How The Green Movement Empowered Putin’s Invasion Of Ukraine

by C. Feldman , Feb 2, 2022 in ClimateChageDispatch


Whatever you think our obligations to defend Ukraine at the moment, you must concede that the green movement in Western Europe and the United States made his actions possible. [bold, links added]

They also made any non-military reaction toothless and unpersuasive. It has been the equivalent of a poker player discarding a royal straight flush and then trying to bluff his opponents with the pair of deuces remaining in his hand.

Only with dumb opponents is he likely to take the pot. And Russian President Putin is definitely not dumb.

Indeed, the weak sanctions proposed by the West to induce the Russians to pull back were so unimpressive the Russian stock market, which has been collapsing, rose 6.5 percent after President Biden announced them.

Mr. Biden did follow Germany in not certifying Nord Stream 2, but that’s just a temporary, paper contract issue. It’s not a long-term or permanent shutdown. He basically hit a couple of banks tied to the Donbas region.

The GDP for the whole of Ukraine is about $160 billion, maybe. The GDP of Donbas is less than $6 billion and the GDP of Lugansk is $1 billion, also maybe. Delaware’s GDP, just to pick a random comparison, is $76 billion. So, to call Mr. Biden’s sanctions small beer is understating it.

And the reason he cannot actually do much more short of war is that he and the leaders of western Europe—bamboozled by the prospect of “climate change”—have made themselves poorer and weaker by eviscerating conventional fuel production.

While they without ample reason were discarding a very good hand, Russian president Putin was improving his by exploiting and selling to us and Europe his nations’ fossil fuels.

….

The green dream goes lethal

by Melanie Phillips, Feb 24, 2022


There are many reasons why the west must bear considerable responsibility for this crisis. As I wrote here, these include the fantasy indulged in until this week by western nations that Putin posed no threat and was instead a person through whom westerners could enrich themselves.

Thus Britain’s capital has been dubbed “Londongrad,” because British governments have allowed so many of Putin’s fellow oligarchs to use its infrastructure to launder stolen Russian funds — contributing in the process so much to Britain’s GDP.

Then there’s the European embrace of pacifism, which has led Britain and other European states to cut their defence spending and rely instead on America’s protective umbrella which they all took for granted.

 

Storm damaged wind turbine, Ireland, 2008

That parasitic illusion went belly-up with the advent of the Biden administration, whose refusal to defend the free world and its preference instead to throw in the towel wherever possible  — as demonstrated most graphically by America’s disorderly scuttle from Afghanistan — has been duly noted by Putin, along with the regimes in China and Iran, as evidence that the Biden administration would take no effective action to counter their own aggression.

But even more shocking that all this is that, through their unhinged obsession with “climate change,” America, Britain and Europe have handed Putin his greatest weapon against them.

In their determination to reduce carbon emissions by turning against fossil fuels, and having put so many of their eggs in the basket of renewables which are desperately unreliable as national sources of energy, they have made themselves overly dependent on gas.

Sinking Sea Level Alarmism: Study By Nevada Scientists Show Surface Motion of Continents “On Average Upward”

by P. Gosselin, Feb 27, 2022 in NoTricksZone


German climate science critical site Die kalte Sonne here reports on a recent study by Hammond et al (2021) titled:  “GPS Imaging of Global Vertical Land Motion for Studies of Sea Level Rise“.

How we have mischaracterized climate risk

by J. Curry, Feb 19, 2022 in ClimateEtc.


“The current thinking and approaches guiding this conceptualization and description have been shown to lack scientific rigour, the consequence being that climate change risk and uncertainties are poorly presented. The climate change field needs to strengthen its risk science basis, to improve the current situation.” – Norwegian risk scientist Terje Aven

For decision-makers, climate change is a problem in risk assessment and management.  Climate change is a risk because it may affect prosperity and security in a negative way, and because its consequences are uncertain.

