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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Chris V. (15:37:35) :
The annual mean CO2 levels at Mauna Loa are corrected for the seasonal cycle using a 7-year moving average.
Anytime you use a moving average, the trends at the very end of the data set can be a little funky- best not to read too much in
IIRC, the moving average lags the data by 1/2 the average period. So a 7 year MA has a 3.5 year lag. That is why stock traders have a love / hate relationship with simple moving averages (SMA) and often use the Exponential Moving Average (EMA).
The SMA reliably tells you what you want to know (change of trend), just a little too late to do anything useful with it… The EMA tries to patch over this by weighting the latest data more (so the effective lag is less) but at the expense of losing some of the smoothing you were after in the first place. This tell you what you want to know sooner, but with less accuracy. TANSTAAFL.
The best I’ve seen to resolve this is the MACD – Moving Average Convergence Divergence. You take two fast moving averages and watch for the change of their relative slopes (crossovers are most important). Gives good relatively accurate indications of changed trend with minimal lag. Not ideal, but pretty good. I would expect something like this to work with weather / climate data too, but doubt if you really need that kind of enhanced speed for anything. Climatology is kind of a patient science 😉
There are a host of other indicators that are all generally trying to solve this same problem: faster response than ‘the other guy’ but retaining the accuracy of the long term SMA. If anyone wants to know more about these, I’m willing to share. Some of them may be useful in weather / climate analysis. (Though I can’t think of a case where the emphasis on ‘good enough’ accuracy with enhanced speed would be needed.)
A google of: DMI, RSI, Momentum stock indicator, ROC (Rate Of Change), Ultimate Oscillator, and Slow Stochastic will turn up more than you would ever want to look at… “High, Low, and Close” price could be changed to “High, Low, and time of observation” temperature.
Of these, RSI might be the most interesting. In my experience, it indicates an impending change of trend before it happens. My major error in using it has been acting too soon. I now use it to get a ‘heads up’ and watch MACD closer. It might not translate to weather as well, since it is based on the notion that ‘too fast a change is going to run out of people/ money to keep it going’ and I’m not so sure that ‘run out of energy to keep it going’ is as true. It could probably be tuned for things like ocean oscillations where there is a cyclical nature and an inflection point.
The things people go through trying to predict chaotic systems with many interacting drivers over varying intervals of time… I said there were a lot of parallels between stock trading and weather…
Anyone wanting to play with indicators and see what they look like can go to any of the public charting sites (like this one: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp?symb=spy&time=&freq= ) and go to the indicators drop down and just try things. You can probably figure out really quickly if anything looks usable for a weather data series.
peer (19:18:40) :
doc martyn
yes exactly as I think. the 12 years for c14 co2 is time for ultimate removal rate, not a co2 half residency time.
Hardly, the C14 was declining at the same time as overall CO2 was going up!
We have no idea how much co2 is put into the atmosphere on a yearly basis, nor how much is removed.
But we do know that about 2 Gtonnes nett is added every year.
DocMartyn (18:31:40) :
“Phil. (08:49:01) :
You seem to be missing the point. CO2 is no in ‘equilibrium’ it is in steady state.
No you are missing the point, read what was written!
Philip_B (17:51:34) :
It’s not obvious why less CO2 would be emitted in winter. I don’t buy the decreased CO2 emissions due to the economic crisis argument. No global metrics are showing a decrease in energy consumption and if anything we have seen a shift toward cheaper and more ‘carbon intensive’ coal.
Perhaps the answer lies with agricultural practices? As a kid, we used to watch them burn off the rice stubble and burn all the pruned limbs from orchards. Now that is no longer done (no more wall to wall smoke filled days 😉 The tendency to multiple crops in a year and early / late crops has also pushed the ‘season’ longer in some places. There is now irrigation over large parts of Texas, et. al. so they grow more, longer. I have no idea if there is enough of this to matter in total, but the trend is clear. Less CO2 in winter.
Oh, and we have more insulation now, so less winter heating fuel used per home. Maybe part of it is the insulation is next to godliness movement? Total fuel use has continued to rise, but a smaller percentage is going into the winters?
