Leaks from carbon dioxide injected deep underground to help fight climate change could bubble up into drinking water aquifers near the surface, driving up levels of contaminants in the water tenfold or more in some places, according to a study by Duke University scientists.

Based on a year-long analysis of core samples from four drinking water aquifers, “We found the potential for contamination is real, but there are ways to avoid or reduce the risk,” says Robert B. Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change and professor of biology at Duke.

“Geologic criteria that we identified in the study can help identify locations around the country that should be monitored or avoided,” he says. “By no means would all sites be susceptible to problems of water quality.”

The study appears in the online edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Storing carbon dioxide deep below Earth’s surface, a process known as geosequestration, is part of a suite of new carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies being developed by governments and industries worldwide to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions entering Earth’s atmosphere. The still-evolving technologies are designed to capture and compress CO2, emissions at their source—typically power plants and other industrial facilities—and transport the CO2 to locations where it can be injected far below the Earth’s surface for long-term storage. The U.S. Department of Energy, working with industry and academia, has begun the planning for at least seven regional CCS projects.

“The fear of drinking water contamination from CO2 leaks is one of several sticking points about CCS and has contributed to local opposition to it,” says Jackson, who directs Duke’s Center on Global Change. “We examined the idea that if CO2 leaked out slowly from deep formations, where might it negatively impact freshwater aquifers near the surface, and why.”

Jackson and his postdoctoral fellow Mark G. Little collected core samples from four freshwater aquifers around the nation that overlie potential CCS sites and incubated the samples in their lab at Duke for a year, with CO2 bubbling through them.

After a year’s exposure to the CO2, analysis of the samples showed that “there are a number of potential sites where CO2 leaks drive contaminants up tenfold or more, in some cases to levels above the maximum contaminant loads set by the EPA for potable water,” Jackson says. Three key factors—solid-phase metal mobility, carbonate buffering capacity and electron exchanges in the overlying freshwater aquifer—were found to influence the risk of drinking water contamination from underground carbon leaks.

The study also identified four markers that scientists can use to test for early warnings of potential carbon dioxide leaks. “Along with changes in carbonate concentration and acidity of the water, concentrations of manganese, iron and calcium could all be used as geochemical markers of a leak, as their concentration increase within two weeks of exposure to CO2,” Jackson says.

The study was funded by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory and Duke’s Center on Global Change.

Little is now a professional staff member on the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Journal Reference: Mark G. Little, Robert B. Jackson. Potential Impacts of Leakage from Deep CO2 Geosequestration on Overlying Freshwater Aquifers. Environmental Science & Technology, 2010; 101029020119075 DOI: 10.1021/es102235w

The threat to tropical rainforests from climate change may have been exaggerated by environmentalists, according to a new study.

Researchers have shown that the world’s tropical forests thrived in the far distant past when temperatures were 3 to 5C warmer than today. They believe that a wetter, warmer future may actually boost plants and animals living the tropics. The findings, published in the respected journal Science, come from a study of pollen trapped in rocks during a natural period of global warming 56.3million years ago.

Daintree National Park in Queensland, Australia. The threat to tropical rainforests from climate change ‘has been exaggerated by environmentalists’

The extreme warm spell - called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - saw global temperatures soar by 6C (11F) within a few thousand years. The cause of the PETM is unknown. However, some scientists believe it was triggered by the release of vast amounts of carbon dioxide from volcanic activity over a few thousand years.

The injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere set off a spiral of events that warmed the climate and led to even more greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere, they say. Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama examined pollen trapped in rocks in Colombia and Venezuela before, during and after the PETM.

They found that the amount of plant-life in the forests increased rapidly during the warming event with new plant species evolving much more quickly than the older species became extinct. Pollen from the chocolate family and passionflower plant family were found for the first time.

The researchers believe the hotter, wetter conditions - and additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - boosted plant-life and increased biodiversity.

A baby white-faced capuchin rests on a branch with its mother in the tropical rainforest of Manuel Antonio National Park. Researchers believe that a wetter, warmer future may actually boost plants and animals living the tropics

The findings could shed light on man-made global warming caused by the release of carbon dioxide from burning coal and destroying forests. Conservative computer models of climate change suggest the world will warm by at least 2C over the next century.

‘It is remarkable that there is so much concern about the effects of greenhouse conditions on tropical forests,’ said Dr Klaus Winter of the Institute. ‘However, these horror scenarios probably have some validity if increased temperatures lead to more frequent or more severe drought as some of the current predictions for similar scenarios suggest.’ British forest expert Dr Simon Lewis of Leeds University said warmer, wetter weather could boost rain-forests. However, if climate change led to more droughts, it could be disastrous for regions like the Amazon.

