Negative Feedback - the "smoking gun" of our climate
One of the big contentions of the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd is that our climate exhibits positive feedback -- if it gets cooler, the tendency is for it to get even more cool and if it gets warmer, the tendency is for it to get even more warm.
Positive feedback is like stepping on the accelerator when your car is moving too fast and stepping on the brake when it is moving too slow.
The AGW-ers believe that our climate exhibits positive feedback even though the historical record shows quite the opposite.
New studies have come out showing why we have a nice self-regulatory negative feedback loop in place on our planet. It has to do with another greenhouse gas - the Oxygen that we breathe...
From the
University of Copenhagen:
More oxygen – colder climate
Using a completely new method, researchers have shown that high atmospheric and oceanic oxygen content makes the climate colder. In prehistoric times, the earth experienced two periods of large increases and fluctuations in the oxygen level of the atmosphere and oceans. These fluctuations also lead to an explosion of multicellular organisms in the oceans, which are the predecessors for life as we know it today. The results are now being published in Nature.
Everybody talks about CO2 and other greenhouse gases as causes of global warming and the large climate changes we are currently experiencing. But what about the atmospheric and oceanic oxygen content? Which role does oxygen content play in global warming?
This question has become extremely relevant now that Professor Robert Frei from the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with colleagues from Departamento de Geologı´a, Facultad de Ciencias in Uruguay, Newcastle University and the University of Southern Denmark, has established that there is a historical correlation between oxygen and temperature fluctuations towards global cooling.
The team of researchers reached their conclusions via analyses of iron-rich stones, so called banded iron formations, from different locations around the globe and covering a time span of more than 3,000 million years. Their discovery was made possible by a new analytical method which the research team developed. This method is based on analysis of chrome isotopes – different chemical variants of the element chrome. It turned out that the chrome isotopes in the iron rich stones reflect the oxygen content of the atmosphere. The method is a unique tool, which makes it possible to examine historical changes in the atmospheric oxygen content and thereby possible climate changes.
The cool thing (pun intended) is that the article in Nature is a full paper. Peer reviewed. It is not a letter which is not.
Posted by DaveH at September 11, 2009 10:14 PM
| TrackBack