How CO2 Starvation and Plate Tectonics Caused the Greatest extinctions on Earth, the Permian

 

This is the transcript for the video 

"How CO2 Starvation & Plate Tectonics Caused the Greatest Mass Extinction, the Permian Great Dying"

available at https://youtu.be/89imeYT_shs

Welcome back everyone.

This video will explore the wealth of evidence suggesting that the combination of CO2 starvation and plate tectonics caused the greatest extinctions on earth collectively known as the end Permian extinction or the Great Dying.

The end-Permian marked the transition from 300 million years of Paleozoic plant and animal dominance and the resetting of earth's evolutionary trajectory, towards our modern fauna.

The Permian extinctions represented a loss of 57% of all biological families, 83% of all genera, 81%of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species in existence in the end Permian’s last million years.

Coinciding with these Permian extinctions was the decline of abundant CO2 concentrations since the Ordovician period to the stressful low concentrations in the Permian.

For the first time in earth's history, CO2 concentrations fell below 1000 ppm, the concentration that supports maximum photosynthesis productivity.

While plants suffered from low CO2, land vertebrate extinctions were largely a result of oxygen's dramatic roller coaster ride that crashed in the Permian.

It is essential to first understand how changes in CO2 concentrations affect photosynthesis and plant productivity.

The key productivity enzyme, Rubisco, grabs a CO2 molecule and then shuttles it down a metabolic pathway to produce the sugars and carbohydrates essential for all life.

Today various versions of Rubisco are saturated when CO2 reaches 1000 ppm thus maximizing photosynthetic production.

Our current atmospheric concentrations are only 40% of the optimum. For that reason, modern commercial greenhouses raise CO2 to 1000 ppm for maximum crop yields.

During pre-industrial times of the Little Ice Age, CO2 concentrations fell to 280 ppm and evidence shows during that time ocean productivity was much lower than today.

If CO2 concentrations fall below 150 ppm, then photosynthesis can stop completely. So, policies to sequester and lower CO2 must be very careful not to approach this deadly level.

There are many competing theories regards the causes of the massive Permian extinctions, but scientists are nowhere near a consensus.

Click-bait media such as the NY Times have been obsessed only with theories blaming warming temperatures. They then segue those theories into fearful narratives about extinction threats from modern global warming.

However, many researchers have pointed to the competition for the declining CO2, that resulted in severely reduced photosynthesis, the collapse of primary productivity and a significant malfunction of the global food webs. Evidence is rapidly accumulating to support their conclusions.

During the Ordovician with CO2 concentrations 5 times greater than the saturation level, newly evolving photosynthesizing species were not limited by competition for CO2. Thus, the greatest phytoplankton diversity developed then.

By the Permian, CO2 concentrations fell to a stressfully low 200 ppm and very few new species appeared.

There is a strong correlation with origination of new Paleozoic phytoplankton species (illustrated in green) and the concentration of CO2 (seen on the right).

During the great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, the greatest abundance of newly evolved phytoplankton species correlated with high CO2 concentrations. New species typically also suffer higher extinction rates (illustrated in red) as they evolved to survive in niches that are still in flux.

As CO2 concentrations plummeted during the Devonian when land plants competed for and sequestered more CO2, fewer new marine phytoplankton species evolved, and extinctions increased.

By the end Carboniferous and early Permian periods, virtually no new species appeared as CO2 concentrations fell dangerously close to levels at which photosynthesis could no longer be supported.

As a result, much of the green algae clades that had dominated the Paleozoic oceans died off, although this clade also provided the ancestors for land plants.

Phytoplankton from the red clades with more efficient photosynthesis, rose to dominance later in the age of dinosaurs and still dominate ocean primary productivity today.

When CO2 concentrations reached their lowest levels ever in the early Permian, phytoplankton fossils became extremely rare and the Permian experienced what scientists call a "phytoplankton blackout."

So why the Permian blackout?

Biased by the last mass extinction event at the end of the cretaceous when the earth was struck by an asteroid, researchers often search for a single devastating event, like an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption to explain what happened during the end Permian. However, there is a growing scientific belief that the Permian extinctions were more gradual and caused by a protracted decline in environmental conditions that slowly reduced the earth's biodiversity and thus reduced the probability of new species evolving that can adapt to changing conditions.

This notion of a protracted extinction was discussed in the 2021 paper "dead clades walking". A clade is a group of organisms that evolved from a common ancestor. Multiple minor extinction events can gradually reduce a clade’s biodiversity and its resilience, so that the clade is doomed to extinction several million years later.

Clearly a mass extinction does not require an asteroid. The gradual reduction in phytoplankton and photosynthesis can collapse food webs and result in major extinctions that, in the sparse fossil record, are incorrectly interpreted as a relatively rapid extinction event.

The media likes to emphasize the earth's 5 great mass extinctions. But several previous minor extinctions have all contributed to dead clades walking, clades that finally went extinct during the Permian mass extinction.

The first so-called great mass extinction happened during the Ordovician just after the great biodiversity event. Associated with the Ordovician icehouse, 61% of marine life disappeared and mostly culled many of the new species that had recently evolved in a previous warmer climate.

