The CO2 – Temperature link

Guest Post By Frank Lansner, civil engineer, biotechnology.

More words on the topic first presented here:  http://icecap.us/images/uploads/FlaticecoreCO2.pdf

I wrote:

It appears from this graph that CO2 concentrations follows temperature with approx 6-9 months. The interesting part is off course that the CO2 trends so markedly responds to temperature changes.

To some, this is “not possible” as we normally see a very smooth rise on CO2 curves. However, the difference in CO2 rise from year to year is quite different from warm to cold years, and as shown differences are closely dependent on global temperatures. Take a closer look:

lansner1

For this writing I have slightly modified the presentation of UAH data vs. Mauna Loa data:

lansner2

The relatively rough relationship between CO2 growth per year and global temperatures (UAH) is:

1979: CO2 growth (ppm/year) = 3,5 * Temp.anomaly(K) + 0,7

2008: CO2 growth (ppm/year) = 3,5 * Temp.anomaly(K) + 1,2

1979-2008:

CO2 growth (ppm/year) = 3,5 * Temp.anomaly(K) + 0,95

For 2007, a UAH temperature anomaly approximately – 0,32 K should lead to CO2 rise/year = 0 , that is, CO2-stagnation.

These equations are useful for overall understanding, but so far they don’t give a fully precise and nuanced picture, of course. On the graph, I have illustrated that there is a longer trend difference between CO2 and Temperature. Thus, the “constant” of the equation should be a variable as it varies with time (1979: 0,7    2008: 1,2).

The trend difference means, that from 1979 to 2008 the CO2-rise per year compared to the global temperatures has fallen 0,5 ppm/year, or the other way around: It now takes approx. +0,15 K global temperature anomaly more to achieve the same level of CO2 rise/year as it did in 1979.

How can this be? The CO2 rise/year now takes higher temperatures to achieve?

With the human emissions rising in the time interval 1979-2008, one could imagine that it would be the other way around, that CO2 rises came with still smaller temperature rises needed. But no, its becoming “harder and harder” to make CO2 rise in the atmosphere.

So generally, the human emissions effect appears inferior to other effects in this context at least.

Which effects could hold CO2 rise/year down as we see?

The fact that we today have higher CO2 concentration in the atmosphere than in 1979 does not favour more CO2 release from the oceans. However the fact that we approx 500 million years ago had several thousand ppm CO2 in the atmosphere implies that the 385 ppm today hardly does a big difference.

My guess is, that what we see is mainly the effect of the growing biosphere.

In short: A period with higher temperatures leads to higher CO2 rises/year and thus of course after some years higher CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

In the period of rising temperatures and CO2 concentration, the biosphere has grown extremely much.

The results of trend analyses of time series over the Sahel region of seasonally integrated NDVI using NOAA AVHRR NDVI-data from 1982 to 1999:

lansner3

Source: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Greening_of_the_Sahel

Even if we put every European in “Plant a tree”-projects we could never reach a fraction of what mother nature has achieved in Sahel alone over these few years. In Addition, in these areas lots of more precipitation is occurring now. ( If we here have a “point of no return” im not sure Africans would ever want to come back to “normal”. We Europeans want so much to help Africans – but take away the CO2? What kind of help is that? )

In addition, the seas are much more crowded with life, plankton etc.

The biosphere is blooming due to CO2: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/08/surprise-earths-biosphere-is-booming-co2-the-cause/

So today we have a larger biosphere. Every single extra plant or plankton cell will demand its share of CO2. It takes more CO2 to feed a larger biosphere. More CO2 is pulled out of the atmosphere today than earlier. An enormous negative feedback on CO2 levels. Roughly: Any human CO2-influence would cause bigger biosphere that eventually omits the human CO2-influence.

A rather interesting scenario: What happens if temperatures go down below approx – 0,3 K UAH??

Well first it appears from my rough equation that CO2 levels will go down. We will have negative CO2 rise / year. But the bigger biosphere is still there (!!!) even though temperature and thus CO2 levels suddenly should drop and it will still demand its bigger share of CO2. And more, in these days of Cold PDO and especially more precipitation due to the solar condition, we might see more CO2 washed faster out of the atmosphere.

