Here is the web page for Dr. Raymond S. Bradley who is listed as:
University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Director of the Climate System Research Center (http://www.paleoclimate.org).
Readers may also recognize Dr. Bradley from his co-authorship with Dr. Michael Mann in the famous MBH98 paper which produced the embattled “hockey stick” graph.
Dr. Bradley has also gained some recent notoriety with his accusations of plagiarism regarding the Wegman report to congress, by Dr. Edward Wegman of George Mason University, which was critical of MBH98’s statistical methods.
Here’s Dr. Bradley’s photo from his UMass web page:
Notice anything interesting? Here are some hints:
His graph for CO2 data titled “Greenhouse Gas Record from the Vostok Ice Core” shows a value around 360 ppm for CO2 at the “zero date” of the present history. The photo must be old, since the current value in the atmosphere from Mauna Loa is said to be around 390ppm currently.
So, it’s an old photo, what’s the problem you say?
For readers not familiar with the CO2 data from the Vostok Ice Core, you can find the official data set here from NOAA’s FTP servers:
CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center)
ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/trends/co2/vostok.icecore.co2
NCDC (National Climatic Data Center)
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/co2nat.txt
NASA Goddard also offers access to the official Vostok data here:
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_CDIAC_CO2_VOSTOK_ICECORE.html
…and they offer this helpful graph, which is time reversed from Dr. Bradley’s graph, with the present day on the left:
That’s odd, the Vostok CO2 data for the present is around 280ppm, way lower than the 360ppm shown on Dr. Bradley’s graph. Strange, but that NASA web page on Vostok Ice Core data shows the most recent update at:
So it must be current, right?
So let’s look at some other sources, maybe they are closer to Dr. Bradley’s value, surely there must be some update somewhere to this Vostok data that I’ve missed.
Let’s check Wikipedia, which always seems to be updated. Even though William Connelly doesn’t edit there anymore surely it’s been updated with this new data in the past year or so? Here’s the Wikipedia graph:
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
That’s odd, the CO2 data there shows just over 280ppm of CO2 in the Vostok record. But they reference Petit, et al 1999 on that page. Hmmm, I went to find that paper, and was able to locate a PDF copy of it here: http://www.daycreek.com/dc/images/1999.pdf and I saved a local copy here Vostok_nature_1999 to prevent overloading that website with downloads. Here’s the title of that 1999 paper from Nature:
Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica
J. R. Petit*, J. Jouzel†, D. Raynaud*, N. I. Barkov‡, J.-M. Barnola*, I. Basile*,M. Bender§, J. Chappellaz*,M. Davisk, G. Delaygue†, M. Delmotte*, V. M. Kotlyakov¶, M. Legrand*, V. Y. Lipenkov‡, C. Lorius*, L. Pe´ pin*, C. Ritz*, E. Saltzmank & M. Stievenard†
Oh, OK, that explains it, the CO2 levels in 1999 must have been 360ppm and that’s where that value on Dr. Bradley’s graph comes from. Let’s check the Mauna Loa record for 1999 here: ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt
The values for 1999 are:
1999 3 1999.208 369.46 369.46 367.90 26 1999 4 1999.292 370.77 370.77 368.19 30 1999 5 1999.375 370.66 370.66 367.84 29 1999 6 1999.458 370.10 370.10 367.87 30 1999 7 1999.542 369.10 369.10 368.42 30 1999 8 1999.625 366.70 366.70 368.21 30 1999 9 1999.708 364.61 364.61 367.95 29 1999 10 1999.792 365.17 365.17 368.41 31 1999 11 1999.875 366.51 366.51 368.58 29 1999 12 1999.958 367.85 367.85 368.58 29
Well that explains it then right? The value of the CO2 atmosphere in 1999 was around 360 ppm, so that’s what Dr. Bradley was showing in that old photo. And the 1999 Nature paper from Petit et al must show the same value, right? Here it is:
Huh, that’s strange, it only shows around 280ppm of CO2 at the “present” of 1999 when this graph was published.
Well OK, the archived NOAA data on the FTP server must be updated and have ~360ppm somewhere in the dataset, right? So I looked through it to be sure. Here’s the most recent data from: ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/trends/co2/vostok.icecore.co2
Hmmm, the most recent data is from 2342 yr BP (years before present) and shows 284.7. That can’t be right, because the distinguished Dr. Bradley shows the data at around 360ppm. Yet, the header shows the co-author names from the 1999 Nature paper on the Vostok ice core data analysis. Surely there must be an update to it?
Maybe the other NOAA data set from NCDC is what he used? at: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/co2nat.txt
Well, it agrees with the CDIAC data, but there’s still no ~360ppm of CO2 listed in the data for the most recent readings.
Well gosh, how can this be?
The answer is seems, is that there is no new data from the Vostok Ice core. It ended, and the official repositories of that data have no new data. The last CO2 value for the Vostok Ice Core dataset is listed as being 284.7ppm.
So how does Dr. Bradley get ~360ppm? Easy, I think he uses the same technique he and his co-authors learned when writing the famous MBH98 paper that made the hockey stick -splice the instrumental record onto the paleo record:
Graph above from Fred Pearce’s Feb 2010 article in the Guardian shows the instrumental record attached to the ice core record.
And here’s a later version from 2003 showing the same instrumental record splice along with paleo data (Figure 1. from Mann et al. EOS Forum 2003):
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003b/mann2003b.html
So it seems rather apparent that Dr. Bradley (or whoever made the graph) simply took the Vostok Ice Core CO2 paleo data and “spliced” it with the instrumental record on the end. Or, as Joe Romm likes to say “make stuff up”.
The only problem is, as he presents it with the title of his graph: Greenhouse Gas Record from the Vostok Ice Core as shown below…
…it’s patently false in my opinion. Ditto for the red Methane line, but that’s another story.
Now here’s the problem. If you took surface temperature data from Antarctica, and spliced it with surface temperature data from Hawaii, and then presented it as the entire historical record from Antarctica, our friends would have a veritable “cow”.
Or, if you took stock performance data from poorly performing Company “A” and spliced on better performing stock data from Company “B”, and then made a new graph and used that graph to sell investors on Company “A”, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would have a veritable “cow” when they found out, wouldn’t they? People go to jail for such things.
But hey, this is Climate Science.
big h/t to WUWT reader Brian M. who sent the tip in via email.
Addendum: I should add that I have no evidence that this graph has been used in any scientific publications or professional presentations by Dr. Bradley, I’m only pointing out that for this photo, which appears to be staged, what is presented doesn’t match the actual Vostok data. Readers should not extrapolate anything beyond this scope until new examples are presented. – Anthony
Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
Yes it does.
So, get over it and stop trying to find someone else to pick on.
Yup. Sloppy Sloppy Sloppy. Sad that its intentional. If he labelled his work carefully, that would be different.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
I am thankful and grateful that we can review this fudged data on this site. It may be next month or next year. They will have to explain the false data one day.
The problem with this post is that the “zero date” does NOT say 360ppm. The data for CO2 ends BEFORE the right side axis that indicates year 0.
Much work for nothing….
REPLY: But you won’t find a 360 PPM value anywhere near the end date in the Vostok record, or anywhere in the record at all, for that matter. Look for yourself:
ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/trends/co2/vostok.icecore.co2
Anthony
On the other hand, I don’t care what the level of CO2 is today because nobody has ever shown that it means diddly for the climate. So what if CO2 is high — the climate is not warmer than in other recent warm periods, not more volatile, major storms are not increasing, coasts are not flooding, etc., etc., etc.
It’s all a bunch of noise about nothing. It’s a smoke screen. Nobody can show anything out of ordinary or anything to be alarmed about so they drum up hysteria over an inconsequential change in a trace gas and then “prove” it’s going to destroy the world via computer model “scenarios.”
Bravissimo!!!! Give ’em enough rope….Hoist on his own petard.
CO2 numbers below 200ppm? I thought the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were well mixed? Not good. What’s the offset between reality and the ice cores? Don’t plants have issues at low concentrations of CO2? Looks to me like the methane increases precede the CO2 increases…maybe we should blame the mammoth poop.
Submitted to the Drudge Report
yep sloppy but not a “hide the decline” type trick
So essentially it IS worth then they thought: CO2 is down a 110 ppm since the hippie years of MBH98!
No wonder it has gotten colder this last month.
@Peter H.
Anthony very clearly noted that the graph does show the current PPM of CO2 (in fact, he noted that the PPM is higher). The issue here is that this scientist, who is making accusations of academic misconduct, is engaging in academic misconduct himself. It seems only fair that he have his own expectations of academic honesty applied to himself.
REPLY: I don’t know that this photo stagecraft rises to that level. I should add that I have no evidence that this graph has been used in any scientific publications or professional presentations by Dr. Bradley, I’m only pointing out that for this photo, which appears to be staged, what is presented doesn’t match the actual Vostok data. Readers should not extrapolate anything beyond this scope until new examples are presented. – Anthony
Peter H says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:14 am
Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
You obviously did not bother to read the article at all because the graph patently DOES NOT show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time for the last decade of the 20th century.
It’s Ray’s poster trick.
>>Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
The problem is that the ice record may not be an accurate record. It may be reading 280 ppm for an atmosphere that was in reality at 340 ppm, with instrument errors or diffusion accounting for the difference. Thus splicing on the recent instrument record may be entirely erroneous.
Actually, we don’t really know until we get ice cores that correlate in time with the Mauna Loa measurements in order to calibrate the proxy to the instrument record.
The ice cores are a guess. A guess is made about atmospheric CO2 based on the cores. We don’t know how accurate that guess is until we have cores that correspond in time with other measurements and we haven’t been measuring long enough to do that yet.
That said, there is no doubt that burning fossil fuel adds CO2. That is not in question. The part that is in question is if that CO2 is harmful in any way or makes any significant change to climate. So far nobody has proved that it does. The *only* information we have are computer models that say it *could* but we have no information that says it *does*.
Peter H., ice core estimates are proxies, that show trends, but the values reported from ice core measurements are “adjusted” just like most climate “data.”
There’s no guarantee that the Vostock Core will EVER show 380ppm in the year 2010 if the proxy record is too coarse to show changes of the type currently being observed.
That is why the deception is significant.
Peter H, seriously… whaaat?
The graph shows Vostok Ice Core CO2 data and then tacks on atmospheric data from somewhere else at the end!
Besides, this should be a headshot/staff photo, not another Hockeystick reloaded/”its worse than we thought”/my construct is too important to leave out of my bio!
Nobody has said that, wherever CO2 appears there is cold around: It is endothermic because its purpose in nature is to be the building block of SUGAR and carbohydrates. The energy it absorbs, unfortunately, it takes it to living beings, though some times troublesome human beings as the Prophet himself, who has been built after big efforts by nature in accumulating such a big bag of ungracefully walking grease. 🙂
On first read of the headline my mind registered Ray Bradbury who you can trust to always tell a good story. That phrase is similar to “who can you trust?” and that sounded very familiar. So I searched. Lots of hits, but of the bunch, I liked this one by Martha Beck (from Oprah’s magazine) :
http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Martha-Becks-No-Fail-Way-to-Figure-Out-Who-to-Trust
It’s because I’ve learned to depend on a handy little inner mechanism—you’ve got one too. Call it a “trust-o-meter,” . . .
So, it is now confirmed that Dr. Ray Bradley is on the “no trust” list.
~~~~ Brian M. !!! nice find
Anthony, great post.
To all: Happy Thanksgiving
Dr. Mann about the splicing reconstruction with instrumental records as cited from http://www.realclimate.org:
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum. :o)
See
So if the graph had been labeled “Data from Vostok Ice Core plus one point showing current value”, you would have had no objection?
Anthony,
Thanks for the analysis & interpretation.
Amazing how much a single photograph can reveal.
Anthony,
so your point here is that the title of the slide should have said “Vostok Ice Core + observations” instead of just “Vostok Ice Core”?
Still, much work for nothing.
REPLY: So you’re saying then it’s OK if a company publishes spliced data in a stock report but doesn’t tell anyone? -A
The Hockey team are incredible; that is, they have completely shredded their own credibility. This pic is golden!
Does anyone know what co2 levels are for antarctica itself?
I have seen themed maps of co2 levels globally from satellite, and they show antarctica as being lower than the rest of the earth. If thats the case, you cannot splice a record for antartica which has lower co2 levels, with the higher global record, you cant compare an apple with an orange – but then it makes a nice hocky stick for them to scare people with and generate funding / publicity.
As an aside, the vostock core always fascintates me, the correlation with dust (cosmic dust?) and temperature – is it increased dust causing the earth to cool, or increased dust due to a drier cooler windier earth? We may never know!
Wow. Just wow. This doesn’t even pass the giggle test.
How could he possibly justify this, or think it would go unchallenged?
[snip – off color]
Anthony,
I think it would be worse if the company published a stock report that was 50.000 years old, if the stock owners were interested in present results and future forecasts… 😉
And, after all, we don’t know what was being said at the lecture.
Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
Yes it does, with periodicity that is regular and has been part of the Climate Forever regardless of MAN Proves AGW is a myth!.
Peter H says
“Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
Yes it does….”
So you appear to support the saying that “the ends justify the means”. This way of thinking is the problem in climate studies.
Nothing to worry about!. That happens in a parallel world known as “Brave New World” (To find it you just to cross the Bermuda Triangle or going Way over the Rainbow….)
Actually at the point reading 360ppm the line is going straight up, off the chart! It’s worse than we thought!! Shocking!!!
I think this might be the source of the graph:
http://files.eesi.org/corell_061506.pdf
So I don’t think its right to say Bradley ‘made this up’, rather I think he simply plagiarized it.
REPLY: We don’t know that – Anthony
I suppose someone will pipe up and say that he was just stood next to a graph reviewing it for a student or something? I hope he told them that it is entirely false to title the graph as one thing (GHG Record from the Vostok ice core) and then to add/superimpose OTHER data on top in the same colours, etc.
Moreover, he should advise that there should be a definitive method of indicating two different sources of data with a break between. No doubt this graph has never seen the light of real publication thanks to Bradleys review?
/sarc off
Why are some posters here trying to rationalize a graph that is CLEARLY WRONG AND DISHONEST!?
And you would think someone of his intellect would have the presence of mind to vet a photo like that before putting it on his web page…[LOL!]
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.” Michael Mann, 2004
I guess the oil companies are now photo-shopping Prof. Bradley! The only possible explanation for which we have a physical mechanism!
It is sad that we have to view another misleading graph.
The Global Warming community tries its best to mislead the public but they cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
These guys just can’t get past the notion that if they don’t have the numbers they want they can just make ’em up.
crosspatch says: “Actually, we don’t really know until we get ice cores that correlate in time with the Mauna Loa measurements in order to calibrate the proxy to the instrument record.”
Um, we do have those. Law Dome and Mauna Loa overlap almost exactly. Then, Law Dome and Taylor Dome, same. And Law Dome, Taylor Dome and Vostok, same.
Klimate Kip says: “The graph shows Vostok Ice Core CO2 data and then tacks on atmospheric data from somewhere else at the end!”
It wouldn’t much matter whether the instrumental record for atmospheric CO2 at the end was from Mauna Loa, Barrow Alaska, American Somoa or the South Pole. On average, they all show basically the same thing. It’s a well-mixed gas.
Is it time to panic?
Just a quick note. We need to be sure what is meant by “Before Present”. It is NOT “Before 2010”. The “Present” in “Before Present” derives from its use in radiocarbon dating where a reference year (“The Present”) was chosen arbitrarily as 1950. For example, “20 years BP” means 1930. The term is used in a range of studies including archaeology, carbon-14 dating and geology (to my certain knowledge).
This does not alter whether or not an instrument record from Hawiai was attached to the Vostok ice core record and whether or not this is valid. We do, however, need to be careful with the term, “Before Present – BP” because it does not mean what some writers above think it means. We then look stupid and give an excuse for others to challenge the argument with a red herring (if you can mix the analogies!).
Old habits die hard. Splicing apples and oranges together yeilds………research grants.
Re Daniel Bengtsson
Do you at all understand what has been done? You can never in science splice on data from a different source on a continuous line. There are simply no circumstances that would allow this. You can make a line from a combination of data sets that are averaged but you can not change data set and continue the line with the new set. Capiche?
For those of us that run websites that present data this is an amusing and frustrating article. I have been mercilessly hounded for using heavily smoothed data that didn’t show enough warming in the present day. If I had pulled something like this I would have really taken heat (maybe enough to cause actual global warming).
It is a good example of the ethical standards that the people that work with Mann have. Clearly trying to express their point is more valuable than actually understanding what the data is trying to tell them.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic
There’s an assumption here that the Vostok data has the Mauna Loa data spliced on it. My guess is that Bradley (or whomever) add an Antarctica CO2 instrument record, or just drew a straight line from the end of the Vostok record to recent value that was 360 ppm.
So it appears to me the best we can say is it’s the Vostok record spliced with something else.
MilanS says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:34 am
To be a bit anal here, Mann was talking about a temperature record, not CO2 records. The quote leaves me uncertain as to whether Mann knows of CO2 records that are spliced together. One of the exciting things claimed about the Vostok record is that it is a long, unbroken record. Maybe it isn’t any longer! (Pun intended.)
The part that I found interesting was that the graphs that go back 400k years seem to show a rather regular saw tooth pattern as if CO2 levels have been rising and falling in cycles since well before the industrial age. I would seem to be beyond doubt that human activity is contributing to the current peak but what was causing them before? Also what effect accounts for the reversals that led to the troughs in between?
I’m thinking of a 5-letter word that begins with “F”…..
Here’s a possible question for the Climate Science Rapid Response Team.
Have the ice core experts ever experimented with fake snow, different CO2 levels and artificial compression to simulate the weight of different depths? Could this give experimental data to compare with real ice cores?
snip – stop it with insinuations about Dr. Bradley. Your posts are now set for auto-review – Anthony
TinyCO2 says:
November 24, 2010 at 11:07 am
Yes, of course!…..in our Model Simulations !
Bill Hunter says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:54 am
Careful now. You’ve got to make sure you don’t confuse the “thermometer pea” with the “CO2 pea”. The thimbles, of course, don’t care.
Having said that, this is not one I’d try to take to the bank.
CruGate on the other hand…
@crosspatch
‘That said, there is no doubt that burning fossil fuel adds CO2.’
Really and how do we measure exactly who’s adding the CO2 to atmosphere when even the poor sods over at NASA has admitted to not knowing the ins and outs of the CO2 cycle.
Burning fossil fuels emits CO2 and that’s what everyone is onboard with. But whether or not our emitted CO2 has any additive effect is in reality just anyones guess. The statistical chart that was compiled to show that sure we do it’s our emission, has to be, right, because we emit CO2 and there’s more CO2 this year then previous year so it must be us. . . The logic is fundamentally flawed even in the basic statistical department, what with mother nature apparently emits more CO2 per year then all us poor evil wankers with cars and industries manage and large patches of forests to clear, the puny humans that is.
If man, not mannschtick, quite emitting CO2, which would pretty much mean stop breathing or everyone else would make war on China and India, that wouldn’t account for all of the addition of CO2 each year. Which apparently have also been proven with equally bad ass statistics, from the same dumb hippies that made the first graphs or so I’ve been told.
Hippies actively plant shit, puny humans plant trees, but what the frakk does mother nature do but spew out even more CO2 like it doesn’t even have any effect what so friggin ever. Proper trolls though would prefer to clean up the oceans from all the crap and stuff and plastic particulate and green peace hippies.
i find it difficult to believe that these folks are still considered “scientists”
i mean, i would not have got away with such shenanigans in junior high physics. and this guy teaches at a university? mind boggling. just mind boggling.
dark ages on the way indeed.
jimmi: “So if the graph had been labeled “Data from Vostok Ice Core plus one point showing current value”, you would have had no objection?”
Of course there will be objection! The description and graph are still absolute garbage from a scientific perspective! You cannot pretend that two measurements obtained using completely different methodology are equivalent without first calibrating one to the other. You surely know that and understand why?
Looks like an amazing non-story to me.
Who would ever have thought that a cropped publicity photo might not have all the details listed and visible?
More specifically, a little searching turned up the caption for the image:
http://www.pages-igbp.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/products.woa/wa/product?id=99
The graph (when shown in full with the caption) does indeed say exactly what it is and how the modern data was added.
REPLY: Thanks for that. But it’s still data splicing, and that’s the whole issue. And since Dr. Bradley is expecting precision in attribution from Dr. Wegman, it seems only fair that he should add such a caption that clearly states what it is to his own web page, don’t you think? Or, he could just use a head shot like everybody else and be done with it. Clearly though, he wanted that graph to be visible to people who viewed it, otherwise he simply would have stood in front of it, instead of leaning to the side.
I’ll also point out, that there’s no line color difference (to delineate data sets) presented in the graph for the instrumental portion, either in the example you cite or in the Bradley photo. At least the MBH 98 and 2003 examples delineate the datasets by color. This leads the uninitiated to think that the Vostok Paleo ice core record in fact shows this value, when it doesn’t
– Anthony
furthermore how could anyone actually defend such shoddy presentation?
[snip]
Excuse me if I’m saying the obvious, but is this not the same chart that Al Gore uses (with the aid of a lift) in An Inconvenient Truth? I’m looking at a still frame of it on DVD, and it appears to be identical. I don’t recall if Al mentions the source in his movie, and I don’t feel like watching it at the moment to see if he does…
“Greenhouse Gas Record from the Vostok Ice Cores” — the other problem with these records relates to the amount of ice that’s necessary to deliver a sufficient amount of gas to sample. The ice core CO2 records are sample slices from a period of time and don’t relate to a single point on the chart. IMO, the charts should use square waves not diagonal lines.
Ferdinand Engelbeen has posted some great comments related to CO2 on this thread:
Missing the big picture on CO2
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/22/missing-the-big-picture-on-co2/#comments
They include this look at MLO and SPO (South Pole and Mauna Loa):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_mlo_spo_raw_select_2008.jpg
He warned about the fact that the above image is not full scale but it points to some interesting subtle differences between the 2 locations.
Here’s his full scale example (Samoa and Mauna Loa):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_raw_select_2008_fullscale.jpg
The pic appears to be marketing, to attract students that support AGW to the university. It is staged, and he is leaning back to show the chart as you can see as he appears uncomfortable (he should feel that way). Linking back to their page shows they are selling t-shirts as well. I remember my college team spanking UMass in basketball on a regular basis. Ah, the good times those were.
the Vostok CO2 data for the present is around 280ppm, way lower than the 360ppm shown on Dr. Bradley’s graph.
This brings to mind (if I remember correctly) a heated debate earlier this year by commentors that The Team may have added 80 ppm onto the recent Vostok data to bring in into line with the modern measuremets of Co2 levels… anyone remember that debate? anyone got a link to the associated WUWT posting?
Daniel Bengtsson says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:21 am
Daniel Bengtsson says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:36 am
Daniel Bengtsson says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:45 am
Much work for nothing.
Well, we have found the turkey. Now everyone have a good Thanksgiving and make sure you give something to the people who have less than you do.
Peter H says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:14 am
NO! NO! NO!
You, sir, have not an honest bone in your body!
The header on the chart in back of Mr. Bradley distinctly says
“Greenhouse Gas Record from the Vostok Ice Core”
It says nothing else. To include ANYTHING ELSE is patently false!
It does NOT say “Atmospheric CO2 Over Time”–you just wished it did.
Re: TinyCO2 says:
Perform an actual experiment! You must be joking. They might write a computer model and simulate it. That way they can be sure they get the correct result.
Anthony, I actually looked at this data just a few days ago. If you look very carefully at the Wikipedia image you will notice a very very small error. The y-axis of the top most graph is slightly more to the left than the two bottom graphs. I made a new graph (slightly different) here: http://www.ekstrand.org/climate/iceage20101122/all.png
I don’t think anyone will make any incorrect conclusions based on this small error. But it is still interesting to look at the difference between CO2, CH4 and temperature when going out of the ice ages. I made two additional pictures that shows the phase differences between these entities. The images along with the Octave/matlab scripts are available in the same folder: http://www.ekstrand.org/climate/iceage20101122/
would not the higher methane reading through a cog in the CAGW wheel?
surely he does not mean to imply that the burning of hydrocarbons is releasing CH4 into the atmosphere as well as CO2?
anyone else notice this?
Nuke says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:22 am
On the other hand, I don’t care what the level of CO2 is today
Have you missed the entire rational for the introduction of Carbon Trading and Carbon Taxes?
Is the Vostok ice core data a reliable means of estimating the atmospheric CO2 level?
Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski is sure it is not.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
Peter H says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:14 am
Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
Yes it does.
So, get over it and stop trying to find someone else to pick on.
Really? Anthony is “picking” on someone?
Be careful. You may be accused of plagiarism too!
/sarc off
codehead says:
November 24, 2010 at 11:26 am
“Excuse me if I’m saying the obvious, but is this not the same chart that Al Gore uses (with the aid of a lift) in An Inconvenient Truth?”
If this is true, it is really inconvenient!!!!! hahaha!
REPLY: Gore’s AIT chart is temperature data and CO2, seen annotated here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/80992994@N00/380193705/sizes/z/in/photostream/
-Anthony
Tim Folkerts: Thank you for confirming the splice. The graph is complete junk.
If I did something like that in my work for any of my projects, I would be fired.
Anthony, excellent work as always. Which is why WUWT is one of my favorite web sites. Keep at ’em.
Having looked at the temperature graph for Vostok many times whilst reading this post it has occurred to me that the temperature signal is progressively less noisy the farther back in time you go.
Is that simply due to the thinner and thinner annual layers from the deeper core leading to smoothing of the noise?
Anthony
A very interesting post.
Did you realise that you must have accidentally transposed the image, as the second half of the temperature record on the Hockey stick is upside down? Our instrumental and anecdotal records show a slow steady temperature rise (with advances and set backs ) from around 1700, long before Dr Hansens Giss figures kicked them into the stratosphere.
12 of the oldest instrumental records shown graphically in next two links.
http://i47.tinypic.com/2zgt4ly.jpg
http://i45.tinypic.com/125rs3m.jpg
Scores of old instrumental records collected on my site here.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
Anthony, to prevent embarassment to Dr Mann can you correct your inadvertent mistake and readjust the graph so it shows this steady increase instead of the decline?
tonyb
Joanne Nova has many great points to make about the Ice Cores to help interpret Dr. Bradley’s graph:
Ice Core evidence — where is carbon’s “major effect”?
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/08/ice-core-evidence-no-endorsement-of-carbons-major-effect/
The big picture: 65 million years of temperature swings
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big-picture-65-million-years-of-temperature-swings/
Carbon rises 800 years after temperatures
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/carbon-rises-800-years-after-temperatures/
The 800 year lag – graphed
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
Ray simply employed Mike’s trick to boost the gentle incline, in order to increase the impact of an otherwise boringly periodic graph.
Why can the skeptic community not accept that standard mathematical procedures, as employed here by a master in the field, are beyond their comprehension?
May I suggest that the term for selectively borrowing from previous authors, deleting terms such as ‘carbon dioxide’ which do not support ones theory, while hypocritically accusing others of plagiarism, and posing in front of Mike’s Trick graphs, should henceforth be known as Bradlification.
OT: Happy Thanksgiving Anthony and to everyone else that makes this site so insightful and fun.
Best,
John from CA
By the way, at this moment it’s a toasty -56F in Vostok, Antarctica…with highs during the day warming up to -30F (brrrrr).
Happy Thanksgiving!
Why don’t you guys just ask the man himself about the chart?
Wow! I was not aware it takes several millennia for carbon dioxide to get enclosed in Antarctic ice. If you have a look at Historical CO2 Record from the Vostok Ice Core, the difference between Age of ice and Mean age of air in it is anywhere between 1879 and 6653 years (at depth 506.4 m and 3119.51 m respectively). The present spike (or any other, for that matter) is made invisible by such a heavy smoothing.
[snip]
Gentlemen,
I find this to be an appalling case of guilt by association. Here we have a photograph of a chart with Dr. Ray Bradley in the foreground. I simply cannot understand why this chart is characterized as false simply because it is in the same picture with Dr. Bradley.
This chart has done nothing except being photographed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
REPLY: I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or not, if so use the /sarc tag
But the issue is data splicing of two different data sets. And the fact that this photo seems to be staged so that the chart is the most prominent portion of the photo, as Dr. Bradley leans to the left to expose it clearly and the full title. – Anthony
We can’t see the full chart behind him in the photograph, so we can’t tell if there are any notes that should be included. Even so, it seems a bit of stretch to make something out of this as the general data displayed is accurate even if the title is not strickly correct. (though we don’t know if some notes may be hidden behind him). CO2 levels of the past 400,000 years at least are pretty well established now, and so the most important thing about the chart behind Dr. Bradley is not as much the source as the huge spike in CO2 in the modern era when compared to the last 400,000 years. I would agree though that in general the last few decades of CO2 levels in the chart should be colored a different way to make it clear that they came from direct measurements.
The CO2 Record in Plant Fossils
Because plant stomata numbers do not change after the leaves or needles fall from the tree they make a good indicator or proxy of atmospheric CO2 in Earth’s past. What they show is that the popular belief that CO2 levels prior to the Industrial Revolution were a steady 280 ppm (parts per million) may be incorrect.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html
http://www.co2science.org/subject/s/summaries/sdco2proxy.php
That’s nothing, check out the CO2 concentration in this very similar graph from 2006 (page 32):
385!
Anthony said:
“REPLY: Gore’s AIT chart is temperature data and CO2, seen annotated here:”
Well, yes, I know that. I’m talking about the CO2 portion of that chart, strictly. I’m looking at a frame that’s earlier than the one you showed, ending at “Today” (no future projection). It’s identical to the Bradley chart, according to my calibrated eyeball–every wiggle and pause–so I assume it’s from the same source.
While not excusing the guy—he certainly should have known better—he’s probably displaying that IPCC graph to secure funding—to show he’s “one of them (wink, wink).”
‘Short Description: Greenhouse trace gas changes over the last four climatic cycles (Vostok ice core, Petit et al., 1999). The CO2 and CH4 records are plotted together with the Vostok ice isotopic record (dD). The present-day antarctic CO2 (365ppmv) and CH4 (1600 ppbv) are also indicated” (Emphasis added) ‘
Short description for the graph is incorrect by all rational thinking:
The present day CO2 CH4 are also idicated ….by an arrow. The fact that the current levels are attached to the last four climatic cycles and are not a part of Vostock ice core, Petit et al.,1999 data is totally reprehensible.
This is not science…… this is smoke and mirrors better consigned to the circus tent than a University. Any University governance that can ratify this type of behaviour needs to take a good look at their priorities and what prestige will be left at the end of this episode that can only be recorded historically as the ‘grey’ ages of scientific discovery.
stumpy : “Does anyone know what co2 levels are for antarctica itself?”
About the same as everywhere else …
http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/CO2AtVariousStations.JPG
… but with less seasonal variation.
Goodness knows where I downloaded the data from. I could probably find out if you need it. My comment for myself (Aug 2010) says “All data was downloaded last year, I think, and might not all have been downloaded at the same time.”
@Anthony Watts
“This leads the uninitiated to think that the Vostok Paleo ice core record in fact shows this value, when it doesn’t”
I guess that means that people who limit their scientific exposure to squinting at the background details of pictures of professors might come out somewhat misinformed.
This is a pretty bizarre post and the Wegman angle only adds to that. First we have the Steve McIntyre accusing Bradley of unattributed copying from Fritts when his own samples show him clearly attributing Fritts and now we have “I found something that isn’t precisely clear if you knew nothing else whatsoever about climate science in the background of his headshot”.
If this is the best available, so far as criticism goes, Bradley must be clean as a whistle. I’m left scratching my head over these bizarre accusations however.
REPLY: No, it’s not the “best available” simply an odd puzzle. Why does this group of people continually splice dissimilar data sets? That’s the question. – Anthony
“And the fact that this photo seems to be staged so that the chart is the most prominent portion of the photo, as Dr. Bradley leans to the left to expose it clearly and the full title. – Anthony”
Leaning-slightly-to-the-left-no-my-left-his-right-gate?
Berényi Péter says:
November 24, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Wow! I was not aware it takes several millennia for carbon dioxide to get enclosed in Antarctic ice. If you have a look at Historical CO2 Record from the Vostok Ice Core, the difference between Age of ice and Mean age of air in it is anywhere between 1879 and 6653 years (at depth 506.4 m and 3119.51 m respectively). The present spike (or any other, for that matter) is made invisible by such a heavy smoothing.
=======
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen the phrase, “Move along, there’s nothing to see here” /sarc 😉
I completely agree and if you take into account the realization that atmospheric mixing requires 14-24 months to reflect Northern to Arctic circulation as well as the amount of ice core required to sample for CO2, the idea of putting Greenland and Vostok Ice Core data on the same page in the same time frame seems silly and the idea of “Global state” from the Ice Core records ludicrous.
I could be missing something important, I’ll keep an open mind and assume the entire record isn’t a complete Climate Science mess.
No, I haven’t missed it. I believe I said it was all meaningless because this level of CO2 is having no noticeable effect on our climate, at least not to our real climate.
The y axis is a little disingenuous.
Not if you worked in marketing!
I’m with KFB. Why not contact Dr. Bradley and ask for the source of his data? Surely the good doctor or his people will be happy to provide some provenance.
I don’t know Anthony, compare slide 32 to slide 34 on the PDF from
mpaul says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:49 am
I think this might be the source of the graph:
http://files.eesi.org/corell_061506.pdf
So I don’t think its right to say Bradley ‘made this up’, rather I think he simply plagiarized it.
REPLY: We don’t know that – Anthony
REPLY: I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or not, if so use the /sarc tag
Okay, my previous post needed the /sarc tag.
Of another note, check the top right corner, is the chart predicting the red Methane levels into the future beyond blue CO2 levels?
Robuk said:
“What they show is that the popular belief that CO2 levels prior to the Industrial Revolution were a steady 280 ppm (parts per million) may be incorrect.”
___
I think you should be careful about using the term “popular belief” as the it would imply common or typical. The common person on the street has no idea what the CO2 level is now or in the recent or remote past. Readers on WUWT are far from common. We know that CO2 levels were around 260-280 ppm prior to the industrial revolution, but as as Vostok (and other) ice cores tell us, over the past 400,000 or so years, CO2 levels have varied greatly with the coming and going of passed glacial periods. The most important issue is that the fact that the current levels have spiked rapidly (geologically speaking) to levels not seen in at least 400,000 or even 800,000 thousand years and we still are not sure how sensitive the climate system is to this rapid spike.
Given the problems with CO2 seep out of ice bubbles, and the other discrepancies between Vostok and other data sources, I’d say the levels it shows should be increased by about 33% across the board.
There! All fixed.
Stay cool Anthony, he was being sarcastic in support of Wegman.
Some folks have a crucifix on the wall… others have a
representation of the Madonna.
Doctor Bradley has a chart.
What’s the problem ?
Granted, I just held a ruler up to the computer screen to come up with this, but the “Today” spot appears to be about 2500 years ago based on the scale of the x-axis.
Not Earth-shattering, but a bit funny. Wouldn’t a smart guy like that remember to put the present at 0 years ago?
I would love to see someone Photoshop-in the graph of the CO2 increases lagging the temperature increases by 800 years.
This post brings up some interesting points.
1. OK first (lets get it out of the way) Bradley’s graph is true to form (it simply follows MBH98 procedures) splicing the instrument record onto a proxy record even though (apparently from another quote herein from Realclimate) Manna says that’s never been done?!! Really!! If I did this sort of thing in my profession I would suffer chastisement and more that likely be academically castrated.
2. What I always find incredible is that the CO2 levels of the ‘globe’ are measured (or certainly quoted) at one site in the tropics in Hawaii. Aren’t there any other sites around the world to cross check these values?
3. OK. What I get from this graph is that either the Vostok cores do not reflect the ‘true’ CO2 concentrations (through degassing whatever) which basically means that the ‘true’ values in past were very much higher than indicated. And it follows that the 360 ppmv shown in the Bradley graph (and current value) would not be that unusual compared to the ‘true’ historical ice record values. Or if the CO2 concentrations where the Vostok samples were collected are historically much lower than measured in Hawaii then the Hawaii values are simply not “global”. Is this too simple a deduction to make ? I’d like to get comments from people here more familiar with the available data.
First, he’s pushing the CO2 is going to kill us all/temp thing.
Second, he didn’t choose a chart with the temps over laid on it…….
because that chart doesn’t work!
Well that’s kinda funny; because I was perusing an ice core graph that Ferdinand Englebeen was kind enough to post a link to; of the 800kyr Dome-C ice core, and amazingly it also shows tha present ice core CO2 way below the curent Mona Loa number.
In fact it even has an arrow at the present 390 ppm, and then just blank page down to the old 280 range.
Seems like ice core pyramid inches are different from atmospheric pyramid inches.
And since Dr. Bradley is expecting precision in attribution from Dr. Wegman, it seems only fair that he should add such a caption that clearly states what it is to his own web page, don’t you think?
This is apples and oranges, don’t you think? One is a cropped publicity photo. One is a report to congress! I expect considerably better citations in an official report than on a head shot.
“But it’s still data splicing, and that’s the whole issue. “
To some extent, all data is “spliced” since no two experiments are done in the exact same circumstances. The question is then “is the splicing significant enough that is deserves special note in a particular presentation of the data?” If I use a different multimeter tomorrow than I did today, I’m not going to note that on a graph even in a scientific publication (especially if the two results seem to agree, although I might well note it in a lab notebook). If I combine thermometer data to tree-ring proxies onto a single graph, then some mention SHOULD be made in even fairly casual presentations of the data.