The late Devonian mass extinction was more disruptive, involving the loss of entire carbonate reef ecosystems that had dominated the early Paleozoic oceans. However, many researchers now believe that the end Devonian extinctions were simply the last of up to 7 protracted minor extinction events during a time when the colonization of the continents by land plants was rapidly depleting CO2 concentrations and dramatically reducing phytoplankton biodiversity.

The beginning of another glacial period during the mid-carboniferous caused 14-39% of the marine genera to go extinct.

The carboniferous rainforest collapse driven by drying continents and extremely low CO2 concentrations is considered to be only a minor extinction event, yet it totally altered tropical ecosystems and marked the peak in atmospheric oxygen before oxygen plummeted during the Permian.

Between 7 and 17 million years before the end Permian mass extinction, between 35 & 47% of marine invertebrate genera went extinct as well as nearly 80% of land vertebrates.

Those previous extinction events reduced biodiversity and support beliefs that the end per main mass extinction event was likely the culmination of dead clades walking.

The end Triassic and end cretaceous mass extinctions are the last two of the great extinctions but will not be examined here.

By sequestering CO2 and raising oxygen concentrations, photosynthesis paved the way for its own demise by amplifying photorespiration which greatly reduces photosynthesis in both marine and land plants.

The key enzyme Rubisco first evolved when CO2 was abundant and oxygen scarce. Thus, under those conditions Rubisco could be sloppy about discriminating between CO2 and oxygen yet still be productive.

As oxygen concentrations increased and CO2 decreased throughout the Paleozoic, Rubisco increasingly grabbed oxygen instead of CO2 initiating destructive photorespiration that reduces plant productivity.

Laboratory experiments under current oxygen levels found when CO2 concentrations are as low as 220 ppm, plant biomass production is reduced by 50% and 30% of that reduced productivity was due to photorespiration. When CO2 was reduced to 150 ppm, productivity was reduced by 92%.

For ocean phytoplankton, reduced CO2 is even more detrimental. When CO2 diffuses into the ocean most molecules immediately react with water creating 3 forms of inorganic carbon. CO2, bicarbonate, and carbonate ions. (Left graph) bicarbonate ions now constitute over 90% of the ocean's inorganic carbon, but rubisco can only use CO2 molecules.

Furthermore, as CO2 is depleted ocean pH rises (seen in right graph). And ocean pH controls how the inorganic carbon is proportioned between more useable CO2 and bicarbonate ions.

When CO2 falls to 200 ppm, ocean pH rises to 8.5 and the amount of available CO2 approaches zero.

To survive the negative effects of reduced CO2, phytoplankton have evolved CO2 concentrating mechanisms that increase the internal CO2 concentration.

Photosynthesizing cyanobacteria evolved the ability to import bicarbonate ions and shuttle them into a carboxysome where an enzyme converts bicarbonate ions into CO2 while in the proximity of Rubisco.

Algae evolved similar mechanisms with pyrenoids. Without a carbon concentrating mechanism, Paleozoic phytoplankton species experienced limited growth.

All modern phytoplankton have developed various CO2 concentrating mechanisms to survive in today's low CO2 world.

Experimental phytoplankton strains with dysfunctional CO2 concentrating mechanism just cannot survive.

As CO2 has declined over the last 20 million years several clades of land plants (yet still a small percentage of all species) have evolved a similar CO2 concentrating mechanism known as c4 photosynthesis.

In the upper sunlit euphotic zone, phytoplankton generate an abundance of dissolved organic matter and sinking particulate matter.

That organic matter sustains an abundance of marine life in the complex food webs of the dark twilight zone.

Today's oceans contain as much dissolved organic matter as exists in the earth's terrestrial ecosystems.

Several scientists had questioned the reliability of the phytoplankton blackout data because robust invertebrate communities persisted in the fossil record for longer times despite crashes in phytoplankton species.

However, awareness of the bacterial loop, first published in 1983, has altered scientific thinking about ocean food webs. Before 1983, it was widely believed that only phytoplankton could directly sustain the zooplankton, and benthic animals.

However, it is now understood that the bacterial loop recycles dissolved organic matter and thus can maintain a substantial food web until the dissolved organic matter is depleted.

However, unlike oxygen generating phytoplankton, the bacterial loop consumes oxygen and expands the oxygen minimum zones which coincide with the many deadly anoxic events of the Permian.

The complex interactions between, disappearing phytoplankton, cyanobacteria and bacterial loops resulted in the extinction of various Permian marine animals in various niches at different times.

Looking more closely at the stages of the Permian, begining with the ending of the Paleozoic ice age there were large losses in biodiversity with major extinctions during the earliest Permian stages.

Ammonoids had been declining for the Permian’s' first 30 million years with many going extinct 17 million years before the end pemican extinction.

By the Capitanian stage, 75% of the Permian coral families became extinct as well as 82% of coral species.

