Beck on CO2 and Temperature: Oceans are the "dominant CO2 store"

I’d like to comment on this, because I’ve looked at the issue in quite some detail, and even posted a paper about it on Arxiv.
In that paper, I showed that you could simulate the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere using only the temperature data, and get really good agreement with both the long term growth curve, and the short term (monthly) fluctuations in CO2 uptake (rate of change), all this assuming a simple temperature response of the carbon cycle with a given response time.
However, that result was wrong. It was wrong in that you can get the same kind of agreement if you include the “human” emissions properly, something which I had not done at the time I wrote the paper. So I am now pretty convinced that most of the increase in CO2 concentration is due, in fact to human emissions. (and yeah, if I were not so lazy, I would have removed my paper from Arxiv already…).
That being said, I learned a lot from this exercise. Making mistakes is a good way to learn.
One thing is that the carbon cycle IS dependent on temperature, something that has received surprisingly little attention in the scientific litterature. It seems to me that we could get very useful information if we studied that dependence in more detail.
But the other thing I realized is that the carbon cycle DOES react to human emissions (well, all right, nothing new here…). The carbon “sink”, whether it is forests, or phytoplankton, expands with the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. In fact, the carbon sink has expanded tremendously over the past century. The more CO2 we pump into the atmosphere, the more is absorbed. I knew it before, but playing with the data just made it more real…
But a big question is, what is the response time of that reaction? We are being told that the “residence time” of CO2 is 50, or even 100 years. In other words, it would take that long to get rid of the surplus CO2 if we stopped emitting today. I have a hard time with that figure. There just does not seem to be any empirical support for it. Sure, you can find nice simulations with such long lifetimes, superimposed on the CO2 growth curve, and there seems to be a perfect match. The problem is, you can get a similar match with about ANY lifetime value, short or long! And at some point, the uncertainty about the past history of CO2 just prevents you from discrimating between the possible values.
In the end, it is a trade-off: either the system responds strongly, but slowly, or it is less sensitive, but reacts rapidly.
A careful examination of the temperature response might help discriminating between the two options. But I must admit that I could never get a statistically significant answer. I just stopped trying…
A better knowledge of the past history of CO2 concentration would also help. I am not convinced by Beck’s data on the high CO2 concentrations during the 1930’s. Just seems too anomalous. On the other hand, I think that stomatal frequency data could provide a more precise proxy than ice cores. They do tend to show that the CO2 concentration fluctuated more than is currently admitted, and moreover that it followed the temperature.
A final comment on high CO2 concentrations in the oceans. Most people are not aware of it, but the CO2 concentration at the surface of oceans varies tremendously, depending on where you are. I mean, it varies by as much as a factor of two. Some regions of the oceans are very strong sinks, others outgas like crazy. Temperature has an effect on this, but mostly, this is the result of biological activity. Phytoplanktons are tremendous little beasts, they eat up a LOT of carbon, which they then dump at the bottom of the oceans. Their role in the carbon cycle is just beginning to be fully unraveled. There’s a lot we don’t know. Ocean biological productivity turns out to be awfully difficult to measure with any accuracy.
In the end, the role of phytoplanktons may be crucial in understanding our climate, especially the switch between glacial and interglacial, and why there are ice ages at all. They may be the reason why, as Gerald Marsh pointed out in his APS article, CO2 concentration is actually historically low.

The CO2 data can’t be any worse than the surface record of temperature as revealed by your weather station survey can it, Anthony?

I haven’t read the paper, but I’m highly dubious. What wet chemical measurements of CO2 have been made lately, with which we can compare to Mauna Loa?
Unless I’m missing something, this splice-job is just as bad as the Hockey Stick. Just like McIntyre’s call for updating the tree-ring proxies, I won’t believe a word of this until someone shows me that wet chemical measurements made today in the same way as in the past can agree with Mauna Loa.

I have often heard from the alarmists that average atmospheric CO2 concentrations are higher now (at around 360ppm) than ever before in the history of instrumental data. Beck’s work indicates concentrations of over 430 ppm a bit less than 200 years ago. Did the alarmists choose to ignore the data that didn’t fit or were they just ignorant of the larger body of climate science work by others?
I don’t quite understand the 5 yr. temperature lag. The ice cores are suggesting a much longer lag, but opposite, that is, CO2 concentrations lag temp rise. Can some one explain this difference?

