George E. Smith (18:19:58) :

Sorry, that was not George E.Smith , I was quoting him and my end of italics did not work :(.

I (Anna V:) had said:
They are stable measurements for that particular locations picked because it is suppose to have stable measurements. It is an inherent hypothesis in the CO2 team that CO2 measurements have a meaning only where they are stable. So they choose not only locations but also time of day, to avoid contamination from CO2 sources.

If you keep on reading this blog, you will learn that the whole game is corrections. They estimate and correct if there is extra CO2 from a more active volcano. Simple.
That is why a growing number of us, many scientists of different persuasions, are questioning the basic numbers used for all this AGW scare.

This topic will not get much traffic from now on, since it is on page two.

George E. Smith (18:19:58) :
They are stable measurements for that particular locations picked because it is suppose to have stable measurements. It is an inherent hypothesis in the CO2 team that CO2 measurements have a meaning only where they are stable. So they choose not only locations but also time of day, to avoid contamination from CO2 sources.

Eyas (10:10:56) :

Is it really possible that there is no CO2 contamination of these samples from the Volcanoes?

There are many folks here much more knowledgeable than I am. Is there an explanation for the layman that describes how one can be certain of having no contamination from local sources? Not only the volcano that the monitoring station sits on, but also the longest continually erupting volcano on earth about 15 miles away. Not to mention the development of the Big Island since these measurements began.

How is a lack of contamination determined? How can one know?

George E. Smith (18:19:58) :
They are stable measurements for that particular locations picked because it is suppose to have stable measurements. It is an inherent hypothesis in the CO2 team that CO2 measurements have a meaning only where they are stable. So they choose not only locations but also time of day, to avoid contamination from CO2 sources.

Eyas (10:10:56) :

Is it really possible that there is no CO2 contamination of these samples from the Volcanoes?

There are many folks here much more knowledgeable than I am. Is there an explanation for the layman that describes how one can be certain of having no contamination from local sources? Not only the volcano that the monitoring station sits on, but also the longest continually erupting volcano on earth about 15 miles away. Not to mention the development of the Big Island since these measurements began.

How is a lack of contamination determined? How can one know?

if the co2 is lower in concentration in the top layers, it simply could be taken up into the deep ocean by convection. Or these top layers could be the source of co2 into the atmosphere. I dont see how a single measurement tells you anything about how much is moving or what direction it is moving in

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/12/sea-co2-climate-japan-environment

Working with Pavel Tishchenko of the Russian Pacific Oceanological Institute in Vladivostok, Lee and his colleague Geun-Ha Park used a cruise on the Professor Gagarinskiy, a Russian research vessel, last May to take seawater samples from 24 sites across the Sea of Japan.

Announcing their results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say: “The striking feature is that nearly all anthropogenic CO2 taken up in the recent period was confined to waters less than 300 metres in depth. The rapid and substantial reduction … is surprising and is attributed to considerable weakening of overturning circulation.”

can anyone get hold of a draft? I want to see whether the previous samples were also in May.
May, from AIRS data is in the time region of breath out of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Thank you for the tip on concrete absorbing CO2. That one is new to me, and will be very useful in my work.

It would also be interesting to know how much CO2 is absorbed by high-pH wastewater streams before being acid neutralized, or pH adjusted as is sometimes stated.

Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California

And your opinion, let alone reasonings, as a physicist is valued, indeed.

Then make an effort to rebut. I submit your ODE needs derivation from a Navier-Stokes equation. The oceanic flux doesn’t merely scrub your net daily, it is so large it scrubs the biogenic flux daily!!!!

That is what the 13C:12C fraction variance confirms.

Argue from first principles, ‘authority’ doesn’t count for diddly.

radioactive co2 measurements DO NOT measure c02 transit times from the atmosphere to the biosphere. A single co2 could go into a leaf, and get exchanged out of that leaf at night, or it could go into the ocean and come out of the ocean. The radioactive measurements do measure the final loss of a co2 molecule into a trapped non exchangeable state, perhaps limestone or soil carbon.
The c14 rate also only measures the trapping rate under conditions from 1960 to about 1975. Do you know how much the co2 resorbtion rate changes as a function of the [co2]? is it linear or is it geometric? I dont think anyone know these things or has useful estimates.

Finally I would like you to look at the IPCC co2 record and the ORNL carbon emissions record. Ask yourself how much co2 and how much carbon causes a 60 ppm change (one half). divide up the curve and look at it. Its important. This is very important data.

Now think about how much of this rain falls on soils and percolates through rock into the ground water? Any bets that there has been little thought given to rain entrained CO2 into aquifers? It doesn’t take a mountain…

FWIW, I’ve seen an article some time back that explored the tons of CO2 scrubbed by the Himalayas. They found a lot of carbonate in the streams running of the mountain and explored… Found precipitation scrubbing of CO2 that then landed on stone and reacted. There’s a lot of stone in the world…

Are we saying that the 280 ppm long term stable value is a myth?

This whole logic evades me. Every molecule of CO2 should be measured and integrated to get a snap shot of world CO2. We will hae to wait for OCO for this and even then it will only be measurements at 1:20pm over the world !!

We also cook a large quantity of CO2 out of limestone to make lime, that the warmers clearly must count (it’s too obvious to miss) but I wonder if they account for all the CO2 that is then absorbed by that lime as all the mortar, cement, etc. made from it sets up and ages… Cement blocks take a long time for the CO2 to reach the middle, but cement structures don’t last forever.

And I wonder how many tons of industrial lye turn slowly into bicarbonate of soda upon disposal.

