Climate Jui-Jitsu

Climate Jui-Jitsu

The Jui-Jitsu school of martial arts has many techniques; however, Jui-Jitsu is most noted for its throws and trips achieved by yielding. When an opponent pushes forward, the Jui-Jitsu fighter yields to the direction of the attack and then turns the resulting momentum with a trip or a throw. The stronger the thrust of the opponent, the harder the fall for that opponent.

A similar philosophy might be applied even more so to an attack of excessive (at least to us) global warming. Seriously hotter temperatures would open new physical ways to respond, and clearly visible major changes would cause people to more readily support radical countermeasures.

In the last century and a half, the world has only seen increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about a third (0.03 to 0.04 of one-percent) and slight warming of about 1 degree Celsius. These two changes have actually increased crop yields. More carbon dioxide increases the photosynthetic efficiency of many plants so they become more productive. That efficiency has increased the green at the edges of deserts. Meanwhile, increased photosynthesis and slight warming have caused thicker vegetation to advance northward into the Arctic.

However, more serious warming might have … well … more serious effects. Probable painful effects of serious warming would be melt-back of polar ice sheets raising seal levels, melting of the permanent Arctic pack ice in the North-Polar Ocean, greater drought in areas such as the U.S. Southwest, more rain in other areas, and less fertile oceans as warmer surface waters suppress upwelling of cool mineral-rich deep waters needed to fertilize the sunlit surface waters (stratification). (With limits on certain key minerals, the deep ocean waters are often blue and clear rather than the green of more fertile waters.)

That leads to a radical countermeasure that nature already performed during a massive global-warming period about 49 million years ago. At that time, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was 2500 to 3500 parts per million, at least six times the present atmospheric level. The temperatures were like the semi-tropical swamps of Florida, complete with snakes and crocodiles.

The Arctic Ocean was largely ice free. There was much more rain than today, and the Arctic Ocean was ice free even in winter. The arrangement of drifting geological plates was such that the Arctic Ocean was cut off from the world ocean. Hence, it was a freshwater body, much like the Black Sea today.

This precipitated the Azolla Event. Mats of the azolla freshwater fern floated on the surface during the summer when the continuous light of the midnight sun allowed them to grow explosively. Then, in the 6 months of continual darkness, most of them died and sank to the bottom. There, as with the sea bottom of the Black Sea, the waters had no oxygen (anoxic), and they did not decay through oxidation. Thus, gigatons of carbon were sequestered on the ocean floor. When spring brought sunlight back, the cycle started again, and the process continued for nearly a million years.

There were two results from the Azolla Event. First, the azolla ferns captured a major amount of carbon from the atmosphere. That carbon was ultimately buried and metamorphosed into the coal, oil, and gas that are found abundantly in the Arctic today. Second, this carbon capture (drawdown) reduced the world’s atmospheric carbon dioxide level by about half.

That drawdown continued for millions of years of chilling, and the world entered its present glacial age with long periods of extensive ice sheets punctuated by relatively short (ten- or twenty-thousand-year) interglacials of melting back ice sheets, such as our present age, followed by major returns of ice sheets. There has even been speculation that the low level of carbon dioxide (about 270 parts per million) before the Industrial Revolution was about to cause another advance of the ice sheets—a new ice age.

One might think of the Industrial Revolution, with its rapid increase in burning fossil fuels plus major deforestation as a climate geoengineering fix that we did not even realize that we were doing. Increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stopped, and even reversed, global cooling. Maybe it was a little too good of a fix.

So, how can we apply the lessons of the Azolla Event?

It is easier to start in the tropics rather than today’s dangerously cold polar regions. Vast areas of the world’s tropical oceans are “bluewater deserts” because the warm surface waters are lighter than the colder nutrient-rich deep waters (again, that stratification is expected to get worse with continued global warming). Those cold waters are also a potential cooling resource for power plants—increasing their efficiency and assuring that water used to cool the power plant does not exit the plant so hot that it kills surrounding marine life. Thus, a wide pipe and the parasitic loss of pumping deep water to the surface are practical investments.

