https://phys.org/news/2017-09-mathematics-sixth-mass-extinction.html

Briefly, the two equation model accounts for some of the ‘Gaian’ behavior, such as the photosynthesis cycle. The ‘leakage’, which prevents the ocean from taking carbon out of the surface water and depositing it on the ocean floor, is because the increased acidification (which we are observing today) prevents shell fish from accumulating carbon and sinking to the bottom when they die. As a consequence, carbon stays at the surface, where wind and waves mix atmospheric carbon with shallow water carbon over relatively short periods of time. That is why over 90 percent of the carbon emitted into the air is now in the shallow waters of the ocean.

Please note that if humans tried to take the carbon out of the atmosphere only, the ocean would give carbon up from the shallow waters into the atmosphere. So our burden is much heavier than simply removing carbon from the atmosphere.

When the professor ran the numbers, he found that the remaining carbon budget is about 300 gigatons, which is the lowest projection in the IPCC report. If humans restrict net additional carbon burning to the lowest amount in the IPCC projections, then by 2100 we may still be on a trajectory to the Sixth Mass Extinction, since there is so little wiggle room.

In terms of Surplus Energy Economics, it seems clear to me that the economic system which is currently burning carbon at a furious rate probably won’t survive until 2100. So my base assumption is that we would see a series of ‘downward bumps’ as financial systems founder and production processes move toward the medieval. But a fatalistic attitude would say that, so long as carbon remains to be burned, clever humans will figure out a way to do it…probably using dirtier and dirtier technologies.

I would also speculate that as carbon energy becomes scarcer, then the diversion of some of that energy into energy sinks such as ethanol and private ICE automobiles and our hugely wasteful agriculture will collapse. But we will still burn all the carbon fuels we can get our hands on.

I’m not well enough informed about the question of plastic and chemical pollution and their effect on the shellfish. I don’t think the plastic and chemicals would do them any good…so another threat that probably needs to be dealt with.

Can anything be done about it? The most promising avenue seems to me to be Eco-Ag…putting long lived carbon molecules back into the soils and to a lesser extent into forest biomass. If we intend to do that, we need to get started post-haste. The sorts of industrial forests used to produce electricity in Europe are not good in terms of long term sequestration of carbon. And turning industrial agriculture and food preparation and storage and distribution from a 10 units in to 1 unit out, into a 10 units in to 15 units out will require a complete revamping of society.

It is also possible that the building of wind and solar operating on, most likely, an intermittent basis may give us a ‘better medieval’ system than the windmills and solar which actually operated in the medieval period…surely we are better engineers now?

Is 2100 so far away as to be irrelevant, using a 6 percent per year discount factor? Economists and cornucopians may think so, but I look at it in terms of what my presently existing grandchildren need to be doing during their prime working years…and that is a tall order. Combining the realities of Surplus Energy Economics with the realities of being on a track to the Sixth Mass Extinction is a real reality check.

Don Stewart

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rogerglewis
on July 22, 2019 at 8:49 am said:
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https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1700906
Here is the link to the full Paper.
“This observation may help explain the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum’s modest biotic impact. The Frasnian-Famennian extinction provides another exception. Supposing that it is indeed a mass extinction, its presence well below the critical line illustrates an important point: Mass extinctions need not be caused by disruptions of the carbon cycle (2).

Modern investigations of mass extinctions often emphasize a plurality of causes. Erwin’s “complex web of causality” (8, 37) addresses how a combination of volcanism, climate change, marine anoxia, methane release, and other environmental stressors may have contributed to the end-Permian extinction. Recent studies of the end-Cretaceous extinction consider massive volcanism (38) in addition to a bolide impact (39). Flood basalt eruptions are also clearly associated with the end-Triassic (40) and end-Permian (15) extinctions, but their contribution to CO2 levels is ostensibly modest (41). Evidently, the carbon cycle both indicates and excites Earth system change. These dual roles merge, however, if external perturbations cause the cycle to respond by magnifying the initial disturbance. System-wide instability may then follow. Because the critical rate rc bounds qualitatively different dynamical regimes, perturbations that exceed rc (at time scales much greater than τx) suggest such unstable evolution. The carbon cycle thus becomes one of many environmental stressors, and an array of causes is naturally implicated.”

The Discussion part of the Paper is interesting in that it concedes, “Mass extinctions need not be caused by disruptions of the carbon cycle” (2).

I would add to that last quote “If at all”

And point those interested in the Ocean Chemistry of Carbon Sequestration to Prof. Glassmans Acquittal of CO2 particularly Ocean Solubility of CO2 and Henry’s Law.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190402051937/http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html

ABSTRACT
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the product of oceanic respiration due to the well‑known but under‑appreciated solubility pump. Carbon dioxide rises out of warm ocean waters where it is added to the atmosphere. There it is mixed with residual and accidental CO2, and circulated, to be absorbed into the sink of the cold ocean waters. Next the thermohaline circulation carries the CO2‑rich sea water deep into the ocean. A millennium later it appears at the surface in warm waters, saturated by lower pressure and higher temperature, to be exhausted back into the atmosphere.

Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation. Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases. Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause. Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase. If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere.