Wood Romances

Map of Geothermal Heat Flux from Davies 2010 Sometimes I here people make claims that the globe is warming because of some aspect of the Earth's geology from the Earths' core or mantle, such as increase in geothermal heat from the Earth's interior or an increase in atmospheric CO2 coming from volcanic activity. Geothermal Heat Flux Estimates for the surface heat flow from the Earth's interior is pretty well constrained. Two recent estimates I've seen are 46 ± 3 TW[1] and 47 ± 2 TW[2]. This would count any geothermal heat from the Earths' interior, including volcanic activity, ocean ridges, subduction zones, etc. With this figure we can account for how much geothermal heat contributes to the Earth's surface temperature. Since the Earth has a surface area of 5.1*10^14 m^2, the surface heat flux from the Earth's interior is Fi = 0.09 W/m^2. The total surface heat flux is determined by the Earths' surface temperature, and if we use a standard estimate of...

Cenozoic CO2 and Temperature A new paper was published this month that I think will produce some exciting new insights for those interested in historical geology and paleoclimate studies. The paper is a product of the Cenozoic Carbon dioxide Proxy Integration Project (CenCO2PIP) Consortium, and it looks to reconstruct the proxy evidence for CO2 levels during the Cenozoic (the last 66 million years). The Cenozoic began after the asteroid impact (and/or volcanism) at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary that caused the mass-extinction that included the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. The value of this kind of work will have significant benefits for scientists as they seek to constrain estimates for long-term climate sensitivity (ESS). We can think of "sensitivity" on roughly three time scales:  TCR : On a near-immediate time scale, GMST increases with increasing CO2 in what is called transient climatic response (TCR), which generally speaking tells you how quickly temperat...