Study of hemispheric CO2 timing suggests that annual increases may be coming from a global or equatorial source

Laurence Kirk (17:30:00) :
“..Maybe in your back yard. But out here the wheat paddocks that replaced the evergreen eucalypt forest are bare dirt for seven months of the year, as there is negligible rainfall between October and April and the grounwater is mostly saline. (I don’t know, you city boys!)”
City-boy is only partly applicable to me, as I spent many summers and long weekends on a working farm/ranch in the U.S. south. Plus living and working abroad as I wrote above. We had to work very hard to keep the weeds out of the cultivated rows.
If deforestation has or had anything to do with increased CO2, then it sure does not show up in the annual cycle measured at Mauna Loa. From all the hysteria on the AGW side, one would think that the winter peaks in CO2 would be growing smaller or disappearing altogether. Peaks are still there, year after year. Like that battery bunny, still going, and going, and going…
Another AGW prediction that failed to materialize.
And the amount of specialty forests for pulp and paper, such as at Aracruz, where the cultivated trees grow many times faster than the native species, surely counter some of the deforestation. Aracruz’ eucalyptus trees are (at least in the 1980s when I was there) harvested every 7 years, having achieved a height of around 84 feet. They may have improved their trees in the past 25 years.
As I have written on this blog before, man’s planting and watering of millions of trees, shrubs, and many thousands of acres of grass just in Southern California alone are taking in CO2 by the ton every day. None of that was here before man settled and built up the southland area. Where is the AGW’ers applause for that one?
The same is true for the other cities/towns in the U.S. desert Southwest, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and others. One can fly over them in summer daylight, and see the green crop circles — absorbing CO2 by the ton, every day.

Pamela Gray (13:25:09) :
“Roger, it is called upwelling. The thermocline (the variably mixed water that sits on top of deeper, denser, colder water) is disturbed by wave action from trade winds and axial spin, thus allowing the more nutrient rich and colder underlayer water access to the top. Go here for a really good explanation.”
Thank you, Pamela. I read all of that in the links, slowly and with care, and I must ponder this for a while. It seems to me on first impression that this is horribly wrong. Winds, several hundred feet above the thermocline, and wave action also far removed (vertically), influence the cold water to upwell?
I suspect there is a much different mechanism at work, causing the undisputed upwellings of cold water where fishermen know to go to catch fish. One cannot deny that the cold water reaches the surface. I won’t speculate here (could be embarrassing to be really wrong) until I have looked into the physics of this just a bit more.
(Wanders off to the technical library, dusts off the physics books, the fluid dynamics books, physical chemistry book for properties of water, statics and dynamics and conservation of energy books, and settles in for a nice long read and contemplation…calculator and pencil and paper in hand for sketches and doodles…hoping my brain has not yet fossilized and I can understand this stuff that I once excelled at.)
This is one of the things I really like about WUWT. Thank you again, Anthony, for allowing me to play in your playground.
Pamela, you are a teacher? I feel like a student with an assignment…how do I submit my report for a grade?

I scanned through all postings to try and see if this is a duplication, I hope iut is not. I don’t understand what all the discussion is about. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm, Chapter 7, Figure 7.5 shows without any room for interpretation how the north-south gradient of CO2 has increased from 0.5ppm to close to 3ppm (that is the difference between annual mean concentrations (ppm) at Mauna Loa and the South Pole, Keeling and Whorf, 2005, updated) as fossil fuel emissions (GtC) increased from just under 3 to just over 7. A lock at the image at the top of the page, and just some visual integration and averaging of the north and south hemisphere seems completely consistent with that Fig7.5. There are more and redder patches in the north than in the south.

Re Journals PNAS, Nature ect. “Leading Journal”, no longer counts. A major NEW discovery ie:, A novel Genetic finding in Nature would probably be credible, “Climate Science” to date not really at hot one for Nature (just see Steig’s Antarctic “warming” Debunking in all leading Science blogs run by Meteorologists or expert statistitians such as here or at CA. On the other hand I think “Climate Science” is something that should and needs to be pursued, although now its like a bunch of kids playing computer games… (imagine being able to forecast months ahead!). If climate scientist took this attitude now, their “science would eventually be recognized possibly.. LOL