And just how much carbonate is absorbed by all those folks spraying ammonia on windows to clean them? On fields of crops? (I’ve driven past fields with direct ammonia application underway… it is strong straight ammonia.) ANY CO2 near there will be looking to be Ammonium Carbonate real fast! And it doesn’t all have to come from the air. Simply binding carbonate that would have moved out of the soil into the air is sufficient to shift the balance / budget.

These are examples of what I think is common in the warmers science. Asymmetrical accounting. They are diligent at counting things supporting their thesis, but less so at finding the others… and downright dismissive of the smaller ones (one web site claimed that the cement absorption could be ignored since it took a long time to get deep inside large blocks; ignoring that those large blocks don’t last forever, geologically speaking, and a lot of cement goes into ‘cinder blocks’, not bridge foundations… It also ignores that a 1cm shell on the outside is more volume than the center 1 cm slice.)

At any rate, there is a large quantity of industrial and agricultural alkaline material used and I’m sure it takes CO2 out of the air. I just don’t know how much.

Side bar: Home made lye soap slowly absorbs CO2. That is part of the advantage of letting it ‘age’. The residual lye converts to something a bit more skin friendly ;-) But I doubt if lye soap making is what’s doing it…

Hmmm… but soap lye historically was made from wood ashes… I wonder if they account for the CO2 absorbed by the ashes left from burned forests? From coal ash?

http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/

Have a look at the animations, they are eye opening as for as mixing goes and how the north and south hemispheres behave.

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/

A new satellite will go up in February, will be able to read from the ground up, but depends on sunlight so no nightly CO2, except by modelling daytime data. It is called OCO

http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov

For me, these global AIRS shots even from 10000 meters, show that the well mixed hypthesis is shaky and that Beck’s compilation of chemical readings deserves a much closer scrutiny. Here are some plots in his presentations:

http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm

IMHO I believe that the concentrations of CO2 as a variable are treated with an airbrush and not considered as a variable on par with the other climate variables that need global integration. To rely on the hypothesis of “well mixed” and assume that all sources and sinks can be estimated is an error in methodology.

And don’t forget the precipitation forming in the air at cold temps then dropping through the air column into the ocean. I’d expect cloud / precipitation scrubbing to be much more important than things like ‘ocean skin effect’, yet you don’t hear much about it.

What Keynes said was that when private demand dropped to hazardous levels (during financial collapse / financial panics / depressions / recessions / economic downturn / next euphemism to be added to the list ) the government needed to spend to prevent an economic collapse even if it means large deficits. Then everyone likes to put a period. But he didn’t. He went on to say that during times of excess spending by the private sector the government needed to withdraw money from the system and run a budget surplus to prevent inflation. (Not just a reduced deficit, a real honest to gosh surplus.)

Under Clinton (and Daddy Bush before him) we forgot step 2 (though we got close!) and so had too little in the ‘kitty’ when this panic hit. So we get very large deficits or the economy dies.

The only question that remains is what happens in 6 months to a year when (if?) the economy picks up. At that time the Fed needs to start moving to a fiscally neutral position (followed by a fiscally surplus position when things get good!) to prevent inflation. I don’t expect them to (whoever is in office) since everyone has forgotten the second half of Keynes. Republicans and Democrats have both learned to buy votes with your money and inflate away the debt.

I expect the eventual answer will be inflation (though not a hyper inflation, folks catch on to them too quickly these days. See Argentina monetary history and the history of the Real in Brazil). More the slow 3% / yr. type that nobody notices and let compound interest law solve the ‘debt’ and the ‘home value below mortgage’ problem. But watch who runs the Fed to find out.

In any of these cases, the impact on CO2 and weather will be minimal. Most folks stop buying prime rib and new supercars, but they still eat hamburger and drive to work (or job hunt) and turn the lights and TV on in a warm home. Demand for energy is far less elastic than most other goods and services in the economy. Example? The USAF is the largest consumer of fuel in the government. What are the odds we will not be flying aircraft in the present geopolitically unstable times? Will times become more stable & peaceful during an economic downturn?

The more things change, the more they stay the same… See:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Influence_of_Wealth_in_Imperial_Rome/The_Business_Panic_of_33_A.D.

So by two empirical tests, one unrepeatable on command, your notion fails.

No evidence to suggest that Beck’s results were applicable for the whole atmosphere, far from it! What I described is a straight forward ODE.

Perhaps the answer lies with agricultural practices? As a kid, we used to watch them burn off the rice stubble and burn all the pruned limbs from orchards. Now that is no longer done (no more wall to wall smoke filled days ;-) The tendency to multiple crops in a year and early / late crops has also pushed the ’season’ longer in some places. There is now irrigation over large parts of Texas, et. al. so they grow more, longer. I have no idea if there is enough of this to matter in total, but the trend is clear. Less CO2 in winter.

Oh, and we have more insulation now, so less winter heating fuel used per home. Maybe part of it is the insulation is next to godliness movement? Total fuel use has continued to rise, but a smaller percentage is going into the winters?

And as a final point: Lights run much longer in winter than summer. To the extent that folks have converted to efficient lighting, the winter CO2 would be impacted more than the summer.

I’m sure there are other things like this, I just don’t want to waste space on a canonical list.

No you are missing the point, read what was written!

yes exactly as I think. the 12 years for c14 co2 is time for ultimate removal rate, not a co2 half residency time.

Hardly, the C14 was declining at the same time as overall CO2 was going up!

We have no idea how much co2 is put into the atmosphere on a yearly basis, nor how much is removed.

But we do know that about 2 Gtonnes nett is added every year.