So …
* is there a reason to question the accuracy of the ice core method? ( You seem to accept it at face value in your blog)
* is there reason to question the accuracy of the current Mona Loa measurements? (no one seem to seriously question this)
* is there reason to think Hawaii and Antarctica have significantly different CO2 levels? (again, this doesn’t seem to be a major issue)
Is any of this truly significant enough that an issue should be made of a publicity photo? I think not
Is any of this significant enough that an issue should be made of it in a scientific publication? Certainly it is! But it WAS noted in the scientific publication.
As I said before — this all leads me to view this as a non-story …
REPLY: Well non-story by your opinion or not, it remains. – Anthony
So the figure from the core rose to about 280 and any sane mathematical projection therefrom leads to a current value of 360. What’s the problem?
Or are you just busily smearing Bradley because he dared to protest when he discovered Wegman had plagiarized and distorted his work?
You’re so transparent, Watts.
REPLY: Ah, insults from another anonymous coward, always a pleasure. Explain why Dr. Bradley waited four years (from 2006) to bring up plagiarism charges, and then also explain why data splicing of dissimilar data sets is acceptable, and then you might have an argument. – Anthony
Anthony says
———
Now here’s the problem. If you took surface temperature data from Antarctica, and spliced it with surface temperature data from Hawaii, and then presented it as the entire historical record from Antarctica, our friends would have a veritable “cow”.
————
It’s a false comparison.
Temperature varies with latitude so splicing temperature records from different places makes no sense.
CO2 is relatively well mixed in the atmosphere so splicing data from different places is sort of OK in a quick and dirty kind of way.
REPLY: I should have been clearer, I was thinking temperature ANOMALY data, as we are often presented with. In hindsight what I should have done was published some such silly combination first, let the squalling commence, and then publish this story, then use the “but you said data splicing wasn’t OK in the last post” comments 😉
– Anthony
I emailed Raymond and suggested he should come on over to this post and explain the chart to us.
Holding breathe – waiting…..going blue…..
Observing past Team Tactics its likely the headshot & chart will simply disappear into cyberspace.
FerdinandAkin says:
November 24, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Gentlemen,
I find this to be an appalling case of guilt by association. Here we have a photograph of a chart with Dr. Ray Bradley in the foreground. I simply cannot understand why this chart is characterized as false simply because it is in the same picture with Dr. Bradley.
This chart has done nothing except being photographed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
REPLY: I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or not, if so use the /sarc tag
But the issue is data splicing of two different data sets. And the fact that this photo seems to be staged so that the chart is the most prominent portion of the photo, as Dr. Bradley leans to the left to expose it clearly and the full title. – Anthony
———
My oh my the apologists are stretching things! As Anthony suggests this composition of this photo was no accident – unless you think that this chart snuck in behind him while he was not looking to be “photographed in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
It was obviously put in the right place at the right time and is just another not-so-clever attempt at brainwashing. And, of course, this method allows this argument that it was just an ‘accident’ while still sublimally delivering the scary hockey stick message to gullible viewers.
In any case, great job Anthony! And in case FerdinandAkin doesn’t get your point about convenient splicing, how’s this:
“Gentlemen, I find this to be an appalling case of a photograph of a chart which seems to be staged so that the chart is the most prominent portion of the photo.”
P.S. Putting that ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign up behind Bush was just an accident too.
Should have gone to Specsavers.
Tim Folkerts says:
November 24, 2010 at 11:22 am
“Looks like an amazing non-story to me.
Who would ever have thought that a cropped publicity photo might not have all the details listed and visible? ”
I just downloaded the actual slide, the details are not on the actual slide, the photo isn’t cropped.
http://www.pages-igbp.org/products/overheads/raynaud.vostok.ppt
REPLY: That’s a similar graph, but not the same one behind Dr. Bradley. Note the Y axis labels are different as is the title slightly different. – Anthony
Forgive my uninitiated ignorance, but isn’t Lake Vostok like umptillion leagues beneath the surface of Antarctica, in which case how could any core sample ever represent any point in the current epoch ?
Or do I just not know what the heck is going on down there ?
Seems that “Ashleys Book of Knots’ is required reading for climate scientists. As any mariner knows a splice is a trick to make a rope longer. sarc/off
I’ve had academic photos taken. The photographer just wants to pose you an in academic looking setting – some maths scribbled on a whiteboard – pointing at something on a computer screen – whatever. I wouldn’t want to judge anybody on the basis of what appears in the background of a posed photo.
REPLY: Oh I understand where you are coming from, though I doubt the photographer got to make the choice. He needed help, either from Dr. Bradley or an assistant to setup a projector and choose a slide. In my experience people generally want to be photographed in front of things they are proud of or want to convey. Unlike being in public, the great thing about such photographs is that you can choose the setting and refuse to be photographed in settings you don’t agree with. Dr. Bradley obviously thinks this graph important enough to be seen with, otherwise we’d just have a head shot.
Curious though that he didn’t choose one of the more famous graphs like the one from MBH98.
Either way, data splicing has always been a point of contention, and that’s an issue again here with this graph. – Anthony
My climatology prediction program is pointing to a message from an irate photographer claiming that a copyrighted image has been purloined, and must be taken down.
This would then classify this event as: a Bradlification, though a Briffacup in execution, followed by a Gavinaction.
Glossary of terms:
Bradlification: Pompous scientific hypocrisy
Brffacup: A scientific mistake or gaffe
Gavinaction: Aggressive and shrill legal threats
What is the point of this post? Is the information about CO2 concentration false, or is their another motive for this post?
Here is a reference which discusses the Vostok ice core data, and it says pretty clearly in the text that data after 1958 is from the air record:
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/Closer_Look/index.html
The second graph (Data 3) is for the past 200 years. This time period includes all of the Industrial Revolution which began in the mid-1800s. The start of the Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of the large-scale exploitation of fossil fuels. The small dip in temperature in the early 1800s was caused by volcanic eruptions which reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. CO2 inflection points are visible at around 1860, 1950 and 1975. After 1958, the data are from annual air measurements, not ice core proxies, and are therefore of higher quality.
So what is the problem? Where is the deception? Was this made an issue because the problems with the Wegman Report have hit the fan?
REPLY: Its curious because this is the first time I’ve ever noticed the “instrumental splicing” on other proxy data. The deception comes in from not delineating the two sets of data, either by a break mark ~//~ in the line or a change in color, leading one to believe that the data is contiguous from the ice core, when in fact it is not.
At least in MBH 98 and again in 2003 in the graphs shown above, they delineated the colors so the observer knew what they were looking at. In Dr. Bradley’s backdrop and in the graph cited in comments above here: http://www.pages-igbp.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/products.woa/wa/product?id=99
seen here as an image: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/raynaud-et-al-2000-vostok.png
Have no delineations or even labels/notes on the graph to delineate the data sets.
The first graph you cite here… http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/Closer_Look/index.html
…has the same problem for the CO2 record; single color, two data sets, spliced, no notes or break. The point is that data splicing without delineation will land you in jail if you are in stocks and pushing combined data in a prospectus without notice, and if I did something like that here and presented two pieces of data spliced into a single graph, with no mention of it being spliced, a lot of people, and especially you (who howls at everything here) would be all over it once they figured it out.
Don’t bother replying, because I have no interest in wasting several hours arguing with you as you do others here, I have far more important things to do. – Anthony
There have been a couple of comments/questions on the measurement of atmospheric CO2. Such as: what is it in Antarctica and why is the data from Hawiai always quoted.
There is lots of information on the CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center) site
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/
In particular, data from a variety of sources is given at:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/
There are probably other sources but I would suggest people interested in the measurement of atmospheric CO2 could learn a lot from here.
You’re left with only two choices:
1. Dr. Bradley actually knew what was being photographed behind him,
and he approved.
2. Dr. Bradley is totally unaware of his surroundings, had no idea that
chart was there, has never seen this picture, and should not be allowed
to cross the street alone.
Either way, you’re choice…………but spliced is spliced.
I miss the temperature record on the graph , which shows, well, nothing.
http://p6.hostingprod.com/@treks.org/arctic_vostok-ice-core-petit.png
Mike’s Nature Trick: It isn’t just for tree-ring proxies.
Ask your climatologist if Mike’s Nature Trick can work for your data.
Rob Z says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:26 am
CO2 numbers below 200ppm? I thought the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were well mixed? Not good. What’s the offset between reality and the ice cores? Don’t plants have issues at low concentrations of CO2?…
______________________________________________________________
Yes Plants have an issue with CO2 below 200ppm they CROAK! (the C3 plants like trees)
“…The CO2 concentration found in air bubble and in secondary air cavities of deep Vostok and Bryd cores range from 178 and 296 ppm…
According to Barnola et al (1987) the level of CO2 in the global atmosphere during many tens of thousands of years spanning 30,000 to110,000 BP were below 200ppm. If this were true then the growth of C3 plants should be limited at the global scale because their net Photosynthesis is depressed as CO2 concentration in air decreases to less than about 250ubar (less than about 250ppmv)(McKay et al 1991) This would lead to the extinction of C3 plant species . This has however not been recorded by paleobotanists (Manum 1991).” http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
More on the problems with the CO2 measurement can be found at http://www.co2web.info/
I may have missed something but since the chart is splicing of ice core data with other measurements, there must be massive fudging at the transition to achieve a continuous line on the graph. Would any honest scientist do this without an explanation?
@Ian H
‘I’ve had academic photos taken. The photographer just wants to pose you an in academic looking setting – some maths scribbled on a whiteboard – pointing at something on a computer screen – whatever.’
What’s the saying: You can always screw an academic out of seeing the whole picture.
What’s in a background?
Al Gored says:
Um… that was because the mission was accomplished. I don’t recall the sign having any more details on exactly which mission, as far as I can tell people who were upset about that chose the mission they wanted to make a hassle about.
All official pictures with me in them have backgrounds that I chose, it would be a stretch to assume any different of Dr. Bradley.
Surely there is a lot of overreaction here.
The Vostok ice core measurement go back nearly 600,000 years and show a regular pattern of CO2 changes through the glacial periods from about 180 pp to 280 ppm and back. The current measurement is 390 ppm (or 360 when that image was created). So something that varied naturally from 180 to 280 now has a value of 390, and you see something wrong with pointing that out? On the scale of the graph the Vostok measurements end 19/20ths of the way from the 50kyear marker to the zero line – that is not much greater than the width of the line being plotted. The Vostok measurements are identified, the current value is identified, so as far as I can see there is no ‘manufactured data’ and the only thing that could be objected to is that someone has drawn a line from the end of the Vostok data to the current value. Is that so serious? There are things in climate science which are dubious (like some of the computer models) but the CO2 measurements are one of the sound parts, so are you not shooting yourselves in the foot by objecting to this?
What is known about the uncertainties pertaining to the CO2 data (i.e., ppm) derived from the Vostok ice core? I scanned the Petit et al. paper, and it seems the dating is the primary focus of uncertainty with that analysis. I’m interested in understanding how reliable the presumed peak CO2 levels were through the interglacials.
“”””” Peter H says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:14 am
Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
Yes it does. “””””
Well actually it shows what has and is going on with the ice core CO2 over time; well except for that fake recent data. He even labelled it as such.
How convenient that they plot those CO2 and Temperature curves from Vostok on different graphs. They obviously have adjusted the vertical scales to make the two data sets come out with about the same amplitude (no problem there) but since they can do that, couldn’t they also adjust the zero offset so that the two lines lie on top of each other.
Then it would be immediately apparent what the only really interesting information is in these curves; which is that the temperature changes before the CO2 changes; not the other way round.
Al Gore had the same problem when plotting similar data in his book: “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Yep truly inconvenient Al, that today’s CO2 rise incident; might simply be a consequence of the 800 year delay since the mediaeval Warm period.
eadler says:
The funny thing is, I think you actually believe this.
If this was ANY OTHER DISCIPLINE, that dramatic change would most likely result in recalibration of the ice core data, not a plan to seriously cripple our society.
Seriously, tell me you’re not actually under the belief that the planet experienced a steady, smooth, monotonous 260ppm CO2 concentration from the end of the last ice age until the day the steam engine was invented…
Anthony , you are right to be cautious about where this graph comes from but as you say above this is THE message he chooses as a back drop on his offical page at umass. The graph is not some accidental scribble on a blackboard it is a well prepared and labelled graph and it seems unlikely that all that work was done just for the photo , it must come from somewhere. I’m sure someone will spot where it’s from.
Ice cores don’t become ice cores until some considerable depth so there’s no way that level of CO2 came from Vostok data , there is no update. It’s an ice core. The first sample analysed was from 148m , an ice age of 5700 years and and estimated age of the trapped air bubbles of about 2300 years. At that time CO2 was no higher than the previous peaks. All the rest on Bradleys graph comes from some where else and is GRAFTED on without any labeling or attribution.
This is clearly another case of “Mike’s trick” as you correctly suggest.
However, you should be careful about the term graft as you use it to apply to the Pearce graph and the 2003 one. Both of those show superposition of incompatible data , which is very bad practice but not deception if clearly labeled as both those cases appear to be.
What made made Mann’s hockey stick and Jones’ WMO front page graph blatant misrepresentation was the fact this they were GRAFTED, ie. date from one data set was truncated and was then blended with data from another incompatible data set. Jones even went so far as to use the same colour for the whole thing
In order to get the running mean from Briffa’s “decline” data to blend into the temperature data it was necessary to “pad” the window of the running mean tree-rings data with something else. Having chopped out the inconvenient downward data it seems the window was padded by repeating the last value before the trucation. Thus making the mean flatten out and blend into the thermometer data.
McIntyre went into all this in his usual excruciatingly thorough way and it’s documented at CA.
So I think it’s very important to differentiate between superposition and splicing/grafting data.
What you have clearly shown here is a splice. What’s more, it is an unaccredited change to someone else’s work. Probably Petit et al.
Thanks for shining a light on this.
A pound of coal will emit a fairly well-known amount of CO2 when burned. Same with a pound of crude oil or pound of methane. You look at a country’s combined oil, gas, coal consumption. The US CO2 emissions have been flat in recent years, China’s is skyrocketing, increasing in both annual volume and rate of increase.
When you increase the burning of coal/oil at the rate that China and Brazil and India have been, there absolutely has to be an additive effect as far as the total atmospheric CO2 is concerned. But if CO2 emissions were to stop increasing and simply stay at today’s levels, I believe the atmospheric CO2 would actually begin to decline as increased biomass begins to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at an increased rate.
So … inject more CO2 into the air, plants will grow better, after some lag period these plants will begin to pull more CO2 per year out. If the CO2 emission rate is maintained at a flat rate, the plants will “overshoot” and CO2 levels will begin to drop. Plants will then slow down a bit and undershoot so CO2 levels will rise again … the process will ring a little bit until it settles into equilibrium.
The problem is that right now CO2 emissions are increasing at a faster rate than the plants can “bulk up” but if the growth in the rate of increase levels off, I expect to see a leveling off and then a decrease in atmospheric CO2 in a multi-decadal context (in other words, it would take longer than 10 years but probably less than 100 years).
The removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is relentless and no matter how much we try to put back in (all fossil fuel does is put *back* CO2 that was taken out earlier), the earth’s biosystem will become more efficient at removing it. The more we put in per year, the more is taken out per year.
This is apples and oranges. The real-time measurements are at a much greater resolution than the ice core measurements. The ice core measurements are smudged, as it were, by age accuracy and gas diffusion.
I have a good, real science, experiment. In one hundred years, take ice core samples and compare the derived CO2 levels with the historically measured levels.
“”””” jimmi says:
November 24, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Surely there is a lot of overreaction here.
The Vostok ice core measurement go back nearly 600,000 years “””””
Well jimmi there certainly is soemthing wrong here.
Over that time frame from Vostok the CO2 ranges from 180 to 280 with one spike up to 300ppm; so you would get the idea that the average CO2 for nearly a million years has been about 230 ppm ;but we are assured that in the recent pre-industrial era the basline atmospheric CO2 was 280 ppm; which is what the maximum was over the long history.
The third grade science question in “Are You Smarter than a Fifth grader ?” might be.
Do you believe that the CO2 trapped in ice cores must be equal to the CO2 which is in the atmospehre at the same time ?
Those ten year old kids would surely answer that the CO2 measured in the cores, can not be compared with the values in the atmosphere. Moreover; Vostok Station is at a high altitude; I’d guess 10,000 feet; but you can google or wiki it.
Well what do you know; the atmospheric pressure up there is much lower than at sea level; and maybe the gases remain in the ice at different rates depending on the atmospheric pressure.
Well we all know that CO2 is quite soluble in water; and more so in cold water. That ice probably is the result of precipitation of moisture that originated somewhere else and was at high altitude when the droplets formed and dissolved the CO2.
But the “air” that is trapped in those pockets in the ice, was air thatw as at ground level when it became trapped.
Why anyone would expect the ice samples to maintain the air/CO2 ratio of some high altitude atmosphere level is beyond me.
So to claim that atmospheric CO2 over the last 800,000 years was 230 ppm average is just plain silly.
Let’s put this in simple terms for the hard of thinking, without any tenuous analogies:
The 360ppm figure is not from the Vostok ice cores, but from instrumental measurements. The Vostok numbers are not direct measurements as such, but proxies based on retained CO2 in bubbles trapped within the ice. Given that the ice cores don’t show this level in the most recent ice, there has to be some question as to the absolute CO2 values suggested by the proxy (though the historic trend/shape is likely an accurate one.
If the proxy data is just that, and can’t be shown with sufficient certainty to tally accurately with instrumental data, then it is invalid to join the two datasets together and suggest that the series should be read as homogenous and comparable across time.
Choosing it for one’s publicity shot on one’s website suggests that one is perfectly comfortable with being associated with it.*
*If I may weaken and resort to an analogy at the end, a senior politician is unlikely to pose for their prime publicity photo on the set of a violent pornographic snuff movie. The association isn’t really the desired one…
When CO2 is plotted with reconstructed temps, one side has the temp scale and the other side has the CO2 scale. It isn’t “rescaled” to be exact. It is just using the vertical lines for separate scales.
Man, if I don’t just sit at the computer and hit send, my comment ends up down the page long after a thought was finished and we moved on to something else.
Splicing, data, lines, colours etc. etc. aside.
Let’s forget about all of what might follow from this photo and concentrate on the photo itself.
It does not appear to be photo-shopped in any way; a very close-up view will show this (look at the hairs on the back of the head in relation to the background).
Nobody of the alleged scholastic standing of Dr. Raymond S. Bradley would allow any written or pictographic representation of his august self to be published without his express permission.