Acknowledging some concern with Beck’s rigor, all of the criticism’s amount to is ankle-biting.
Mauna Loa CO2 levels are measured indirectly, via IR absorption. These spectroscopic absorption criteria were not established empirically but by means of the outdated Beer-Lambert Law that, while yielding a straightforward answer, is clearly inadequate to the task. In fact all of the spectroscopic absorption graphs commonly available were drawn from such computations, they are ‘electromagnetically naive’.
No calibration procedures are published and they persist in drying the air with H2SO4.
The most that can be said is they give the ‘shape” of an actual smoothed curve. The data deleted by the smoothing process is not ‘noise’, as though one knows the answer already and simply needs to make the data obey.
The ice-core CO2 levels aren’t ‘imprecise’ they are worthless for establishing contemporary atmospheric levels. Apart from comparing historic trends they use is only obfuscatory.
Picking at Beck’s reconstruction of historic volumetric measurements and other methods by those who have established no particular analytic insight into the methods employed is a waste of our time to read.
I do not for a moment believe Francois’ assertion that the antrhropogenic fluence can even be seen on a global scale. Deleting the ocean fluence from the seasonal sinusoid and longterm trend would still leave it indistinguishable noise on the resulting curve.
The Mauna Loa seasonal curve cannot be thought to be biogenic; the NH growth flattens by the end of August. The total biogenic fluence is on the order of 800 Gtons, that dissolved in the oceans and in intermediate bottom-dwelling carbonates is 150,000 Gtons. As the temperature rises CO2’s partial pressure rises and it enters the atmosphere, as the ocean’s temperature cools the partial pressure falls and it leaves the atmosphere.

The thing that bothers me about the ML CO2 is the actual readings declined a bit and stayed flat for a year. But humans were producing just as much CO2 as before and Pinatubo put up a bunch as well.
That tells us that there is another agent using CO2 or producing CO2.

Jim Watson:
That was a great theory when I first heard it, but global temperatures were probably higher between 1000-1100 than 1200. What this paper by Beck shows us is that this issue is very complicated, as CO2 concentration is quite variable from place to place and method to method. The oceans, if I were to guess, were probably responsible for at least 20 parts per million of this CO2 increase, and maybe higher than 30 parts per million. Unless someone can correct me….

Mark H. says: “Is Mauna Lao the only place on earth taking RDIF readings?” No, here are time series from various places around the world: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker/tseries.php?type=mr
Jim Watson says: “The incredible uniformity of the recent rise of CO2 in the atmosphere has always troubled me a little…This type of smooth signature is NOT normally indicative of human activity. Shouldn’t there be fits and jabs as the CO2 rises in response to changes in human economies, the rise of China as an industrial giant, the changes in standards of living in India, etc.” Well, it hasn’t been completely smooth and there are little fits and jabs in addition to the seasonal cycle (although they probably have more to do with variations in uptake than variations in emissions). However, I don’t think that those things you listed regarding human economies have made for dramatic differences in emissions from one year to the next. Also note that the emissions is correlated with the derivative, i.e. the slope, of the CO2 concentration curve…So, even if there was a 10% change in emissions from one year to the next (which I think would be huge compared to reality, except perhaps during the Great Depression), it would not look all that dramatic on the plot of CO2 concentration vs time.
Jim Watson says: “THEORY: Could it not be that the current rise in CO2 is merely the natural result of the ‘800-year lag’ in warmer temperatures from the Medieval Warm Period?” In a word, no. For lots of different reasons, we know the current rise is due to us and that the oceans are in net absorbing…not outgassing…CO2 currently. And, it would be an awfully strange coincidence if the only time during the last 750,000 years (according to ice core measurements) that CO2 levels rose above 300ppm was the century when we started emitting significant quantities of it into the atmosphere.

I don’t think the spectroscopic measurements could be very imprecise. Spectroscopy is not rocket science, it is performed daily in thousands of labortories, and the techniques are well proven, and get better every day. And Mauna Loa is NOT the only place where CO2 is measured. There are a number of stations around the world. They don’t all agree, because CO2 does travel around. Most emissions are in the northern hemisphere, and the oceans have, as I said, local areas where they absorb and outgas, which also depends on the time of year (and the temperature). Quite frankly, I think the CO2 data are quite reliable.
If there is an area where the data is uncertain, it is that of human emissions. Before we got interested in CO2, no one really paid any attention to how much CO2 was emitted worldwide. So any data we have for worldwide emissions before, say, 20 years ago, are highly speculative. This is what, IMO, makes it hard (or easy…) to extract parameters on the lifetime of CO2. Because, in order to do that, you need to have a model linking emissions and concentration. A simple model of the form:
dC/dt = -a*(C-Ceq) + Em
where C is the CO2 concentration, Ceq is some equilibrium value, and Em are emissions. The parameter “a” is what you want to know. But the equilibrium value is not a constant. This is where you include the growing sink, and the temperature effect. In fact, you can have a set of coupled equations with CO2 in the air, in the land biomass, and in the oceans. The land biomass can also be split into the living biomass, and the CO2 in the soil. The oceans in turn have CO2 in the upper surface, and at the bottom. And so on, and so on, it can get very complicated. Various interactions can have different time constants and sensitivities.
But in trying to extract those parameters, you are stuck with the empirical data that you have. Again, IMO, the emissions data have much more uncertainty than the CO2 data post-1959, and this is what limits our ability to simulate the carbon cycle.
There IS definitely an effect of temperature, superimposed on human emissions. I found that it is almost impossible to disentangle the two. The temperature effect could be large (as much as 20% of the rise of the past century), or it could be small. In my simulations, there was no statistical difference between the two cases.