This adds up to my belief, that a cooling after a longer warming trend, mostly due to the bigger biosphere, could be accompanied by quite rapid fall in CO2 levels. Faster that temperature raise leads to CO2 rise? In short, I postulate: CO2 often falls quicker than it rises:

lansner4

lansner5

(I am very aware that the data Ernst-Georg Beck has gathered has had a lot of critic. I will not here be a judge, but I think its fair to show that Becks data to some degree matches my expectations, even though the level of CO2 appears high. But I am no judge of what is too high etc.)

So what to expect now? First of all, how about the present cooling??

We should be able to see the big Jan  2008 dive in global temperature in CO2? Well yes, this dive should 6-9 months appear thereafter. And if we take a look at Mauna Loa data released Aug 3, nicely in the 6-9 months time frame after Jan 2008, we saw a dive.

lansner6

However, this dive was mostly removed from Mauna Loa data 4 Aug 2008, so its hard to judge anything about 2008.

Antarctic ice core data shows that in the period 1890-1940 there was a flat development approx 8 ppm from 300 ppm to 308 ppm.

We have seen first in this writing, that the CO2 is very responsive to temperature changes 1979-2008. So how come the warmer temperatures 1920-40´s has no effect at all on the extremely straight Antarctic CO2 curve?

Is there a mismatch between extremely flat Antarctic CO2 data on one side and Mauna Loa data/UAH data on the other side? If so, which data sets are correct? Mauna Loa/UAH  or  Antarctic ice cores?

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George E. Smith
December 19, 2008 3:39 pm

I meant to add in above, that a recent paper in Scientific American claimed that humans started global warming around 8000 years ago and even stopped an ice age in its tracks; based on the beginnings of Agricultere was the claimed reasoning. I can’t comment much since the authors were climatologists I think, who presumably know what they are doing. I seem to recall a Colorado linkage of some sort.
But as to CO2 measurements all over the world, the NOAA results are quite astonishing. If you think the land/ocean distribution north and south of the equator is way out of whack, wait till you see the CO2 assymmetry.
I found it at: http://www.mlo.noaa.gov/Projects/GASES/co2glob.htm for the decade 1987-1997; but I think noaa pulled it; but if you know their site, maybe you can locate where they hid it from prying eyes.
But the gist of it is, that whereas the annual CO2 cyclic variation on CO2 spewing Mauna Loa is about 6 ppm peak to peak, it is very much greater, and largest right at the north pole, and my Scripps Institute CO2 expert contact says it is actually 18 ppm at the NP. So much for a 200 year residence time, if 18 ppm is removed in a mere five months.
The phase of the cycle reverses at around -15 lat (seasons) and at the south pole there is almost no annual cycle and 0.5 to 1 ppm p-p amplitude at most.
The extreme assymmetry of an atmospheric component in what is purportedly a well mixed atmosphere is very puzzling.
The above link which I lifted straight off the graph including all the caps gives me a 404 error, but maybe you can dig around NOAA and find it; or try asking them why they censored it.

December 19, 2008 3:42 pm

IRGA measures CO2 directly, as used by all the official sites.
Since when ?
If CO2 is not measured directly by IRGA, then how is the (raw voltage) data corrected ?
By constants the world over, or are the corrections measured (locally)…..Obviously this is not the case otherwise CO2 would have been measured directly, so no need for corrections, but the IRGA method can not measure CO2, O3, CH4, or N2O directly. It can only measure them overall, together, as one.
Well, certainly that was the case in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Has it improved that much since ?
It’s good MLO now has a change log, in the past it would of made interesting reading….
Then there are the reference gases, air + CO2 originally, the holes there are obvious, there have been two other reference mixtures used since, yet no steps in the released data ?
There be many a slip between spoon and mouth.
Normally it is called fraud.

