Mauna Loa CO2 record posts smallest yearly gain in its history – maybe

I need to improve my html skills….
link didnt work above so posting it again here:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2056/2471196255_c3318ee700_o.jpg

Forgetting for a moment changes in US demand, the fastest growing CO2 emissions are from China and India. Those emissions growths are going to continue to swamp any reduction in US emissions.
A little over 6.5 million additional passenger cars were sold in China last year. Automobile ownership was up over 30% in 2007. In absolute numbers of cars, China is in the top 10 of world markets and accounted for about half of all world car advertising.
Americans might be putting off buying new cars but they aren’t giving their cars up. If anything, not buying newer more efficient cars is resulting in higher consumption of fuel than we would have if the older cars were taken off the road and replaced with newer models.
And I am not noticing any great decrease in automobile traffic around here. California’s recent increases in unemployment seem to be driven more by California’s jacking up of the state minimum wage throwing lower wage earners out of work. Every time California raises the minimum wage, unemployment rises.

RJ Hendrickson — re U.S. fuel consumption.
You are correct, it did drop noticeably in September according to EIA reports. But for the entire year, the decrease was around 3 percent less than 2007.
I also noticed the much decreased traffic, and lower speeds for about two or three weeks. Then prices came down rather quickly.
What is intriguing to me is the Detroit Auto Show currently underway. Lots of hybrids and electric vehicles there. Should have a measureable downward impact on U.S. fuel consumption for the next few years. Assuming anyone can get a loan to buy a car! But any reduction in the U.S. will likely be more than offset by increased auto sales in other countries.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California

If it’s not too late for interest, have a look here for general CO2 info.

This paper http://www.cspg.org/conventions/Gussow2008/abstracts/003.pdf is much more interesting than regurgitating errors on web pages.

Joel Shore
“Well, most economists believe that the time to tighten the federal government belt is not when the economy is in what may be the worst freefall since the Great Depression and the federal government is the only entity that can take up some of the slack. Of course, the fact that we spent the last 8 years building up additional debt after having erased the deficit during the Clinton years is clearly a lost opportunity.”
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Your expression, “most economists,” is analogous to the expression, “most scientists.”
Anyone who has read the Constitution understands that all spending legislation originates in the House of Representatives, is modified in the Senate, gets its final form in a conference between the two legislative bodies, and is then forwarded to the president for signing into law.
It has been apparent that the Congress absolves itself from all responsibility of the catastrophic effects that their ill-conceived legislation creates. Diversion and blame are two attributes of an irresponsible Congress.
“Only the federal government can take up the slack.”
The federal government does not create wealth, it is a net tax and debit on the productivity of its entrepreneurial citizens. Its “productivity,” if it can be called that, is in printing fiat money that creates further debt on the citizenry. In essence, the “bail-out” stimulus package is nothing more than a “theft” of the future productivity and wealth through the subtle taxation by inflating the money supply and a redistribution of that wealth. The government creates nothing but debt.
Recalling the original “emergency” stimulus package of US$700 billion, it was defeated in the House of Representatives. The Senate “stimulus” legislation of US$850 billion was passed, the additional US$150 billion was for “earmarks,” characteristic of a “caring” and “responsible” Congress.
Of the “emergency” bailout funds, only US$350 billion has been allocated. The only emergency was the bailing out of the financial cabal in and around the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The discussion is now about how to “spend” the remaining US$350 billion.
The incoming administration wants to create jobs. The federal government does not create anything but debt.

One of the readers here posted the link to a graph I presented here over at Tomino’s site. It was in response to a thread mentioning an acceleration in the rate of atmospheric CO2 increase. After seeing Tomino’s response to it I decided to have a look at the ‘rate of increase’. I have produced several graphs and created a thread : Trends in Yearly CO2 Increase
I fail to see a trend from recent years showing increases are accelerating in rate.
They were once…. but not now.

Who was it said that if you can’t do arithmatic you don’t know what you are talking about.
Observe the dot by dot red curve above; which is an approximation to the real data, since it is only a one per month “measurment”; no doubt the result of some actual daily real data after being processed through some AlGorythm.
One can also see that the data consists of a somewhat sore tooth cycle superposed on a more or less straight line ramp.
The saw tooth signal has a p-p amplitude of about 7 ppm, and looks for all the world like an RC integration of a rectangular wave, with a 2:1 on off duty cycle.
Note that it takes a mere 4 months for the ML CO2 to drop by 7 ppm. If you had the pole to pole three dimensional plot which NOAA has hidden from prying eyes, you would see that at the south pole, the annual cycle is reveres, and no more than 1 ppm p-p amplitude, while at the north pole the cyclic amplitude has built up to what a CO2 expert aquaintance for Scripps Inst. in La Jolla CA tells me is actually an 18 ppm p-p amplitude; and it is actually maximum amplitude at the north pole. So tell me again about how the ocean water takes up all that CO2, given that it is under perpetual ice at the north pole.
But the key thing is that whatever it is that is capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the north pole, it can remove 18 ppm in just four months. and if the excess ovber the stable value was 100 ppm, it only takes 5.5 times 4 months or 22 months to remove at a straight line rate. But assuming the decay is actually an exponential integration of a square pulse, then it takes five time constants to remove 99%, so that would be 110 months, or about nine years.
So remind me again how the CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 200 years, once it escapes our tail pipes; when 99% of it is capable of being removed by natural processes in just nine years.
I wish somebody had a month to label each of those 12 dots per cycle, so I could phase the saw tooth, with the fruit growing cycle down in the California central valley.
It seems to me, that in the spring time, bare trees and fields return to lush greenery in a week or two, and then that enhanced bio-mass gets to work removing CO2, for four months; and then for late summer and fall, the green turns to brown and dead “greenery” and CO2 take up stops.
It would appear to me from the missing three-D graph, that the southern ocean take up of CO2 is pretty much constant 12 months out of the year with almost no cyclic change at all, but the increased and still increasing bio-mass in the northern hemisphere accounts for most of the cyclic variation throughout the year.

Lee Kington (14:43:43) :
Nice charts on CO2 increases.
http://penoflight.com/climatebuzz/?p=182
One thing that struck me, is the chart from 1998 on. It looks like a dampening cycle, with shorter frequencies and reducing amplitudes.
Anyone here with expertise in this?

half life
you can not have a half life unless you know the mass fluxes from ocean and land to atmosphere and then back again. and you know where it started from. i dont know what t one half is
you can try, by plotting ln[co2] vs year assuming a net unidirectional flux
you get co2= exp([.004176*year]-2.436) where .004176 is the rate constant in calendar years eg 1967. you cant get a real half life from this data, but if you want to its .693 / .004176

Arn: The atmospheric lifespan of CO2 is very complicated, because it can very from seconds to thousands of years. It could be respired by vegetation or soil and taken up by surrounding vegetation almost immediately, or it could end up in the atmosphere for centuries or even millenia. I don’t know offhand of a reference where the frequency distribution of CO2 lifespan has been graphed, and if I saw one, I would treat it with a grain of salt. I think the important thing is that, on average, the lifespan would be very long compared to (say) CH4 or most sulphur-containing aerosols.