Meanwhile today while CO2 is increasing, the Antarctic ice cap is also increasing.
Bill Illis writes about it:
Ice sheets formed in Antarctica about 35 million years ago when CO2 was about 1,200 ppm. Ice sheets also formed in Antarctica about 350 to 290 million years ago when CO2 was about 350 ppm. Ice sheets also formed in Antarctica about 450 to 430 million years ago when CO2 was about 4,500 ppm. The more common denominator is when continental drift places Antarctica at the south pole.
Below, Antarctica today.
New data illuminates Antarctic ice cap formation
From a Bristol University Press release issued 13 September 2009
A paper published in Nature
New carbon dioxide data confirm that formation of the Antarctic ice-cap some 33.5 million years ago was due to declining carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A team of scientists from Bristol, Cardiff and Texas A&M universities braved the lions and hyenas of a small East African village to extract microfossils from rocks which have revealed the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere at the time of the formation of the ice-cap.
Geologists have long speculated that the formation of the Antarctic ice-cap was caused by a gradually diminishing natural greenhouse effect. The study’s findings, published in Nature online, confirm that atmospheric CO2 started to decline about 34 million years ago, during the period known to geologists as the Eocene – Oligocene climate transition, and that the ice sheet began to form about 33.5 million years ago when CO2 in the atmosphere reached a tipping point of around 760 parts per million (by volume).
The new findings will add to the debate around rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere as the world’s attention turns to the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen which opens later this year.
Dr Gavin Foster from the University of Bristol and a co-author on the paper said: “By using a rather unique set of samples from Tanzania and a new analytical technique that I developed, we have, for the first time, been able to reconstruct the concentration of CO2 across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary – the time period about 33.5 million years ago when ice sheets first started to grow on Eastern Antarctica. “
Professor Paul Pearson from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who led the mission to the remote East Africa village of Stakishari said: “About 34 million years ago the Earth experienced a mysterious cooling trend. Glaciers and small ice sheets developed in Antarctica, sea levels fell and temperate forests began to displace tropical-type vegetation in many areas.
“The period culminated in the rapid development of a continental-scale ice sheet on Antarctica, which has been there ever since. We therefore set out to establish whether there was a substantial decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as the Antarctic ice sheet began to grow.”
Co-author Dr Bridget Wade from Texas A&M University Department of Geology and Geophysics added: “This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
“Our study is the first to provide a direct link between the establishment of an ice sheet on Antarctica and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and therefore confirms the relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global climate.”
The team mapped large expanses of bush and wilderness and pieced together the underlying local rock formations using occasional outcrops of rocks and stream beds. Eventually they discovered sediments of the right age near a traditional African village called Stakishari. By assembling a drilling rig and extracting hundreds of meters of samples from under the ground they were able to obtain exactly the piece of Earth’s history they had been searching for.
Further information:
The paper:Atmospheric carbon dioxide through the Eocene–Oligocene climate transition. Paul N. Pearson, Gavin L. Foster & Bridget S. Wade. Nature online, Sunday 13th September.
TomP
If you say:
“That one plot undermines all of your other points concerning the existence, reliability and trend of global average temperatures.”
it is clear you have not read all the various references which illustrate the unreliabilty of a global record and that any warming or cooling signal relies on manipulation, lack of data, incorrect data and a flawed premise and can not be relied on to parse global temperatures to fractions of a degree. We are also looking at the blink of an eye in the Worlds history and the figures should be seen against the broader context of warmer and colder periods, such as the LIA, MWP, Roman optimums etc.
In showing the grapoh you are assuming;
a) the figures are right
b) they mean anything anyway
I clearly said ‘I am sure a warming or cooling signal of some sort can be picked up, but that it is accurate enough to parse to fractions of a degree back to 1850 is doubtful…’ In other words it isn’t reliable, and citing one graph that uses the very data and principles that I am complaining about doesn’t negate in the slightest the basic principles which I have taken the trouble to gather together from numerous sources.
Come on TomP you can do much better than that. Read the references in their proper context, otherwise it would appear you haven’t even reached the race course let alone the first hurdle… 🙂
tonyb
“Can I take it that you accept there is a log response to CO2, and hence these increases have been warming the Earth?”
As the Earth warms the ocean releases CO2 into the air.
