated by the warming effects in the other oceans.  

Thus it is the sea surface changes in multiple oceans, not merely those in the tropical Pacific, that are crucial to determine the global warming rates. Note that the change in the ocean temperature comes first followed by the change in global temperature rates. It seems the oceans play an important part in controlling the global temperature in addition to controlling the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. Oh, and we have periods of cooling of the earth while Carbon Dioxide continues to rise.  This doesn’t fit in with what the climate alarmists say does it?  

So at the present time oceans are probably being warmed by the huge number of undersea volcanoes-geothermal vents, as well as the sun.  In shallower water because of warmer water and lower pressure, Carbon Dioxide is already being emitted into the atmosphere from sediments.   We don’t know whether the deep sea storage of Carbon Dioxide has been disturbed. If it has, then even more Carbon Dioxide is reaching the atmosphere.  We must not forget the Carbon Dioxide dissolved in the oceans from the atmosphere. As the oceans warm this is again returned to the atmosphere. 

It seems highly likely that the increase in carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere in recent times is not coming from the very small amount humans emit, but from the warming of the oceans- the greatest storage system for Carbon Dioxide. 

The climate alarmists would not want to hear this. Trillions more dollars on top of the trillions spent already cannot stop this. Of course there is always the question anyway: Does Carbon Dioxide cause climate change? The Met Office Hadley Centre  (UK), admit that the earth has cooled since 1998. (Readers can check this out). But all that time the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere kept rising. (Met office, and Mauna Loa). So the temperature is going down but the amount of CO2 is going up. There is no correlation between the Earth’s temperature and the amount of CO2.  Carbon Dioxide is NOT causing global 

warming.

Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.