Antarctic Ocean Outgassing

Timothy Birdnow

The cornerstone of climate change alarmism is that industrial emissions are responsible for all of the observed rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. All of it.

Those of us with brains know this is not true, but we are generally shouted down.

BUT, as it turns out atmospheric carbon dioxide continued to rise at the same rate it had been rising when industrial emissions were curtailed during the pandemic, and that strongly suggests a natural explanation for rising levels.

Well, here is another factor to consider.

Storms in the Antarctic region are responsible for a considerable outgassing of carbon dioxide from the oceans.

Half of all carbon dioxide bound in the Earth's oceans are in the deep south.

So, is the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide a cyclical thing, a natural part of the environment?

I suspect as much.

From the article:

Storms over the waters around Antarctica drive an outgassing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a new international study with researchers from the University of Gothenburg.

The research group used advanced ocean robots for the study, which provides a better understanding of climate change and can lead to better global climate models.

The world's southernmost ocean, the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, plays an important role in the global climate because its waters contain large amounts of carbon dioxide. A new international study, in which researchers from the University of Gothenburg participated, has examined the complex processes driving air-sea fluxes of gasses, such as carbon dioxide.

I would point out that Antarctica is a highly volcanic region. Much of this carbon dioxide may well be a result of outgassing from inside the planet.

This explains some of the unseasonably warm days seen around the Antarctic Peninsula.

It also may well explain why some of the "missing heat" found in the oceans are deep in the southern oceans and nowhere else.

The Antarctic Ocean appears to be full of volcanoes.

So, is it really "missing heat" or rather heat from geothermal activity? And is this perhaps driving the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide? We estimate how much we are putting in the air not by surveying all of our industrial emission sources but by simply subtracting what we think the natural sources are putting out and assume the rest is caused by Man. But is it really?

Industrial emissions dropped during the pandemic yet co2 levels continued to rise.

Now why do you suppose that is?


One has to wonder if global warming is not really a function of geomagnetic effects and Milankovitch cycles. We may be seeing an increase in volcanism in the southern oceans disgorging co2 in the process and producing the mild warming we've witnessed.

Remember, there are only 4+ molecules of carbon dioxide for every TEN THOUSAND molecules of air, and of that we are responsible for less than one molecule. If that.

And while the stratosphere has cooled (ostensibly because heat is being trapped at the lower levels) we aren't really seeing the troposphere heat up as it should be.http://www.drroyspencer.com/2019/05/the-weakness-of-tropospheric-warming-as-confirmed-by-airs/

Also, the "missing heat" is somehow going into the oceans (moving downward when heat normally rises) and disappearing. Put a couple of beers in a cooler, one on top of the ice and one below. Which is colder? My beer has never been warmer at the bottom of the cooler.

This is a strange form of planetary warming. And it is a very mild warming. (0.13* per decade since 1980, if wwe believe we are making accurate temperature measurements, which are in fact rather dubious. We know NASA and NOAA have fudged the data, lowering historical temperatures to make warming appear greater.)

James Ervin adds:

You are making an interesting point.

The vast majority of Antarctica has been cooling slightly for most of the last century to the present.

But, the western 1/5th of the continent sits over one of the largest volcanic provinces in the world and is warming dramatically. Over 80 percent of all ice melt across Antarctica is measured near the volcanoes.

See Loose et al. (2018) Evidence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04421-3
"These geochemical measurements provide an independent line of evidence of present-day subglacial volcanism in Marie Byrd Land. They also support a growing list of studies revealing that regional volcanism is a recurring characteristic of the basal boundary beneath the WAIS."

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:19 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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