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:
For this writing I have slightly modified the presentation of UAH data vs. Mauna Loa data:
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:
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:
(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.
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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One more reference on this subject is by climate statistician William Briggs, at
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/2008/04/21/co2-and-temperature-which-predicts-which/
Thank you for your excellent summary Richard (Richard S Courtney (00:08:00)).
Richard concludes:
“there is no conclusive evidence that any of the 20th century increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is or is not due to the burning of fossil fuels.”
Thank you for your comments Michael (Michael Smith (00:50:58).
Michael asks:
“Does the temperature cycle length have an influence on CO2 lag?”
Very good question – I think the answer is yes. Here is why:
We understand from Vostok ice core data that there is a ~600 year lag in CO2 after temperature. The temperature cycle here is perhaps 1500 years. I have not independently analyzed any of this data.
The work you and I have done shows a ~9 month lag in CO2 after temperature. The peak-to-peak cycle length is ~3 years, in my opinion.
Are there one or more intermediate time cycles where CO2 lags temperature? Ernst Beck has complied tens of thousands of analyses of early measurements of atmospheric CO2, and concludes that CO2 levels were much higher during the 1930’s warm period than the generally-accepted levels; CO2 dropped sharply during the cooling from ~1946 to ~1977; and CO2 increased since 1977 due to the recent warming, and is now at similar levels to the early 1940’s. Beck has suffered scorn from both sides of the climate debate, but this does not negate his thousands of data points, or prove him wrong. Time and honest data will tell the story…
Beck believes the delay in this intermediate cycle is ~5 years. The cycle length is probably ~60-80 years.
If Beck is right then there are at least three cycles – “a wheel within a wheel within a wheel”.
The next question is will the current global cooling cause a decline in atmospheric CO2, or is the humanmade component of CO2 sufficiently large to overcome the natural variation which is apparently driven by temperature?
If you want to pursue this further, I suggest you examine the CO2 records from various sites. The range of seasonal CO2 variation is ~16ppm at Barrow Alaska versus ~1ppm at the South Pole, versus an average annual increase in global CO2 of ~1.5ppm. The Northern Hemisphere seasons are clearly dominant in CO2 variations. The variation in “peak and valley” months at different locations is interesting.
These scientific questions are truly fascinating.
However the more important question is will the current cooling be mild or severe, as some researchers fear. It would be truly ironic if our society continued to obsess about global warming, only to face a deep freeze.
Best regards for the Holidays!
Allan
Barrow CO2
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/brw/brw_01C0_mm.co2
Mauna Loa CO2
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/mlo/mlo_01C0_mm.co2
South Pole CO2
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/spo/spo_01C0_mm.co2
Here´s a Hadcrut/CO2rise graph (Based on Bill Illis graph):
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/co2hadcrut.jpg
I get CO2 stagnation for Hadcrut = + 0,05 K anomaly.
The reason i made this was to visualize the trend difference better.
“Something” is eating the CO2 out of the atmosphere better in some periods than others. This “something” i symbolized with the green colour in the trend graph. As mentioned, part of this “somthing” could be the size of the biospehere. The “Biosphere” then seems to have had minimum around 1977.
Annualized Mauna Loa dCO2/dt has “gone negative” a few times in the past (calculating dCO2/dt from monthly data, by taking CO2MonthX (year n+1) minus CO2MonthX (year n) to minimize the seasonal CO2 “sawtooth”.)
These 12-month periods are (Month ending in):
1959-8
1963-9
1964-5
1965-1
1965-5
1965-6
1971-4
1974-6
1974-8
1974-9
Has this not happened recently because of increased humanmade CO2 emissions, or because the world has, until recently, been getting warmer?
Fair Warmings:
This topic is highly contentious, and has generally been dismissed by both sides of the climate debate.
I hope you all realize that by even discussing this subject in public, we will all be dragged before Al Gore’s Star Chamber and subjected to tortures perfected during the last such Inquisition…
Regards, Allan 🙂
George E. Smith (15:13:32) :
I’ve never been able to figure out; is lol = LOL = Lots Of Luck or is it Laughing Out Loud ? I can’t kee p up with the jargon.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lol
An archaic usage is Lots of Luck (what it meant to me in the 1980’s) now it almost universally means Laughing Out Loud.
Dear Frank,
thank you very much for supporting my work and using my data.
You will find the latest version ( dec 2008) of my data on my website: http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm. I have included unpublished data series and have compiled an uncorrected (yearly averages from raw data) and a corrected line (inclusive estimated errors). Since about 1865 the data show an accuracy range of within +-3% of the measured value. Comments on data, sources and corrections please see also on my website at the end (scoll down to: Compiled data of historic measurements – EXCEL .