In the last five years, the Amazon has experienced two ‘one in a century’ droughts, he said. ‘The 2005 Amazon drought was widely characterised as an unusual 1-in-100 year event, which caused tree deaths leading to rotting trees releasing over four billion tonnes of carbon dioxide,’ he said. ‘And now in 2010, another drought has stuck, which initial analyses show is more extensive than 2005, even though it is only five years later.

‘These droughts are consistent with model projections showing a die-back of the Amazon, further accelerating climate change in a dangerous loop. ‘The new paper is useful, but doesn’t address present-day concerns of drought-impacts that affect the forest itself and the millions of people who live there.’ The speed of modern day man-made climate change was much faster than the global warming of 60 million years ago, he added.

Read more here. Icecap Note: drought is favored in years with low solar and La Ninas. They will occur more frequently in the cold PDO and low solar decade(s) ahead. AGW is not real (except for urban warming) and so has nothing to do with recent events.

John Le Mesurier’s recent article in On Line Opinion, ”The Creeping Menace” , re-hashes the alarmism about rising sea levels. Much has happened, however, since Al Gore scared the world with visions of metre high seas flooding New York.

First, there is still no proof the Earth is experiencing “dangerous” warming. Temperatures have levelled off since 1998. Many measuring locations are also located in unsuitable areas. Furthermore, the methodologies of averaging temperature are inconsistent and full of problems. This is why “Global Warming” was replaced as a slogan by “Climate Change” (nobody denies that climate changes), and more recently by “Climate Disruption” (which is impossible define or prove).

Second, the increased temperature is supposed to increase sea level mainly by melting the ice-caps, which is impossible. Thermal expansion of the oceans seems to be of little consequence at present because the satellite measurements show the oceans are cooling. Le Mesurier gilds his picture with a few asides on “extreme climatic events” in general and hurricanes in particular. Recent studies, however, show no increase in hurricane activity in the last 40 years.

With regard to sea level, I have come to the view the IPCC and Australian Bureau of Meteorology, run by CSIRO, are unreliable sources of data after critically assessing their statements on this subject for some time. Direct studies of sea level are showing only small rises. You can see the sea level data for yourself for the United States and a few other countries here. Most stations show a rise of sea level of about 2mm per year, but note the considerable variation even within a single state.

Models depend on what is put into them. For example, a 2009 report by the CSIRO for the Victorian Government’s Future Coasts Program on The Effect of Climate Change on Extreme Sea Levels in Port Phillip Bay based its model on temperature projections to 2100 of up to 6.4 degrees. That is the most extreme, fuel intensive, scenario of the IPCC and implies unbelievable CO2 concentration levels in 2100 of approximately 1550 parts per million (expressed in CO2 equivalent). Usage of all known fossil fuel reserves would only achieve half of this and continuation of the current rate of increase in concentration levels would result in only 550ppm by 2100.

In terms of sea levels, the result is a CSIRO predicted rise for Port Phillip Bay by 2100 of 82cm and, with the help of the Bureau of Meteorology, an increase due to wind to 98cm. That is not only well above even the top level projected by the latest IPCC report but is also well above any projections from the last 20 to 100 years.

Two favourites of sea level alarmists are Tuvalu and the Maldives. Sea level measurements for Tuvalu (and 10 other stations) between 1992 and 2006 are available on Fig. 13 on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website (PDF 1.97MB). For about the past eight years the sea level seems to be virtually constant. Vincent Gray has reviewed the evidence and finds virtually stable sea levels in the South West Pacific, and he also discusses how the data have been manipulated to suggest rising sea level.

Sea level in the Maldives was studied in enormous detail by the doyen of sea level scientists, Niklas Axel-Mörner. His team determined the sea level curve over the past 5,000 years based on evidence of morphology, stratigraphy, biology and archaeology supported by extensive C14 dating, and found that “All over the Maldives there is evidence of a sub-recent sea level some 20cm higher than the present one. In the 1970s, sea level fell to its present position.”

Incidentally a recent study of coral islands in the Pacific by Webb and Kench showed the islands are actually growing larger despite any possible sea level rise.

Holland is very low and would be particularly vulnerable to any large rise of sea level. It is also a world leader in coastal study and engineering, and the Dutch are not alarmed. In the December 11, 2008, issue of NRC/Handelsblad (Rotterdam’s counterpart to The Australian or The Age) Wilco Hazeleger, a senior scientist in the global climate research group at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute wrote:

In the past century the sea level has risen twenty centimetres. There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise. It is my opinion that there is no need for drastic measures. Fortunately, the time rate of climate change is slow compared to the life span of the defense structures along our coast. There is enough time for adaptation.

