Arctic sea ice now 28.7% higher than this date last year – still rallying

Hmm. Maybe there really is a 12- to 13-month lag between ENSO events and Arctic response.

Well, I guess we can expect a data modifiation program real soon now. That will fix this problem.

How far WILL the signal shift go …

I guess frezzing ice is a good thing to prove those AGW people wrong, but I am concerend that it may be a rather cold ski season this year.
Maybe that sun spot will give us some help.

Anthony,
OT
You promised us and AIRS airing that has not materialized.
I would really like people’s opinion of the animations
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/
where the waves of CO2 become maximum in spring and over land masses. The press release talks of industrial pollution, but that should be more or less constant (heating in winter air conditioning in summer, industries running all year round).
REPLY: There was this post on the release of the paper, but I have done nothing since. I am juggling several projects so I haven’t done as much in-depth work lately. – Anthony

“I guess frezzing ice is a good thing to prove those AGW people wrong”
You forget that more ice is a sign of AGW. /sarcasm

To Allan S. Blue – where’s the full dataset?
If you want to spend some time poking around this NSIDC ftp site, there is historical daily numbers going back back to 1972.
Just be aware there have been changes in methodologies so the numbers don’t match up very well with today. [Although you’d think the NSIDC could use these to come up with an homogeneous dataset and they might make these daily numbers available to the public – I found this ftp site by accident, it is not linked to by the NSIDC.]
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/seaice/polar-stereo/trends-climatologies/

Go Baby Ice!
What’s the graph look like for ANTarctic ice which was at record maximum levels last year? Are we seeing matching behavior?

Today on the Drudge report, for the first time, 3 headlines concerning record cold and ice growth! Finally!

Just a cite from our “favourite” blog (I mean Polar Defense Project):
Arctic sea ice is in rapid decline, with no likelihood of stopping under current conditions. The rate of loss is 30 to 50 years ahead of most predictions and has been seriously underestimated. Many scientists consider that it passed a tipping point 15 to 20 years ago; we are now seeing the results of this.
So we’re over the tipping point! It tells us everything. The rapid decline in the summer months, and now this unprecedented growth rate… It is all due to this so-called tipping point, and of course due to AGW, what else?
Nothing matters.

Appears the tail end of the 2008 red line is going straight up. Am I seeing this correctly?

I notice that Mr Pugh’s (The Arctic Kayaker) blog has ‘comments off’.

How about discussing how thin much of the ice is, even though its areal extent has recovered?
We were probably just helped in part this year by the strong and prolonged La Nina. Yes, much of the younger ice did not melt this year – not as much as would normally be expected, anyway – which helps explain the fast recovery we now see, but there will still be a large proportion of thin, young ice, where decades ago we would have had much thicker, older ice. If we get a strong El Nino, I should not be surprised if we see the 2007 minimum record broken, and by quite a margin, too.

Cold day today in Alert, Canada: -17 Fahrenheit, coldest day of the season I’ve seen. Re-freeze should get a good turbo from temps like that.
Slightly OT, the morning low in Ely, Nevada, on Monday: 7 degrees — beat the previous minimum for the date by 8 degrees.
Whipping up a good batch of cold this year.

Anthony Isgar: Good point about soot.
“This suggests that soot may contribute to thinning of sea ice (16), melting permafrost, glacier retreat, and accelerating movement of Greenland ice (17).”
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2003/12/15/2237157100.DC1/7157SuppText.html?ck=nck
“But on snow—even at concentrations below five parts per billion—such dark carbon triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming.
“Impurities cause the snow to darken and absorb more sunlight,” says Charlie Zender, a climate physicist at the University of California, Irvine. “A surprisingly large temperature response is caused by a surprisingly small amount of impurities in snow in polar regions.””
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=impure-as-the-driven-snow

Gary
– on graph for ANTarctic:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/s_plot_daily.html
Crosspatch
– on:Cryosphere Today-problem
(Repost)
It is important to know and understand that the graphs on Cryosphere Today shows Sea Ice “Area” while the other sites, NSIDC and IARC-JAXA, show Sea ICE “Extent”
There IS a difference between those two measures…

While poking around for other headlines on this I came up with the following from The Discovery Channel. It is a week old but still interesting for the slant they take.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/10/07/arctic-sea-ice.html
Is the ice thickness now the new concern?

