UPDATE: I received a reply tonight from Pieter Tans, who is the manager for the MLO data, it is another error in presenting the data, similar to what happened with GISS in October, a monthly data value was carried over. In this case, November to December. – Anthony
From: “Pieter Tans” <Pieter.Tans@xxxxx.xxx>
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 7:24 PM
To: “Anthony Watts ” <awatts@xxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: Questions on currently posted 2008 MLO data
> Anthony,
>
> The posted December figure is an error. It will probably be fixed
> tomorrow. The error does not appear on my computer. Our web site is
> run by a separate server dedicated to communicate outside the firewall.
> At this moment I don’t know why it repeated the November value for December.
>
> Sorry about this mishap.
>
> Pieter Tans
The year end CO2 data for the Mauna Loa Observatory is out, and it shows that the trend of Co2 increase has slowed. This year saw the lowest increase in the annual mean growth rate ever in the Mauna Loa Co2 Record: 0.24 parts per million.
Whether this is real, a data error, or something else remains to be seen. As we’ve learned previously, the Mauna Loa record is not infallible and can be adjusted post facto. To MLO’s credit, they have been responsive to queries from myself and others, and have pledged to make improvements to the process. They now have a change log, but there is no mention of the December 2008 data in it.
Here is the graph recently posted by MLO. Notice the two dips in 2008.
The blue line represents the mean value, while the red line is the monthly values. Note that the red line shows seasonal variance related to earth’s own processes that emit and absorb CO2. In the case of the 2008 value of 0.24 ppm/yr it comes on the heels of 2007’s strong year of 2.14 ppm/yr which by itself isn’t that remarkable, being only the seventh highest year in the record.
What is interesting though is the correlation of lower CO2 to a cooler 2008, suggesting that natural mechanisms, particularly the oceans, played a role in the the lower Co2 value for 2008. There are also other likely drivers of this change. For the layman reader, this is essentially the “soda pop effect”. As anyone knows, warm soda pop tends to ‘fizz’ vigorously, while cold soda pop is more tame. This is because colder water can absorb more Co2 than warmer water, and warmer water releases it more easily, especially when agitated. Lesson here, and citing from experience; don’t leave a 12 pack of Coke in your car on a hot summer day. 😉
Here is a graph of Carbon Dioxide solubility in water versus temperature:
Here is the entire annual mean growth rate MLO data set:
year ppm/yr
1959 0.95
1960 0.51
1961 0.95
1962 0.69
1963 0.73
1964 0.29
1965 0.98
1966 1.23
1967 0.75
1968 1.02
1969 1.34
1970 1.02
1971 0.82
1972 1.76
1973 1.18
1974 0.78
1975 1.10
1976 0.91
1977 2.09
1978 1.31
1979 1.68
1980 1.80
1981 1.43
1982 0.72
1983 2.16
1984 1.37
1985 1.24
1986 1.51
1987 2.33
1988 2.09
1989 1.27
1990 1.31
1991 1.02
1992 0.43
1993 1.35
1994 1.90
1995 1.98
1996 1.19
1997 1.96
1998 2.93
1999 0.94
2000 1.74
2001 1.59
2002 2.56
2003 2.25
2004 1.62
2005 2.53
2006 1.72
2007 2.14
2008 0.24
Here a copy of the CO2 values of the last three months:
| Month | Mean | Interpolated | Trend(seasonally corrected) |
| 2008 10 | 382.98 | 382.98 | 386.34 |
| 2008 11 | 384.11 | 384.11 | 386.19 |
| 2008 12 | 384.11 | 384.11 | 385.03 |
Source data from MLO is here
Note the identical months of November and December. It could be a GISS October2008 kind of carryover error, it could also be real. The global values for December 2008 are not yet out. Mauna Loa is only one of many CO2 reporting stations.
If the data is real, there is a dead stop in the monthly numbers, which results, when seasonally corrected, in a considerable decrease, not seen in previous Decembers through the entire record.
As MLO points out:
“The last year of data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks.”
As I previously mentioned, some reasons could be cooling of oceans. In particular the Pacific where we’ve had a La Nina event. See this guest post from Dr. Roy Spencer on how the oceans could be driving the observed Co2 changes. The other possibility is the global economic crisis. This has led to lowered consumption of fossil fuels, particularly gasoline, which saw a significant drop in miles driven this past year due to high prices and other economic uncertainties.
Most probably it is a combination of events or possibly an error. Stay tuned.
h/t to Werner Weber and many other people who notified me
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for those interested, rate of change of MLO yearly averages (yearly delta MLO ppm) compared to mans emissions is only an r squared of 0.37 with a correlation constant of .61.
can some one tell me how co2 concentration was ever related to mans emissions?
this data is being distorted.