What about the alleged cause of most of the scary sea level rise - the melting of ice-caps? This idea of rapid loss of ice is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.

In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy kilometre-deep basins. If sliding were operative they could only slide into the basin. Virtually all the studies on which alarmist conclusions are based are on the outflowing glaciers around the edges of Greenland where glaciers can flow downhill, and where there is some melting. There is no melting in the interior of ice sheets - it is far too cold.

Glaciers have a budget, with accumulation of snow, conversion to ice, flow of ice, and eventual destruction by melting, ablation or collapse. The centres of the ice sheets, occupying basins, flow only at the base, warmed by geothermal heat and driven by the weight of the overlying ice. There is no direct flow of the near-surface ice in the centre of an ice sheet to the outflow glaciers.

The accumulation of kilometres of undisturbed ice in cores in Greenland and Antarctica show hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation with no gaps in the record caused by melting. The existence of such layers, youngest at the top and oldest at the bottom, enables the glacial ice to be studied through time, a basic source of data on temperature and carbon dioxide in the past.

In the Greenland ice sheet several cores have more than 3km of undisturbed ice which go back in time for over 105,000 years (much less than the Antarctic equivalent). The Vostok cores in Antarctica provide data for the past 414,000 years before the ice starts to be deformed by flow (induced by the weight of the overlying ice and geothermal heat). The Epica core in Antarctica goes back to 760,000 years. The cores show there have been many times when the climate was much warmer than today (e.g. Mediaeval Warm Period). It is fanciful to conclude kilometres of ice can suddenly melt when the records show no melting whatsoever in the ice sheet accumulation areas. After considering the evidence of three quarters of a million years of documented continuous accumulation, how can we rationally accept that right now the world’s ice sheets are collapsing?

The idea of a glacier sliding downhill on a base lubricated by meltwater seemed a good idea when first presented by de Saussure in 1779, but a lot has been learned since then. Not even alpine valley glaciers or the outflow glaciers of Greenland move this way, but by a process called creep, best known from metallurgy. This process explains why the crystals of ice in the snout of a glacier are about a thousand times bigger than the first crystals in the snowfall. Sliding cannot account for this.

Collapse of ice sheets is commonly shown to stir fears of rising sea levels. Yet wherever ice sheets or glaciers reach the sea, the ice floats and eventually breaks off to form icebergs. It is part of the glacial budget: the glaciers never did flow on to the equator. Icebergs have always been with us. Captain Cook saw them on his search for the Great South Land.

Observers frequently seem surprised by the size and suddenness of what they see. In 2007, when a piece of the Greenland ice shelf broke away, the scientists who were interviewed said they were surprised at how suddenly it happened. How else but suddenly would a piece of ice shelf break off? The actual break is inevitably a sudden event - but one that can easily be built into a global warming horror scenario. The point to remember is that the release of icebergs at the edge of an ice cap does not in any way reflect present-day temperature. It takes thousands of years for the ice to move from accumulation area to ice front.

The Hubbard Glacier in Alaska has long been a favourite place for tourists to witness the collapse of an ice front, 10km long and 27m high, sometimes producing icebergs the size of ten-storey buildings. One tourist wrote “Hubbard Glacier is very active and we didn’t have long to wait for it to calve”. Yet the Hubbard Glacier is advancing at 25 metres per year, and has been doing so at least since its discovery in 1895.

Variations in melting or calving around the edges of ice sheets are no indication that they are collapsing, but reflect past rates of snow and ice accumulation in their interior.

Despite alarmist propaganda there is much evidence to suggest that the ice sheets are in good health.

For example, one recent paper is entitled “A doubling in snow accumulation in the western Antarctic Peninsula since 1850” (Thomas et al. 2008).

Another reports that “The East Antarctic ice-sheet north of 81.60S increased in mass by 45 plus/minus 7 billion metric tons per year from 1992 to 2003… enough to slow sea-level rise by 0.12 plus/minus 0.002 millimetres per year” (Davis et al. 2005).

Wingham et al. (2006) wrote: “We show that 72 per cent of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining 27 ± 29 Gt yr-1, a sink of ocean mass sufficient to lower global sea levels by 0.08 mm yr-1.”

Johannessen and colleagues analysed satellite data on the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2003. They found an increase of 6.4 plus/minus 0.2 centimetres per year in the vast interior areas above 1500 metres, in contrast to previous reports of high-elevation balance. Below 1500 metres, the elevation-change rate is -2.0 plus/minus 0.9 cm/year.