Now baby Ice has made almost half the distance to 1979-2000 average.
If we got a severe global cooling starting 2014, as Landscheidt predicted, then others have predicted this:
http://www.goredearth.com/images/24arch.jpg
😉

Ah but not really a peep from this blog about antartica sea ice is there..
REPLY: …and your point is??? Antarctic sea ice has not neen an issue. It was above long term average baselines this past year. It has more ice than usual, and thus has been ignored by alarmists and MSM as a bellwether of climate change. If you have a specific thing that merits attention, I’ll be happy to take a look. – Anthony

“Cryosphere Today shows Sea Ice “Area” while the other sites, NSIDC and IARC-JAXA, show Sea ICE “Extent””
It is confusing to me. I thought that area is a measure of the extent. If ice extends to a certain point, then it covers a certain area. I suppose what I fail to see is that if the ice “extent” is today greater than 2005 (measured in km^2), how can the area be less measured in km^2? Sounds to me like they are trying to use semantics to cover something. I can see how they could be different numbers, but their relationship between the different years should remain the same.
By that I mean that a year can have one number measured one way and a different number when measured the other way. Fine, I have no problem with that. But given a different year, if one number is the same, I would think the other number would need to be the same or fairly close to it.
I don’t see how you can have ice at 2005 levels of “extent” with only half the difference in area between 2005 and 2007. How does it extend so far in square kilometers of extent without covering the same amount of area?

RW: I find the tone of this post, with comments like Go nature!, very infantile. What you obviously neglect to mention is that the current ice area is still far below the 1979-2000 mean. From this graph it looks to be about 2 million square kilometres, or about 25 per cent, below the long term average. That would not seem to warrant any enthusiastic proclamations about how great nature is.
Perhaps you are the one needing to tone things down. Of course the ice is still lower than the 1979-2000 mean; it is, after all, recovering from a record low last year. The whole point, which you have conveniently overlooked, is that the ice is, in fact recovering at a very rapid rate. Take your AGW blinders off, and look at the above graph again. Notice the steep slope of the red line. That, plus the fact that ice extent is now 28.7% higher than it was at this time last year is impressive. Nature is truly amazing.

See for yourself:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=15&fy=2007&sm=10&sd=14&sy=2008

RW: “What you obviously neglect to mention is that the current ice area is still far below the 1979-2000 mean. From this graph it looks to be about 2 million square kilometres, or about 25 per cent, below the long term average. ”
The years 1979-2000 do not a long term average make. BTW, if you average the area of ice from 2001-2007 into your “long term average”, I’ll bet in drops it down enough so that the 25 percent goes away.

“Freeze baby Freeze!

[…] Following on from Andrew Bolt’s post yesterday, Watts Up With That? has the full story […]

Pamela Gray,
I have noticed this for the last year and a half in my area. There is no excuse to continually get hi/lo temps wrong. It is a simple matter of wet/dry bulb reading and a formula. I have discussed this with others and have no idea what to make of it other then another way that AGW is causing harm to real meteorology and climate science and hurting weather forecasting credibility.
ts

This is a better way of saying what I am thinking:
AMSR-E extent in 2005: about 7,000,000 km^2 Cryosphere Today anomaly, -100,000 km^2
AMSR-E extent in 2007: more than 7,000,000 km^2 Cryosphere Today anomaly, -200,000 km^2
I don’t see how ice extent can go UP and yet the anomaly goes 100,000km^2 more negative.
Also, thickness in 2009 will be much greater than it was in 2008 because 2009 will have more old ice. Old ice stands up to summer melting better. In fact the thickness of the ice in 2008 was already better than it was in 2007. Every year the Russians put a science station on an ice floe. It took weeks to find a suitable floe at the end of 2007 and even that one was thinner than their desired minimum. They found a suitable floe in only a few days in 2008.
2009, given conditions similar to 2008 will end with much more ice than 2008 had because it will start with older ice having less salt content. Ice with less salt content is harder to melt.
Also, 2007 was not a melt event due to temperatures, it was a wind event. The wind literally blew much of the ice out of the Arctic ocean into the Atlantic. That ice simply floats on water. Given the right wind currents, it can practically all blow out into warmer summer Atlantic waters where it melts.

Right now at 9:20 PM it is 33.5 degrees F. The NOAA NWS predicts a low of 32 tonight for Lostine, Oregon (just 13 miles from Enterprise). The low usually hits after midnight and sometimes just before the Sun begins to lighten the eastern sky. Anthony, maybe you can speak to these daily predictions that are always too high for this location. Remember, the private Enterprise station was bought and installed because the NWS was not an accurate source of weekly weather, and not even 24 hr weather.