By the end Capitanian stage, 7-10 million years before the end Permian, 35 to 47% of all marine invertebrate genera had gone extinct. Many researchers now include the Capitanian extinctions as one of the earth's 6 great mass extinctions and separate it from the end Permian. The Capitanian extinctions happened in a cool climate and before the rapid rise in CO2 and the warming that some blame for causing the end Permian extinctions.

On land, North American coal deposits disappeared in the early Permian after the carboniferous rainforest collapsed.

Stressful atmospheric CO2 hovered between 150 and 700 ppm during the late carboniferous.

The lowest calculated values of 100 ppm would have been lethal for many Permian plant species and correlates with the disappearance of coal deposits.

Both laboratory experiments and paleontological evidence show most plant species respond to low CO2 concentrations by producing more stomata to increase CO2 diffusion into the plant.

However more stomata increase water loss and make the Permian plants more vulnerable to the increasing dryness throughout Pangea’s formation. As a result, minor plant extinctions happened throughout the Permian, starting with the Carboniferous Tropical Rainforest Collapse.

The towering lycopsid rainforest trees went extinct leaving only related diminutive species requiring less carbon, some of which have survived until today and are frequently used in terrariums.

As moisture requiring species were extirpated and drought tolerant species increased, food chains were gravely disrupted resulting in the mid-Permian Olson extinctions.

By the Roadian stage 45% of the plant species had gone extinct in the Chinese micro-continents. And by the Capitanian 56% had gone extinct.

Declining biodiversity reduces the probability of new species evolving that would otherwise balance out natural background extinctions.

The formation of Pangea had a negative effect on biodiversity. Pangea removed unique niches from its converging island-like micro-continents. Studies of modern island biology have demonstrated how only a few species are genetically capable of producing a radiation of new species, and only when vacant niches are available.

The "oldest" existing volcanic Hawaiian island, Kauai, emerged about 5 million years ago which is about the time of the arrival of the ancestor of Hawaii’s honey creepers. Since then, one ancestor gave rise to at least 12 unique species, each evolving varied beaks to exploit Hawaii’s unique vegetation.

Of the hundreds of continental vagrant species that ever arrived on the Hawaiian Islands, only a few remained and they only evolved small changes in size or color. But even fewer possessed flexible genomes that allowed successful speciation that could exploit unfamiliar but available niches.

Likewise, the ancestor of the Galapagos finches arrived about 2 million years ago on the volcanic islands and radiated into at least 14 unique species.

During the early Paleozoic, in the Ordovician, many of today's continental land masses were just a multitude of separate large volcanic islands or micro-continents. Islands provided more coastlines with unique coastal niches for marine species.

There were also more abundant shallow seas that readily recycled critical nutrients that would otherwise be sequestered in the deeper ocean.

The convergence of those Ordovician micro-continents into the fully united single continent of Pangea during the Permian, reduced coastlines, and the areal extent of shallow seas.

Pangea's formation also provided connectivity that allowed more competitive generalist species to invade and eradicate species living in previously unique niches of isolated islands. The loss of productive shallow seas exterminated the least productive species within those habitats.

And the loss of coastlines reduced the flow of water vapor from the ocean to the inland. As Pangea consolidated, the continental interiors dried and inland species that had adapted to previous wetter climates became the first to go extinct, like the lycopsid trees of the carboniferous rain forest.

However, species on the islands of north and south China persisted for millions of years later.

The drivers and timing of terrestrial vertebrate extinctions often differed from ocean extinctions. However, the ultimate drivers were still CO2 starvation and Pangea’s formation.

As plants colonized the land, global CO2 was further reduced to near lethal levels for algae by the end of the carboniferous, while oxygen levels rapidly increased to the highest levels ever in the earth's history, benefiting greater animal speciation.

The abundance of oxygen enabled an increase in terrestrial biodiversity as the more aquatic species could venture further onto the land and survive as sufficient oxygen simply diffused through their moist skin or via other forms of primitive breathing. The legacy of these early evolutionary experiments is still seen in amphibian and reptile species that survive today.

Lungless salamanders still totally rely on simple diffusion through their skin for uptake of oxygen (orange bars) and removal of CO2 (green bars). Many frogs and salamanders have aquatic larvae that breathe in water with gills, then metamorphose to air breathing adults with moist skin and primitive lungs ventilated by constant throat flutters.

Despite better evolved breathing mechanisms, many reptiles still supplement their oxygen via diffusion through their skin.

However, oxygen concentrations plummeted during the Permian as the phytoplankton blackout, the rainforest collapse, and Pangea’s switch to less productive vegetation in drier conditions, had dramatically reduced the photosynthetic production of oxygen. Different clades of land vertebrates that had recently evolved in a climate of abundant oxygen, could not compete with species that had evolved more efficient breathing.

Insects rely on passive diffusion for breathing. The high oxygen concentrations enabled the evolution of the earth's biggest insects and centipedes during the carboniferous. however, those giant insects were the first to go extinct as oxygen levels plummeted during the Permian. In fact, it was the only time our earth had ever experienced the mass extinction of insect clades.