If man had never used fossil fuel technologies then the amount of CO2 in the air at this global temperature would be precisely the same since the oceans would set it that way.
TonyB,
“In showing the grapoh you are assuming;
a) the figures are right
b) they mean anything anyway”
In showing four separately derived plots of global mean temperatures, from both surface and satellite measurements, I am assuming nothing.
It is the agreement between the plots, both in general and in particular (for instance see how the 1998 El Niño can be quite clearly been seen in each plot) that shows the figures are meaningful and reliable.
For further confirmation, compare one of these four, HadCRUT, to Oerlemans’ independently derived glacier temperature series, to which you apparently have no objection:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/1994/glaciervsinstrumental.png
Are you really claiming that urban heat islands from recent cities built on glaciers is responsible for the temperature rise?
Sandy
Interesting post, which relates to the point I was making in my 16 30 20
The oceans over ride everything. The amount of co2 in the air is very dependent on the warmth of the oceans. The annual flux -without mans impact-is therefore considerable and should show up in peaks and troughs as was recorded pre 1957, not a nice smooth barely increasing line.
tonyb
. transfer
Jeff Green,
“I haven’t asserted that all of the antartic will melt. But then are you asserting that the temperature will not rise in the antartic futher increasing the melt rate.”
Further increasing the melt rate? Are you seriously suggesting that antarctica is melting? Apart from the tiny western peninsular that sticks out into the circumpolar currents, antarctica is actual gaining ice, not melting.
There is no prospect at all of antartica melting while it remains a) covered in ice with an albedo of 0.9 and b) cut off from the circumpolar currents.
I did a quick back of the envelope calculation. If the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth at the equator at midday is approx 1000 wm^-2 and if the south pole at summer is at approx 70 degrees to the ecliptic, then the insolation falling will be 1000*cos70 = 340 wm^-2 approx. Now, if we look at the effect albedo has, compared to before glaciation took place:
Before glaciation say albedo = 0.4. Then retained flux = (1 -0.4)*340 = 205
After glaciation with albedo = 0.9, retained flux = (1 – 0.9) * 340 = 34 wm^-2.
This is a huge difference, 170 wm^-2. How do we achieve that by CO2 forcing alone? Well, according to IPCC, forcing for doubling CO2 = 5.35ln2 = 3.7 wm^-2. Now, how many doublings do you need to get to 170 wm^-2 ?
The answer is given by 170 = 5.35 ln x, where x is the number of doublings. Solving for x we get x = e^32, which is a huge number. In other words there is no amount of CO2 than can acheive the same forcing with ice present as occurred before there was ice.
Jeff Green,
“Business as usual burning of fossil fuels takes us to about 6 degrees centigrade average increase by 2100. IPCC was quite conservative in their models for consensus reasons. 800 to 1000 ppm puts us in the disastrous zone for our climate.”
We’re arguing in circles. If you continue to use computer models as evidence that catastrophic warming will occur in the future then all I can say is that you are choosing to believe in what once people called prophecies. Unless you are prepared to open your mind, there is little I or anyone can say.
Scott Mandia (03:13:49) :
@ur momisugly MartinGAtkins (21:41:11) :
Already caused many problems? Like what?
What extinctions do you directly attribute to AGW?
There hasn’t been any “coral reef destruction”. There was some bleaching after the 98 El Nino but they have now fully recovered. It’s natural, but as the catastrophists had never seen it before they spun it into their usual nonsense. Notice there were no joyful reports of it’s recovery.
Again, there are no credible reports of any damage to coral reefs or any other marine life.
See here for the deceitful practices of new age marine researchers.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6189
Another undefined problem.
Of course if you don’t know why an infestation is accuring you can always blame good old global warming.
Attacks are largely to trees under stress from injury, poor site conditions, fire damage, overcrowding, root disease or old age. However, as beetle populations increase, MPB attacks may involve most large trees in the outbreak area.
Due to pressure by environmentalists many forest are no longer being managed efficiently. This leads to a build up of forest trash that shelters the larvae through the winter.
The pests can be controlled by withdrawal of all funding from universities that host pseudo science courses such as Forest Ecogeography, Fish Physiology, Conservation Biology, Geology of Our Environment and so on. Infact anything with Eco in it’s name. Next social security payments should be withheld from any person who appears in public dressed as a cute animal of any kind, a red Indian, a skeleton with or without a gas mask, a tie dyed t-shirt, juggling, walking on stilts or wearing a beret with a red star on it.