NSIDC normally does monthly updates but changed to twice monthly as the minima was reached. As pointed out above they are still not that late if they decide to do a midmonth update or not.
to be perfectly honest it is rather early in the re-freeze season to be trumpeting anything one way or another at the moment. Using the graph above and it’s data set most years seem to be very close going into January and it is at that point the maxima seems to be determined.
We shall see though.
Regards
Andy

Pamela Gray
– its weird, In northern sealand, Denmark, in the morning i had 3-4 mm ice on certain water areas in my garden, on my car etc. But the Danish DMI said there had only been 0,2 degrees frost, and it was one tiny area in Jutland 200 km away. We had no frost, but a big area of North sealand was frozen.
Thi however could be some effect that only the boarder quite near the ground was frozen? Not 2 meters up? Hmmm maybe..

Did you notice how all the curves tend to join in November? I would personally wait till the end of November before trying to conclude anything. The pace is fast, but not faster than 2007 if you count days from the minimal extent.

Ed Scott (17:11:18) :
No significant global warming since 1995
And when you consider that the 3 years or so previous to 1995 were affected by the Pinatubo eruption you could be talking about no significant warming for almost 20 years. Of course. “significant” here means in the statistical sense.
But I am surprised no-one has actually produced a reconstruction of global temps without the Pinatubo effect. It shouldn’t be that difficult. After all James Hansen has often claimed how well climate models were able to reproduce the Pinatubo cooling.
I wonder why it’s not been done.

Crosspatch
– on the difference betwwen “Extent” and “Area”
Yes, this can be a bit confusing so I went ahead and sent a mail to one Bill Chapman(found his mail under “Contact” on Cryosphere Today) and asked for some information.
To summarize the answers(can quote his actual answers if wanted):
“Extent” – all grid cells(pixels) in the satellite data with a ice-concentration greater than 15% will be counted and summed
“Area” – all grid cells(pixels) will be summed but weighted according to the value of the ice-concentration for each grid cell(pixel)

Flanagan
Its true that the curves might join in november, but still this early freezing is interesting, and still the ice produced earlier might very well end up thicker in the end, and thus, even thogh curves should join, the ice will be stronger for next years melt season.

“We were probably just helped in part this year by the strong and prolonged La Nina.
…If we get a strong El Nino, I should not be surprised if we see the 2007 minimum record broken, and by quite a margin, too.”
In other words, the NATURAL ups and downs of the ENSO are an important factor in determining events in the Arctic. But if we are, as the consensus seems to hold, in the negative phase of the PDO, then the next few decades ought to see more frequent and stronger Ninas and less frequent and weaker Ninos.
‘I am Nina, hear me roar!’

I’m sure you’ve seen the chart that the “movement formally known as GW” is using to explain how hotter has made us cooler… I’ve seen it on at least 3 GW based websites to explain the current cool down … (no pun intended)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/thc.html
But I find it interesting that a little research in to the origin of this chart, which was posted in 2005, they attributed the heating in this model to the sun, now on quite a few websites this very graph is being used to prove GW theories even though they tell us the sun has no effect.. strange world we live in.
I am beginning to wonder … Has Climate Change (formerly global warming) again changed its spots and started skulking around as energy independence? Please don’t get me wrong.. I’m all for US natural resources to be harvested, and new cleaner energy solutions but I am getting a bit worried when I hear our presidential candidates spouting global warming (no one sent them the memo on the name change) and energy independence in the same sentence. They are two completely different things .. or are they???
I may be paranoid, but we really need to step up the watch or we will be carbon credit central in 10 years. Afterall we need another scam now that the housing has crashed. I honestly hope our elected officials know that the support being seen right now for getting us unhooked from the mainline of oil from the middle east is different than saving the planet from the demon Co2.

Comparing the IARC-JAXA data with NOAA
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135
it seems that NOAA calculates ~ 0.5e6 km2 less area than IARC-JAXA when area is below ~7e6 km2.
I suspect NOAA has a problem with their algorithm – the distribution of their area data reveals an apparent gap from 7..8 km2.