From Beck’s English links page
He links to his published paper:
180 YEARS OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 GAS ANALYSIS BY CHEMICAL METHODS, Ernst-Georg Beck
Energy & Environment · Vol. 18, No. 2, 2007, pp 259-282
Erratum
With two published comments:
Comment on “180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods” by ernst-georg beck pp. 635-646(12) Authors: Meijer, Harro A.J.;,
and Keeling, Ralph F.
with Beck’s reply Comments on “180 years of Atmospheric CO2 Gas Analysis by Chemical Methods” pp. 641-646(6) Author: Beck, Ernst
<a href=”http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm”Beck’s web cite links to numerous historical papers and analyses which should keep most critics happily(?!) reading for many hours.
Note Beck’s spread sheetBasic database (>90 000 series, 143 averages over 150 years, >53 locations ) rev1, 11/2007
Finally note Beck’s 113 page monograph. (Forthcoming?)
Beck E. G. (2006/2007) History of CO2 Gas Analysis of Air by Chemical Methods, pp. 1–113. “to be published.” (Can anyone find this published/posted?)
Eyeballing the chart above, note particularly the deviations in:
1822 285 ppm vs 440 ppm = 56% difference or 18 std deviations;
1856 290 ppm vs 380 ppm = 31% difference or 10 std deviations;
1942 305 ppm vs 440 ppm = 44% difference or 15 std deviations; assuming a 3% standard deviation.
Those relative deviations appear sufficiently far probability to require a serious analysis as to the causes and/or errors.

Corrected link:Beck’s web cite links to numerous historical papers and analyses which should keep most critics happily(?!) reading for many hours.
Reply: I think I fixed it now~Charles the moderator

Anthony,
When I studied Beck’s previous work, a small point that particularly impressed me was the subtle correlation of CO2 concentrations with moon phases. It shows up in Beck’s reconstructions of antique data as well as the modern data. The ubiquity of the lunar signature helped persuade me to believe in the reality of his findings.
I’m looking forward to reading this new paper.
– Erik

James (09:03:41) : gave this link.
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2/bayreuth/bayreuth1e.htm
I f you go to this and click on the graph, you go to more graphs. At the bottom of the last one is a clickable link, “Keeling on accuracy”
“Keeling´s statements on pre-1958 chemical CO2 measurements
* The mean value that Theodore de Saussure found was roughly 0.04% by volume, which I will put in modern units as 400 parts per million by volume (ppmv). This value was much less than von Humboldt had found, but still in considerable error.
* De Saussure’s Memories, published in 1830, nevertheless ushered in a period of increasingly precise measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide culminating in some nearly correct measurements in the 1880s by a Belgian named Jules Reiset.
* Unfortunately, none of the other investigators of carbon dioxide reproduced the seasonal cycle even approximately correctly, casting doubt on all of their data.
* After the 1880s, interest in carbon dioxide diminished for reasons which I have not been able to establish. Indeed, a quick and easy but not very precise 19th century technique of measurement, called Pettenkofer’s method, became the most common method for measuring carbon dioxide, so that measurements actually became less precise than the best of those of the 19th century. The 20th century data were generally higher than the correct concentrations, although of course this wasn’t known at the time.
* My first measurements were made with only a brief prior investigation of the scientific literature.
* In all cases I found the concentration of CO2 in the afternoon to be close to 315 ppmv. I came to the conclusion that the published 20th century data generally were in error and that the CO2 concentration, when not locally influenced, was nearly the same at least from the equator to the northern limits of the United States, perhaps everywhere.
Speech: Winner of the Second Blue Planet Prize (1993);
http://www.af-info.or.jp/eng/honor/bppcl_e/e1993keeling.txt”
Sure of himself, isn’t he?

