[QUOTE=chalsall;401942]Please forgive me. I am interested in this domain.

But...

Fjords are relatively small. They could consume 1,000% of their mass in carbon and not really make that much of a difference.[/QUOTE]
Well maybe the math doesn't fly, I'm just a parrot after all. I mostly try to stay out of the way of people getting work done while I crow over a shiny tidbit or two.

[QUOTE=chalsall;401942]Please forgive me. I am interested in this domain.[/quote]

But not enough to do even a tiny bit of reading or arithmetic, it seems.

[quote]Fjords are relatively small. They could consume 1,000% of their mass in carbon and not really make that much of a difference.[/QUOTE]

How about we do some simple back-of-the-envelope-style order of magnitude estimation? The wiki entry on fjords lacked total-area/volume data, so let's take the area number from the article:
[quote]Fjords cover only 0.1 percent of the world's ocean surface but account for 11 percent of the organic carbon in plants, soils and rocks that gets buried in marine sediments every year after being washed off the land by rivers, it said.[/quote]

Total earth ocean surface is ~70% of total surface area. Convenient mnemonic for earth size is that constant-longitude (i.e. great circle) distance from either pole to equator is almost exactly 10000 km. (From hereon '=' will mean 'approximately equals'). So R = 6370 km, thus ocean area Ao = 0.7*4*Pi*(6370 km)^2 = 357 million km^2.

We can argue about average depth of fjords and shape, but based on the Wikipedia description of various fjords, an average depth of 100 m seems reasonable, in the 'if anything on the low side' sense. That gives a total fjord volume estimate Vf = 0.001 (fraction of total ocean surface) * 0.1 (avg deoth in km) * Ao = 35,700 km^3, with a total water mass of 35,700 Gt. (since 1 m^3 of water has mass very close to 1 metric ton, 1 km3 similarly weighs roughly 1 Gt).

Now compare to [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere]annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions[/url]:
[quote]Burning fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum is the leading cause of increased anthropogenic CO2; deforestation is the second major cause. In 2010, 9.14 gigatonnes of carbon (33.5 gigatonnes of CO2) were released from fossil fuels and cement production worldwide, compared to 6.15 gigatonnes in 1990.[/quote]
Thus earth's fjords would in fact need absorb less than 0.1% of their water-weight annually in CO2 to entirely soak up human-caused emissions.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;401950]But not enough to do even a tiny bit of reading or arithmetic, it seems.

...

Thus earth's fjords would in fact need absorb less than 0.1% of their water-weight annually in CO2 to entirely soak up human-caused emissions.[/QUOTE]

I very much enjoy being called out when I speak out of my ass and am probably wrong. Truly. :smile:

My response was "gut". The number's didn't seem to make sense to me, and it seemed a bit like a "Climate change denial" article. "Don't worry about burning carbon sequestered millions of years ago; it will happen again Really Soon Now!"

I'm very happy to be proven wrong. I, certainly, will be reviewing the article in question, and the numbers, over the weekend.

[QUOTE=chalsall;401986]I very much enjoy being called out when I speak out of my ass and am probably wrong. Truly. :smile:

My response was "gut". The number's didn't seem to make sense to me, and it seemed a bit like a "Climate change denial" article. "Don't worry about burning carbon sequestered millions of years ago; it will happen again Really Soon Now!"

I'm very happy to be proven wrong. I, certainly, will be reviewing the article in question, and the numbers, over the weekend.[/QUOTE]

Perhaps I am more averse to people talking out of their nethers than I should be, because that connotes methane emissions to me, and CH4 is a much more potent GG than CO2. OTOH since you were doing so metaphorically, I should probably take my aversion to the literalists - maybe a protest outside a local Mexican food establishment?

I suspect even an annual CO2 uptake of 0.1% of water mass is very large by biological-productivity standards, but that seems at least not completely out of the range of possibility, and anyway we don't need fjords to suck up all the human-emitted CO2, just some appreciable fraction. Of course I'm still in the "first, best option is to reduce our emissions of the stuff via green tech and population-boom-curbing" school, but there are powerful industrial/financial, political, religious and social institutions aligned against such eminent sensibility.

[URL="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-point-of-no-return-climate-change-nightmares-are-already-here-20150805?page=7"]An alarmist article[/URL]. I've not studied it or the reliability of the reports its summarizes to be able to decide whether it's justifiably alarmist.

o [url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/08/31/obama-can-rename-mount-mckinley-denali-but-he-cant-stop-its-loss-of-ice/]Obama can rename Mount McKinley Denali — but he can’t stop its loss of ice[/url] | WaPo

o [url=http://grist.org/article/hey-burning-man-your-desert-party-sucks-for-the-rest-of-us]Hey burning man, your desert party sucks for the rest of us[/url] | Grist

"Burning Man] will spew a minimum of 49,000 tons of greenhouse gases. How much is that? About the same that the nation of Swaziland (population 1.2 million) produces in a week. [That] does seems like a lot just to get naked in the desert and talk about your chakras. Ironically, Burning Man’s single most important tenet, according to every Burner ever, is leave no trace."

However, the more meaningful metric of wastefulness is how much *more* said amount of GG emissions is relative to what those folks would be responsible for in a less wretchedly-excessive context - the article goes on to note that the average BM participant will emit ~2x the US per-capita average in CO2 during the event, factoring in emissions due to traveling to and from the venue. Harder to say is how that compares to the rest-of-year average for the average BM [strike]wankerish poseur[/strike] participant - sure there is probably an above-average fraction of Tesla owners represented there, but [a] Teslas are not really 'green' when one factors in the supply-chain pollution (including at the downstream end - those huge batteries are eco-nasties compared to disposal of a conventional IC-engine car) and electricity-generation pollution, and [b] there is probably an above-average fraction of Tesla owners represented there, as well, a sort of bong-smoking wannabe-hippie analog of the Davos conference. So in the end BM may actually represent a net reduction in GG output for said participants taken as a group.