Ed Scott (13:09:16) :
Outstanding.
Thank you for pointing this out……it needed to be said (maybe not here, but it still needed to be said) err ahh, written.
I’m terribly sick of uneducated people hanging the economic lows (and highs) on the President (any President). Congress is responsible for spending legislation. Congress is responsible for spending this country into a hole.
Anthony Watts says:
Yeah, I’ve never quite understood that either, but just to be on the safe side, maybe you should send me both dollars and donuts! 😉
From your corrected graph (and my vague memory of what the original one looked like), it indeed looks like the error was what I suggested…Or at least something close to it.
As for these mistakes in publicly-released data, I guess there is a dynamic tension between getting the data out quickly to the public and checking it carefully before releasing it. And, things move so fast now in the internet age that even though it looks like there was only about 12 hours of time (as best as I can estimate…you may know better) between when you posted this up and you received an e-mail from Tans acknowledging there was an error, thousands of people got to know about it! I have to admit that I am happy that as a scientist I have worked in fields where people aren’t clamoring to see my data!
“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”
Indeed. At10,000′ the daily fluctuation at Mauna Loa seems to be about 12ppm or so. At 24,000′ the AIRS fluctuation is 6ppm. Half the atmosphere is beneath.
If the fluence at sea level were 20×2, into and out of the atmosphere, then we could be talking 80 Gtons daily.
Thanks to Les Johnson, Peer & Lulo relative to CO2 atmospheric lifetime:
I think you answered my question that there is no answer, only assumptions. Sounds like a dangerous game since we’re betting billions on the answer using algorithms that depend highly on the this empirically unknown factor.
Am I wrong anyone?
jcbmack (17:33:42) :
this data is being distorted.
Continue.
If rain-scrubbing is a sink and sequester of CO2, then this is a sink that may not be in models. But if AIMS were up and running, one might be able to see CO2 leaching out of the atmosphere where rain is abundant. I am thinking of the 5th grade science textbook model of ocean breezes building up to clouds which pile up next to mountains and rain down on the ocean-side slope, taking CO2 with it. If it creates a mild acid-based carbonate solution, no wonder dripping water off a gutter can drill a hole into concrete below.
hmmmm
If the premise holds, it would be a bugger to put rain into models. But not to worry. If the world does warm, rain will become more abundant thus reducing CO2…wait a minute…this sounds like a self-adjusting system. Run-a-way global warming cannot tolerate such things.
Joel Shore (18:04:33) :
Sorry.
I applaud Tans on his candor and integrity; however, the original anomaly was so dramatic that even I saw it immediately.
“Close enough for government work” seems to permeate the government work ethic more often than not and I dare say that numerous other bureaucrats could and should have double checked such a glaring decrease prior to publication.
Regrettably, there is absolutely no incentive to get it right the first time when it comes to government work……a true pity.
These types of “mistakes” seem to be occurring with more and more frequency and I fear it’s because people are watching the end product more closely…….double checking the facts and figures.
Repeated “mistakes” such as this cast a shadow of doubt, (skepticism), on future (and past) publicized information and pollute the data pool.
I double and triple check my work before I release it. If I continually released flawed data I’d soon be unemployed…….won’t happen with a government employee.
Atmospheric nuclear bomb testing produced a spike in the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. This spike was monitored and the half-life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was estimated to be 12.9 years.
http://nzic.org.nz/CiNZ/articles/Currie_70_1.pdf
Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the same IPCC said, “This time period has been established by measurements based on natural carbon-14 and also from readings of carbon-14 from nuclear weapons testing, it has been established by radon-222 measurements, it has been established by measurements of the solubility of atmospheric gases in the oceans, it has been established by comparing the isotope mass balance, it has been established through other mechanisms, too, and over many decades, and by many scientists in many disciplines”
The source of doubt for this seems to come from the MWP deniers.
Run-a-way global warming cannot tolerate such things. Nope, these are not the droids you’re looking for. Move along, move along.
Think of another way CO2 is taken out for a long time: fire. A forest absorbs CO2 and is then burned. But combustion is not complete and a lot of charcoal is left. This charcoal (carbon that came from CO2 taken out of the air) is very stable and can possibly stay right there in the soil for millions of years. If rains come and a landslide covers that charcoal, it can stay sequestered from the atmosphere.
A century of putting out forest fires, particularly in “old growth” forests actually adds to atmospheric CO2. Why “particularly old growth”? Because a fully mature forest does not remove CO2 from the air. Once a group of trees is, as a unit, no longer adding overall biomass as trees die and decay, it releases as much CO2 through decay as it takes in through growth. A fire would convert much of that dead material to a more stable form of carbon (charcoal again) and clear out areas that would allow young new trees to begin absorbing CO2.
