ABSTRACT: IN CONCLUSION WE PROPOSE THAT THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PETM IN THE VIDEO ABOVE CONTAINS AN EXTREME FORM OF THE ATMOSPHERE BIAS SUCH THAT A DEEP OCEAN GEOLOGICAL EVENT THAT CAUSED WARMING AND OXIDATION OF THE OCEAN AND EMITTED CO2 INTO THE ATMOSPHERE IS SEEN IN REVERESE AS A CREATION OF THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2, THE SAME ATMOSPHERIC CO2 LEVEL THAT THE DEEP OCEAN GEOLOGICAL EVENT HAD CREATED.

RELATED POST AND BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE PETM FEATURING GERALD DICKENS, JAMES ZACHOS, PHILIP GINGERICH, AND DENNIS KENT. LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/10/28/petm/

POST ON ATMOSPHERE BIAS: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/20/an-atmosphere-bias-part-2/

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

ITEM#1: THE LAST TIME THE GLOBE WARMED:

“THE LAST TIME THE GLOBE WARMED” was not millions of years ago in the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum but in the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) about a thousand years ago. The MWP peaked in the period 900-1200 AD at about 0.8C warmer than the average for the millennium that preceded it. Prior to that the globe had warmed in the Roman Warm Period about 3,000 years ago; and before that, there was the Minoan Warm period more than 3000 years ago and the Holocene Climate Optimum about 7,000 years ago. The PETM warming more than 50 million years ago cannot be described as “the last time the globe had warmed.

ITEM#2: THE PALEOCENE EOCENE THERMAL MAXIMUM

THE OVERALL CONSENSUS OF RESEARCHERS WHO HAVE STUDIED THE PETM IS PRESENTED IN A RELATED POST:

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/10/28/petm/ AND THE FINDINGS REPORTED BY THESE RESEARCHERS CAN BE SUMMARIZED AS FOLLOWS:

THE PETM WAS A GEOLOGICAL EVENT IN THE DEEP OCEAN THAT AT ONCE HEATED THE OCEAN WITH A SIGNIFICANT OXIDATION EVENT IN THE OCEAN THAT CONSUMED THE OCEAN’S OXYGEN, AND RELEASED LARGE QUANTITIES OF CARBON DIOXIDE INTO THE ATMOSPHERE. THE ATTEMPT BY CLIMATE SCIENCE TO REPRESENT THE PETM AS A GREENHOUSE EFFECT IS EXPLAINED IN YET ANOTHER RELATED POST AS AN ATMOSPHERE BIAS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/20/an-atmosphere-bias-part-2/ WHERE WE NOTE AS FOLLOWS:

ITEM#3: THE ATMOSPHERE BIAS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE:

THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENTS PRESENTED IN THE ATMOSPHERE BIAS POST LINKED ABOVE ARE REPRODUCED HERE FOR CONVENIENCE.

Oceanic oxygen depletion: Warming of deep waters was followed by oxygen deficiency in the deep ocean as seen in the extinction of 30–50% of the oceans bottom dwelling species. Oxygen depletion implies that warming was associated with oxidation of some kind.

Ocean Acidification: Coincident with oceanic oxygen depletion, there was a rapid decline in pH down to depths greater than 3km of the ocean. The data indicate a very large global oxidation event in the ocean that generated large quantities of carbon dioxide.

Increase in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide: Atmospheric CO2 levels show a large uncertainty range from 230 to 630 ppm that is thought to have increased by more than 70% in course of the 10,000-year PETM event.

The attempt to describe the observed warming of the PETM in terms of the greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO2 and thereby to draw theoretical parallels with the current warming episode has not yielded useful results because it yields gross anomalies in terms of climate sensitivity and also because much of the warming recorded came before the increase in atmospheric CO2.

However, a strong interest persists such that research efforts continue to try to find ways to describe the PETM warming, ocean heat content, and ocean acidification in terms of the steep rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration found in the paleo data although the causation in the paleo data is in reverse. However, paleo proxy data have large uncertainties and a question that does not have a direct and explicit answer in the paleo data is what had caused the large deep-ocean oxidation event that warmed the ocean, depleted its oxygen, increased its inorganic carbon concentration, and injected carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The possibilities that have been explored are methane hydrates in ocean sediments that were dissociated into methane by a deep ocean heat source, likely to be geothermal, that was hot enough not just to break down the hydrate and produce methane but also to ignite and oxidize the methane to water and carbon dioxide. This explains the ocean’s oxygen depletion.

