Mauna Loa CO2 record posts smallest yearly gain in its history – maybe

There is one thing i find a but .. emm .. strange about Mauna Loa Observatory.
Why would anyone with half of brain put such observatory on volcanic island ?!

Response of atmospheric CO2 due to ocean temperature change is a complex phenomenon. On one hand there is a direct an intermediate action due to the interaction of the ocean surface and the atmosphere, which is instantaneous without any time lag. The other effect, which is probably responsible to the approximately 800 years of time lag observed in ice cores is due to the thermohaline circulation. Salty cold water at the Arctic sinks and returns to the surface about 800 years later by upwelling around the West Coast of South America in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Since the water prior to sinking is very cold, it contains a fair amount of CO2 characteristic of the ocean temperature prevailing at the time of sinking. The upwelling takes place in tropical ocean waters, which hold much less CO2 and a significant portion of it is released.

Anthony
Any further info on the report at Canada Free Press regarding Al Gore being sued for Fraud? Worth a topic.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/7408
Trevor
REPLY: That article is broadly erroneous, which is why you won’t see me cover it here. No suit has been launched. – Anthony

Jim Watson (11:58:40) :
Climate 101 question from a layman: Does the annual drop in CO2 on this chart result from the winter cycle in the Southern Hemisphere (which has a far greater percentage of ocean surface than the NH)?

The drop is usually considered to be due to NH summer plant growth, but of course winter oceans are taking place in the SH at the same time. Due to delays in SH air reaching NH, NH changes are expected to reach Mauna Loa more quickly than SH changes. I think the seasonal drop is probably due to NH plant growth.

About a year ago, Australia signed the Kyoto protocol – now we have this result of lower CO2.
The world is saved – all praise the wisdom of the Australian Federal Government.
(Whoops…).

1992 was the next lowest amount of annual increase in the last fifty odd years.
However, I note that the amount of variance from 2007 is 1.90 PPM. The variance from 1998 to 1999 was a shift of 1.99 PPM. 98 to 99 we had a drop in global temperatures.
What mechanism would couple the cooling to CO2 level increase so quickly? Phytoplankton population due to La Nina conditions present from mid to late 1998 into 1999 and again in recent times?

In the monthly value data, is the “hitch” on the left side of each tooth due to the SH plant growth usage making a dent in the SH ocean outgas increase?
that the annual drop is more influenced by the NH plant growth than SH cool water CO2 “ingassing” but those 2 are working together to make the biggest annual spike.
The sawtooth nature of these curves is primarily influenced by plants and oceans each doing their thing in each hemisphere. Plants have an instantaneous influence as they suck up CO2. The bottom of each tooth aligns with the northern hemisphere late summer because NH land area is greater than SH. The other is a water temp driven effect where seasonal warming (or cooling) of the sea surface outgasses dissolved CO2 (or dissolves excess CO2 from the air). This effect starts immediately but my understanding is that it does not happen “fully” in each season. At the end of winter the cold water will still want to dissolve more CO2 from the air, but it will now start to warm and head toward a CO2 outgassing condition.
It may take 5 years for the air vs water CO2 concentration imbalance to fully equalize not as instantaneous as plants sucking up CO2 for their immediat growth needs. H has more land than the SH so the NH drop is greater than the SH occurrence 6 months later. I
I’m a pseudo-layman too

The annual mean CO2 levels at Mauna Loa are corrected for the seasonal cycle using a 7-year moving average.
Anytime you use a moving average, the trends at the very end of the data set can be a little funky- best not to read too much into them.

There is more to it than just ocean, by the way. Decay of organic matter on land also adds CO2 and when it is colder, this decay process is retarded and virtually stopped during periods of freezing. When cold temperatures dip farther South, things like leaf litter decay slower releasing less CO2. Same for bogs and swamps.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/weekly_petroleum_status_report/current/txt/wpsr.txt
trying the link again.
Roger

Another layman here who is deeply interested but who admits that a lot of this debate is beyond his immediate comprehension.
Perhaps a comparative study between the Mauna Loa site and the Australian Cape Grim site run by our CSIRO would turn up some interesting comparisons between the CO2 contribution or CO2 sink originating in the Southern Ocean.
To my totally untrained eye it seems that there was a considerable rise in CO2 levels measured by Cape Grim during the 1998 El Nino event.
Cape Grim is on the north west corner of the island state of Tasmania at lat. 40 degrees 41 minutes south and therefore well down in the Southern Ocean.
There are no land masses upwind of this station until the South American continent which is well over 10,000 kms to the west as even South Africa is well north of the roaring forties latitude that Cape Grim is located on.
The Cape Grim station has been operational since 1976 and it has been collecting flask CO2 samples for analysis since that time.

Tom in cooler than I like Florida (13:22:48) :
[snip – enough of this – Anthony]

I’m with Ric. Looks like a simple case of mis-handled missing data point.

La Nina getting stronger: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.1.9.2009.gif

I had a quick look at the Mauna Loa Observatory change log linked in the original post. I don’t have the knowledge to make an assessment of its content, but the simple act of publicly documenting changes to the record dramatically enhances the credibility of that record. I’m sure that documenting changes to a “single source” collection record is much, much simpler than documenting changes to the various surface temperature records, but that of course doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done. Credibility is a hard thing to create and an easy thing to lose, but not attempting to create it in the first place is a straightforward recipe for utter failure.
Surely the keepers of the various published surface temperature records can understand this?
OA

CO2 levels are decreasing as we get closer to Obama taking office. It’s simple, it’s the Obama effect.