Because true amphibian and reptiles had not evolved yet, and the varied characteristics of Permian vertebrates often blurred the line between reptile and amphibian, many Permian vertebrates are best referred to as just tetrapods (4- leggeds) or amniotes if they no longer needed to lay their eggs in water.

One clade of amphibian-like animals, the lespospondyls, appeared in the carboniferous but were extinct by the mid Permian.

Another clade of amphibian-like tetrapods also evolved in the carboniferous

And some evolved reptile-like characteristics as well. While some species also went extinct by the mid Permian, others survived into the age of dinosaurs.

Synapsids were reptile-like animals whose surviving species gave rise to mammals.

The pelycosaurs were sysnapsids that dominated the early Permian but went extinct by the mid-Permian.

The dinocephalians were synapsids that replaced the pelycosaurs. But they went extinct by the Permian’s end Capitanian stage.

Diapsid clades replaced the synapsids in the mid-Permian. This clade's more versatile genetics withstood the end-Permian extinctions and enabled the Mesozoic evolution of crocodiles, dinosaurs, birds, snakes, and lizards, many of which have persisted though today.

In light of all the many extinction factors, the NY Times' promotion of only climate warming as the cause of Permian mass extinctions simply to maintain fear regards our current climate warming, is egregiously irresponsible. The serial reduction of biodiversity for most clades from the Ordovician to the end Permian, strongly suggests CO2 starvation was a far more powerful ecosystem disruptor than periodic warming episodes.

The loss of 61% of marine biodiversity during the Ordovician glaciations, not only demonstrates the lethal power of colder temperatures, but also calls into question the role of CO2 as a temperature control knob.

The Ordovician icehouse happened when CO2 concentrations were ten times higher than today at 5000 ppm.

Some scientists argue solar output was 4% lower and thus counteracted any warming from high CO2. But a solar drop of 7 w/m2 of insolation, does not counteract 13.5 w/m2 of calculated greenhouse warming.

The late Paleozoic icehouse has been attributed to falling CO2 concentrations, even though the glaciations were initiated in the early carboniferous when CO2 was about 2000 ppm. Scientists have proposed other theories for glaciations happening under high CO2 concentrations, suggesting the formation of Pangea prevented warm ocean currents from moderating the polar climate of the southern hemisphere.

By cherry-picking the rise in CO2 only during the very end Permian, such blinkered analyses have allowed some researchers to echo the narrative that it was deadly CO2-driven global warming that caused end Permian extinctions and then fearmonger their conclusions to rant we're in danger of extinction from today's 1-degree Celsius warming climate.

However, such theories totally fail to account for dead clades walking and the numerous extinctions that set the stage for the end Permian extinctions via colder conditions and CO2 starvation.

So, I encourage you to heed the warning from Aesop 2500 years ago. We must avoid any remedy that is worse than the disease. Rash attempts to sequester CO2 and lower its concentrations to levels approaching plant starvation, will prove to be disastrous.

Likewise, shun bill gates' "block the sun" proposals. Such lunacy will definitely disrupt the earth's life-giving carbon cycle and upset global productivity and devastate all ecosystems! Scientists must take a closer look at how CO2 starvation caused the world's greatest extinctions and act accordingly. Furthermore, click-bait media needs to be shamed into honestly educating the public about all the science.

Thank you.

For more superb educational climate science Bookmark my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/uc7xnhez2qcj_phf2mvdfk0q/videos 

 Or read the transcripts at perhapsallnatural.blogspot.com 

 Jim Steele is an ecologist and Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, (whose research restored a critical watershed), author of Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition.

UCLA's Daniel Swain and NPR’s David Romero Collude to Flood Our minds with a River of Climate Fear Mongering!

 

UCLA’s Daniel Swain and NPR’s David Romero Collude to Flood Our minds with a River of Climate Fear Mongering!

There have been many news articles about the human suffering caused by the floods that inundated the town of Pajaro in Monterrey County, California on March 11, 2023. But NPR’s article This Winter's Floods May Be 'Only a Taste' of the Megafloods to Come, Climate Scientists Warn was the most disgusting example of how Daniel Swain and National Public Radio dishonestly use any tragedy to fearmonger a climate crisis. Alluding to CO2 driven climate change Swain stated, “As disruptive as this year's events have been, we're nowhere near to a plausible worst-case storm and flood scenario for California.”

However, the real story is about government ineptitude and the human risky penchant for building in natural flood plains. When California’s county lines were being drawn up in 1850 as California achieved statehood, the concern was not how to best manage a watershed, but the result of compromises between competing political interests. Thus, the Pajaro River and its main tributary the San Benito River became the dividing line between 4 different counties.

The town of Watsonville, in Santa Cruz County on the north side of the river, and Pajaro, in Monterrey County on the south side, were first developed by non-natives in the 1850s in the middle of the Pajaro River’s flood plain. Floods were common and inevitable. Each winter the returning rains turned the flood plain into a mosaic of meandering streams, marshes, ponds, and flooded fields. So, levees were constructed to prevent flood damage to buildings and agricultural fields. The first levees were built to protect the relatively wealthier town of Watsonville on the north side of the river. Still these levees frequently failed as evidenced by this man canoeing down Watsonville’s main street in February 1922.

