During the past few years you would’ve had to be locked up in a basement by some lunatic to avoid having heard of global warming. I know it’s off topic to discuss it here but just this once, the reason for this is that today I “discovered” something that is far beyond crazy. I’ve never heard of this phenomenon on a global scale before and the scary thing is that it can be connected with warm periods, both empirically and theoretically.

Global warming scenario
At this point a lot of smart people believe that it doesn’t matter what we do, due to a force feedback loop we’re gonna get a lot warmer. So what, you might think? First of all no one really knows how a warmer world will affect the area of arable land and worst case scenario is that the whole landmass will be turned in to some kind of gigantic desert. Not really a problem, we can build a lot of nuclear power plants and start a massive desalination operation to get food, better yet if we manage to get the solar cells to be good enough to do the same. Heck, if we somehow manage to get fusion power up and running we could probably manage anything.

Sure the coming chaos will probably kill off more than half of us before we manage to make the above scenario happen. I’m kinda cynical though, the way we behave in this age of stupid makes me feel that the fewer of us the better, that’s why I don’t really give a shit as long as some of us survive, hopefully wiser and better equipped to take care of the planet, don’t count on it though…

Ocean anoxia
It seems however that the problem is not the heat, it’s an obscure (at least to me it was) side effect called Ocean anoxia (emphasis on ocean). If the water temperature close to the poles rise above about 5 degrees the water that the ocean currents bring there won’t easily sink to feed the loop, the most famous example of this kind of loop is probably the Gulf Stream. If you think that the surface temperature at those latitudes never will reach 5C, think again, they’ve been over 10 sometimes!

So when the oxygen rich surface water fails to sink we get a massive layering of productive surface waters and a dead oxygen depleted deep sea, these waters do not mix easily, trust me! As a Swede this is nothing new for me, this is a common problem in eutrophic lakes and more importantly, the Baltic Sea which we and the other countries around it have managed to kill with irresponsible agriculture, yay! What’s news (for me) though is that it can happen on a global scale, think Pacific instead of Baltic.

I know what you’re thinking, whatever… The deep sea is not important to the biosphere, it’s practically a dead zone anyway. Apparently the problem arises due to anaerobic bacteria which “burns” sulfur instead of oxygen, these things will experience a veritable Eldorado because oxygen is highly toxic to them, no oxygen == party time! This has happened before, it was probably the cause of the worst extinction event in Earth’s history!

Hydrogen sulfide
Naturally the byproduct of their metabolism is H2S instead of H2O, which is the case with aerobic bacteria and animals. It won’t take long before the H2S will start entering the atmosphere causing, yep you guessed it, major acidification which will make the above agriculture by desalination scenario a lot more difficult, enter Venus on Earth. The H2S will probably break down the ozone layer too.

On top of everything else we now need to create our own biosphere to block the acid and the UV radiation from killing us and everything we try to grow. That is going to be very expensive and require a lot of energy to setup, I wonder how many we will be able to fit in our brand new Biosphere, it has to be somewhat bigger than the one they have there in Arizona… And this time there won’t be any second chances.

The salvation, maybe
I have nothing reasonable to back it up with but I have the feeling that the only thing that will even give us a fighting chance to survive Venus 2.0 for about 500 000 years is fusion power, which will - if we can get it running - put more power at our hands than ever before.

So do whatever you can to speed ITER and DEMO on their way. The schedules for these two facilities feel somewhat unhurried… Our grandchildren will probably appreciate some kind of increased effort here.

If it really is us doing this by burning fossil fuels the irony is complete. It’s during these anoxic periods that the majority of the oil deposits were created because all the dead creatures falling to the bottom won’t be broken down properly in the oxygen depleted environment, they become oil instead. And so we are killed by the very event that created the thing we are using to create it.

Updates:
I just donated $10 to the EMC2 project on emc2fusion.org. It might be a long shot but the loss of $10 is not hurting me either.

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Tags: energy, fusion, Global Warming

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 12:52 am and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.