Spencer on an alternate view of CO2 increases

Slightly OT but germane to regulation of CO2 is an excerpt from an inter-agency memo authored by Office Management Budget:
“The amount of acknowledged lack of understanding about the basic facts surrounding [greenhouse gases] seem to stretch the precautionary principle to providing regulation in the face of unprecedented uncertainty,”
This reported today in the Wall Street Journal as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson appears to about face on “Cap N’ Trade.” But without $646 billion in carbon trade revenue – how will the Administration pay for programs?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124214922088511421.html

Ahem, I shall get the criticisms over: Heretic! Unbeliever, Infidel!! Ok, that said this may be a very good way of seeing what Co2 actually is in our atmosphere.I’ve held that the Co2 content is from largely Oceanic heating.-Now that things are cooling off for whatever the reason,could we be seeing some stabilization or even decrease?-Due mainly to the Oceanic absorption of Co2…

Well at least the world’s factories are contibuting their (small) amount of an increase in a gas that is plant food and will cause plant-life to flourish.
I don’t know if we crossed a magic threshold that could be with a certain CO2 level + lots of rain or not, last year the mullberry and hackberry trees in our backyard grew some jumbo-sized leaves that were quite a bit bigger than usual, our neighbor’s young walnut tree had leaves that looked like they were hit with a jumbo ray, and there’s early signs some trees in our yard could have huge leaves this year as well.
This is why I didn’t like it when I saw a picture of these things that are designed to take CO2 out of the air, the CO2 is helping out with the rain to create good-sized plant growth that’s more than normal behind our house and around a few other spots in our neighborhood.

Fantastic !!!
It is great to see how your 90-10 Model serves to hang the AGW Alarmists on their own petards !!!!

The ice core data shows long-term rises in CO2 following temperature increases and the short-term data shows CO2 lags surface temperate rises by 6 months. Now how can CO2 be causing the increases?

Anthony:
Sometime in the last year, you posted an article, (by Joe D’Aleo I believe – could be wrong as I’m going by memory). I tried to find it. No luck. Do you still have it? It would be nice to read that along side the above.
Thanks in advance.

The CO2 balloon has major leaks. Temperature doesn’t seem to respond to the monotonic increasing of atmospheric concentrations of this trace gas. Understanding whatever it is that consistantly is overwhelming CO2 should go a long way towards understanding climate. The anthro contribution to the increasing levels of CO2 is miniscule, 3-4%. It seems we are wasting a lot of time and resources on a non-problem that certainly isn’t driving our climate.

I don’t think you’re actually saying 10% from an Anthropogenic source. b=.1 would represent 10% if a=.9, but since you have a=4.6 you’re actually saying that the Anthopogenic contribution is closer to 2 percent (2.13%). Increasing b to .2 means it’s a 4.17% contribution. a=4.6 would be a normalized to 97.87%. Your weighting variables are percentages only when your equation is normalized.

Al prophesying
CO2 choking
cows farting
planets circling
Sun moving…
Oh Gosh!, barycenter!
sunspots disappearing
jet stream downing
cosmic rays falling
clouds growing
la nina dancing
Oh Gosh!, my head dizzying

It is an interesting theory, and there certainly are mechanisms that can explain the cause and effect relationship. But the real test will be the models ability to predict CO2 rate of change going forward. The Achilles heal of the climate models is of course they seem much better at predicting the past than they are at predicting the future, since this model has a six month lag, it should only take a few years to vet the model and make sure it has staying power.

Mr. Roy W. Spencer,
You have an easy to understand style of writing. Thank you for that,
A fellow Yooper

Well, there’s nothing new here. CO2 desorbing from oceans is one of the most classical positive feedbacks in global circulation models. End of the story.
REPLY: Which is the problem of alarmism in the first place, you never look beyond that, nobody wants to dig any deeper. “Man made CO2 is the cause, end of story”. As another psoter said: Get some integrity “Flanagan”. Look deeper instead of replaying talking points if you are capable. – Anthony Watts

HOW STRONGLY DOES THE SUN INFLUENCE CLIMATE?
Since the middle of the last century, the Sun is in a phase of unusually high activity, as indicated by frequent occurrences of sunspots, gas eruptions, and radiation storms. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Katlenburg-Lindau (Germany) and at the University of Oulu (Finland) have come to this conclusion after they have succeeded in reconstructing the solar activity based on the sunspot frequency since 850 AD. To this end, they have combined historical sunspot records with measurements of the frequency of radioactive isotopes in ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic. As the scientists have reported in the renowned scientific journal, Physical Review Letters, since 1940 the mean sunspot number is higher than it has ever been in the last thousand years and two and a half times higher than the long term average. The temporal variation in the solar activity displays a similarity to that of the mean temperature of the Earth. These scientific results therefore bring the influence of the Sun on the terrestrial climate, and in particular its contribution to the global warming of the 20th century, into the forefront of current interest.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=25149
Sun warms oceans, oceans outgas CO2, simple, the sun becomes highly active then CO2 starts to increase. Less cloud more cloud, the sun is still the driver as it was at the end of the little ice age. 220ppm as average CO2 level is rubbish, Beck disproved that number.

You showed a plot for an 80-20 split, and increased model departure from actual. What happens when you run a 95-05 apportionment? Is the curve flattened further, but lower than actual? Perhaps a constant is needed to correct the deficiency.

Joel
Carbon Dioxide like most gases is less soluble in water as temperature increases. If the water is warmer more of the CO2 is released in the air. Warm beer or whatever will give you more fizz than an icy clod one.

Erik–ascribing a percentage to SST and to anthro is more complicated than simply looking at the ratio of a/(a+b). It’s a*SST/(a*SST+b*anthro). It depends on the relative units of SST and anthro.
(It appears Spencer may have missed this as well.)

“What could be causing long-term warming of the oceans? My first choice for a mechanism would be a slight decrease in oceanic cloud cover. There is no way to rule this out observationally because our measurements of global cloud cover over the last 50 to 100 years are nowhere near good enough.”
Some studies indicate rapid changes in earths albedo right before the super el nino 1997/98.
Se link below.
http://www.bbso.njit.edu/science_may28.html
I dont know how accurate that data is though but if it is correct it seems to me that the jump upwards in temperatures in the mid 1990 and beginning of 2000 was caused by less cloudcover during a few years.
Since it is obvious that the CO2 increase is sensitive to global temperature changes one could calculate how much CO2 would raise at different temperatures. Based on the Mauna loa and RSS global temp data I estimate the CO2 would roughly stop increasing if the yearly global temperature would drop to -0.3 to -0.4 (RSS). That would be equal to the global temperatures near 1900.

Two questions pop out of this paper:
1) It concludes that 10% of observed increases in CO2 are the result of human activity and 90% are from natural sources. The figures I see comparing current total atmospheric CO2 with that of the four previous and comparable global temperature peaks of the past 450,000 years indicate CO2 content is currently 36% higher than it was during those past peaks. Although that variance does not rule out “natural”, it certainly raises questions.
2) We’ve recently seen a paper on this site indicating that ocean temperatures have actually declined over the past 100 years, yet we know atmospheric CO2 has risen during that period. Isn’t this contrary to Spencer’s logic?

“Are we really sure that ALL of the atmospheric increase in CO2 is from humanity’s emissions? After all, the natural sources and sinks of CO2 are about 20 times the anthropogenic source, so all it would take is a small imbalance in the natural flows to rival the anthropogenic source. ”
The thing I’m wondering about is, with a residence time of 5 years in the atmosphere, when does anthropogenic CO2 stop being anthropogenic and become natural? If there’s more CO2 now than 100 years, which is clearly seen, there is that much more CO2 to be within the various sinks.