Frank. Lansner
December 19, 2008 3:42 pm

E Smith
You write:
“If I understand Frank’s thesis, he still finds that warming (the cause) preceeds CO2 increase (the effect), even if only by 5 months.”
-There are of course also longer terms relations. As shown in Antarctic icecores, trends of temperature are often 500-1500 years before CO2 trends. Of course the oceans take 500-1500 years to oscilate fully, so the short term variances are only the exchange with upper layers. Only the upper layers are heated up / cooled down by the short term atmosphere variances.

Bill Illis
December 19, 2008 4:50 pm

Frank, I think the CO2 temperature response is probably related to ocean absorption rates but I could be wrong.
Since 1958, oceans and plants seem to be absorbing about half of human emissions.
On average lately, we have been adding about 4 ppm per year of CO2 to the atmosphere but the concentration is increasing at only 2 ppm. (Average that is, the concentration is actually increasing at a slightly exponential rate – about 0.00187 ppm extra each month.)
I thought before the oceans were the cause. It seemed to me that a slightly cooler ocean is absorbing more CO2 than a slightly warmer ocean does. When global temps go down, the ocean surface seems to follow right along (or visa versa.) Cooler temps, more ocean absorption, less CO2 rise.
I think the 5 month lag is the key to answering whether it is oceans or biomass which is providing the factor causing the CO2 temperature response.
The oceans have longer lag responses than the land and biomass. But then there is a definitive up and down seasonal cycle in CO2 which is more tied to biomass cycles in the northern hemisphere (where there is more land than in the southern hemisphere).
So, I guess I am not sure anymore.

Philip Mulholland
December 19, 2008 4:58 pm

George E. Smith (15:39:01)
Have you seen the graph of CO2 vs Years 1997-1999 that Ferdinand Engelbeen posted at CA?
Re: Ferdinand Engelbeen (#182)
In this series of data the CO2 Measurements for Barrow, Alaska drop to a minimum each year during August (months 8, 20 & 32). My take on this is that in August the Arctic Ocean’s ice carapace reaches its minimum and consequently the maximum surface area of the coldest sea water on the planet is exposed to the atmosphere. Henry’s Law applies and the CO2 levels in the air above the ocean drop. These atmospheric levels recover each winter once the ocean freezes and the ice carapace reforms.

Joel Shore
December 19, 2008 5:02 pm

George E. Smith says:

I meant to add in above, that a recent paper in Scientific American claimed that humans started global warming around 8000 years ago and even stopped an ice age in its tracks; based on the beginnings of Agricultere was the claimed reasoning. I can’t comment much since the authors were climatologists I think, who presumably know what they are doing. I seem to recall a Colorado linkage of some sort.

What you are talking about is a hypothesis by Ruddiman, who is a well-respected climate scientist. And, while other climate scientists certainly respect Ruddiman, a lot of them are skeptical of this hypothesis. (And, I think even Ruddiman himself, while defending his hypothesis, doesn’t claim that he is sure it is correct…I think he concedes that it is just a hypothesis.) One reason for skepticism (among others)is that it seems to require a climate sensitivity at the high end…or beyond the high end…of the generally accepted range.
An interesting aspect of this is that when Ruddiman first presented this hypothesis, some AGW “skeptics” embraced it because it seemed to argue that mankind has done something good by putting these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Of course, the problem with this point-of-view is, as I noted, that his hypothesis seems to require large sensitivities to greenhouse gases…which seems to imply the most extreme warming scenarios from our current injection of considerably more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And, of course, even if we did…unbeknownst to ourselves…do something good by increasing greenhouse gases a bit through agriculture (e.g., release CO2 by clearing land and release methane by growing rice), one can still have too much of a good thing. (As an analogy, if I pour some water over someone who is very thirsty, then he will appreciate that but not if I deluge him to the point where he is drowning in water.)

crosspatch
December 19, 2008 5:22 pm

The air at the South pole is CO2 (and O2) depleted.
See the Wikipedia article on Vostok Station in the “Climate” section.

# A partial pressure of gases that is different from that which most humans are used to.
# A lack of carbon dioxide in the air, which leads to irregularities in a person’s breathing mechanism.

So there is less CO2 in the air there and so one would expect to find less CO2 in the ice cores taken from there.
We need to know what current CO2 concentration is at the boring location before we know anything about the historic levels relative to today. You can not compare Mauna Loa with Antarctica.

