Hot Water, Hot Earth 236
Calopteryx notes a New Scientist article on the discovery of "supercritical" water emerging from a vent in the Atlantic Ocean at 407 deg. C (765 deg. F). One of its discoverers actually said, "It's water, but not as we know it"; it's the hottest water ever found on earth. The cause seems to be a huge bubble of magma beneath the ocean floor, 3 km below the sea surface. Meanwhile Nymz shares a journal entry on a hot spot on land: a 2-acre patch in Ventura county, in California, that has heated up to 433 deg. C (812 deg. F). Here geologists blame buried hydrocarbons burning as they get access to air through cracks in the ground. That high temperature was measured a foot below the ground surface.
Carbon sequestration (Score:1, Insightful)
Here geologists blame buried hydrocarbons burning as they get access to air through cracks in the ground.
Does carbon sequestration still sound like a great idea?
Hot Earth?? (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't want to piss off the Gore groupies!
Hot Vents Melt ICE? Noooooooo! It couldn't be! (Score:1, Insightful)
Could it be that Hot Vents Under the Ice could melt the ice? Well from a basic test you can do in your kitchen - put ice in hot water - proves that it could be the case that the hot vents could melt the ice cap!
Maybe it's not ALL man after all! Maybe mother nature is just doing her thing not caring one bit about us which is the NORMAL course of events in objective reality.
Also, it couldn't be that the sun hitting the earth warms the planet. Nope that's not a factor either even though the sun's gotten a bit hotter over the last four centuries that it's been monitored by humans.
It all must be man. Evil vile man.
Re:Can we still blame pollution for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:When will people learn?!?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that there's a difference between the roles of natural cycles, and millions of people burning hydrocarbons right?
Perhaps I should explain. If I put a 100 pound weight on one side of scale and 100 pounds of gold on the other the scale should stay balanced right? I mean assuming this is scale is working like a scale should. Now suppose I put just one ounce of gold extra on the scale. It's just one ounce of gold right? Compared to the 100 pounds that's like a shaving. Shouldn't make much difference, but now the scale's off balance.
That's what's going on in the world. Sure all these natural cycles are inputs. And what we humans do may be dwarfed by the natural cycles. But the natural cycles were more or less balanced (at least on a human time scale). In the past hundred years or so we've added quite a bit of extra input to one side of the scale. What we've added is minuscule compared to the natural cycles, but remember this is a balance that we're monkeying with. And the stakes are high enough that we might want to err on the side of caution.
Underwater Supervolcano (Score:3, Insightful)
When I first read this article I was immediately reminded of Yellowstone National Park with the phrase "huge bubble of magma". Yellowstone is a well known super volcano. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
With over 75% of the earth being water, it seems natural to assume that there are supervolcanos underwater. My question is ... does anyone know and if so what sort of effect do such eruptions have on the marine ecosystem?
Re:When will people learn?!?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't make the assumption that nature wouldn't. It's just that we can't do as much about nature. Burning fossil fuels we can.
Re:When will people learn?!?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
what a bullshit notion, that nature or the earth is in balance. The earth has been far, far hotter and far far colder and far, far wetter and far, far drier in the past. Even the Sahara dessert was heavily vegetated not even 12,000 years ago. The oceans have been rising since the last ice age.
Re:When will people learn?!?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
What part of time scale of humankind do you people have a problem with? I realize that the earth swings wildly over the geological record. If catastrophic climate change happens over the next 12,000 years humans might be able to adapt pretty easily. If it happens over the next 70 we might have a bigger problem. In the range of a human lifetime (give or take 70 years) the earth stays pretty balanced (up until recently).
Re:When will people learn?!?!?! (Score:1, Insightful)
And perhaps the Earth Mother's apron strings are used to suspend the balance...?
This is nonsense. The atmosphere has frequently been out of balance - vulcanism, asteroid strikes, what have you. Each time the atmosphere has rebounded, from much more CO2 than nowadays, for example.
So you should be thinking about feedback, and positive stability. The Global Warmers claim the planet has negative stability, but all their maths is wrong and the data is now disproving their theory....
Re:When will people learn?!?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
catastrophic climate changes have occurred in very short time periods, less than the 12,000 years you posit. It is inevitable that there will be more from entirely natural causes and people and ecosystems will die.
Re:When will people learn?!?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the key phrase. On a human time scale things have been very calm.
On a geological time scale, things have been very very very active. Cold, hot, cold, hot. Glaciers, volcanoes. We don't even know all that has happened because we simply haven't been here keeping records for all that time.
We can guess what happened, but it's only a guess, and depends on many assumptions that cannot be verified independently. (For example, CO2 cannot possibly diffuse out of a trapped gas bubble in an ice core over thousands or tens of thousands of years, right? How big a surprise is it to some people that solid water can simply evaporate even while frozen solid?)
We do know that things have been much different in the past. We are fools to assume that the only 'right' way for the earth to be is how it is now. Or a decade ago. And yet, fools build houses on sandbars all the time. Expensive houses. And then demand that the government do something when nature changes. Just like we are demanding action when nature changes climate, like it has for billions of years prior to us.
The climate is not a zero sum game. Putting an ounce of gold on one side doesn't mean the system won't react (and we know it will) to restore balance.
But then, a 100 pound lead weight on one side doesn't balance a 100 pound gold weight on the other in the first place. Lead is measured in a different system than gold. Even though a troy ounce weighs more than an avoirdupois ounce, there are only 12 to the pound. You can put a LOT of extra gold on the gold side before the lead is balanced.
Re:Start drillin'! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Start drillin'! (Score:3, Insightful)