Physicist says fossil fuel burning is insignificant in the global carbon pool

Yes! Thank, You.
We need to hear this more often.

I fear this is nonsens. Dangerous nonsens. It is rather simple…take the global fossile fuel consuption and calculate theoretically how much CO2 that will produce. The simple chemical equation is sufficiant. Then calculate the volume of the earth atmosphere…also not a very difficult exercise. Then it is very easy to calculate the concentration impact of that fossile fuel burning. OK no ocean absorption… and no other phenomena…But even then it is very obvious that fossile fuel burning HAS a impact on the atmospheric CO2 concentration….whatever references and diploma’s that professor may have.

Excellent, great to hear some sense from a highly respected scientist.

Lets hear it for Denis Rancourt. It is time for others to speak out. I think his statement: “More importantly, scientists know virtually nothing about the dynamic carbon exchange fluxes that occur on all the relevant time and lengths scales to say anything definitive about how atmospheric CO2 arises and is exchanged in interaction with the planet’s ecological systems. We are barely at the point of being able to ask intelligent questions.” is right on the money. Something I have believed and said myself many times. Something many readers here have as well.
It is not just because we agree with Dr. Rancourt that he is correct though. If one truly adheres to the scientific method and its philosophical principals no other conclusion is possible.
From one scientist to another, good on you brother.

Ah…. another sane voice crying in the wilderness. I don’t know about Canada, but if he were in the US he just stepped off the funding marry-go-round. He looks too young to retire.
You know science is on the fast track to self destruction when theories, postulates, opinions and research approaches that deviate the slightest bit from current theory are no longer even considered acceptable ‘cocktail party conversation’ by the “consensus”. I guess that’s all we can expect from government funded (controlled?) research.

I liked and encouraged getting a handle on smog and pollution and am thankfull for the environmental cleanup push that has resulted in such improvement. I think now that the environmental movement has been hijacked by the control freaks and those who think they are so much smarter than the rest of us. My lowest iq test was 128, low in comparison to most of the posters on this site yet quite adequate to follow the ideas espoused, and I resent the idea that I need my actions of an environmental nature regulated!

De Rode
Yes, human burning of fossil fuels have put more CO2 into the atmosphere. But it is trivial compared to natural sources. Fortunately, natural sinks (biomass), absorb 99.+% of natural plus human CO2 emmissions. What you are ignoring is that our oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface, is the largest source and sink of CO2 – far exceeding all other sources, including human produced CO2!
Time is on the skeptics side. None of the AGW computer models have been close over the past 12+ years. The longer we can prevent the AGW crowd from squandering untold trillions of dollars on worthless remedies, which hurt our economies and daily lives while having zero impact on our Earth’s climate, the better off all humans will be over the coming century!
AGW is a scam, the largest and most destructive ever foisted on humanity!
Bill Yarber

Little to disagree with on the science and the insignificance of man on the face of this planet, but I think Dr. Rancourt has misunderstood the political significance and intent behind carbon trading.
As constructed, both the UN and the EU systems are designed to move both production and capital from the developed First World to the less developed world as part of the loony left’s utopian egalitarian dream that I would have thought he would actually be in favour of…
I don’t have a problem with raising up the Third World but I really don’t want to do it by destroying what we have built over decades here in the developed world and that is precisely what capping and/or taxing CO2 production out of existence is doing.
It is actually the developed states, and their peoples, which are being undemocratically managed and controlled – not the other way round…

This we know already!
Seemingly insignificant additions to atmospheric CO2 as causative of increasing temperatures through ‘feedback’ is where the real argument lies. On this, Dr. Denis Rancourt says;
“There is no justification beyond conjecture for the “amplification hypothesis”.”
If Dr. Rancourt can nail that one then he can save mankind from the folly that he so accurately (IMHO) describes.

Dr. Denis Rancourt gives a very nice summary of what I have expected all along. If we can get by all the CAGW nonsense, maybe we can get back to tackling real environmental and energy issues.

Depressing. Everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen cronyism, nepotism, power politics, manipulated data, fudged data, invented data, ignored data, intractable cognitive dissonance, and con games. Whistle blowers are punished. Somewhere there must be some exceptions — maybe aeronautical engineering? Airplanes sometimes stay up in the air, somehow.

The conclusion that human CO2 emissions contribute insignificantly to CO2 accumulations is defective. The human effect is the result of both emissions and removals due to the carbon cycle. The author claims to know nothing about removals due to the carbon cycle. So lets just look at the empirical evidence.
CO2 concentrations are going up. Humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Because of isotope ratios, we know that human fossil fuel sourced CO2 is accumulating.
Conclusion: global warming is our fault.

De Rode Willem says:
September 20, 2010 at 8:54 am
‘It is rather simple…’
Explaining the increase in atmospheric CO2 is simple if you ignore the much larger parts of the carbon cycle, such as biomass, oceans and volcanos. This what Engelbeen did in his recent attempt to justify the IPCC theory that attributes the CO2 increase to fossil fuel burning.
Dr. Rancourt does not deny any effect; he says the effect is insignificant.

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt addresses the lack of sufficient AGW (or much less CAGW) science that is actually of the “settled” or “consensus” variety. Thank you.
Maybe some humor on uncertainty and doom/gloom is in order. I posted this over at Bishop’s blog a few hours ago, addressed originally to Josh.
——————–
Above the doorway entrance to the IPCC’s HQ office should be an engraved plaque with the following quote inscribed:
“`all hope abandon, ye who enter here of assessing uncertainty in climate science”
[With my sincere apologies to Dante Alighieri]
Above the exit doorway of the IPCC’s HQ office should be a plaque with:
=> a smiley face labeled: “Have a nice apocalyptic CAGW day!”
John

Noting that his title indicates he is a “former” professor, I am sure that his comments will be dismissed by the liberal elite as the mere ramblings of a disgruntled crank. Alas, he will likely become a passing footnote marginalized, if necessary, by the same tired ad hominem attacks should he attempt to step out any further of his “place.”

Mr. Rancourt comments on his blog “Just because many other factors were different one billion years ago say, does not invalidate this comparisons because the main factors were the same (same planet, same biomass, diverse life, same slowly evolving sun, same large latitudinal variations in incident irradiance, etc.)” http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-burning-of-fossil-fuel-significant.html#c974336068943468367
As a physicist, he can be forgiven for not knowing much paleontology, but not all things were the same a billion years ago…

“We contribute 8% of the whole of GPP on earth by burning fossil fuel.”
I thought it was 4%. Has it recently shot up?

He calculates that CO2 generated by Fossil fuel burning is comparable to the CO2 exumed by humans and their domestic animals. In one of his previous blogs he says
“Furthermore, if we consider that all living things breathe (admittedly some microbes don’t breathe oxygen) and that Earth’s (living) biomass is approximately 10^15 kg-C, then total global breathing may well exceed the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning by a factor of between ten and one thousand times greater.”
Quite a wide margin, but he says ants for instance have ten time our biomass, but even at the low end it puts our contribution to CO2 generation into perspective.

“For left progressives to collaborate with First World governments that practice global extortion and geopolitical wars in order to pass carbon schemes to undemocratically manage and control the developments of non-First-World communities and sovereign states is obscene, racist, and cruelly cynical.”
This is misplaced hyperbole. Human history is clear: states have used credit expansion (inflation of their currency) to finance war, either to deflect some domestic issue away from the ruling elites, or to seek economic domination over others.
But that was before the widespread adoption of welfare socialism by the west. Now governments use credit expansion to finance government spending on social programs. They in effect go to war against private holders of assets to gain resources to spread around to others in a frantic effort to retain power.
(And the biggest recent scheme of credit expansion was Fannie and Freddie via the Community Reinvestment Act. It amounted to about twice the size of the bailouts for the banks.)
The weapons of this new form of warfare are bureaucratic and legal in nature. Instead of conquering territory to benefit government by force of arms, for example, we have the creeping control over any land in a “watershed” in order to bring about the UN’s “Century 21” plan of land planning, complete with “wildlife corridors” and mass resettlement of rural populations, all in the name of saving the planet. We have such creeping control over the financial system that the Bank of America is now literally owned by the US Government and few people care. And what freedom we have will only diminish as our economic serfdom is perfected by our creditors, thanks to the Thelma and Louise spending plan: drive off a cliff while laughing about the things we accomplished.
Global Warming was the perfect weapon of this new war. Indeed, it was the Neutron Bomb, allowing government to stop any human use of energy but leaving the things government wanted to do, such as massive public works projects, untouched. The more complicated that government made the environmental laws, the more people who had to be employed and the more money government had to spend, in order to get something done. All these people, suppliers and subcontractors became beholden to the rulemakers and the money printers, and those in charge of “spreading the wealth around”.
Government is now at war against its own citizens for the purpose of gaining as much control over them as possible. That is exactly why those who view themselves as being on the side of big and Bigger government are reacting the way they are to the Tea Party. This is why the November election is so important.