Compared to the MLO and other background CO2 data the historical CO2 data are NOT selected and smoothed. Beside this we can compare modern CO2 background data with “my” historical CO2 series near ground using modern vertical profiles showing an average of the seasonal variation near ground in th order of 50 ppm. Thats typical for the uncorrected pre-Keeling CO2 data. ( please see my recent essay in E&E vol 18,7 2008.
Cross correlation with SST in the northern hemisphere reveals a lag of about 5 years after temperature, spectrum analysis shows an oscillation of about 65 years as SST in the polar ocean and the geomagnetic index.
So I am awaiting falling CO2 soon. It ´s an exciting time.
Ernst-Georg Beck (03:14:03) :
Ernst, can you explain the calibration technique of the instruments for ice core data? Among other things, we know about diffusion, the gaussian filter effect that takes out short term variability that might explain the smooth ice core data, etc., but when taking readings from the air samples in ice, what is the mechanism for accounting for the CO2 contained in the ice itself?
In other words, given X concentration of atmospheric CO2 when snow falls and is compressed to ice, (a) what was the original CO2 concentration in the water in the snow (presumably near zero due to a nearly perfect crystal structure), and (b) how much of what was in the air ends up being in solution in the ice after N years?, and (c), what method us used to recover the CO2 that was in air but is now in water?
I ask this because there seems to be a bias that increases with the age of the sample, compared to the chemical record. What is the mechanism that could introduce such a bias using the methods used at the time when the ice cores were analyzed?
Not sure if you saw this, but dCO2/dt is very sensitive to temperature and reacts instantaneously, and it would be very interesting to take this derivative and reverse-integrate over time with your CO2 data to see what deltaT would occur, then compare that to the temperature record.
http://home.comcast.net/~naturalclimate/CO2_growth_vs_Temp.pdf
Let me know what you think…
Thanks,
Mike Smith
would people (deniers (us)) stop referring to past co2 values obtained from glaciers (ipcc), antarctica and greenland, as being meaningful. please read Z. Jaworowski’s (with Segalstad and Ono) many papers on this subject of trapped gases in glaciers, where he discusses the over 20 mechanical and chemical processes that make accurate measurements impossible; even in shallow cores above the point where co2 is supposedly permanently trap in ice cavities in the firn, co2 concentrations are already 20-40% lower than those measured in air at mauna loa. this puts the notion (myth) that ice core values can be taken as the equivalent of direct measurements as a falsehood.
also read Ernst-Georg Beck’s compilation and discussion of over 90,000 direct co2 meaurements by the classical chemical method covering the period 1812-1961; inital accuracies being 15% error in the period 1812-1857 but reaching error levels of less than 3% from 1857-1961. he shows that co2 reached a level of 450 ppm in 1942; due to the warming in the period 1920 through 1940 plus the co2 output of world war 2; climbing from 320 ppm in 1920 and returning to 330 ppm in the 50’s. beck provides a real view of how much co2 can vary during the time the ipcc claims co2 remained almost flat before rising to 375 ppm today. ipcc glacier icecore co2 levels are a myth or a fraud.
peter bartner (06:54:17) :
I’ll read the articles… I can see the ice core data is too low, I was hoping if we knew the error conditions present in the data, it might be possible to back out the errors and still have something reasonably useful. I can think of a whole lot of processes to watch out for, but I’ll see what Jaworski says. I guess based on your reading, it’s hopelessly flawed data. Maybe we could give it to Hansen and he could fix it and make it all good again… Or has that already been done?
@Ernst-Georg Beck
Its very nice to see that you hold up your flag, because you have every reason to do so. We are many that are very grateful for the people who uses so much of their life on an issue that benefits the whole world.
Thanks to Beck, Watts, Steve McIntyre, Joseph D´aleo and many many others. Champagne for you guys!!! You are writing world history.
When i sometimes mention your work, beck, im met with non-arguments and very bad attitude. The present issue here at WUWT shows – as often before – that what realy IS ridiculous is the Antarctic icecore CO2 data, that we are forced to believe in.
@Peter Bartner: YES! Unless someone can defend Antarctic data much much beter than we have seen here, these data are to regarded as USELESS.
Best data sets we have – even if not 100% precise – is obviously Becks data.
Aother thing: No one has objected to my thought:
“Any human CO2-influence will cause bigger biosphere that eventually omits the human CO2-influence.”
But if its true… that changes somthings, i dare say?