quote Pamela Gray (07:08:40) :
Damn! In that last sentence I meant to say ever increasing atmospheric CO2 in linear step to ever decreasing plankton blooms. I was in such an excited state! endquote
Aha, but you forgot to explain the isotope signal. There is more 12C in the atmosphere than expected, Man burns high 12C fuel, therefore Man has caused the high 12C signal in the atmosphere.
Or something else is happening.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (above) has an isotope graph which people claim proves an anthropic source for the light C. However, the graph does not actually do that — the light C signal begins around 1700 which is well before we started pumping oil. So, how to account for that?
There are two ends to the light isotope pipeline, production and consumption. If Man has altered the consumption end — something he has had the capacity for since large scale agriculture began — then it must be in the direction of a greater heavy isotope pull down.
Starving phytoplankton populations alter their balance to become more C4 metabolism oriented. C4 discriminates less than C3 metabolism and the resultant phyto incorporates more 13C. When it dies and sinks, it takes that 13C out of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is now relatively light in 13C, but foolishly we interpret this as being caused by an addition of 12C, not a reduction of 13C.
Diatoms bloom earlier than phytos, and they outcompete their slower rivals until they run out of dissolved silica to make their intricate and beautiful shells. Only when the diatoms have run out of silica can the phytos, making their calcium carbonate structures, begin to flourish.
Large scale agriculture will have been pushing a lot of dust into the oceans and been addng silica. Thus, from much earlier than the approved text would have us believe, more diatoms. Diatoms — tahdah! — use a C4-like carbon fixation process which pulls down more 13C and pumps it into the deep ocean. The heavy C component in the atmosphere goes down, hence Mr Engelbeen’s graph, falling since 1700AD.
I’ve thought of.. I think it’s four ways that we could have disrupted 12C/13C balance. I think that all four are probably involved in the anthropic signal.
Someone above (excuse my not checking, it’s four in the morning and I only came down for a cup of tea) mentioned WWII and the climate signal there. I’d love to see a really detailed breakdown of the isotope signal from ’38 to ’50. The whole period is very interesting, with the most intriguing data being the UKMO marine air temperature anomaly MOHMAT 4.3. This doesn’t smear out the initial warming (the smear in Hadcrut is a function of the IMHO dubious Folland and Parker bucket correction) or mask the precipitous drop once the Kriegesmarine had stopped covering the ocean surface with oil.
One of my explanations of the isotope drop involves low chromium and zinc levels — starved of these phytos go into their C4 mode — and there ought to be a jump in 12C levels when a really big volcano pumps high Cr and Zn leachate ash into the oceans.
Enough! I’m falling asleep.
JF
Google ‘the opal ocean’.
The Mohmat graph may be on Bob Tisdale’s site.

PS to Roger Sowell (12:08:21) :
No offense meant re ‘City Boy’ comment! It was said in jest..
Best regards,
LK

Roger Sowell (19:31:01) I would add to your list the whole front range of Colorado, which was nothing more than a few cottonwoods along a couple of rivers, some sparse pear cactus and sagebrush. What we have today is wholly from irrigation.

Upwelling is why the PDO anomaly has turned cold. Compare the vapor and cloud trajectories with the Pacific Ocean SST change and you will see the pattern. By the way, winds ARE near the surface, else sailing ships would be dead in the water.
Of note, our local paper has reported that a near record number of salmon have returned, leading to a possible salmon season on the Imnaha river. This near record number, along with high numbers of steal head returning to spawning grounds makes me think there are more nutrients in the Pacific and estuaries allowing these fish to survive in greater numbers. Could it be that we are having plankton blooms already? And will MLO pick this up in terms of a wiggle in CO2? Not likely. Its placement pretty much guarantees that it will measure whatever the trade wind blows its way. It cannot measure the increase sink that may be happening in a colder ocean. At least not for a while.

Ferdinand
Thank you for replying. You say that “I hope I made it clear that I don’t assume that the natural sources and sinks are constant”.
Perhaps I oversimplified, but if they’re not constant, they must be tracking each other to satisfy your maths. Is that likely?

“”” Phil. (20:45:36) :
George E. Smith (16:35:24) :
I’m sure there’s a way to look at it and know how much of each spevcies is in there by volume of course. Counting heads would do it; but that would be abundance by molecular species instead of volume.
I still say it is much easier to specify the relative numbers of molecules of each species present; and then that doesn’t matter whether the gases are ideal or not, or if there is water present.
The measurement is typically done by IR spectroscopy using wavelengths absorbed by the species of interest, water is removed for several reasons: being a variable component of air it is removed to give a common basis for comparison, being IR active it may absorb somewhat at the wavelength of interest, and last but certainly not least the optics and cells used in IR spectrometers are frequently made from salt crystals which prefer dry air!
Those MMGWCC folks are really determined to eliminate water from consideration in climate effects aren’t they.
Well when the models include water in its correct vapor, liquid and solid phases present at any time; I’ll start to pay some attention to what the climate models tell us happened years ago; even though we know from observations what that was.
Why do you think that water isn’t included in the models? “””
Well Phil, I certainly did not mean to imply that the science of Quantitative Analysis is not an old hat part of Chemistry (which isn’t my forte).
My whole point is that since the discovery of molecules, and elements, it is much simpler to quantify mixtures on the basis of how many molecules of each species are present; well the ratios of those numbers anyway. Then there is no need to get involved in Ideal gas theory, or Van der Waal’s equation. Also the molecular abundances easily reveal that GHG trace gases are so rare in the atmosphere, that they act as individual molecules; and not in any collective way.
So it is not like Solid State Physics where the atoms act in concert, so that the bulk properties of the material are quite different from atomic properties.
I’m familiar with some of the problems of IR spectroscopy because of the problem with water damage to the optical elements.
As to this question:- “Why do you think that water isn’t included in the models? ”
I never said any such thing. I did say the following:- “Well when the models include water in its correct vapor, liquid and solid phases present at any time….”
If your information is that this has been accomplished; then that will be the first I have heard of the modelling community claiming to correctly model clouds in their GCMs. I’ve never heard any such claim before.
And given that we have no real way to even observe and measure the effect of clouds (in any scientifically accurate way); I doubt that the modellers have reduced to models, that which we cannot even obseve properly.
If you know of a network of ground, or satellite based cloud monitoring sensors, I would be happy to learn about it.
Satellite monitoring would have it’s limitations, being able to measure albedo effects; but not the ground level insolation under those clouds. And it would require a satellite network similar to the Iridium system to have complete global coverage 24/7.
And the ground network of temperature measuring stations, is already inadequate to do that task; and would fall far short of monitoing ground level insolation everywhere on earth 24/7.
But once again I am anxious to learn; so if you know of such networks can you point us to their data output.
Otherwise I will stick by my statement; which was different from your question.
George