Just to throw in a thought. Could the rise in CO2 be in step with the rate at which vegetation is being cleared? Land clearance has been relatively in step with population growth and along with the advances in technology the physical effect of population growth over recent decades is probably augmented.
As far as what is driving SST I wonder if direct solar heating is overstated and there is much more exchanging of heat between land, sea and air. The focus of attention appears to be primarily the amount of sea surface exposed to the sun, but equally the same sea surface is exposed to the same area of sky with whatever heat it contains or extracts. Infra red images of the oceans imply that the shallows or coastal areas are the hottest with these warm waters being ‘dragged’ out and away from the coasts. I expect to see temperature difference on land because of the variety of surfaces but apart from the affect of the earths rotation I would expect to see more uniformity in SST as water is much the same over most of the planet including it’s height if it is warmed solely by direct solar radiation.

Joel (11:56:17) :
“Is it the physical properties of oceans that alter C02 absorption or is it biological? I could be backwards, but I’m having trouble understanding how a warmer ocean (regardless of why it’s warmer now) absorbs less CO2 than a cooler ocean, especially if the absorption is through marine life. Wouldn’t warmer temps increase plant life and therefore decrease C02? ”
Where do the baleen whales go to fat up? The tropics or the polar seas? Answer: the polar seas. Why? Because that is where the greatest concentrations of plankton are to be found. Why? Because the colder water in the polar seas carries more nutrients and CO2 than the warmer water of the tropics. The polar seas are the richest marine environments in terms of marine flora and fauna. So the answer to your question is: No, warmer temperatures would cause a decrease in marine plant life (less CO2 in the water) and thus reduce their mitigation of CO2 levels through photosynthesis.

Spencer’s simple model is very interesting, but as he implies, the simplicity allows for questions.
One question has to do with sulfates and black carbon. There was global dimming though 1990, global brightening since, due evidently mainly to the fall of the FSU and the huge drop in SO2 emissions as industry went bust there and in eastern Europe, and secondarily due to acid rain programs in the US and Europe). It would be good if Spencer could somehow accomodate these changes, which should affect SSTs, and which certainly could cause warmer SSTs after Pinatubo’s effects diminished. Even if cloud cover didn’t change, reduced sulfate would mean more sunlight penetrates to the surface, because in low humidity, sulfate forms a light colored aerosol. It was only around 2000 or so that increased Chinese emissions caused worldwide SO2 drops to level off and reverse a little.
Secondly, volcanos should be included in the model. After Pinatubo, temps decreased and cloudiness increased for a year or two, which caused vegetation to actually grow better for a couple of years, which sucked a bit more CO2 from the air — which is why in 1992 only about 0.4 ppm of CO2 increase was recorded at Mauna Loa.
Third question: posts on WUWT discuss the PDO, and the fact that it has been in a warm phase until recently — could this be a cause of the increase in SSTs, instead of a hypothesized change in cloud cover?
Spencer could easily be right about the cloud cover, but I’d like to ask him to address these questions to see how robust his argument is.

Cassanders (12:44:55) :
for both prophet and priest are profane; yea, in my house have I found their wickedness, saith the LORD.
Only the prophet speaketh lies about CO2. Don’t believe him! CO2 is the gas we all God’s children exhale, and green trees breath. HE is profane!

…. and an apology for my incorrect spelling of Dr. Spencer’s name.

Roy,
In your model equation, what values were used for the variable “Anthro”?
What would happen if the Anthro component were simply omitted? Can a value be found for the “a” coefficient that results in the model fitting the observations even better?

Eager to read the comment by Ferdinand Engelbeen

I like to mention the Nevada FACE facility where they measure background CO2 continuously in a desert environment and which for 10 years has shown little or no trend (though a lot of scatter). Nobody ever comments about it but I see it as important evidence. Presumably these scientists are doing the background measurements correctly otherwise the whole experiment would be pretty pointless.
http://www.unlv.edu/Climate_Change_Research/NDFF/co2_treatment.htm
I’ve been wondering why Kealing never chose a desert environment; a short drive from his office, after having already reported in his talks that he got low background readings in such environments. I mean why a volcano in the Pacific? What on earth was he thinking about? Even today on the ML website they say it’s the cleanest air in the world which is nonsense: It’s a volcano for Pete’s sake – and they admit they need to correct for it’s emissions! However that’s a side issue. It just makes me wonder about Kealing’s decision-making mechanism. But maybe he was a surfer.
No doubt Engelbeen will pop in and link his website and mention that the Antarctic station agrees with ML.

To Nick Stokes, re “Where does it all go”
The earth is obviously greening:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalGarden/
Now where do you suppose trees gets their carbon from? Maybe you can use some simple arithmetic.

The long-term record shows that the CO2 changes trail the temperature changes by roughly 800 years. When I have tried to discuss this with True Believers, I’m told that there is a feedback process under which the changes are amplified by the increased release of dissolved CO2 from the higher temperatures, and I’m just too simple to understand the science, which has already dealt with fools like me, so shut up.
Well, here’s what I don’t understand. After 90 thousand years of cold temperatures, when the CO2 levels are at their lowest, the temperatures start rising, and continue to rise for that eight century interval before the CO2 levels begin to go up. Similarly, after ten thousand years of interglacial, when the CO2 is at its highest, the temperatures start dropping, and continue to do so for eight centuries before the CO2 levels follow.
How is it that CO2 levels that have been stable for thousands of years cause 800 years of temperature changes in the first place?

“Global warming theory assumes that the increasing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere comes entirely from anthropogenic sources, and it is that CO2 increase which is causing global warming.”
These things are not ‘assumed’.
“is it possible that long-term warming of the oceans (say, due to a natural change in cloud cover) might be causing some portion of the long-term increase in atmospheric CO2?”
Why, of course. But we know that this portion is very small. How we know this should be common knowledge among anyone interested in climate science, but let’s run through it one more time:
Observation 1: concentration of atmospheric CO2 is rising steeply. It is 40% higher than it was at any point in the 800,000 years or so before 1800.
Observation 2: not only is the concentration rising steeply, but its isotopic composition is changing. After 800,000 years or so of little variation, the proportion of CO2 molecules containing a 13C atom began dropping sharply about 200 years ago.
Observation 3: In the oceans, a similar drop in 13C is observed, and the quantity of CO2 in the oceans is found to be rising.
Conclusion: the oceans cannot be the source of the extra CO2, because if they were, then a) the amount of CO2 in them would be falling, not rising; and b) the δ13C in the oceans would have to be rising, not falling. Roy’s ideas fail to explain the observations, and must therefore be discarded.
Instead, we can see that obviously, the extra CO2 must be coming from a reservoir with a lower δ13C than both atmosphere and oceans. Who might know what that could be?
If, despite the isotopic evidence, you want to believe that warming has caused the rise in CO2, then you can see from ice cores that the relation between CO2 and temperature that held for 800,000 years or so was that a 1°C rise in temperature corresponded to about an 8ppm rise in CO2. Therefore, to explain the ~110ppm rise in CO2 since 1800, we require a temperature rise of 14°C. Hands up if you believe it’s got 14°C warmer globally since 1800.
“The best model fit assumes that the temperature anomaly at which the ocean switches between a sink and a source of CO2 for the atmosphere is -0.2 deg. C… it would mean that the ocean became a net source of more atmospheric CO2 around 1930.”
The oceans are a net sink of CO2. Therefore, the model fails.
“And just how strenuous and vehement the resulting objections are to what I have presented above will be a good indication of how politicized the science of global warming has become.”
How outrageously unscientific, to pre-emptively claim that all possible objections must be political. Strenuous and vehement objections are the only sensible scientific response to a deeply flawed analysis. Politics is irrelevant.

