Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Im sorry, Im having a hell of a lot of trouble following what your trying to develop here.
Our understanding of the planets "energy budget" as related to tectonics is pretty well thought out. Id suggest you take a read through CONTINENT AND SUPERCONTINENTS ED2 by Rogers and Santosh. Originally published about 15 years ago, its a good depiction of how the movement of continental masses and ocean basins has occurred through the last few Billion years. Its a well written and quite approachable text that may clear up some of your assumptions that are inconsistent with what the evidence shows us.

Quote:

Grasses don't hold the same density of carbon per unit volume as wood and they don't live and grow for decades or even centuries like trees

Grasslands and savanna's have existed pretty much in place for over 100000 years. (Glacial deposits had pretty much swept entire countries clean of trees during the Pleistocene).

Even earthworms were gone from North America until European settlers brought them along on ships as part of the "Columbian Exchange"

Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago

A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act...

We live in a sharply polarized political and cultural environment in which it has become increasingly difficult to discuss urgent issues across the divides. With the emergence of purity policing and call-out culture, amplified by social media, it is difficult enough to conduct honest, civil conversations even with people who share most of our own opinions and values.

If we’re looking for an issue that tops all others in urgency, anthropogenic global warming is a good candidate. The warming atmosphere has begun to destabilize Earth’s climate patterns with unprecedented speed. Through the remainder of this century, the rate of change will be orders of magnitude too rapid for numerous life forms to adapt. It will be far too quick for human societies to adjust without immense dislocation and suffering. We’ve made only feeble attempts to retard or halt the process, though we’ve known about it for over three decades. Meanwhile, debate around climate change has become toxic and dysfunctional.

In this case, the toxin came mainly from the political Right. As the philosopher Neil Levy has argued, the scientific topic of global warming was intensely politicized by organizations with vested interests in unrestricted capitalism. These hired the notorious “merchants of doubt” to propagandize against respectable science—the doubt merchants set out to debunk the whole idea of global warming and climate change. There was no deep reason such radical science denial should have become a shibboleth for right-wing orthodoxy, but it’s now the case in many circles. There is evidence that many right-wing or conservative citizens view acceptance of climate science as the mark of an ideological enemy—an ill-intentioned person who cannot be trusted and should not be given a hearing.

Free-market opportunists and fanatics have the most to answer for in this instance—they have acted cynically to damage the social fabric—but left-wing environmentalists have not always been helpful to their own cause or to the planetary future. In that respect, another philosopher (and environmentalist), Simon Keller, expressed something of a mea culpa in a book chapter published in 2015. Keller points out that the revelation of dangerous global warming, backed up by more and more research, was not a surprise to environmentalists, who already possessed values and a worldview that made them receptive to the message. The facts about global warming fitted well with environmentalists’ pre-existing understanding of the world, which included a critique of indefinite economic growth. For this group of people, news about global warming even seemed like a vindication.

Clearly enough, it is more difficult for people to accept the consensus science of climate change if they begin with different values and a different worldview. If you doubt this, put yourself in their place for a moment. If you begin by valuing technological innovation and industrial development, with no special love of the wilderness (or “nature”) and with a deep distrust of government activity and international institutions, thirty years of findings from climate scientists will not seem at all like a vindication. The findings will fit badly with your pre-existing worldview, giving you a prima facie reason to reject them. They will seem alien and counterintuitive. You won’t be able to absorb the science without adjusting your view of the world. That is more frightening than it sounds, because it might open the door to other, unknown and unwelcome, adjustments. You will look upon the science with suspicion, and you might find the merchants of doubt reassuring and persuasive. Their claims will make intuitive sense.

Given such considerations, Keller thinks it would help the public discussion to highlight ways in which the facts of global warming could fit with a wider range of ideological views. This could mean putting on the table all options for responding to global warming and climate change—from just letting it all happen, to adapting to it, to countering it aggressively with geoengineering technology. In a sincere discussion between people with conflicting worldviews, we might even agree that some measures are unfortunate but necessary—to be adopted, that is, with a degree of reluctance rather than with environmentalist triumphalism.

The question here is how we can encourage people who are naturally suspicious of climate science to consider the science on its merits. Keller suggests, and I agree, that we’d be better off if we could think of those people as what most of them really are: decent individuals who are trying their best, from a different starting point than our own, to make sense of a perplexing world.

At this late stage, the situation with global warming is becoming desperate, and I doubt that a truly effective package of measures in response—if such could be identified—would now make any political or other group completely happy. Ten years ago, I would have considered some measures beyond the pale of serious consideration. By now, however, we need to talk honestly with minimal rancor, and without delay, about every genuine option, however distasteful it might seem. That includes but is not limited to carbon taxes, stronger international institutions, greater use of nuclear power, adaptation measures, and research into the science of geoengineering.

Climate change is an issue of the highest priority. More broadly, however, public discussion on many issues has become toxic. Discussion becomes toxic once some participants will not even listen to their opponents and critics, whom they view as untrustworthy, fundamentally bad people. Some of our opponents and critics might indeed be avaricious, opportunistic, crooked, or worse; in that case, they deserve little respect. But most are good people who legitimately disagree with us. Many of them have interests and experiences that are worth considering. Some might bring important parts of the truth.