Mr. Sowell, not to pick at straws or anything…
” …With respect, actually there is data from EIA to support a rather small decrease in mileage driven in the U.S. in 2008, compared to 2007. The reduction was small, approximately 3 or 4 percent”
As a frequent visitor to WUWT and CA, I am more than a little bit leery of statistical claims without documentation. A 3-4% result could be arguably within the margin of error for the poll.

The last time we got all excited like this the explanation was that Mauna Loa had gone through a couple of weeks at the end of the month (IIRC) when they weren’t able to get good readings. As a result they waited until they had a couple of weeks data the next month, and then they went back and infilled, thus bringing the number Up, considerably.
It seems likely we’ll see something similar this time. However, couldn’t we just give the good Dr. a call, and see if this is the track we’re on?
REPLY: I sent an email earlier today, no reply yet. – Anthony

I should mention that the 1000/3% is for bery large base populations of red/black balls (as an approximation for the human jar). For smaller base pops, sampling theory also applies, and gives different results. However, my basic premise is that EIA is not sampling, and although there is errors associated with that sort of data collection, they will be different than those found with sampling theory.

Joel –
Having reviewed papers, I have to agree with Dr. Spencer. Asking for only one reviewer is not common. For an AGU based publication, I would also be shocked.
Gov’t spending to get us out of a recession is a Keynsian approach. And I believe even Keynes wanted it to be limited. When you get too much spending (and the pre-requisite printing of money) by gov’t, you get inflation, and perhaps hyperinflation (see Weimer Germany and the wheel barrow of money).
Other economic theorists (ie, Chicago School) would recommend slashing corporate taxes to stimulate growth, but then again, what would that do? Its not like businesses efforts have ever led to any economic growth. Gov’t is always the grower of economies! Just ask the Soviets!
Good slapdown of the last eight years of overspending. Like you, I have complete confidence that the current congress and Pres. Obama will be completely restrained…

shows the Global Average Annual Mean Growth Rate for 2008 to be 1.82
Again, the global number does not include the December value. That is up to November only.

[Okay, maybe not first anymore! I see Kum Dollison is thinking along similar lines.]

Here is a graph on miles driven:
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/05/miles-driven-per-year-by-americans.html
Doesn’t look like there is enough of a drop to make much difference. Idling factories from the the Olympics and the economic downturn would be another tiny effect.
I would think the colder weather slowing and inhibiting growth would have a larger effect in NOT taking CO2 out of the atmosphere!!! Not to mention the extra heating being done to keep warm!!
A side note, the wind farms in England and other areas have had large drops in output during the worst of the cold snaps last year and recently.
IF the drop is real, I would bet on the oceans which may have been slightly cooling since before 2003!!!!

Over at Real Climate, they’re having a fit, saying that everyone at WUWT thinks that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with rising CO2 concentrations (see the comments under the best science blog competition article). Clearly, we understand that CO2 emissions increase CO2 concentrations, but that interannual temperature changes influence the year-to-year differences in growth rates. I think they get confused because of the skepticism many of us display (myself included) about the “which came first – CO2 changes or temperature changes” before the industrial revolution (uhhh… temperature came first and the solar influence must be stronger than the CO2 influence given that the trend keep going up and down rather than being continuous positive feedback, unless it’s some sort of biofeedback or something, but then this would show that warming is good… I digress). Anyway, they are claiming we’re all idiots and that no skeptic has ever published anything useful, so we should probably bombard them with some sanity. Maybe they’re just jealous that they’re being trounced.
REPLY: Well, at least they are reading. Issac Asimov once joined Mensa, and had this to say about it: “Furthermore, I became uncomfortably aware that Mensans, however high their paper IQ might be, were likely to be as irrational as anybody else.” He further described some members as “intellectually combative” and eventually resigned from the Mensa Society. We all have our irrational moments, our failures, and our blown theories, the trick is to not get too worked up about it and to maintain civility and good cheer. Understanding is seldom achieved through anger. – Anthony

“2) Hows does the flip in the PDO affect CO2 absorption?”
As the PDO’s two states both have warm and cool spots, the gross gas/temp effect would depend upon whether there is a difference in the average temperature of the two states. The local conditions would also affect what happens, such as if a warm or cold spot happens to be in an area where the atmosphere has high or low CO2 and whether there are other differences (such as there tending to be more or fewer waves). So someone would have to study all the variables; as AGW proponents seem to avoid the PDO I would be surprised if there has been sufficient study of such details of the PDO.

Roger Sowell (16:12:21) :
Steve Berry:
“Firstly, the amount of miles driven doesn’t appear to have been reduced during the economic crunch – there is no evidence to support this at all.”
With respect, actually there is data from EIA to support a rather small decrease in mileage driven in the U.S. in 2008, compared to 2007. The reduction was small, approximately 3 or 4 percent.

Sorry, that was me. Haven’t been driving my F250 as much since I started working from home. 😉

DaveM, Brendan,
Re the EIA data on U.S. petroleum consumption.
EIA does a bit of sampling in compiling their numbers. Essentially, each Monday they query all the largest companies by volume until they obtain data on 90 percent of the expected volume for that week. The final 10 percent represents a lot of smaller operators and appears to be estimated.
The methodology is laid out, for those interested, on their site as Appendix A, Weekly Petroleum Status Report Explanatory Notes. It includes some statistical language.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/weekly_petroleum_status_report/wpsr.html
In any event, my earlier calculation was perhaps a bit too high. Petroleum use in the transportation sector is approximately 19 percent of total world-wide energy use, but in the U.S. transportation comprises approximately 29 percent of all energy use. So, depending on one’s view of the global reduction in transportation due to the economic slowdown, my numbers given above should be reduced by a factor of at least 3, possibly as much as 5. On the other hand, if global numbers were available, the result above would not include the 25 percent factor. I believe it is a bit early, being only January, for good numbers to be had for world-wide energy use for 2008.
It does not appear that a reduction in driving made much difference, if any, in CO2 emissions to the atmosphere.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
p.s. Fascinating discussion, the above comments. Can anyone point me to an article on the mechanism for CO2 absorption/desorption in the oceans? As a chemical engineer, I am interested in how the CO2 is absorbed, given the very low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the extremely low degree of mixing at the air/water interface. There are waves crashing on the shores, certainly, where some mixing will occur. Also, the global surface area of cold water is very much smaller than that of warm ocean water. Just curious, trying to keep up!

