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To: Moominoid who wrote (61721)	4/11/2005 8:01:43 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi David. <<Clouds have a big surface area! They must be absorbing a LOT of CO2 and raining it into the ocean. I dare say that's a faster absorption process than straight into the ocean surface. I admit that's a complete wild guess, but photos of Earth from space show a LOT of opaque cloud, so the surface area of clouds must be about 1000 times that of the ocean surfaces. > Clouds aren't busy absorbing CO2. Even if they were it wouldn't make much difference in terms of raining it into the surface ocean. The surface would exchange some back into the atmosphere and keep in equilibrium. Removal of CO2 to the deep ocean occurs slowly when surface water sinks as in the North Atlantic. In most locations there isn't much mixing between the top 100 metres and the rest of the ocean. The other main route is sedimentation by lifeforms...> Yes, clouds are stripping atmospheric CO2 and depositing it in the ocean. Here's how it works. The ocean is a CO2 sink, absorbing it from the atmosphere, converting it to plants using sunlight, which are eaten by beasties, and dumped on the ocean floor as in shells, bones and organics. You can see the White Cliffs of Dover as one minuscule example of CO2 stripped from the ocean. The amount of limestone around the world is vast. Then there's all the subducted organic material converted to oil and gas deposits stuck in sedimentary layers. Recirculated untrapped organic material powers volcanoes long after it has been dumped on the ocean floor conveyor belt to the subduction zones. It is a stupendously large factory. Back to the beginning, people are digging up the trapped hydrocarbons, burning them and releasing them back into the biosphere as plant food. What happens to that CO2 and the climate is the big question. Some of the CO2 is absorbed directly into the ocean when a molecule bumps into the surface and is dissolved. Some is eaten by plants and there are a LOT of plants around the world and they are very hungry, greedy brutes, some of them hundreds of tons big and a thousand years old. Some just swirls around in the atmosphere, wondering what to do. The devil finds work for idle hands so that swirling CO2 is alleged to malevolently cause the dreaded Greenhouse Effect which is alleged to be sending us to a runaway cookhouse or, failing that, an ice-age, or maybe both [according to the doomsters]. Meanwhile, back at the ocean surface, the sun beats down and while CO2 is soaking in, H2O is evaporating. The H2O joins the swirling gases in the atmosphere. When it gets too concentrated in cooler places, reaching the dew point, it condenses and forms clouds. When a CO2 molecule bumps into the surface of some water, it has no idea whether it's the ocean surface, a lake or a drop of water in clouds. It just bumps in and stays there if the concentration of CO2 isn't too high. Then, when the drops of water agglomerate, they get too heavy to remain suspended and fall as rain, going plop into the ocean, or onto land, running off in streams and rivers back into the ocean. When the acidic streams [carbonic acid] run through limestone, they dissolve the limestone and we get interesting limestone caves, stalactites and stalagmites. You will perhaps recall the dreaded ACID RAIN fears of the 1980s in which sulphur oxides dissolved in rain and made lakes acidic. Just as SO2 dissolves in water droplets, so does CO2, both making a slightly acidic rain drop. Now, back to the amount absorbed by clouds. It's HUGE compared with a flat ocean surface. The surface area of a drop of moisture in a cloud is a sphere. There are umpty trillion tiny sphere. So many that clouds are opaque and even quite black. It takes surface area to enable absorption and clouds have surface area in spades. When you look at satellite photos of Earth, you can see that there is a LOT of cloud. Clouds can be towering atmospheric scrubbers so high that 10 km high 747s have to fly around them with the cloud tops well above them. The surface area of water drops in them is stupendously huge. When a torrential downpour arrives, you can get an idea of just how much surface area is involved, but remember that a drop of rain is thousands of times bigger than a tiny drop of mist, so a drop of rain's surface area is thousands of times less that the drops of mist that make up a rain drop. 4 x pi x r2 is the surface area of a sphere so you can see the difference between a big and small drop of water. Surface area is the name of the game for absorption and chemical reactions, which is why we have big long intestines and alveoli in our lungs. In an hour, a couple of centimetres of water can accumulate, so you can see just how much surface area was involved in that amount of water when in the form of tiny drops of mist in the sky. So clouds ARE very much busy absorbing CO2. They DO make a huge difference to the amount of CO2 ending up in the ocean. Life in the ocean feeds on that CO2, starting with photosynthesis by little aglae thingies and working up to Blue Whales and Great White Sharks, all of which end up dead on the bottom of the ocean [their skeletal remains and some trapped hydrocarbons which don't get eaten by something else before sinking]. I just made that up, so no, I don't have data. Mqurice