(209f) A New 12-Step Climate Change Mechanism, based on Formation of Carbon Dioxide Hydrates Around Deep Ocean Submarine Volcanoes and Hydrothermal Vents

We are living in perilous times, according to a significant anxious portion of the world's population. We are being told that our planet is in a path that leads to uncontrolled warming from the sun, because we have been burning fossil fuels at dangerously high rates for too long now. The critical connection established by a vocal segment of the scientific community is the presence of ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide gas from various energy/materials-producing operations, or just from plainly existing in this world. Another significant fraction of the world's population does not believe that human existence is in any danger at all despite what the anthropogenic or man-made climate change (CC) proponents have been preaching for more than a decade now. To round out the camps, some people just do not care; but one can infer from their actions the lack of decisiveness or the tendency to retreat into cozier and/or simpler lifestyles. This work is meant to augment the current debate on the CC issue, based on scientific concepts and methods used by the author in the field of chemical engineering. Ideas that are presented here are not meant to be the last word on the CC debate. Instead they are formulated to provide a middle and hopeful ground on this contentious subject.

In this presentation, the author will unveil critical mechanistic connections between the formation of underwater waves from catastrophic thermodynamic phase changes involving carbon dioxide hydrates deep in the ocean and prevailing climate changes, including the more disruptive climatic events (such as the El Nino phenomenon). To someone with enough knowledge of energetic systems, significant heat absorptions/releases and volume changes per fluid mass resulting from the formation of condensed phases seems to be quite obvious. But this concept has been overlooked and/or disregarded. It seemed that mass and energy effects of natural forces that resulted in these massive underwater waves have been averaged out in the entire ocean ecosystem or not involved in the measurements. And yet it will be shown that while their origins on the ocean floor are local, their climatic effects can be global in scale.

It should be expected that time-dependent (dynamic) measured climatic variables (such as global carbon dioxide ocean uptakes, sea surface temperatures, atmospheric temperatures, sea levels, etc.) from human-caused (anthropogenic) carbon dioxide emissions will have a well-behaved smooth-curve dynamic pattern. This is because the atmosphere where emissions are mostly released is a relatively good fluid dispersion system for anthropogenic carbon dioxide that is also uniformly absorbing of the sun's energy. Whereas, it will be shown here that effects of natural intense localized temporal energy releases from the oceans will have a distinct dynamic signature, and should show as a series of peaks in various time-dependent plots. If the dynamic signature coming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is dominant, then the overall result of its dynamic signature in the global system should be dominant as well. As it can be seen from the implications of the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) report, this is not the case. Time-dependent peaks of climatic experimental data are still significant instead of being completely overwhelmed by the anthropogenic dynamic signature. Various climatic data will be shown here to be mechanistically linked to dynamic peaks associated with catastrophic energy absorptions/releases, with cycles currently revealed in mean seasonally adjusted global measurement data that are recurring at 1-7 peaks per decade. These climate change cycles have not been adequately explained by current concepts, even though they have usually been recently occurring as a yearly cycle.

In conclusion, with better understanding of the conceptual underpinnings of global carbon dioxide releases, it seems to be feasible to formulate engineering solutions to manage these above-mentioned catastrophic climate cycles from the deepest sections of the oceans. The possible attainment of a manageable global equilibrium of climatic behavior is the goal that the author aspires to communicate to the public. It should also be noted that the 12-step mechanism outlined in this work to explain climate change-related behavior has been used by the author to explain some other ocean mysteries, such as El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, the volcanic torus, large deep ocean solitary waves or solitons, and other interesting revelations.