The area around such a power plant becomes an artificial upwelling of nutrient-rich waters that stay at the surface because they are adjusted to be just slightly warmer than the existing waters. The resulting upwelling area can be an oceanic agricultural (aquaponic) area miles in extent with networks of cables to anchor sea weeds (sea vegetables!) and cages for finfish and shellfish. The power plant provides heat and power for cooking, canning, and freezing the produce. Just a few lost stems and leaves from the sea vegetables can carry carbon down to the ocean floor. Similarly, just a small percentage of spilled fish feed and fish waste can drop tons of carbon to the sea floor to drawdown carbon from the air and spread it in a vast volume of horizontal area and depth.

Produce is the key. Sales of animal and vegetable sea produce can make a profit while serving the longer-term goal of drawing down carbon dioxide from the air. That is better than climate-cooling geoengineering schemes that cost fortunes and yield nothing in return.

Tropical waters are the logical place to start because warm waters are safer for workers. A growing industry can develop the more robust robotic technologies to run aquaponics and transportation for operations in colder waters. The great Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica does not have a major heat difference between the surface and deep waters, but the surface waters still lack a few trace nutrients.

Finally, approaching the home of the original Azolla Event, Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean have a slightly different situation now than 49 million years ago. Those waters are nearly as salty at the surface as the world ocean because there are now major connections via the North Atlantic Ocean and the Bering Strait. They have more freezable less-saline water floating above warmer—but more saline—water carried by the Gulf Stream from the tropics. Warming some of that deeper saline water enough to keep it at the surface would not only keep fertile waters near the surface, but it would open significant areas of open water (polynyas) in the midst of the pack ice.

The polynyas of warmer salty water would serve three functions. First, they would allow room for pack ice to spread rather than stacking up; thus, the ice would remain thinner and melt sooner for extending the navigating season in the Russian Great Northern Route east to the Pacific and the not-yet-commercial Northwest Passage through Canadian waters west to the Pacific.

Second, it would provide open water earlier in the summer to grow more sea plants and feed fish. That is important for the most important function.

Third, open northern waters have been described as something that would increase global warming because open water absorbs more sunlight than ice. However, open water in polar areas may actually reduce net global warming several ways. Spring, fall, and especially winter open water radiates huge amounts of heat to the cooler polar skies. Lush sea-plant growth during the unending spring and summer polar days release chemicals into the air. Those chemicals give us the distinctive sea smell, AND they provide nucleation sites for water to condense making sunlight-reflecting sea fogs—another cooling factor.

Finally, those sea plants draw down carbon dioxide from the sky and turn it into hydrocarbon plant matter. This comes in a pulse that ends with the setting fall sun. Most of the sea plants then die and sink to the Arctic Ocean / Hudson Bay sea floor. As a bonus, these areas are enclosed basins so that ocean currents are less likely to swirl the dead plant material up to the surface where it might be eaten by various plant-eating creatures that then “breath out” carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere. (Yes, the plant-eating creatures would mostly be water creatures that would transfer carbon dioxide and oxygen via gills or membranes.)

An additional detail is that the azolla ferns of the Azolla Event had their leaves (half the size of a dime) standing up to catch and harvest the low-lying sunlight. Otherwise, much of the light energy would reflect away from the water, and not be available to algae/phytoplankton below the surface. Thus, they harvested much more energy for their growth and (ultimately) to reverse excessive global warming.

For the age of open polar waters (if it happens), we would need to breed a saline-loving ocean plant. Thus, it might be a salt-tolerant azolla, or it might be a cold-tolerant sargassum from the Sargasso Sea. In any event, it would be a species that must still be not too cold tolerant. It must largely die off in the winter so that a pulse of carbon would drop to the ocean floor. We must pay our dues for the coal, oil, and natural gas that have powered our fabulous development for the last three centuries.

Thus, returning to our original theme, enough warming to provide an ice-free Arctic Ocean (and Hudson Bay) would provide the Jui-Jitsu opportunity to throw global warming into global cooling. The only issue might be deciding when to stop adding to the cure lest it cause a different (ice-covered) problem.