Bill Illis
December 19, 2008 5:38 pm

I have one more CO2 chart that some of you may not like, but based on the ice cores and the global (rather than Mauna Loa) CO2 measurements, and the average growth/acceleration rates over time in the CO2 numbers, we are likely to reach the doubled CO2 level of 560 ppm by 2070 or earlier (just 60 years away).
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/1071/co2forecastwz0.png

Exponential
December 19, 2008 6:11 pm

I spent some time looking at some of the CO2 curves from various stations, specifically Mauna Loa. Here is the thing that makes me wonder:
A simple curve fit of data taken for the same month of each year reveals beautiful exponential curves with R^2 values over 0.99. This is just damn peculiar (to quote Capt Kirk).
Now there are all sorts of hand waving arguments as to why this is so, but the truth is that nobody knows why this should happen. Whatever the immediate cause for increasing CO2 might be, it has to be a random process. Now granted, there are all sorts of random processes out there, but they are all so unsatisfying.
One thing that does need to happen though, is that we need to understand the effects of age/entropy on the gas analyzing equipment itself. Although they are calibrated using “reference” mixtures continuously, there are still non-linearities in the machine itself that I am still trying to understand.

CJ
December 19, 2008 6:37 pm

The name “Mona Loa” jumped out at me, too, especially as it’s due to erupt again soon, and has shown signs of reawakening. Frankly, I can’t think of a worse location for a CO2 monitoring site. I’d always assumed they used Mona Kea, which is believed extinct. Monitoring atmospheric CO2 on an active volcano (!) makes as much sense as having a temperature monitoring station in the middle of a parking lot.. oh, wait, they do that, too.
Sure you can compensate to a degree for the volcanic component, but why not have better, cleaner data?
Hrmmm, well, the key issue I see in the comments above is that if Mona Loa puts out that much CO2 during an eruption, it must be taxed, for the good of us all! I’d suggest sending the tax collectors into the caldera during the next eruption to collect said taxes. If the volcano refuses to pay, it will therefor become the nations largest (and hottest) criminal….
Seriously though, my sincere thanks to Mr Watts for cutting through the PC BS so many times. You are doing your coutry a great service, because if we avoid a debilitating “carbon tax” and other economic poison pills, it will only be thanks to you and people like you. Thank you.

crosspatch
December 19, 2008 7:39 pm

“we are likely to reach the doubled CO2 level of 560 ppm by 2070 or earlier”
Okay, and that presents a problem? I don’t think it would cause a measurable difference in temperatures. Well, maybe just barely measurable. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas but not a particularly efficient one. If a planet has no water vapor and the atmosphere is 100% CO2 (like Venus or Mars) then yes, the primary greenhouse effect will be from CO2.
Imagine someone wearing a t-shirt and a down parka. The t-shirt is CO2 and the down parka is water vapor. If they put on a second t-shirt, it isn’t going to make much difference in their temperature as the down parka is providing most of the insulation. Let me put it another way. Have two people standing outside at 4am on May 1. One is in Miami and one is in Tucson. Which one will be warmer? Both places have just exactly the same amount of CO2 in the atmosphere but one has much more water vapor. On May 1, 2008 Miami was 10 degrees warmer than Tucson at 4am. Doubling CO2 might make Tucson .05 degrees warmer or something practically immeasurable, but it isn’t likely going to change Miami at all because water vapor already blocks radiation over the same wavelengths that CO2 does (and more). So the person standing in Tucson has just a t-shirt (CO2) and no parka (water vapor). Miami has both. If both put on two t-shirts, it isn’t going to make any difference to Miami because that down parka swamps the impact of the shirt, but you might notice some difference in Tucson, but not much.
Bill, there is not one shred of evidence anywhere that CO2 is causing any temperature increase. All the evidence points to the fact that CO2 rises BECAUSE of temperature increase.