“dC/dt = -a*(C-Ceq) + Em”
These very many CO2 fluences, e.g., the CO2 burned (from the biomass sink) to create CaO, the CO2 release from the carbonate (the geologic sink), the CO2 returned to produce cement (from the ground water sink and atmospheric sink), all this is captured in the above equation?
You need to work with vector math not scalar math, otherwise nothing certain you might know about this moment’s state can be used to gain insight into the next moment. The ‘sinks’ are in dynamic exchange with multiple others continuously. Silly scalar math requires tagging your C atoms.
Now, Spencer, some months back here, measured the 13C/12C variance in the Mauna Loa seasonal and long-term trend signals by means of an F-Test. The variance was the same! Therefore, whatever its limitations, the biogenic and anthropogenic fluences were not significant. What, pray tell, does that tell you?
Keeling maintains the seasonal signal is biogenic, he is wrong about this as he is wrong about the 19th century averages.

I would like to draw your attention that the means exist to have global maps of CO2 concentrations:
http://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=ShowNews_DynamicContent&NewsID=10
Unfortunately this information starts and stops in July 2003, despite ” . I do not know whether they are waiting for a commercial use of the information and keeping it private, or the information contradicts orthodoxy.
In this July 2003 map one can see differences in concentration of 15ppm over the globe, a few percent .
It is a pity we do not have all the months since then.

Re: “After the 1880s, interest in carbon dioxide diminished for reasons which I have not been able to establish.”
Could the answer his perplexity be the 30 year cooling trend that kicked off around 1880? How early was CO2 driving temperature originally speculated?

This whole thread seems to cry out for tele-connecting these CO2 monitoring sites so that NASA could determine the “correct” value for all reports.

addendum to my July 25th, 1312:40
When I looked for ‘Pettenkofer’ & ‘titration’ & ‘CO²’, on WIKIPEDIA,
about two years ago, there was still a link to his method. If I remember correctly, of
course. Now it’s gone.
“Ein Schelm, der Arges dabei denkt” – “Honi soit qui mal y pense”
According to the most picturesque legend, it was established to commemorate an incident in which Edward was dancing with Joan of Kent, Countess of Salisbury, when one of her blue garters dropped to the floor. As bystanders snickered, Edward gallantly picked up the garter and put it on his own leg, admonishing the courtiers in French with the phrase that remains as the order’s motto “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shame to him who thinks evil of it,” or, more popularly, “Evil to him who evil thinks”). Britannica 2001
Regards
Klausb

Don’t satellites pointed at the planet have spectrometers?
Could they not be used to measure CO2 concentrations?

Francois Ouellette
“So after going through that phase, I decided to come back to simplicity. Because all the data I have is CO2 in air, CO2 emissions, and temperatures.”
That gives you correlation but doesn’t get you climate sensitivity. I think this is what Spencer is getting at. Localized variations in CO2, air temperature, ocean temperature, cloud cover, convection, evaporation, slope of trends point to differing sensitivities.
The simplification and averaging and smoothing of CO2, emissions, and global temperature mask the true sensitivity. For example, positive PDO periods increase the rate of temperature trend, negative phases decrease it, and the models don’t take that into consideration–all they see is the over-simplified correlation of more CO2 and increasing temps.
At the risk of being pounded over the head with a twobyfour, I’m seeing the sun as the basic driver–no matter the fact TSI is less variable than thought. CO2 is an amplifier not the driver and the oceans control the distribution and amount of heat. How much CO2 amplifies is the big question. It may not be very much considering quiet sun and cool oceans with rising CO2 currently results in cooler global temps.
So, basically, simplifying temp, CO2, and emissions is fine for some purposes, but nothing is going to beat getting down and dirty with the details to understand the processes occurring on a more regional than global basis.

Francois Ouellette, very interesting and I find myself in agreement with most of what you say (I don’t disagree with the rest. I just don’t know).
Perhaps you could help answer a question. It seems plants with adequate temperature, water and nutrients are limited in their growth by CO2 concentrations.
Trees represent the bulk of the Earth’s terrrestial biomass. Trees grow relatively slowly and generally large trees create more additional biomass than small trees (such as more leaves).
We know that there has been a significant increase (6%) in plant biomass over recent years. It appears plants take up more CO2 at higher concentrations and there will be a lag due to the tree growth effect. My guess would be between 20 and 50 years before maximum bio uptake is reached.
My question is, Has anyone quantified this and what do the models assume?
The reason I ask is that it appears possible that bio activity alone will limit CO2 concentrations, irrespective of human emissions.

Francois & Gary
Yes the CO2 concentrations are scalar AND the CO2 fluxes are vectors (or tensor fields). Both trends and flows need to be examined in evaluating the reasonableness of the data Beck has compiled.
klausB
Thanks for noting your experience in that CO2 titration and observation “Pettenkofer did extremely good bookkeeping, when he did his measures, location, wind direction, season, distance from Giessen and Wetzlar, the towns in this area at that time … and so on.”
That is a good reminder of the Germanic trait of systematic thoroughness and penchant for accuracy. There appears no basis for facially dismissing that quantitative accumulated data. That data needs to be accounted for and the differences with the ice core data and modern spectroscopic data need to be clearly understood.