Global climate change policy has been dominated by a specific strategy of risk management – the Precautionary Principle as a justification for setting specific targets for the elimination of manmade emissions of carbon dioxide.  In the early 1980s, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) became bullish on the idea that fossil fuels would produce dangerous climate change. The prospect of eliminating fossil fuels was congruent with UNEP’s broader interests in environmental quality and world governance. At Villach in 1985 at the beginning of the climate treaty movement, the policy movement to eliminate fossil fuels became detached from any moorings in the science – the rhetoric of precaution argued that we should act anyway to eliminate fossil fuels, just in case. This perspective became codified by the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Treaty in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Instead of framing the IPCC assessments around risk assessment, the IPCC reports narrowly framed its assessments to support the UNFCCC policies, focusing on dangerous climate change associated with fossil fuel emissions.  The torquing of climate science and the manufacture of a consensus around dangerous human-caused climate change not only oversimplified the scientific and social challenges, but led to the adoption of a “predict then act” strategy to manage and control, supporting decisions about elimination of fossil fuel emissions that were begun in the 1980’s.  The congruence of the IPCC assessments and UNFCCC policies enforces the belief that climate change is a simple or tame problem, with science trumping all practical questions and conflicting values and purposes.

Evaluation of the Homogenization Adjustments Applied to European Temperature Records in the Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset

by P. O’Neill et al., Feb 24, 2022 in MPDI


The widely used Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) monthly temperature dataset is available in two formats—non-homogenized and homogenized. Since 2011, this homogenized dataset has been updated almost daily by applying the “Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm” (PHA) to the non-homogenized datasets. Previous studies found that the PHA can perform well at correcting synthetic time series when certain artificial biases are introduced. However, its performance with real world data has been less well studied. Therefore, the homogenized GHCN datasets (Version 3 and 4) were downloaded almost daily over a 10-year period (2011–2021) yielding 3689 different updates to the datasets. The different breakpoints identified were analyzed for a set of stations from 24 European countries for which station history metadata were available. A remarkable inconsistency in the identified breakpoints (and hence adjustments applied) was revealed. Of the adjustments applied for GHCN Version 4, 64% (61% for Version 3) were identified on less than 25% of runs, while only 16% of the adjustments (21% for Version 3) were identified consistently for more than 75% of the runs. The consistency of PHA adjustments improved when the breakpoints corresponded to documented station history metadata events. However, only 19% of the breakpoints (18% for Version 3) were associated with a documented event within 1 year, and 67% (69% for Version 3) were not associated with any documented event. Therefore, while the PHA remains a useful tool in the community’s homogenization toolbox, many of the PHA adjustments applied to the homogenized GHCN dataset may have been spurious. Using station metadata to assess the reliability of PHA adjustments might potentially help to identify some of these spurious adjustments. View Full-Text
SEE ALSO HERE : WUWT
SEE ALSO HERE : CERES

The Decline Effect – Part 1: Ocean Acidification

by K. Hansen, Feb 22, 2022 in WUWT


There have been a couple of mentions of the decline effect over the past month, mostly prompted by a recent paper that appeared in  PLOS BIOLOGY  authored by Jeff Clements, Josefin Sundin, Timothy Clark, and Fredrik Jutfelt titled “Meta-analysis reveals an extreme “decline effect” in the impacts of ocean acidification on fish behavior”.

The subject matter of the paper, examining the decline effect in the field of Ocean Acidification (OA), particularly in studies on the effects of OA on fish behavior, is itself interesting.  I have written about OA and OA science many times here at WUWT.

There are two parts to this story about the decline effect.  1)  The specific case of the decline effect in OA studies claimed in the Clements et al. paper.   2)  The general case of the hypothesized causes of the decline effect in the sciences.

This essay will address the first issue:  the decline effect in OA studies.

The decline effect in OA science:

As for the specific OA case,  part of that story, featured in the Clements et al. paper,  has been well-covered by Steve Milloy at JunkScience in his article “Climate fish scare turns out to be just a fish story”.

There are several obvious potential causes of a decline effect in a field. They are: publication bias, citation bias, methodological bias, and investigator effects. 

As part of the review process of the new Clement et al. paper, each of those potential causes was investigated – and all but one were eliminated as a major cause.  It is that last cause that I write about today.

The missing parts in Steve Milloy’s coverage are something that I have written about before and is left under-said Clements et al. (2022):

First, you may recall that Timothy Clark (one of the co-authors of Clements (2022)) and others wrote a paper bluntly titled: “Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes” published Nature in January 2020.

