Climate Change - Maybe The Bear Was Right!

A mid-ocean smoker... a mini volcano where the centre of the earth oozes out at the bottom of the ocean. Is this the real global warming culprit? (Photo courtesy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute)

It's not often I'm wrong (about just about anything really), and a couple of blogs back, I wrote that I might have been wrong about volcanoes and global warming. Deep down inside, I had this nagging feeling that this admission may have been premature, and that my original thinking was close to the truth.

In a way only synchronicity can explain, a few days after that 'retraction', a doco popped up on National Geographic Channel that added some clarity and evidence to the debate that fills up the empty spaces inside my straw brain.

Let's do a quick recap...

Do you remember that I'd dredged some stats out of the Smithsonian archive that showed that the rate of volcanic activity appears to be increasing? Ok... and I made the retraction based on the fact that those eruptions pump gasses and dust into the atmosphere that might, in fact, actually cool the world. Chester may have been wrong! Except that he may not be...

Let me explain.

Have you ever heard of the mid-ocean rifts? These are the places on the floor of the ocean where the crust of the world is cracked. The plates on either side of those cracks are moving apart, which makes the mid-ocean rifts the most volcanically active places on the planet.

Wait... don't yawn yet... this is important...

The activity at these rifts means 90% (maybe more) of the world's volcanic activity happens on the bottom of the ocean, well out of sight. So well out of sight, in fact, that only a handful of people have ever been down there to take a look.

What those who dared found when they got there was astounding, and the energy output (in the form of heat) at the place where the inside of the world oozes out into the ocean is estimated as greater than all of the energy production of all of mankind, and that's based on old, incomplete estimates of just how much volcanic activity is there.

The temperature of the water down there is thousands of degrees. It's hot enough to melt the aluminium in the submersibles they've sent down to take a look, and this molten goo bubles out of the centre of the earth 24/7/365, right along the entire length of the rift. We're talking about places so deep that the pressure is so great the water can't boil.

Think this through people. Here's a little experiment for you to think about. Take two buckets of water, and two heating elements. With the first one, just put it over the top of the water, and with the second one, immerse it, all the way to the bottom of the bucket. Now switch both heaters on.

Which bucket do you think might heat up quicker? (If you said the first one, then stop reading because this is clearly beyond you.)

So...

What causes most of the weather on earth? The oceans.

And what do the climatologists say is happenng to those oceans? They're getting warmer.

Why? "Oh, because humans are heating up the world." Yeah, right. Little insignificant humans. And an increase in the heat at the bottom of the ocean has nothing to do with it? Pfft!

Remember, the amount of volcanic activity has doubled in the last 200 years. Is this reflected at the rifts? They don't know, because these rifts are so poorly studied that the first photos were only taken in the late seventies, and the number of submersibles in the world capable of going there can be counted on less than your fingers.

Like I said in my original post on this, there's no doubt we've been reckless in the way we've treated the world around us and there's no doubt we need to change our habits, but to blame climate change on humans?

I think not.