In the 1930s the US Army Corp of Engineers began drawing up plans to expand and rebuild the Pajaro River levee system but due to various delays the levees weren’t completed until 1949. Within only 10 years of levee completion in 1955 and 1958, two major floods exceeded the level design capacity. Unlike NPR, no honest scientist would ever suggest that climate change caused those failures within just 6 years of its design.

In 1963, the USACE acknowledged poor planning in levee design, and congress authorized re-construction of the flood control system, however no funds were provided from the federal government. Since 1949 seven major floods over the next 50 years exposed the flaws in the designs by these so-called flood control experts.

In an interview with the NY Times, Mark Strudley, the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency’s executive director said “federal, state and local officials had talked since the 1960s about the need to shore up the water infrastructure around the Pajaro River, but the property values in the area were so low that they did not meet the threshold for repair under the cost-benefit formula that the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers were using.

After winning several lawsuits regards the levee failures in the 1995 flood, politicians finally developed a new plan to rebuild the levee system, set to begin in 2024. But NPR simply pushed gloom and climate doom asking, “whether those plans will account for the changing climate and the increased frequency and ferocity of storms expected.” NPR ignored that the 2023 Pajaro flooding was undeniably caused by another failed levee which was largely due to the political battles regards how each county contributes to the maintenance and repairs of an aging levee system.

The root of the political battles goes back to 1850 county boundaries. On the west side of the Pajaro Gap lies 2 counties comprising the river’s lower basin and on the east side another 2 counties that comprise upper basin. Most of the rainfall happens in the upper basin, then flows through the mountain gap into the floodplains of the lower basin to threaten Watsonville and Pajaro. The lower basin counties argue that the rapid urbanization in the upper basin had created an “asphalt effect” which increased runoff and river water volume. Thus, those counties should contribute the most money for levee upgrades in the lower basin. The upper basin blames the lower basin counties for not maintaining the levees and stream channels. For decades such squabbles delayed funding for improvements that could have definitely prevented the 2023 flooding.

But climate alarmists always push the scientific factoid that in a warmer world the atmosphere holds more moisture thus CO2 is causing bigger floods. But that factoid is totally irrelevant here. They ignore California’s rainy season happens during the cooler winter and historically the greatest amount of flooding in over a thousand years happened during the cold Little Ice Age.

And worse, NPR and Swain failed to share NOAA’s data showing global warming never caused the Pajaro River to reach flood stage. Pajaro River’s flood stage is set at a level determined by its history of numerous floods. The Pajaro River did not exceed historical levels that naturally happened during floods for the past century. The only honest attribution for the devastating flooding was that the people of Pajaro were victimized by political infighting between county governments who had agreed to maintain the levees needed for Pajaro to survive in this natural flood plain. Levees and government promises have long been known to give people a false sense of security, only to settle them into more dangerous locations.

NPR and Swain never addressed any of the natural and political issues leading to the flooding of Pajaro, incessantly choosing to fear monger climate change and push catastrophic speculation about the future. They interviewed Antonio Hueso, a 72-year-old retired farmworker, whose home was damaged for the 2nd time during levee failures. Hueso wisely said “I’m going to fix my house, and when people forget about the flooding, I will sell my house and move to Madera or Fresno”. Such a wise and simple solution of moving out of harm’s way didn’t fit NPR’s narrative, so in the radio version they added “But In a warming world will a move to higher ground suffice?”, as if the climate gods have warned us about coming floods of biblical proportions.

Daniel Swain, who was groomed by climate alarmists Noah Diffenbaugh and Michael Mann, chose to rant that warming of the climate has doubled the likelihood of a mega-flood and every degree of new warming increases that likelihood even more. What was once considered unlikely to happen in our lifetimes “has become quite likely.” Swain wouldn’t be surprised if as many as four megafloods happened just in this century. “We're not necessarily talking about 100 years from now. We're talking about the next 20 or 30 years.” Of course, such catastrophic predictions have served Swain very well as he frightened California politicians into funding his flood-modeling project.

NPR finished with an interview with Denia Escutia, a high school senior. “I think Pajaro deserves climate justice. I call this my home, but is it really my home if they don't want to help us?” Her final reply to NPR was her future is gone. Then NPR closed with one last scare tactic blaming broken levees on climate change by saying, “gone because the climate the levees were designed for no longer exists.”

And once again climate alarmists obscure the real problems and real solutions. It is disgusting!

Global Warming Greenhouse Theory’s Greatest Weakness

Global Warming Greenhouse Theory’s Greatest Weakness

This is the transcript for the video at https://youtu.be/XHLafd2MU-k

 

Welcome back everyone.

How long heat gets trapped near the earth's surface determines the global temperature, but the lack of adequately measuring this time delay is the greatest weakness in global warming theories.

The public often gets the wrong impression of the greenhouse effect from illustrations like this suggesting CO2 is trapping heat forever.