An alternative theory identifies the mantle as a direct source of both carbon and heat (Svenson 2004). Since the Svenson paper, it is not almost universally conceded that the intermediate role for methane hydrates is unnecessary. In recent papers we find that the overall consensus of researchers in this field, including principal investigators James Zachos, Philip Gingerich, and others now favor the Svenson theory that the mantle was the direct cause of the PETM event without the an intermediate role for methane hydrates previously assumed. Thus the current state of the PETM theory is that it was an entirely geological event. 

However, the issue of great interest in the PETM in the era of AGW climate change warming since the end of the LIA, described as a creation of fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy,  is the role of the greenhouse effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the PETM and its various horrific events including global warming, ocean heat content, ocean acidification, and mass extinctions of ocean flora and fauna ultimately driven by rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. 

Here we present three such papers and their critical evaluation.

REFERENCE ARTICLE#1: SUDDEN ANCIENT GLOBAL WARMING EVENT TRACED TO MAGMA FLOOD [LINK] . This article from Quanta magazine was published March 19, 2020. The author is “contributing writer” Howard Lee. It cites James Zachos, Lee Kemp, Appy Sluijs, and Stephen Jones and a recent paper by Jones to conclude that the PETM was a purely igneous geological event with warming and carbon release from the ocean attributed directly to magma from the mantle without the intermediate role of methane hydrates. It concludes that the PETM was indeed a purely geological event. Unlike media articles on the subject, it makes no effort to relate the PETM to AGW or to relate the horrific ocean warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction of ocean flora and fauna to atmospheric CO2. It admits that the rise in atmospheric CO2 of 70% was not the cause of the PETM but an effect of the PETM in terms of its geological cause.

REFERENCE ARTICLE#2: NEW RESEARCH REVEALS PETM CLIMATE WARMING  WAS GEOLOGICALLY INSTANTANEOUS [LINK] ,  This article in Planet Watch magazine was written by Andrew Burger in October 2013. It says that  the PETM event released 3,000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere from hydrocarbon-rich organic mud-stone, and methane hydrate deposits on the seafloor of the continental shelves. And that the 70% rise in atmospheric CO2 thus caused in turn caused rapid global warming  as well as ocean acidification, steep rise in ocean heat content, and mass extinctions in the ocean. It is often overlooked that the mass extinction of the PETM event was purely oceanic. In fact that this mass extinction is credited with the creation of new species, in particular, the modern order of land mammal from which we are derived. Without the PETM there would not have been humans. Mass extinctions are natural and not an evil that is extraneous to nature such that it is the job of human ecologists to prevent mass extinctions.In addition to forcing rapid warming, this led to an abrupt rise in the acidity of the oceans, which, in turn, led to mass extinctions of the phytoplankton that not only form the base of the marine food chain, but produce as much as half the oxygen in the atmosphere and absorb as much as half the total atmospheric CO2 sequestered as part of the carbon cycle. Similarly drastic changes have been found in terrestrial flora and fauna. This article thus serves as an example of the atmosphere bias in AGW climate science that leads to these kinds of extreme interpretations of the PETM geological event such that a rise in atmospheric CO2 caused by geological events in the ocean is inverted and atmospheric CO2 is then interpreted as the the cause of the oceanic events by way of the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.

REFERENCE ARTICLE#3: Caldeira Lab Research:Paleoclimate and geochemical cycles. An Ancient Carbon Mystery:  Here the authors use the PETM to forecast how the current AGW warming will evolve in the future by studying the greenhouse effect of CO2 in the PETM and with the assumption that the PETM was the creation of rising CO2. It says that “the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)—may be the best ancient analog for future increases in atmospheric CO2. But how well do we understand this event?”. By thus drawing an analogy betweenn AGW climate change and the PETM, the authors claim that they can use the PETM to understand how AGW will evolve in the future. Specifically, they use the PETM to understand climate sensitivity, as seen in the image below. Here, for various estimates of how much carbon was driven from the ocean to the atmosphere they estimate what the climate sensitivity had to be to cause the ocean to drive that much carbon into the atmosphere. We propose here that this causation reasoning is invalid because it uses circular reasoning. That The atmosphere caused the ocean to warm because ocean warming caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to rise contains two hypotheses that cancel each other out in the sense that they can’t both be true. This publication of climate scientists led by Ken Caldeira reveals a deep seated atmosphere bias in this science such that a predisposition to the idea that the greenhouse gas effect of atmospheric CO2 drives climate limits their ability to see climate data in the broader context that includes the role of earth’s geological forces in climate phenomena as described in related posts [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]