“That’s enough right there to put him firmly in the “nutcase” category. Humans have devastated the natural order of things over most of the globe. With the possible exception of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps, there isn’t a square mile of land that hasn’t been seriously affected by human action, going back at least two thousand years and probably more than fifteen thousand.”
Been to Antarctica?
Be interesting to know many square miles on the continental USA “hasn’t been seriously affected by human action”

John, I italicized the text I took issue with. -bbt

Ken Hall @ September 20, 2010 at 10:23 am:
Ken, the IPCC itself actually says human CO2 production is currently about 4% of the total yearly output of the planet. If the accumulation to date were to have stayed in the atmosphere, the total concentration would be roughly 600 ppm. The CAGW advocates claim that the other roughly half of the accumulation went into the oceans, and the rest is just hanging around to be slowly removed.
Empirical evidence against this hypothesis argues that the correlation between estimated human production and measured change is poor across all spectral components. In fact, the last several decades’ measured accumulation in the atmosphere is remarkably linear.
Moreover, the hypothesized slow dynamics of reabsorption would naturally lead to a far ranging random walk-like behavior, which is not indicated by the historical record upon which the advocates rely. Just as Nature abhors a vacuum, it abhors maintaining any equilibrium which is not enforced by competing dynamics. To maintain the supposed historic tight equilibrium, the system would require a high bandwidth, but such a high bandwidth would prevent the observed buildup from being due to exogenous input, and so there is a contradiction.
The conclusions, to one who really understands how dynamic systems work, are that A) the greater part of the CO2 buildup we have seen in recent decades is due to natural variation, and B) the historical record is suspect. Even now, if one plots the rate of change in measured CO2 concentration, it is abundantly clear that it is decelerating, and we have reached an inflection point. It may take a couple to three more decades if the curve is smooth, or it could happen rapidly, which the historical data indicates at least qualitatively is possible, but average CO2 concentration will almost certainly begin to decrease again in time, as it likely has bobbed up and down for centuries before we were around to observe it.

Being true that huge areas of our planet have been modified in some way by humankind (devastated is not the word because things in Earth are always changing, there are no absolute references on earth), it’s also true that we can feel how weak we are.
We all know that if something would wipe us from the earth surface (let’s say a total extinction triggered by a 20km-wide comet hiting us), it surely would take only a few centuries for natural forces to remove most evidence of what the humankind once was … centuries in Earth are like minutes in our lives.
Earth is not at risk for now … humankind always was and always will be.
Natural forces are FAR more powerful than our primitive society. Earth receives from the Sun 10,000 times the energy we are capable to produce … this number is the best indicator of our real ‘power’ … not even being close to be a Type I civilization in the Kardashev scale, the smallest among ‘advanced civilizations’.
AGW is a way to give scientific support to the idea that humankind has a central role in everything and that someone has to control that ‘power’ (and be paid for that). The exact same way that the acclaimed geocentric model from those prestigious greek scientist did that dirty job a thousand years ago for the Middle Age political institutions.
Humankind is not central to anything.
Real scientist have a deep knowledge of History of Science, because if you don’t know the past events you will for sure repeat the same mistakes. But today we are being flood with thousands of self-acclaimed scientist that don’t know anything about Ptolomy, Aristotle, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler … they just will say, write or do whatever can boost their monthly income or their political power … they don’t care about what really the Science is about … if they did, they would very, very, very careful about backing an idea that closely mimics the worst mistake in Science history.
To all the scientist that claim that it’s obvious that the Earth won’t survive to the humankind … I will say that it’s also obvious that the Sun revolves on the sky around us … once a day !!! … do you agree ? … think about it !
Regards.

You should check the background of “skeptics” that WUWT promotes. Rancourt was a U Ottawa physics professor, he was fired for breaking the rules. He is a anarchist who expresses contempt for fellow leftist professors. He writes at globalresearch.ca, a pseudo-academic, anti-globalization, anti-Israel, 9/11 conspiracy site. Even though there is some good science in his global warming articles, it is marred by radical political rants.
Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article970280.ece
His blog: http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/

De Rode Willem
September 20, 2010 at 8:54 am
I fear the lefties are liars, dangerous liars. The paleontologist record demonstrates that the earth is far more stable the you destroyers of life try to portray. The little bit of CO2 that mankind is liberating, gets incorporated into life. All of the carbon in fossil fuel, after all was living matter. Why do you greenies hate life so much?

GregL
September 20, 2010 at 9:56 am
“If she weighs the same as a duck she must be a witch.”
“Burn here!”
With lefty logic like that, no wonder we are in trouble.
BTW, that whole isotope ratio thing has enough holes in it to drive a herd of methane emitting buffalo through it.

Important post, and much respect is due to this scientist with integrity – but this story (and vid) has been on the net for a couple of months now. Why is it being posted on What’s Up just now?

@Rancourt
I read the wider indictment (some big lies of science) and was interested in hearing more of your take on acid rain. It that problem was inflated then it was the environmentalist movement that caused any recent warming by meddling with S02 content of fossil fuel emissions. SO2 is pretty effective at global cooling so when we burn fossil carbon without scrubbing out “pollutants” we get a balance of greenhouse gases and anti-greenhouse particates. Efforts to lower SO2 emission are ongoing with global phase-in of ultra-low sulfer diesel which will of course continue to help warm the planet. Not that warming the planet is a bad thing, mind you, it’s just that environmentalists inadvertantly caused it by insisting that particulates be removed from emissions. For that matter environmentalists encouraged the fossil fuel industry by another ill-advised 60’s and 70’s movement to limit construction of nuclear power plants.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Doctor Gee says:
September 20, 2010 at 10:16 am
Noting that his title indicates he is a “former” professor, I am sure that his comments will be dismissed by the liberal elite as the mere ramblings of a disgruntled crank. Alas, he will likely become a passing footnote marginalized, if necessary, by the same tired ad hominem attacks should he attempt to step out any further of his “place.”

He was dissmissed from Carleton University for giviing all his students A+’s. He believes that grades are not conducive to learning physics. The university administration felt otherwise.
Rancourt and I may share some views regarding the abuse of science in support of AGW, but many of his positions are really quite far out there. I therfore hesitate to take his “conversion” seriously, and think his other views make him too easily dismissed by to most people.

Wolfwalker you think to highly of yourself and mankind and by your statement I suspect you live in a city. I live in an area of Canada that has abandoned mining towns and after a hundred years hard to tell if anything was even there like I said only a hundred years. An old sawmill near me was abandoned and all the steel structures have collapsed and are quickly corroding and that was only 40 years with the forest taking over.. Natural microbes have taken care of a good portion of the gulf oil spill. I could go on but I think you get the idea. We need good stewardship of the earth for our survival but the earth can recover from whatever we do to it..Remember it was a molton rock at one time.

All so obvious that it is terrifying that it has to be said – and even more terrifying that any so-called ‘scientist’ should suggest anything different as anything but a wild hypothesis. Beddington and his ilk will, I believe, have caused devastating damage to the credibility of scientists for many decades.
I just wonder how long it will be after this distressing scam is fully debunked before a large section of society falls for yet another apocalyptic myth?!

This ocean acidification side show on the global warming science bandwagon, involving major nation research centers and international collaborations, is interesting to compare with the 1970s-1980s hoax of boreal forest lake acidification.
Nice! 🙂

“Nature” is going to “burp” one of these fine days, and all will be forgotten, all this wrangling to no rational purpose. Perhaps (some) humans will survive, perhaps not.

Sandy says:
September 20, 2010 at 11:11 am
“That’s enough right there to put him firmly in the “nutcase” category. Humans have devastated the natural order of things over most of the globe. With the possible exception of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps, there isn’t a square mile of land that hasn’t been seriously affected by human action, going back at least two thousand years and probably more than fifteen thousand.”
Been to Antarctica?
Be interesting to know many square miles on the continental USA “hasn’t been seriously affected by human action”
I would add places like Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Alaska and even Texas right here in the good old US of A, as well as most of Canada and much of Africa and South America have not been changed much by people. How about Siberia? The concept that the planet is totally changed by man is an east and west coast idea coming from big city folks who have never been out much. People are very much concentrated in cities in most of the world. And that is in itself part of the problem as thier thought processes are dependency oriented.

GregL says:
September 20, 2010 at 9:56 am
Conclusion: global warming is our fault.
You missed his point about alleviating guilt for being on the privileged end of the planet.

“If you have a theory that predicts higher temps from higher GHGs, then that theory is confirmed by the last 160 years.”
===================================================
Mosh, since no one knows, or can know, how much hotter, how much colder, how much of that higher temp is perfectly natural, and how much is because of GHG’s….
…….The theory is worthless.

k winterkorn says:
September 20, 2010 at 1:24 pm
The isotope ratios show that the rising CO2 is likely from a biologic source. This does not confirm that humans are the main source. Most CO2 from bio-sources are not human activity related, and variations in those sources are a possible source of CO2 change.
================================================
K, you are absolutely correct.
Thank you for bringing that up…bacteria are busy little buggers and there’s a lot of them.