And as a final point: Lights run much longer in winter than summer. To the extent that folks have converted to efficient lighting, the winter CO2 would be impacted more than the summer.
I’m sure there are other things like this, I just don’t want to waste space on a canonical list.
gary gulrud (16:41:57) :
lulo and Phil.
Beck (papers at Icecap) reported early direct measurement of CO2 by chemical means the value by 1820 rising to 450ppm which I take to follow Tambora in 1815 and other smaller but large eruptions in 1812 & 1814. Tambora ejected 100 Km^3, 20% of which was H2O and CO2 to support the ultraplinian column extending into the Mesosphere.
The level took between one and two decades to return to ~300ppm, or the average for the period.
So by two empirical tests, one unrepeatable on command, your notion fails.
No evidence to suggest that Beck’s results were applicable for the whole atmosphere, far from it! What I described is a straight forward ODE.
Brendan (19:32:46) :
Gov’t spending to get us out of a recession is a Keynsian approach. And I believe even Keynes wanted it to be limited. When you get too much spending (and the pre-requisite printing of money) by gov’t, you get inflation, and perhaps hyperinflation (see Weimer Germany and the wheel barrow of money).
What Keynes said was that when private demand dropped to hazardous levels (during financial collapse / financial panics / depressions / recessions / economic downturn / next euphemism to be added to the list ) the government needed to spend to prevent an economic collapse even if it means large deficits. Then everyone likes to put a period. But he didn’t. He went on to say that during times of excess spending by the private sector the government needed to withdraw money from the system and run a budget surplus to prevent inflation. (Not just a reduced deficit, a real honest to gosh surplus.)
Under Clinton (and Daddy Bush before him) we forgot step 2 (though we got close!) and so had too little in the ‘kitty’ when this panic hit. So we get very large deficits or the economy dies.
The only question that remains is what happens in 6 months to a year when (if?) the economy picks up. At that time the Fed needs to start moving to a fiscally neutral position (followed by a fiscally surplus position when things get good!) to prevent inflation. I don’t expect them to (whoever is in office) since everyone has forgotten the second half of Keynes. Republicans and Democrats have both learned to buy votes with your money and inflate away the debt.
I expect the eventual answer will be inflation (though not a hyper inflation, folks catch on to them too quickly these days. See Argentina monetary history and the history of the Real in Brazil). More the slow 3% / yr. type that nobody notices and let compound interest law solve the ‘debt’ and the ‘home value below mortgage’ problem. But watch who runs the Fed to find out.
In any of these cases, the impact on CO2 and weather will be minimal. Most folks stop buying prime rib and new supercars, but they still eat hamburger and drive to work (or job hunt) and turn the lights and TV on in a warm home. Demand for energy is far less elastic than most other goods and services in the economy. Example? The USAF is the largest consumer of fuel in the government. What are the odds we will not be flying aircraft in the present geopolitically unstable times? Will times become more stable & peaceful during an economic downturn?
The more things change, the more they stay the same… See:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Influence_of_Wealth_in_Imperial_Rome/The_Business_Panic_of_33_A.D.
Roger E. Sowell
There are waves crashing on the shores, certainly, where some mixing will occur. Also, the global surface area of cold water is very much smaller than that of warm ocean water.
And don’t forget the precipitation forming in the air at cold temps then dropping through the air column into the ocean. I’d expect cloud / precipitation scrubbing to be much more important than things like ‘ocean skin effect’, yet you don’t hear much about it.
Here are again the links for live CO2 data:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/
Have a look at the animations, they are eye opening as for as mixing goes and how the north and south hemispheres behave.
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/
A new satellite will go up in February, will be able to read from the ground up, but depends on sunlight so no nightly CO2, except by modelling daytime data. It is called OCO
http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov
For me, these global AIRS shots even from 10000 meters, show that the well mixed hypthesis is shaky and that Beck’s compilation of chemical readings deserves a much closer scrutiny. Here are some plots in his presentations:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm
IMHO I believe that the concentrations of CO2 as a variable are treated with an airbrush and not considered as a variable on par with the other climate variables that need global integration. To rely on the hypothesis of “well mixed” and assume that all sources and sinks can be estimated is an error in methodology.
Just a thought, on the missing sink for CO2. Any feedback is welcome.