‘We can look at the same trends and draw the same conclusions the other way.’
It’s not a ‘trend’, of course, it’s a ‘fluctuation.’
This is not a distinction without a difference, however. Consider, for example, the gyrations of the SOI
http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/SeasonalClimateOutlook/SouthernOscillationIndex/30DaySOIValues/
“Daily values are presented for research purposes only. 30 day (or larger) average SOI values are the key indices for forecast purposes.” In other words, the fever chart of daily readings is not very significant, but the 30- and 90-day running means are. Note also that the 30-day trend has been down while the 90 day has been up.
Persistently high positive numbers on the two long-term trends correlate with La Nina conditons, high negatives with El Nino’s.
The question is–or, at least my question is– what time span is suitable to what purpose? For mid-range forecasters, it is sometimes not the longer-term trend that is of immediate significance but the suddeness of a fall or a rise over, say, a week to ten days. For example, a sudden fall and recovery of the SOI often telecommunicates to a 500 mb trough in the Eastern U.S. a week to ten days later.
The same question of a suitable time span for a specific purpose surely arises when the spans in question are more ample. Also, agenda can come into play. The Arctic has certainly warmed over the past 50 years, but what has been the trend over the past 80? If your agenda is the make a case for CO2-driven warming, then the 50-year span is for you.
The satellite record dates back to 1979, so we can talk about trends over the past 30 years. But virtually all of this period falls within the regime of a positive PDO. Surely it will be interesting (to you young’ uns who will make it through) to see what, when the PDO flips again to positive, the 60-year or so trend is, over a full cycling of the PDO.
So, back to polar bear land. Last winter, the ice, it would seem, made a dramatic recovery and this year’s freeze-up is really going gangbusters. A trend? Over two years? Hardly. An insignificant blip in a long-term trend? Possibly. Or possibly the beginning of a reversal. Only time will tell.
And on that paragon of a novel thought, I shall sign off.

John Finn – take a look at Lucia’s The Blackboard – Anthony has a link set up. Look in her September postings – she did some temperature analysis with the effect of volcanos.

This came to my attention today, thought you might like it:
http://www.tfheaven.free-online.co.uk/modernparents.jpg

Looks to me like the “canary” better get a fur coat.
Max

The joining of the curves in November has to do with the basin being frozen up completely from Greenland around the pole to Novaya Zemlya. with the growth areas being the two areas where the Pacific meets the Arctic ( Bering Straight) and the Atlantic meets the Arctic ( North Sea) – where the freezing has to fight against the warmer currents from the larger Oceans.
To achieve a greater freeze rate, the water from the larger oceans must be colder when it arrives in the ice creation zones. This goes back to the need to cool the subtropical oceans first.
Here is last year in November.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ARCHIVE/20071115.jpg
And 2000 in November.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ARCHIVE/20011115.png
And if you look at 1983 – which was the last real cold winter – you can see that the Bering Straight and much of Hudson Bay is frozen up by Nov 15 – which is not matched in most other years.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ARCHIVE/19831115.png

Sorry that this is OT but David Holland, author of BIAS AND CONCEALMENT IN THE IPCC PROCESS: THE “HOCKEY-STICK” AFFAIR AND ITS IMPLICATIONS, which is a well argued and referenced indictment of Mannian climate reconstructions, has posted a very interesting comment at Harmless Sky here. Those of you who also read Climate Audit will be familiar with the subject matter which concerns the reluctancee of at least one IPCC review editor to reveal how he carried out his duties.

So “The Arctic” is generally considered to be the portion of the earth north of +60 degrees, and it contains 6.699 % of the earth suface assuming a spherical earth.
The “Arctic Circle” is at +67.5 degrees, and contains only 3.806% of the total area. So the area between 60 and 67.5 degrees is 2.892%. The land masses of Siberia, and northern Europe, as well as Alaska, Canada, and Greenland extend to at least +72.5 degrees in a band almost completley encircling the globe, and only 2.314% of the total surface remains north of that. But Canada and Greenland reach to +75 degrees where only 1.703% of the surface remains, in fact they both go beyond +80 degrees.
Being generous and placing the northern land cutoof at +72.5 degrees leaves 2.314% remaining surface area; so 4.384% of the earth’s surface is land between +60 and +72.5 degrees
So if you go south instead; virtually the entirety of Antarctica lies inside the Antarctic Circle, so it comprises no more than 3.806% of the earth surface and it is totally surrounded by water amounting to 2.892% of the surface, which is a lot more than the 2.314% of the earth north of +72.5 degrees.
So in fact it IS true that there is more land in the Arctic than in the Antarctic; but it is also true that the Antarctic is mostly land; 56.82%
Just to clear up that factoid.

