The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. During the first four billion years, there were no hydrocarbons beneath the surface: no coal, no oil, no natural gas.
All the carbon atoms on Earth are in plants, animals, or the atmosphere. Yet the oceans did not boil. The Earth was not too hot for life. If it had been we would not be here.
The first lifeforms arose early in Earth’s existence.
The earliest fossils of microbes themselves, rather than just their byproducts, preserve the remains of what scientists think are sulfur-metabolizing bacteria. The fossils also come from Australia and date to about 3.4 billion years ago. (Wacey, D., Kilburn, M. R., Saunders, M., Cliff, J., and Brasier, M. D. (2011). Microfossils of sulfur-metabolizing cells in 3.4-billion-year-old rocks of Western Australia. Nature Geoscience, 4, 698-702. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1238.)
Bacteria are relatively complex, suggesting that life probably began a good deal earlier than 3.5 billion years ago.
However, the lack of earlier fossil evidence makes pinpointing the time of life’s origin difficult (if not impossible). (Hypotheses about the origins of life, Khan Academy.)
Organisms evolved that employ the process of photosynthesis. This plant life continues to consume carbon dioxide (CO2) and produce oxygen.
After a billion years or so, an atmosphere resembling that of the present day began to take shape. Earth’s present atmosphere is composed as follows:
It is important to note that in the above circle graphs, nitrogen, oxygen, and argon compose 99.964% of our atmosphere. The amount of CO2 is 0.04%.
That is NOT 4% or even four-tenths of one percent. It is four one-hundredths of one percent: 407 parts per million (by weight: One part per million is one gram per million grams). The below graphs are from NASA.
Dropping back 500 million years, before there were any hydrocarbons beneath the surface of the Earth, there was abundant plant life and animals with vertebrae had evolved.
Indeed, recently the remains of “giant worms” in northern Greenland (there was no Greenland ice sheet) dating from that period have been found. At that point, there were thousands of square miles of shallow coastal and inland seas.
As plant life and single-cell organisms decayed and died, they sank to the bottom. Over many millions of years, this dead organic matter was covered and compressed as continents shifted and the land sank and rose.
The plants became coal. Cellulose (C6H10O5) is the primary organic component of plants. Simply put, photosynthesis in plants takes water from the Earth and CO2 from the atmosphere, and together with energy from the sun produces organic molecules with the sun’s energy stored in the bonds that bind the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
Carbohydrates and hydrocarbons: same stuff. The coal family ranges from peat to anthracite with a half-dozen grades in between (lignite, bituminous, etc.).
Peat is not much different from wood; anthracite coal is almost pure carbon. Besides carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, coal also contains sulfur, nitrogen, and coal ash. Of course, when carbon burns, CO2 is produced.
The single-cell organisms that decayed and sank became covered, turning into petroleum. The petroleum subjected to the most pressure and temperature became natural gas, i.e., 95% methane (CH4). CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H20
The process of the formation of hydrocarbons began about 500 million years ago, spanned several hundred million years, and ended about seventy-five million years ago.
Earth has never been too warm, at most about twenty degrees Fahrenheit above today’s average temperature.
That average temperature level was maintained over billions of years with no carbon stored underground.
Twenty degrees warmer would put an end to snow in much of the world, but that would be it. The Yukon and Siberia would be pleasant places to live and farm.
Robert Stewart is a graduate of Brown University and he has law degrees from New England School of Law and New York University Graduate Law School. He is presently a semi-retired (retired but still working) mathematics instructor at a technical high school in Massachusetts. He has followed closely the climate debate and the many failed predictions for fifty years.
Top Image by Marcos Marcos Mark from Pixabay
“During the first four billion years, there were no hydrocarbons beneath the surface: no coal, no oil, no natural gas.”
Unless the late Tommy Gold’s hypothesis, that hydrocarbons are abiogenic and are primordial in origin, is correct. His book “ The deep hot biosphere” is worth reading.
How did Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, acquire it’s oceans of hydrocarbons and mountains of coal?
I don’t know but I’ll do my best to find out. Thanks for your comment.
Sorry about the typing of my name.
heating and compressing dead organic matter is one way, but not the only way. to form hydrocarbons.
I can’t figure out the purpose of this article so I assume it had no purpose
“All the carbon atoms on Earth are in plants, animals, or the atmosphere”
NOT TRUE
The main sources of carbon are rocks and the deep oceans. It is possible that atmospheric CO2 leve;s have been declining for 4.5 billion years.
You’re right about the rocks but except for the c0al, the carbon in them is going to stay there. The point of the article was, and I am sorry if it wasn’t clear, is that even if carbon dioxide is a main driving force in controlling temperature, even if we burn all the hydrocarbons the earth won’t become too hot. There were no hydrocarbons for the first four billion years of earth’s history.