December 19, 2008 7:41 pm

crosspatch (17:22:45) :
The air at the South pole is CO2 (and O2) depleted.
See the Wikipedia article on Vostok Station in the “Climate” section.
# A partial pressure of gases that is different from that which most humans are used to.
# A lack of carbon dioxide in the air, which leads to irregularities in a person’s breathing mechanism.
So there is less CO2 in the air there and so one would expect to find less CO2 in the ice cores taken from there.
We need to know what current CO2 concentration is at the boring location before we know anything about the historic levels relative to today. You can not compare Mauna Loa with Antarctica.

The air at the S Pole is not depleted in O2 or CO2 it’s just at a lower pressure, hence a lower partial pressure. Yes we can compare the two locations, allowing for the thinner air at the pole the pressures are comparable, in any case [CO2] is given as mixing ratio in ppm not as a partial pressure.

Joel Shore
December 19, 2008 7:51 pm

crosspatch says:

So there is less CO2 in the air there and so one would expect to find less CO2 in the ice cores taken from there.

I think you are getting confused from a statement about there being less CO2 in total (because the air is “thinner”…i.e., there is less of all atmospheric gases there…due to a combination of elevation and the fact that the air thins out more as you go up in elevation near the poles than elsewhere). I am reasonably sure that the statement in Wikipedia was not meant to be a statement about the concentration of CO2 in the air there in PPMV (parts per million by volume), as the South Pole CO2 measurements show the CO2 levels there are in the same neighborhood as they are elsewhere.

We need to know what current CO2 concentration is at the boring location before we know anything about the historic levels relative to today. You can not compare Mauna Loa with Antarctica.

They have been measuring CO2 levels in a variety of places, including at the South Pole, as Phil. noted in a comment above with this link: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-keel.html

Joel Shore
December 19, 2008 7:55 pm

CJ says:

Hrmmm, well, the key issue I see in the comments above is that if Mona Loa puts out that much CO2 during an eruption, it must be taxed, for the good of us all! I’d suggest sending the tax collectors into the caldera during the next eruption to collect said taxes. If the volcano refuses to pay, it will therefor become the nations largest (and hottest) criminal….

Volcanoes put out only a very small amount of CO2 in comparison to our emissions, which is why CO2 levels were (using accepted measurements, not Beck’s nutty ones) quite constant for the last ~10,000 years…and haven’t been above ~300ppm in at least the last 750,000 years. In fact, the major effect of significant volcanic eruptions is cooling due to the sulfate aerosols that they release (although in order to have a significant cooling effect, the eruption has to be large enough that it injects the aerosols into the stratosphere where they can stay around longer…and it apparently helps if the eruption is reasonably near to the equator).

December 19, 2008 8:08 pm

gary gulrud (14:36:55) :
“Actually they don’t!”
Kauffman indicates their protocol does indeed include such dessication, e.g., at:
http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/ccr.pdf

No he doesn’t he quotes the same method that I did, they do not use H2SO4.
Your link gives me no clue as to your bona fides as it doesn’t work for me.
I have no link.
We have yet to examine the issues with the Siemens black box.
It’s not a black box, it’s a standard instrument and is very reliable, I used one in my lab for several years.

December 19, 2008 8:35 pm

To: Bill Illis (16:50:50) :
Since 1958, oceans and plants seem to be absorbing about half of human emissions.
On average lately, we have been adding about 4 ppm per year of CO2 to the atmosphere but the concentration is increasing at only 2 ppm. (Average that is, the concentration is actually increasing at a slightly exponential rate – about 0.00187 ppm extra each month.)

Justify that claim: Calculate the Total mass of carbon and hydrogen “burned” by “man” over each of ten years (this would include all coal mined , all oil pumped, all natural gas burned, (and the vanishly small mass of wood burned by 4th world peasants). (Nukes are CO2-free, hydropower is CO2-free, but solar and wind, etc. are small contributors to electricity alone, not to mention their percentage of the total energy budget. A few more percentage points need to account for “cow farts” and farming, but what else is significant?
That mass of CO2 – from energy production – doesn’t add up to any fraction of your 2 ppm increase.
Biomass? Show the calculations that a “farmed acre” over twenty years is emitting/saving/transferring much different than a staic woodlands – which has much lower denstiy of plants. (Though trees are larger of course, but far fewer in number/sq acre. And the ground under a mature forest is pretty vacant. New growth? Much higher – but those “tree farms” or newly cleared tropics are rapidly re-growing.
The most common excuse is that “clear-cutting” and “destroying the rain forest” account for the other HALF the so-called human-caused CO2 increase.
Now, justify THAT claim. With real numbers.