Dear Mike,
I am sorry but am not an expert in ice core reconstruction technique. I have to point to the work of Jaworowski e.g. here:
Jaworowski Z. (1994) Ancient atmosphere – Validity of Ice records. Environmental Science & Pollution Research, 1(3):161-171 http://www.scientificjournals.com/sj/espr/Pdf/aId/7193.
And here you will find the important Neftl et al. papers from the 80s
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2/neftel82-85.pdf showing high CO2 levels that they have ignored.
The bias that increases with the age of the sample, compared to the chemical record you mention could be the ice age/gas age difference which grows by depth and age.
By the way this difference is 30 years in the first half of the 20th century (Etheridge 1995). So ice cores cannot resolve the CO2 peak around 1940.
You know the discussion paper by J.J. Drake?
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jdrake/Questioning_Climate/userfiles/Ice-core_corrections_report_1.pdf
He recalculates the ice core data without such a difference and comes to reasonable ice core values much higher than the notorious too low data. Such low CO2 sould have been noticed in a plant extinction but we have no evidence for that.
And finally there are living bacteria in the ice down in 2 km depth. Guess what C source they have used? CO2 and CH4 from the ice. And they do respiration. ( Christner et al. 2008)
For me the ice core CO2 levels could be recognized as what bacteria and diffusion had left back.
best regards
Ernst
Frank. Lansner
Another thing: No one has objected to my thought:
“Any human CO2-influence will cause bigger biosphere that eventually omits the human CO2-influence.”
But if its true… that changes somethings, i dare say?
Could you clarify a bit more your thought? Are you saying that extra human generated CO2 will generate a bigger biosphere which will be feeding off this human input? On the lines that the biosphere expands to fill the CO2 budge available?
sorry for
budge –> budget
Anna V.
Im just “thinking” here 🙂 Some times on a good day something usefull comes out of it.
But if its true that higher CO2 levels promote bigger biosphere (Well, they use 1200ppm CO2 in greenhouse because it works…) Then, a steady extra CO2 every year from humans should have the same effect? But in the same pace, with some lag, the biosphere will seak to eat that “CO2-food” and thus becom bigger and remove CO2 a little faster. So.. at least to some degree, a steady extra CO2 from human “should” only lead to so much extra CO2 in the atmosphere? Just a thought.
K.R. Frank, and merry Christmas.
“No he doesn’t he quotes the same method that I did, they do not use H2SO4.”
Indeed they have taken down the paper detailing the Mauna Loa protocol. Nonetheless, Kauffman is my source. Do you have one?
“Yes you should, the cause is the year on year release of ‘new’ CO2 from fossil fuels in excess of what can be absorbed by the oceans and biosphere.”
You have absolutely no reason or cause to assert this. As already stated, the daily fluence between the ocean and atmosphere dwarfs the yearly athropogenic contribution. Mere arithmetic verifies this. How is your notion even conceivable?
Off Topic
But I came across this interesting page at NASA from 2001. (not sure if anybody has referenced it previously.
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20011207iceage.html
“A new NASA computer climate model reinforces the long-standing theory that low solar activity could have changed the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere from the 1400s to the 1700s and triggered a “Little Ice Age” in several regions including North America and Europe.”
However what we are seeing here in Michigan, and much of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere this winter, its starting to look like NASA may have been half right in this statement:
“Changes in the sun’s energy was one of the biggest factors influencing climate change during this period, but have since been superceded by greenhouse gases due to the industrial revolution.”
Merry Christmas to all and to all a chilly night.
gary gulrud (11:28:37) :
“No he doesn’t he quotes the same method that I did, they do not use H2SO4.”
Indeed they have taken down the paper detailing the Mauna Loa protocol. Nonetheless, Kauffman is my source. Do you have one?
Yes as shown below, it’s evidently the same one as Kauffman uses since he quotes it verbatim! To reiterate they don’t use H2SO4!
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.html
You can find a more detailed description at:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html#infrared
“Yes you should, the cause is the year on year release of ‘new’ CO2 from fossil fuels in excess of what can be absorbed by the oceans and biosphere.”
You have absolutely no reason or cause to assert this. As already stated, the daily fluence between the ocean and atmosphere dwarfs the yearly athropogenic contribution. Mere arithmetic verifies this. How is your notion even conceivable?
I suggest you redo the math, the annual release of CO2 from fossil fuel consumption is twice the annual growth in CO2. The e-folding time of CO2 in the atmosphere is measured to be ~14 years which rather contradicts your daily fluence statement.
Richard S Courtney (00:08:00) :
The change to the 12C:13C isotope ratio of atmospheric CO2 is in the direction expected if the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration were caused by the anthropogenic emission of CO2.