Someone of this presumed standing would be very careful to ensure that nothing in the least threatening to his/her reputation would be included in that material which was to be published.
Dr. Bradley must, therefore, have been aware of the background to his featured photograph; in fact, Dr. Bradley must have posed for this picture.
Such approval of the photograph implies approval of everything appearing in the photograph, including the background.
Should my somewhat simplistic suppositions be shown to be correct, then the esteemed Dr. Bradley agrees with that data shown on the graph. This data has been shown to be incorrect.
What is the only reasonable conclusion which can be drawn?
It is very cold where I am. I have to dress in several layers and go out and feed our horses. I am not happy about this. Still, it happens every winter so I am not surprised. I am surprised at the number of people that do not understand that the current posting is not about the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is about someone making a chart that mixes together data sets from different places and different times. This is not appropriate. (“ . ”)
I just love how you can sail the Oasis Of The Seas through the Mann’s 2003 error bars
jimmi says:
November 24, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Surely there is a lot of overreaction here.
The Vostok ice core measurement go back nearly 600,000 years and show a regular pattern of CO2 changes through the glacial periods from about 180 pp to 280 ppm and back. The current measurement is 390 ppm (or 360 when that image was created). So something that varied naturally from 180 to 280 now has a value of 390, and you see something wrong with pointing that out? On the scale of the graph the Vostok measurements end 19/20ths of the way from the 50kyear marker to the zero line – that is not much greater than the width of the line being plotted. The Vostok measurements are identified, the current value is identified, so as far as I can see there is no ‘manufactured data’ and the only thing that could be objected to is that someone has drawn a line from the end of the Vostok data to the current value. Is that so serious? There are things in climate science which are dubious (like some of the computer models) but the CO2 measurements are one of the sound parts, so are you not shooting yourselves in the foot by objecting to this?
———————————————————————————————–
But Jimmi your assuming that the ice core CO2 was the same as the air value at the time. There is no certainity in that. On the contrary as another post has indicated its possible that it is less than the air value at the time. We simply do not know and consequently it would be reasonable to indicate the different method of measurement on the graph unless of course one wants to push a dramatic looking visual as “evidence”. But I would agree of course the graph is not in a “peer reviewed” paper so its possible to get away with a much more sloppy presentation.
Anthony & WUWT reader Brian M.,
Thanks for the pre-Turkey Day stimulation.
I think this post provides a simple message like, “There is a kind of intellectual buzz in the air and it is buzzing now about a UMASS prof near you.”
Your buzzing energy is impressive.
Happy thanksgiving to all & to all a good night.
John
Isn’t there another problem with this graph, in that the CO2 vertical axis has a distorted lower end? The bottom of the vertical axis is labeled “0”, and the the next number up is “180”. But from that point on, the numbers the same distance represents only a rise of “60”. This creates an exaggerated notion of the actual increase in CO2, as if CO2 has almost doubled from the pre-industrial era, rather than only gone up about 50%. Clearly, the graph has been calibrated to create a more sensational impression of the changes that have gone on, rather than an accurate reflection of the proportions of the change.
Keith says:
*If I may weaken and resort to an analogy at the end, a senior politician is unlikely to pose for their prime publicity photo on the set of a violent pornographic snuff movie. The association isn’t really the desired one…
Or reading a playboy magazine.
Aren’t the implications of this completely “earthshattering”, first it calls into question all of the Vostok data, because in 1999 Vostok measured 284ppm while Mauna Loa measured 360ppm, then even if that is ok, there have been periods when CO2 was just has high as it is now? How was this missed? It seems like this should have been caught and exposed by a skeptic, or else the tracks covered by the warmers.
One question that maybe relevant.
Is this a graph that he might present in class to students, and
whether the splicing issue is mentioned along with the inherent
dangers in doing splicing.
This is from Eric Steig’s May 2006 review, posted on RealClimate, of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth:
“Several of my colleagues complained that a more significant error is Gore’s use of the long ice core records of CO2 and temperature (from oxygen isotope measurements) in Antarctic ice cores to illustrate the correlation between the two. The complaint is that the correlation is somewhat misleading, because a number of other climate forcings besides CO2 contribute to the change in Antarctic temperature between glacial and interglacial climate. Simply extrapolating this correlation forward in time puts the temperature in 2100 A.D. somewhere upwards of 10 C warmer than present — rather at the extreme end of the vast majority of projections (as we have discussed here). However, I don’t really agree with my colleagues’ criticism on this point. Gore is careful not to state what the temperature/CO2 scaling is. He is making a qualitative point, which is entirely accurate. The fact is that it would be difficult or impossible to explain past changes in temperature during the ice age cycles without CO2 changes (as we have discussed here). In that sense, the ice core CO2-temperature correlation remains an appropriate demonstration of the influence of CO2 on climate.”
“NicklasE says:
Anthony, I actually looked at this data just a few days ago. If you look very carefully at the Wikipedia image you will notice a very very small error. The y-axis of the top most graph is slightly more to the left than the two bottom graphs. I made a new graph (slightly different) here:” http://www.ekstrand.org/climate/iceage20101122/all.png
Not to change the subject, but it looks like “Dust” has a better correlation to “temperature” than CO2. Then again, I’m just an old construction worker.
It is assumed that “colder dryer temperature caused more dust”
O/T; but, there have been some discussions re e-mails.
NOAA has an e-mail machine also.
>>> “I believe we owe it to everyone to provide the best estimates we can where direct measurements are not possible,” she wrote”.
“In the e-mails, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Jane Lubchenco, cautioned a colleague about how to present the government’s findings: “I believe we owe it to everyone to provide the best estimates we can where direct measurements are not possible,” she wrote. “We also need to be forthright about how certain we are about each number, which we’ve done.”
“Obama Administration Surrenders Gulf Oil Leak Estimate E-Mails
CBS NEWS ^ | 11-24-2010 | CBS
Obama Administration Turns Over Internal E-mails by Government Scientists Concerning Estimates Now Acknowledged as Too Low
(AP) The Obama administration late Wednesday defended the integrity of its estimates – which turned out to be inaccurate – during the summer of how much oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico, turning over thousands of pages of internal e-mails written by government scientists who worked on the project.
In the e-mails, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Jane Lubchenco, cautioned a colleague about how to present the government’s findings: “I believe we owe it to everyone to provide the best estimates we can where direct measurements are not possible,” she wrote. “We also need to be forthright about how certain we are about each number, which we’ve done.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com …”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2632751/posts
Once again, Anthony is directly over the target, if the reaction from alarmists is any indicator. Bradley’s who live in glass walled Co2 chambers should not throw stones.
This is not much different than the graph presented by Ben Santer at the recent Congressional “hearing” where it was made to look like temperatures sky rocketed straight up after 1975 and the scaling for the CO2 made it appear to correlate perfectly with temperatures through 2010. By looking at his graph an uninformed person (e.g. most politicians) would conclude it’s “worse than we thought”.
What a dishonest motley crew this bunch is.
Rises in CO2 follow temperature rises, rises in CO2 don’t precede rising temperature.
Since CO2 is a function of temperature, it is not the cause of rising temperature.
And using a normal y-axis, we can see there is no reason to panic.
There is no testable, empirical evidence that CO2 causes measurable warming. The IPCC is simply lying about the effect of CO2. So is Mr Bradley.
nofreewind,
“because in 1999 Vostok measured 284ppm while Mauna Loa measured 360ppm, ”
Vostok did not measure 284 ppm in 1999 – look up how ice cores are measured.
FrankK, and George E Smith,
Vostok is not the only ice core – there are at least 30 different sites – not just Antarctica but Arctic and even tropical regions. There are even sites which get close to present day , for example Law Dome which records up to mid 20th century. The 280 ppm figure is taken as typical of interglacial periods. The Law Dome measurements indicate ~280ppm till early 1800s. EPICA is an even longer sequence than Vostok – they agree on most details, but don’t take my word for it – look them up.
The graph that has generated so much interest was probably based on Figure 4 in the article by Raynaud et al (1990) published in Quaternary Science Reviews, but there have been so many other versions of that reproduced, I can’t be sure of its exact source. It is one of many figures and photographs which decorate the walls of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Your readers may be interested to learn that it takes many years before gas bubbles in polar ice sheets are sealed from contact with the atmosphere. Just how long it takes depends mainly on the accumulation rate, as that determines the depth at which the snow becomes compressed, from snow to firn to ice. Thus, ice cores will never record “today’s” level of greenhouse gases—they only provide historical data to compare with instrumentally recorded data. Where ice cores have been recovered from locations with very high accumulation rates a record of greenhouse gases can be obtained which extends in time up to a few decades ago, and these perfectly match the measured greenhouse gas values from remote locations around the world. Thus it is quite reasonable to plot the ice core greenhouse gas data with the instrumentally recorded data. This is well understood by students of paleoclimatology, but I can understand why it might not be so clear to those less familiar with the field.
Those who would like to learn more could take a look at Chapter 5 in my book, Paleoclimatology (Academic Press, 1999).
In a word: No.
It’s not easy to say when CO2 started rising. You could make the call before 1800, but it certainly started its current (annually) monotonic rise by the late 1800s. (CSIRO graph)
Temperature, however, didn’t hit its minimum until about 1910.
HadCru
NASA
However you measure it, the CO2 rise started first.
Haha….. AGW hypothesis and proponents PWNED, once again!….:-)
Well, at the end of the day, it’s still all about those models, isn’t it?
And when have ~any~ of those models ever predicted the recent weather with even a modicum of accuracy?
WHEN? Right: NEVER!
If they can’t predict the weather now, then WHY on Earth would anyone in his right mind be expected to believe a prediction several decades hence?
They predicted MORE hurricanes, but those didn’t happen.
They predicted MORE hot weather, but that didn’t happen either. The cold weather arrived here (western Washington) more than two weeks earlier than usual, and brought snow with it.
The predicted an ICE-FREE North Pole, but that hasn’t ~even~ come close to a reality.
They predicted sea-level rises of Biblical proportions, but that hasn’t happened either.
I’m surprised they haven’t predicted a plague of frogs and locusts!
Virtually ALL of their predictions have fallen through the thin ice of their own failed suppositions and are rapidly sinking to the depths of junk science.
I’ve watched 1950’s science fiction B-movies which had far more credibility than the crap being tossed our way as ‘science fact.’
And BTW, Anthony, thanks for another revelation into the inner workings of what now passes for ‘academia.’
Sorry, Wombat, your graphs either show temp or CO2. Nice cherry-picking. But check out the provenance of the ones I posted, and you will see that you’re wrong.
But even if you can’t see you’re wrong, everyone else can.☺
Ray Bradley said………….”Your readers may be interested to learn that it takes many years before gas bubbles in polar ice sheets are sealed from contact with the atmosphere. ”
========================================================
Pfft. No news to us mate. We probably knew that before you did. Don’t come the all knowledgeable omnipotent one with us.
…So you willingly admit that the graph that appears behind you is wrong, misleading and meaningless….. You admitted you spliced the proxy with the instrument record without labeling that fact on the graph…… Bit silly wasn’t it?
Ray Bradbury said…. “Thus it is quite reasonable to plot the ice core greenhouse gas data with the instrumentally recorded data. ”
========================================================
I’m sure there are better ways of showing comparisons?
He’s wearing a cardigan in front of a white board with numbers and lines on it, this is a marginally better photo than the tired old polar bear drowning or the steam rising out of a cooling tower of an industrial landscape of doom.
You’re not supposed to look at the numbers any more than you’re supposed to remember that polar bears can swim or that Swedes take steam baths because you might remember there are no actual numbers in support of any of this crap.
@Ray Bradley, I’m sorry professor but your excuse doesn’t wash and borders on fraud, despite your argument from authority.
Fix Bayonets.
Can you believe Mr. Bradley implied that we don’t understand the subject matter?
I emailed Raymond Bradley and received the following response.
—————————-
The graph that has generated so much interest was probably based on Figure 4 in the article by Raynaud et al (1990) published in Quaternary Science Reviews, but there have been many other versions of that reproduced that I can’t be sure of its exact source. It is one of many figures and photographs which decorate the walls of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Your readers may be interested to learn that it takes many years before gas bubbles in polar ice sheets are sealed from contact with the atmosphere. Just how long it takes depends mainly on the accumulation rate, as that determines the depth at which the snow becomes compressed, from snow to firn to ice. Thus, ice cores will never record “today’s” level of greenhouse gases—they only provide historical data to compare with instrumentally recorded data. Where ice cores have been recovered from locations with very high accumulation rates a record of greenhouse gases can be obtained which extends in time up to a few decades ago, and these perfectly match the measured greenhouse gas values from remote locations around the world. Thus it is quite reasonable to plot the ice core greenhouse gas data with the instrumentally recorded data. This is well understood by students of paleoclimatology, but I can understand why it might not be so clear to those less familiar with the field.
Those who would like to learn more could take a look at Chapter 5 in my book, Paleoclimatology (Academic Press, 1999).
Raymond S Bradley
Distinguished Professor
Director, Climate System Research Center
Dept of Geosciences
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
MA 01003-9297
Tel: 413-545-2120
Bradley, your credibility is shot.
The scientific method requires that you provide your raw data, metadata and methodologies to any skeptical scientist [the only honest kind of scientist] who requests it, and answer their questions. Instead, you hide out.
You and your clique of grant hogs ignore the scientific method, making you anti-science. You have made climatology akin to Scientology, phrenology and astrology. McIntyre and McKittrick have your back up against the wall, and you’re desperate.
People are onto your CAGW scam. You are no longer believable or credible. And it is your own doing. You have sold out scientific integrity for grant money and notoriety. But the worm is turning, and CAGW charlatans are now playing defense. And it will only get worse.
Howdy, Orville Redenbacher! ☺
Good reading…
Spliced data of differing types…..
No way to match current readings on CO2 concentrations and long term levels so their is NO COMMON GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION.
I wonder when these folks will learn that truth in advertising is in their best interests?
If Wombat is correct about his Co2 timeline, that makes sense since we have been steadily warming out of the LIA. Thanks Wombat.
Wow, real classy. Attack the victim. Maybe you’d like to suggest that Dr. Bradley should have buttoned one more button, or that he’d had too much to drink.
I probably should have said…… “you admit that the proxy record is spliced to the instrumental record…. Since of course you are saying that you didn’t do the graph and it appears in “the article by Raynaud et al (1990) published in Quaternary Science Reviews.” So it is not your graph…. just a “graph on a wall” among many, etc.
But because it is not labeled as a mix and match of different records….. It’s a misleading graph and a very silly way of presenting a comparison… etc. You would have to agree, would you not Mr Bradley.
Tamsie,
Bradley is the victim like Elmer Gantry was the ‘victim’.
The true victims are the hard-bitten taxpayers being forced to fund the CAGW scam.
Tamsie, could you please address your post to someone. Please and thank you.
crosspatch says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:30 am
Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
Actually, we don’t really know until we get ice cores that correlate in time with the Mauna Loa measurements in order to calibrate the proxy to the instrument record.
The ice cores are a guess. A guess is made about atmospheric CO2 based on the cores. We don’t know how accurate that guess is until we have cores that correspond in time with other measurements and we haven’t been measuring long enough to do that yet.
We have at Law Dome.
David Ball,
“Can you believe Mr. Bradley implied that we don’t understand the subject matter?”
Well I am sure you understood, but it is clear from the comments that several people did not realize that the ice core data from Vostok stops at a date corresponding to roughly 2500BP, though other ice core samples get closer to present day.
“The scientific method requires that you provide your raw data, metadata and methodologies to any skeptical scientist [the only honest kind of scientist] who requests it, and answer their questions. Instead, you hide out.”
Smokey, the Vostok data is all there on the internet http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/current.html
as is that for other ice cores, and the modern measurements from Hawaii. It does not take much methodology to plot a graph, so why don’t you make your own and show it?
jimmi says:
November 24, 2010 at 8:44 pm
The problem as I see it, is the Ivory Tower mentality that a lay-person such as myself could not possibly fathom the depths and breadth of knowledge that they possess.
Smokey says:
November 24, 2010 at 8:10 pm
===========================
Bravo.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
REPLY: Its curious because this is the first time I’ve ever noticed the “instrumental splicing” on other proxy data. The deception comes in from not delineating the two sets of data, either by a break mark ~//~ in the line or a change in color, leading one to believe that the data is contiguous from the ice core, when in fact it is not.
It isn’t proxy data.
REPLY: It isn’t a direct measurement of temperature is what I was thinking due to the Wikipedia graph, so I misspoke. The CO2 portion is directly measured from the trapped gas bubbles. -Anthony
Excellent work.
WUWT gives me my daily detective story!
Like an episode of Columbo every day.
Splicing 2 different graphs together? That’s a standard mathematical procedure.
SARC OFF
Lew Skannen says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Excellent work.
WUWT gives me my daily detective story!
Like an episode of Columbo every day.
I loved it when he’d stop, after it looked like he was done talking to the suspect, and say “One more thing…..”
“Mr Bradly, about that graph….one more thing…..you were splicing 2 different graphs together, isn’t that right…..”
Since this guy co-authored a number of Mannian reports, I really don’t see the point in being careful about the fact that they appended instrumental data to paleo data. It was done and it is out there!!!
“So it seems rather apparent that Dr. Bradley (or whoever made the graph) simply took the Vostok Ice Core CO2 paleo data and “spliced” it with the instrumental record on the end. ”
No-one has mentioned this so perhaps it’s not common knowledge that the splice is no different to the Law Dome ice core – Mauna Loa splice used in the GCM CO2 ppm spin-up datasets.
The model dataset is easily accessed at GISS ModelE and I’ve checked NCAR’s CAM – same data splice just different name and format; all groups in the IPCC stable use it. The spin-up ends at 2000 and then the SRES scenarios from the RCP Database take over in simulations.
Small wonder then that the models are unable to mimic the 30s – 60s warm/cool phase change and the observed condition 2000 – 2010.
You also can fund such a misleading figure in EPA’s website
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/pastcc.html
among other places, as it was science…
Leaving aside historical ice-core records, I have always thought it a little strange that so much weight is given to CO2 concentrations measured on an island which (a) sits pretty much in the centre of the largest/warmest ocean on the planet, and (b) has significant volcanic activity.
How can that provide a representative picture of global atmospheric CO2 concentrations?
It´s off topic, but you must see this one, i cant stop laughing 😀
http://www.climatehotmap.org/namerica.html
I think most people are missing the big issue here, namely : can you splice these data sets together at all?
Is there any proof that the ice core record is the same as the atmospheric record, without a degree of leaching and reduction in the ice-CO2 concentrations?
Where is the proof that 280 ppm really was 280 ppm? Perhaps the 280 ppm line represents a nice 340 ppm, which closely fits the recent CO2 concentrations. In which case, the graph would be complete nonsense bordering on fraud.
