As for the alleged irrefutable evidence that people caused the last century’s CO2 increase, the “smoking gun” invoked by one of my critics, Dr. Michael Mann, and his fellow fearmongers at realclimate.com, the claim is based on the idea that the normal ratio of heavy to light carbon–that is, the carbon-13 isotope to the lighter carbon-12 isotope, is roughly 1 to 90 in the atmosphere, but in plants there’s a 2 percent lower C13/C12 ratio. So, observing that C13 in the atmosphere has been declining steadily though very slightly since 1850, they claim that this is due to man’s burning of fossil fuels, which are generally believed to be derived from fossilized plant matter.

OK, so both C12 and C13 are stable and they are looking for a ‘plant’ signature in burned fuel, not a decay signature. One Small Problem… C4 metabolism plants absorb more C13 than do C3 metabolism plants. Over the last 100 years we’ve planted one heck of a lot more grasses world wide than ever before. Grasses are C4 metabolism…

Have they allowed for this? If so, how? I’m not sure how one would figure out the C4 vs C3 plant population ratio of the world, and certainly don’t see how you would figure out what it was 10,000,000 years ago. “”

So E.M. ,I’m not sure I deciphered who said what in this discussion i’ve excerpted; but it does lead me to as if you are expert in this C13/C12 isotopic business; which I gather is a biological science phenomenon. Somewhere else I saw the C3-C4 metabolism thing referenced and I confess it went in one ear and out the other and hit nothing living in between. I understand the C14 thing from my days as a nuclear/atomic physicist, and sometime student of cosmetic rays. But this bio thing is all alien to me.

But if I understand the concept, bio materials (at least some) are deficient in c13; ergo decline inC13 in the atmosphere suggests fossil fuel burning.

But that raises some probably ignorant questions in me.

Are not living plants deficient in C13; so doesn’t burning of forests and or grasslands also lead to C13 deficiency. Doesn’t biodegradation of plant materials 9rotting dead trees) also lead to C13 depletion. If in this recent period of warming, and for other reasons the total green biomass of the planet has increased (as is claimed); then doesn’t that increase in total plant matter and subsequent decay, lead to C13 depletion.

If C13 deficiency as well as C14 absence in coal deposits denotes biologiccal origins for coal deposits (no brainer and of course C13 only); is there data on isotopic abundance in petroleum deposits; that would indicate that petroleum is also a biological fossil fuel; rather than simply a liquid mineral of non-biological origin?

Now who is going to argue that increasing numbers of humans have not burnt up large quantities of biological or fossil materials that are deficient in C13; How does non-depleted carbon participate in the atmospheric carbon cycle; what is its origin, and what puts it in the atmosphere.

Then; suppose we discovered a large source of usable fossil fuel, say peroleum, and it happened to also contain a sizeable amount of Argon, which the petroleum industry decided to not extract; so as we start burning the stuff, we start enriching the argon in the atmosphere . The fact that the atmospheric argon concentration is increasing, can certaiinly be regarded as proof that we are burning some of this argon enriched petroleum; But that is a far cry from asserting, that that particular source of argon enriched carbon is selectively remaining in the atmosphere.

In other words, if primordial atmospheres contained a certain C13/C12 ratio, and then we start burnigng fuels depleted of C13, the Carbon in the atmosphere DOES NOT have to increase, in order for C13 depletion to occur; it merely points out that we have two sources (at least) of atmospheric CO2 and they have different C13 content, and our continued use of the depleted one, will continue to deplete the atsmospheric C13, even if it does not increase the total atmospheric CO2.

My carbon dioxide expert at Scripps could probably tell me, but I figure you probably can too..

I don’t see C13 or C14 depletion as being evidence of human increase in atmospheric CO2; just that we use a lot of Carbon that is deficient in both those heavy isotopes.

I also do not understand the O18/O16 temperature proxy either.

I don’t see how temperature can transmute one into the other

I’m asking him to justify his statement, with recent references, if he’s sure of his position that shouldn’t be difficult. Of course if he continues to refer to a paper published in 1984 that won’t cut it.