Roger E. Sowell
We also cook a large quantity of CO2 out of limestone to make lime, that the warmers clearly must count (it’s too obvious to miss) but I wonder if they account for all the CO2 that is then absorbed by that lime as all the mortar, cement, etc. made from it sets up and ages… Cement blocks take a long time for the CO2 to reach the middle, but cement structures don’t last forever.
And I wonder how many tons of industrial lye turn slowly into bicarbonate of soda upon disposal.
And just how much carbonate is absorbed by all those folks spraying ammonia on windows to clean them? On fields of crops? (I’ve driven past fields with direct ammonia application underway… it is strong straight ammonia.) ANY CO2 near there will be looking to be Ammonium Carbonate real fast! And it doesn’t all have to come from the air. Simply binding carbonate that would have moved out of the soil into the air is sufficient to shift the balance / budget.
These are examples of what I think is common in the warmers science. Asymmetrical accounting. They are diligent at counting things supporting their thesis, but less so at finding the others… and downright dismissive of the smaller ones (one web site claimed that the cement absorption could be ignored since it took a long time to get deep inside large blocks; ignoring that those large blocks don’t last forever, geologically speaking, and a lot of cement goes into ‘cinder blocks’, not bridge foundations… It also ignores that a 1cm shell on the outside is more volume than the center 1 cm slice.)
At any rate, there is a large quantity of industrial and agricultural alkaline material used and I’m sure it takes CO2 out of the air. I just don’t know how much.
Side bar: Home made lye soap slowly absorbs CO2. That is part of the advantage of letting it ‘age’. The residual lye converts to something a bit more skin friendly 😉 But I doubt if lye soap making is what’s doing it…
Hmmm… but soap lye historically was made from wood ashes… I wonder if they account for the CO2 absorbed by the ashes left from burned forests? From coal ash?
George E. Smith (18:19:58) :
Are we saying that the 280 ppm long term stable value is a myth?
A myth, no. They are stable measurements for that particular locations picked because it is suppose to have stable measurements. It is an inherent hypothesis in the CO2 team that CO2 measurements have a meaning only where they are stable. So they choose not only locations but also time of day, to avoid contamination from CO2 sources. Ice core measurements, if they are not contaminated and homogenized as many have claimed, are still measurements of very cold places very far away from sources, and the well mixed argument does not hold:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/
This whole logic evades me. Every molecule of CO2 should be measured and integrated to get a snap shot of world CO2. We will hae to wait for OCO for this and even then it will only be measurements at 1:20pm over the world !!
Pamela Gray (19:00:23) :
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.
Now think about how much of this rain falls on soils and percolates through rock into the ground water? Any bets that there has been little thought given to rain entrained CO2 into aquifers? It doesn’t take a mountain…
FWIW, I’ve seen an article some time back that explored the tons of CO2 scrubbed by the Himalayas. They found a lot of carbonate in the streams running of the mountain and explored… Found precipitation scrubbing of CO2 that then landed on stone and reacted. There’s a lot of stone in the world…
If we emit fossil fuels, all of these molecules (5s, 13y or 10000y) are molecules that would not otherwise have been there in the first place, and effect is felt for a lot longer than the 12.9 years. Why? Firstly, some of the molecules are around, by low probability chance, for hundreds of years or more. And the difference between man and a volcanic eruption is?
Phil
radioactive co2 measurements DO NOT measure c02 transit times from the atmosphere to the biosphere. A single co2 could go into a leaf, and get exchanged out of that leaf at night, or it could go into the ocean and come out of the ocean. The radioactive measurements do measure the final loss of a co2 molecule into a trapped non exchangeable state, perhaps limestone or soil carbon.
The c14 rate also only measures the trapping rate under conditions from 1960 to about 1975. Do you know how much the co2 resorbtion rate changes as a function of the [co2]? is it linear or is it geometric? I dont think anyone know these things or has useful estimates.
Finally I would like you to look at the IPCC co2 record and the ORNL carbon emissions record. Ask yourself how much co2 and how much carbon causes a 60 ppm change (one half). divide up the curve and look at it. Its important. This is very important data.