It’s interesting. I was looking for a way to comment on Dr. Spencer’s blog but there was no link. I had a few questions for him, one related to data source and the other was why didn’t he do a multivariate regression to find the ratio between natural and AGW rather than hand match the temps.
Either way, it’s an interesting analysis and if we trust the long term temperatures it might be worthwhile to do the regression.

Joel
Your question may have been answered.
1) First the carbon dioxide needs to get into the ocean.
2) Second, the ocean needs to be cool enough to retain it for long enough to allow photosynthetic plankton to assimilate it.
3) Then the rest of the plankton food chain needs to really incorporate the carbon products into the biomass.
1) is not often considered thoroughly – there is not sufficient ocean surface area for effective diffusion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the ocean to support the bulk of photosynthetic life there. The key source is precipitated rain water, saturated with carbon dioxide, mainly in temperate and subpolar zones. In tropical zones, both on land and in the ocean, the respiration of the biomass accounts for much of the circulating carbon.
2) Tropical oceans, and tropical landmasses recycle much of the carbon dioxide reaching the surface dissolved in rain directly back into the atmosphere. Subtropical desert regions consolidate carbon dioxide into carbonate minerals which fix sand dunes and mineral-rich lake deposits.
3) Biomass has two parts – the organic and the inorganic. The organic bit -protein, carbohydrate, lipid etc., and the inorganic stuff – shells, bones, dental stuff, maybe I can include resin and some resistant plant products here too, stuff that is not easily biodegradable. The organic stuff is readily recycled, but the inorganic stuff is either fossilized, or incorporated into sediments. Some scientists think that even the inorganic stuff is recycled into petroleum products, as long as there is a source of carbon and hydrogen, and the temperature and pressure are high enough.

Flanagan (13:08:37) :
Well, there’s nothing new here. CO2 desorbing from oceans is one of the most classical positive feedbacks in global circulation models. End of the story.
Exactly, any positive feedback from additional CO2 seems to be over. Shouldn’t we already have had a temperature “runaway” without any additional anthropogenic CO2 whatsoever?

Monster,
The primary driver of climate change is the interaction of the earth’s orbital parameters: eccentricity, tilt, and wobble which were proposed by Milankovich more than a century ago and verified in the 1970-80s by the CLIMAP and SPECMAP projects. These cycles produce the large-scale glacial-interglacial oscillations. What happens on the shorter terms (millennial, century, and decade) can be attributed to other causes.

I have recently seen dire predictions about higher atmospheric CO2 acidifying the oceans and disrupting the ability of shellfish to deposit calcium carbonate in their shells efficiently. No doubt this is the beginning of the fall-back position when temperature changes have obviously failed to follow CO2 levels.
RW, your points may be valid (or not) but I am struck by the way you so confidently assume that the whole business comes down to the variability of CO2. First, your line of argument completely fails to deal with the established facts that the world has been both much warmer and much colder than it is now, before the emergence of humans and after. Since everything that we’re observing now is clearly within the bounds of natural variability, why is it necessary to invoke human causation? In fact, why is it not specious to do so before carefully eliminating all possible natural causes?
Second, I know from my own line of work that when you try to explain the behavior of highly complex systems in terms of a single variable you’re going to be wrong. It’s called “excessive reductionism”, and it’s an unhealthy phenomenon, especially when you don’t really know what all the other variables are.

Flanagan (13:08:37) : Look, CO2 it is just a tiny part of the atmosphere, only a 3.85 per TEN THOUSAND (provided we believe in Mauna Loa-a Volcano-figures).
So, it is a trace gas, which you and me, we humans, EXHALE , and plants/trees breath. It is a small part of the air, which DOES NOT can hold heat as compared with water (3,227 times less).
Our planet earth, I don´t know if you ever look above to the sky, IT IS NOT CLOSED, as within a crystal box, it is OPEN TO SPACE, there it goes the warm by a process which makes baloons fly up, ya know? , that´s called convection. So, when air gets some heat it goes up there and loses it.
Read: http://www.giurfa.com/gh_experiments.pdf

Try an experiment of going outside on a warm, cloudy day. When exposed to the sun, you can feel the heat. When a cloud passes over, the shadow induces a change in the heat intensity you feel, making it noticeably cooler (ie not necessarily cool, but cooler). Unlike permanent shade, this isn’t the cooler air, it is the result of a partial blocking of the sun.
Given what we know of the solar cycles, a strong sun during a solar maximum has more power and likely results in less cloud cover overall. It would then be expected to have a ocean heating effect. The slightly warmed oceans are therefore more chemically active, both releasing more CO2 and increasing organic decay rates. I would also presume the increased surface warming would trigger greater ocean current activity, churning up more CO2.
Once the opposite occurs, a solar minimum reduces the direct warming effect and triggers greater cloud cover, resulting in increased shade. This causes a marginal cooling, reducing CO2 releases, slowing decay, and reducing ocean current movement.
As these are slow processes resulting in marginal changes, the effects become more noticeable over longer periods of time (ie the time duration of the Solar Maximum or Minimum counts), as well as being contingent on the intensity. Timing would also count with regards to other cyclical events, whether solar or Terran, as these would either amplify or offset each other.
Mt understanding is that at present, the Solar Cycle, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Inter-Decal Oscillation and Southern Oscillation Index have all recently swung from “warm” to “cool” (with the others I’m not sure, although the Indian Ocean patterns are still casting a dry effect on Australia despite multi-year La Ninas). Its when they align that things appear to get interesting, and if we are entering such a period of alignment (and it seems difficult to determine what level of inter-causality exists), then we should expect an ocean cooling effect and, if Dr Spencer is correct, a drop in CO2 levels.

Co2 clearly follows temperature in the earths history, it is clear that solar activity in the past drove SST and co2 was a result of this warming due to outgassing of the sea, which is essentially a large co2 reserve. We know that slightly elevated TSI triggered the Medieval Warm Period, and over the last centuary TSI was at a similar level, hence observation would indicate that the sea should be warming (the amplification required could be due to variation in cloud cover) and therefore co2 should be released. It makes sense and matches observation and as far as I am concerned that is science, explaining observation. Your above empirical model goes a long way towards demonstrating this is still happening and makes perfect sense. There are of course numerous papers that support this, many papers estimate the co2 lifetime at around 7 years, co2 rises at the same rate in each hemisphere etc…
Yet question the co2 dogma and you are called a “denier” or a fool!

E.M.Smith: The carbonate the fish excrete is high in magnesium ..
Oh my God…! Where does this CO2 nonsense has take us to?
Fish excrete!!! That´s really funny LOL
O’ Evil prophet, all the damage you have made!
You are no longer a serious person, prophet, you are a clown!

C. Boncelet (13:40:15) :
I think you overlooked this line :
“…this admittedly simple model.”

Re: Adolfo Giurfa (18:45:15)
I was just thinking about how hopelessly-conflicted some of these threads get when you succeeded in putting all into some much-needed context — Nice work Adolfo!

Smokey:

In the first link, Gavin Schmidt has been gelded by Monckton. Did Schmidt actually believe that he could get away with his prevarications online?? Altering graphs produced by someone else is thoroughly dishonest. It is fraud, isn’t it? It appears that people check their ethics at the door when they enter GISS/RealClimate territory.

Oh, give me a break, Smokey! He didn’t “alter the graphs”…He simply simply copied that part of the graph that was relevant, leaving off a little plug along the top border of the graph for Monckton’s website address and he also did not copy Monckton’s caption below the graph. There is no law that says that if you show a graph that someone else has shown you also have to include their caption. (Of course, if Gavin had misrepresented the graph because Monckton had said something very different in the caption than what Gavin implied Monckton was saying, Monckton might have a legitimate complaint. But he doesn’t make any such complaint.)
This is a completely manufactured controversy over nothing and you, a supposedly “skeptic” have fallen for it hook-line-and-sinker! You appear to be about the least skeptical person on the entire planet when it comes to things that agree with your preconceptions.