Well reading the Good Doctor’s words; immediately brought to mind the extensive post by Ferdinand Englebeen purporting to show that (pretty much all) of the increase in atmospheric CO2 can be attributed to burning fossil fuels. That is my words summarising Ferdinand’s; and if I misstated his case; then my apology.
But I think Dr Rancourt, may be being a bit flippant.
Hopefully as we move into the future with a much greater energy production from Coal; especially in China and India; I would hope that at least there would be considerable (reasoanble) effort to try and make it as clean a coal technology as is practical.
But when I read Ferdinand’s extensive treatise; I get the feeling that a lot of people spend a lot of time playing with all kinds of variations on variations of isotopic contents of a variable that seems to have totslly gross gaps in the knowledge of just what the total carbon circulations in the atmospehre really are; and what is presented as a well mixed atmospehric component is anything but that. We learn that different plants have different metabolisms and these process 13C/12C differently; and all these things vary from pole to pole, and with altitude; and evidently with closeness to advanced cindustrialized nations.
Mean while we have one of the fundamental tenets of “Climate Science” the so-called “Climate Sensitivity” which to this day; people still insist is a logarithmic link between atmospehrics CO2 abundance and the earth mean Temperature (somewhere).
Now it seems like the “Climate sensitivity” is not too specific about where and how you measure either T or CO2; but I take the definition of “Climate Sensitivity to mean that:-
T2 – T1 = (cs) log|2 ((CO2,2) /(CO2,1)) ; where my symbols have their most obvious meanings; given the mathematical unfriendliness of this format.
T2 and T1 are two observations of some measure of global Temperature (somewhere) at two differnet time epochs; while CO2,2, and CO2,1 are the corresponding atmopsheric CO2 abundances corresponding to those T values.
Also it is to be understood that there may be some time offset, between the time the Temperatures are recorded, and the time that the CO2 abundances are recorded; and that time offset; evidently might be in the +/- 1000 year range.
In any case I presume that there exists some data sets of Temperatures observed or Proxied somewhere at some time on earth; and CO2 data also measured or proxied.
So here for example is one rendition of such data:-
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
So here we have both CO2 and Temperature Proxie data (presumably) going back for 600 million years; and encompassing some five “halvings” of the CO2 abundance over that time frame.
Now I have no idea who obtained either of these data sets; but they seem to be widely promulgated; and presumably have indergone considerable peer review.
So just looking at these two curves by eyeball, I would say there is absolutely no simple single valued continuous mathematical relationship between these two curves. Moreover by eye, I can see no conceivable time shift between these two curves; that would bring to light some simple single valued continuous functional relationship between these two sets of data.
So that then raises the possibility that this difficulty might disappear, if in fact we plot the Logarithm to the base two of the CO2 abundance; rather than the CO2 values themselves; since that is the form that is enshrined in the very notion of “Climate Sensitivity”.
So somebody must have the values for the raw data that plotted these two graphs. Therefore, somebody should be able to construct a single graph of this data; plotting T versus Log|2 (CO2). Moreover it should be possible to cross-correlate these two data sets for different time offsets between the data values, and arrive at some preferred propagation delay time for whatever is the response to whatever is the driving force; and then plot the logarithmic graph for that freferred time delay.
Well as simple as it sounds; nobody seems to have done just that; and yet everybody in theis “Scientific Discipline cites this “Climate Sensitivity” mantra as if it was carved as a footnote on the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mt Sainai.
So my challenge to the adherents to the cs mantra is simply this. Either refute this data; that is so widely disseminated to show why it should not be believed; or else do the cross-correlation and Logarithmic conversion to show us the graph that proves the concept of a “Climate Sensitivity” is valid. It’s about time saomebody did that.
Alternatively; I suppose somebody could do the same thing wiht the more recent data for apparently actually measured values for the Temperature (somewhere) and the CO2 for the last 100 to 150 years; for which we apparnetly have such actually measured data. In this case it evidently only encompasses about 1/3 of one doubling of CO2; but then it is accurately measured observational data. So do the log conversion on that, and provbe it is logarithmic, and not linear; or some other functional relationship.
I have one final observation relating to Ferdiand’s CO2 budgetary analysis.
We have since 2008; and maybe earlier experienced a several years long period of catastrophically reduced global industrial activity; whcih must have been accompanied with a large and easily measurable reduction in the amount and rate of fossil fuel burning on planet earth. Sinc the ML and other site annual CO2 measurement data clearly indicate rapid changes in the amount of CO2 in as little as a month; then clearly the measured CO2 observations from ML and other well known global sites; should carry a clear signature of this reduced industrial activity; since Ferdinand insists that the data clearly shows a fossil fuel based increase that should have considerably diminished. These changes, should at least be as measurable as the almost microscopic changes in 13C/12C ratios; that Ferdinand says are quite visible.
so does somebody have a citation to such data ?

Re my last comment: you can add bureaucrats to that too.

“”” Ammonite says:
September 20, 2010 at 1:39 pm
edmh says: September 20, 2010 at 10:48 am
“Just running the numbers …
• Greenhouse Effect = ~33.00 deg C
• Water Vapour accounts for about 95% of the Greenhouse Effect = ~ 31.35 deg C
• Other Greenhouse Gases GHGs account for 5% = ~1.65 deg C
… So closing carbon economies of the Whole World could only ever achieve a virtually undetectable less than 0.01deg C.”
What would happen if all the non-water-vapour GHGs were magically scrubbed from the atmosphere edmh?
CO2 has a residence time in the atmosphere of ~100 years. Water vapour has a residence time measured in days/weeks. Wherever it rained temperatures would plummet and the ability of the sun to return the lost water vapour to the atmosphere would be compromised. Welcome to snowball earth. Water-vapour on its own is not self-sustaining. “””
Perhaps you could elaborate on just exactly what YOU mean by :- “”” CO2 has a residence time in the atmosphere of ~100 years. “””
I have never seen a formal definition of what that means. Being an old analog circuit designer, I would be inclined to think that such a statement would mean that If I deposit a certain number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere; each of them having a serial number for positive identification; and they decay in some exponential fahion; meaning that the rate of loss is proportional to the difference between the present value; and the normal “equilibrium” value; as is seen in countless numbers of natural phenomena; then in 100 years, I should find perhaps n0o more than 1% of the original serial numbered CO2 molecules.
Such a result would indicate a decay “time Constant” of 20 years; sicne five time constants is the time for decay to 1% residual. If a 5% residual amount is acceptable; then that would take three times constants; so the Time constant would be 33 years.
But I’ll go with the more stringent requirement.
If the time constant is 20 years, then simple mathematics shows that the initial rate of decay; due to whatever removal process has the 20 year time cosntant, would be a rate of 5% per year (1 / tau). The actual decay would be to 1/e or 37% remaining after one time constant, and about 69% of 20 years to decay to 50%.
So how does that rate of correction stack up against actual obsevations.
Well the actual change in CO2 that happens at the arctic region every single year, is 18 ppm peak to peak; and that change happens in just 5 months when the CO2 is going down, and in the remaining 7 months of the year when it is increasing.
So if we take the present excess of CO2 at 390 ppm, over the apparent long term equilibrium value of 280 pppm as being 110 ppm then the average rate of decay over five months is 18/110 or -3.27% per month. This is a small enough change to take as being approximately the same as the initial rate of change which is 1/tau. So that means the decay time constant is 1/3.27% or 30.5 months; about 2 1/2 years.
That is a whole lot faster than a 20 year time constant; eight times faster in fact; and that is actual observed measured data; which recurrs every single year.
So I think the 100 year residence time is pure bunkum.
In any case; it is quite academic; because one CO2 molecule is about as good as another; and the same goes for H2O molecules; and the plain fact of the matter is that the amount of water vapor in the atmospehre is always a whole lot more than the amount of CO2; and it doesn’t matter a hill of beans if one molecule exits stage left to be replaced by another; so the whole concept of “Residence time” is simply a red herring.
No matter how quickly a particular serial numbered H2O molecule leaves the atmosphere the total number in the atmospehre remains pretty much the same on a global scale.
And as it so happens hemans in their automobiles ; and in their respiration emit more H2O to the atmosphere than they do CO2; so if CO2 is a human caused dangerous GHG pollutant with public health problems then so too is H2O’ so we shoud restrict and or tax it as well.

Steven Mosher says:
September 20, 2010 at 1:23 pm
I’ll put it another way: If you propose a theory which says that the effect of more Ghgs in the atmosphere is an earth that is the same temperature or cooler… Then that theory is disconfirmed by the last 160 years. If you have a theory that predicts higher temps from higher GHGs, then that theory is confirmed by the last 160 years.
========================================================
But then you’d have to find a reason the climate changed to warmer in the past, sans an increase in GHGs. It is only uninteresting to people that don’t believe current and past warming is related. Moreover, the theory was retrofitted to the “evidence”. The cyclical occurrences of nature have been documented and accepted in many different times and areas of nature. I would assert the recent warming we’ve seen is nothing more than a residual effect of in the increase in the ability to monitor such things. The fact that we don’t know all of the inputs and forcing of climate pretty much belays confirmation of anything.
Using that logic, I can show my drinking causes global darkness. I usually drink in the evenings and lo and behold when I look out my window, it’s dark outside before I go to bed. EVERY TIME! Of course, I’ll need more funding to continue my experiments and research. Neither my nor the above theory has been confirmed by anything.

What De Rode Willem says, this is bunkum.
Denis Rancourt is physicist that doesn’t know about diffusion and conservation of mass.
sad.

[REPLY – Differing views are permitted here. Personally, I happen to side with Ferdinand, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hear arguments from all sides and not take it as an insult. ~ Evan]
Absolutely spot on. This is what makes this and sceptic blogs in general infinitely superior to the pro-AGW sites.