Another major contributor to CO2 increase in the atmosphere is paper recycling. For every tree that is “saved” by recycling paper, one is not planted. You end up with fewer trees planted and areas that were “farmed” for pulp trees are sold off and put to other uses. If you send your phone book to the landfill, sure it will fill the landfill faster but it will sequester a couple of pounds of carbon that must be replaced by planting a tree to be harvested for replacement paper.
Actually you would do better to simply burn the paper and bury the ash. If you have a pound of carbon that is taken out of the atmosphere by a tree and converted to paper and then burn it, you might be left with a couple of ounces of high carbon ash. Bury this ash and you have put back into the air less CO2 than it took to make the paper. Also, a new tree must be planted for replacement paper. Old growth trees are not cut for paper. Paper trees are farmed. Paper companies are the worlds largest planter of trees. If we all recycled all of our paper, paper companies would make that one last cut and then sell the land. You aren’t saving a single tree by recycling paper, you are preventing trees from being planted and reducing an atmospheric CO2 sink. Burning the paper and burying the ash would reduce CO2 more than recycling.
Sorry Michael? I know you are being facetious but I must be slow tonight because I don’t quite get what you mean. I was brainstorming on CO2 being rained out of the atmosphere, as was suggested earlier. Do you have information to the contrary? Please share.
Crosspatch, what an interesting post. I used to do noise surveys in log and lumber mills. Most have closed. Forests are no longer being harvested. Fire wood cutters can no longer clean up the forest floor. Growing space is severely hampered and trees that do manage to take hold are small and spindly, unable to withstand heavy snows. They just bend over, snap off, and add to the fuel on the floor. Big pines are topping out and no longer growing. My own plot of trees at the ranch are way past due for harvesting, and several pines have topped out, but I can’t find a mill that will buy the logs. It makes perfect sense that growing forests would use lots and lots of CO2. Wonder if anyone has done a comparison study on the rate of decrease in tree harvest along side increase in CO2.
Les Johnson (16:19:00) :
One thing that struck me, is the chart from 1998 on. It looks like a dampening cycle, with shorter frequencies and reducing amplitudes.
I should perhaps do some further smoothing in order to reflected the anomalies better. As noted on the site I think something changed in or right after 1988 and again in 1998. Those changes were not identical but they do exist. I liken the graphs to a waveform representation of a signal. If the waveform pattern changes on the scope…. something changed. It could be an intermittent but if it does not return to normal it is more than a bit of noise, etc.
The question in this case with nature is how long does it take to return to ‘normal’ ? Why the second event? My present feeling is that 1988 and 1998 were essentially non-anomalies. The channel was being changed (as you note ‘frequency’).
As always I believe that climate should be studied from a long-term perspective. However, in doing so it is essential to be cognizant of short term changes, learn what caused them, and learn what they mean to the larger picture.
Pamela Gray,
I think Michael is agreeing with you, that perhaps this mechanism is deliberately NOT in the climate models. It would tend to stabilize the system, as you pointed out.
I am still working on what I suspect is many tons per day of CO2 scrubbed out of the atmosphere via man-made cooling towers and spray ponds. My gut feel is that it is small, compared to the CO2 released via hydrocarbon combustion, but it is bugging me so I will have a look.
The trouble we have as engineers to achieve a gas absorbed into a liquid has me wondering about the ocean uptake of CO2. Lots of surface area, to be sure, but not much driving force via gas concentration or by pressure. Also, almost zero mixing.
As was said…. Hmmmm…..
I am beginning to suspect that the better mechanism is as mentioned earlier, with rain drops falling through a mile or two of sky and then into the ocean. A zillion or two or three raindrops per day ought to do it. The rain is fairly cold, too, which increases the gas’ solubility.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
I wonder what misting sprinkler systems do in CO2 pumped greenhouses. It would be a fairly easy experiment. Simply determine what amount of pumped-in CO2 is necessary to demonstrate continued rise, stable levels, and falling levels, in the presence of rain.
George E. Smith (15:00:06) :
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;
They’re not doing a very good job of hiding the data, it’s freely available on the web!
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.
If you look at a typical year’s CO2 data from Port Barrow in the Arctic (below):
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun July Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2004 383 383 382 384 383 381 372 367 369 373 379 382
You’ll notice that the [CO2] is ~constant through June whereupon it drops sharply by about 17ppm over the next couple of months. Guess what happens during that time? The sea ice breaks up exposing the atmosphere to that cold water that’s been separated from the atmosphere for ~6 months, no surprise that the CO2 is rapidly absorbed. In October the ice grows back allowing the CO2 to be replaced.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/co2/barrsio.co2
At the South Pole there is no such change just a steady growth but of course there is no opening pool of cold water down there.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/co2/csiro/spo_mm.dat
But leave the plants outside while you do the experiment. Plants lurv their CO2 in greenhouses and can chew right through it in minutes. Also, did you know that pumped-in CO2 is not well mixed unless given a stir?