RH: Plant physiologists have known that you are correct that this is good for plants for decades. I think it is unlikely that it is completely inconsequential for earth climate (though I think it’s all overblown by wild overestimation of the parameters that determine radiative forcing). In any case, I thought you would appreciate this EXCELLENT review on the positive influence of rising carbon dioxide concentrations on photosynthesis rates, water-use efficiency and nitrogen-use efficiency.
http://si-pddr.si.edu/dspace/bitstream/10088/48/1/More+Efficient+Plants.pdf

everyone at WUWT thinks that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with rising CO2 concentrations

*sigh*
Sure, human emissions have *some* impact but I wouldn’t say emissions are the majority impact of rising CO2 numbers. But there is the bigger question: Does it really matter. So far it appears that the climate sensitivity to CO2 or more accurate, the feedback associated with increased CO2 emissions have been grossly overstated. In other words, increased CO2 might not really amount to much of a problem. If increased water vapor is a net negative feedback, as a growing body of evidence seems to suggest, then doubling CO2 may not have the consequences that the models suggest.
Want to mitigate global warming? Have your neighbors go along with you and paint your roofs white. Turn your neighborhood into a suburban cool island. Increase the albedo above what it was when it was natural landscape. Reflect that visible light back into space before it can be turned into IR and trapped by CO2. THAT seems to me to be a more effective method of “fighting global warming” than spending billions to hamstring the economy.
And I am only half kidding.
If we go into a period of considerably cooling ocean temperatures, we could see a significant reduction in rate of CO2 accumulation. Now a lot of that CO2 would get burped back out when sea temperatures rise, but a lot wouldn’t because it would have been absorbed by biological and reactive processes and taken out of the cycle for a long time.
But in any case, I would not be surprised if the tenor of the conversation on the part of the warmists becomes more shrill and desperate if their projected temperature increases continue to fail to materialize. They have a lot invested both professionally and personally in those models and have placed their names on the line. If it comes to pass that it was all wrong, it is going to have repercussions beyond their own personal lives. For one thing it will probably make the public much slower in the future to believe a *real* problem when it arises.
Sure, atmospheric CO2 is rising and humans contribute to that rise. Is it a problem? I am not convinced. We have bigger problems with things like irresponsible land use issues to tackle that *do* make a difference. Just the problems with surface recording data is enough to mask most of the “global warming” that has occurred to date. Sea temperatures are not rising either and that is where Earth stores most of her heat.

Crosspatch:
I agree with you on some points. I tend to agree that rising CO2 concentrations might have as much positive impact as negative impact, even if it induces some warming, which I believe is overstated (as you will see implied by my latest post). However, I highly doubt that the CO2 rise is *mainly* due to the ‘cold beer on a hot day bubbling’ process. I am willing to listed to reason if you can explain to me why you feel that several gigatons of carbon emissions wouldn’t increase CO2 concentrations by a ppm or two each year. The budget is well-established and there are thousands of scientists trying to figure out where the ‘missing sink’ is (ie., according to our best budgets, the CO2 concentration should be rising even faster than it is on the basis of our emissions). I’m listening (and not sighing – how irritating – I digress).
As for painting rooves white: whatever. Yes, it would be locally cooler if you were to do this, but cities make up a tiny fraction of land surface area. We might see a reduction or even a reversal of the UHI bias that is plaguing the global climate record, with most stations located close to populated areas. However, you might also end up with locally decreasing convective precipitation (which would be a good or bad thing depending where you live) and an ugly city… white rooves… ugh! Where I live, cold is more of a problem than heat anyway. I say keep ’em black!

Where I live, cold is more of a problem than heat anyway. I say keep ‘em black!

Yeah, been through that before. That black roof is costing you money. It makes a much better radiator at night and night is much longer than day in winter when you think you “need” the black roof. And the elastomeric coatings designed for this use include insulating ceramic spheres that act as an additional layer of insulation. The result is that your house stays warming in winter and cooler in summer with the white roof and you consume less energy for climate control.
If night is 15 hours and day is 9 hours, your black roof is acting as a very efficient radiator of heat from your house to the air at night.
“I am willing to listed to reason if you can explain to me why you feel that several gigatons of carbon emissions wouldn’t increase CO2 concentrations by a ppm or two each year.”
Because the latest numbers I read was that all human activity creates about 3% of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. The other 97% are from natural processes such as decay of organic matter.
But again, even if we are increasing the CO2 load by a couple of parts per million, there is no evidence that it is harmful in any way. There is no evidence that CO2 is the cause of current warming. Temperatures are not tracking CO2.
Also, the planet was at a record low CO2 atmospheric CO2 content before we started adding it back. Practically all plants and animals evolved with much higher CO2 levels than exist today. It is quite possible that we could be assisting more of a *recovery* of atmospheric CO2 levels back to something much more beneficial for the biosphere than we are *polluting* anything.
I am still waiting for anyone to show that even a single degree of temperature change is due to changes in atmospheric CO2. All we have to date are computer models and the observations aren’t matching the models.

When one considers the increasing demands that human and other animal populations are placing on the planet for food and oxygen, it seems that high concentrations of CO2 are exactly what is needed for the plant kingdom to thrive and produce the food and compounds required.