Of course even if we believe global sea level is rising, it takes another leap of faith to accept that it is caused by minuscule increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by human activity.

Prof. Cliff Ollier
School of Earth and Environment
University of Western Australia

It’s a soggy Monday night but the pews in one of Ottawa’s most spacious churches are overflowing with believers. “We have tried to assume the position of the gods,” the angry man at the lectern thunders, “without the knowledge to manage our ecological footprint.”

No, the speaker is not a preacher, at least not a preacher of the conventional sort. He is David Suzuki, scientist, environmentalist, icon.

The natural systems that sustain us are infinitely complex, he tells the worshipful audience. We are only beginning to understand them and we cannot possibly predict what effect the actions and technologies of almost seven billion people will have on them. We must be humble. We must be cautious and reverent. “We don’t know enough to take the place of the gods,” he proclaims.

It’s a familiar theme, which is appropriate because Suzuki, at 74, is summing up his life’s work—his “legacy,” as he puts it in the title of his new book.

Suzuki delivers another familiar theme this night. He illustrates it with a thought experiment.

Imagine a test tube filled with food. That’s the Earth, he says. Now introduce a single bacterium to that test tube and let it grow exponentially. In the first minute, one bacterium becomes two bacteria. In the second minute, two become four. Four become eight. Eight become 16. If it takes one hour for the bacteria to multiply until they fill the entire test tube and there’s no more food—and the bacteria all die—when will the test tube be exactly half full of food and half full of bacteria?

In the 59th minute. Which is strange because at that moment things look fine. But the very next minute, catastrophe strikes.

“Every scientist I talk to agrees with me,” Suzuki declares, “that we’re already past the 59th minute.” We must drastically change the way we live, immediately, or we are doomed.

Neither of these themes is unique to Suzuki. Indeed, they are standard fare among environmentalists. And therein lies a little-recognized paradox.

I recently wrote a book called Future Babble (to be released Oct. 12), which is about expert predictions, why they fail, and why we believe them anyway. The experience of sifting through heaps and heaps of failed predictions has made me quite sympathetic to Suzuki’s first theme of humility. We truly are awful at foreseeing what is to come. And there’s little reason to think we’ll get much better. Indeed, key properties of complex systems make prediction inherently impractical or even impossible. We really should be humble. And cautious.

But how can a humble and cautious man say we are “past the 59th minute”? To know that, one must fully understand all those complex natural systems—to say nothing of social systems—and be able to see how they will develop in the future. Monday night, Suzuki said this is now possible thanks to “scientists and supercomputers”—the same scientists with supercomputers who “don’t know enough to take the place of the gods.”

This stunning contradiction shows up most clearly when environmentalists talk about climate change. On the one hand, greens oppose geo-engineering schemes—deliberate attempts to alter the atmosphere to counteract the effects of climate change—on the grounds that we cannot possibly predict the consequences of our actions. But they also treat forecasts of what will happen if humanity doesn’t curtail carbon dioxide emissions as perfectly reliable glimpses of the future. That makes no sense. Either we can reliably predict the effect human actions have on climate and the natural world or we cannot. Which is it?

Environmental activism is steeped in this contradiction. A 1992 statement by leading scientists warned of “unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems” and insisted—rightly, I believe --that this uncertainty strengthens the case for action. But then the statement declared humanity had “no more than one or a few decades” to make the necessary changes. If the collapses are unpredictable, how could they possibly know how much time we have to avert them?

This isn’t humility. It’s hubris. To see how foolish it is, consider the history of similar forecasts.

The famous and revered 1972 report “Limits to Growth”—the first to dazzle the world with “scientists and supercomputers”—opened with a statement from UN secretary general U Thant that the world has “perhaps 10 years left” to stave off calamity. The report itself offered computer-generated forecasts that supported this claim: Radical changes implemented in the 1970s would avert disaster, the forecasts showed, but it would be too late if the same changes were not implemented until the year 2000. Either that report was wrong then, or Suzuki is wrong now. There’s no way around it.

But Suzuki seems not to care for historical references like this. He even lionizes the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, the author of 1968 smash The Population Bomb, who made a long list of predictions that failed, using essentially the same analysis as Suzuki. In 1974, for example, Ehrlich argued that growing resource shortages would make Americans and others drastically poorer in the years ahead, putting an end to consumerism and the conventional economics of growth. “We are facing, within the next three decades, the disintegration of nation-states infected with growthmania,” Ehrlich wrote. Thus, it was a little odd to listen on Monday as David Suzuki railed against the consumerism and economic growth which Ehrlich said would be swept away long ago.