Speaking of CO2, we know that NASA has satellites that can check CO2 over the entire earth and update the data daily, much the same was that UAH checks temperatures. Why can we NOT have access to that data? Maybe it contains inconvenient truths.

Mike Bryant
This link that I gave earlier also has a turning globe version.
http://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=ShowNews_DynamicContent&NewsID=10”
It seems that this “airs” business is not well coordinated, or somebody is suppressing data. 5 years to repeat simple plots is funny.

Mike,
on your link the scatter plot and the comment are indicative.
It says “tropical oceans”, and the caption reads:
“CO2 derived from AIRS calibrated radiances since launch shows the steady rise in global levels due to human factors.”
. A look at their global map at the top of the page shows much less human factors in the tropical oceans than in the northern hemisphere!!!!
Why are they not scatter plotting where the human factors really are???
In addition one can see large concentration from areas that can only be attributed to volcanic activity.
It is possible that the data are being sat on to figure out a way of subtracting inconvenient truths. The five year delay means that it is hard to do so.

The Justus Liebig University Geissen is running a
Free Air CO2 Enrichment Facility
See: “detailed description of the enrichment technique:
Jäger, H.-J., Schmidt, S.W., Kammann, C., Grünhage, L., Müller, C. & Hanewald, K. (2003): The University of Giessen free-air carbon dioxide enrichment study: description of the experimental site and of a new enrichment system. Journal of Applied Botany 77, 117-127.
Schmidt, S.W. (2003): Ein modulares System zur Untersuchung der Auswirkungen von erhöhtem atmosphärischen Kohlendioxid auf Grünland-Ökosysteme. Dissertation, JLU Gießen.
Quelle: http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2003/1125/ ”
Contact Persons
There is an:
“Air Quality Monitoring Station Linden of HLUG Phenological Garden and Air Quality Monitoring Station
“The Air Quality Monitoring Station Linden, located at the Environmental and Climate Impact Research Station Linden, is part of the air quality monitoring network of Hesse which is operated by the Hessian Agency for the Environment and Geology (HLUG).”
See: data of the monitoring station
This includes temperature and CO2 etc.
Perhaps KlausB or others could followup exploring Beck’s documentation and especially the work of W. Kreutz with subsequent CO2 data from Geissen or nearby sites.

Francois Quellette, yr 25th, 13:58
Keith Wooster, yr 25th, 17:15
David L. Hagen, yr 25th, 21:34
Francois, Keith,
David’s link ‘data of monitoring stations’ to the Linden
station gives current CO² datas for Giessen (Linden is
a suburb of the city of Giessen).
David,
thanks a lot for the links,
(darn… should have find them by myself).
Too, when you look on the stations available
on that link, there are Wetzlar and about 30
other stations in and around the state of Hesse,
Germany.
Hmmm, I put it onto my to-do-list, to try to get
some more stations with CO² datas and find the
files containing these datas. Would be really nice
to compare then these datas with datas from Beck’s
collections and current monthly Mauna Loa datas.
KlausB

klausB your 26th (06:20:14)
Thanks for clarifying Linden’s location. Complements on identifying those other weather stations. Re: “Would be really nice to compare then these datas with datas from Beck’s collections and current monthly Mauna Loa datas.” Look forward to what you find.
Julian in Wales (yr 26th 07:04:12)
CO2 dissolving shells is conventional wisdom publicized by global warming alarmists. However, common sense suggests sea life has survived far higher CO2 concentrations than at present. e.g., see Figure 7 “Fluctuating CO2 but stable temperature for 600m years” in Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, Christopher Monckton, Physics & Society, July 2008.
Monckton cites reports showing CO2 > 1,000 ppm from 65 to 248 million years ago, and from 360 to 560 million years ago!
See also recent research: Dynamics of dimethylsulphoniopropionate and dimethylsulphide under different CO2 concentrations during a mesocosm experiment Vogt, M., Steinke, M., Turner, S., Paulino, A., Meyerhofer, M., Riebesell, U., LeQuere, C. and Liss, P. 2008. Biogeosciences 5: 407-419.

There were no statistically significant differences in
the temporal development of DMSPt , DMSPp and DMSPd
concentrations and in DLA, which hints at a certain resilience
of the studied system to changes in pCO2.

Comments at OceanAcidification.org
Marine Ecosystem Response to “Ocean Acidification” Due to Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment

. . .the eight researchers say their observations suggest that “the system under study was surprisingly resilient to abrupt and large pH changes,” which is just the opposite of what the world’s climate alarmists characteristically predict about CO2-induced “ocean acidification.”