As for Spencer’s ideas, as RW has explained, they are in clear contradiction with what we know from the data … which is that the oceans are in net absorbing CO2, not emitting it.
Furthermore, there is no self-consistency here with other data that has been presented … For example, if you want to believe that the oceans have not warmed for the last few years (as a blog post here from several days ago asserted) and you want to believe Spencer’s post here then why have the CO2 levels continued to rise significantly?
Also, if you want to believe that during past glacial – interglacial cycles, the initial CO2 change lagged the initial temperature change by about 800 years (as seems likely), then you have to conclude that even to get the release of CO2 that was seen in those cycles takes a long time…and that effect, as has been noted, is at most about 15ppm rise in CO2 levels for every 1 C of global temperature change, which would imply a fairly small contribution to the >100ppm rise in CO2 levels since the industrial revolution given the temperature rise that we’ve seen.
In fact, the rise in CO2 levels from ~280ppm to ~385ppm is almost entirely due to our emissions. (And, in fact, it would be about twice as large if the oceans and biosphere were not acting as a sink for CO2.) The year-to-year temperature fluctuations due to El Nino and La Nina and the like do cause fluctuations in the rate at which the CO2 level rise but the overall warming of the oceans has not been significant enough to contribute anything but a small fraction of the overage change in CO2 levels seen since the beginning of the industrial revolution (and, even then, it is not the oceans releasing CO2 in net…it is them just absorbing less of what we emit).

Smokey said:

Altering graphs produced by someone else is thoroughly dishonest. It is fraud, isn’t it?

By the way, when you actually materially alter what someone else had graphed or predicted so that it is no longer an accurate representation of what they predicted but you claim it is their prediction, this is in fact very dishonest. And, that is exactly what Monckton did by making a plot that he claimed to show the IPCC predictions when they were in fact not the IPCC predictions but rather an exaggerated version of them. Strangely, you don’t seem particularly bothered by this!
So, in some sense, you and Monckton are “hoisted by your own petard”!

Great work Dr. Spencer.
My first serious doubts of AGW arose about ten years ago when a brilliant chemical engineer offhandedly asserted that the theory was obviously wrong because CO2 increases were simply the effect of rising ocean temperature, not the cause.
Joel:
Already mostly answered, but clearly the dominant process in CO2 absorption is physical. There is not nearly enough plankton in most ocean water to metabolize much of the CO2, certainly not on a daily basis. And the temperature is never the limiting factor in photosynthesis. As noted elsewhere here, the tropics are limited by the low concentrations of CO2 in the water. The polar regions are relatively lush and are limited by light, not temperature.
jmrSudbury (12:11:38) :
Beware of complex models. Finding a better fit by adding factors that have no physical basis or are unknown creates all sorts of incorrect conclusions. I wouldn’t trust the precision of a Geology 101 textbook chart very much, it neglects the daily changes. I saw somewhere that ML CO2 varies 10 ppm every day! This is exactly what would be expected from the daily heating of the top surface of the ocean water.
Absorption by vegetation is minor compared to the amount of overall absorption, and it is certainly does not explain where the half of the CO2 from fossil fuel and cement (now 7 GT/yr) has gone or why it varies so much year to year.
Claude Harvey (13:46:47) :
While total ocean heat is essential to an energy balance of the earth. Only the surface exchanges CO2 with the atmosphere, so surface temperature is the only temperature that matters. Also, the fact that it is cooling, very slightly, does not matter, just that it is still above average. Perhaps most importantly, the water upwelling and outgassing may be from hundreds of years ago when the LIA water was much colder and absorbed a whole lot more CO2 just before it went down the conveyor.
Jan Breslow (13:54:29) :
The thermodynamics are actually pretty straightforward. The argument that the concentration is too low is a misunderstanding of the dynamics. Interactions (collisions) between molecules happen at such a fast rate that very small concentrations of IR absorbers (which by definition emit at the same wavelengths) can efficiently transfer heat as if the gas were pure. Every time a photon is emitted by CO2 changing its vibrational state (which cools it), it almost instantaneously is reheated by collision with a N2 or O2 molecule.
Nick Stokes (15:42:19) :
What is your point? Dr. Spencer has simply shown that without any hand waving, it appears that 90% of the increase is due to temperature. In other words, if SST cools to normal, instead of the ocean only absorbing 50% of CO2 emissions, it would absorb 95%.
Nick Stokes (16:17:55) :
Dr. Spencer never said it went into vegetation. Obviously it is coming out of the ocean or being sequested in the deep ocean, actually both happen each year so you could probably improve the model if you separated the average SST into absorbing (cooling) and outgassing (warming).

I’m not buying it. There are several inconsistencies.
If Bristlecone Pines can be considered as a proxy for CO2 levels, then the hockey-stick millennial CO2 reconstruction is confirmed. If we reject the reconstruction, we must also reject a key piece of evidence against Michael Mann’s millennial reconstruction.
So, assuming we accept the hockey-shape CO2 reconstruction along with Loehle’s millennial temperature reconstruction, we could not also attribute the modern CO2 increase to increasing oceanic temperatures. If this were the case, why are historic CO2 levels so flat when oceanic temperatures were so variable?

I agree in your general assertion that not all climate change is man-made but disagree with the reality of the figure you generated at 10%.
I believe the more critical issue is pollution in general and not specifically CO2 emissions but as you pointed out this issue has been politicized by both sides and rational debate is rare.

Eric Lightborn (22:23:24)
“I believe the more critical issue is pollution in general and not specifically CO2 emissions but as you pointed out this issue has been politicized by both sides and rational debate is rare.”
Nice to see a truthful, non-partisan comment in the climate debate.