Marshall Islands Growing, Not Shrinking. World Bank’s Embarrassing Error In Alarmist 2021 Report

by C. Rotter, Feb 21, 2022 in WUWT


Last October, just before Glasgow Climate Conference, the World Bank issued a report with a dire warning for the Marshall Islands. It claimed: “Rising sea levels in the atoll nation of Marshall Islands are projected to endanger 40 percent of existing buildings in the capital, Majuro, with 96 percent of the city at risk of frequent flooding induced by climate change.”

The startling claims were based on “new visual models” and that the rising sea levels were due to co2-induced warming.

But now we learn that the model inputs were garbage, and so the model outputs were garbage as well. Nothing of the sort is going to happen to the Marshall Islands anytime soon.

Analysis shows 4% growth from 1945 to 2010!

German climate site Die kalte Sonne here took a closer look at the dramatic claims and found the World Bank report had a grave error: they failed to account for the role that coral reefs play in island building.

2015 paper published by Ford et al indeed found that the opposite is happening: the islands are expanding and not sinking and shrinking. The paper’s abstract:

Most Published Studies Exaggerated the Effects of Ocean Acidification – and Covid, Etc.

by J. Marohasy’sBlog, Feb 20, 2022


The concept of ocean acidification, and human-caused global warming more generally, could be described as containing a grain of truth embedded in a mountain of nonsense. Indeed, the projected large increase in atmospheric CO2 will at most cause a small reduction in pH – it will not turn the ocean acidic. Yet this is what is implied by the term ocean acidification. True acidification would require average pH to be reduced below 7.0, at which point seashells would indeed begin to dissolve. This is an impossible scenario, however, because of the ocean’s effectively limitless buffering capacity.

There is a newly published study by Jeff Clements and team that concludes many of the published studies on ocean acidification, especially those studies published in high impact journals and accompanied by sensational media reporting, have turned-out to be wrong, or at least exaggerated.

My colleague Peter Ridd describes the situation:

This problem with exaggeration of threats applies to many areas of science and has a name: The Decline Effect.

The Decline Effect goes like this: an early report, usually attracting huge media interest, predicts some sort of catastrophe. But when follow up work is done, usually with far better experimental procedure and far greater numbers of samples, the original report turns out to be wrong.

Jeff Clements’ team included Timothy Clark, Josefin Sundin and Frederik Jutfelt who were involved in a study last year proving that numerous reports by James Cook University’s coral reef centres on reef fish was totally wrong.

I co-authored a book chapter with John Abbot some years ago that explained:

British colonisation of Australia 250 years ago to blame for recent wildfires

by P. Homewood, Feb 18, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


Britain’s colonisation of Australia in the late 18th century is partly to blame for the nation’s recent ravaging by bushfires, a new study claims.

Before British ships carrying convicted criminals landed in New South Wales in January 1788, aboriginal people tended the landscape and were in charge of bushfire prevention.

But after the penal colony was established, and indigenous people were forced off their land and away from territories they had tended for centuries, the settlers took a new approach.

Suppression is now the primary focus. Instead of proactively and gradually reducing the risk of fire, authorities try to extinguish a fire as soon as possible after ignition.

Researchers from around the world, including Australia, have published a paper saying this change in tack has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago.

“Indigenous people managed Australia’s flammable vegetation with “cultural burning” practices,” the study authors write in an article for The Conversation.

“These involved frequent, low-intensity fires which led to a fine-grained vegetation mosaic comprising grassy areas and scattered trees.

“Landscapes managed in this way were less prone to destructive fires. But under colonial rule, Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their lands and often prevented from carrying out many important practices.”

The change in wildfire prevention due to colonisation has left Australia more vulnerable to wildfires now than it was 250 years ago

….

 

Dire Warnings Of A Climate Collapse By 2020 Made By Media In 2007 Get Postponed Again

by P. Gosselin, Feb 18, 2022 in NoTrickZone


In 2007, in the wake of the 4th IPCC report and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Germany’s most widely circulated daily, Bild, reported:

There are only 13 years left to save our earth! Can the climate catastrophe still be prevented? There is only little time left to save our planet!” According to the World Climate Report, mankind has at most until 2020 to prevent the worst by introducing efficient technologies.