David L. Hagen

I have also wondered about the stairstep to heaven graph of CO2. It seemed suspicious to me from the beginning but I didn’t spend much time on the issue as other things that were solar and weather related peaked my interests more.
It seems to me that this measure would only make sense if the instrument were located near a “vent” of some kind. Is there a degassing area near this instrument, or some kind of swirling weather pattern (like what occurs in the Antarctic area seasonally that help create the ozone hole) that sucks in the CO2 being degassed nearby? Are there other graphs from other instruments located near CO2 sinks that don’t show this kind of regular pattern?
Is it possible that this station is measuring CO2 degassing and not some kind of human increase?

Philip B.
Do you know what constitutes the overwhelming majority of the Earth’s biomass? Surprise, surprise! It is… bacteria !! So most of the carbon cycle, whether on land or in the oceans, is really regulated by the action of bacteria, or rather, their respiration.
It is obvious that more CO2 means more plants, and more biological productivity in general. Life thrives on CO2.
There is an aspect that seems to be mostly overlooked in all the literature on the carbon cycle, and it is adaptation, or natural selection. As the CO2 in air increases, the effect is not only that plants will benefit from it. The effect is that the plants and other organisms that grow better in a CO2-rich environment will DISPLACE the other organisms, thus amplifyng the effect. We think of natural selection as being a slow process, but that’s for higher organisms. For bacteria and even for plants, it proceeds much more rapidly.
Syl : I was NOT trying to find the climate sensitivity. I was just trying to figure out how the carbon cycle is modulated by temperature. Because if there is, say, more outgassing when it’s warmer, it means that some of the CO2 increase is a RESULT of the temperature increase, and not its cause.
Gary Gulrud: O.K. maybe I overreacted. I know there is much emphasis on fluxes in the literature. I think it may be the wrong way to look at things, because it distracts you from the cause of the flux. So I looked at fluxes as being the result of a departure from equilibrium, and focused on finding how the equilibrium is itself a function of temperature, and even of the CO2 concentration itself. It is by no means a novel or original approach, and is rather standard, and even simplistic. I’m just doing this on my spare time, and don’t intend to make a carreer out of it! I was surprised to find out how you could, with that very simple model, get good agreements with the measurements. Just goes to show, IMO, that the average behavior of the carbon cycle is rather simple, despite all the local complexity. Much like the way we link volume of gas to temperature and pressure, without having to account for all the movement of individual molecules.

I just sent a post that has a URL in it. It points to a web site that shows CO2 stations. They appear to be located near CO2 degassing sites. The post is probably in the spam folder.

Dave Gardner (05:42:27) : Thank you for the information.
Really enlightening – Cornish Mines really weren’t a nice place to work!

Francois
I have always thought that the reason for the low levels of CO2 in the atmosphere is because of the race between flora, which is desparatly trying to turn energy, water and CO2, (plus a few other things), into carbohydrates with oxygen as a byproduct, and fauna, which is trying to turn carbohydrates and oxygen into energy with CO2 as a byproduct.
I’ve even wondered if the fact that fauna is largely exothermic has anything to do with the fact that CO2 levels lag temperatures. As the temperature goes up, the fauana become more active and reproduce more, producing more CO2.

Keeling junior challenges Beck’s work and ends thus:
“A small number of the earlier observations may in fact have been done with sufficient attention to sampling and analysis methods. Nevertheless, interest in the early observations waned in the 1980s when it became clear that background concentrations in the past could be established more reliably from air archived in ice cores (8). Although Beck claims that the earlier data exhibit seasonal variations which correspond to modern observations, this claim is unsubstantiated. The diurnal variability that Beck documents is in fact a smoking gun for data being non-representative of the background.
“There is clearly no basis for assuming that meaningful background trends can be extracted by averaging the early data over 11-year intervals, as Beck has done. In effect, Beck has turned back the clock to before 1957, rejecting the notion of an atmospheric background, a concept which has stood the test of 50 years of scientific scrutiny.
“It should be added that Beck’s analysis also runs afoul of a basic accounting problem. Beck’s 11-year averages show large swings, including an increase from 310 to 420 ppm between 1920 and 1945 (Beck’s Figure 11). To drive an increase of this magnitude globally requires the release of 233 billion metric tons of C to the atmosphere. The amount is equivalent to more than a third of all the carbon contained in land plants globally. Other CO2 swings noted by Beck require similarly large releases or uptakes. To make a credible case, Beck would have needed to offer evidence for losses or gains of carbon of this magnitude from somewhere. He offered none.
“The Beck article provides an interesting test case for E&E’s recently advertised willingness to serve as a forum for “skeptical analyses of global warming” (E&E mission statement, Dec. 2006). The result was the publication of a paper with serious conceptual oversights that would have been spotted by any reasonably qualified reviewer. Is it really the intent of E&E to provide a forum for laundering pseudo-science? I suggest that some clarification or review of the practice is appropriate.”
These last sentences are telling. Pseudo-science indeed!
Beck answers every point here, and notes in addition that his paper’s purpose was to assess the QUALITY of the old measurements – an essential first step, if we are to re-assess our CO2 picture as much as Beck’s findings suggest. About this assessment of quality, Keeling is silent…
Today I read somewhere (rocket scientist? Hissinck?) an “obvious” solution to the ice core CO2 anomaly:- pressure drops when samples are taken, and ice that has CO2 over 280 ppmv cracks under pressure and releases it all… so we never get higher figures. Someone else mentioned bacteria that sequester the CO2…? Sorry I cannot quote exact refs!