RW,
Do you have any numbers before 1972?
I’d like to see the period from 1900 to 1950, especially 1915, if you can produce them.
In 1915, it hit 100 degrees in Alaska.
In addition, there were numerous forest fires in Alaska that year. In fact, the 1930s were the worst in history for fires. That implies a warm, dry summer.
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF3/317.html
“Many references to extensive forest fires in Siberia, Alaska and northern Canada are found in the writings of eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers. Some recognized that lightning was the cause of forest fires, but the explorers frequently attributed the fires to native peoples. Authorities on forest fires, including H. J. Lutz of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have concluded that early native peoples were, in fact, responsible for many fires.
Some fires were intentionally set to get rid of mosquitos or possibly to increase moose browse. Others were accidental from signal fires or camp fires going out of control.
Indians were not the only starters of fires. In 1915 the “Kennicott fire” was intentionally set by a woodcutter to create fuel wood for use at the Kennicott mine. Sixty-four thousand acres (100 square miles) was burned. In the same year, sparks from a train set a fire that burned 384,000 acres near Chitina.
Prior to 1940, there were a number of large fires in Alaska and Yukon that each burned more than 100,000 acres. Among the biggest were the 1,900,000-acre fire at Lake Iliamna in 1935, the Sheenjak River burn of 312,000 acres in 1937 and the Mosquito Fork Flat fire along the old Valdez-Eagle trail that burned over 900,000 acres in 1922.
In Alaska alone it is estimated that there are about 200 million acres of “burnable” land, of which about half is actually forested. Only about seven percent of the burnable land can be considered commercial forest capable of producing 20 cubic feet per acre (1.4 cubic meters per hectare) or more of wood annually.
Virtually all the northern forest has been burned over during the last 200 years. It is estimated that a million acres each year is burned, on the average.
The worst year of all seems to have been 1940. That year, fires in the Yukon, Tanana and Porcupine watersheds and on the Seward Peninsula burned 4.5 million acres.
Less serious was a 38,000-acre fire near Fairbanks in 1926 created when a group of children set a tree afire to drive out a squirrel. The next year another Fairbanks district resident started a 5,000-acre fire in an attempt to scare away bears that were muddying the water hole used by his horses.
”
We also know that from 1900 to 1950, there were no McFarland events in the US. That tends to imply things were much warmer then.

Here is a story about the Thule living in the Arctic Ocean from 1200-1600 AD and then abandoning the area probably due to too much summer ice. Sounds to me like the Arctic was warm enough to melt most of the ice 1200-1600 AD.
Hmm.
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF19/1927.html

Must be hot ice according to NASA.
Federal Report: Arctic Getting Warmer and Warmer
“WASHINGTON — Autumn temperatures in the Arctic are at record levels, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty as sea ice melts and reindeer herds appear to be declining, researchers reported Thursday.”
Thursday, October 16, 2008
(Associated Press}
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,439381,00.html

This comment was for the Dr Meir – article, but i had a technical problem, here goes:
Sorry for writing so much 🙂 but i have to answer
Lazlo
too:
YES! you are 100% correct! Time after time you hear some “news” about warming as though it is new data! Its lying and manipulating every normal people who does not check these things out!
More examples:
We had “news” that Glaciers where shrinking, but these “news” where in fact from 2005 and back.
We OFTEN hear that SEA LEVELS are rising. But the truth is, sea levels has not risen one milimeter since 2005 !
See this example, Nasa:
http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#SeaLevel
They specifically write that their graph is updated!
NASA: “Sea Level Last updated 09.16.08”
But they have NOT updated their graph. They stopped updating 2´nd quarter of 2007. Why are they not updating?
Heres the data they could have shown:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/havstand.jpg
– the truth, Just when temperatures seem to decline, so does sea level.
Ok! You could say that this sea level fall COULD be “random”. But you cannot say that there is not a fine match between temperature decline and sea level decline right now.

I am trying to understand the discrepency between Cryosphere Today’s plot of “Current Canadian Archipelage Sea Ice Area” and their own graphic of ice distribution.
The plot shows the that there was more ice one year ago, but the graphic shows much more ice this year. This also goes for the AMSR-E graphic for the Archipelago.
See details here
Tom

Here in the UK, doubtless to accompany the depressing announcement that our glorious leaders have committed us (seemingly) to reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% for mercy’s sake, there came a report that the arctic is blooming this autumn and the whole place is hot as hell. I can’t remember the supposedly august body which generated the report.
Can anyone inform this confused non-scientist (and AGW sceptic) what the relationship is between this and rapidly growing Arctic ice which looks set to catch up with every year back to 2002 at the very least.