Probably so. CO2 levels were about 5 to 7 times higher than they are today when most of today’s plants evolved. Today’s plants are much more productive with higher levels of CO2 which is why greenhouse operators often enrich the air inside greenhouses with CO2 (up to 1000ppm is very common).
You can go back in the geological record to when CO2 levels were at 7000 ppm and global temperatures were about 5 degrees above current levels. How much of that increase was due to CO2 and how much to having no land at the poles to anchor ice is a big question. If we had no land near the poles, there probably wouldn’t be any year-round ice there even with today’s CO2 levels. There should be fossil forests buried in the mud out on the continental shelf from when sea levels were 100 meters lower in the last glaciation. I sometimes wonder why nobody has looked for old, swamped trees there for study.

“Over at Real Climate, they’re having a fit, saying that everyone at WUWT thinks that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with rising CO2 concentrations”
My opinion: increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations throughout 20th century were mainly caused by humans (although other factors also have their impact), people saying we only emit 3% annually (http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse says 3.4%) must remember that the other CO2 ’emissions’ are in general no net additions to atmospheric concentrations, but just natural cycles, so the human part of the added CO2 is lots bigger than 3%. The relevant question is (as crosspatch says): should we worry? No of course, because CO2 is a nice plant fertilizer and the effect on climate seems to be quite minor, no greenhouse warming hot spot to be seen, negative feedback observed by Aqua satellite, etc. I would guess that maybe human-emitted CO2 has caused some 0.2 °C of warming, but then again, this is not in any way a reason for panic.

Increasing CO2 in the air and in the water is a stimulus to its own removal, and since we don’t know how those feedbacks work in detail, we cannot predict the response of the carbon cycle, except, perhaps, to suggest that removal and sequestration of any anthropogenic carbon will happen faster than has been widely believed.
======================================

If he has the real December value on his computer, why didn’t he just tell you what it is?
=================================

Roger E Sowell says:

I once calculated, very roughly, that approximately 7 cubic miles of new water has been condensed from combustion of hydrocarbons, taking into account burning of petroleum, natural gas, and coal since 1900. Others may have a better estimate. However, realizing that all 7 cubic miles of that water condensed and fell to earth as rain, it absorbed at least some CO2 as it fell. This mechanism would not be cyclical, rather a one-time occurrence. I fully understand just how small 7 cubic miles is in relation to the entire ocean.

And plants take that water and CO2 and use the abundant energy from sunlight and turn it in to O2 and food for it self. It is recycled.

I’ve been musing about the carbon cycle. Using school level physics I calculate that the CO2 in the atmosphere contains enough carbon to cover my back garden(and the rest of planet earth) with 1mm of soot. You can correct me if I’m wrong. Meanwhile… The grass grows about 1m a year. Which makes me think that the life of carbon in the atmosphere is a wee bit shorter than the consensus suggests.

Sekerob (05:32:14) :
Read on, whilst the oceans acidify and saturate.
Is this the next environmental catastrophe that’s about to befall mankind as “global warming” falls by the wayside?
Please let me know as I’ll begin wringing my hands well beforehand.

Anthony, when will AIMS be able to report CO2 on a current global basis? Or am I missing something?
REPLY: Good question, they seem to have gone quiet. I’ll check. – Anthony

Crosstab, Anonymoose: Don’t get me wrong. I *agree* that increasing temperatures should increase CO2 concentrations. We can see that over the past 650,000 years, where temperature precedes rises in CO2. I *also* agree, as I mentioned in the post above, that solar effects on temperature are more important than any CO2 feedback. Finally, I *also* agree that there are more positive than negative effects of CO2, including positive effects on photosynthesis, water-use efficiency and nitrogen-use efficiency. I also think the issue has been inadvertently politicized and holds the potential to be the biggest PR disaster for science in the history of the world.
With regard to the CO2 growth issue, however, it is not hard to find good, honest estimates of how much CO2 is emitted by human beings (and by every natural terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems for surface types that happen to be sources), and it is also not hard to find good, honest estimates of how much CO2 is taken up by terrestial and oceanic ecosystems (for those regions that happen to be sinks). These estimates do take into account the oceanic temperature, and you can even account for the impact of increased temperature on soil and growth respiration. The budget doesn’t balance out, meaning that there is some, as yet unknown, missing carbon sink.
Anonymoose, let us pretend, for the moment, that you were correct, that scientists had assumed that the budget is completely balanced, and that they had neglected the impact of rising postglacial temperatures on oceanic CO2 release. Well, this would mean that we would expect CO2 concentrations to be rising even faster than they are. Under your assumption (which, from my understanding of the issue, is not correct), the missing sink would be even larger! Again, not that it matters, because all three of us appear to believe that the net impact of CO2 on the global environment is a positive one. What we are doing today is taking a world that had become CO2-impoverished, because of millions of years of photosynthetic carbon-hydrogen bonds lost to carbon deposits, and now retrieving that carbon from the depths of the earth and temporarily replenishing some of the lost carbon (concentrations used to be in the thousands of ppm).
We agree here, but our emissions *do* increase the atmospheric CO2 concentrations relative to those from warming alone. Emissions are, as you state, be 3% or so of the budget… yes, and, as a result, it increases the CO2 concentration in the air by much, much less than 1% each year. That this is exacerbated if it is warmer than in recent years, and reduced if it is colder than in recent years, I do not argue.

Crosstab: You are right about the effect of white rooves on my energy costs. I just don’t care. I was referring to weather-related effects.

errata: let alone chemistry of course.

Just wondering if Pieter Tans has an internet connection? Couldn’t he check what he is sending out to the world? This is more than sloppy it is incompetent.