TomP said
“Are you really claiming that urban heat islands from recent cities built on glaciers is responsible for the temperature rise?”
Of course I’m not suggesting anything of the sort, but I am sure a computer model could easily make such a connection 🙂
I am asking you to examine the temperature record history in a more dispassionate manner, whilst querying the meaning of a global temperature whilst putting the current warmish period into a broader historical perspective. Our climate did not begin in 1850 nor indeed with satellites in 1979.
So let us ask ourselves a few questions-
* Has the temperature at a tiny number of specific measuring points increased since 1850? Possibly.
* Do we know the amount of any change of a notional global temperature with scientific accuracy to fractions of a degree? Certainly not.
*Is sufficient notice paid of distortions such as UHI, poor siting, changes of sites, numbers, equipment etc? No
* Is the current warm era unprecedented in human history? Certainly not.
* Should we change the world system because of short term and potentially inaccurate information based on incomplete temperature records, ignore past climatic trends and link everything to a tiny rise in human generated emissions overshadowed by natural emissions and water vapour? No
*Do we know anything like as much as we think we do about climate. No.
*Is that any excuse to be wateful and reckless in our use of resources? No.
*Is there a practical alternative to burning fossil fuels in order to maintain our own standard of living whilst using carbon as the means of dragging the third world out of poverty, sickness and hunger? Unfortunately not yet.
As regards your separate comments about glaciers, these are a proxy-they do not give us precise figures. For those interested, this is a draft of the report TomP refers to, I do not have access to the paid version.
http://home.badc.rl.ac.uk/mjuckes/mitrie_files/docs/mitrie_glaciers.pdf
The following link comments on the above data;
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V8/N11/EDIT.php
This is an extract from 1868 concerning a British expedition to Greenland, a land which was then an almost unknown quantity but whose coast Scoresby junior had found to be clear of ice in 1820, had subsequently iced up again, then found by Captain Graah in 1828 to be clear again. Apparently conditions had changed once more;
“We lived for the greater portion of a whole summer at Jakohshavn, a little Danish post, 69° 13′ n., close to which is the great Jakohshavn ice-fjord, which annually pours an immense quantity of icebergs into Disco Bay. In early times this inlet was quite open for boats ; and Nunatak (a word meaning a ” land surrounded by ice “) was once an Eskimo settlement. There is (or was in 1867 ) an old man (Manyus) living at Jakohshavn whose grandfather was born there. The Tessi-usak, an inlet of Jakohshavn ice-fjord, could then be entered by boats. Now-a-days Jakohshavn ice-fjord is so choked up by bergs that it is impossible to go up in boats, and such a thing is never thought of. The Tessiusak must be reached by a laborious journey
over land ; and Nunatak is now only an island surrounded by the in-land ice, at a distance — a place where no man lives, or has, in the memory of any one now living, reached.
Both along its shore and that of the main fjord are numerous remains of dwellings long unin-habitable, owing to it being now impossible to gain access to them by sea. The inland ice is now encroaching on the land. At one time it seems to have covered many portions of the country now bare. In a few places glaciers have disappeared.”
This link deals with glaciers in Roman Times.
http://archiv.ethlife.ethz.ch/e/articles/sciencelife/gruenealpen.html
The relative lack of glaciers enabled the Romans to traverse high level routes to quell rebellions in various parts of their empire.
So the glacier report may be broadly true-after all it covers the period we know as the LIA. However there were undoubtedly periods of warming in this period, and prior to that throughout our history. Glaciers retreat and advance accordingly.
You are taking a very short term view and relying on concepts (global temperatures) and an accuracy (global records to 1850) that are not as clear cut as you want to believe. Within my previous post I cited the changing number of weather stations and two reports from those who dispute the notion of a global temperature. No doubt you have read these and have already asked E M Smith for access to his work on GISS. Would you refute his findings?
Tonyb.
TonyB,
Does not the agreement to a fraction of a degree between the temperature plots, from the ground and independently determined from satellite, show that the figures are meaningful and reliable?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/plot/gistemp/plot/uah
If not, please give an alternative explanation as to why the plots and the glacially derived record agree to such precision, but despite this all duplicate the same errors.