RW (16:21:26) :
“Conclusion: the oceans cannot be the source of the extra CO2, because if they were, then a) the amount of CO2 in them would be falling, not rising ”
You seem to have bought the IPCC mantra hook line and sinker.
How accurately do we know the CO2 levels in oceans relative to the amount of CO2 it releases into the ocean. What is the uncertainty? Over 200 GtonsC/yr are emitted into the atmosphere via natural processes against only 8 GtC/yr from man. The oceans hold 38,000 GtonsC. A 1% error is 380 GtC, half as much C as in the entire atmosphere. It is not possible to measure changes in ocean C content -3 Gtons C per year (1/13,000 of the oceans C content), with enough accuracy to rule out the oceans role in changes to atmospheric CO2 if the uncertainty in this number is accounted for. Isotope measurement has even greater uncertainty.
ASSUMPTIONS are the heart of IPCC science. For example, assuming the surface layer of the oceans to be in equilibrium leads IPCC to conclude that the measured increase in CO2 is from man’s emissions, without increases due to background effects or warming of the ocean.
The IPCC use the MLO record to represent global CO2, since they calibrate CO2 measurements from other sources to make them all agree, on the assumption that atmospheric CO2 is well-mixed. This contradicts observations of CO2 gradients in latitude and longitude.
IPCC ignores the global flow of CO2 through the atmosphere and across and through the surface layer of the ocean, and then into and out of the Thermohaline Circulation. CO2 is absorbed near 0ºC at the poles, more so in the cold waters of the Antarctic, and returned about one millennium later to the atmosphere at the prevailing tropical temperature. Much of it returned to the atmosphere near the MLO as the MLO sits in the outgassing plume of the Eastern Equatorial Pacific, and CO2 circulates with measurable gradients around the globe.
IPCC does not model the oceans temperature-dependent exchange of about 90 gigatons of carbon per year, even though it dwarfs mans emission of 8 gigatons per year. The outgassing of CO2 is a positive feedback of global warming.
IPCC considers the ocean to absorb mans CO2 at a few gigatons per year, or 50% of its emission rate. It reports natural CO2 outgassed from the ocean as being exchanged with the atmosphere at about 90 gigatons per year
( 100% of the oceans emission rate). IPCC offers no reasonable explanation for the accumulation of mans CO2 (50%), but not natural CO2 (0%).
IPCC’s conclusions are wrong that CO2 is long lived (do the math on the exchanges and the total CO2 in the atmosphere), that it is well mixed, and that it is a forcing, meaning that it is not a feedback.
IPCC assumed cloud cover to be a constant (due to lack of understanding and lack of historical data and accurate historical observations) and not a dynamic feedback and thus ignored what is likely the dominant feedback in the climate system, the negative feedback of cloud albedo.
“If, despite the isotopic evidence, you want to believe that warming has caused the rise in CO2, then you can see from ice cores that the relation between CO2 and temperature that held for 800,000 years or so was that a 1°C rise in temperature corresponded to about an 8ppm rise in CO2.”
The Vostok record, especially the 450,000 year reduction, includes the dominant period of ice ages. The warm periods are the interglacial maxima which are geologically brief, and even instantaneous if you consider that the sampling interval of ice core samples is 1.3 millennia. The present interglacial is within a few degrees of the ceiling interpreted from the previous four maxima. It also suggests that CO2 levels lagged temperature by as much as 800 years.
CO2 levels as measured via chemical analysis with an accuracy of 3% have shown CO2 levels in the 19th century and even in the 1940’s to be at or above levels of CO2 today. The argument to discard these levels is not very convincing if you accept that CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere. Also, there is some uncertainty in measurements of gaseus inclusions in ice, since the assumption the gas is representative of global atmosphere at the time is not verifiable. Furthermore, an untested assumption that the air in bubbles in ice is 90 to 200 years younger than the ice in which the bubbles are entrapped was made in order to explain the concentrations
of GHG in air bubbles from ice deposited in the 18th and 19th century were similar to those of the present atmosphere. This way 100-200 year old ice is considered to contain air bubbles from 20th century air.
Your own assumption that CO2 and temperature is linear is not true, and even IPCC agrees. An 8 ppm increase at 200 ppm has a much greater effect on temperature than an 8 ppm increase at 360 ppm. The effect of doubling CO2 from 180 to 360 ppm (180 ppm) would be similar to a doubling CO2 from 360 ppm to 720 ppm (360 ppm).

“Global warming theory assumes that the increasing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere comes entirely from anthropogenic sources”
No it doesn’t.
It does assume that some of the increasing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere comes from anthropogenic sources.
It turns out that the oceans and the terrestrial biosphere are net carbon sinks, so the increase is entirely due to anthropogenic sources. But when the oceans get warm enough to outgass, creating a further positive feedback, this will be entirely consistent with global warming theory.

pft: the amount of CO2 in the oceans is rising. Therefore, they cannot be the source of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Simple as that. 13C measurements both of the current atmosphere and in ice cores are easily accurate enough to show that a dramatic change in the composition of atmospheric CO2 began about 200 years ago, after 800,000 years of almost no variation.
If you want to believe that the oceans are the source of CO2, you have to believe that fossil fuel CO2 is just disappearing, that oceanic CO2 is somehow changing its isotopic composition of its own accord, and that temperatures have risen many degrees since 1800.
“The IPCC use the MLO record to represent global CO2, since they calibrate CO2 measurements from other sources to make them all agree, on the assumption that atmospheric CO2 is well-mixed. This contradicts observations of CO2 gradients in latitude and longitude.”
You had a lot to say about the IPCC there, much of it apparently under the impression that the IPCC itself carries out science. It does not. This one statement in particular is not remotely true. Where on earth did you get this idea from?

There’s too much curvature discrepancy for me. The SST data seems to force the curvature whereas the emissions data is relatively linear as is the Mauna Loa data.
As far as I can see a detrended SST anomaly to provide the short-term variability with the emissions anomaly to provide the long-term trend would provide a much better match.
That wouldn’t support Spencer’s hypothesis. Does anyone have the data?

There is a basic reason why this analysis by Dr. Spencer cannot be published in a scientific journal. As alluded to in at least one posting above, his analysis either assumes that the law of the conservation of matter does not apply or that there are order of magnitude errors in our estimates of the amount of fossil fuels that is burned and/or the change in atmospheric CO2.
What mass balance (conservation of matter) estimates tell us is that the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 is about half the rate of CO2 release from burning fossil fuels. In other words, over the long term, about 50% of the CO2 released by combustion is absorbed by nature and 50% is accounted for by the increase in atmospheric CO2. Since we have not observed massive increases in terrestrial plant matter (a potential sink on land), scientists have concluded that oceans are a net sink for CO2. That is, over a time scale of years and decades, the oceans are absorbing more CO2 than they release.
If we use Dr. Spencer’s results and assume that the oceans are releasing CO2 and that this release is much greater than fossil fuel burning, we can calculate that the rate of increase in CO2 in the atmosphere should be an order of magnitude higher than observed in the Mano Loa data. If Dr. Spencer were to submit his findings to a scientific journal, the discussion section of his manuscript would need to explain these discrepancies between his results and what is known about world fossil fuel consumption, the resulting CO2 release and the increase in atmospheric CO2. The alternative would be to assume that CO2 from fossil fuel (magically) disappears or that the oceans (magically) absorbs CO2 from fossil fuel while releasing CO2 from other sources.
I assume that Dr. Spencer must be aware of these issues. Dr. Spencer said that the purpose of his analysis was to “stimulate debate.” However, without further explanation it is will just cause confusion among the naive public while being ignored by scientists.

Carl Wolk (22:13:31) :
If Bristlecone Pines can be considered as a proxy for CO2 levels, then the hockey-stick millennial CO2 reconstruction is confirmed. If we reject the reconstruction, we must also reject a key piece of evidence against Michael Mann’s millennial reconstruction.
So, assuming we accept the hockey-shape CO2 reconstruction along with Loehle’s millennial temperature reconstruction, we could not also attribute the modern CO2 increase to increasing oceanic temperatures. If this were the case, why are historic CO2 levels so flat when oceanic temperatures were so variable?
Mann used the Bristlecone Pines as a “temperature” proxy. Temperature measurements from adjacent weather stations demonstrate that this is in error. It has been theorized that the variation in the rings is due to CO2, but there doesn’t appear to be any confirmation studies. Irrelevant anyway.
The historic CO2 reconstruction by Callandar and continued by Keeling is also problematical.
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm
The hocky-stick is junk science at its best.
Great job by Dr. Spencer!!!
It really did bring out the AGW trolls.

Nick Stokes
You say “We burn nearly 10 Gigatons of C per year. The atmospheric increase is about 5-6 Gt. The rest is thought to go into the ocean.”
But look at this up to date link here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/18/trees-tropics-climate-change
“Over the world’s tropical forests, this extra “carbon sink” effect adds up to 4.8bn tonnes of CO2 removed each year – close to the total carbon dioxide emissions from the US.”
4.8bn tonnes (or 4.8Gt) is the missing carbon sink that you thought we should assume went into the oceans. So the ocean isn’t a net sink after all. The missing sink was the biosphere all the time. But I now wonder how correct the “10 Gigatons of C per year” calculation is. Bear in mind that the IPCC seems to think that deforestation adds 20% to carbon emissions, which is the opposite of the truth, I don’t give much hope for their other numbers.