“As I slowly make my way through the material on WUWT, it occurs to me that there may be other mechanisms for CO2 removal from the atmosphere, not including oceans and trees. I do not know much yet about this, so if I am slow please have patience.”
One very important mechanism that takes CO2 out for a very long time is erosion. When rock is exposed to air, it is subjected to bathing in rain. CO2 in the air dissolves in rain and forms a weak carbonic acid. This acid reacts with the rocks forming carbonates. These carbonates stay out of the atmosphere for a very long time. In fact, many have put forth the notion that the rising of the Himalayas has resulted in scrubbing a considerable amount of CO2 from the atmosphere and is one of the reasons for the dramatic drop in CO2 to record low levels in recent geological history. In fact, it has been put forth that if this scrubbing were to continue at the rate it has been, we would begin to see mass extinctions of plants as they came under stress from lack of CO2.
Things such as rock “flour” from glacial grinding of rock absorb a huge amount of CO2 as it reacts with rain, too. As glaciers recede, more rock is exposed and so more CO2 is reacted out of the atmosphere.

Michael D Smith and jeez,
Thanks for the help.
Anthony,
Your site is my new favorite and your contributors give the most clear and intelligent coverage/discussion of the current climate debate.
Educational and Entertaining! Who could ask for more?

Interesting that energy consumption and mileage driven dropped very little in 2008 vs. 2007.
This is anecdotal, but when the price of gas in Calif. went over $4.00 and news of the near-collapse of the financial system came along, the drop in traffic along my usual route to the hardware store was more than noticeable, even drastic from previous months. Not a monster pickup truck in sight anywhere, and the kids with their hotrods and lowriders seemed to have disappeared. I would have sworn the traffic was 50% less than what I was used to.
With the amount of unemployed people going up tremendously and manufacturers shutting down plants worldwide, one would think that energy consumption, miles driven, and anthropogenic CO2 emissions would be all be dropping like a rock.

CO2 increse ended as I predicted in the spring 2008. If global temperature anomaly for 2008 would be 0C the CO2 increase rate would become 1.2+-0.4ppm. Now the temp anomaly was slightly higher, ~0.09.
So the CO2 still is tightly connected to temperature and not to anthropogene emissions as shown on the graph I have made, see below. 2008 not added yet.

Often I wonder what the significance is of taking a current value and seeking out as far back as possible a matching value to say look, the sea ice is now the same as 1979″, forgoing that weather is weather influenced by ENSO, PDO,Vulcanic eruptions, stratospheric ozone depletion, ABCs and whatnot. Moreover, these far back “lows” are often one-off anomalies, whereas the current decades are nothing but anomalous.
The 2008 value is 1.86 ppmv matching 2007. 2004 was 1.74 ppmv so, not “look, 1993” which according to my simple spreadsheet had a mean increase of 0.68 ppmv
The short series: Second last column isthe annual mean and the last is year on year mean increase
1990 12 1990.958 354.21 354.21 355.15 30.00 354.16 1.26
1991 12 1991.958 354.98 354.98 355.91 31.00 355.48 1.32
1992 12 1992.958 355.39 355.39 356.27 31.00 356.27 0.79
1993 12 1993.958 356.7 356.70 357.59 31.00 356.95 0.68
1994 12 1994.958 358.74 358.74 359.65 31.00 358.64 1.68
1995 12 1995.958 360.42 360.42 361.29 30.00 360.63 1.99
1996 12 1996.958 361.96 361.96 362.78 31.00 362.37 1.74
1997 12 1997.958 364.12 364.12 364.89 31.00 363.47 1.11
1998 12 1998.958 366.87 366.87 367.61 27.00 366.50 3.03
1999 12 1999.958 367.86 367.86 368.59 29.00 368.15 1.65
2000 12 2000.958 369.62 369.62 370.33 30.00 369.40 1.26
2001 12 2001.958 371.11 371.11 371.83 31.00 371.07 1.67
2002 12 2002.958 373.71 373.71 374.45 30.00 373.17 2.10
2003 12 2003.958 375.97 375.97 376.71 30.00 375.78 2.61
2004 12 2004.958 377.51 377.51 378.23 31.00 377.52 1.74
2005 12 2005.958 380.07 380.07 380.78 30.00 379.76 2.24
2006 12 2006.958 381.85 381.85 382.55 31.00 381.85 2.09
2007 12 2007.958 383.90 383.90 384.60 29.00 383.71 1.86
2008 12 2008.958 385.54 385.54 386.28 30.00 385.57 1.86
But, possibly we’re talking a different data set, than that coming from the ESRL

Lulo and others,
Pieter Tans is the boss, and therefore the errors made by his staff are his responsibility. The fact that, like some other understaffed groups, they put out data without doing any kind of “data rationality” checks IS HIS FAULT.
This is the type of thing that a programmer could write a warning error for in 5 minutes or less.
If this was data that was not being used to educate the public on issues that are making major transformations to society I might agree that it is not that big a deal. This data is and it IS a big deal. Repeatedly issuing data that happens to have problems shows little professionalism and undermines our reason to trust the WHOLE record!! Repeatedly issuing corrections to data only in one direction makes the appearance even more dismal.

Sekerob, papers like those will be much more interesting when they include data more recently than, say, 2002 or 2003. It will be papers that include data from after 2005 that are going to upset the apple cart.

crosspatch, (13:02:16)
Given the extensive x-ref, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/429689 to include the very Svalgaard posting in this threat it does not seem to have lost it’s credibility. The current data just is a continuation of a trend set in around 1950 with an ever so slight down slope all the more questioning the solar weight on global warming.