How do we tell ancient carbon from fossil fuels from ancient carbon from smokers at the bottom of the ocean? Do we know the isotope ratio of CO2 from mid-ocean ridges vs land volcanoes? (Land volcanoes are from subduction zones so I’d expect more rapid recycle of C from ocean sediment to yield a different isotopic ratio…)
Just curious… looks like an interesting technique.
I wandering off to learn more about C12 / C13 origins and ratios I ran into this gem. It does raise the interesting question: If MMCO2 dropped dramatically during the great depression, where is the signature in the record?
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070611/cockburn
I should acknowledge one imprecision in my description of Dr. Martin Hertzberg’s graph in my first column–“the smoothly rising curve of CO2”–which prompted several intemperate responses, charging that I couldn’t possibly expect CO2 or carbon levels to drop just because of a one-third cut in manmade CO2. Indeed, I should have written, “One could not even see a 1 part per million bump in the smoothly rising curve.” Even though such transitory influences as day and night or seasonal variations in photosynthesis cause clearly visible swings in the curve, the 30 percent drop between 1929 and 1932 caused not a ripple: empirical scientific evidence that the human contribution is in fact less than a fart in a hurricane, as Dr. Hertzberg says.
From the same article by ALEXANDER COCKBURN, with questions…
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070611/cockburn
As for the alleged irrefutable evidence that people caused the last century’s CO2 increase, the “smoking gun” invoked by one of my critics, Dr. Michael Mann, and his fellow fearmongers at realclimate.com, the claim is based on the idea that the normal ratio of heavy to light carbon–that is, the carbon-13 isotope to the lighter carbon-12 isotope, is roughly 1 to 90 in the atmosphere, but in plants there’s a 2 percent lower C13/C12 ratio. So, observing that C13 in the atmosphere has been declining steadily though very slightly since 1850, they claim that this is due to man’s burning of fossil fuels, which are generally believed to be derived from fossilized plant matter.
OK, so both C12 and C13 are stable and they are looking for a ‘plant’ signature in burned fuel, not a decay signature. One Small Problem… C4 metabolism plants absorb more C13 than do C3 metabolism plants. Over the last 100 years we’ve planted one heck of a lot more grasses world wide than ever before. Grasses are C4 metabolism…
Have they allowed for this? If so, how? I’m not sure how one would figure out the C4 vs C3 plant population ratio of the world, and certainly don’t see how you would figure out what it was 10,000,000 years ago.
On the naïve and scientifically silly assumption that the only way that plant-based carbon can get into the atmosphere is by people burning fuels, they exult that here indeed is the smoking gun: Decreases of C13 in the atmosphere mean that our sinful combustions are clearly identifiable as major contributors to the 100 ppm increase in CO2 since 1850.
This is misguided, simply because less than a thousandth of the plant-based carbon on earth is bound up in fossil fuel. The rest of the huge remaining tonnages of plant-based carbon are diffused through the oceans, the forests, the grasslands and the soil. In other words, everywhere. Obviously, lots of this C13-deficient carbon has the chance to oxidize into CO2 by paths other than people burning fuel, i.e., the huge amount of plant material that’s naturally eaten or decayed by the biosphere.
And as C4 plants have been sought out (they are more efficient, so more food per growth unit) we get more C13 in the plants. There are even efforts to transplant the C4 genes into C3 plants to get better yield. This would argue for more C13 being sequestered in soils over time as C4 plants have expanded. Have they examined the C12 vs C13 ratio changes in soils over time?
Perhaps even more significant, cold ocean waters absorb lightweight C12 preferentially, resulting in lots of C13-deficient carbon in the oceans. This low-C13 carbon most certainly would have been released massively into the atmosphere over the course of the world’s warming trend since 1850, when the Little Ice Age ended.
And would also argue that volcanic emissions from subduction zone volcanoes ought to be C13 deficient to the degree that ocean bottom ooze is being recycled. Has this been considered?
All of these larger natural pathways for emitting low-C13 carbon into the atmosphere have been considerably accelerated by this same warming trend. So once again, the greenhousers have got it ass-backward. The 100 ppm increase in CO2 can’t be uniquely attributed to humans because at least as plausibly it could be the effect, not the cause, of the warming that started after the Little Ice Age denied by Dr. Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann.
It looks to me like there are very significant issues in trying to assert that C13:C12 ratio changes in the air can tell you anything about CO2 origin in fuel burning…
From: http://www.springerlink.com/content/f5272856220314nk/
We get that the C12:C13 ratio is different in oils than in coals and varies in the source lipids from which oil is made.