Tamsie, how on earth did this co-consnspirator with Mann get to be a victim? Could you please elucidate your proof as I am fascinated by your assertion.
“Ride the incline”
Well done Brian M and Anthony.
If i was his PR department I’d airbrush the graph out and put a picture of President Bush there, that’d fix it.
Goose the gander!
I’m sure Dr. Bradley will want to clear up all this confusion so he will more than likely be sending in his own blog on this site in order to clarify how it’s all come about. So we can look out for his explanation.
Trick or Cheat?
“That’s odd, the Vostok CO2 data for the present is around 280ppm”
No it isn’t – there is no data from the Vostok ice core for the present. The latest CO2 data is from 2342 years ago and the last temperature determination is for about 400 years ago.
So I fail to see any real problem here. Are we just objecting to the title of the graph? Seems so.
We can all accept, I hope, that what the graph shows is essentially correct. Pre-industrial levels of CO2 were about 280 ppm and today’s level is nearer 390 ppm. A single data point for the current level of CO2 gas been added to the end of the many data points from the Vostok record because Vostok doesn’t go up to the present day. Change the title to ‘CO2 levels for the past 400,000 years’ and the graph is correct. There is no deception here.
The interesting thing to note is that in the previous interglacial period, called the Eemian, temperatures were higher than they are now. According to the IPCC’s own ‘Arctic Impact Assessment Report (2005)’ , Section 2.7.3.1 says, “the Eemian was generally warmer everywhere…during the Eemian the winter sea-ice limit in Bering Strait was at least 800 km farther north than today, and that during some summers the Arctic Ocean may have been icefree. The northern treeline was more than 600 km farther north”.
So, Mr. Bradley’s graph shows that CO2 levels are much higher now than they were in the previous interglacial, but temperatures now are lower. Therefore, this current interglacial (the Holocene) has some more natural warming to do in order to simply catch up. So let’s accept the graph.
I assume that the Vostok Ice Core data here is the ‘corrected’ data set. According to direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 during the 1850’s this was from 420-520ppmv, using the same methods as is currently accepted as producing the correct answer. This does not appear on the Vostok records.
“David Waring says:
November 24, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Forgive my uninitiated ignorance, but isn’t Lake Vostok like umptillion leagues beneath the surface of Antarctica, in which case how could any core sample ever represent any point in the current epoch ?
Or do I just not know what the heck is going on down there ?”
There’s nothing shameful about ignorance. In this case there’s just a bit of confusion about nomenclature. The Russians maintain a research station on the icecap called Vostok. They then discovered a large freshwater lake under it, which naturally they called Lake Vostok (only in Russian, of course). Being keen to examine the lake, they drilled down to it (does anyone know if they’ve actually broken through yet?) and in the process extracted an ice core, examination of which yields samples of CO2 concentration (and other data). This, again naturally, is called the Vostok ice core. So the core has nothing to do with what you seem, quite understandably, to think refers to a sediment core under the lake.
Hope this helps,
Jerry
Academics are so …….academic!
I love your analogy of splicing Hawaii and Antarctica data together and splicing stock performances from two companies. I think that’s perfect! No true scientist would splice two different measurements together unless there was a very good proven correlation and/or causation between the two. For example, one could splice a temperature record obtained from mercury thermometers with one from thermocouples provided there’s accurate calibration between the two.
jimmi says:
November 24, 2010 at 8:50 pm [ … ]
You completely missed the point: the scientific method requires cooperation with skeptical scientists. Instead, the alarmist crowd deliberately obstructs the scientific method.
That’s not science; that is advocating an alarmist agenda. But Bradley is stuck in his position. If he started to follow the scientific method now, his entire CAGW agenda would go down in flames.
Bomber the cat has completely missed the point.
Data obtained one way (measuring CO2 now on Mauna loa)
cannot be compared directly with data obtained another way (from ice cores in Antarctica). For example, rapid changes, or peaks, in the past might not be visible in the ice core data because they would get smoothed out by diffusion.
It’s a dishonest data splice, and a favorite trick of the IPCC to mislead people. They do it with CO2 levels, with sea level rise, with temperatures, and of course with proxies (the infamous “hide the decline”).
John Marshall,
“According to direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 during the 1850′s this was from 420-520ppmv, using the same methods as is currently accepted as producing the correct answer”
The current measurements are made using spectroscopic techniques which did not exist in the 1850’s, and which are far, far more accurate. No 19th century values are accurate enough to be trusted. See this http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
if you want to know how it is done.
Smokey,
The scientific method does not require collaboration – competition works just as well if not better. All the data is there if you want to analyze it yourself.
James Allison says: November 24, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Then Smokey says, publish your evidence, etc. your credibility is shot, Bradley!
We need to look more closely at the story and the science. I’ve felt for a long time that this, the unholy Ice Hockey Stick, had not been receiving the attention it deserved. Bradley’s story can sound quite scientifically convincing… until we look at the practical details of CO2 measurement in ice cores… and the way the splice was actually carried out, with a similar omission to the “hide the decline” omission. See my page that introduces the first-rate and wrongly sidelined work of Jaworowski. Jaworowski, like Tim Ball, saw the corruption red in tooth and claw as it came into being, and later on his polemics tend to distract from the excellence of his science. Plus he got viciously attacked.
What makes the continuing CO2 rise difficult to explain naturally is that people forget the oceans’ thermohaline current that lags overall 800 years or so, because the cold CO2-rich water sinks and flows for a long time along the sea bottom before rising and outgassing. IMHO. Hence the smoothness of the CO2 rise, which simply does not match our own CO2 rise.
What gets me about Bradley is his DROPPING CO2 as a factor in treering sizes (Wegman put it in again), then he uses this graph. Since CO2 is well-known to influence tree growth especially pine-types, this omission/hyperinflation to me raises the 5-letter F-word.
Plus, the low CO2 levels that Vostok apparently shows should have resulted in the inhibition and shutdown of plant growth all over the world.
I think NASA have spliced proxy and direct measurements together on the CO2 graph on this page.
http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#SeaLevel
They claim it’s a proxy graph but curiously it matches the instrumental value at present day. Striking!
(PS I was looking for see level data – hence the link title)
Bomber_the_Cat … your argument assumes that the CO2 content of the ice core samples is an accurate representation of the true atmospheric levels throughout history.
Bomber the Cat … CO2 levels are not uniform around the earth … in view of this do the ice core samples truly reflect average CO2 content of the atmosphere?
Thanks to Dr. Bradley for posting here. Please stay around and discuss.
A couple of things struck me about this data. First, I was not aware that the Vostok core data begins at a depth of 150 m, where the ice is 5000 years old and the CO2 is “locked in” from 2000 years ago.
They must HAVE that first 150 m of ice core. What’s in it?
Now there is a natural objection to including CO2 from more recent ice core data because nobody is quite sure (as far as I understand) how to do time resolution for this data at levels where the CO2 is still understood to be settling to its permanent level. At any level near the surface one expects a mixture of gas from a fairly long period of time.
But SOMEWHERE around 50-80 m, according to the dogma of ice core sampling, present day CO2 levels is being locked in right now. Everything above this must be assumed to be present day level.
Well, this is an oversimplification — at that level one expects a mixture of gasses from the last 1500 years or so, but according to CO2 calibration dogma, that is about where current CO2 is dominant. But NONE of the CO2 at that level or above is any older than that.
Coming up higher, say to 30 m, one gets CO2 that is less than 1000 years old, just working from linear trend. At 10 m one gets CO2 less than 300 years old.
But this still gives an entirely wrong impression. If current CO2 levels dominate at 50 m it must ALSO dominate, even more, at 30 and 10 m. Indeed, at these levels we must have essentially pure present-day CO2.
One might object that there is compression in deeper ice so it is not helpful to compare the youngest ice. That may be true for some varieties of data. But if it is concentration of CO2 from air bubbles, this should be irrelevant: while gas may be more compressed further down, the component ratios of identical gas mixtures should be preserved. Yes, CO2 is also dissolved in ice, but as far as I know compression is not a significant factor in this.
My point is that there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to omit the first 150 m of data for CO2 levels. Indeed, one should it to contain a MORE AND MORE ACCURATE reading of CO2 levels as one nears the present (though without a clear time resolution). Above a certain level there should be a very large sample containing essentially pure present-day atmospheric gases. Surely this data is recorded somewhere. My thought is that it is essential information for calibrating the ice core CO2 record.
Where is this data? What does it say? Does the record calibrate well with modern-day CO2 levels, starting around 50 m, as one would expect?
Whilst titling should be clear, your analogy is wrong. The results are correct; and certainly for any academic work the source of data should be made clear.
Like it was in, for e.g., the 2000 Briffa Quart. Sci. Rev. paper.
“Or, if you took stock performance data from poorly performing Company “A” and spliced on better performing stock data from Company “B”, and then made a new graph and used that graph to sell investors on Company “A”, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would have a veritable “cow” when they found out, wouldn’t they? People go to jail for such things.”
No, it’s like taking the measurements of something over 20 years with a ruler, and then switching to measuring it with a tape measure, and then splicing the two together. You’re measuring the same thing, not different things.
Bomber_the_Cat says:
See? This is what I’ve been talking about.
Really Bomber? Are you actually under the illusion that what the graph shows is essentially correct? REALLY?!?! You actually don’t understand why this is even in question, do you???
Even though we can’t see if there are any notes on the chart, I’ve agreed that in would have been a good thing to color code the chart or have a break that clearly delineates the different data sources. Also, this notion that it was some obvious attempt to decieve by placing the Dr. where he was so has to accentuate the end of the chart– it was not to decieve but a highlight the important point of the chart–the extreme anomaly that the current growth in CO2 represents when compared to the past 400,000 years! The chart’s label may be only 99.9% correct as that is the portion of the data that came from Vostok, but its representation of CO2 levels over tme (regardless of source) is 100% correct.
I find it amazing that an entire thread could have been dedicated to this simple issue, but I suppose considering the level of acrimony between “warmists” and skeptics, I suppose not so amazing…
REPLY: And yet you never seem to see any of your long drawn out arguments over minutiae here in the same light. – Anthony
Jimmy Haigh says:
November 25, 2010 at 6:38 am
Thanks to Dr. Bradley for posting here. Please stay around and discuss.
—————————————-
Methinks anybody who is the subject of a post on WUWT should be emailed a link with an invitation to comment. It would be easy to do and a fair thing to do.
It would also be good marketing for WUWT.
Jimmy Haigh said on November 25, 2010 at 6:38 am:
Bradley’s response looks identical to his response to James Allison’s email.
Offhand it looks like we got a drive-by cut-and-paste “response to my critics,” which I shall presume was used more than for just those two instances. You might as well give thanks for “helpful information” from an automated telemarketer and hope they call back.
jimmi says:
“The scientific method does not require collaboration – competition works just as well if not better.”
That is incorrect. McIntyre & McKittrick spent many years trying to get cooperation from Mann, Bradley and Hughes, to no avail. They were stonewalled every step of the way. They spent thousands of hours laboriously trying to replicate MBH, before finally succeeding in exposing the cherry-picked data they used, and replicating, testing and falsifying their methodology.
That, my friend, is not how the scientific method works.
Smokey says:
November 25, 2010 at 9:00 am
Jimmi does have a point, as does Smokey!. Though the scientific ‘method’ is really based on trial and error (or hypothesising if you like) and then experiment, observation and (hopefully) replication.
Both collaboration and independent works are valid approaches but with different benefits:
a collaborative approach allows for many ‘thoughts’ to be placed on the table and bandied around but may also ‘fix’ or ‘limit’ the direction of interest…
an independent approach (especially of the mind) can often ‘look’ into areas not envisaged by others or ‘discounted’ by the collaborative ‘concensus’.
As with most things, there are advantages and disadvantages.
The key point is that in order to VALIDATE any work – as required by proper scientific methodology – ALL workings and data must be made available for appropriate peer review and ‘testing’.
“Excuse me while I puke…”
‘…It’s nice to not to have to go look for mushrooms sometimes…’ An Obscure Chinese Proverb’ (I made it up actually)
The warmists ENRON approach to Science is why we are here and why this is the #1 Climate Science blog in the world. This is fantastic Work. Playing ‘spot the lie’ will not always be this easy though. Have a great thanksgiving everyone at WUWT!
My thanks.
The use of non attributed sources on ones documents, is there not a name for that. 🙂
Mick.
R. Gates,
You are delusional if you think the CO2 levels shown on that chart have anything to do with reality. The CO2 levels of the Instrument portion of the chart are only valid for the station that took those measurements with their associated data filtering and adjustments. (Oh, you didn’t know they had to filter the data?? HAHAHAHAHA)
As far as the Vostok ice cores, there is no empirical data supporting the relationship of the measured gasses in the ice cores, after they have been substantively mishandled, with whatever the actual CO2 levels were in the presumed periods they THINK it represents.
Tell me, when did science start to represent as hard facts things that are on the level with reading chicken gizzards??
Many thanks, Lucy Skywalker and others, for your analyses/information, in particular the Jaworowski paper in http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-ice-HS.htm. It seems that the ice core records which R Gates asserts are “100% correct” are nothing of the sort. Neither the CO2 levels nor the timescales are reliable.
This throws open the whole CO2-temperature debate yet again. In an earlier dialogue with Ferdinand Engelbeen on WUWT, I argued that in the absence of fossil fuel CO2, the atmospheric CO2 levels would have risen, but probably not by much. But the “not by much” was based on the ice core record, so I must now retract that bit. Without fossil fuels, it is now possible that CO2 levels would have risen appreciably.
Just shows – I should have been reading Lucy Skywalker’s blog. If only there was enough time for all this …….
Not quite on topic, but why do these guys photo’s always appear so smug?
BTW, a large dose of white looking “global warming” hit us in the N.E. lastnight/today.
Readers of this blog, should read this definitive statement by kuhnkat, then look on the mis-interpretation of this data as being “proxy data” by the post’s author; and then compare these statements with Dr. Bradley’s succinct and accurate explanation of both the science, and the location of the photo backdrop.
This information makes this post a candidate for the most mis-leading post ever on this site. Even though I had low expectations for logic, knowledge, and understanding amongst the regular commentators here, but these comments hit a new low.
Kev-in-UK says:
“ALL workings and data must be made available for appropriate peer review and testing.”
I could not agree more.
Thus, the stonewalling of MBH98 regarding requests for their data, methods and metadata for more than twelve years is not the scientific method.
They are anti-science.
Smokey says:
Which goes right back to my earlier posts: this is a POLITICAL tactic, and has nothing to do with Science. Accuse others of what you’re doing. How many of us now have been accused of being “anti-science”? And for what? Insisting on the Scientific Method? How wrong is that???
It is understandable that climate scientists would want to correlate paleo data series with modern instrument records. A great deal of research has gone into discovering correlations between the two.
If, as a researcher, you spend a thousand hours pursuing a correlation hypothesis and find a weak correlation, do you publish your findings and benefit those who come after you? However, if you cherry pick your data and do some adjustments you have discovered a strong correlation – you have just proven your hypothesis! With this “strong correlation” you can justify splicing the two data series and come up with a scary hockey stick graph.
Why do you do this? You do it because it brings fame to you and your academic department. Fortune follows in the form of grants for more research. You have learned this technique from years of experience and you use this wisdom to guide your graduate students. Your department expands and flourishes as new students flock to a respected field of study where they can save the world and prosper while doing it.
It’s spliced data, with no discontinuity in line colour, no clear labelling, nothing. I wonder how many conferences with policy makers this one did the rounds of. If Ray Bradley wants to defend this as valid science, where is the peer reviewed paper he published it in?
Smokey says:
November 25, 2010 at 12:02 pm
absolutely – but of course, this is exactly what some of the warmists are doing in their ‘world’. Jones is another prime example – no publication of data or method means no chance to verify (or repudiate) his work. The really bad thing is that any peer review is done by buddies in the same gang!
To me, the climate gang assume we are all idiots, a bit like those online betting sites – where basically you bet on some digital (allegedly) card/game/etc and they will tell you if you have won! Sounds fair? Strangely, I understand that folk actually fall for that method of gambling! LOL
>>Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?<>Yes it does.<>So, get over it and stop trying to find someone else to pick on.<<
That's right. Stop criticizing my religion or I'll chop off your head!!!
Dr. Bradley,
The picture behind you represents an act very similar to “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline.” The main point is that it is scientifically illegitimate to mix two separate data types into the same graphic, unless some direct correlation between the two datasets has been firmly established. Has the Mauna Loa data been correlated to the Vostok data is some way? When Mauna Loa is measured at 360 ppm, will Vostok also be measured at 360 ppm? I don’t think so. And I think a graphic splicing one type onto another dataset is just plain wrong – scientifically and ethically.
“since the current value in the atmosphere from Mauna Loa is said to be around 390ppm currently.”
That’s bias slipping in. Is “said” to be? No. It IS.
But this is WUWT
REPLY: Oh, please. What next, attacking the placements of commas? But, your comment is truly the laugh of the week. Happy Thanksgiving. – Anthony
@ Ray Bradley: ” it takes many years before gas bubbles in polar ice sheets are sealed from contact with the atmosphere …. Thus, ice cores will never record “today’s” level of greenhouse gases”
Firstly, thanks for comment and welcome to the site.
The sealed ice (starting at the base of the firn) records a meainingful signal. Surely it must follow that the firn carries exactly the same signal. (No signal in the firn = no signal in the ice.)
The only question would then be how to sample the air carried in the column above the sealed ice. What are the issues that render this impracical and leave us waiting years to measure the putative signal?
Use of Mauna Loa and temperature data without proper attribution to the sources may be considered plagiarism by the authors of these data sets.
crosspatch: “That said, there is no doubt that burning fossil fuel adds CO2.”
Perhaps the ambiguous point is whether by saying “adds CO2”, you mean “has increased pCO2”.
A question – It is frequently claimed that burning fossil fuels has caused some/all of an increase in pCO2. Hidden within this type of statement is an assertion about what pCO2 would have been today (some lower value), absent our emissions. I’m not sure this is testable (other than by models) and I therefore wonder whether isotope ratio is reliable as evidence that we have “increased pCO2”.
Kinda like mixing batches of purple paint (always to the same hue) where blue paint contains two dfferent isotopes of a certain element. Start with a prepared batch which uses only one isotope then mix more paint using the other isotope. All we have shown is that the same hue can be produced with different isotope ratios. So what – the outcome is the same colour every time. (The paint mixing process is not far from a continuous process – just as our CO2 emissions join a continuous process of CO2 exchange in the natural environment.)
George E. Smith says:
November 24, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Do you believe that the CO2 trapped in ice cores must be equal to the CO2 which is in the atmosphere at the same time ?
Yes it is, be it not equal to the atmosphere above the ice sheet, but equal to the atmosphere at the same depth, which is near the same as above the ice sheet, but somewhat older, due to decreasing pore diameter with depth which hinders rapid diffusion. See the Law Dome ice core data:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_overlap.jpg
Well what do you know; the atmospheric pressure up there is much lower than at sea level; and maybe the gases remain in the ice at different rates depending on the atmospheric pressure.