Re: “Ah, OK the ol’ “close enough for government work” thinking makes it OK then if data is released for public consumption, and then fixed. Why not simply do it right the first time? I can think of lots of venues when this sort of sloppiness in posting data that others use would get people fired, cause product recalls, cause accidents, or get people killed. So why should climate science get a free pass for sloppiness? – Anthony”
Because this isn’t a venue where it can “cause product recalls, cause accidents, or get people killed”. Who uses the freshly released monthly data other than blogs for no purpose whatsoever than hobby number watching? How can an error in release cause people to be killed? It’s simply not as important as you seem to think it is. The records yes, the recently released data on a website no.

REPLY: Hobby number watching? Go tell that to Gore, or to Hansen. Rubbish, trillions of dollars of world economic policy hinge on these numbers, and you don’t think it is important that it be done right? Sorry but your argument just doesn’t wash. There is no excuse for sloppiness, especially here. – Anthony

Leif Svalgaard (13:52:10) :
Thanks, same charts, same author, the original paper where my link refers to a 2008 presentation on that said. No upset of apple carts that I can discern.
So unless missing something in a big way, Crosspatch, you were saying?

I’ve seen passing references but no clear indication of something I’ve been trying to understand. One of the critical assumptions and an underpinning of the GCM’s is a long lifetime for emitted CO2 in the atmosphere, i.e., decades up to a century. Does anyone know or have a link to the official IPCC assumption for this?
I’ve seen other abstracts that refer to a lifetime around the range of a decade which makes a BIG difference on the outcomes of the models. Where does this debate stand? Any links to good studies on this subject would be appreciated.

Arn: Thats part of the problem, knowing CO2 and its half life in the atmosphere.
The IPCC assumes long half-life’s, with 50-200 years given.
Some sources show half-life’s of less than a decade.
Therein lies the problem. If there is a problem with CO2 induced warming, and if the longer estimate is correct, we need to start cutting back now, for our grandchildren to see any results.
If the shorter period is correct, and we need to make cuts, we can start cuts in a decade or two, and still see results in our lifetime.

George E. Smith (15:00:06) :
at the north pole the cyclic amplitude has built up to what a CO2 expert aquaintance for Scripps Inst. in La Jolla CA tells me is actually an 18 ppm p-p amplitude
….whatever it is that is capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the north pole, it can remove 18 ppm in just four months. ”
Have a warm damp mass of air filled with 390 ppm CO2 and cool it . The pressure drops and water in liquid form condenses. It absorbs CO2. Absorbing CO2 lower the freezing point of water cools and absorbs more CO2. The water turns to snow and lands in the ocean. Co2 is scrubbed from the air.
Looking at the Hawaii data, I get a t 1/2 for atmospheric CO2 of 9-11 years and a human input of about 35% the natural rate of efflux.
You must understand that what ever the rate of geological release of CO2 is, it must also be matched by the mineralization rate. Every now and again a huge volcano erupts and will cause a spike in the atmosphere, the plant has a mechanism to clear it. Of it didn’t we would have much more regular extinctions of sensitive species, like large carnivores and frogs.

That was not vary good spelling.

this data is being distorted.

Anthony Watts says:

I’ve never figured out how to collect or pay on a dollars to donuts bet. It’s always confusing, who sends what? 😉

Yeah, I’ve never quite understood that either, but just to be on the safe side, maybe you should send me both dollars and donuts! 😉

You may very well be right and if so, it will be the second time in the last 4 months that such an error has caused data for the public release to be incorrect. – Anthony

From your corrected graph (and my vague memory of what the original one looked like), it indeed looks like the error was what I suggested…Or at least something close to it.
As for these mistakes in publicly-released data, I guess there is a dynamic tension between getting the data out quickly to the public and checking it carefully before releasing it. And, things move so fast now in the internet age that even though it looks like there was only about 12 hours of time (as best as I can estimate…you may know better) between when you posted this up and you received an e-mail from Tans acknowledging there was an error, thousands of people got to know about it! I have to admit that I am happy that as a scientist I have worked in fields where people aren’t clamoring to see my data!

Thanks to Les Johnson, Peer & Lulo relative to CO2 atmospheric lifetime:
I think you answered my question that there is no answer, only assumptions. Sounds like a dangerous game since we’re betting billions on the answer using algorithms that depend highly on the this empirically unknown factor.
Am I wrong anyone?

If rain-scrubbing is a sink and sequester of CO2, then this is a sink that may not be in models. But if AIMS were up and running, one might be able to see CO2 leaching out of the atmosphere where rain is abundant. I am thinking of the 5th grade science textbook model of ocean breezes building up to clouds which pile up next to mountains and rain down on the ocean-side slope, taking CO2 with it. If it creates a mild acid-based carbonate solution, no wonder dripping water off a gutter can drill a hole into concrete below.
hmmmm
If the premise holds, it would be a bugger to put rain into models. But not to worry. If the world does warm, rain will become more abundant thus reducing CO2…wait a minute…this sounds like a self-adjusting system. Run-a-way global warming cannot tolerate such things.