“No evidence to suggest that Beck’s results were applicable for the whole atmosphere, far from it! What I described is a straight forward ODE.”
Then make an effort to rebut. I submit your ODE needs derivation from a Navier-Stokes equation. The oceanic flux doesn’t merely scrub your net daily, it is so large it scrubs the biogenic flux daily!!!!
That is what the 13C:12C fraction variance confirms.
Argue from first principles, ‘authority’ doesn’t count for diddly.
“For me, these global AIRS shots even from 10000 meters, show that the well mixed hypthesis is shaky and that Beck’s compilation of chemical readings deserves a much closer scrutiny.”
And your opinion, let alone reasonings, as a physicist is valued, indeed.
E.M. Smith
Thank you for the tip on concrete absorbing CO2. That one is new to me, and will be very useful in my work.
It would also be interesting to know how much CO2 is absorbed by high-pH wastewater streams before being acid neutralized, or pH adjusted as is sometimes stated.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
OK, how about this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/12/sea-co2-climate-japan-environment
Working with Pavel Tishchenko of the Russian Pacific Oceanological Institute in Vladivostok, Lee and his colleague Geun-Ha Park used a cruise on the Professor Gagarinskiy, a Russian research vessel, last May to take seawater samples from 24 sites across the Sea of Japan.
They compared the dissolved CO2 in the seawater with similar samples collected in 1992 and 1999. The results showed the amount of CO2 absorbed during 1999 to 2007 was half the level recorded from 1992 to 1999.
Crucially, the study revealed that ocean mixing, a process required to deposit carbon in deep water, where it is more likely to stay, appears to have significantly weakened.
Announcing their results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say: “The striking feature is that nearly all anthropogenic CO2 taken up in the recent period was confined to waters less than 300 metres in depth. The rapid and substantial reduction … is surprising and is attributed to considerable weakening of overturning circulation.”
can anyone get hold of a draft? I want to see whether the previous samples were also in May.
May, from AIRS data is in the time region of breath out of CO2 in the atmosphere.
anna v
if the co2 is lower in concentration in the top layers, it simply could be taken up into the deep ocean by convection. Or these top layers could be the source of co2 into the atmosphere. I dont see how a single measurement tells you anything about how much is moving or what direction it is moving in
Eyas (10:10:56) :
Is it really possible that there is no CO2 contamination of these samples from the Volcanoes?
There are many folks here much more knowledgeable than I am. Is there an explanation for the layman that describes how one can be certain of having no contamination from local sources? Not only the volcano that the monitoring station sits on, but also the longest continually erupting volcano on earth about 15 miles away. Not to mention the development of the Big Island since these measurements began.
How is a lack of contamination determined? How can one know?
Eyas (10:52:31) : Your comment is awaiting moderation
George E. Smith (18:19:58) :
They are stable measurements for that particular locations picked because it is suppose to have stable measurements. It is an inherent hypothesis in the CO2 team that CO2 measurements have a meaning only where they are stable. So they choose not only locations but also time of day, to avoid contamination from CO2 sources.
Eyas (10:10:56) :
Is it really possible that there is no CO2 contamination of these samples from the Volcanoes?
There are many folks here much more knowledgeable than I am. Is there an explanation for the layman that describes how one can be certain of having no contamination from local sources? Not only the volcano that the monitoring station sits on, but also the longest continually erupting volcano on earth about 15 miles away. Not to mention the development of the Big Island since these measurements began.
How is a lack of contamination determined? How can one know?
Eyas (10:53:15) :
George E. Smith (18:19:58) :
Sorry, that was not George E.Smith , I was quoting him and my end of italics did not work :(.
I (Anna V:) had said:
They are stable measurements for that particular locations picked because it is suppose to have stable measurements. It is an inherent hypothesis in the CO2 team that CO2 measurements have a meaning only where they are stable. So they choose not only locations but also time of day, to avoid contamination from CO2 sources.
If you keep on reading this blog, you will learn that the whole game is corrections. They estimate and correct if there is extra CO2 from a more active volcano. Simple.
That is why a growing number of us, many scientists of different persuasions, are questioning the basic numbers used for all this AGW scare.
This topic will not get much traffic from now on, since it is on page two.