Roger Sowell (21:00:36) :
I am beginning to suspect that the better mechanism is as mentioned earlier, with rain drops falling through a mile or two of sky and then into the ocean. A zillion or two or three raindrops per day ought to do it. The rain is fairly cold, too, which increases the gas’ solubility.
Of course one of the routes by which CO2 can enter the ocean is rain which has a pH of 5.6 due to dissolved CO2. However, once in the ocean it will still equilibrate with the atmosphere (CO2 is less soluble in sea water than fresh water).
There has been an UPDATE IN THE DATA. New value is 1.58, not 0.24. Still lower than the average of the last 20 years, I think.
Best regards.
I am most curious about the AIMS data regarding global atmospheric CO2. If the concentration goes down as measured via satellite while the Mauna Loa surface station continues to show a climb, me thinks the modelers have missed a sink or two. And that maybe these sinks start up and slow down in cyclic ways. While the Mauna Loa is a stairstep to heaven, might there be a stairstep (or several) going down? The Earth being as old and full of life as it is, I am thinking that we don’t really know all the ways that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are removed from the atmosphere, and no one seems to really give it much thought. We only seem to be seriously measuring how much is going in to it.
One more thing. It seems to me that it is taking much longer to get that AIMS satellite to send us CO2 data than it took for the temp satellites to bring us temp data. If the data they are collecting is not what they expected and they are taking extra time to make sure it is right, then tell us that, with regular updates. I for one will be quite the frothin redhead if I find out they are only going to let the Ivory Tower folks look at the CO2 satellite data.
Keep thinking Nylo, but better is to check the annual historic data, which is available in 2 forms, annual and months, and global v mlo only.
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/
Global annual:
1980 1.68 0.07
1981 1.08 0.07
1982 0.99 0.07
1983 1.83 0.07
1984 1.31 0.07
1985 1.63 0.07
1986 1.02 0.07
1987 2.69 0.07
1988 2.21 0.07
1989 1.38 0.07
1990 1.24 0.07
1991 0.82 0.07
1992 0.64 0.07
1993 1.15 0.07
1994 1.68 0.07
1995 1.98 0.07
1996 1.08 0.07
1997 1.97 0.07
1998 2.92 0.07
1999 1.36 0.07
2000 1.23 0.07
2001 1.85 0.07
2002 2.38 0.07
2003 2.21 0.07
2004 1.64 0.07
2005 2.44 0.07
2006 1.76 0.07 <
2007 2.17 0.07
2008 1.82 0.07
MLo Annual:
1989 1.27 0.11
1990 1.31 0.11
1991 1.02 0.11
1992 0.43 0.11
1993 1.35 0.11
1994 1.90 0.11
1995 1.98 0.11
1996 1.19 0.11
1997 1.96 0.11
1998 2.93 0.11
1999 0.94 0.11 <
2000 1.74 0.11
2001 1.59 0.11
2002 2.56 0.11
2003 2.25 0.11
2004 1.59 0.11
2005 2.53 0.11
2006 1.72 0.11
2007 2.14 0.11
2008 1.58 0.11
My 86 year old neighbour regularly comments ” Believing one does in church”. That 0.01 for MLO is really significant to do the ol “look how far we can go back” to argue things are changing. They’re not and it’s thus but a hair not equalling 2004, but still more than 1999, just half the thought.
The significance to the planet is the global, I know, and 2006 was less than 2008, a post La Nina year with positive SOI! The CO2 rate increase curve is concave. You might want to read some other climate blogs for some new analysis on the perceptions.
gary gulrud: wild dreams you’re having with the 80 GT daily exchange. How on context does this then not swallow up the 9.4 GT than humans are spitting into the atmosphere, isotope 12 marked CO2, so we do know the increase is Anthropogenic.
To my previous post: 9.4 GT Annual!!!
Sekerob, is anything wrong with the post I submitted previously, as to recommend me to continue thinking?
The data shows a very strong correlation between yearly average temperature and CO2 increase, yet despite La Niña we are still quite hot compared to the 90’s, and emitting more and more CO2, however it has increased in similar rates as it did during some of the years by then. I see that, with yearly temperatures like those of the 90’s, we would be suffering LESS CO2 increase than in the 90’s. I see that as soon as the temperature starts to drop more, your concave curve is going to turn convex (i.e. the line of the increases, the derivate, will begin to have a negative slope), and will do that despite the increases in emissions to come. You can already see it happening here (graphs plotted with the data you just posted):
http://www.elsideron.com/YearlyIncreasesCO2.png
Best regards.