Think of another way CO2 is taken out for a long time: fire. A forest absorbs CO2 and is then burned. But combustion is not complete and a lot of charcoal is left. This charcoal (carbon that came from CO2 taken out of the air) is very stable and can possibly stay right there in the soil for millions of years. If rains come and a landslide covers that charcoal, it can stay sequestered from the atmosphere.
A century of putting out forest fires, particularly in “old growth” forests actually adds to atmospheric CO2. Why “particularly old growth”? Because a fully mature forest does not remove CO2 from the air. Once a group of trees is, as a unit, no longer adding overall biomass as trees die and decay, it releases as much CO2 through decay as it takes in through growth. A fire would convert much of that dead material to a more stable form of carbon (charcoal again) and clear out areas that would allow young new trees to begin absorbing CO2.
Another major contributor to CO2 increase in the atmosphere is paper recycling. For every tree that is “saved” by recycling paper, one is not planted. You end up with fewer trees planted and areas that were “farmed” for pulp trees are sold off and put to other uses. If you send your phone book to the landfill, sure it will fill the landfill faster but it will sequester a couple of pounds of carbon that must be replaced by planting a tree to be harvested for replacement paper.
Actually you would do better to simply burn the paper and bury the ash. If you have a pound of carbon that is taken out of the atmosphere by a tree and converted to paper and then burn it, you might be left with a couple of ounces of high carbon ash. Bury this ash and you have put back into the air less CO2 than it took to make the paper. Also, a new tree must be planted for replacement paper. Old growth trees are not cut for paper. Paper trees are farmed. Paper companies are the worlds largest planter of trees. If we all recycled all of our paper, paper companies would make that one last cut and then sell the land. You aren’t saving a single tree by recycling paper, you are preventing trees from being planted and reducing an atmospheric CO2 sink. Burning the paper and burying the ash would reduce CO2 more than recycling.

Crosspatch, what an interesting post. I used to do noise surveys in log and lumber mills. Most have closed. Forests are no longer being harvested. Fire wood cutters can no longer clean up the forest floor. Growing space is severely hampered and trees that do manage to take hold are small and spindly, unable to withstand heavy snows. They just bend over, snap off, and add to the fuel on the floor. Big pines are topping out and no longer growing. My own plot of trees at the ranch are way past due for harvesting, and several pines have topped out, but I can’t find a mill that will buy the logs. It makes perfect sense that growing forests would use lots and lots of CO2. Wonder if anyone has done a comparison study on the rate of decrease in tree harvest along side increase in CO2.

Pamela Gray,
I think Michael is agreeing with you, that perhaps this mechanism is deliberately NOT in the climate models. It would tend to stabilize the system, as you pointed out.
I am still working on what I suspect is many tons per day of CO2 scrubbed out of the atmosphere via man-made cooling towers and spray ponds. My gut feel is that it is small, compared to the CO2 released via hydrocarbon combustion, but it is bugging me so I will have a look.
The trouble we have as engineers to achieve a gas absorbed into a liquid has me wondering about the ocean uptake of CO2. Lots of surface area, to be sure, but not much driving force via gas concentration or by pressure. Also, almost zero mixing.
As was said…. Hmmmm…..
I am beginning to suspect that the better mechanism is as mentioned earlier, with rain drops falling through a mile or two of sky and then into the ocean. A zillion or two or three raindrops per day ought to do it. The rain is fairly cold, too, which increases the gas’ solubility.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California

I am most curious about the AIMS data regarding global atmospheric CO2. If the concentration goes down as measured via satellite while the Mauna Loa surface station continues to show a climb, me thinks the modelers have missed a sink or two. And that maybe these sinks start up and slow down in cyclic ways. While the Mauna Loa is a stairstep to heaven, might there be a stairstep (or several) going down? The Earth being as old and full of life as it is, I am thinking that we don’t really know all the ways that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are removed from the atmosphere, and no one seems to really give it much thought. We only seem to be seriously measuring how much is going in to it.
One more thing. It seems to me that it is taking much longer to get that AIMS satellite to send us CO2 data than it took for the temp satellites to bring us temp data. If the data they are collecting is not what they expected and they are taking extra time to make sure it is right, then tell us that, with regular updates. I for one will be quite the frothin redhead if I find out they are only going to let the Ivory Tower folks look at the CO2 satellite data.

To my previous post: 9.4 GT Annual!!!

sekerob, your delta mlo is different from cdiac?
isnt the 1999 delta 1.45 for MLO and 1.63 for world?

should be .94 vs 1.64 not .99 vs 1.64

“With the amount of unemployed people going up tremendously and manufacturers shutting down plants worldwide, one would think that energy consumption, miles driven, and anthropogenic CO2 emissions would be all be dropping like a rock.”
I think it taken as a percentage of the whole?…it would be insignificant. Number of plants shut down vs. number still running and new plants coming online?…don’t know the number, but I’m sure it’s much smaller than the MSM would lead us to believe. Likewise with unemployed people…remember, it averages %6. And for many of those, they may be driving as much or more as they were when they were employed. Not all, but some. So again…overall impact is likely negligible.
“What is intriguing to me is the Detroit Auto Show currently underway. Lots of hybrids and electric vehicles there. Should have a measureable downward impact on U.S. fuel consumption for the next few years. ”
What is the percentage of man-made C02 released by U.S. automobiles?…again…I’m betting it’s a very small percentage.
JimB

Pamela:
“If it creates a mild acid-based carbonate solution, no wonder dripping water off a gutter can drill a hole into concrete below.
hmmmm”
How do we know how much, if any, of the hole is caused by the acidic solution, and how much is caused by the force of a drop of water slamming into it from a height of 8-10′?
;*)
JimB

“Because a fully mature forest does not remove CO2 from the air.”
Another issue with Mauna Loa, Pamela’s ‘stairstep to heaven’. Keeling and minions believe it biogenic owing to terrestrial plants whose center of mass would lie around Tropic of Cancer.
But the peak of sequestering by the data is October. It cannot follow July/August.
Now consider the SO as the 800 pound gorilla. Remember 7% more insolation.

Christian Bultmann:
Thanks for the link, it affirms and corrects my thinking. On the latter, the cold trap error seems to be similar in size to the H2SO4 dessication method used in French volumetric methods bridging the ice core data to WWII era.

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?

Lee Kington. Your graph clearly shows the 1998 peak, which demonstrates the boiling up of CO2 from sea waters due to 1998 el Nino high temps.