Marcus
December 19, 2008 8:58 pm

Are people here serious about thinking that the CO2 rise in the past 50 years is due to oceans and not human emissions??? As another commenter pointed out, take away the human emissions, and the ocean+ecosystem is a net sink, not a net source.
Let me posit a simple thought experiment: Take an ocean with a temperature that follows a sine function plus whatever the atmospheric temperature is. The ocean CO2 sink depends on the ocean temperature. If the atmospheric temperature is constant, we’ll see a sinusoidal CO2 concentration.
For the sake of argument, assume that atmospheric temperature rises as CO2 rises (and falls at CO2 falls). There will be some positive feedback, such that the sinusoidal CO2 concentration will be larger than in the case where CO2 does not cause temperature change. Choose constants appropriately such that the feedback is not a runaway.
Now, assume that humans are dumping CO2 in the atmosphere every year. What do we see?
We see a rising atmospheric temperature with a superimposed sinusoid from the oceans. The ocean temperatures also show a sinusoidal temperature, with a steady rise (as it follows the atmosphere).
So, a naive analysis like Frank Lansner’s would look at atmospheric CO2 in this example and note that it follows ocean temperature much more closely than it does emissions – after all, the ocean gets both the trend right _and_ the year-to-year variability right!
But we set this example up. We _know_ that the long term trend is due to the human emissions.
The real world is a little more complicated, in that as CO2 in the atmosphere increases, we expect the partial pressure in the atmosphere to be out of equilibrium with the CO2 in the ocean. So, we expect that, on average, the ocean will be a CO2 sink. As the temperature of the ocean goes up (whether due to random variability like ENSO or due to global warming) the solubility of CO2 goes down, but this does not necessarily make the ocean a net source: it really just becomes a smaller sink. And of course, there is an ecosystem too, and humans burn both fossil fuels and chunks of rainforest, and there’s a small weathering sink, and melting Arctic ice caps exposes more ocean water that means more CO2 absorption, and lots of other issues: but the takeaway, “settled” science is that human CO2 emissions are the cause of _all_ (and more!) of the atmospheric increase in the Mauna Loa (and other CO2 station) records.
And we can see that the ocean is being a net sink because it is becoming more acidic, which means it is holding more CO2 not less (and by the way, “more acidic” is equivalent to “less basic”, regardless of whether you are at pH 7, 10, or 3. Just the way that -10 degrees is warmer than -12 degrees, even though both temperatures are darn cold).

Dave Dodd
December 19, 2008 9:10 pm

According to Dr. Tim Ball, “Pre-industrial CO2 levels were about the same as today. How and why we are told otherwise?”
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/6855
Dr. Ball states that CO2 levels were ~355ppm in the early 1800s and today’s levels at ~385 ppm aren’t significantly different. There’s no debate: CO2 levels haven’t changed in 200 years! The 280 ppm numbers from “pre-industrial” times were cherry picked!
Case closed!

Marcus
December 19, 2008 9:12 pm

Robert A Cook: 2.12 Gigatons of Carbon is about 1 ppm of atmospheric CO2. Humans have been burning about 7 gigatons of carbon per year (average of last 10 years. See http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/carbon.html for numbers, multiply by 12/44 to go from CO2 to C). So, the mass of CO2 from energy production is _larger_ than 2 ppm.
On “farmed acre” versus “forest acre”: determining the carbon comparisons aren’t easy. Not only do you have carbon in trees versus carbon in veggies, but there are differing amounts of carbon that stay in the soils in the two systems. There are lots of arguments in relation to the new renewable fuels standard in EISA where people are trying to calculate indirect land use change emissions, because converting non-cultivated land to cultivated land typically results in carbon release. Now, if you char your plant waste and till it back into the soil, that helps. Similarly, if you grow tree farms, and then build houses with the trees, that helps store carbon. But it is complicated. http://www.bioenergywiki.net/index.php/RSB_Current_Debate_on_Land_Use

crosspatch
December 19, 2008 10:01 pm

“Are people here serious about thinking that the CO2 rise in the past 50 years is due to oceans and not human emissions???”
No, we are serious in thinking that CO2 is absolutely harmless.