A comparison of the time delayed cooling by 3 different mechanisms of trapping heat, calls into question how each mechanism contributes to global temperatures and extreme weather. Other heat trapping mechanism by sea ice, clouds, or urban surfaces, won’t be discussed. Now undeniably, greenhouse gases delay the escape of infrared radiation back to outer space. .

In contrast heat domes that produce heat waves don’t trap radiation but suppresses the normal convection process that normally carries heated air away from the surface for days and even months.

The ocean's salty sub-surface layers also suppress ocean convection, trapping ocean heat for days, seasons, and years. And that trapped heat intensifies hurricanes and typhoons.

In one of the 20th century's most influential books "the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn wrote “philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can be placed upon a given collection of data.” Kuhn was advising us to be careful and distinguish good data from the opinions claiming the data supports their pet theory.

This illustration graphicly represents the collection of data describing how the energy absorbed by the sun each day escapes back to space via waves of long wave radiation. It is solid, undisputed science based on theory and observations from satellites and laboratory experiments. It is the foundation of greenhouse theory upon which opinions regarding various climate crisis theories have been constructed.

The laws of physics have theoretically determined "how much" energy each infrared wavelength should transport back to outer space, for a given surface temperature if, there was no atmospheric interference. This is represented by the blue curve.

For non-physicists, it is helpful, to think of infrared wavelengths as roadways carrying solar heat from the earth back to space. Wavelengths between 20 and 15 microns should act like interstate highways carrying the greatest flow of heat,

While wavelengths of 5 or 40 microns act like dirt paths allowing very little heat transport.

The black jagged line represents how much energy each wavelength is actually transporting back to space as observed by satellites.

The difference between the blue and black curves represents an undeniable greenhouse effect. This is all excellent data and settled science.

But beware! This data does not determine for how long infrared heat will be trapped. Greenhouse gases only serve as detours, not permanent traps. Those detours simply delay the time needed for heat to escape to space. Not understanding this crucial point, has led to many absurd theories of a climate crisis, mass extinctions and much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

CO2 is a powerful greenhouse because it absorbs wavelengths centered around 15 microns that serve as major interstate highways for heat escape. CO2 forces half the theoretical heat to take a detour.

CO2 emits any absorbed heat in less than a second and emits those wavelengths in all directions with half re-directed back to the earth's surface. It is this redirected heat that is believed to warm the surface.

In this illustration the green line separates absorption by CO2 from absorption by water vapor. The red line shows that by doubling CO2, it only increases the amount of re-directed heat by 1%.

Water vapor absorbs much more heat from a wider range of wavelengths. Dry desert climates lacking water vapor experience a reduced greenhouse effect. Heat can escape more freely so that nighttime temperatures rapidly plummet by 50 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, despite a remaining CO2 effect.

More importantly, there are also wavelengths that always escape freely to space, providing an atmospheric window that allows about 15 to 20% of the earth's energy to escape without delay. That window also provides the escape detour for re-directed greenhouse heat.

Although the redirected energy is transported by specific wavelengths of water vapor and CO2. It has a more general effect. A warmer surface now emits the entire spectrum of wavelengths.

So, 20% of CO2's redirected energy now escapes freely through the atmospheric windows counter-acting the warming. That process repeats and continues throughout the night dropping surface temperatures lower and lower, back to their early morning minimums. So, despite added energy, the greenhouse effect doesn’t trap heat for very long.

Extreme heatwaves caused by heat domes operate in a manner like a car with its windows raised. It doesn’t matter how heat is radiating back to space, but for how long warm air is trapped close to the surface.

The longer the windows are up during midday sunshine, the higher the temperatures rise. At midday in 80F heat, temperatures inside your car can rise by 43 degrees to 123F in just one hour. Tragically, not realizing how quickly heat can accumulate, pets and children left in cars can die.

To reach 123 degrees Fahrenheit, the car's rate of energy gain was at least 154 W/m2 for a full hour (FYI a watt is a measure of energy per second). Increased CO2 only adds about 2 W/m2, so it would be silly to argue that rising CO2 made the car hotter, when just lowering the windows would eliminate the extreme temperatures. The important dynamic for people to understand is suppressed convection causes extreme temperatures.

The ground, heated by solar radiation, sheds that heat in 3 ways: by emitting a spectrum of longwave radiation, by cooler air absorbing heat when contacting the ground, and by convection that carries the heated air towards the stratosphere. Without convection, the earth's surface would trap surface heat like the car with its raised windows.

Convection not only causes warmer air to rise but allows cooler air from higher altitudes to sink. The mixing of cooler air further reduces surface air temperatures.

Carrying warm air up to the stratosphere is also crucial for cooling. You can see where the stratosphere begins when a rising rain cloud flattens out as it reaches an altitude where the stratosphere begins, called the tropopause. At that altitude, the air is about 100F (64C) cooler than the ground. The air has cooled due to both lower air pressure and by radiating heat back to space.

 

However, if the air doesn’t radiate heat away, cool air would simply warm back to its original temperature as it sinks. So, how does 99% of the air molecules that are not greenhouse gases, mostly oxygen and nitrogen, radiate away the heat they absorbed from contacting the ground?