Gary: Yes, I completely agree with you, but the average residence time doesn’t matter as much as you think (it is important, but not as limiting as many here are implying). We are adding molecules with a *mean* residence of 12.9 years. Some have a residence time of 5 seconds and some of them have a residence time of 10000 years (this is why CO2 is so complicated). If we emit fossil fuels, all of these molecules (5s, 13y or 10000y) are molecules that would not otherwise have been there in the first place, and effect is felt for a lot longer than the 12.9 years. Why? Firstly, some of the molecules are around, by low probability chance, for hundreds of years or more. Secondly, these molecules will compete with naturally produced CO2 for uptake). I am a total climate change skeptic for a wide variety of reasons, and I don’t think CO2 is a problem at all, but I *do* think it is reasonable to propose that a long-term concentration increase results from emissions from human activities and the oceans.

“” DocMartyn (16:52:04) :
Have a warm damp mass of air filled with 390 ppm CO2 and cool it . The pressure drops and water in liquid form condenses. It absorbs CO2. Absorbing CO2 lower the freezing point of water cools and absorbs more CO2. The water turns to snow and lands in the ocean. Co2 is scrubbed from the air. “”
Thanks Docmartin. I didn’t mean to create an impression that I had no idea what removal processes are in play. I just said whatever processes they were, they can sure remove a lot of CO2 fast.
The water scrubbing of course can easily occur at other places than the arctic. True the colder the water, the more CO2 it can contain, but rain, sleet and snow can all form well out of the arctic,a nd remove a lot of CO2.
So why don’t we see a massive removal in the southern oceans. If the process you describe requires open water to take place, why wouldn’t it happen continuously in the southern ocean instead of cyclically as at the North Pole.
I must say I found it interesting to learn that the north pole becomes ice free every year; I would have thought that there would be more or less permanent ice there for a large part of the arctic ocean.
As for the wide availability of the NOAA 3-D curve; I have numerous hard copies on dead tree that I luckily made when it was on their site; but I can enter the exact same URL including the exact letter cases, and it does not bring up the curve.
Maybe somebody else can popit up from: http://www.mlo.noaa.gov/Projects/GASES/co2glob.htm
Which is where my copy comes from
I’ve seen those papers which show CO2 decay curves with long time constant tails some of them thousands or millions of years assignable to rock weathering and the like. Not impressed. No I didn’t say those processes don’t occur, I had never thought about such things but I believe it if a geologist says that rocks ougas CO2 due to weathering.
Still not impressed. We are told, that the long term steady state atmospheric abundance of CO2 was about 280 ppm; which is about the lowest that CO2 has ever been in the last billion years or so; so even at 385 ppm, we are enjoying some of the lowest CO2 levels this planet has ever had.
I’ve not seen one shred of evidence, that establishes that any of those long time constant tails, even the ones with 200 year “residence times” kicks in at CO2 levels as high as even 280 ppm.
So I have seen no evidence that all of the excess over 280 ppm, wouldn’t disappear in something of the order of the time frame I alluded to. I wasn’t aware of the 12.9 year computation based on nuke test aftermath, but given that actual measured result, I consider my simple stick on a sandy beach estimate of 9 years to be not too shabby. Given that everything in climate science modelling has a mandatory 3:1 fudge factor in predicted outcome. that puts my 9 year number fair and square in the middle of a 5-15 year fudge window, so 12.9 years is close enough for me.
I’m astonished by Gary Gulrud’s input that in 1820 the abundance was 450 ppm.
Michael Mann seems to insist that the earth temperature was constant for several thousand years prior to his hockey stick foot, and therefore CO2 should have been constant too, since supposedly one causes the other and the order hardly matters much if both are constant.
Are we saying that the 280 ppm long term stable value is a myth?

I now have high speed internet so the AIMS animated graphs work for me. I had no idea they had data all the way to July 2008. The animation looks a lot like ocean SST animations. Which we know have decadal oscillations. From a scientific view, many of the variables related to atmospheric CO2 have oscillations that are quite long. CO2 itself has seasonal and diurnal oscillations. It would be reasonable to ask if CO2 has a longer oscillation as well. But there is not enough years of data on a truly global scale (with all the sources AND sinks accounted for) for us to see if there are such long term natural (like 20 to 50 years) oscillations. It seems scientifically juvenile to jump to conclusions so early in the data collections process.
Using the Mauna Loa site to trumpet impending doom just doesn’t pass the scientific smell test. It would be just as foolish for me to state that Wallowa County is a good place to measure snow levels and then say it is representative of the entire planet. We now know that snow levels vary a great deal across the globe, and has short term and long term local and regional oscillations. I know this is a laughable example but logically, is it any different that the case with CO2?
Good science that leads to lasting, repeatable, testable and robust theoretical understanding of phenomena takes time. It seems that today’s scientists want to rush the process to what, be first in line for the big credits? Hope not. Take a lesson from playwrights. Your efforts have to pass the smell test at the local theater before they can hit the big city lights. If you don’t go through this process, your theory could end up on the one hit wonder late night talk show circuit.

Here are again the links for live CO2 data:
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.

George E. Smith (18:19:58) :
Are we saying that the 280 ppm long term stable value is a myth?
A myth, no. 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. Ice core measurements, if they are not contaminated and homogenized as many have claimed, are still measurements of very cold places very far away from sources, and the well mixed argument does not hold:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/
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 !!

If we emit fossil fuels, all of these molecules (5s, 13y or 10000y) are molecules that would not otherwise have been there in the first place, and effect is felt for a lot longer than the 12.9 years. Why? Firstly, some of the molecules are around, by low probability chance, for hundreds of years or more. And the difference between man and a volcanic eruption is?

“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.”
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.