Pamela Gray (10:52:53) :
“Maybe what we need is measurements from satellites that could determine CO2 in the upper atmosphere where the models predict it to do its “damage”. Who knows, maybe there are even holes in CO2 like there are for ozone.”
Links for interesting satellite measurements are posted above. Have look at :
http://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=ShowNews_DynamicContent&NewsID=10
and http://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/Products/CarbonDioxide/
It is just this this AIRS business seems to keep data for itself. They have only posted July 2003 data. They promise more in 2008, a 5 year delay from a government sponsored agency? Something up? Waiting to go commercial once carbon limits are imposed?

“I’ve been up to the Mauna Loa volcano crater a few times. It has to be at least a mile or two across, maybe more, with a very deep caldera. Since Hawaii is geologically active, I’ve often wondered why they would cite a CO2 monitoring station there. Wouldn’t you think that at least some of the CO2 indications must come from natural venting?”
Monitoring should get very interesting when Mauna Loa next erupts. Is there also a monitor station on Mauna Kea?

anna v (21:03:08) :
“It is just this this AIRS business seems to keep data for itself. They have only posted July 2003 data. They promise more in 2008, a 5 year delay from a government sponsored agency? Something up? Waiting to go commercial once carbon limits are imposed?”
This thing bothers the heck out of me. Dr. Spencer said that Watson wanted to regulate CO2 about twenty years ago. Maybe Watson and Hensen had already been working together for years before to hijack the data. Was Mauna Loa hansenized 30+ years ago? I hope this isn’t the Volcano CO2 Island effect. VCI…
Why are these CO2 monitoring stations along the Pacific ridge?
Why the huge delay from the AIRS satellite?
Maybe I’m just paranoid, but this thing really stinks.

Sorry about the error in my previous post. That is 0 degrees C, not F. I am still stuck in the operating world.
Steamboat Jack

I have read in many papers that CO2 becomes well mixed in the atmosphere. How do we know that? The 2003 satellite image sure doesn’t look like CO2 is well mixed. Here is just one reason: if CO2 interacts with water vapor it would make sense that CO2 is not well mixed because water vapor isn’t (I check it every day and water vapor is definitely not well mixed across the globe).
I agree with several posters above about the lack of data from satellites. And I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get involved in carbon trading schemes given the potential bias in CO2 stations. At the very least, as a business owner, I would get pretty pithy if I were forced to give up part of my business income for carbon offsets, given the current state of the (lack of and potentially biased) data. In fact, I would get so pithy that I would have to get a pretty darned good lawyer to do my pithing for me. Al Gore’s scheme will never get off the ground.
REPLY: Pamela, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself, and when I saw that sat image I wondered how that claim could be justified. Look for a post on this. -Anthony

Headline.
NASA Holding Back Data on CO2
or
NASA CO2 Data Adjusted To Match Global Climate Models

Lucy Skywalker your 26th
Professor Zbigniev Jaworowski, a glaciologist from Poland, provided a written statement for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation 19 March 2004. His research leads him to believe that the CO2 in the deep ice cores is transformed into gas hydrates under the high pressures existing in the deeper cores. He believes these escape during the drilling process returning to gaseous state. This has not been proven for lack of research funding (imagine that). Paraphrased from Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers.

FWIW, there are large numbers of monitoring sites beyond those whose data is found at CDIAC, for example Shauinsland in Germany. They can separate the background signal from interferences from industry and agriculture by careful work, much in the same way that the Mauna Loa measurements are separated from any interference from the volcano. Details on the later can be found at Ryan, Chemical Geology 177 (2001) 201-211, it used to be on the net, but the link has died.
Notice that Beck does not continue the temperature curve beyond 1960, and except for the bump in 1940, the blue and red curves do not follow each other
FWIW

“Having been to the Mauna Loa Observatory at 11,500 feet it interested me that it is directly DOWNWIND of the Kileaua Volcano that has been erupting for over ten years.” bob gregg
Wow! What a thought! Is CO2 possibly not rising despite massive use of fossil fuels? Is it being “sunk” faster than it can be “sourced”? Does the AGW theory not even have the fact of rising CO2 levels as an input?
Just asking.