Spencer confuses the temperature modulation of the sink speed (3ppm/y/K) with temperarture sensitivity of the equilibrium sink (10 ppm/K)
The units are completely differerent. In electronics Its comparing a temperature resistor with a temperature sensitive battery.

Apologies if this has been posted…I’m travelling and have limited access, so can’t read all the comments to check.
Pretty serious coverage on Hot Air this morning of Senate hearings between Sen. Barrasso and Lisa Jackson regarding the “Smoking Gun OMB memo”, including Youtube clip.
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/12/video-epa-memo-says-greenhouse-effect-not-proven/
JimB

Also Nick,
“I note the oddity of this post’s assertion that ocean warming is the source of the regular annual rise in CO2, when just a few days ago we had another of many posts asserting that the oceans are cooling.”
This might have been fair comment if you hadn’t already accepted the illogicality of a warming sea being a net carbon sink. It appears that you only look for discrepancies in the skeptic storyline when the IPCC storyline contains far more. The cooling, by the way, is only over the last 6 years.
Furthermore, you might have noticed on this site that the Mauna Loa measurements had been showing suspicious drops until “errors” were corrected. In reality, like the other corrections of outgoing radiation, radiosonde, satellite and ocean buoys, all of which were adjusted towards the hypothesis, the real problem is that too many people are so certain of the hypothesis that they just don’t believe what their instruments are telling them. But the raw, unadjusted data are all consistent. As Douglass noted though, some of the “corrections” make the data inconsistent.

Bill DeMott (02:03:40) :
“What mass balance (conservation of matter) estimates tell us is that the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 is about half the rate of CO2 release from burning fossil fuels.”
Where did you get this from? Please post a link or prove this. What are the error bars on this estimate?
By the way, remember from your undergraduate thermodynamics that matter is always conserved in chemical reactions: fuel+air –> products of reaction (which includes CO2, H2O, CO, …). I’m not sure why you would invoke “mass conservation” in this case…

Maybe this observation couldbe incorporated in this simple model?
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/co2_and_temperature_relationship_shown_questions_flat_ice_core_co2_graph_du/

Those new flash ads bring my browser to a very slow pace, forces me to view them, can’t scroll, can’t switch windows.
They are detestable.

Lindsay H (04:15:10) :

If co2 is being absorbed in polar waters and released in tropical waters would there be an observable difference in co2 concentrations between say antartic waters and the tropics. Equally there should be an observable difference between northern hemisphere concentrations where 90% of MMco2 is released and the southern hemisphere.
….
yet there does not seem to be much difference
…
I have some difficulty in understanding how 9-10 gigatons of carbon can be diffused through the atmosphere to the south pole so quickly.

Water evaporates from the oceans in some places while rivers feed water into the oceans in other places; yet we observe that sea level is roughly the same everywhere. Hard to believe that all this water can flow around the world so quickly!

A graph which shows both temperature and CO2 changes might be helpful. On this, you can see that temperature rises before CO2 rises, and temperature drops before CO2 drops. The analysis by Spencer uses statistics to confirm that this happens, but with the two on the same graph you can see it yourself.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958

Perhaps, I am missing something elementary here, but when Spencer uses the 90%-10% split ocean-anthropogenic isn’t he saying that changes in ocean temp *determine* 90% of the variation of in CO2 concentrations, not that 90% of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere came directly from the oceans.
As example, assume animals A and B live on an island. If animal A only eats animal B, then we could say that the population of A is determined by the population of B. Even if we (anthropogenically) parachuted As in by the thousands, they would still be ultimately be determined by the population of B(excess As simply die off).
Cheers, 🙂

The CO2 cycle is very interesting, thank you Dr. Spenser for your time on this. I am still puzzling over this AIRS video, I’ll post a link below. This video shows that the highest annual concentrations of CO2 occur in April, approx. 40-60 deg. N. In the western hemisphere, it looks like Alaska and Canada are the big emmiters. This makes no sense to me, as things are just beginning to thaw from winter, from non-industrial, low-density habitation areas. The only thing I can imagine is a loss of snow and ice releasing CO2 from under the same. I suppose all the underwater and underground species have been respirating all winter, and that might be released.
http://tinypic.com/m/2l9dea/1%5DView My Video

AGW-ers:
The ocean is a net sink, no doubt, but the the interesting bit is what would the concentration have been without our emissions? It bothers me a little that the ocean becomes a source during strong ninos, and that there is not a widening gap between CO2 increase and temp graphs as the emissions increase.
counter-AGW-ers:
How do you explain this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
and this: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
Temperature should have been 12 deg higher to explain the CO2 level, and you have to choose between a warm MWP or man-made CO2. You can’t have both MWP as warm as today and ocean as the source.

The Monster (16:09:52) :
The long-term record shows that the CO2 changes trail the temperature changes by roughly 800 years. When I have tried to discuss this with True Believers, I’m told that there is a feedback process under which the changes are amplified by the increased release of dissolved CO2 from the higher temperatures, and I’m just too simple to understand the science, which has already dealt with fools like me, so shut up.
There is NO evidence that the rising CO2 causes any feedback. This is AGW bluster at its worst. This contains what you need to rebut it.
PaulHClark (23:03:16) : I found this a useful (and for me at least easy to read) piece when looking at CO2 and ocean carbon sinks – it also gives an explanation of Henry’s Law [Lubos Motl URL]
I’m very sorry to say Lubos has got it wrong AFAICT. He usually has my respect. The oceans hold a huge amount of CO2 and we therefore have every reason to suspect that atmospheric CO2 levels are very sensitive to small SST changes. Have a look at my page on CO2 and decide for yourself. The whole CO2 issue is an ever-changing mobile flux that is heavily dependent on the oceans and the biosphere and far less dependent on us to date. It is a strange coincidence that the rising CO2 rate is about half the emissions rate – but it is a coincidence that has mesmerised the whole of AGW.
Here are some useful figures (gigatons of carbon) to help get things in proportion:-
Atmosphere 700… Ocean “surface” 700… Biosphere 70… Total ocean 40,000… Fossil fuel reserves 12,000…
Annual natural flux 230… Annual human CO2 emissions 6…

JFA in Montreal (06:40:33)
“Those new flash ads bring my browser to a very slow pace, forces me to view them, can’t scroll, can’t switch windows.
They are detestable.”
I found what *seems to be a solution to multi-minute hangs: I discovered that I can relieve the (seemingly-permanent-at-times) hangs by grabbing-&-dragging the scroll-knob (right margin). (Attempting to scroll via mouse-wheel seems to fail.)

Gilbert:
I am not an “AGW troll.” I find it disconcerting that if I doubt one argument proposed by one skeptical scientist, I am assumed to agree with AGW theory. I am what you would call a “skeptic,” but I think he is wrong on this issue. “Skeptics” have begun (especially on this blog) to leap onto any theory that would contradict AGW theory; this is not skepticism.
For Spencer’s proposed mechanism to make sense, we have to reject ice-core data in light of the medieval warm period. Instead we turn to Beck’s reconstruction. I find it odd that the chemical measurements show such rapid, and changing CO2 content, yet as soon as Mauna Loa begins to take measurements the slope turns very flat and does not change from a general linear rise. Are there any modern CO2 chemical measurements that we could use to compare against Mauna Loa data?
So really, this debate is focused on the wrong place. Spencer’s proposition is impossible if we accept ice-core data. It might be correct if we accept Beck’s chemical data.

JamesG (15:41:54) :
Thanks JamesG for that great explanation. I suspected that the 50% argument was a wild guess and likely bogus.