[url=www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change]What Exxon Knew About Climate Change[/url] - The New Yorker
[quote]Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”[/quote]
An NC reader [url=http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/09/links-91915.html#comment-2493640]adds some context[/url]:
[quote]The beauty of that article by Bill McKibben is that at the bottom of that page from the New Yorker is an ad:

Support Keystone XL. (Learn more)

To support America’s energy security, you see.

Bill McKibben is the person who made the Keystone XL pipeline not just a celebrity, but the sole focus of heightened publicity and attention about OMIGOD oil. He was successful for a couple of years in keeping the Keystone XL pipeline in the headlines (got himself arrested protesting against it in front of the White House), with no attention being paid to 1) the numbers, which showed that coal mining and combustion contributed far more to CO2 emission than did all the oil from Canada’s oil sands even if the entire amount were mined and burned (which is not possible); and 2) the continuing expansion of the pipeline systems carrying oil from Canada (mostly from the oil sands) into the US, to the point that Keystone XL became increasingly less and less important; and 3) the completion of the southern part of Keystone XL (no Federal approval necessary since it doesn’t cross a national border) and put online at the beginning of this year, carrying 400 000 barrels of oil a day by February, mostly from Canada, to the US Gulf Coast refineries that buy it.

I’ve thought for a couple of years now that McKibben serves as what Lenin called a useful idiot, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if CEOs of coal companies had made sure that checks had been sent regularly to support 350.com, the effort McKibben had founded with the aim of protesting against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

McKibben has a new topic now, I guess, legitimate and important but, um…what about Keystone XL? After all that hoo-haw?[/quote]
Not to mention the proliferation of deadly oil-carrying rail-tanker disasters, in the absence of pipelines serving the needed corridors - yes, the lesser of 2 evils is still evil, but if the choice is shipping via pipeline vs rail tanker, I'll take the former very day of the week. Of course just learning to use less of the stuff should be humanity's top priority.

[url=www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/09/with-shells-failure-u-s-arctic-drilling-is-dead.html]With Shell’s Failure, U.S. Arctic Drilling Is Dead[/url] | naked capitalism

This book was recommended to us today: [url]http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/[/url]

It looks interesting!

:uncwilly:

[URL="http://mynewsla.com/weather/2015/11/01/hottest-socal-october-ever-by-4-degrees/"]Hottest SoCal October ever, by 4 degrees[/URL]
[QUOTE]Unofficial readings of 95 degrees were recorded on two days at normally-cool Malibu.

The average high temperature last month at the official Downtown Los Angeles measuring station, at USC,was 75.6 degrees, 7 degrees warmer than the next-hottest October, back in 1983, which also was an El Nino year.

Twenty-five days last month saw highs of 80 or above at USC, which set another record. And on seven nights last month, the mercury downtown did not drop below 70, and yes, that’s another record.

At LAX, next to the Pacific Ocean, the average high was 74 degrees. That’s 8.1 degrees above the previous record October, in 1958.

Burbank was even hotter: its October average high was 76.2 degrees, 9.3 degrees above the record set in 1991.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=only_human;414550][URL="http://mynewsla.com/weather/2015/11/01/hottest-socal-october-ever-by-4-degrees/"]Hottest SoCal October ever, by 4 degrees[/URL][/QUOTE]
We are not believing, endorsing, or promoting in any way the "global warming" propaganda, but we have to mention a fact, the Oct 2015 [U]was[/U] the hottest October in the last 15 years since we are in Thailand and leaving in the same place. We can prove it with personal records from our thermometer (we have one outside, which records the stuff, personal design).

The difference was quite big, because we felt it also at the shower heater. Actually, we first "felt" it, then we checked the thermometer, to make sure. Our heater has a knob to adjust the electric power (this is cheap stuff, you can buy everywhere, you don't adjust the water's output temperature, but the input power, in fact not even that, you only adjust the phase-cut timing for the AC voltage wave) and this knob has an "yearly" cycle, this means it is at minimum in April, when the water from the pipe is already "too hot" to waste electricity on it, and we start turning it up in May, when the rains start, going a little bit up periodically (weekly?), if we feel the water cold, in such a way that at the end of November it reaches the maximum. We like our water warm in a "very narrow temperature range", and other enemies in the house never use our bathroom/shower - we are kinda Al Bundy related to this subject:razz: well... whatever, you got the point. We have a few tons glass fiber water tank, i.e. not sensitive at all to sharp changes in the climate, like day/night, sun/shadow, and a house pump which supplies a constant flow, so the shower temperature only depends on the applied power and some average temperature of a longer period (the fiber tank is a good insulator), and not on the water flow, air bubbles, or such. So the "knob" is quite "reliable".

We usually start turning the knob down end of December, as the water coming from the pipe gets a bit warmer, and the shower gets too hot for our skin. We turn down the knob quite fast (almost daily) in Feb-March, such as in April is again at its minimum point (i.e. no heating).

This year we didn't have to move the knob up at all in October, and in fact we moved it down, such as now is pointing in the direction where, during other years, was pointing during August. Also the rain was visible less than other years, this October.

OTOH, that means nothing, two and three years ago we had the "coldest November" in 15 years (+9°C, in the morning, other years were usually 12, seldom 11). And this year's April was one of the colder (but not the coldest) in 15 years, with no day over 45°C (other years we have seen 48 in the shadow, during midday April - the hottest month of the year). Of course, the "colder" thingies never got mentioned in the press.