It is those who put forth the relatively new hypothesis of AGW / runaway global warming / climate catastrophe, who must justify their statements.

It’s called the Scientific Method: someone puts forth a new hypothesis – like AGW/runaway global warming – and if it withstands falsification, fine.

Hardly new and it has withstood falsification.

REPLY: Alright you two. I’m declaring a Christmas moratorium on this argument, knock it off. Stop being naughty, be nice.- Anthony

Care to justify this statement, references from this century preferred!

Phil, here’s how it works: Steven Goddard need not justify anything about your putative AGW, or the always-inaccurate computer models that are its only real support. It is those who put forth the relatively new hypothesis of AGW / runaway global warming / climate catastrophe, who must justify their statements.

It’s called the Scientific Method: someone puts forth a new hypothesis – like AGW/runaway global warming – and if it withstands falsification, fine.

The problem is that AGW has been repeatedly falsified. Note also that as carbon dioxide levels rise, the globe continues to cool.

I understand that the latest convoluted meme is that global warming causes global cooling. But… please. Enough.

Both the references you cite state that GHGs are the major source of warming, strange you should forget to mention that!

“The substantial role inferred for soot in global climate does not
alter the fact that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global
warming in the past century and are expected to be the largest
climate forcing the rest of this century.”

“Greenhouse gases, which trap outgoing energy, are primarily responsible for the remaining temperature increase and are considered the Earth’s most important overall climate changing mechanism.”

However, the models were wrong about the other pole, so they are really no more valuable than a coin toss.

Care to justify this statement, references from this century preferred!

There is no question that human activity is having an impact on Arctic ice. Hansen and others have published papers in the last few years attributing a significant part of Arctic warming to soot (as much as 94%) and the Arctic yellow ozone cloud (from pollution) is also known to be causing significant warming.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2004/2004_Hansen_Nazarenko.pdf
http://www.physorg.com/news100354399.html

The point is that there is no substantive link to CO2 and Arctic ice, and people who claim so are basing their beliefs on the idea “the models predicted it.” However, the models were wrong about the other pole, so they are really no more valuable than a coin toss.

Yes but there’s less of it so the total heat lost is less than that via CO2.
Check out the Modtran spectrum for the earth’s atmosphere below, the notch at 667 cm-1 is CO2 and that at ~1000cm-1 is O3.

http://s302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/?action=view&current=Modtran-dry.gif

You ought to look at the “CO2 – Temperature link” thread… I’ve lifted a bit from there to post here, please forgive the duplication:

I don’t get my science from an English Lit major, you’d be well advised to do likewise.
Try reading: Modeling Terrestrial Ecosystems in the Global Carbon Cycle With Shifts in Carbon Storage Capacity by Land-Use Change,
W. R. Emanuel & G. G. Killough, Ecology, Vol. 65, No. 3. (Jun., 1984), pp. 970-983.

You ought to look at the “CO2 – Temperature link” thread… I’ve lifted a bit from there to post here, please forgive the duplication:

From an article by ALEXANDER COCKBURN, with questions…

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070611/cockburn

As for the alleged irrefutable evidence that people caused the last century’s CO2 increase, the “smoking gun” invoked by one of my critics, Dr. Michael Mann, and his fellow fearmongers at realclimate.com, the claim is based on the idea that the normal ratio of heavy to light carbon–that is, the carbon-13 isotope to the lighter carbon-12 isotope, is roughly 1 to 90 in the atmosphere, but in plants there’s a 2 percent lower C13/C12 ratio. So, observing that C13 in the atmosphere has been declining steadily though very slightly since 1850, they claim that this is due to man’s burning of fossil fuels, which are generally believed to be derived from fossilized plant matter.