That is why CO2 levels are expressed as ppm by volume in dry air: the volume ratio doesn’t change with atmospheric pressure, neither the composition in dry air, wet air shows large differences in water vapour with pressure, which is of no interest for CO2 levels.
Well we all know that CO2 is quite soluble in water; and more so in cold water. That ice probably is the result of precipitation of moisture that originated somewhere else and was at high altitude when the droplets formed and dissolved the CO2.
CO2 is not soluble in ice or snow. Antarctica is a desert: extremely dry. All water is ice, except at the ice-air surface, where some waterlike layer of a few molecules thick may be present (until about -32°C). Hardly a hiding place for CO2.
But the “air” that is trapped in those pockets in the ice, was air that as at ground level when it became trapped.
At local near ground level, which at the South Pole is about the same as at Mauna Loa or Barrow (Alaska) or in 95% of the atmosphere.
Ron Cram says:
November 25, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Has the Mauna Loa data been correlated to the Vostok data is some way? When Mauna Loa is measured at 360 ppm, will Vostok also be measured at 360 ppm? I don’t think so.
There is no possibility to measure 360 ppmv in the Vostok ice core, as the bubbles are closing only at some 150 m depth, where the ice is already several hundred years old. The 360 ppmv is measurable somewhere in the transition zone between firn and ice, but due to the large smoothing (some 600 years for Vostok, you have to wait another 300 years to see the average increasing to 360 ppmv…
But it is possible to compare the Vostok ice core with other ice cores, each with increasing accumulation rates and therefore faster closing time, better resolution and more recent CO2 data (even with a 20 years overlap with the South Pole data). That results in the following graph for the past 10,000 years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_010kyr.jpg
And I think a graphic splicing one type onto another dataset is just plain wrong – scientifically and ethically.
Although in this case it doesn’t make any difference, it should have been clearly marked with different colors and/or clearly said in the caption.
un-ethical, un-scientific …… UN !
Mike Jonas says:
November 25, 2010 at 11:29 am
Many thanks, Lucy Skywalker and others, for your analyses/information, in particular the Jaworowski paper in http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-ice-HS.htm. It seems that the ice core records which R Gates asserts are “100% correct” are nothing of the sort. Neither the CO2 levels nor the timescales are reliable.
This throws open the whole CO2-temperature debate yet again. In an earlier dialogue with Ferdinand Engelbeen on WUWT, I argued that in the absence of fossil fuel CO2, the atmospheric CO2 levels would have risen, but probably not by much. But the “not by much” was based on the ice core record, so I must now retract that bit. Without fossil fuels, it is now possible that CO2 levels would have risen appreciably.
Just shows – I should have been reading Lucy Skywalker’s blog. If only there was enough time for all this…
I know, Lucy (hi Lucy) still believes Jaworowski. I don’t. He has a lot of objections against ice core measurements which are physically impossible, even the opposite of what he claims. And he didn’t read the scientific literature since 1991, where many of his objections were clearly refuted or explained. Especially the work of Etheridge of 1996 by drilling three ice cores at Law Dome with different drilling techniques (wet and dry), measuring CO2 top down in firn until closing depth, etc.:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1996/95JD03410.shtml
unfortunately behind a paywall.
Here my opinion about Jaworowski:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
Jordan says:
November 25, 2010 at 3:37 pm
The sealed ice (starting at the base of the firn) records a meainingful signal. Surely it must follow that the firn carries exactly the same signal. (No signal in the firn = no signal in the ice.)
The only question would then be how to sample the air carried in the column above the sealed ice. What are the issues that render this impracical and leave us waiting years to measure the putative signal?
Etheridge e.a. have done measurements top down in firn by inserting double seals in the drilling hole and extracting air out of the firn layers in between the seals. This shows a small gradient with depth, at bubble closing depth (72 m for Law Dome) some 10 ppmv below the atmospheric CO2 content of the air at the surface. Thus there is little difference in age (some 7 years) or CO2 levels of the average air between closing depth and the surface. Something similar for Vostok, but closing depth is much deeper there (much colder).
The problem is that it takes years from start closing of the first bubbles to full closing of all bubbles. Thus some enclosed air in the same ice layer is older, some is younger. The necessary time depends on the accumulation rate: 8 years (1.5 meter ice equivalent per year) averaging for Law Dome to some 600 years (a few mm/year) for Vostok.
Thus it isn’t of much help if you measure in firn, the transition zone may be more interesting…
R. Craigen says:
November 25, 2010 at 7:27 am
My point is that there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to omit the first 150 m of data for CO2 levels. Indeed, one should it to contain a MORE AND MORE ACCURATE reading of CO2 levels as one nears the present (though without a clear time resolution). Above a certain level there should be a very large sample containing essentially pure present-day atmospheric gases. Surely this data is recorded somewhere. My thought is that it is essential information for calibrating the ice core CO2 record.
Where is this data? What does it say? Does the record calibrate well with modern-day CO2 levels, starting around 50 m, as one would expect?
There is a very good reason why the first 150 meter are not used: it is firn, not fully closed ice, where still open pores allow diffusion of air from/to the atmosphere. Levels of CO2 there are near equal to surface air, but older in composition when going deeper as the pores are more and more closing and reduce the exchange speed (firn/ice density is a good measure of that process).
For a few cores, the firn data are known, see e.g. Law Dome:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_firn.jpg
“Now here’s the problem. If you took surface temperature data from Antarctica, and spliced it with surface temperature data from Hawaii, and then presented it as the entire historical record from Antarctica, our friends would have a veritable “cow”.”
Not to be critical because overall I disagree with splicing the two together like Bradley has done, but this analogy is not necessarily accurate.
Greenhouse gases are well-mixed in the atmosphere meaning that generally speaking the measurements at mauna loa will be accurate when compared to Antartic ice cores. An example is the good agreement between law dome in antarctica and mauna loa for CO2 measurements. Local temperatures are not globally distributed so the analogy kinda fails in that sense…
Ferdinand Engelbeen,
My comment must have been poorly written as you have misunderstood me. I understand the time delay issue of Vostok ice cores. My comment did not relate to the ice cores but to CO2 measurements of the atmosphere in the Vostok region similar to the atmospheric measurements taken at Mauna Loa. I do not think you will find a direct correlation. It is certainly unscientific for Bradley (or whoever was responsible for the graphic) to splice data measuring atmospheric CO2 in Hawaii with CO2 trapped in ice cores in Russia.
Jordan says:
November 25, 2010 at 4:08 pm
Perhaps the ambiguous point is whether by saying “adds CO2″, you mean “has increased pCO2″.
It is both: no doubt that humans have added a certain quantity of CO2 by burning fossil fuels and little doubt that that has increased pCO2 as well as in the atmosphere as in the oceans’ surface layer. This was discussed at WUWT in four guest posts by myself, with all together a few thousand reactions… But I have made a web page where most arguments are condensed:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html
I therefore wonder whether isotope ratio is reliable as evidence that we have “increased pCO2″.
It is only one of several indications, not a full proof, but together with the rest of the evidence, there is little doubt left.
MattN says:
November 24, 2010 at 11:05 am
I’m thinking of a 5-letter word that begins with “F”…..
Mmmm. What could that be….
a) FALSE
b) FRAUD
c) FAKED
d) FINTO (Italian)
e) FATTO (Italian)
f) All of the above.
Not personally a skeptic… I visit here to try to gather what all sides are saying. And I’m sorry, guys, but if this is the best you can do, it isn’t much.
You’re not advancing your cause with this kind of …. [I’ll snip the end of the sentence myself!]
latitude says:
November 24, 2010 at 2:17 pm
You’re left with only two choices:
1. Dr. Bradley actually knew what was being photographed behind him,
and he approved.
2. Dr. Bradley is totally unaware of his surroundings, had no idea that
chart was there, has never seen this picture, and should not be allowed
to cross the street alone.
Either way, you’re choice…………but spliced is spliced.
latitude you have (nearly) hit the nail on the head.
It is very simple, as explained by one of my own favorite sayings:
Telling Lies
OR
Incompitent……
Your Choice.
Correction.
That should read:
latitude you have (nearly) hit the nail on the head.
It is very simple, as explained by one of my own favorite RESPONSES:
MattN says:
November 24, 2010 at 11:05 am
I’m thinking of a 5-letter word that begins with “F”…..
Mmmm. What could that be….
a) FALSE
b) FRAUD
c) FAKED
d) FINTO (Italian)
e) FATTO (Italian)
f) All of the above.
Or maybe it was just FOLLY
Or possibly it is FACT? (is ? a letter)
You get the message.
Nice catch! : )
Comparing ice core data to modern instrumental data is like comparing apples to oranges.
You don’t get it. We don’t have a cause to advance. We are only holding scientifically accountable those people who do espouse a cause on the basis of a faith in pseudo-scientific and mythic rhetoric.
Paul K2 says:
“Readers of this blog, should read this definitive statement by kuhnkat, then look on the mis-interpretation of this data as being “proxy data” by the post’s author…”
It’s only part proxy data, Paul. The rest has been spliced onto it by Mr Bradley. Next, you say:
“This information makes this post a candidate for the most mis-leading post ever on this site. Even though I had low expectations for logic, knowledge, and understanding amongst the regular commentators here, but these comments hit a new low.”
Thanks for your content-free rant, typical of the alarmist contingent. Maybe you prefer RealClimate instead.
.
Ed in Madison says:
“Not personally a skeptic… I visit here to try to gather what all sides are saying. And I’m sorry, guys, but if this is the best you can do, it isn’t much.”
More content-free comment. But since you’re from the Peoples’ Socialist Soviet of Madison, you get a pass. You probably can’t help yourself.
Not Bradley, however. He’s a charlatan who ignores the scientific method. But he would make a pretty good Scientologist, IMHO.
Smokey: My comment tried to direct you to read Dr. Bradley’s response, which you still clearly don’t understand; so you are missing the content of my comment completely.
Here is a partial list of the errors in your comment, mostly because you are building on the mistakes in Mr. Watts’ original post.
1. Mr. Bradley is actually Dr. Bradley.
2. Dr. Bradley didn’t produce the graph of the data that Mr. Watts claims has been spliced. Dr. Bradley gave the link to the original paper, and identified the source of the display that Mr. Watts is criticizing. Claiming that Dr. Bradley is responsible for manipulating this data, would be like taking a photo of the Pope in New York with Trade Center in the background, and claiming the Pope was part of the 911 attack. Mr. Watts, for whatever reason, decided to smear Dr. Bradley with the attack on the graph of data. And a lot of comments here have made the same mistake, like Ron Cram, who say Dr. Bradley created the graph being criticized.
3. None of the data in the graph is proxy data. You seem to believe that the CO2 level is calculated from a proxy, but this is incorrect. The data show CO2 directly measured in air extracted from boreholes in the Antarctic, so no proxy was involved. Mr. Watts has already admitted that is a mistake, earlier in these comments, so you may want to backtrack and read those comments.
4. You seem to have bought into Mr. Watts’ claims that surface air readings or Mauna Loa data was spliced onto the graph. There is no good reason to believe that, and this conjecture by Mr. Watts is likely incorrect. I come to a very different conclusion. The exact data collected can’t be determined from the photo, but Dr. Bradley and others have give clues to source of the graph, and Ferdinand Engelbeen gives links to some sites where the data likely came from. It appears the air that tested at the higher and more recent readings came from boreholes, but from the layers of firn in the first 80 meters or so of the boreholes, but using a double seal collection apparatus. Much of this data was apparently collected in Antarctica from boreholes at Law Dome using methods developed at Siple Dome boreholes. The Law Dome air from the firn at a depth less than 30 meters was already exceeding 350 ppm CO2 according to data reported in Etheridge in 1996. Any recent measurements on those layers of firn would show readings exceeding 360 ppm CO2 as displayed in the graph. For Mr. Watts to pretend that there aren’t any CO2 measurements from Antarctic boreholes approaching these CO2 levels is disingenuous.
5. My comment on the lack of logic, knowledge, and understanding by the people posting on this site, has just been confirmed by your error-ridden comment; so adds yet another error in your comments to this list. Clearly my comment was accurate, as you so readily proved.
Mr Watts: Until this moment, sir, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… Let us not assassinate this scientist further, sir. You’ve done enough. … Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
(with full credit and my admiration for Joseph Nye Welch in responding to Senator McCarthy)
REPLY: Mr. K. Dr. Bradley is aware of this thread, responded via email, and didn’t dispute (complain about) the “smearing” you raise, nor complained of “cruelty” or unfair treatment. Thus, your argument fails. The question remains; is it OK to splice data from two different sets, then present them as a single data set under a single title for one data set with no delineation or caveat? My opinion, and the majority of opinion is that it is not. Dr. Bradley gave implicit approval of such techniques by allowing himself to be photographed in front of one such graph, as well as presenting the photograph on his personal web page. Thus, the criticism of that photograph’s graph and his approval of it is valid.
Perhaps in your zeal, you fail to understand that criticism of a public figure’s work or presentation is fair game. There’s nothing “cruel” about hypothesizing and conjecturing how a misleading graph was created and presented. I note your double standards; obviously you consider your smears posted elsewhere about me and this site (yes I read them) from the comfort of anonymity as being above such sort of criticism. So here’s the deal. If you wish to impugn my character here, have the integrity yourself put your full name on it like I do. If you feel that your opinion is so right, so important, I would think you would be proud to stand behind it by putting your full name to it. If not, and you feel that smearing me from anonymity is OK, please don’t post here again. – Anthony Watts
This thread is awesome. Really.
Once again, the AGW defenders have failed to read the post, and jumped off in several directions. Or worse, read the post but not accurately.
Here’s a summary, try to follow:
1. the picture behind Dr. Bradley is something he either chose or approved.
2. the Vostok core does not include present day. Whether or not present day examination of ice exists is not the issue.
3. in spite of the Vostok core not including “today”, the chart which allegedly shows the Vostok core DOES include “today”.
4. Conclusion: the chart is in error.
5. Dr. Bradley is fine with having an erroneous chart as the background for his image.
As a side issue, most of us don’t believe that multi-thousand year ice accurately represents the actual CO2 content from its era, or at the very least it is not calibrated properly.
Yes the graph is bunk. I can’t help thinking about the guy’s mug, though. I’m thinking I just took my car in for an oil change and he’s the technician, telling me there are some serious problems which will cost a lot to fix, but better now than letting it go till later. When asked what the problems are, he begins spewing cartalk jargon while looking very serious and grim.
Ron Cram says:
November 25, 2010 at 5:51 pm
My comment must have been poorly written as you have misunderstood me. I understand the time delay issue of Vostok ice cores. My comment did not relate to the ice cores but to CO2 measurements of the atmosphere in the Vostok region similar to the atmospheric measurements taken at Mauna Loa. I do not think you will find a direct correlation. It is certainly unscientific for Bradley (or whoever was responsible for the graphic) to splice data measuring atmospheric CO2 in Hawaii with CO2 trapped in ice cores in Russia.
Sorry, English is not my native language, thus it happens that there are misunderstandings both ways…
But be aware that Vostok indeed is the name of several places in Russia (mostly quite hot in summer, very cold in winter) but also a permanent manned station on Antarctica above a few km of ice. That is were the ice core was drilled some decade ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station
The local atmospheric CO2 levels at Vostok are practically identical to the levels continuously measured at the South Pole (since 1958, but discontinuously with bi-weekly flask samples in some years), as also the CO2 levels measured at coastal stations of Antarctica show. The SH CO2 levels lag the NH levels with some 14 months, that is because most of the human emissions are in the NH and the ITCZ slows the exchange of air masses (including CO2) between the hemispheres. Seasonal variability is less in the SH (less vegetation) and opposite the NH seasonal variation:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/month_2002_2004_4s.jpg
But that has little influence on the trends in the ice cores, as even the best resolution ice cores (Law Dome, 2 out of 3 ice cores) average the CO2 levels over 8 years. The yearly averages of CO2 levels in 95% of the atmosphere don’t differ with more than 5 ppmv, where most of the difference is because of the lag between the NH and SH levels:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends.jpg
Thus one can say that the CO2 levels in the ice cores are identical to the South Pole measurements (there is an overlap of some 20 years with the Law Dome ice cores), but lagged in the ice core (some 7 years) and more lagged compared to the Mauna Loa data and smoothed over 8 years (Law Dome) up to some 600 years (Vostok, Dome C).
The large smoothing of the Vostok and Dome C ice cores is not a problem either: the transition between a glacial and an interglacial needs some 5,000 years for a 100 ppmv change.
If an undergraduate produced a graph like this (taking an indirect measurement for most of the period, then tacked on the direct measurement for the last few years / decades) they’d be told:
1) Ideally, you shouldn’t make such comparisons – it is almost certain that it is a false comparison because there will be a bias between the datasets
2) If you do, at the absolute minimum you have to mark where the transition between the datasets is on your graph.
It amazes me that some Professors seem to have forgotten the exact same stuff they teach in the first few weeks of an undergraduate (at least geology) course…
We had a cat called Bomber back in the 70’s. Good cat! Liked our bunny Trueman.
By standing in front of an image, Bradley gave approval. It therefore follows that those protesting the BP oil spill gave, by being photographed on oily beaches, their approval to oil spills.
kuhnkat says:
November 25, 2010 at 10:10 am
R. Gates,
You are delusional if you think the CO2 levels shown on that chart have anything to do with reality.
______
Hmm…I do think the chart is probably fairly close to what CO2 levels were in the past and up to the present. The only issue with the chart is the label– whether the whole data set came from Vostok and representing it as such. There have been so-called “skeptics” who even doubted (and still do) modern readings of CO2 levels, so it goes to prove that certain skeptics simply want to doubt science in general.
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Thanks for the link on pCO2 – I’ll have a look at it when I get the chance (busy weekend ahead). But you’re right – there was a lengthy debate on the issues quite recently and it doesn’t need to be started up again here.
On the sealing of ice and the measurements from the firn/transition. I look upon this with some suspicion. There is an undefined convolution of the “signal” going on in the firn/transition. The outcome of that process is what is being laid onto the top layers of the sealed ice. There can be no suggestion that the ice contains a record of atmospheric conditions – at best it is a “convolved” signal (and possibly not a stationary convolution either).
That just goes to support Anthony’s point – splicing is not acceptable.
It’s nothing like at the level of a “lab notebook” issue, like using one multimeter one day and another the next. It is more like stitching an unfiltered signal onto the end of its own moving average and then declaring – “look here, something odd has happened!”.