C02's warming effect is greatest at low altitudes where it is largely saturated. So future increases of CO2 will have a smaller and smaller warming effect.

Unfortunately, click-bait media rarely informs the public that CO2 also has a strong cooling effect increasing emissions in the stratosphere and mesosphere. Satellites observe that the stratosphere is cooling twice as fast as the lower atmosphere is warming.

Warmed oxygen and nitrogen can shed their heat by colliding with CO2 and transferring its heat. So, CO2 can then radiate their heat away.

In contrast, heat waves are caused by suppressed convection in the lowest 6 kilometers of the atmosphere that prevents rising air from reaching the stratosphere and cooling radiatively. Heat domes trap heat for days. They are high pressure systems where sinking air inhibits convection and reduces cloud cover which also increases solar heating.

Canada's record high temperature was set and reset 3 days in a row at the end of June 2021 in Lytton, British Columbia. The final record was 45F (25C) warmer than the average maximum temperature for June. A difference that's intriguingly like the increased temperature of the car with its raised windows.

Southwestern Canada’s heat wave was caused by an exaggerated ridge in the jet stream known as an omega block. Omega blocks regularly cause high-pressure systems that linger in one location. As the block remained in place for days, more heat accumulated each day driving Canada’s record temperature higher and higher.

Click-bait media, like CNN clearly doesn’t know its geography. They ranted that this very local heat dome was evidence that "climate change is frying the whole northern hemisphere."

However, science doesn’t support CNN’s rants as climate models all suggest any warming "should reduce such blocking events."

Finally, if we also consider that the dryness accompanying most heatwaves reduces the normal greenhouse effect, plus the absolute lack of any correlation between heat waves and rising CO2 as seen in this EPA graphic, it suggests that all the hype by politicians and the media ranting heat waves are evidence of a CO2 driven climate crisis, is just unsubstantiated fear mongering.

Lastly, suppressed convection also warms the oceans causing layers of trapped heat that can warm the air and intensify hurricanes and typhoons. There is a scientific consensus that no matter at what depth heat is absorbed, it is trapped in the ocean until it rises to the micron-thick skin surface, the only place ocean heat can escape.

However, when there is a salinity gradient with fresher water at the surface and saltier water below, despite being warmer, the denser saltier water suppresses convection, preventing it from reaching the skin surface to cool.

Humans have taken advantage of that salinity effect by creating solar ponds that generate useful heat to warm buildings and greenhouses or generate electricity. Solar ponds maintain a bottom layer of dense salty water at about a 6 to 10-foot depth where solar heating is greatest. Those dense layers trap penetrating solar heat, raising the bottom layer temperature to as high as to 190F (88C) despite air temperatures of only 68F (20C).

Similarly, salinity gradients in the ocean trap heat in subsurface layers maintaining warmer ocean temperatures from the tropics to the arctic.

Surveys in tropical oceans observed that the upper 20 to 40 meters will usually be well mixed by the winds and currents. So that layer has similar salinity, represented here by the blue line.

As well as similar temperatures represented by the black line.

But between 40 and 60-meters depth, increased salinity trapped solar energy and slightly increased temperatures where we would otherwise expect cooler temperatures due to declining solar penetration. Oceanographers call this layer the "barrier layer" because it stores heat and prevents colder deeper water from mixing with the surface layer, thus making surface temperatures warmer.

In contrast to the solar-salinity heating effect, there is no obvious mechanism demonstrating how greenhouse infrared might warm a solar pond or the ocean. All infrared energy re-directed towards the surface by greenhouse gases never penetrates deeper than a very few microns into the ocean's skin surface layer.

A recent tropical ocean study measured 410 watts of greenhouse infrared energy penetrating a few microns into the cool skin surface.

However, the cool skin surface immediately radiates away all the heat that reaches that layer. In this study the heat emitted from the skin layer accounted for all the infrared heat from the atmosphere plus any solar heated subsurface water that had risen by convection and conduction to the skin layer.

Solar heated water requires more time to reach the skin surface and ventilate. Thus, it is most likely that any ocean warming is driven by trapped solar heat that is mixed downward.

There are well studied natural mechanisms demonstrating how oceans create and maintain salinity gradients that trap subsurface solar heat. In the simplest of terms, regional differences in evaporation and precipitation produce the required salinity gradient.

Atmospheric circulation, the Hadley Circulation, creates regions of descending air and high pressure that generate clear skies, greater solar heating as happens in heat waves and high rates of evaporation with very little rainfall. Saltier water is produced there.

As illustrated by the red regions, these so-called ocean deserts happen at the same latitudes where the atmospheric Hadley Circulation maintains deserts on land.

The trade winds then blow that saltier water towards the equator and westward.

The trade winds also blow the evaporated water vapor towards the equator where it converges, then rises and produces the world’s greatest region of rainfall around the equator, here represented in blue, and named the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The copious rainfall maintains the salinity gradient with fresh water on top of the warm saltier water. These combined dynamics constantly provide the needed ingredients to produce permanent heat trapping barrier layers.