In a country that aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, returning land to peat bog could save 1.4m tonnes of carbon emissions each year

Gill Andersen is, as far as she knows, the only British woman farming the lowlands of central Jutland. And after 32 years, she doesn’t think much of Denmark’s plans to meet new emissions targets by returning much of her land to peat bog.

“I don’t think there are any farmers who want to ruin the climate,” she says. “But the answer is not to flood our land and kill all the trees.”

Peat may seem like a fringe issue in the battle against climate change, but according to a recent study by Aarhus University, flooding cultivated former peatlands could cut Denmark’s emissions by 1.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year – about the same amount produced by the capital city of Copenhagen. With Denmark now committed to the world’s most ambitious climate goals, these savings are in the spotlight.

The ruling Social Democrats struck a deal this month with supporting and opposition parties to enshrine these climate goals in law. “It’s the most ambitious climate law in place at the moment,” says professor Katherine Richardson at Copenhagen University. “This has been a social tipping point. Nobody in Denmark a year ago dreamed we could be in a situation like this now.”

Denmark, currently on track to reduce emissions by 48% by 2030, has now committed to reduce them by 70%, and to go carbon neutral by 2050. When the climate emergency and the environment unexpectedly became the main issue in the run-up to Denmark’s June election, the now prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, hurried to Jutland, to the Vejen Mose peat bog on the edges of Andersen’s land, to underline her green credentials.

Frederiksen came to see Andersen’s neighbour, farmer Henrik Bertelsen, who had already planned to flood 90 hectares, close to three quarters of his land. When former peat bogs are drained, organic matter trapped for thousands of years breaks down and releases carbon dioxide. Living peat bogs, on the other hand, absorb and trap carbon as they grow.

Bertelsen’s scheme aims to reduce emissions by an estimated 2,000 tonnes of carbon equivalent a year, enough to offset the total climate impact of 350 Danes.

“When people say that cultivating land like mine is one of the big problems and flooding land is key to reducing climate change, I think, ‘OK, I want to do that,’” he explains as we trudge through the sodden ground, cranes squawking all around us.

Denmark’s political parties agreed at the beginning of this month to spend over the next decade 200m Danish kroner (£23m) a year on buying up land for reflooding, and work is likely to begin in 2020.

In Denmark, opponents of climate action are in retreat. Even the far-right, anti-immigration Danish People’s party backed the law – quite something for a political party whose leader warned of “climate hysteria” in the election campaign and whose former chief talked of “climate morons”.

Two small parties which represent just a dozen seats opposed the action, making its passing in February a formality. All future governments will have to abide by the climate goals.

Denmark’s main business lobby, the Confederation of Danish Industry, is backing the 70% target and the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, the main agricultural trade body, aims to make the entire Danish food industry climate neutral by 2050.
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Thats the Munchausen speaking.

I suggest you pay closer attention to Farmerman. He's a somewhat cranky but educated, experienced geologist, and likely knows well what he writes about.

Scientists reach remote Thwaites glacier, vanishing at increasing rate, for mission

An international team of scientists has reached the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica and is preparing to drill through more than half a kilometre of ice into the dark waters beneath.

The 600-metre deep borehole will allow researchers to lower down a torpedo-shaped robotic submarine that will explore the underside of the ice shelf to better understand why it is melting so fast.

Thwaites glacier, which is part of the west Antarctic ice sheet, has lost an estimated 540bn tonnes of ice since the 1980s. But recent measurements show that the melting of the glacier is speeding up, sending even more ice into the Amundsen Sea.

“There are several glaciers in Antarctica that are doing similar things, but this is the one we are most worried about,” said David Vaughan, the director of science at the British Antarctic Survey, who has travelled south with the UK-US drilling team.

Thwaites glacier is one of the most remote and inhospitable places on Earth. It has taken the researchers weeks to get themselves and their equipment to the drilling site, a spot on the ice shelf about 1,500km (932 miles) from both the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera research station and the American McMurdo station.

n brutal conditions, where the temperature can fall below -20C, the researchers will have only a few days to drill through the ice shelf, deploy the “icefin” submarine and retrieve it, and set a suite of monitoring instruments into the ice before the hole freezes over. “The aim is to do it as rapidly as possible. All of this will happen in three to four days. They really can’t afford to muck about,” said Vaughan.

The expedition to the Florida-sized glacier became more pressing this year when Nasa scientists used ground-penetrating radar to reveal a massive cavity in its base. The cavern, two-thirds the size of Manhattan and 300 metres tall, was formed as 13bn tonnes of ice melted away over the past three years. The enormous cavity allows water to get under the glacier and melt it from beneath.

Earlier this week, scientists on the team hauled radar-equipped sledges over the ice to map the thickness of the shelf near the “grounding line” where the glacier leaves land and extends over the sea. The map will help them pinpoint where to drill the borehole. During the site assessment, they came across a crevasse that plunged deep into the ice shelf.

Once they get the green light, the scientists will use a hot water drill to bore a 30cm-wide hole through the ice shelf. The equipment can melt a hole at about 1.5 metres per minute, meaning it will take more than six hours of nonstop drilling to get all the way through. Small teams who sleep overnight in tents on the ice will work in rotation around the clock to drill the hole, deploy the submarine, and set other instruments into the borehole for long-term monitoring.
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