CO2 concentrations look to me like they are related to plant growth / photosynthesis—greatest in Spring (in either hemisphere, N or S; esp in agricultural araes and the great forests in Canada and Russia, and not so much over oceans and great deserts (Sahara)

Off topic – Hadcrut3 now out for September 0.376 giving an average for 2008 of 0.296

Bob Trueman (11:17:06) :
“Can anyone inform this confused non-scientist (and AGW sceptic) what the relationship is between this and rapidly growing Arctic ice which looks set to catch up with every year back to 2002 at the very least.”
The ice growth rate will slow quite quickly now. It is not at all surprising for the rate to have been so rapid this year. Don’t forget that this summer the summer ice was completely surrounded by clear water for the first time, in previous years there has always been a connection to land. If you think about it the sea ice can not spread into land! This gives the impression of a rapid ice melt due to cooler anomolous temperatures whereas the reason is simple available area to freeze. Check out this for the latest anomolies at the poles http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/ You will see that the ice extent is well below the mean for this time of year.
Lazlo
“Heres the data they could have shown:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/havstand.jpg
– the truth, Just when temperatures seem to decline, so does sea level.”
If you check a more recent graph of sea level rise you will see that it is still increasing by approx 3.3cm a year. the graph you show only goes up to February 2008, this was heavily influenced by the strong La Nina. Copare that to this graph http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html where the graph includes measurements to June and you will see the rate back to where it would be expected to be. The increase in seal level can either be attributed to thermal expansion or glacial melt, both signs of a warming globe.

It is fairly easy to get confused AND decieved from reporting on CO2.
Slightly simplified one can say there is a global concentration of CO2 which mainly is driven by the carbon flux from natural sources, and there is an anthropogeic carbon release which mainly comes from buring of fossil fuels.
I havn’t checked recent data, but the anthropogenic contributioin has for some time been in the range of approx. 3% of the natural fluxes. (This does by itself NOT mean that it is insignificant, but the information is important to remember). From Eia page (see below) 7.2 / (119.6 + 90.6=210.2) = 0.033
When referring to global CO2 level, one should remember that the unit is ppm (Parts Per Million), currently some 383 ppm http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
It is also worthwile to observe that the annual CO2 level reflects the annual growth cycle with a maximum level at the season when it is spring at the N hemisphere and fall in the S H.
Due to the large seasonal fluctuations it is adviceable to use a running mean smoothing. Observe (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/) that the increase (until now) has varied, but been in the range from some 0.4 to 2.9 ppm. This means that since the measurements started, the global CO2 has not increased 1% a single year, (which is employed in some of the IPCC scenarios, and e.g. from 2008-2009, 1% corresponds to an annual increase by 3.83 ppm).
This should not be confused with increase in the annual anthropogenic release, which (at least before the economical “collapse” was in the range of 3 % annually)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/greenhouse/Chapter1.htm
The real numbers are therefore an incease of 3% in the 3% that is anthropogenic. 0.03 x 0.03 = 0.0009, approximately one tenth of a per cent.
Again, I do NOT claim that this is insignificant for the climate. As you can seee at the EIA page, the carbon relaease and sequestration are approximately in balance, making the 3% anthropogenic (and correspopndingly the 0.1% increase, a possible influence)
Cassanders
In Cod we trust

Trend for 2008 now tucking in well on the graph for subsequent years so there is no story here. At least not yet.
Regards
Andy

If anyone is interested I’ve done an annual temperature comparison study of 28 matched urban and rural sites (each within a 100 km of each other) across the US for the past 111 years. It is quite enlightening as to AGW. This was for my son (he’s 11) and we posted it on YouTube (under Global Warming:Urban Heat Effect. Yes, I know that it should have been Urban Heat Island Effect.) Give it a look and leave a comment. Data from GISS. It is very interesting to look at long term rural site data over the world.

Thank you

Howdy,
New to the site. Some interesting reading here.
Perhaps you know that Breakpoint, a daily commentary done by Chuck Colson, has cross-referenced this page from http://www.breakpoint.org/listingarticle.asp?ID=11046. Quite interesting considering the full “Further Reading” list. But whatever. Thought you’d be interested.
Craig
Austin, TX