Choice of ground stations (satellite coverage is near global), UHI (satellites measure the troposphere), and instrumental error (are microwave sensors and thermometers all conspiring against us?) don’t seem to be valid explanations, though.
Co-author Dr Bridget Wade from Texas A&M University Department of Geology and Geophysics added: “This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
“Our study is the first to provide a direct link between the establishment of an ice sheet on Antarctica and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and therefore confirms the relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global climate.”
NO, not at all: a teleconnection is NOT a causal relationship and from the abstract, there is nothing suggesting causality.
Sandy says:
So, if your view was correct, then the oceans should be getting more basic as CO2 is liberated from them. And yet, they are actually getting more acidic, demonstrating that they are absorbing more CO2. That the oceans and biosphere are absorbing CO2 also is a consequence of the observation that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are rising at about half the rate that they would be if all of the CO2 from burning fossil fuels remained in the atmosphere. (And, by the way, where do you think the CO2 that we produce is going if it is CO2 from the oceans that is causing the rise?)
Some other questions for you: Why is it that CO2 levels are higher than they have been over the last 750,000 years…Is it just a coincidence?
Also, if we look at the ice age – interglacial cycles, it appears that each degree C of global temperature rise is associated with the release of at most ~20ppm of CO2…and it appears that there is a significant lag time before this happens. So, how can less than 1 C of warming has produced more than 100ppm of CO2 rise and has done so very rapidly?
P Wilson: I have no idea what you are talking about anymore. I suggest that you take your ideas up with someone like Roy Spencer who is actually measuring the amount of radiation being emitted by the Earth. Maybe he will have the patience to disabuse you of your confusions. I frankly don’t.
Again Joel, thnks for the reasoned reply. Lets not get confused by radiation emitted from the earth, which is negligible and radiation reflected from the earth, which isn’t so negligible. Two different things. Maybe that is the confusion you’re referring to.
Looking through some of your other posts, which I had the chance to today, you say that it is possible to double c02 anthropogenically. At 3%, it means that 97 c02 is natural from perspiration and decay. Given that a warming of oceans by .1C alone puts 200gt of c02 into that atmosphere, which is 26 times that of humans, it is difficult to justify that we could even begin to compete with this. Efectively to double c02 would require us to increase our output by several thousands of percent, which is, I’m sure you will agree, is a physical impossibility even over a long term period.
Oceans have a ph of 8.1 which is alkaline. Oceans have been absorbing huge amounts of c02 for billions of years. During the dinosaur period, five times as much as today. They rapidly stabilize due to equilibrium with calcium carbonate, and living cells control their own internal ph.
so I put it to you: On the one hand, we’re putting so much c02 into the air that its accumulating at an unprecedented rate. On the other, oceans are taking up c02 so well that its acidifying the oceans. These are contradictory positions, and neither are verified.
It seems to me that the acid in the oceans is invoked as an alternative when the c02 global warming scare blows up in activists faces.
Here’s a balanced view of oceanic biology
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/acid.htm
addendum. scienific analysis, not view
In otherwords, for sake of simplification, at a ph of 8.1, there is no measured acidification of the oceans
Indiana Bones (15:01:59) :
“I am continually at a loss as to why people here and elsewhere insist on using “wikipedia” as a source for hard facts. How does a hearsay, ad hoc, opinion based encyclopedia qualify as a source of empirical data?
Or am I alone in this concern?”
You are not alone. With their article making the facile statement that “if” all the ice melted the sea would rise by whatever their figure was, at a time when the Antarctic ice (volume, extent) is actually rising rather gives their position away.
More importantly, if the build-up of ice on Antarctica is increasing, what horrors can we expect from the consequent decline in sea levels. Just think of all that extra fuel being burned as people travel further and further to get to their seaside holidays!
The basic conclusion of this report is clearly false. The CO2 connection cannot be assumed just because of the correlation and no clear evidence of causality is shown.
There is good evidence that changes to levels of CO2 follow changes in temperature, rather than cause them. This means that, at best, CO2 can only have a very weak influence on climate. This is evidenced by the last decade of slightly declining temperatures while CO2 continued to grow.