OK, so both C12 and C13 are stable and they are looking for a ‘plant’ signature in burned fuel, not a decay signature. One Small Problem… C4 metabolism plants absorb more C13 than do C3 metabolism plants. Over the last 100 years we’ve planted one heck of a lot more grasses world wide than ever before. Grasses are C4 metabolism…

Have they allowed for this? If so, how? I’m not sure how one would figure out the C4 vs C3 plant population ratio of the world, and certainly don’t see how you would figure out what it was 10,000,000 years ago.

On the naïve and scientifically silly assumption that the only way that plant-based carbon can get into the atmosphere is by people burning fuels, they exult that here indeed is the smoking gun: Decreases of C13 in the atmosphere mean that our sinful combustions are clearly identifiable as major contributors to the 100 ppm increase in CO2 since 1850.
This is misguided, simply because less than a thousandth of the plant-based carbon on earth is bound up in fossil fuel. The rest of the huge remaining tonnages of plant-based carbon are diffused through the oceans, the forests, the grasslands and the soil. In other words, everywhere. Obviously, lots of this C13-deficient carbon has the chance to oxidize into CO2 by paths other than people burning fuel, i.e., the huge amount of plant material that’s naturally eaten or decayed by the biosphere.

And as C4 plants have been sought out (they are more efficient, so more food per growth unit) we get more C13 in the plants. There are even efforts to transplant the C4 genes into C3 plants to get better yield. This would argue for more C13 being sequestered in soils over time as C4 plants have expanded. Have they examined the C12 vs C13 ratio changes in soils over time?

Perhaps even more significant, cold ocean waters absorb lightweight C12 preferentially, resulting in lots of C13-deficient carbon in the oceans. This low-C13 carbon most certainly would have been released massively into the atmosphere over the course of the world’s warming trend since 1850, when the Little Ice Age ended.

And would also argue that volcanic emissions from subduction zone volcanoes ought to be C13 deficient to the degree that ocean bottom ooze is being recycled. Has this been considered?

All of these larger natural pathways for emitting low-C13 carbon into the atmosphere have been considerably accelerated by this same warming trend. So once again, the greenhousers have got it ass-backward. The 100 ppm increase in CO2 can’t be uniquely attributed to humans because at least as plausibly it could be the effect, not the cause, of the warming that started after the Little Ice Age denied by Dr. Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann.

It looks to me like there are very significant issues in trying to assert that C13:C12 ratio changes in the air can tell you anything about CO2 origin in fuel burning…

From: http://www.springerlink.com/content/f5272856220314nk/

We get that the C12:C13 ratio is different in oils than in coals and varies in the source lipids from which oil is made.

Lipid fractions of organisms have consistently lower C13/C12 ratios than do the whole organisms. The average difference between nonlipid and lipid materials for all organisms studied is about 0.5% and ranges in individual species from as little as several hundredths to more than 1.5%. This suggests that petroleums and other noncoaly organic matter in ancient sediments are derived from lipids, or at least from certain components of the lipid fraction. In contrast, coal deposits apparently are derived from whole plants or from the cellulosic fraction of land plants, which is the major nonlipid constituent, of plant tissues.

Has the petroleum from around the world been tested for differences in C12:C13 ratio? I’d expect significant variation based on the above. Is this allowed for in the attribution of atmospheric CO2 to fuel burning?

From:

http://www.isgs.illinois.edu/pttc/Illinois%20petroleum/IP111%20Isotopic%20Identification%20of%20Leakage%20Gas%20from%20Underground%20Storage%20Reservoirs–A%20Progress%20Report.pdf

Bacteriogenic methane from Illinois generally has a C13 values in the range of -64 to -90% relative to the Peedee Belemnite ( PDB ) standard. The 11 samples from pipelines and storage reservoirs that have been analyzed have all had C13 values in the range of -40 to -46%.