Carl Wolk,
you might want to look up the current CO2 data in cities. There are huge diurnal variations that exceed 500ppm peak in many of them.
What needs to be understood is that CO2 is NOT well mixed in the atmosphere. Around sources the measurements will regularly be much higher than the isolated measuring stations now in vogue. In fact, ALL those stations have strict standards that throw out measurements that are outside certain standards. This is to prevent mistakes in procedure or things like Volcano eruptions (see Mauna Loa), or odd wind patterns that bring CO2 saturated air from an inconvenient location (downtown anywhere) or a warming body of upwelling water or…, to the pristine measurement site.
Basically, those chemical measurements taken back then could not be duplicated now because the current levels would probably be much higher!!!!!! Why the warmers hyperventilate over them is pretty pitiful. It also shows how ugly they are when you consider that they are maligning some great scientists with their claims of poor practices and shoddy work just to try and shore up THEIR shoddy, misleading work.
Now, they can argue forever whether it is anthropogenic or natural, BUT, there is a heck of a lot more CO2 flux than is presented in their toy models.

Amazing what odd little nuggets one finds.
In the paper above “earth observatory” the authors report that plant growth in the tropics was stimulated by “less cloud over and higher solar radiation”.
If so I imagine the oceans in the tropics also warmed from the same effect.
Kindest Regards

By the way, here is a summary of what is generally understood by scientists in regards to CO2, along with references into the literature: http://www.radix.net/~bobg/faqs/scq.CO2rise.html

oms (08:44:10) :
yet we observe that sea level is roughly the same everywhere. Hard to believe that all this water can flow around the world so quickly!
That is gravity that is keeping the levels constant. The consistency moves very very slowly and stays locally. Floods in Italy do not muddy the seas in Greece. There is no universal force, as gravity for water, around the globe for CO2. And AIRS data show that there is no direct mixing
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/story_archive/CO2_Increase_Sep2002-Jul2008/

All of the tundra ponds are emitters of CO2 and methane, because of the amount of organic matter that that drains into them. However, I doubt that the amount would be comparable to human sources in inhabited regions and the peaks should be in summer, when temperatures are higher. Unlike oceans, inorganic carbon in lakes is mainly controlled by dissolved organic carbon from the water shed rather than atmospheric sources.
Concerning human CO2 emissions, the numbers are precise, within plus or minus 2% of the total. A book on “The carbon cycle” is available on Google books. You can see detailed listings of all of the various sources. I don’t have the author handy, but found it by searching (in google scholar) under “ratio of fossil fuel consumption and atmospheric CO2 increase”

The role assigned to CO2 in the CAGW morality play is laughable. It’s as if the Royal Shakespeare Company had asked Adam Sandler to play the title role in King Lear.

anna v (21:18:25) “Considering that ground measurements give much larger CO2 concentrations, that will be a factor too. Is there a biologist in the house? Do burgeoning flora emmitt more CO2?”
That would be soil organisms. I can’t give you any numbers (without researching them) – but I won’t hesitate to say the respiration peak should occur in summer (at high latitudes).

Why CO2 falls after the beginning of an ice age, rises after initial warming coming out of an ice age
A Wally Broecker article, based upon analysis of sediment cores, found that after the earth cools substantially after the initiation of an ice age, the drier and windier conditions off Patagonia cause about 50 times more dust from the southernmost part of South America to blow into the southern ocean. The dust has minute amounts of iron, which in fact does fertilize the ocean, enough to draw down tens of PPM of CO2, but over a time scale of several thousand years.
While some of the increase in CO2 drawdown ends up on the seabed in the form of diatomic/planktonic detritus, most of it occurs as an increase of dissolved CO2 in the ocean itself (the detritus gets processed by bacteria before it sinks very far, releasing the CO2 back into the water).
The process of CO2 drawdown takes so long because it requires that high CO2 waters only a few hundred meters or less from the surface near Antarctica are exported to deep waters, in a vertical “elevator” process that occurs in that part of the world. From these southern ocean deep waters, deep currents gradually redistribute the CO2-rich waters around the world.
Whenever this CO2 rich water gets to surface, it releases CO2 back to the atmosphere. So in order to get the full increase in oceanic CO2, the entire ocean must be saturated with the excess CO2. At this point, there is a steady state balance of input and output of CO2.
When the earth finally warms again, the input fertilization process slows back to the “normal” we see today — e.g., little natural wind blown iron fertilization off Patagonia — but the output process continues for a few thousand years until the tens of PPM of CO2 are all back in the atmosphere.
Fertilization does work, but it took thousands of years. To attempt to get something like 40 PPM sequestered in this manner, in say 100 years, would likely create hypoxic and anoxic dead zones because it would take place in one place, the southern ocean, where surface waters are exported to depth and there is a relative lack of iron. So I’ve become reluctantly convinced that iron fertilization isn’t the solution to too much atmospheric CO2 (yes, I agree, we don’t know how much is too much; if I didn’t agree, I wouldn’t be reading this blog). Whether we should fertilize the ocean is not the main topic of this post, however.
Thus one point of this post is to point out why CO2 levels rose and fell with the ice ages, and why there was a substantial lag of about 800 years before the CO2 dropped enough for us to measure it (going into the ice age) and rose by that much (going out). This doesn’t negate a cooling and warming role, as a positive feedback in each direction, but I don’t think Broecker or anyone else has tried to model how much of an additional feedback the changes in CO2 levels, subsequent to going into or out of an ice age, actually occurred.
The other point is to say that on the short time scales of decades that Roy Spencer analyzes, more CO2 gets into the ocean because with more in the atmosphere, the partial pressures of CO2 in air vs. CO2 in water cause something like half of the CO2 in the air to be dissolved in the oceans, even with slight increases in SSTs. I’m a bit surprised Spencer didn’t know that, he clearly knows his own field very well.

Carl Wolk (14:48:56) :
I am not an “AGW troll.” I find it disconcerting that if I doubt one argument proposed by one skeptical scientist, I am assumed to agree with AGW theory. I am what you would call a “skeptic,” but I think he is wrong on this issue. “Skeptics” have begun (especially on this blog) to leap onto any theory that would contradict AGW theory; this is not skepticism.
——
First, my apology. My troll statement was not aimed at you, but to all the warmers generally on this thread.
As for the alternate theories on this blog, I agree. It isn’t necessary to show what the source of climate change is. Only necessary to demonstrate that AGW isn’t it.
——
For Spencer’s proposed mechanism to make sense, we have to reject ice-core data in light of the medieval warm period. Instead we turn to Beck’s reconstruction. I find it odd that the chemical measurements show such rapid, and changing CO2 content, yet as soon as Mauna Loa begins to take measurements the slope turns very flat and does not change from a general linear rise. Are there any modern CO2 chemical measurements that we could use to compare against Mauna Loa data?
So really, this debate is focused on the wrong place. Spencer’s proposition is impossible if we accept ice-core data. It might be correct if we accept Beck’s chemical data.
——
I tend to reject the ice core data used by Callandar because it does not appear to be representative. There are also legitimate questions about the accuracy of ice cores. I think that the historical data from chemical analysis may only be useful to demonstrate the deficiencies in Callandars CO2 construction. At best we may only be able to say that we don’t know what the historical values really were, and consequently the claims that the current levels are higher than ever, are without merit. And I’m also suspicious of the Mauna Loa data.
As long as the government money is going into AGW research, it’s going to be difficult to do the kind if studies that will show what the reality is.
Also, while it appears counter intuitive, it is entirely possible for the co2 content in the atmosphere and the c02 content in the oceans to rise at the same time. The oceans are constantly absorbing and releasing CO2, and only a minor change in ocean temperature would change the balance.
While Dr. Spencers analysis may be a bit iffy, it did generate a lot of questions and it may actually be correct in a somewhat simplistic manner
I would suspect that we agree more than we disagree.