Lipid fractions of organisms have consistently lower C13/C12 ratios than do the whole organisms. The average difference between nonlipid and lipid materials for all organisms studied is about 0.5% and ranges in individual species from as little as several hundredths to more than 1.5%. This suggests that petroleums and other noncoaly organic matter in ancient sediments are derived from lipids, or at least from certain components of the lipid fraction. In contrast, coal deposits apparently are derived from whole plants or from the cellulosic fraction of land plants, which is the major nonlipid constituent, of plant tissues.
Has the petroleum from around the world been tested for differences in C12:C13 ratio? I’d expect significant variation based on the above. Is this allowed for in the attribution of atmospheric CO2 to fuel burning?
From:
http://www.isgs.illinois.edu/pttc/Illinois%20petroleum/IP111%20Isotopic%20Identification%20of%20Leakage%20Gas%20from%20Underground%20Storage%20Reservoirs–A%20Progress%20Report.pdf
Bacteriogenic methane from Illinois generally has a C13 values in the range of -64 to -90% relative to the Peedee Belemnite ( PDB ) standard. The 11 samples from pipelines and storage reservoirs that have been analyzed have all had C13 values in the range of -40 to -46%.
Which seems to show that biological source methane can vary widely in C13 content and that pipeline gas is not the same signature as biological, coal, or petroleum. Has this been allowed for? If so, how? (Frankly, given the biological origin variance I don’t see how it’s possible…)
(I hand typed the above quote and there was what looked like maybe a sigma in front of the C13’s… could not get a cut/paste to work fast…)
It looks to me like there are more holes here than bucket… I don’t see how C12:C13 ratio can be reasonably used to make any clear assertion about where the CO2 in the air comes from. How much Clathrate out gasses each year on the ocean bottoms? With what C12:C13 ratio? How much natural gas leaks from the ground? What are the ratios for bacteria produced methane from various ecosystems including ocean bottom? Are they all the same? How do you know? Since bacteria have been shown to eat oil and natural gas, how do you distinguish their CO2 from those eating wood?
Frank. Lansner (14:58:14) :
But if its true that higher CO2 levels promote bigger biosphere (Well, they use 1200ppm CO2 in greenhouse because it works…) Then, a steady extra CO2 every year from humans should have the same effect? But in the same pace, with some lag, the biosphere will seak to eat that “CO2-food” and thus becom bigger and remove CO2 a little faster. So.. at least to some degree, a steady extra CO2 from human “should” only lead to so much extra CO2 in the atmosphere? Just a thought.
I think that is correct. More CO2 -> more growth -> steady state at new biosphere level. You ought to eventually ‘rate limit’ again when plant growth is high enough to suck up the CO2 enough to CO2 concentration limit again.
FWIW, the CO2 vs geologic time graph shows that most plants evolved during times of much higher CO2. The growth response to added CO2 says that plants are nutrient limited on CO2. THAT implies that they have not yet had time to adjust to present abnormally low CO2 levels… They are slightly suffocating and trying to adapt.
(Once a nutrient is available to a plant in sufficient amount, any added amount does not enhance growth. That is how the optimum level is determined. We are not anywhere near optimum CO2 for plant productivity.)
Since Mauna Loa is in the middle of the Pacific, and since we are in a cooling PDO, when should we see Mauna Loa CO2 dropping?
Mike
Mike Bryant (21:13:23) :
Since Mauna Loa is in the middle of the Pacific, and since we are in a cooling PDO, when should we see Mauna Loa CO2 dropping?
Mike
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/img/pdo_warm_cool.tif
“The change to the 12C:13C isotope ratio of atmospheric CO2 is in the direction expected if the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration were caused by the anthropogenic emission of CO2.”
Last Jan. or Feb. Spencer posted here to the detriment of this hope. Suess was wrong; the 13C:12C ratio of the Mauna Loa seasonal and long term trend data are identical as measured by the F-Test. The source of each is SO SST.
Keeling was wrong; the seasonal signal is not biogenic.
“Yes as shown below, it’s evidently the same one as Kauffman uses since he quotes it verbatim! To reiterate they don’t use H2SO4!”
So if they no longer use H2SO4 then the Callendar-Keeling curve should show a discontinuity of 20ppm where the practice was abandoned, somewhere following the mid-’50s, having been used by the French volumetric method whose data they accept, no?
gary gulrud (06:41:52) :
Suess was wrong;
Actually he was bang on, he was referring to C14. Where do you get this stuff from?
gary gulrud (07:29:30) :
“Yes as shown below, it’s evidently the same one as Kauffman uses since he quotes it verbatim! To reiterate they don’t use H2SO4!”
So if they no longer use H2SO4
There’s no ‘if’ about it, they don’t, as I’ve shown you twice and your own source has confirmed!