And then there were the two books which introduced a young Paul Ehrlich to ecology. Both William Vogt’s Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet were published in 1948. Both were influential best-sellers. Both made arguments similar to Ehrlich’s and Suzuki’s. And both were stuffed with predictions that flopped: “The most critical danger is that we shall not realize how short we are of that one unrenewable resource—time,” wrote Vogt. “If we wait until next year, or the next decade, to push our search for a solution, then our fate may well be sealed.”

We never learn. Earlier this year, scientists delivered the startling news that despite increases in sea level caused by climate change, only four out of 27 small Pacific islands surveyed were smaller than they had been in the 1950s. The remaining 23 had either stayed the same size or grown, thanks to offsetting accumulations of coral debris.

Water rises; islands get smaller. It seems like the simplest thing in the world to predict.

Nature constantly surprises us, Suzuki said Monday night. “I hope we can learn some humility.” Indeed.

Read post and comments here. H/T Matt Vooro

Reality denier: After polar bear numbers have greatly increased since the cooling scare of the 1970s, he now suggests that CO2 may kill them all by the time his daughter grows up

Climate [Fraudster Michael Mann] Speaks Out - Science News

Late the morning of November 7, Mann stepped in front of a crowd of reporters just off the campus of Yale University, as part of a plenary panel at the annual Council for the Advancement of Science Writing meeting. It was a friendly crowd, most of whom had spent years covering the overwhelming scientific evidence that greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere by human activities are causing global temperatures to heat up.
...
Mann concluded that “there’s not just a hockey stick - there’s a hockey league.” Some scientific uncertainties do remain about climate change, such as the precise effects of clouds in a changing climate. “There are legitimate uncertainties,” Mann said, “but unfortunately the public discourse right now is so far from scientific discourse.”
...
I’ve seen Mann in this frame of mind before; several years ago he testified in front of some of his staunchest critics at a National Academy of Sciences panel set up to review the hockey stick work. The jaw I saw clenched back then seemed not to have loosened, even when the audience was a group of friendly journalists rather than aggressive panel questioners. (The final NAS report reaffirmed the basic science underlying the hockey stick reconstruction.)

Yet Mann remains keenly aware of the political import of every word. He ended his talk with an impassioned plea to action, complete with a picture of his daughter marveling at swimming polar bears at the local zoo. “I can’t imagine having to tell her when she’s grown up that the polar bears became extinct,” he said, “because we didn’t act soon enough to combat a problem that we knew was real but that we couldn’t convince the public of.”

See post here. See Steve McIntyre on Mann’s where he comments “...one sees someone who purports to be a “scientist” making unsupportable statements” here.
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Inaccurate news reports misrepresent a climate-science initiative of the American Geophysical Union

WASHINGTON-An article appearing in the Los Angeles Times, and then picked up by media outlets far and wide, misrepresents the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a climate science project the AGU is about to relaunch. The project, called Climate Q&A Service, aims simply to provide accurate scientific answers to questions from journalists about climate science.

“In contrast to what has been reported in the LA Times and elsewhere, there is no campaign by AGU against climate skeptics or congressional conservatives,” says Christine McEntee, Executive Director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union. “AGU will continue to provide accurate scientific information on Earth and space topics to inform the general public and to support sound public policy development.”

AGU is the world’s largest, not-for-profit, professional society of Earth and space scientists, with more than 58,000 members in over 135 countries.

“AGU is a scientific society, not an advocacy organization,” says climate scientist and AGU President Michael J. McPhaden. “The organization is committed to promoting scientific discovery and to disseminating to the scientific community, policy makers, the media, and the public, peer-reviewed scientific findings across a broad range of Earth and space sciences.”

AGU initiated a climate science Q&A service for the first time in 2009 to provide accurate scientific information for journalists covering the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. AGU has been working over the past year on how to provide this service once again in association with the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico.

AGU’s Climate Q&A service addresses scientific questions only. It does not involve any commentary on policy. Journalists are able to submit questions via email, and AGU member-volunteers with Ph.D.s in climate science-related fields provide answers via email.

The relaunch of the Climate Q&A service is pending. When AGU is ready to announce the service, we will notify journalists on our distribution list via a media advisory that the service is once again available for their use.

For additional information about the Q&A service please see a 2 March 2010 article about the 2009 Q&A service that was published in AGU’s weekly newspaper Eos, and a blog post about the service on AGU’s science communication blog The Plainspoken Scientist.

The American Geophysical Union was established in 1919, and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. AGU advances the Earth and space sciences through its scholarly publications, meetings and conferences, and outreach programs. For more information, please visit the AGU web site.