As reported by the Financial Times Deutschland, UN climate researchers predict: “If greenhouse gas emissions do not decrease substantially by 2020, global warming will set in motion irreversible processes such as the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and the acidification of the oceans.”

See original article (in German) here at Bild.

Since then, the horror scenarios obviously have not come to pass. Moreover, instead of greenhouse gases “substantially decreasing” globally, they’ve actually increased substantially.

Doomsday Climate Studies Turn Out To Be Overblown Nonsense

by Washington Are Beacon Staff, Feb 17, 2022  in The WashigntonFreeBeacon


For over a decade, scientists have warned that the acidification of ocean water could decimate fish populations. Acidification changed fish behavior, several studies found, making them less likely to evade predators.

As carbon emissions pushed pH levels higher and higher, climate advocates sounded an apocalyptic tone. Fewer fish would mean fewer fisheries, which would imperil the livelihoods of millions of fishermen across the globe. It could also mean fewer medicines, many of which are derived from marine life.

 

According to a new paper in a top-ranked biology journal, these concerns are vastly overblown.

The paper, published in PLOS Biology on Feb. 3, reviewed 91 studies of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior. It found that better-quality studies tended to find smaller effects on fish behavior—and that the studies with the most dramatic results tended to have low sample size, making them less statistically reliable.

New Study: In Northern Poland The Medieval Warm Period Was 3°C Warmer Than Today

by K. Richard, Feb 17,2022 in NoTricksZone


The temperature record for this region also shows today’s temperatures are not much different than they were during the Little Ice Age.

Another chart contained in the study (Pleskot et al., 2022) shows North America’s and Europe’s mean annual temperatures are nearly the lowest of the last 4,500 years.

Hundreds More Papers Published In 2021 Support A Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm

by K. Richard, Feb 14, 2022 in NoTricksZone


In 2021, several hundred more scientific papers were published that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob…or that otherwise serve to question the efficacy of climate models or the related “consensus” positions commonly endorsed by policymakers and mainstream media sources.

These scientific papers affirm the position that there are significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes…emphasizing that climate science is not settled.

More specifically, the papers in this compilation support these four main skeptical positions — categorized here as N(1) – N(4) — which question the climate alarm popularized in today’s headlines.

N(1) Natural mechanisms play well more than a negligible role (as claimed by the IPCC) in the net changes in the climate system, which includes temperature variations, precipitation patterns, weather events, etc., and the influence of increased CO2 concentrations on climatic changes are less pronounced than currently imagined.

N(2) The warming/sea levels/glacier and sea ice retreat/precipitation extremes…experienced during the modern era are neither unprecedented or remarkable, nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability.

N(3) The computer climate models are neither reliable or consistently accurate; the uncertainty and error ranges are irreducible; and projections of future climate states (i.e., an intensification of the hydrological cycle) are not supported by observations and/or are little more than speculation.

N(4) Current emissions-mitigation policies, especially related to the advocacy for renewables, are often ineffective and even harmful to the environment, whereas elevated CO2 and a warmer climate provide unheralded benefits to the biosphere (i.e., a greener planet and enhanced crop yields, lower mortality with warming).

In sharp contrast to the above, the corresponding “consensus” positions that these papers do not support are:

A(1) Close to or over 100% (110%) of the warming since 1950 has been caused by increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, leaving natural attribution at something close to 0%.

So, shale gas doesn’t work? Really?

by P. Homewood, Feb 16, 2022 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


We should find out whether UK shale gas will work – lift the fracking ban and let’s find out.

We do understand that if you’re an activist in a political party then it is necessary to accept some of the argument as handed down from on high. That’s rather what the collective vision of a political party means. But we do wish that such activists would occasionally have a little think about what they’re being asked to swallow. Perhaps taste it for basic logic, that sort of thing.

Take, for example, this insistence that there’s no point in fracking for natural gas because it will take a decade to get anywhere. Peter Franklin repeats this at Conservative Home for example:

Ireland, Sweden Show No January Warming Since 1988. Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Now More Than 40 Years Stable!

by P. Gosselin, Feb 15, 2022 in NoTricksZone


The January mean temperature data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA )are now available for Sweden and Ireland. Also below we look at Antarctic sea ice extent.