Which seems to show that biological source methane can vary widely in C13 content and that pipeline gas is not the same signature as biological, coal, or petroleum. Has this be allowed for? If so, how? (Frankly, given the biological origin variance I don’t see how it’s possible…)

(I hand typed the above quote and there was what looked like maybe a sigma in front of the C13′s… could not get a cut/paste to work fast…)

It looks to me like there are more holes here than bucket… I don’t see how C12:C13 ratio can be reasonably used to make any clear assertion about where the CO2 in the air comes from. How much Clathrate out gasses each year on the ocean bottoms? With what C12:C13 ratio? How much natural gas leaks from the ground? What are the ratios for bacteria produced methane from various ecosystems including ocean bottom? Are they all the same? How do you know? Since bacteria have been shown to eat oil and natural gas, how do you distinguish their CO2 from those eating wood?

Here Here! As a specific example: I’ve had trouble the last couple of years getting tomatoes to produce. Why? Pollen grain growth to fertilization is very temperature dependent and variable by variety. This year the temperature dip dropped below the ~80F needed and my brandywine gave me nothing. I did pick up a Siberian to trial (expecting cold) and it STILL has a tomato on it now! They set fruit as low as 45F or so. In between were my Arkansas Travelers and Prudens Purple that did OK in summer but were finished months before the Siberian. All from a few degrees variation.

Next year I will be growing a lot of Siberian and trying to make Siberian x brandywine. (I REALLY like brandywine…but it just won’t produce much here near the coast unless temps are abnormally high.)

George E. Smith (00:22:03) :
Justin, you have to be a little careful here. See what you excerpted about sunlight being reflected by the ice.

George, did you see the link I posted that showed O3 as being down 40% at the poles and it being a significant part of the GHG profile ( 1/3 ). Have you considered what it would mean to heat loss to have 40% less ozone? 13.3% less total GHG effect ought to do something! How does the absorption spectrum of O3 relate to that of water and CO2? You’re much better at figuring this out than I am…

I’d expect that 13% more heat loss at both poles might have something to do with our present frigid weather coming from the poles… “”

E.M. ;

Without going back and refreshing, I roughly recall you raising the issue.

It seems to me that Ozone (O3) affects warming in tw different ways.

First of all, the single biggest cause of difference between the Air mass zero solar spectrum and the air mass one spectrum, is the absorption due to Ozone.. AM0 is the spectrum outside the atmosphere; AM1 is the equatorial noonday spectrum at ground level as a result of traversing one atmosphere of air.

Now at the poles and particularly over Antarctica, you never get an AM1 spectrum, because the solar path is always oblique, so the short wavelength loss from ozone is even more severe at the poles, or the polar egions in general.

Since short wavelength UV is largely respponsible for the Atomic Oxygen that forms Ozone, then you would expect lack of Ozone production during the winter midnight, and ozone holes.

One can find papers and reports from the 50s and 60s that hint at Ozone holes long before they were actually observed as such.

In the immediate post WW-II ear, the Airforce, and NASA’s forerunner, were quite concerned with radiation hazards of high altitude flying (military); and people such as Thekaekara et al did a lot of high altitude studies of solar spectra and atmosphere for that reason. In 1969 they published what to that time was the most respected value of the solar constant before satellite measurments, at 1351 W/m^2 ( 1969 I believI graduated in 1957, and we used the value 1353 when I was in school.

But what those early papers reveal, is that the color temperature of the sun, was known to have aseasonal variation, and on top of that an eratic variation (unexplained) ; but it was believed that the cause was cseasonal and other changes in the short wavelength end of the ground level solar spectrum. I’m not aware of any specific attribution to Ozone, but in light of modern knowledge one can ifer thaqt the cause was ozone variation, and probably Ozone holes which have always been with us. No I am not going to claim the CFC thesis is bogus; butt I do think it is somewhat argumentative, but there clearly were ozone holes long before their were CFCs (but not necessarily as severe).

I can tell you as a kid growing up in New zealand, I got the worst damn sunburns at the beach or ski slopes, than I have ever experienced in california, of fishing down in Baja, Sea of Cortez.

Now that ozone absorption would lead to upper atmosphere warming by direct absorption of solar energy near the peak (out to maybe 600 nm).