@jim G:
‘The concept that the planet is totally changed by man is an east and west coast idea coming from big city folks who have never been out much. People are very much concentrated in cities in most of the world. And that is in itself part of the problem as thier thought processes are dependency oriented.’
Quite. The planet is a lot bigger than people who live in crowded hot cities seem to imagine. When you travel by air, you easily forget how much of the earth’s surface you’ve crossed in a relatively short time. Ask a Roman legionary, marching from Britain to Syria at maybe 15 miles a day, how big the planet is; or a 17th century sailor heading to India from Europe.

“…you still have to face the fundamental physics which says, if that past time in history had as much GHGs as Today, it would have been warmer than it was… The theory of AGW doesnt strictly preclude the existence of warmer periods in the past. What it says is that the current warming we see is best explained by increased GHGs. ” -Steve Mosher
—————————————————————–
So what you’re saying is that we need to emit more CO2 in order to avoid the next ice-age.

His cost for speaking up!
[mod note – perhaps this would be better under Tips & Notes ~ac]

Enneagram says:
September 20, 2010 at 10:16 am
THINK!, have you noticed that every green proposition is tanatic?, enthropic, against Eros, against Life itself?.
Their dream world: A Giant mountain of human compost!
Life is Nature´s “trick” to overcome Death
Let us awake!
They are the preachers of Thanatos, the pontifices of doom, the church of Negation, proclaiming the Gospel of Hate!

I have the proof right here. Apparently, Hitler, Stalin and Mao weren’t efficient enough exterminators –
http://www.prisonplanet.com/global-warming-alarmist-calls-for-eco-gulags-to-re-educate-climate-deniers.html

Jim G wrote: “The concept that the planet is totally changed by man is an east and west coast idea coming from big city folks who have never been out much. People are very much concentrated in cities in most of the world.”
Today, yes. Ten thousand years ago, no.
One of the ways in which modern humans’ arrogance manifests itself is in thinking that “primitive” means “inconsequential.” Stephen Budiansky wrote a book about this a few years back, Nature’s Keepers, documenting some of the ways in which even primitive humans can and do manipulate their environment in massive ways. For example:
* Whenever humans move into an area for the first time, they permanently alter local flora and fauna by their activities. It’s generally accepted that humans played some role in the extermination of several regions’ megafaunas over the last 50,000 years, more or less — all through the Americas, Australia, New Zealand…
* The Serengeti of modern legend, with its fantastic show of wild ruminants and the predators that prey on them, is a direct result of human activity. For centuries the local people routinely burned the plains to stop natural succession and provide good grazing for their herds of cattle. In the late 1800s, epidemics devastated the natives, and soon they and their cattle and their fires were largely gone. The populations of wild ruminants exploded, as did their predators. That’s how we got the golden age of African big game hunting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
* North American Amerinds also used large-scale burns as a method of controlling vegetation. It’s now known that much of the ‘untouched wilderness’ that white American settlers found as they moved west across North America was highly unnatural, a result of Amerind land management practices followed by distorted succession when the Amerinds vanished and the areas went wild again. Much of the great American prairie of the Great Plains, grasslands stretching as far as the eye can see, was entirely artificial. When the fires stopped, the grass retreated and the trees and brush moved back in.
* In northwestern Europe, humans cleared old-growth forest from huge tracts of land, tens of thousands of acres, in a few decades, and replaced it with open land suitable for grazing cattle and sheep. The loss of so much forest seems to have had noticeable long-term effects on regional climate and wildlife.
* Every time humans move into a previously-uninhabited region, they bring invasive species with them — animals, plants, microbes. These invaders permanently alter the local ecosystems.
* As Yellowstone Park’s inhabitants found to their sorrow, even attempts to protect the land from human disruption typically lead to greater disruption, as in the “fight every fire” doctrine of the National Park Service which led directly to the catastrophic firestorm of 1988.
It’s true that, given enough time, an ecosystem will always rebuild itself. But what gets rebuilt is rarely if ever what was there before. Man’s fingerprints remain, even centuries later.

To the person bemoaning his 128 “IQ” test. Dr. Benjamin Fine’s 1976 Classic:
“The Stranglehold of IQ”, should nicely dismiss any worries about IQ.
“IQ” is quite as bogus as AWG.
Sorry, but learning this is very important. Remember the L.A. yacht yard worker called out to haul down the “upside down” flag on the yacht, which the club members who owned the yacht had put up not only upside down but also JAMMED a rather simple mechanism…the yacht belonged to the L.A. Mensa club. One of the methods of getting into the Mensa club: An IQ test of 130 or above. Sanford and Binet would be so proud!

George E. Smith says:
September 20, 2010 at 3:01 pm
so does somebody have a citation to such data ?
George, I followed your link and found another link to the temperature graph.
Looks like it states “Paul Fomat Project”.
Nothing turned up on Google.

Robert says:
September 20, 2010 at 8:46 pm
Having been a student at that University while Dr. Rancourt was there. I think it was perhaps necessary that WUWT mentions that he was a former professor because he was fired what has been termed by some as academic misconduct. He was not a climate researcher and perhaps people on here have the impression he was one. The Laboratory for Climatology and Paleoclimatology was operating at the University of Ottawa and he certainly did not participate.
===========================================
Your subject-changing and trying to focus “against the man” don’t need any further attention.
Good thing he can speak for himself on these interviews, and he does not need your commentary.
Res ipsa loquiter.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

David, UK
thanks for the laugh about politicians!!

RW
You, Ferdinand and the AGW all make the same mistake, ignoring the outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans since the end of the LIA! Ferdinand claims he knows how much is human induced because burning fossil fuels will increase the CO2-12 percentage. But he fails to see or to mentioned that the CO2 generated by ocean biomass and the CO2 outgassed by warming oceans will be almost entirely CO2-12, totally negating his analysis and conclusion. Mankind has only been producing measurable CO2 emissions for the past 60 years yet CO2 concentrations have been linearly increasing since the end of the LIA. But AGW proponents ignore data and facts that conflict with their theory and agenda!
AGW is a scam, only a fool or someone with a ulterior motive promote it!
Bill Yarber

George E. Smith says: Sep 20, 2010, 3:31pm
– Perhaps you could elaborate on just exactly what YOU mean by :- ” CO2 has a residence time in the atmosphere of ~100 years.” {lots of valid calculations} … So that means the decay time constant … about 2 1/2 years. So I think the 100 year residence time is pure bunkum. … In any case; it is quite academic; because one CO2 molecule is about as good as another; and the same goes for H2O molecules … so the whole concept of “Residence time” is simply a red herring.
Hi George. I like your method for estimating residence time of an individual CO2 molecule. It is a sensible skeptical approach, yields the correct order of magnitude (see Segalstad/Essenhigh) and reveals some sloppiness in my post.
I should have used the term “effective residence time” in reference to “100 years”, meaning the estimated time it would take to permanently scrub the increase of one accumulated CO2 molecule from the atmosphere (rather than that of a specific CO2 molecule – the figure you have calculated.) That is, if the atmosphere contained X molecules of CO2 and one was added, how long would it take before the atmosphere was back to X molecules (not necessarily the same ones it started with). Please note that the “100 year” figure is unlikely to be very precise. (Effective residence time may act as a gauge as to how long we may be stuck with a problem should CO2 have the impact predicted by many climate scientists.)
As you also correctly point out, one molecule is as good as another. If each H2O molecule lost is reliably replaced by another it is irrelevant what the residence time is and in this sense it is indeed a “red herring” – in a steady state situation.
The thought experiment in response to edmh’s comment was to consider what would happen should all non-water-vapour GHGs be scrubbed from the atmosphere never to return. The key question is “would a lost H2O molecule reliably be replaced in such a situation?” If so there would be little change (as is edmh’s implicit assumption from my reading). If not, there would be an inexorable decline potentially leading to snowball earth – my expectation. (In such a case H2O residence time would influence the rate of decline but not the end result.)
Muddy enough?

Bill Yarber says:
September 20, 2010 at 10:31 pm
RW
You, Ferdinand and the AGW all make the same mistake, ignoring the outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans since the end of the LIA!
It took an ice age and a 5-6 deg swing in temperatures to cause a 100 ppm change in CO2 levels. All the long term records, e.g. Armagh, CET, Uppsala, all show an increase in temperature since ~1800 of around 1 degree C. Since ~1850 CO2 concentration has increased by more than 100 ppm and shows no sign of slowing up.

“thebuckwheat says:
September 20, 2010 at 10:56 am
“For left progressives to collaborate with First World governments that practice global extortion and geopolitical wars in order to pass carbon schemes to undemocratically manage and control the developments of non-First-World communities and sovereign states is obscene, racist, and cruelly cynical.”
This is misplaced hyperbole. Human history is clear: states have used credit expansion (inflation of their currency) to finance war, either to deflect some domestic issue away from the ruling elites, or to seek economic domination over others. “”
thebuckwheat: Inflating the money supply is not free money! Those bonds are interest bearing are they not? Banksters are still collecting on war bonds! And when inflation has been abused to the point of risking the currency? An alternative scam is required, one that can still fill the bankster trough even with declining/negative GDP/growth, that’s where the carbon scam comes in IMO 😉

I think that Dr. Rancourt made the same mistake as may others before him: he compares the one-way addition of CO2 by humans with the amount of natural CO2 circulating through the atmosphere, which shows very little natural variability (currently only halve the human addition)
Compare that to a fountain with a huge pump circulating the water in the reservoir with some 10,000 liter per minute, while you add 1 liter per minute in the reservoir with a hose. The addition is only 1/10,000th of the total “addition”, but even so the content of reservoir will increase from the 1 liter per minute, not from the 10,000 liter which circulates.
In the past 50+ years, nature was a net sink for CO2, whatever the amount of CO2 circulating through the atmosphere. Thus the contribution of nature to the increase in the atmosphere was zero, nada, nothing, at least in the past 50 years.