Ferdinand Engelbeen November 25, 2010 at 5:08 pm :”I know, Lucy (hi Lucy) still believes Jaworowski. I don’t. [… ] the work of Etheridge of 1996 […] unfortunately behind a paywall. […] Here my opinion about Jaworowski:[…]”
I am not in a position to accept or reject what you say, not being familiar with this quite technical field, not having access behind paywalls, and not having time to read everything anyway. I will restrict myself to a few specific comments, and the general observation that, to me, Jaworowski makes too much sense to be dismissed especially since there is so much uncertainty about just about every facet of this topic.
1.Lucy Skywalker has been through your analysis, and concludes “I felt that all Engelbeen’s subsequent points were well answered in Jaworowski’s text”. I do not regard either of you as being more reliable than the other – ie. I am not accepting one’s statements and not the other’s – but there is clearly room for disagreement.
2.Jaworowski’s paper cites Slocum (1955) as showing selection bias by Callander (1938, 1940, 1958). I note that in your document when you dismiss claims of selection bias, you do not address Slocum or Callander, but only Neftel.
3.You quote Luthi in support of Neftel elininating an outlier: “This artefact can be explained by the fact that this ice is from an ice-core section drilled towards the end of the season 2002–2003, when an ethanol–water mixture had to be added at the bottom of the borehole to allow further drilling. This caused partial melting at the outside of the core and subsequent refreezing when hoisting the core through colder sections of the bore hole”, Jaworowski repeatedly draws attention to problems like this [Pearman found “post-coring melting”, Etheridge said core used by Neftel was “exposed to melting”, most cores “were exposed to ambient atmospheres and physical and chemical changes during drilling and storage”, etc, etc], yet you do not address them in your rebuttal.
4.You say that “Jaworowski mainly refers to works written by… Jaworowski”. I thought this was a rather curious claim, and I didn’t notice it when I read the Jaworowski paper. I don’t think the facts support your assertion. In the first (bit less than) half of Jaworowski’s text I found the following references: Callendar (2) , Arrhenius, Fonselius, Slocum (2), Stanhill, Keeling, Jaworowski (3), Wigley, Neftel (23), Berner (2), Broecker, Brolin, IPCC (2), Oeschger (3), Raynaud and Barnola (6), Friedli (3), Segalstad and Jaworowski (2), Coachman (2), Matsuo and Miyake (2), Hemmingsen, Scholander (2), Reynaud and Delmas (2), Hodgman, Weast, Stauffer (4), Stauffer and Oeschger (2), Ng and Patterson (2), Pearman (6), Etheridge (6), Alley and Bentley, Enns, Siegenthaler, Takenouchi and Kennedy, Miller, Barnola (3), De Angelis (2), Petit (2), Boutron (3), Kudryashov (3), Korotkevich, Gow and Williamson, Gow (7), Legrand (2), Zotikov (2), Barkov, Hobbs, Jones and Johari. I stopped there (taking too long) but noted that there were only a further 3 references to Jaworowski. If there is anyone that Jaworowski shows paper-selection-bias to, then surely it is Neftel…
Paul K2 says:
Since your other claims have been taken care of by the comments following yours, I’ll just answer your first point, which contrary to your belief was not a mistake.
I deliberately used “Mr” instead of “Dr” because I regard Bradley as a scientific charlatan, for reasons I have given many times before. “Dr” is a term of respect, and I have none for any scientist who refuses to follow the scientific method because to do so would threaten his grant income.
If Bradley gives a convincing reason why he refuses to cooperate with others who wish to replicate his data and methodologies, we can discuss it. But stonewalling requests from other scientists for 12 years means only one thing to me: MB&H are hiding information that would promptly falsify the basis for their hockey stick chart, and they know it. The fact that Bradley poses in front of his bogus chart shows that his agenda is CAGW propaganda rather than the honest science the public pays for and expects.
The work of MB&H is funded by taxpayers, and they must answer to the public. Instead they hide out, and pretend that “Trust us” is a satisfactory response. It is not. It is the response of scientific charlatans covering up their pseudo-science.
If I’m wrong, I will apologize – just as soon as MB&H provides to Steve McIntyre and others all the information they have been requesting for over twelve years.
Smokey,
I would agree, and can hardly see anyone who doesn’t allow others to replicate his work to be a member of the scientific community, even if he would start to follow the scientific method from now on.
Gererally speaking about scientific misconduct, I would suggest to establish a principal witness protection, which would include job security.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (November 26, 2010 at 2:52 am) : “The SH CO2 levels lag the NH levels with some 14 months, that is because most of the human emissions are in the NH and the ITCZ slows the exchange of air masses (including CO2) between the hemispheres.”
That’s a nice theory F.E., and I’m sorry to have to keep disagreeing with you, but here is a graph of the 12-month CO2 changes at Barrow (far N), Mauna Loa (Mid) and S Pole (far S!):
http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/CO2ChangesAt3Stations.JPG
You can see that the S Pole and Mauna Loa tend to change at similar times, with the S Pole sometimes getting (or losing) the CO2 first and sometimes Mauna Loa. It is Barrow in the far north that more often lags significantly.
Mike Jonas says:
November 26, 2010 at 11:23 am
Jaworowski’s paper cites Slocum (1955) as showing selection bias by Callander (1938, 1940, 1958). I note that in your document when you dismiss claims of selection bias, you do not address Slocum or Callander, but only Neftel.
Callendar was not about ice cores but about selecting historical (wet chemical) CO2 measurements based on several a priori criteria. Some of his criteria have merit: like no measurements used for agriculture (huge local variation over and under leaves), within 10% of the bulk of measurements at several places, etc. I agree that the criteria were biased by his own idea of what should be the right levels, but anyway it is better to have a priori criteria than no criteria at all and accept all historical data as equally valid, even the wildest values measured over land.
The remarkable point is that the levels +/- 10% were conformed some 40 years later by measuring the CO2 levels in ice cores, which fit in that band. Thus his criteria were not that bad. And it was confirmed that measuring over land near vegetation is completely unreliable for “background” CO2 levels.
Neftel was about ice cores, where in some parts a very wide range of values were found, that was where also drilling fluid was found. That means that there were cracks in the ice. What Jaworowski suggests is that one should have accepted the higher values (confirmation bias?), while these were clearly contaminated. I should have discarded all measurements of that part of the ice core, but Neftel used the lowest values in further publications, as he was sure that these were the right ones (confirmation bias?). Anyway the lower values were confirmed by later drillings in other places for the same time frame. Thus the confirmation bias of Neftel was the good one, not the one of Jaworowski.
Jaworowski repeatedly draws attention to problems like this [Pearman found “post-coring melting”, Etheridge said core used by Neftel was “exposed to melting”, most cores “were exposed to ambient atmospheres and physical and chemical changes during drilling and storage”, etc, etc], yet you do not address them in your rebuttal.
Most of the objections of Jaworowski are about the first drilled ice cores (as already said, before 1991), where a lot of errors were made in drilling, handling, transport, etc… But they have learned of these errors, while Jaworowski seems to have ended his knowledge in 1991. The 1996 paper by Etheridge was a quite direct response to a lot of allegations by Jaworowski.
Currently, the ice core parts are immediately packed in PE foil and kept (mostly on site) at -20°C for up to a year for relaxation. That means that the volume increases, the inner pressure goes down and most clathrates decompose again.
There are few chemical reactions that affect CO2 levels. That is no problem as long as not too much active dust is included (as is the case for Greenland ice cores, thanks to Icelandic volcanoes). After cold storage and transport, at the laboratories the outer parts are removed and only the inner parts of the ice core are used for measurements. Mostly grating techniques under vacuum are used (which further destroys any clathrates left), but for checks and for mass spectrometry of isotope ratio’s the full sample is sublimated, then cryogenically separated in the different components and measured…
You say that “Jaworowski mainly refers to works written by… Jaworowski”
That is what I have read in several of his works, but indeed that is not the case for what was written by him on Warwick Huges’ pages. I will change that.
Nevertheless, the citations he makes to other’s work don’t support Jaworowski. Take e.g. his quote that even at -73°C there is liquid water in ice. But his reference is about a study of sulpfuric acid at grain boundaries in Antarctic ice, not about water, and the inclusions were away from the air bubbles.
I have a chemistry background, that means that I have at least some notions about diffusion. What he writes is that the lower levels of CO2 found in ice cores are caused by cracks in the ice, thus CO2 escaping (preferentially more than N2/O2) to the outside world, where the CO2 levels are some 100-200 ppmv higher. Either he doesn’t have the slightest clue about diffusion (which goes from high to low), or…
That was already enough for me to take all what he says with a grain of salt. But for me the door closed with his complete false accusation of the “arbitrarely” shift of the Siple ice core CO2 measurements to match the Mauna Loa measurements. In that case, he simply did use the wrong column in the table of measurements: he used the ice age instead of the gas age, while these are adjacent columns in the same table. Either he has not the slightest clue that there is a difference in age between the ice layers and that of the enclosed bubbles, which is unbelievable for an ice core specialist, or…
I have send a message to him about these two points… no answer.
You may fill in your own “or”, but my “or” is that I don’t believe one word of what Jaworowski says.
Mike Jonas says:
November 26, 2010 at 2:52 pm
That’s a nice theory F.E., and I’m sorry to have to keep disagreeing with you, but here is a graph of the 12-month CO2 changes at Barrow (far N), Mauna Loa (Mid) and S Pole (far S!):
http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/CO2ChangesAt3Stations.JPG
You can see that the S Pole and Mauna Loa tend to change at similar times, with the S Pole sometimes getting (or losing) the CO2 first and sometimes Mauna Loa. It is Barrow in the far north that more often lags significantly.
You are looking at the rate of change of the CO2 levels, which are heavily influenced by temperature changes, but that are not the CO2 levels themselves. Here a view of the yearly increase of CO2 at the same stations (+ Samoa, at 15S) for the period 1995-2004:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends_1995_2004.jpg
The South Pole CO2 levels lag Mauna Loa with about 14 months, Samoa lags MLO with about 10 months, but Mauna Loa (at 3,400 m) also lags Barrow (at sealevel) with about 8 months… It takes time to level off the differences over altitudes and latitudes, but as there are continuous (increasing) emissions, the lags even increase over time.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (November 26, 2010 at 2:56 pm, November 26, 2010 at 3:28 pm) : Your arguments against Professor Jaworowski look very convincing, but I would prefer to see his reply (if one is ever forthcoming) before accepting what you say. A while ago, a very well-known physicist (not you!) posting on WUWT made a very convincing-sounding criticism of another physicist’s work. I emailed the criticised physicist, and received a full and, to me, even more convincing explanation. Unfortunately it came long after the relevant WUWT dialogue had passed into history so I didn’t post it on WUWT (and I hadn’t obtained the 2nd physicist’s permission to do so).
Regarding CO2 levels: you say “The South Pole CO2 levels lag Mauna Loa with about 14 months, Samoa lags MLO with about 10 months, but Mauna Loa (at 3,400 m) also lags Barrow (at sealevel) with about 8 months… It takes time to level off the differences over altitudes and latitudes, but as there are continuous (increasing) emissions, the lags even increase over time.“.
Given the noise level, it isn’t easy to verify your statement from the data. But if what you say is correct (Barrow gets the CO2 first, then Mauna Loa, then S Pole, and the lags are increasing over time) then Barrow should show the greatest change over time, followed by Mauna Loa, S Pole.
But the overall change at Mauna Loa is the largest in both absolute (ppm difference) and relative (ppm ratio) terms. I base this on downloaded data from 1974/2 to 2007/12 (the full common period that I have downloaded) and the linear trend (MS Excel TREND() function) over that period for each station.
(Mauna Loa 328.1ppm to 382.0: +53.9ppm, +16.4%. Barrow 329.8ppm to 383.1: +53.3ppm, +16.2%. S Pole326.5ppm to 379.0: +52.6ppm, +16.1%. Figures each rounded to 1 dec pl.)
It seems to me that CO2 sloshes around the planet in ways that are not fully understood, and that findings concerning CO2 in ice cores and atmosphere may not be fully reliable.
Smokey,
You keep complaining about people hiding data, so:
Go read Appendix 7 of the Muir Russell report. http://www.ccereview.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
Now I guess you probably do not like the whole report, so I am not asking you to believe it, but Appendix 7 is purely factual and describes how they (the report authors) downloaded all the raw data, and how they analyzed it.
They say the following:
1. Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is
impossible for any group to withhold data.
2. It is impossible for any group to tamper improperly with data unless they have
done so to the GHCN and NCAR (and presumably the NMO) sources
themselves.
3. The steps needed to create a temperature trend are straightforward to
implement.
4. The computer code necessary is straightforward to write from scratch and
could easily be done by any competent programmer.
5. The shape obtained in all cases is very similar: in other words if one does the
same thing with the same data one gets very similar results.
6. The result does not depend significantly on the exact list of stations.
7. Adjustments make little difference.
OK, so you think Mann et.al. fiddled the data – go get the raw data and do it yourself. Apparently it took the Muir Russell committee 2 days.
jimmi, please. Stonewalling is a characteristic of the alarmist clique.
Here, I’ll help you get up to speed on Muir Russell’s shenanigans: click
jimmi,
Here’s more pertinent info on the devious Muir Russell: click
And yes, Mann absolutely ‘fiddled the data.’ How else can you explain this?
Maybe some day the scales will fall from your eyes, and you will realize how much you have been lied to by Mann et al.
Ferdinand probably knows about this, but Hans Oeschger dealt with many of the same points in 1995 in Environ Sci. & Pollut. Res. 2 (1) 1995, pp. 60-61. Some may have heard of Oeschger as in Dansgaard-Oeschger events.
Smokey says:
November 26, 2010 at 7:16 pm
jimmi, please. Stonewalling is a characteristic of the alarmist clique.
Smokey all you ever do is lie and stonewall, oh and insult other posters such as Dr Bradley .
Smokey
I am not a member of an alarmist clique -I am properly skeptical in the sense that I know that skepticism works in both directions. I do not believe everything the ‘warmists’ say, but neither do I believe everything said here. I am not asking you to believe all of the Muir Russell report so your links are pointless. I asked you to read Appendix 7 where it says that no data is hidden and anyone can analyze it themselves. A proper skeptic would do so.
Looks like Bradley is one of these alleged scientists that just like to make stuff up to fit a funding and political agenda. No thanks. Americans and now even Europeans are on to the scam.
Phil.
As I said, the day that Bradley begins to cooperate with Steve McIntyre is the day I will apologize to him. And to you, for that matter.
In the mean time, Bradley continues to ignore the scientific method, and you defend his deliberate anti-science. Where would we be if Albert Einstein had never published in Annalen der Physik without addressing the concerns of Wilhelm Wien, Max Planck and many others?
Bradley [along with Mann, Hughes and their clique with both front feet in the grant trough] refuses to share their methodologies and data with interested parties like McIntyre and McKittrick, making a mockery of testability – the basis for the scientific method. How can a conjecture like AGW be tested if the basis for it is kept as confidential as nuclear defense secrets? This is the weather we’re talking about.
So quit your hand-wringing over my holding Bradley’s feet to the fire. Either he plays the game fairly, or he is a scientific charlatan. If he – or you – want an apology, it is a simple matter for Bradley to contact Steve McIntyre and offer to cooperate with his requests for data, methods and metadata.
jimmi,
You misunderstood. I was not referring to you as a member of Mann’s clique – which is a specific term used in statistics. The Wegman Report to Congress explains the term. To understand the issues you need to read the report.
NO ONE responded to this intresting post!!!!
“timheyes says:
November 25, 2010 at 4:47 am
I think NASA have spliced proxy and direct measurements together on the CO2 graph on this page.
http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#SeaLevel
They claim it’s a proxy graph but curiously it matches the instrumental value at present day. Striking!”
Not proxy, but ice core vs direct atmosphere. Note how the NASA graph is described in their own words…” The chart on the left shows the CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere during the last three glacial cycles, as reconstructed from ice cores. The chart on the right shows CO2 levels in recent years, corrected for average seasonal cycles.”
The chart on the left does show both methods combined, but does not state it. The biggest reason I find to question the ice core is, as has been pointed out, the very low levels are not backed by periodic plant die off such levels would cause. At any rate the chart on the left combines two methods, one that has been dispuded by legitmate scientist, and one that is not, thus it is bad science amd apparently done by NASA.
Mike Jonas says:
November 26, 2010 at 5:05 pm
About Jaworowski: I received a reaction of him some time ago about a different discussion, where I showed the combined ice cores CO2 graph for the past 1,000 years. His reaction was that there was no difference in age between the ice and the enclosed air, thus that the shift was arbitrarely to match the South Pole measurements.
I did write to him that Etheridge had measured the air composition of firn top down until closing depth and in the ice core, which shows that the gas composition is about the same as at the surface, but some 10 years older, while the ice at that depth was already 40 years. That confirmed the 30 years ice age – gas age difference as the theoretical migration speed calculations showed. The same for gravitational separation, as Oeschger found (thanks Eli, was not aware of that work).
I also included the fact that migration via cracks is always from high to low levels and that any remaining clathrates decompose very fast under vacuum at measurement time. I received no answer…
About the CO2 levels:
The problem is in the seasonal trend: if the data start in Februari, when seasonal CO2 levels at Barrow are at their maximum, but end in December, when the seasonal trend still is in its increasing part. That gives a begin-endpoint bias of about -4 ppmv. Mauna Loa picks up the seasonal changes a few months later and has a smaller seasonal amplitude, which gives that its begin-endpoint bias is about -2 ppmv. That makes that your trends have different biases… See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/month_2002_2004_4s.jpg
Better is to use yearly averages, as the effect of the seasonal variations is near zero after a full cycle. But all together, the differences all over the globe (except in the first few hundred meters over land) are small, compared to the huge exchanges that take place over the seasons. And these differences even are smoothed out in the ice core record. A lag of 1-2 years in the data (or about 4 ppmv) is not a real problem…
David says:
November 27, 2010 at 5:05 am
While I agree that the NASA graphs are at least sloppy and should show the overlap (the most recent ice cores reach 335 ppmv, not 380 ppmv), I disagree here:
The biggest reason I find to question the ice core is, as has been pointed out, the very low levels are not backed by periodic plant die off such levels would cause.
The equilibrium for C3 plants (mostly trees) is about 90 ppmv. At that level there is no growth anymore and CO2 uptake and respiration are in equilibrium (that is from experiments in greenhouses). But C3 plants start to have problems below 200 ppmv. Despite that the “background” CO2 levels, as measured in ice cores, were around 180 ppmv for long periods during the ice ages, the levels over land in general (especially in the morning) were high enough to allow a few hours of photosynthesis. Here what I wrote in another discussion (minus a few errors):
Here a few days of CO2 measurements at Giessen, mid-west Germany, compared to the same days at Mauna Loa, Barrow and the South Pole:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/giessen_background.jpg
CO2 levels at Giessen increase enormously at night (little wind, inversion layer) and drop rapidely below background in daylight. With background levels at 180 ppmv, that would give a similar increase at night, but less drop in daylight as the photosynthesis gets limited by the lower CO2 levels.