We begin by looking at the trends from 5 stations in Sweden, for which the JMA has enough data to allow adequate plotting. since 1988:

Evidence that Clouds Actively Regulate the Temperature

by W. Eschenbach, Oct 6, 2013 in WUWT


I have put forth the idea for some time now that one of the main climate thermoregulatory mechanisms is a temperature-controlled sharp increase in albedo in the tropical regions. I have explained that this occurs in a stepwise fashion when cumulus clouds first emerge, and that the albedo is further increased when some of the cumulus clouds evolve into thunderstorms.

I’ve demonstrated this with actual observations in a couple of ways. I first showed it by means of average photographs of the “view from the sun” here. I’ve also shown this occurring on a daily basis in the TAO data. So I thought, I should look in the CERES data for evidence of this putative phenomenon that I claim occurs, whereby the albedo is actively controlling the thermal input to the climate system.

Mostly, this thermoregulation appears to be happening over the ocean. And I generally dislike averages, I avoid them when I can.  So … I had the idea of making a scatterplot of the total amount of reflected solar energy, versus the sea surface temperature, on a gridcell-by-gridcell basis. No averaging required. I thought well, if I’m correct, I should see the increased reflection of solar energy required by my hypothesis in the scatterplots. Figure 1 shows those results for four individual months in one meteorological year. (The year-to-year variations are surprisingly small, so these months are quite representative.)

Are electric cars the new ‘diesel scandal’ waiting to happen? They generate polluting particles just like petrol vehicles, are not even that cost-effective and, as one expert finds, will not save the planet

by B. Lomborg, Feb 6, 2022 in Daily Mail


  • While diesel cars tend to be more fuel-efficient with lower emissions, they also emit greater quantities of other pollutants that damage air quality and health 

  • Now, electric cars could be the future for many as BJORN LOMBORG explains

Do you remember Britain’s ‘dash for diesel’? It began more than 20 years ago when the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced a new car tax system favouring vehicles with lower emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

Diesel cars tend to be more fuel-efficient with lower emissions, and Mr Brown hailed them as the greener and cheaper option. Over a decade and a half, the number of such vehicles on British roads quadrupled.

What didn’t emerge until much later — although it was no secret in the motor industry or among government officials — was that diesel cars also emitted greater quantities of other pollutants, nitrogen oxides and particulates that damage air quality and human health.

 

Methane Spikes !

by Kip Hansen, Feb 10, 2022 in WUWT


Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane

Our ever benevolent and protective scientist class has come to our rescue by raising the alarm – if they didn’t, we might not be adequately alarmed by this dangerous situation.

Seriously, the Nature punchline is, as you may have already guessed:  “some researchers fear that global warming itself is behind the rapid rise.” 

Yes, that’s right.  Global Warming (itself!) may be behind the rapid rise.

The author of the Nature article, Jeff Tollefson, calls this a “grim milestone” (however, no reason for this being either grim or a milestone is given).

Those interested in this trivial issue should read the Nature article.  There are some interesting points in it concerning suspected and hypothesized sources of the methane and the reason for the rather odd pattern of rise and fall seen in multi-year data.

However, here is:

The Bottom Line

1.  Always look at the units attached to any numerical data.

1900 ppb (parts per billion) is 1.9 ppm (parts per million)

Or, in percentage of the atmosphere:

0.000 19 Percent [%]

2.  What that means in the Real World™ is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere is so small — there is more neon and helium in the atmosphere than methane — that if you searched for a molecule of methane, and individually sorted through a BILLION molecules, you might find one or two.  You might find none in your first billion, but if you sorted enough billions, your find would average out at just under 2 per billion. (Good Luck!)

3. As the Earth continues to warm and green as it comes out of the Little Ice Age, we see more life which means more methane.  More life is a Good Thing.

4.  Atmospheric Methane has spiked! — to almost zero.

# # # # #h

Author’s Comment:

Almost Zero is an important issue.  Many of the most popular dangers and harms touted in the popular press are about the crisis of “things” being discovered at levels which are best described as “Almost Zero”.  This is the nutty misapplication of the precautionary principle, where the mere existence —  the mere detection —  of a thing is automatically equated with harm.