Then Ozone has a well known IR absorption band from about 9-10 microns’ which is pretty near the peak of the BB spectrum,. for 15 deg C, the so-called mean global temperature. The Ozone IR band is much sharper than the CO2 band for several reasons. Ozone is a thin high altitude layer, whereas the effective CO2 is a ground level thick layer, so the4 realm of the ozone is lower density, and lower temperature, so the Doppler, and collision broadening of the intrinsic Ozone absorption line is much smaller than the CO2 band at 14.77 microns, which broadens to about 13.5-16.5 microns.

The ozone band exhibits another explainable phenomenon..

The depth of the CO2 absorption band is not much dependent on the incidence angle oof observation (form outer space), sinnce it is very nearly saturated, and supposedly has a logarithmic absorption versus CO2.

On the other hand, the depth of the Ozone dip is very dependent on angle of obliquity of obsevation, and this can readlily be understood by imagining a thin laminate of ozone in a shell around the earth, and just look geometrically, how the total layer thickness varies significantly with oblique viewing from outer space (up to 80 degrees from normal incidence.

Now with modern polar orbit satellites there is no need to make ozone measurements form oblique angles since the satellite is going to go right overhead sometime. The data I mentioned is from a quite old textbook, “The Infra-Red Handbook” which predates polar orbit satellites by many years. It is largely a military handbook for weapons designers who need to understand optical signal propagation and noise sources, for guided weaponry (side-winders and such). (no I never worked on such things; but that book if you can find it, is a gold mine of infromation valuable for climate discussions, since it has the reflectance curves for darn near any kind of terrain you want to know., and atmsopheric transmission data for any range of wavelenghts of possible military significance. it was basically developed under US Navy sponsorship by a group at U of Michigan (I believe)

But long and short of it is that I would expect Ozone to exhibit lots of effects maybe good and bad related to polar climate, and specially Antarctic. I actually returned to NZ in March of 2004, which is going into their Spring, and while out fishing in Bay of Islands (north end), I once again got a nice sunburn; so it isn’t that I just have gnarled leather skin that California doesn’t bother. Next time I’ll remember the SunBlock.

One source shows it dip below 2007 for a few hours at the narrowest neck on the graph, and some “end of the worlders” are jumping with joy.

Actually, I was surprised that it wasn’t discussed at all in the blogs that favor the AGW-hypothesis. As for myself, like I said I’m alarmed rather than alarmist, so you won’t actually see me jumping for joy when it turns out Arctic Ice is melting faster than predicted. At the same time it might speed up action on mitigating strategies. I know most people here dread all those wasted trillions on climate issues, but the only trillions I see going anywhere at the moment are the Iraq war and banks, credit card companies and auto makers.

Anyway, I’m experiencing contradictory feelings when it comes to the Arctic Sea Ice, although all in all I hope of course it is a natural cycle and mankind doesn’t/cannot have a significant impact on climate.

Who knows, maybe one day the warmists might actually have a real piece of evidence supporting their cause…..

I was wondering about this. Purely hypotethically speaking: If the 2009 minimum extent would break the 2007 record, what would this do to the opinion of people who believe GW is not A? Do you, Steven or Pamela, consider the possibility that AGW is having an impact on the Arctic? And if not, would you start considering it (and enter the discussion about possible implications and effects) if the 2007 minimal extent record would be broken? Or would that still be too soon for you to mean anything?

On the other hand if the 2009 minimum extent would be above vice-champion 2008 I’m sure even more people would be compelled to believe the jury is still out on AGW (most people I know believe this already, so much for MSM). From a PR point of view this wouldn’t be good news for people who want to see drastic measures taken to keep CO2 levels below ??? ppm. Which is only logical.

Arguing with you is pointless. Sea ice extent is just about where it always is this time of year. A few days ago it was at the high end of the very narrow recent range, and today it is near the low end of the range. In a few days it will probably swing back the other way. None have any statistical significance.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png

The map you linked shows this quite clearly. Please stop the FUD.