crosspatch
December 19, 2008 10:08 pm

Humans dump about 3% of total CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Decaying organic matter contributes about 30%. Currently burning coal fires contribute more CO2 than the combined automobile emissions on the planet. People have no sense of the scale and how SMALL the contribution of human activity is on the grand scale of things.
CO2 doesn’t cause warming, warming causes additional CO2. If leaf litter stays unfrozen for just one more week, the additional decay adds more CO2 to the air.
CO2 isn’t harmful, it doesn’t cause any significant warming of the atmosphere and in any case, the amount of emissions that we could actually cut wouldn’t amount to a pinch of owl scat in the grand scheme of things.

Mark
December 19, 2008 10:28 pm

I propose that that we refer to CO2 in a more friendly way… Lets start referring to it as “plant food” since that’s what it is.

Frank. Lansner
December 20, 2008 12:51 am


Is it ok i make a new edition of your graph tonight, Danish time?
I think its super relevant, it does point more to Biomass as a cause of the difference in trends. If the difference in trends where CO2-forcing related, the tendensy from my graph 1979-2008 should be ongoing also from 1958.
No source shows a falling CO2 graph from 1958 to 1977. Therefore your graph – that “came from heaven” 🙂 – makes the CO2 forcing-explanation less likely. The biomass is recorded to fall even into the 1970´ies, and thus this effect is in best harmony with solid data. But obviously not “proven yet”. things just add up….
Another thing. Most researches shows that we had a lot warmer planet earth in the stoneage, 4-9000 years ago. And my my, the whole Sahara green and full of animals… Things just add up, it seems.

Katherine
December 20, 2008 1:48 am

Marcus wrote:
Are people here serious about thinking that the CO2 rise in the past 50 years is due to oceans and not human emissions??? As another commenter pointed out, take away the human emissions, and the ocean+ecosystem is a net sink, not a net source.
No, just that the rise in CO2 is actually a Good Thing since plants need it to survive. In fact, commercial growers use CO2 enrichment systems to improve plant growth.
“Levels of 800 – 1800 ppm have proven to be optimal for the majority of crops grown under protected cultivation…. CO2 enrichment to levels of at least 800 ppm has been shown to increase the growth rate, yields and early harvests of many crops and is certainly economically viable for most high value crops.” — from Day-Night Temperatures and CO2 Enrichment
For the sake of argument, assume that atmospheric temperature rises as CO2 rises (and falls at CO2 falls).
Why should we assume that when real world measurements have shown it to be false?
“The hypothesis that the CO2 rise during the interglacials caused the temperature to rise requires an increase of about 6 °C per 30% rise in CO2 as seen in the ice core record. If this hypothesis were correct, Earth temperatures would have risen about 6 °C between 1900 and 2006, rather than the rise of between 0.1 °C and 0.5 °C, which actually occurred.” — from Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

Jerker Andersson
December 20, 2008 2:07 am

I came to same conclusion about in april earlier this year and posted it in a thread here back then when just wanted to see if there was any relationship between temperature and CO2 increase.
I just compared yearly data to see if there where any connection and I where a bit amazed over how obvious it was. It didn’t even take a scientist to find out that the CO2 increase mainly seems to be controlled by global temperatures, not the other way around.
I found that CO2 would stop increasing if temperatures droped to -0.37C.
Yearly CO2 increase, Anthropogen CO2 emissions and temp anomaly:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2056/2471196255_c3318ee700_o.jpg
Diagram relation ship CO2increase and temp anomaly.
X axis = PPM/year and Y-axis is yearly temp anomaly
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2142/2403439021_ff14af3781_o.jpg