CONCLUSION

The proposed heat trapping effect of atmospheric CO2 could not have initiated the PETM warming because the oceanic carbon enrichment and oxidation events preceded the rise in atmospheric CO2; and the rise in atmospheric CO2 is poorly quantified. Also, using the IPCC climate sensitivity range of ECS = [1.5, 4.5] in conjunction with the best guess for the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration does not explain the amount of surface warming. It is therefore possible that other sources of heat, possibly geothermal, may have been what injected large quantities of geological carbon into the ocean, oxidized the carbon, depleted the ocean’s oxygen, heated the ocean, reduced ocean pH, and released the oxidation CO2 into the atmosphere causing atmospheric CO2 to rise. The motivation to reverse this causation sequence and explain the PETM in terms of the greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO2 that was created by the event, is explained in terms of an atmosphere bias in climate science that prevents climate scientists from consideration of geological forces of the planet that are relevant to the oceanic and surface phenomena under study. FOOTNOTE#1: It should be mentioned in this context that the failed obsession of climate science with the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet causing catastrophic sea level rise; and the horror of the acidification of the ocean with fossil fuel emissions that have been repeatedly used to justify their proposed costly climate action plans are derived from previous realities from the paleo record that cannot be related to the current warming trend of the Holocene. In the previous interglacial, the Eemian, the WAIS had collapsed with catastrophic sea level rise of 5 to 9 meters. This had happened at the onset of the interglacial in the first millennium of the Eemian and its attempted recreation 10,000 years into the Holocene has been a comical failure. Similarly, the ocean acidification fear was borrowed from the PETM, the gross mismatch between the PETM and the Holocene notwithstanding such that its failure can be understood in that light. FOOTNOTE #2: The most dramatic change and the one most relevant to humans is that the PETM is credited with the rapid expansion of the modern order of mammals on land and the first appearance of the modern orders of mammals from which we are derived. For details please see the various works of Paleontologist Philip Dean Gingerich. Mass extinction is the way nature works. It is not something that requires humans to take control of nature and ensure that mass extinctions are not allowed to happen. Humans are part of nature and mass extinctions is how nature works. The great interest of humans in managing nature is unnatural and illogical.

THE PETM WAS NOT AN ATMOSPHERE DRIVEN CLIMATE EVENT BUT A GEOLOGICAL EVENTTHAT ORIGINATED IN THE DEEP OCEAN AND CAUSED ATMOSPHERIC CO2 TO RISE AS A CONSEQUENCE.

INCIDENTALLY, THE MODERN ORDER OF MAMMALS WERE EXCLUSIVELY OCEANIC CREATURES AT THAT TIME. LIKE MANY OTHER OCEANIC CREATURES OF THE TIME, MOST WERE KILLED IN THE OCEAN WARMING AND ACIDIFICATIONEVENT BUT MANY SURVIVED BY CLIMBING ONTO LAND AND THAT IS HOW THE MODERN ORDER OF MAMMALS BECAME LAND CREATURES AND WHY WE HUMANS, THEIR DESCENDENTS ARE LAND CREATURES.

IN CONCLUSION WE PROPOSE THAT THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PETM IN THE VIDEO ABOVE CONTAINS AN EXTREME FORM OF THE ATMOSPHERE BIAS SUCH THAT A DEEP OCEAN GEOLOGICAL EVENT THAT CAUSED WARMING AND OXIDATION AND EMITTED CO2 INTO THE ATMOSPHERE IS SEEN IN REVERESE AS A CREATION OF THE ATMOSPHERIC CO2 THAT THE DEEP OCEAN GOLOGICAL EVENT HAD CREATED.

IMAGES: STILL IMAGES OF TEXT FROM THE VIDEO

MORE THAN ANY HUMAN HAS EVER SEEN ….. SO FAR

THE BLINK OF ANY EYE IN GEOLOGIC TIME

AND THINGS WERE ALREADY WARM BY TODAY’S STANDARDS.

DEGREES CELSIUS

COMFY SWIM IN THE SEAS AROUND ANTARCTICA

THAN THEY EVER HAD BEFORE

NOWHERE NEAR THE TROPICS

IN THE OCEAN

RAPIDLY AND