And it seems that the absolute minimum for (C3?) photosynthesis is at 90 ppmv:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v193/n4815/abs/193587a0.html
The balance for some more growth than decay (respiration at night) will be higher.
Ferdinand Engelbeen : I’ll deal with the 2nd issue first to get it out of the way – I realised after posting that I should have used whole years. I re-worked the numbers on whole years and it made virtually no difference (after all, only 1 month in ~30 years had been missing). I can supply the numbers if you like. My doubts remain.
On Jaworoski : This is an intriguing debate. On the one hand, we have a maverick scientist of high repute calling foul. On the other hand we have the orthodoxy closing ranks and presenting convincing-sounding arguments as to why they are right and the maverick is wrong. Is it AGW or stomach bacteria or Einstein or evolution or Galileo all over again? Or are the orthodoxy right, as I am sure they most often are?
I have found and read the Oeschger item that you referred to. I am really not in a position to comment on the technical stuff, but the issue that seems to be the biggest sticking point is the age of the air in the ice. The basic arguments seem to be that CO2 concentrations in 19thC ice are similar to today’s, therefore (a) Jaworowski : 19thC CO2 concentrations were similar to today’s, or (b) orthodoxy : the air in 19thC ice is today’s air.
To my simple mind, Jaworowski’s seems more reasonable. A lot of explaining has to be done to get (b), such as how air from above forces its way down through the ice into areas of much higher pressure in order to displace the air there. Now presumably that is not the mechanism, and any physical flow is actually the other way, but I think there is still some explaining to do.
Oeschger says “Fig. 5 b speaks for itself; why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?“. I don’t know where Fig. 5 b is, but presumably he is referrring to the same data as in the Jaworowski paper fig.10b.
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Images/ice-HS/Fig-10.gif
The argument for (b) looks seductive, because it gets the graphs to dovetail neatly – but it is a bit too close to hockey-stick methods for my liking. As for Oeschger’s argument, I would say that firstly the further down the ice core one goes, the less able one is to relate the trapped air to short periods of time such as a few decades, and Hadcrut shows quite strong warming in the mid-19th century, peaking in 1878 then dropping all the way down again around 1910. Give or take a few years, this dovetails in quite nicely with Jaworowski’s 10b. NB. I think it very likely that the temperature/CO2 gradients shown over long timeframes in ice cores are not representative over short timescales such as a few decades.
thought on CO and the thermohaline current
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Conveyor_belt.svg/500px-Conveyor_belt.svg.png
Some of the increased CO2 gets dissolved in the water (making it less alkaline).
At the poles this gets pulled into the ocean depths by the THC.It then travels for around a 1000 years to reappear on the surface elsewhere (See map). After another 1000 years it is back where it started but with a higher concentration of CO2 dissolved.
Are we in a benign period where our pollution is being hidden from us by the THC? Will future generations then have to cope with our mess?
Will we be seeing the results of the 1st industrial revolution emerging from the depths soon?
walt man says:
November 28, 2010 at 5:35 am
No.
Mike Jonas says:
November 27, 2010 at 3:22 pm
I re-worked the numbers on whole years and it made virtually no difference (after all, only 1 month in ~30 years had been missing). I can supply the numbers if you like. My doubts remain.
I used the yearly averages, which show an increasing lag between altitudes and latitudes, but please send the data you have used, my email address can be found on the family web site.
To my simple mind, Jaworowski’s seems more reasonable. A lot of explaining has to be done to get (b), such as how air from above forces its way down through the ice into areas of much higher pressure in order to displace the air there.
The explanation is quite simple: what is deposited is snow. As you know, that is very porous and air exchanges are quite easy, at the surface simply mechanical by wind and deeper by diffusion. That goes two-ways, always from the higher levels towards the lower levels (one of the other objections against what Jaworowski says).
There is increasing pressure on the snow by the subsequent deposit of other snow layers on top, which increases the density of the layers from snow on top to firn inbetween to ice at a certain depth.
That doesn’t give any pressure on the air in the still open pores, simply because all these pores still are in contact with each other until the surface, only reduces the porosity and thus reduces the diffusion speed.
There is a simple rule that theoretically (and measured practically) there is no diffusion anymore at a certain density of the firn. Below that, some of the pores are fully closed, others still are open and the number of closed bubbles increases with depth until all are closed.
Now, the main question: who is right?
Well, Etheridge did measure what happens in the deep: he measured CO2 levels in the firn top down at Law Dome. That showed that the levels at the start of the bubble closing depth (some 72 meters) were some 10 ppmv less than at the surface. As the measurements were done in 1993 and the South Pole air CO2 measurements go back to 1958, it was easy to know when the CO2 levels at the South Pole were 10 ppmv lower: that was in 1986, seven years earlier. Thus the composition (for CO2) of the air at 72 meter depth is only about 7 years older than at the surface.
At 72 meter depth there are already 40 years of snow deposit. These are easily counted, as winter and summer snow have a different density, which is visible as different layers. Thus with other words, at the same depth, the average gas age is 33 years younger than the ice age at Law Dome. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_overlap.jpg
Thus if Jaworoski says that there is no difference between the age of the ice layers and the enclosed air, then he is not only wrong, but denies what is measured in the field in 1993 and published in 1995/1996. So, I am pretty sure that Jaworowski is not the new Galileo in this case and that the “consensus” for once is right…
walt man says:
November 28, 2010 at 5:35 am
CO2 levels around a millennium ago were about 280 ppmv, during the LIA some 6 ppmv less for some 0.8°C less. Not really much difference to haunt us…
See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
walt man says:
November 28, 2010 at 5:35 am
Sorry, misinterpreted what you meant: from the current increasing levels by the emissions, a part is absorbed by the oceans and goes into the depth of the oceans. The deeper oceans already contain a tremendous amount of CO2 in the form of (bi)carbonates. Even with a doubling of the emissions, that increases the CO2 content of the deep oceans only with a few % and that is what comes back some 1,000 years later. Thus the resulting new equilibrium of CO2 in the atmosphere would be around a few % too.
Anthony,
You can use my full name. I always do on the internet. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting on this.
Ray Bradley,
“Where ice cores have been recovered from locations with very high accumulation rates a record of greenhouse gases can be obtained which extends in time up to a few decades ago, and these perfectly match the measured greenhouse gas values from remote locations around the world. Thus it is quite reasonable to plot the ice core greenhouse gas data with the instrumentally recorded data. This is well understood by students of paleoclimatology, but I can understand why it might not be so clear to those less familiar with the field.”
That’s a bad assumption. How do you know that ice cores being brought up from extreme pressure are not effected by the extraction process, or other effects. Surface ice is not very old or under very much pressure.
If I inflate a series of brand new bike tires over time to the same exact pressure the most recent ones will match the original measured pressure, but the older ones will not.
The fact that current periods match is no proof that the proxy doesn’t skew over time, and especially given that in this case depth increases with age.
Has anyone done comparisons between an area where snow accumulates more slowly with ones where it accumulates more quickly? This way one can compare the effects of depth vs. age. Also if this proxy is so accurate one would expect that ice cores worldwide would agree except for the effects of averaging due to speed of accumulation.
Sorry but I don’t trust climatologists because of all the wrong assumptions I’ve seen them make in the past. Like for instance assuming that increased melting of ice in the Himalayas would lead to reduced river flow. Of course, the opposite is true, a net increase in flow. The only way that wouldn’t happen is if it sublimates, and that is not the claim.
Ferdinand Engelbeen : The data is here:
http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/CO2Data_DataExtractedForFerdinandEngelbeen20101129.pdf
Text in the original download says “Source: R. F. Keeling, S. C. Piper, A. F. Bollenbacher and S. J. Walker Carbon Dioxide Research Group Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) University of California La Jolla, California USA“. Barrow and S Pole data is dated May 2008, Mauna Loa February 2009.
I said in an earlier comment that “CO2 sloshes around the planet in ways that are not fully understood“. We have talked about the movement of CO2 around the atmosphere, but there are other movements too.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/CO2/carbondioxide/image/annfluxgmm2u2windmap.jpg
shows that CO2 is released by the oceans not only near the tropics, as would be expected, but also (rather unexpectedly??) in the far north and far south.
On Jaworowski and ice cores : You say “That doesn’t give any pressure on the air in the still open pores, simply because all these pores still are in contact with each other until the surface, only reduces the porosity and thus reduces the diffusion speed.“.
I find it extraordinarily unlikely that all the pores are open to each other at any depth. IOW when you say “the still open pores” you aren’t talking about all pores, you are probably talking about dramatically fewer pores as they are progressively buried.
But in any case, Jaworowski’s objection is to the assumption that “the age of the gases in the air bubbles is much lower than the age of the ice in which they are entrapped“, and cites Neftel claiming that “the air was about 90 years younger” than the ice. Jaworowski doesn’t claim that “there is no difference” (your words), but that it is “similar“. You are now talking about “the average gas age is 33 years younger than the ice age“. Seems we have come quite a long way towards Jaworoski’s position.
In that light, take another look at Jaworowski paper fig.10b.
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Images/ice-HS/Fig-10.gif
A mere 33 years doesn’t get anywhere near closing that gap. The main thrust of Jaworowski’s argument seems to be standing up pretty well.
Mike Jonas says:
November 28, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Ferdinand Engelbeen : The data is here:
http://members.westnet.com.au/jonas1/CO2Data_DataExtractedForFerdinandEngelbeen20101129.pdf
I see the difference in interpretation now: indeed the difference between BRW and MLO is somewhat decreasing over the full period, but still MLO is lagging after BRW with several months. If the decrease in lag is substantial or temporarely should be seen in a trendline of the differences (right now I have not the time to plot it myself) between BRW and MLO, as BRW is far more variable than MLO…
That the oceans have different places where CO2 is upwelling and absorbed is known: Even in cold oceans, if there is upwelling if the deep oceans, that water is oversaturated with CO2 and there CO2 is released. That is part of the continuous flow of CO2 between upwelling and places of absorption. The mid-latitudes are intermittent: upwelling in summer, sinks in winter. But that all doesn’t influence the trend that much (except for overall temperature changes, which is minor), only the variability around the trend.
I find it extraordinarily unlikely that all the pores are open to each other at any depth. IOW when you say “the still open pores” you aren’t talking about all pores, you are probably talking about dramatically fewer pores as they are progressively buried.
Well it is measured: CO2 was measured in situ in still open pores, which was from the surface to where the first pores were closing: that is at 72 meters depth for Law Dome. Only 10 ppmv difference with CO2 at the surface, thus about 7 years older than at the surface.
CO2 was also measured in the already closed air bubbles at the same depth (72 meter) via the normal route for ice cores. Exact the same level of CO2 was found, thus again 7 years older than at the surface. Thus the average CO2 of all closed bubbles and the average CO2 of all open pores at the same depth is the same.
But in any case, Jaworowski’s objection is to the assumption that “the age of the gases in the air bubbles is much lower than the age of the ice in which they are entrapped“, and cites Neftel claiming that “the air was about 90 years younger” than the ice. Jaworowski doesn’t claim that “there is no difference” (your words), but that it is “similar“. You are now talking about “the average gas age is 33 years younger than the ice age“. Seems we have come quite a long way towards Jaworoski’s position.
Jaworowski states that there is no difference between the age of the ice layers and the age of the enclosed air (*). This is proven false, both theoretically calculated based on diffusion speed and pore diameter and measured in a few ice cores. There is nothing arbitrarely in using the average gas age and compare it with the atmospheric data.
The ice age – gas age difference depends of the accumulation speed, which is quite different for different ice cores. For the fast accumulating coastal ice cores at Law Dome it is about 33 years, for Siple Dome (Neftel) some 83 years and for far inland Vostok hundreds to thousands of years.
Literally from correspondention with him:
The air/ice age difference still remains as an unproved assumption, and the CO2 hokey curve from Law Dome, based on this assumption is false.
“The question remains; is it OK to splice data from two different sets, then present them as a single data set…”
The answer remains: absolutely not. Not EVER. Particularly when it is something as important as this…
Ferdinand Engelbeen : “CO2 was also measured in the already closed air bubbles at the same depth (72 meter) via the normal route for ice cores. Exact the same level of CO2 was found, thus again 7 years older than at the surface. Thus the average CO2 of all closed bubbles and the average CO2 of all open pores at the same depth is the same.”
Something’s wrong. CO2 is supposed not to travel through the ice, that is the whole basis of using ice cores to determine past CO2 levels. So the bubbles that had been closed for a few years should show lower CO2 levels than the ones that are still open. They don’t. This means that CO2 does travel through the ice, and very effectively.
One has to question what value the ice cores have.
Mike Jonas says:
November 29, 2010 at 11:47 am
Something’s wrong. CO2 is supposed not to travel through the ice, that is the whole basis of using ice cores to determine past CO2 levels. So the bubbles that had been closed for a few years should show lower CO2 levels than the ones that are still open. They don’t. This means that CO2 does travel through the ice, and very effectively.
One has to question what value the ice cores have.
Mike, as already said (and as described in the work of Etheridge of 1996, unfortunately behind a paywall):
CO2 was measured in situ in still open pores, which was from the surface to where the first pores were closing: that is at 72 meters depth for Law Dome.
and
CO2 was also measured in the already closed air bubbles at the same depth (72 meter) via the normal route for ice cores.
Indeed once the pores are closed, there is no migration anymore (or so little that it is undetectable). But as the closing process takes several meters from the first closed bubbles to where all pores are closed, therefore the first bubbles contain older air than the last closers. Depending on the accumulation rate, that takes about 8 years for Law Dome (2 cores), 21 years for the third core (taken at the slope with less accumulation per year), some 22 years for Siple Dome and some 560 years for Dome C.
Thus the average composition in the ice core at a certain depth is a mix of CO2 levels from different years, which makes that the resolution is worse, the less snow deposit there is over a year. But at the other side, the less deposit, the more layers one has at the same depth, thus the farther back in time one can measure the air composition from that period: from 150 years for Law Dome to 800,000 years for Dome C.
Ferdinand Engelbeen – I don’t want to flog a dead horse, but earlier you said “the average CO2 of all closed bubbles and the average CO2 of all open pores at the same depth is the same“, now you say “the average composition in the ice core at a certain depth is a mix of CO2 levels from different years“.
There seems to be a contradiction. Two bubbles at the same depth, one closed and one open, originally formed at the same time (because they are the same depth). The open one continues to change its CO2 content to match the outside world, whereas the closed bubble’s CO2 cannot move through the ice surrounding it and therefore matches what the outside world looked like at the time that the bubble closed. This means that the closed bubble and the open bubble will have different CO2 content, in line with your later statement. I don’t then see how your earlier statement can be correct.
So let’s work from your later statement. The argument for air age being much younger than ice age (shown in Jaworowski fig 10a) now depends on all pores remaining open until the last moment, at which time they all suddenly close. That seems absurd to me. Surely the reality is that many more pores will close in the early years than in the later years. This means that the average air age will not be all that different to the ice age, and certainly nowhere near enough to close the gap in Jaworowski fig 10b.
And the AGW case depends on that gap being closed.
Mike Jonas says:
November 29, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Ferdinand Engelbeen – I don’t want to flog a dead horse, but earlier you said “the average CO2 of all closed bubbles and the average CO2 of all open pores at the same depth is the same“, now you say “the average composition in the ice core at a certain depth is a mix of CO2 levels from different years“.
OK, I think that I need to be more clear:
For the Law Dome ice core (other depths and years applicable for different ice cores):
– underway down to about 72 meter: only open firn (compressed snow), no closed bubbles. In situ measured CO2 gradient about 10 ppmv top-down. Near top equal to above surface, at 72 m depth about 7 years older.
– at closing depth (72 meter): in situ measured open pores CO2 10 ppmv below surface. Thus 7 years older than surface. Ice layers counted: 40 ice layers, ice is 40 years old. Ice core extracted and ice with first closing bubbles crushed and air from the bubbles measured: the same CO2 levels is found.
– at final closing depth (about 85 meters): ice 48 layers, 48 years old. CO2 in last open cores: about 18 ppmv less than surface, or about 13 years older. CO2 in ice at same depth: about 20 ppmv less than surface, or about 14 years older. Hardly a difference.
See: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_firn.jpg
Why so little difference? With depth, the diffusion speed of any molecules becomes more and more difficult, due to smaller and smaller pores. At a certain depth (72 m for Law Dome), some ice layers are sealed (vertically, but not horizontally) mainly for winter deposits. Thus the still open pores below first sealing depth have no exchange with the atmosphere anymore. For Law Dome, first closing depth and sealing depth are equal, but some ice cores (Siple Dome) have sealing layers above first closing depth.
Etheridge says the following about the enclosing:
Air becomes sealed in the ice sheet and is subsequently enclosed in bubbles as the open porosity of the firm layer decreases with depth. The enclosed air at any depth in the ice has a mean age a(a) that is younger than the age of the host ice layer a(i), from which the air is extacted. This difference, da, equals the time T(s) for the layer to reach a depth d(s), where air becomes sealed in the pore space, minus the mean time T(d) for the air to mix down to that depth.
Mixing of air from the ice sheet surface to the sealing depth is primarly by molecular diffusion.
Thus my interpretation was wrong. The gas phase averaging happens already above sealing depth and the mixed air is the same in still open pores and already closed bubbles below any depth below the sealing depth. Thus you were right to point to the discrepancy. Not so for what Jaworowski says.
So let’s work from your later statement. The argument for air age being much younger than ice age (shown in Jaworowski fig 10a) now depends on all pores remaining open until the last moment, at which time they all suddenly close. That seems absurd to me. Surely the reality is that many more pores will close in the early years than in the later years. This means that the average air age will not be all that different to the ice age, and certainly nowhere near enough to close the gap in Jaworowski fig 10b.
And the AGW case depends on that gap being closed.
As the measurements show:
At bubble closing start, the average (from about 10 years) gas age at 72 meter at Law Dome is some 7 years younger than at the surface. The ice age at the same depth is 40 years. Difference 33 years.
At end bubble closing, the average (from about 10 years) gas age at 85 meter at Law Dome is some 14 years younger than at the surface. The ice age at the same depth is 48 years. Difference 34 years.
Thus there is a gas age-ice age difference of about 33 years in the Law Dome which depends of deposition speed (which may be different if the climate changes, even for the same core).
No matter if all bubbles closed at once or several meters lower at once, the ice age – gas age difference remains, That means that there is no gap between the gas age estimates and the direct measurements of the atmosphere, even an overlap of some 20 years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_sp_co2.jpg
Thus figure 10a of Jaworowski is proven right (as measured for Law Dome, calculated for Siple Dome), figure 10b of Jaworowski is based on the assumption that there is no difference between the age of the ice layers and the enclosed air, which is proven wrong.