This "solar pond" heat trapping mechanism forms the earth's greatest reservoir of heat, the western pacific warm pool, which stores solar heated water as deep as 200 meters. The warm pool grows during La-Nina like conditions and shrinks when an El Nino event ventilates that heat.

During La Nina-like conditions, the amplified trade winds blow the warm salty water into the western pacific warm pool.

Simultaneously, colder deep water upwells in the eastern pacific, permitting a high-pressure system to form that amplifies the trade winds and creates clearer skies and greater solar heating.

As a result, the eastern Pacific and eastern Atlantic, illustrated here by the blue regions,

Absorb and trap more solar heat than any other regions on earth. That stored heat is eventually transported around the world where it ventilates and warms the atmosphere.

The regions illustrated in red represent where the most of that trapped heat ventilates, warming those latitudes several degrees higher than possible if there was no ventilated heat.

For example, heat ventilating from the Gulf Stream is why western Europe’s winters are milder than similar latitudes in North America by 27-36F  (15-20C).

These dynamics contribute to the recent 150-year global warming trend as the tropical Pacific’s predominant El Nino-like condition during the little ice age switched to a predominant heat-absorbing La Nina-like conditions this past century. Intriguingly, based on scientific estimates of the speed of the global conveyor belt's transport, heat now ventilating in the arctic and reducing sea ice may have first been trapped in the Pacific Ocean 200 years ago.

It is also the trapped heat in tropical warm pools that enables tropical storms to evolve into hurricanes.

And the pacific warm pool with its more permanent barrier layers enables hurricanes with the most intense wind speeds designated as category-5 hurricanes, to develop.

Uniquely, in the tropical south Atlantic, hurricanes virtually never form because waters heated in the tropical south Atlantic circulate across the equator and get stored in the north Atlantic warm pool.

In 2005 three category 5 hurricanes struck the United States prompting a flurry of click-bait media headlines proclaiming global warming was making more fierce hurricanes that also "intensify more rapidly", thus rising CO2 will continue to make hurricanes more deadly.

But examining the different 2005 storm tracks of hurricane Wilma or hurricane Katrina reveals those 2005 hurricanes only reached a "fierce" category 5 status for a very short time and over just a very small local area and not when making landfall. Thus, it is regional ocean warming that is much more likely to be the cause of any intensification bouts. Not global warming.

Political fear mongers do not hesitate to weaponize the societal damage and human grief caused by hurricanes, so they cherry-pick the brief category 5 stints to blame rising CO2, while ignoring the dynamics causing hurricanes to exist for most of their lifetime in much weaker conditions.

Fortunately, mother nature quickly counter-acted the blatant fear mongering. For the next 9 years the USA experienced no intense hurricanes leaving most climate experts without any explanation.

Despite persistent click-bait media headlines from the NY Times or national public radio claiming CO2 is making hurricanes more deadly,

Good solid science finds no correlation with rising CO2 and hurricane frequency.

And no correlation with any increased frequency of the most intense hurricanes, categories 3, 4 & 5.

Yet as expected, the 150 mph winds at landfall from the 2022 hurricane Ian, provided an opportunity for the Guardian and world’s worst alarmist climate scientist, Michael Mann, to fear monger, claiming a climate crisis is causing more powerful hurricanes.

Hurricane Ian was a category 4 when it made land fall along the western coast of Florida. Mann emphasized that Ian was the fifth strongest hurricane to ever make land fall in America. But Mann avoided sharing the inconvenient truths that Ian was tied with 5 other category 4 hurricanes such as the 1919 Florida Keys and 1932 Freeport hurricanes, or the strongest landfall was the 1935 category 5 Labor Day hurricane.

Mann also failed to share that numerous peer-reviewed studies have documented that short bouts of hurricane intensification happen when they passed over the stored heat in ocean barrier layers.

The Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea experience a shifting mosaic of warm barrier layers. Multiple studies have shown that barrier layers supply the heat needed to intensify a hurricane as well as preventing the typical upwelling of cooler deeper water that weakens a hurricane. Still to push his pet theory that all things are possible with rising CO2, Mann’s Guardian article never mentions barrier layers at all.

To produce the salinity gradient for a barrier layer, the Amazon, Orinoco, and Mississippi rivers supply seasonal plumes of fresh water, highlighted in blue, into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

The Loop Current erratically transports deep warm & salty equatorial waters northward towards the Gulf coast. It sometimes veers quickly to the east to join the Gulf Stream. Or 2) it sometimes loops much further northward and 3) sometimes those loops pinch off to form warm eddies.

Whatever the case, when hurricanes pass over a region with fresh river water above and warm salty loop current waters below, the hurricanes intensify. No wonder Michael Mann avoided discussing barrier layers, barrier layer formation and thus hurricane intensification has nothing to do with rising CO2 or a climate crisis.

Clearly, there are many proven scientific dynamics that trap heat and drive warmer temperatures other than rising CO2.

If you follow all the science, you will sleep much better knowing claims of a CO2 driven climate crisis is most likely just a flawed theory placed upon good scientific data! By following all the science, I am sleeping well!