Bill Yarber says:
September 20, 2010 at 9:25 am
And many others…
Yes, human burning of fossil fuels have put more CO2 into the atmosphere. But it is trivial compared to natural sources. Fortunately, natural sinks (biomass), absorb 99.+% of natural plus human CO2 emmissions. What you are ignoring is that our oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface, is the largest source and sink of CO2 – far exceeding all other sources, including human produced CO2!
Some realistic figures:
Some 150 GtC of the 800 GtC in the atmosphere is exchanged with other reservoirs, mainly the oceans and vegetation. That is exchange, which over a full seasonal cycle shows a net sink rate of 4 +/- 2 GtC per year. Thus regardless how much is exchanged over the seasons, the net result is a loss of 0.5% in total CO2 (including 0.5% of the human contribution).
The net result is an increase of 4 GtC/year, all human caused, as nature as a whole is a net sink. The year by year natural variability is quite small: +/- 2 GtC/year, much smaller than the human contribution. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg
The reason why the natural variability is quite small probably is that the inflows and outflows due to the seasons are countercurrent for vegetation and oceans. But from the d13C and oxygen balances can be deduced that both vegetation and oceans are net sinks for CO2, not sources.

wolfwalker says:
September 20, 2010 at 9:29 am
Is even the presence of humans significant on the rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?
Hmm… Seems like he meant this as a serious question, not a rhetorical one.
That’s enough right there to put him firmly in the “nutcase” category. Humans have devastated the natural order of things over most of the globe. With the possible exception of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps, there isn’t a square mile of land that hasn’t been seriously affected by human action, going back at least two thousand years and probably more than fifteen thousand.”
And the world is better for humans around. We may have caused extinctions, but we prevent them too. Wonder how many dinosaurs would still be around had humans been around to save them. Point is: mass extinctions and global catastrophes happened all the time before even our most primitive relatives showed up. We haven’t done anything even close to that range of magnitude. Not even a minor blip.

Christopher Hanley – and what do you suppose has happened to the rate of increase of CO2 concentrations since 1945?

k winterkorn says:
September 20, 2010 at 1:24 pm
The isotope ratios show that the rising CO2 is likely from a biologic source. This does not confirm that humans are the main source. Most CO2 from bio-sources are not human activity related, and variations in those sources are a possible source of CO2 change.
That would be true if the oxygen balance shows that biolife is a net sink for CO2, thus biolife increases the d13C level by a net 12CO2 uptake, but we measure a decrease…

Roy UK, you asked for comments on the website link: although water vapour is an important greenhouse gas, it also has an important negative feed-back mechanism, i.e. cloud formation. CO2 does not have this. So water vapour definitely is part of the model, but if it’s negative feedback (clouds) happened to exactly balance its greenhouse effect, that would leave CO2 as the important greenhouse gas. See what I’m getting at?

George E. Smith says:
September 20, 2010 at 3:01 pm
But when I read Ferdinand’s extensive treatise; I get the feeling that a lot of people spend a lot of time playing with all kinds of variations on variations of isotopic contents of a variable that seems to have totslly gross gaps in the knowledge of just what the total carbon circulations in the atmospehre really are; and what is presented as a well mixed atmospehric component is anything but that. We learn that different plants have different metabolisms and these process 13C/12C differently; and all these things vary from pole to pole, and with altitude; and evidently with closeness to advanced cindustrialized nations.
Your pages about the different metabolisms and therefore different d13C rates of different species are very interesting. If vegetation was a net source for CO2, it would be near impossible to make a differentiation between natural and fossil CO2 from (former) vegetation. But as there is a small deficit (since about 1990) in oxygen use, the whole biological world is a net absorber of CO2. Thus whatever the 13C/12C discrimination in the different species, the current biological world increases the d13C level in the atmosphere, while we measure a decrease…
Mean while we have one of the fundamental tenets of “Climate Science” the so-called “Climate Sensitivity” which to this day; people still insist is a logarithmic link between atmospehrics CO2 abundance and the earth mean Temperature (somewhere).
I think that we agree on this, that the climate sensitivity for CO2 is quite limited and probably far below the 1.5-4.5°C range of the IPCC.
I have one final observation relating to Ferdiand’s CO2 budgetary analysis.
We have since 2008; and maybe earlier experienced a several years long period of catastrophically reduced global industrial activity; which must have been accompanied with a large and easily measurable reduction in the amount and rate of fossil fuel burning on planet earth. Sinc the ML and other site annual CO2 measurement data clearly indicate rapid changes in the amount of CO2 in as little as a month; then clearly the measured CO2 observations from ML and other well known global sites; should carry a clear signature of this reduced industrial activity; since Ferdinand insists that the data clearly shows a fossil fuel based increase that should have considerably diminished. These changes, should at least be as measurable as the almost microscopic changes in 13C/12C ratios; that Ferdinand says are quite visible.
so does somebody have a citation to such data ?
Unfortunately, emission figures are always years later published than CO2 levels…
What I have heard is that emissions reduced by about 20% compared to previous years (we still use heating in cold winters… and production was lower, but not zero). That would reduce the increase rate with about 20% (or more), but the strong El Niño increased the increase rate with a higher figure last year, thus the increase rate has hardly changed…

Sorry OT, but I had to say something about this comment,
“Water-vapor on its own is not self-sustaining.”
Gases/minerals from the sun enters above Ionosphere as H, He, and O, and lower down diatomic molecules N2, O2, NO etc are present. The ionosphere is electrically charged ions and the UV rays ionizes these gases.
In the ionosphere:
O + h v = O+ + e
N + h v = N+ + e
In the neutral thermosphere:
N + O2 = NO + O
N + NO = N2 + O
O + O = O2
The intake of gases/partials from the the sun or processing of gases/hydrocarbons through atmospheric chemistry as nitrogen, oxygen, argon, c02, H2O and isotopes like Xenon or C-14(byproduct from the separation of oxygen and nitrogen) are aways being produced.
The main gases found on the earth are 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, 0.03% carbon dioxide and 1% water vapor.
Once the earth had no water, water started forming, shallow oceans slowly were created. If earth had the same amount of H2O from the beginning, there would be WAY more land compared to our 75% water surface and volume on earth est. at 1.3 bill. Cue. Kilometers, the volume above sea level land is .1% at 13 bil.cu kilometers would also be much higher. We do not lose water to space, 99.99997% of our atmospheric is below 100 km (62 mi), the ionosphere stretches from 50 to 1,000 km (31 to 620 mi). No loss of water vapor, just more.
Oh, getting back ON-TOPIC,
Dr. Denis Rancourt has the right idea looking at CAGW science, but believes it’s a BIG conspiracy theory. This is growing pains of scientific knowledge or understanding, always will be there. Today computer models and GIS have become science, GIGO. The scientists are not evil or plotting, just a training/ belief in a hypotheses beginning to be proven wrong and are using fantasy computer models when they have no answers or scientific evidence to back it up. A Hitech version of Rolling the bones from a shaman, only they posses the truth and interpretation. A gasp of a dieing religion. But not till they have warned of a holy Armageddon doomsday from our disbelief, penance to change it and sacrifices of non believers.
We are there right now in more then one area of science.

Owen says:
September 20, 2010 at 3:49 pm
“The rise in atmospheric CO2 has closely tracked human combustion of fossil fuels, and it will continue to do so! Anyone want to challenge that notion?”
Sure. It hasn’t even come close to tracking it. Atmospheric CO2 has increased by only a small fraction of total fossil fuel combustion. Only by half and that’s before considering how much old growth timber was harvested and burned for fuel or just simply burned away by slash and burn agriculture or made into durable goods and paper and that’s also before methane (which decomposes into CO2 after several years) has been factored in.
The biosphere appears to be greedily sucking up the great majority of human CO2 emissions and is still asking for more. CO2 is a limiting factor for the primary producers in the food chain and in many cases it’s the only limiting factor.

John Finn says:
September 20, 2010 at 4:01 pm
“If all water vapour were removed from the atmosphere more than half of the current greenhouse effect would still remain.”
Claims need to be tested. How do you propose to test that one?
In fact the claim that water vapor dominates the greenhouse effect to that proportion was experimentally tested and confirmed over 150 years ago by John Tindall. He couldn’t even measure the longwave absorptivity of various gases in his laboratory appartus until he removed all the water vapor and he couldn’t measure any absorption at all in standard atmosphere after removing the water vapor.

Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:03 am
re; net producer of O2
Gee, ya think? It’s nice to know that the hypothetical buildup of O2 by green plants over the course of billions of years hasn’t been refuted yet.
However, it does not follow that plants are a net sink of CO2. The reservoirs of biologically available CO2 are huge compared to the amount that is actually taken up and released by biological processes.
A reservoir of biological available CO2 doesn’t add or substract anything from the atmosphere. Even the uptake by photosynthesis at one side and the decay/burning/eating of the biological available CO2 doesn’t change the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Only the unbalance between uptake and release does change the atmospheric CO2 content. That can be measured by the oxygen balance.
Even if the change in oxygen level over the past decade is small and the error margins are huge, the balance shows that all biolife together is a net sink for CO2.

Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:40 am
Sure. It hasn’t even come close to tracking it. Atmospheric CO2 has increased by only a small fraction of total fossil fuel combustion.
Come on Dave, what about the increase tracking the emissions with a ratio of 53%, good to explain 99.66% of the increase? See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
Any natural cause which would track the emissions at such an exact ratio?

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:13 am
“That humans are not the only cause of the increase easely can be falsified, if the measured increase in the atmosphere was larger than the calculated emissions. As long as that is not the case, the emissions are the sole cause. It is that simple.”
Are you still spouting that idiotic logical fallacy? You still can’t see that in a complex continuously varying system with feedback or adaption it is meaningless to label any one thing as the “sole cause” on the basis of an underspecified simple sum? How can you call anything a sole cause when you simply do not know what would have happened in its absence? You don’t know what the CO2 concentration would have been. You don’t know what the isotopic ratio would have been. I guess I was right to ignore your parts 2 and 3. You are just making the same egregious blunders all over again.

I view fossil fuel burning as tapping into nature’s piggy bank of stored photosynthetic energy and nutrients. During better times for the biosphere (read not in an ice age like we’re in now) an abundance of plants and animals, they say the earth was lush from pole to pole, expired and decomposed in anaerobic conditions into an energy & nutrient rich mix of solids, liquids, and gases. Putting it back into the biosphere during an ice age seems like a good thing for as long as we can manage it. The biggest problem in my estimation is the piggy bank has a bottom and when we get close to it that’s when the real trouble begins. Unless of course a supervolcano, big asteroid or comet impace, coronal mass ejection, nearby supernova, disease, or things of nature don’t take out modern civilization first. Life is robust and has survived these assaults countless times. Civilization is what is fragile.

A greenhouse with a huge hole in its roof (ozone layer) is not a greenhouse. There can be no greenhouse effect without a greenhouse.

With the possible exception of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps, there isn’t a square mile of land that hasn’t been seriously affected by human action, going back at least two thousand years and probably more than fifteen thousand.
~wolfwalker 9:29
You should come to Alberta or B.C. Canada, maybe take a drive up the Alaskan Highway.
You’d see so much untouched wilderness from the car you would probably soil your pants in fear.

@Engelbeen
Air entrapment in ice cores occur at depths of 60 to 100 meters. The oldest & longest core taken is 3000 meters and the bottom is ostensibly dated at 160,000 years barely reaching back into the prior interglacial. Anyhow, if the dating is accurate the average deposition time for a meter of ice is about 5 years and entrapment doesn’t occur for 300 – 500 years and that’s assuming gas migration and chemistry with and through the ice stops at that point even under tens and eventually hundreds of bars of bars of pressure where ice acts like a slow moving liquid with horizontal flow confounding things. Thus any reading of atmospheric gases in entrapped bubbles is an average of those gases at best of 300-500 years. Short term fluctuations such as might be driven by climate cycles less than a century in duration, like the decadal oscillations of ocean surface temperatures cannot be read from ice cores.
I understand that laboratory measurements of CO2 began about 200 years ago and contrary to indirect or proxy paleoreconstructions CO2 in the past 200 years has been recorded as high as 400ppm. Warmists dismiss these with a wave of their hand saying there must be some kind of mistake made in the measurement despite the fact that beginning around 1850 it was a standard chemical test with 3% or better accuracy.
So bascially thousands of lab measurements of CO2 for more than 100 years before Mauna Loa became the yardstick are being ignored and in this same period ice core data is missing because it takes at least 300 years for entrapment.

Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:00 am

Claims need to be tested. How do you propose to test that one?
The very same radiative transfer equations which are validated by observations. Radiation ar t frequnencies which can be absorbed by water vapour can also be absorbed by other ghgs. Remove all water vapour and ~36% of the greenhouse effect would be lost, i.e. ~64% would remain. Remove all other ghgs except for water vapour and ~66% would remain. That, of course, assumes it would be possible to remove all other ghg AND retain the current concentration of water vapour.
In fact the claim that water vapor dominates the greenhouse effect to that proportion was experimentally tested and confirmed over 150 years ago by John Tindall.
The presence of water vapour in the atmosphere relies on (a) warming at the surface and (b) a relatively wam atmosphere to hold the water vapour. The average residence time for water vapour molecules is a matter of days. Water vapour is essentially a feedback. Without the other ghgs the surface and atmosphere would be colder and the concentration of water vapour would be reduced.

Bart says:
September 21, 2010 at 9:26 am
This is not an apt metaphor. The fountain has a drain.
Yes, but that doesn’t change the basic error of Dr. Rancourt: that he counts the input of the circulation as “addition”, while the only real addition is what is supplied by the hose and the drain only removes halve of what is added, still resulting in an increase of the reservoir…
It is the nature of feedback systems, Ferdinand, that they do not react one way to normal inputs, and another way for others. If a tight equilibrium is being maintained, then the system has the bandwidth for low sensitivity to exogenous inputs.
Agreed, but you need to take into account the time frame: in the past near million years, temperature was leading the dance and CO2 levels followed with a lag of about 800 years (warming) to several thousands of years (cooling). Thus while the equilibrium was tightly maintained, it needed many hundreds of years to reach the 100 ppmv difference between cold and warm periods. Recently we released some 200 ppmv in only 160 years (mostly in the second halve). Almost asking for a pulse response, compared to the past changes. But with a half life of only 40 years, this excess would disappear in only a few hundred years, peanuts compared to the timeframe of a glacial-interglacial or reverse changes.
That is almost pure conjecture. It amazes me how you cannot see the number of thinly supported assumptions you implicitly make in such statements.
The emission rates are based on fossil fuel sales (taxes!), the increase is what is observed in the past 50+ years and the variability in sink rate is the difference between these two. No assumptions at all. Only maybe some underestimates of the fuel use due to under the counter sales… See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg
I’d agree with you there, but I suspect you typed in haste.
Indeed, the opposite was intended, but have you any indication that the ice core record is wrong (besides what Jaworowski says, but that was discussed in my part 2).
Plot the annual mean growth here. It is quite obvious.
You are looking at the derivative of the increase, the increase rate, which is heavily influenced by (temporal) temperature changes like El Niño’s and Pinatubo eruptions. These make that there is a variability around the trend, but that doesn’t say anything about the cause of the trend itself, see the previous figure.

Bart says:
And, if that captured “a few hundred years ago” were suddenly to be released?
That would be noticed in a sudden increase of CO2 levels, if that was a high enough quantity. But most of the recent organics are recycled within a decade or so.
Still there are discrepancies in the definition:
600 years old peat burning is added to human use of “fossil” fuel, while burning 600 years old wood (old house,…) is counted as “natural”.
This is logically flawed. All the measured increase shows is that, at least temporarily, the net sinks are less than the net sources. But, it does not say anything about the internal composition of sinks and sources.
As long as we are talking about “our” contribution against natural contribution, it doesn’t matter how the sources and sinks are distributed in nature. All we know is that nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2 (and in detail the oceans as well as vegetation). I have used the bank account comparison (too) many times:
If you bring your reserve money of each month to the bank and you figure out in their yearly balance that the bank has an enormous turnover, but that their profit is less than your deposit that year, don’t you think that it will be safe to get your money back as soon as possible and look for another bank? Whatever what the other clients may have done in that year…
Any affine trend slope is a precise ratio of any other trend slope. This is a tautology.
In general yes, but in this case both are slightly exponential and while in many cases correlation is not causation, in this case it is very likely that the emissions cause the increase, as there is a simple physical explanation for it: the oceans are slow emitters/uptakers of CO2 and vegetation growth responds to higher CO2 levels, but a 100% increase in CO2 doesn’t double the uptake. Further, compare the same for temperature changes (also increasing in the period 1975-2000):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_co2_1900_2004.jpg
Which shows the “normal” natural variability…

Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 10:06 am
Air entrapment in ice cores occur at depths of 60 to 100 meters. The oldest & longest core taken is 3000 meters and the bottom is ostensibly dated at 160,000 years barely reaching back into the prior interglacial. Anyhow, if the dating is accurate the average deposition time for a meter of ice is about 5 years and entrapment doesn’t occur for 300 – 500 years and that’s assuming gas migration and chemistry with and through the ice stops at that point even under tens and eventually hundreds of bars of bars of pressure where ice acts like a slow moving liquid with horizontal flow confounding things. Thus any reading of atmospheric gases in entrapped bubbles is an average of those gases at best of 300-500 years. Short term fluctuations such as might be driven by climate cycles less than a century in duration, like the decadal oscillations of ocean surface temperatures cannot be read from ice cores.
You haven’t read my part 2 about ice cores at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/20/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-2/
In short: there are enormous differences in accumulation rate between ice cores, from near the Antarctic coast (Law Dome: 1.2 meters ice equivalent/year) and high altitude inland (Vostok: a few mm/year). That results in very fast to very slow closing of the gas bubbles. For the fastest Law Dome ice cores: 8 years, for Dome C: 540 years average.
Opposite is the length of the record: Law Dome only 150 years back for the deepest usable core sections, while Dome C goes 800,000 years back in time.
The objections of Jaworowski against the reliability of ice cores are completely outdated and already disputed by the work of Etheridge (1996!).
I understand that laboratory measurements of CO2 began about 200 years ago and contrary to indirect or proxy paleoreconstructions CO2 in the past 200 years has been recorded as high as 400ppm. Warmists dismiss these with a wave of their hand saying there must be some kind of mistake made in the measurement despite the fact that beginning around 1850 it was a standard chemical test with 3% or better accuracy.
So bascially thousands of lab measurements of CO2 for more than 100 years before Mauna Loa became the yardstick are being ignored and in this same period ice core data is missing because it takes at least 300 years for entrapment.
Some of the methods were simply not accurate enough, but that is not the main problem with the historical measurements. The main problem is where was measured: in towns, fields, under and inbetween the leaves of growing vegetation,… Only measurements over the oceans or coastal with wind from the seaside would give reliable “background” measurements. And these show values around the ice core measurements for the same gas age…

Ferdinand,
I do not want to continue debating items on which we will never agree, so I will just address a few of your assertions.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 11:52 am
“You are looking at the derivative of the increase…”
That would be why I stated “…it is abundantly clear that it is decelerating…”.
“… that doesn’t say anything about the cause of the trend itself…”
If you filter out the variability, you will see a clear deceleration. Or, if you are not familiar with designing and implementing filters, perhaps you can just do a 2nd order polynomial curve fit. What curvature do you get?
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 12:14 pm
“But most of the recent organics are recycled within a decade or so.”
Source? What are the error bars? Why do you trust the source?
“All we know is that nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2…”
You do not, in fact, know that. What you know is that your model for natural influences as a whole is a net sink.
“…but in this case both are slightly exponential…”
Saying they are “slightly exponential” only sounds like it conveys more information than “they have the same curvature sign.” It’s really not as portentous as you imagine. The odds of finding two such similarly progressing signals at random are about 50/50.
“Which shows the “normal” natural variability…”
How do you allocate which part is “natural” and which is not? Do you assume that natural variability is just the high frequency zig-zaggy part, and the rest is not “natural”? On what basis do you render such a judgment?

Tim Clark says:
September 21, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Cooler water absorbs more CO2. Hmmmm, is that your point?
Even warmer water absorbs more CO2 if you increase the CO2 (partial) pressure in the atmosphere, which is what happened by the emissions…

Scott Ramsdell says: September 20, 2010 at 9:51 am

…link to a UN blurb stating that we have successfully turned the corner on the ozone hole, and it should close by 2048.
I think it’s successes such as [this one]…

Hate to disabuse you Scott but that pair of pics was cherry picked. 2002 didn’t fit the anthropogenic message. Have a look (scroll down to near the bottom). Ozone fluctuation is at least partly natural and the mechanism is IIRC largely known or at least suspected. As with CO2 “warming”, the question is how much is natural?

“”” Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 1:40 pm
George E. Smith says:
September 21, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Can you comment on this paper Ferdinand. I’ve been aware of it since it first appeared. Do you know of any followup information on this information.
It is possible that the increase in certain parts of the earth of vegetation growth encompasses the releases of CO2 in the same area. But I think that the time frame in this case was rather short. “””
Now I thought that CO2 had a 200 year residence time; and this paper dates from 1998.
So how could the situation have altereed very much since 1998; we certainly haven’t had any dramatic changes in emission rates over that time frame.

Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Okay. Then by that logic it’s just as simple that anthropogenic CO2 emissions each year are 3% of all CO2 emissions and natural emissions & sinks which are 97% of the show could easily vary by that much or much over decadal timescales. The tail doesn’t wag the dog.
No, as the 97% are not “emissions” but only part of a cycle. The observed variability of this cycle is only halve what the human emissions show…

George E. Smith says:
September 21, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Now I thought that CO2 had a 200 year residence time; and this paper dates from 1998.
So how could the situation have altereed very much since 1998; we certainly haven’t had any dramatic changes in emission rates over that time frame.
It is a lot more difficult to measure CO2 fluxes over land than background CO2 levels far from sources and sinks. Flux measurements are done with tall towers (200-400 m height) with intakes at different heights. The CO2 level differences give an idea about the CO2 flow in/out the vegetation and/or other sources and sinks in a large area below the tower.
But that is partly based on models about the vertical and horizontal mixing of CO2 with different wind speeds, etc. In the begin years of the measurements, these models might have been far off, nowadays better, I don’t know. I only know that flux measurements are not easy…

@Engelbeen
Unless you’re looking at a different dataset than me 1928 and 1948 are almost identical as are all the years in between. While the absolute error in any one year might be off by 1% the trend should not be unless the experiment was so sloppily done it couldn’t achieve better accuracy from one test to the next. You have not explained a thing in your response.

I still have serious concerns about validity of simple Ferdinand’s model of A=B+C-D complexity. But in any case the origin of CO2 is a moot question, because the global warming signature of the alleged radiative imbalance is missing. Stratosphere cooling and polar amplification aside, there are two more “burning issues” with this signature.
Denis G. Rancourt mentions “lake acidification” hoax. I tried to look this subject up, and all I found was about acidification due to sulfur compounds and other non-CO2 related stuff. The warmists frequently hang on “CO2 leads to ocean acidification” issue. But the ocean is vast and deep, measuring means are scarce, so the “global estimate” does not look overly convincing. At the same time one might think that inner lakes have much less mass, yet their drainage basins are substantial. Therefore, if the cause of acidification in oceans is the excess CO2 in air, then lakes (say, Caspian Sea, Aral, others) must be “acidifying” like hell. I found no literature about vast acidification of lakes due to CO2.
Likewise, it is kind of accepted in climatoilogy that ocean warming must be much better indicator (integrator) of AGW, but same difficulties in measurements do exist. At the same time, inner lakes are less deep and have much less mass than deep oceans. Yet the runoff waters flowing along their basins must be exposed to the same “excess of insolation” versus “deficit of OLR”. Therefore, on average, all inner lakes must warm up much faster than deep oceans, in inverse proportion of their (smaller) water mass prorated to the area of their basin. What is this factor? 10X? 100X? Did any inner lake warm up to 10C over last century? Obviously not. Therefore, I have a very big suspicion that theoretical estimations of “radiative forcings” due to well-mixed GH gases are seriously off, and this is the root cause of the entire “climate disruption” controversy.

Some of the text Anthony quotes is remarkable —
// Is even the presence of humans significant on the rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?
[…]
The present (2010) historic maximum of anthropogenic (caused by humans) fossil fuel burning is only 8% or so of global primary production (GPP) (both expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y). GPP is the rate at which new biomass (living matter) is produced on the whole planet. //
So. An environmentalist who thinks we have no significant effect on the environment.
As for the second, we are talking not just about “primary production” but the carbon cycle.
Consider this analogy ”
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1849
Or See a recent exchange on this point. [at 12:30 Ian Rivlin GP] before which the recently featured
Janet Thompson also makes an appearance.

George E. Smith says:
September 21, 2010 at 3:33 pm
A corollary would be; WHY DOESN’T THIS SEEM TO BOTHER ANYBODY BUT ME ?
My question would be why do you expect to get an exact CO2/temperature log correlation. That correlation may show up if all other variables remained fixed, i.e. they didn’t change. There are also any possible lags to consider. Natural fluctuations due to e.g. ENSO, PDO, solar (~0.1 deg over a cycle) etc but these effects tend to be cyclical, i.e. there is no long term trend. If we consider the last 60-70 years (suppposedly the length of the PDO cycle) then the temperature rise peak-to peak is ~0.5 deg. CO2 has gone up frpm ~310 ppm to ~390 ppm. Using the IPCC calculation
CO2 Forcing = 5.35*ln(390/310) = ~1.2 w/m2
So 1.2 w/m2 has resulted in a 0.5 deg rise in temperature. A forcing of 3.7 w/m2 should result from a CO2 doubling which implies a warming of ~1.5 deg C, i.e. at the bottom of the range specified by the IPCC. The point is the rise will not be linear. It will be slower at some times and faster at others. It is the long term end result that counts.

RW says:
September 22, 2010 at 12:44 am
“Paul Birch – no, you can’t have it both ways. The oceans are a net sink of CO2, not a net source. And they also show a declining fraction of 13C, just as the atmosphere does. You clearly didn’t know that, or you wouldn’t have made your incorrect statements about isotope ratios. Scientists, though, have known it for several decades.”
The Earth does “have it both ways”. The oceans are both sources and sinks. CO2 is continually moving between air and oceans in all directions, as well as between the oceans and other reservoirs, such as carbonate and organic deposits on the sea floor. The oceans are not a single entity doing only one thing; they are a highly complex system that cannot be understood simply by looking at an assumed “net” figure.
In point of fact, it is not even known for sure that the oceans are a net sink from the atmosphere. They probably are, most of the time, since they are a continuing net source for the bottom ooze, which this material has to be come from somewhere; but it is not certain. Once one considers CO2 from sub-sea volcanoes and tectonic boundaries, as well as organics, carbonates and reduced carbon washed in from the land, it is quite possible that they are a net source to the atmosphere. There are other natural sinks, magnitude unknown, which may dominate, such as the sequestration of biomass by infilling of post-glacial lakes, and the sequestration of reduced organic carbon as finely divided particles throughout the soil and continental crust (which alone contains tens of thousands of times more carbon than the atmosphere).