The warming trend (or any temperature trend for that matter) is a statistical number, not the data. For every spike and fall in the noise, weather events coincide that are directly tied to natural processes. Give me any spike or fall and I will send you scurrying to archived weather reports (jet stream data, oceanic conditions, weather fronts, etc) where you will find the explanation quite clear and easy to understand. If this can be done for EVERY spike and fall (which some say is weather), and it can, how can you jump to the conclusion that the statistical trend line (which some say is climate) that is created from these weather events is caused by something else (CO2, Sun, the goddess in the cave)? That is a leap even Evil Knievel would not have attempted. Folks, the weather noise creates the very artificial trend line, therefore the trend line is not climate. Furthermore, the trend line is too removed from cause and affect to be useful in ascribing any cause to such a noisy data set.

Ah, Anthony, I see wisdom in your 8:21:30 post.
===============================

“My objection to him is along the lines of his telling the truth, and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth.”
I wonder if AGW apologists don’t consider the Good greater than one good, the Truth. Its like a difference between believing mankind basically good and ameliorable versus iniquitous and finite.

Bill,
My understqanding is that the ice cores are not exactly like tree rings where each individual year can be isolated uniquely. So my guess is that the faster changes are being integrated by the nature of the resolution of the ice layers. The process Roy is asserting is beyond ice core resolution (I believe)
Pehaps somone “in the business” can elaborate on that.
George

Lucy Skywalker (12:41:52) :
Thank you very much – just when I thought I had an understanding of this issue!

George E. Smith (10:14:38) :
My understqanding is that the ice cores are not exactly like tree rings where each individual year can be isolated uniquely. So my guess is that the faster changes are being integrated by the nature of the resolution of the ice layers. The process Roy is asserting is beyond ice core resolution (I believe)

No – the entry into / out of an ice age should create a visible shift in the CO2 concentration easily within the measurement limits of ice cores
There should be a near instantaneous change in co2 when the temperature changes maintained at least for the time the temperature is changing or as I would expect a permanent step change until the temp returns to normal.
There is NONE – why?

Steve Keohane says:

THis may not answer your question, but the scale of temperature into and out of the glaciations is on the order of 10-12 deg. C.

Actually, the global temperature change was about half that. The numbers that you quote, presumably from the ice core graphs that you’ve seen, represent the temperature changes in the polar regions which evidence suggests are roughly double the globally-averaged temperature changes.

The greenhouse effect just slows the heat loss for the planet. IMO, the greenhouse effect is probably maxed out, and can’t become more of an isulator to allow temperature to climb more than another couple of degrees ever. I think we can be a lot cooler but not a lot warmer.

There is no evidence that I know of that this is the case. In fact, the dependence of temperature on concentration is expected to be approximately logarithmic…which is why people talk about how much change is produced by a doubling of concentration. (For a logarithmic function, the amount of change due to each doubling is a constant.)
Furthermore, going back millions of years, there are past climates that were considerably warmer than our current climate.

Further to George E. Smith (10:23:33) & Leif Svalgaard (12:16:17) who have responded to bill (09:51:23):
I’ve been following the interesting exchange between anna v & bill in the other WUWT thread. An exercise I think would help bill here:
Time-integrate monthly dCO2/dt at varying bandwidth (i.e. 1mo, 2mo, 3mo, 4mo, …). Note particularly what happens at multiples of 12. Consider related insight in conjunction with George’s & Leif’s comments.
Also, in reviewing anna v’s arguments, be careful when inferring-from-context whether she is referring to CO2 or dCO2/dt.
A final suggestion would be to question your own assertions about time-invariant best-lags. To gain related intuition, you might want to try some windowed time-integrated cross-correlation analyses.
I also recommend similar time-integration exercises for Pamela Gray due to the nature of comments appearing at Pamela Gray (06:44:40).
A related reference:
T.F.H. Allen & T.W. Hoekstra (1992). Toward a unified ecology. Columbia University Press, New York.
This book draws attention to the nature of very serious research errors stemming from inattentiveness to the influence of spatiotemporal heterogeneity on parameter estimates across spatiotemporal scale. A study that fails to investigate the influence of summary scale on parameter estimates in the presence of spatiotemporal heterogeneity is at-best incomplete and at-worst severely misleading.

Lets see. The six month lag shown in the plots above, is rate of change of CO2 per year and temperature anomaly per year. Neither have the scale of the effect there, and there is not obvious way to know if the scale of the effect is the same when the absolute temperature is -30C as when it is 30C. We can only guess. There might be a logarithmic dependence, or an exponential one for all we know.
I wonder if one took the measured values in the antarctic of temperatures and CO2 whether the effect of the plots above would be seen? Certainly antarctic CO2 has a smaller amplitude change due to seasonal variations.
My guess: Ice core records come from regions where there is ice, i.e. below 0C where there is no flora, so only the cold ocean bubbling mechanism will dominate for shorterm effects. How much in ppm C02 comes out when going from -30C to -10C? It might still follow temperature, but be too small to count. One would have to wait for the deep ocean rich in CO2 turnover to get an effect.

anna v
I showed some plots of Greenland ice cores on the other thread. You pointed out the CO2 AIRS animations
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/
Greenland is experiencing more or less the same range of changes of CO2 as the rest of the NH but for shorter times. So CO2 from these cores can reflect the temperate zone levels.
When you talk about temperatures of -30C this is not the temperature of the whole globe and vegetation would still be in abundance further south.
Paul Vaughan (12:50:17) :
Time-integrate monthly dCO2/dt at varying bandwidth (i.e. 1mo, 2mo, 3mo, 4mo, …). Note particularly what happens at multiples of 12. Consider related insight in conjunction with George’s & Leif’s comments.
I take it that you have done this and could share you results and conclusions? I would have thought that the accurate record is insufficienltly long to obtain much useful info – but prove me wrong.
I’m not sure what you are saying about leif and george’s comments. There are many ice cores, some have good resolution early on gradually getting worse as shear and compression take their toll. At end of first iceage the granularity is about 150years. Should show up rises in co2 similar to the current

Speaking of CO2 in the oceans; my CO2 expert at Scripps, says that only about 15 of dissolved CO2 is in the from of CO2, and that most appears as either HCO3- or CO3- – ions.
So a question for the Physical Chemists (which excuses me) what part of that mix, of CO2/CO3- -/HCO3- is in equilibrium with 385 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere under the direction of Henry’s Law (and I do mean under equilibrium conditions) recognizing that real world may not be equilibrium.
I’m wondering whether Henry’s Law sets the CO2 gas in solution of whether it sets the total including the ionic species; or something else entirely.
I presume that when the water freezes, that all three species are largely excluded from the ice, but I wonder how much of that must then exit to the atmosphere.
If the wild 18 ppm swing of CO2 in the arctic is biological as in permafrost peat bogs outgassing; why would those sources then take up the CO2 again, and wouldn’t those bogs give off CO2 while in the molten state, whereas the ocean gives up CO2 while freezing.
Enquiring minds want to know.
George

Re: Nick Stokes (16:26:17)
Thank you for these comments (on linked chemical equilibria), which make the picture a whole lot more interesting.
Could you (or anyone else) comment on the role of wind variations (& related surface roughness) in hemispheric, regional, local, & microspatial variations in these equilibria? – and perhaps also comment on how this varies across temperature gradients?
Maybe someone knows of a link to a really good primer?

Leif Svalgaard (18:12:43)
“If the review process is public and transparent, the system cannot be abused.”
The “abuse” will come in the tedious time-consumption – i.e. scientists getting caught hostage by the process. Since each scientist’s time is finite, this will bite into time for innovation.
However, clusters of bright minds will naturally engineer means of balancing cumbersome administrative duties (“red tape”) with research objectives.
Leif Svalgaard (18:12:43) “No balance is needed, nor wanted.”