The IPCC CO2 Climate Narrative: A “Behemoth On Clay Feet” …Ready To Collapse

by P. Gosselin, Fab, 6, 2022 in NoTricksZone


The earth’s history provides the solid proof that acquits CO2. The IPCC’s claim of CO2 being the dominant climate factor is a behemoth on clay feet. 

By Fred F. Mueller

Have you ever had an uneasy feeling when watching the aggressive, intolerant stance of the apologists of “man-made climate catastrophe” against all critics?

The overwhelming majority of our elites blame CO2 emitted by mankind to be responsible for “a runaway overheating” of our atmosphere. “The science” spearheaded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls for us to renounce fossil fuels and return to the frugal lifestyle of the 18th or 19th century.

You might well find you’re not alone with that unease, which is proliferating rapidly since social media giants have started to censor people daring to question the IPCC’s “science is settled” attitude.

Solar Update

by D. Archibald, Feb 2, 2022 in WentwothReport


Reports from the current Northern Hemisphere winter include plenty of low temperature records broken, frozen seas off Greece, etc., suggesting that the world is cooling. A correspondent in Missouri writes:

Nearly 800 chill hours here so far … cold forecast for the next 2 weeks. Will hit 1000 easily. The average when we moved here not quite 20 years ago was 5-600 … for the entire winter. (Chill hours refer to the total amount of time a fruit tree needs to be exposed to cold winter temperatures to allow them break dormancy so they will flower and set fruit normally.)

So that is good news for Missouri — they will now be able to grow things like peaches with a high chill hour requirement for fruiting. Confirmation of colder Northern Hemisphere winters is provided by the snow mass trend by the Finnish Meteorlogical Institute:

Another dot on the graphs (Part II)

by Gavin, Feb 2, 2020 in RealClimate


We have now updated the model-observations comparison page for the 2021 SAT and MSU TMT datasets. Mostly this is just ‘another dot on the graphs’ but we have made a couple of updates of note. First, we have updated the observational products to their latest versions (i.e. HadCRUT5, NOAA-STAR 4.1 etc.), though we are still using NOAA’s GlobalTemp v5 – the Interim version will be available later this year. Secondly, we have added a comparison of the observations to the new CMIP6 model ensemble.

As we’ve discussed previously, the CMIP6 ensemble contains a dozen models (out of ~50) with climate sensitivities that are outside the CMIP5 range, and beyond the very likely constraints from the observations. This suggests that comparisons to the observations should be weighted in some way. One reasonable option is to follow the work of Tokarska et al (2020) and others, and restrict the comparison to those models that have a transient climate response (TCR) that is consistent with observations. The likely range of TCR is 1.4ºC to 2.2ºC according to IPCC AR6, and so we plot both the mean and 95% spread over all all models (1 ensemble member per model) (grey) and the TCR-screened subset (pink).

CMIP6 model means and spreads since 1979 (reader friendly version).

….

Germany January Mean Temperatures Falling Since 1988, Contradicting Claims Of Warming

by NoTricksZone, Feb 2, 2022 in WUWT


According to the media and climate alarmists, winters like we used to have in the global cooling days of the 1970s were supposed to be disappearing due to increasing warming from rising CO2.

But that hasn’t really been happening. For example, Stefan Kämpfe at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) plotted Germany’s mean January temperature going back to 1988:

Rare earths reveal new info in volcanoes’ CO2 emissions

by Mining.com Staff Writer, Jan 28, 2022, in TheNorthernMinerMaps


In a paper published in the journal Geology, the scientists explain that over geological times, variations in atmospheric CO2 depended mainly on volcanic emissions, which are difficult to estimate because they are not directly related to the volume of the magmas that erupted. Indeed, some volcanoes show exceptionally large emissions of CO2 when compared to the amount that can be dissolved in their magmas. Etna is perhaps the most striking example, contributing to 10% (9000 tons/day) of the present global volcanic CO2 emission. That is three times more CO2 than a volcano like Kilauea in Hawaii emits, which erupts four times more magma.

But ratios of Nb/Ta are very constant in many rocks and are only modified by few geological processes—like the infiltration of carbonate-rich melts in earth’s mantle.