Beryllium 10 and climate

17 03 2009

Quick primer:

Beryllium-10 is an isotope that is a proxy for the sun’s activity. Be10 is produced in the atmosphere by cosmic ray collisions with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen. Beryllium 10 concentrations are linked to cosmic ray intensity which can be a proxy for solar strength.

One way to capture earth’s record of that proxy data is to drill deep ice cores. Greenland, due to having a large and relatively stable deep ice sheet is often the target for drilling ice cores.

Isotopic analysis of the ice in the core can be linked to temperature and global sea level variations. Analysis of the air contained in bubbles in the ice can reveal the palaeocomposition of the atmosphere, in particular CO2 variations. Volcanic eruptions leave identifiable ash layers.

While it sounds simple to analyze, there are issues of ice compression, flow, and other factors that must be taken into consideration when doing reconstructions from such data. I attended a talk at ICCC 09 that showed one of the ice core operations had procedures that left significant contamination issues for CO2. But since Beryllium is rather rare, it doesn’t seem to have the same contamination issues attached. – Anthony

Be-10 and Climate

Guest post by David Archibald

A couple of years ago on Climate Audit, I undertook to do battle with Dr Svalgaard’s invariate Sun using Dye 3 Be10 data. And so it has come to pass. Plotted up and annotated, the Dye 3 data shows the strong relationship between solar activity and climate. Instead of wading through hundreds of papers for evidence of the Sun’s influence on terrestrial climate, all you have to do is look at this graph.

be10-climate

All the major climate minima are evident in the Be10 record, and the cold period at the end of the 19th century. This graph alone demonstrates that the warming of the 20th century was solar-driven. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, solar

Wrong: World Health Organization claims that health goes down as carbon goes up

17 03 2009

Does health go down as carbon goes up, and vice versa, per the World Health Organization’s claim?

Guest post by: Indur M. Goklany

A World Health Organization (WHO) communiqué to an International congress on climate change in Copenhagen designed to sound the alarm on climate change, states that it estimates “around 150,000 deaths now occur in low-income countries each year due to climate change from four climate-sensitive health outcomes – crop failure and malnutrition, diarrhoeal disease, malaria and flooding.” [To get an inkling of the quality of these estimates, which are based on modeling studies, see here.] Then, citing “increased risks of extreme weather events, to effects on infectious disease dynamics and sea level rise,” the comminiqué declares that “as carbon goes up health goes down.” It then claims that “a large part of the current burden of disease is linked to energy consumption and transport systems. Changing these systems to reduce climate change would have the added benefit of addressing some major public health issues, including outdoor air pollution (800 000 annual global deaths); traffic accidents (1.2 million annual deaths); physical inactivity (1.9 million deaths); and indoor air pollution (1.5 million annual deaths).” Accordingly it argues, “Reducing green house gases [sic]emissions can be beneficial to health: as carbon goes down health goes up.”

But what do empirical data show?

igoklany_life_expectancy

Figure 1: Life expectancy at birth (1960-2006) for high, medium and low income countries, global carbon emissions (1960-2004), and carbon emissions per capita for each country group (1960-2004). Source: World Bank (2009).

Figure 1, based on data from the World Bank, shows that:

  • Health, as measured by life expectancy at birth, has gone up for the low, medium and high income countries even as global carbon emissions have increased.
  • The higher a group’s carbon emissions per capita, the higher its life expectancy. Thus life expectancy is highest for the high income group and lowest for the low income group.
  • The slowdown in the increase in life expectancy during the late 1980s and 1990s in the low income countries can be better seen in the data for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) shown in Figure 2. This slowdown is more or less coincident with the decline in carbon emissions per capita in that region, which seems to follow declines in economic development (GDP per capita). [Note that higher levels of economic development are associated with higher carbon emissions per capita. This is to be expected. GDP per capita is one of the four multiplicative terms in the Kaya Identity used in the IPCC scenarios to estimate carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion.]

Thus empirical results are at odds with the World Health Organization’s claims that “as carbon goes up health goes down” or ” as carbon goes down health goes up.” Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, economy-health

A Canadian’s view on CO2 and the economy

17 03 2009

bread_line
Photo: (not part of original article) bread lines of the great depression – coming again?

Climate change: Less CO2, less jobs. It’s that simple.

03-16-2009 NIGEL HANNAFORD

If you want to know what an economy that pumps out less carbon dioxide is like, look at Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. Factories closed, growing numbers of jobless, people driving less because they have nowhere to go, government deficits.

As it happens, it’s the U.S. debt crisis that’s done it to us. When the air comes out of the tires of your biggest trading, look out.

However, it’s also what a well-meaning climate-change lobby felt was pain worth risking for the sake of the planet, when it recommended a regimen of emission caps and/or carbon taxes to reduce C02 emissions in Canada.

How do you like it so far?

Not so much, at this desk.

This is not the whole story as it doesn’t include coal and natural gas, but there are some provocative specifics in a recent Statistics Canada document. The Supply and Disposition of Refined Petroleum Products in Canada, was published in November 2008, coincidentally a good month to review because it’s both the latest month for which figures are available and also the month when Canadians watching the American meltdown first noticed they might have a problem of their own. For, it was in November 2008 that retail fell off a cliff – especially car sales – joblessness started to climb, and the federal government was forced to revisit its economic forecasts. No more chat about balanced budgets, and so forth. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 110 Comments »

Categories : Carbon dioxide

Another shocked polar explorer

17 03 2009

You may recall Lewis Pugh and his laughable “expedition” in Kayaks last summer to plant flags of nations on the ice. I came a little more respect for this group, since at least they are attempting some science. But given the media coverage and the problems they face in getting any meaningful data, I have my doubts about this project as well. – Anthony

“Occasionally it’s disheartening too when you’ve slogged for a day and then wake up the next morning having drifted back to where you started.” – Pen Hadow

np-icequest-map

From the BBC:

A team of polar explorers has travelled to the Arctic in a bid to discover how quickly the sea-ice is melting and how long it might take for the ocean to become ice-free in summers.

Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley will be using a mobile radar unit to record an accurate measurement of ice thickness as they trek to the North Pole.

The trio will be sending in regular diary entries, videos and photographs to BBC News throughout their expedition.

The Catlin Arctic Survey team started its gruelling trek on 28 February.

From Pen Hadow’s online journal: Conditions have been hard. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Uncategorized