Bob Greg,
The volcano emissions are supposedly factored out, called “normalized”
data. How they do that and maintain essentially the same record as other stations around the globe is beyond me.
“Though Mauna Loa is an active volcano, Keeling and collaborators made measurements on the incoming ocean breeze and above the thermal inversion layer to minimize local contamination from volcanic vents. In addition, the data is normalized to negate any influence from local contamination. Measurements at many other isolated sites have confirmed the long-term trend shown by the Keeling Curve, though no sites have a record as long as Mauna Loa.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve
I’d include Keeling on the list of original alarmists. What interests me is the consistency of the different stations supposed data (below). Does CO2 mix very well and quickly on a global scale? I’m doubtful.
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/other_stations/global_stations_co2_concentration_trends.html

Mike:
The blue looks the same to me.
All: Note that it is a January depiction when all of the power plants, home heaters, and car engines are working harder for people to stay warm.
Notice the and the NH red areas with higher concentrations downwind off the eastern seaboard and east of the west coast urban areas.
The same is true of the European cities withe a slight deviation for wind direction.

Keith,
Isn’t it odd that NASA calls it January in one place and July in another? Also, why can’t we see all the data? This stuff has been available to NASA at least since 2003, and according to NASA it can be reconstructed from data since the launching of the AIRS satellite.
If CO2 is the stuff that will change the world, why won’t they release the data now?
This thing still stinks.
Does someone need to file a freedom of info request?

Take a look at the trend charts here:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/contents.htm
Several CO2 stations are no longer active. It seems that on my first look, those that showed downward trends have been taken off the active list. At least it looks like that since the data for these downward trending sites seem to end generally around 2000. hmmmm.

I read once that when lost at sea, one should head toward rain clouds since it rains most often over LAND. I was stunned by that statement. Imagine, fresh water mostly falls where it can do some good! Using the same logic, it seems that CO2 would be concentrated where it could feed plants. Therefore, I would not expect CO2 to be well mixed in the atmosphere. I wish I could find that 2003 CO2 map. Perhaps just wild speculation.
[Reply: Here’s what you are looking for.~Charles the moderator.]

“Notice the plume of red CO2 in southern South America. Isn’t that where a volcano is?”
I read a European? volcanologist’s paper via Googling months back stating that H2O and CO2 totalling upto 20% of the ejecta in mass were required to support a plinian column.
His measurements of outgassing found CO2 to range <<0.05 to 0.5 of the vapor content.
With no plinian eruptions yearly outgassing is supposed to be 0.2 Gtons and is dismissed. My rough calculations (I wouldn’t trust them), however, indicated Pinatubo, a VEI 6, or ca. 16 km^3 would have output 4 Gtons of CO2 at 4*10^-4 crustal proportion.
Note Tambora’s, VEI 7, date of 1815 on Beck’s curve.

There is station bias, big time, in that stations that were used as controls are not reported, while those stations that show increases are media-ready. There is also the notion that some CO2 isotope forms are good, ie natural, and some CO2 isotopes are bad, ie from fossil fuel. Still, the bottom line end game, were I an AGWer, is to state that CO2 in general is increasing and that is bad. So in one breath, the argument is that some forms of CO2 are good, and all CO2 is bad. It is becoming a twisted argument that is collapsing on its own weight.

Peter, they have more than one measuring station , but the equipment is all calibrated by the Scripps Institute ( with an Agenda derived from the Alarmist Keeling), and it is a really crude way of collecting changes measuring parts per million.
PhillpB. “it appears possible that bio activity alone will limit CO2 concentrations, irrespective of human emissions.” I think Ocean Temp is a long term (800 year) reservoir, and flora is a short term (almost immediate) reservoir. There are studies of plant growth relative to CO2 levels, but I’ve never seen a number put on the atmospheric effect.

and another one
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html

While I respect the amount of work done by Beck to look at the historical data, I only can disagree to a large extent with his conclusions. Besides the quality of the measurements themselves, the biggest problem is that most of the data which show a peak around 1943 are taken at places which were completely unsuitable for background measurements. In that way these data are worthless for global background estimates. This is confirmed by other methods which indicate no peak values around 1943. As the minima may approach the real background CO2 level of that time, the fact that the ice core CO2 levels are above the minima is an indication that the ice core data are not far off reality.