“it is quite possible that they are a net source to the atmosphere”
No, it isn’t. Isotopic tracers demonstrate that over the last couple of centuries, there has been a net transfer of CO2 from the biosphere and fossil fuels to the atmosphere and oceans. You can’t choose your own facts, I’m afraid.
“In point of fact, it is not even known for sure that the oceans are a net sink from the atmosphere”
In fact, it is known for sure. Again, isotopic tracers show this. I’m afraid you’re just making stuff up.

“”” John Finn says:
September 22, 2010 at 2:00 am
George E. Smith says:
September 21, 2010 at 3:33 pm
A corollary would be; WHY DOESN’T THIS SEEM TO BOTHER ANYBODY BUT ME ?
My question would be why do you expect to get an exact CO2/temperature log correlation. That correlation may show up if all other variables remained fixed, i.e. they didn’t change. There are also any possible lags to consider. Natural fluctuations due to e.g. ENSO, PDO, solar (~0.1 deg over a cycle) etc but these effects tend to be cyclical, i.e. there is no long term trend. If we consider the last 60-70 years (suppposedly the length of the PDO cycle) then the temperature rise peak-to peak is ~0.5 deg. CO2 has gone up frpm ~310 ppm to ~390 ppm. Using the IPCC calculation
CO2 Forcing = 5.35*ln(390/310) = ~1.2 w/m2
So 1.2 w/m2 has resulted in a 0.5 deg rise in temperature. A forcing of 3.7 w/m2 should result from a CO2 doubling which implies a warming of ~1.5 deg C, i.e. at the bottom of the range specified by the IPCC. The point is the rise will not be linear. It will be slower at some times and faster at others. It is the long term end result that counts. “””
Well John, I don’t. But then I am not the one claiming that there is such a correlation. It is embodied in the very description of
” CLIMATE SENSITIVITY ”
Apparently invented by the late Dr Stephen Schneider of Stanford University; and apparently taught to every student of “Climate Science” as being gospel truth.
I DON’T need a PhD in mathematics to understand that assigning a fixed increment (in mean global surface Temperature) to a DOUBLING of some other variable (Atmospheric CO2 abundance) , uniquely defines a logarithmic (to base 2) relationship.
No other mathematical relationship has that unique property. Countless peer reviewed climate journal papers have repeatedly claimed the relationship is logarithmic; and the IPCC seems to assign a range of 3.0 +/-50% deg C to the constant of proportionality.
Now of course I wouldn’t expect the observational data to exactly match any such formula; such physical quantities can never be measured exactly; and in the case of the earth’s global mean surface Temperature; we have no way to measure that at all; so of course I don’t expect an exact fit.
But so long as purveyors of the concensus science of climatology keep on insisting that such a logarithmically related “Climate Sensitivity” even exists; I would reasonably expect that they can prove from some sort of observational data, that such a relstionship is more likely to be true than some competing relationship; such as just for example an ordinary linear; straight line fit. Or would the data better fit an equation of the form:- y = exp (-1/x^2) for example.
The well known graphical representation going back to the Pre-Cambrian 600 million years ago; which I cited above shows absolutely no sign of any single valued continuous functional relationship between Temperature and CO2 (proxies). There are intervals of many millions of years during which totally wild changes in CO2 occur with absolutely no change in Temperature at all.
As for intervals with small changes (in Temperature / CO2) such as you gave in your example of a CO2 change from 310 to 390 ppm, common sense tells us that over such a small change (north polar CO2 changes 18 ppm in just 5 months every year) a logarithmic relationship would be quite indistingu9ishable from a linear relationship; specially given the noisiness of the data; and also a simple linear interpolation would suffice to estimate the change due to the Stafan-Boltzmann 4th power relationship between “Forcing” in Watts per square metre, and global Temperature change (roughly).
Now in your calculation based evidently on IPCC proclamations, the constant of proportionality is given as 5.35 presumably Watts per metre squared, per factor of (e) change in CO2. That 5.35 number implies somewhat better than a 3:1 knowledge of the proportionality relationship.
In any case; it is well known from satellite measures of TSI over about three complete solar sunspot cycles, that TSI changes by about 0.1% of roughly 1.3 W/m^2 peak to peak; and that can be calculated to result in about a 0.07 deg C change in the equilibrium Temperature at earth’s orbit.
So how does the IPCC justify a claim that a change of 1.2 W/m^2 should result in a 0.5 deg C increase in Temperature; that’s seven times what normal radiation laws say is physically possible.
I don’t need a PhD in Physics to understand that the (atmospheric) heating due to CO2 (or other so called green house gas) is driven as a starting point, by the radiant emittance of LWIR thermal radiation from the earth’s surface due to its Temperature and spectral radiant emissivities. And over the globe the total radiant emittance can vary more than an order of magnitude due to local surface Temperature differences; which means that one would have to perform some appropriate global sampling observational process to come up with some sort of global average for the atmospheric heating effect expected from the presence of CO2 or other GHG in the atmospehre.
No such data exists as far as I can tell. the AGW proponents don’t even acknowledge that “Climate Sensitivity” should even be a function of surface Temperatures; which are the primary source for the LWIR radiation that causes the “green house effect”.
When those folks say that the mean global surface temperature changes with the logarithm of the atmospheric CO2 abundance at a rate of 3 +/- 1.5 Deg C per doubling; that to me means going from 280 ppm to 560 ppm gives the same Temperature rise as going from 1 ppm to 2 ppm.
And if that IS NOT true; then they should quit saying that those variables are related by a logarithmic relationship; they aren’t; and that concensus science can have no credibility so long as they insist on maintaining this myth of “Climate Sensitivity”.
The 600 million years of proxy data that is so well known; shows that there is absolutely no relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the mean global surface Temperature of planet earth.
Quite apart from the lack of experimentally observed actual data showing a logarithmic relationship; there also is no physical theoretical basis for any such relationship to exist in the first place.
So stop trying to peddle “Climate Sensitivity” as if it was a fundamental Physical constant akin to the velocity of light.

Ah yes, so Paul Birch knows better than the hundreds of scientists who’ve actually studied these systems, does he? Isotopic tracers, and actually many other lines of evidence, do indeed show that the rise in CO2 in both atmosphere and oceans is unequivocally attributable to the burning of fossil fuels. Perhaps you could tell me which papers you’ve read about this, and specifically which ones you disagree with, and which ones support your view.

Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:02 pm
97% certainly ARE emissions as well as “part of the cycle”. Manmade emissions are “part of the cycle” no more an no less. CO2 is CO2 no matter what source sources it or what sink sinks it. The carbon cycle is 97% natural and anthropogenic activities ostensibly adds 3% on the emission side annually without adding anything on the sink side. This is, more or less, in IPCC AR4 which has a nice diagram showing the gigatons of carbon coming and going from each source and sink.
Dave, circulating 10,000 liter per minute over a fountain with a big pump thus “adds” 10,000 liter per minute to the cycle, while adding 1 liter per minute with a hose is only 1/10,000th of the cycle and thus negligible.
But I am pretty sure that if the reservoir overflows, because someone forgot to close the valve of the hose, that the 10,000 liter per minute “addition” of the big pump has nothing to do with it…

Bart says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Once again, I am leaving aside arguments I feel will lead nowhere. I make this disclaimer because some people have suggested that, when I have moved on from previous explanations in other fora which were not making headway, they thought I was conceding the point.
“What do you have with models? I have no model.”
Your model is everything of which you have taken consideration.
“The possibility that two curves in nature match each other with 99.66% ánd without showing much variability simply is zero. “
Nonsense. They don’t match nearly that well. We went over this with Willis’ analysis way back when. Not only do they not match all that well over lower frequencies, but they share essentially no commonality in the higher frequency realm. You are using statistical methods which are not up to this task. You need more sophisticated tools.
OK, my “model” is the simple plotting of the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere versus the accumulated CO2 emissions:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
In another way: temperature (yearly and smoothed with a 21 one years moving average, as that was used by some to “prove” temperature as cause of the CO2 increase), CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere and accumulated CO2 emissions versus years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_emiss_increase.jpg
No filtering applied, no smoothing in any way for the CO2 data, no statistical tools of any kind used. Simply plotting and R^2 calculated. If one magnifies the graph over only 5 years or so, one still can see the year-by-year variation in accumulation in the atmosphere.
I didn’t find back your discussion with Willis, but I have some suspicion that you were looking at the rate of increase, which indeed doesn’t match that good with the emissions and better with temperature changes. But as said before, then you aren’t looking at the trend, but at the derivative of the trend…
Btw, both warmers and skeptics alike agree that the increase rate is largely influenced by temperature changes. See e.g. Pieter Tans at:
http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf from page 11 on.
Some skeptics then jump to the conclusion that temperature is the main cause of the increase itself. But a derivative of a trend doesn’t tell anything about the cause of the trend…