Tom P
I have given you twenty or so links and quoted studies that illustrate that todays circumstances are nothing unusual. I have already agreed that we may possibly be warming since 1850 as part of a natural cycle (which is often repeated). Indeed, as we emerge from the LIA it would be surprising (and alarming) if we were not warming, but we do not have precise enough information to apportion the precise amount of warming from 1850, especially as a global figure.
There were far too few stations to achieve this as a proper spatial spread and as Callendar observed when writing his 1938 thesis, many of the old stations had faulty instruments or were not consistently properly read. Add in the problems of station movement, instruments, Uhi etc and the local-let alone the global-record is far from perfect.
Forgive me, but if you are using the same stations -however flawed their data may be-you will end up with similar answers. That does not prove they are of value as a scientifcally accurate measure of the last 150 years.
Both the papers cited explain in great detail why the GT is an interesting concept but which in reality has little practical mreaning. It is difficuilt to add anything further to that.
I would stress we need to see things in a much broader historic context than purely playing with figures from 1850 or 1979 that are then being used to draw vitally important conclusions in assigning an unproven catastrophic cause and effect linkage to a minor trace gas that is overwhelmed by its natural counterpart and water vapour.
Have you read any of the studies I linked to? I even included a Hansen one-how many here do that 🙂
best regards
tonyb
TonyB,
You are again studiously ignoring the corroborating evidence from global satellite data in your repetitive deliberations, and such data has none of the issues you list such as station location, movement, and UHI.
Until you address the agreement of the actual data I have presented, from land stations, satellites and glaciers, rather than repeat your tired litany of why all the data must be wrong, if not meaningless, you are willfully embracing ignorance rather than the knowledge that is clearly available.
“”” Joel Shore (18:29:27) :
P Wilson: Are you aware that there are people (including Roy Spencer) measuring the earth’s radiation budget by satellite ( http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/ceres_aqua.html ). I am sure that they will be fascinated by your theory that the heat radiated by the earth back out into space is only 1-3% of the incoming solar energy! “”
Say Joel; Good luck there; maybe Art Bell can help you with this project !
George
P Wilson says:
No, that is not the confusion. To say that radiation emitted by the earth is negligible is just plain wrong. Here is diagram showing the various energy transfers in the climate system: http://climateknowledge.org/figures/WuGblog_figures/RBRWuG0086_Trenberth_Radiative_Balance_BAMS_2008.GIF ; I imagine not all of these numbers have been measured extremely precisely but they have been measured at least approximately. If the earth were as out of radiative balance as you are imagining, the consequences would be huge in terms of the heating that would occur. (If I get the time, maybe I could make some order-of-magnitude estimates.)
(1) That 3% number is really quite deceiving. There are large exchange processes constantly occurring between the atmosphere and the oceans and atmosphere and biosphere but they are just exchanging essentially the same carbon back and forth. What we are doing is taking a store of carbon that has long been locked away from the atmosphere and rapidly liberating it into the atmosphere.
(2) I have no idea where your estimate of how much CO2 the oceans would release if warmed by 0.1 C comes from.
(3) CO2 is currently increasing in the atmosphere by ~2ppm / yr (and would be about double that if all of our emissions remained there). Hence, at that rate, a doubling from the pre-industrial baseline of 280ppm to 560ppm (and being at about 385ppm now) will occur in by around the end of the century. In reality, however, the rate of growth of CO2 levels in the atmosphere has been increasing with time as our emissions have increased, so it will likely happen sooner.
They are not contradictory and they can be verified. About half of what we put into the air remains there and the other half ends up in either the biosphere or the oceans (with the ocean fraction being larger, as I recall).
P Wilson: One more thing that I really should have mentioned since you brought it up before, you say, “Things only give off as much heat as their temperature, so solid matter doesn’t give off any radiation.” I recommend that you do the calculation. Put the average surface temperature of the earth into the Stefan-Boltzmann Eqn and calculate how much blackbody radiation it should emit and compare that to the amount of radiation we receive from the sun. What you will find is that the earth’s surface is actually emitting considerably MORE radiation than it is receiving. The solution to this conundrum is, of course, that because of the greenhouse gases not all of the radiation it emits escapes from the atmosphere, so some ends up coming back to the Earth. Another way of looking at it is that at the altitude where the radiation first does have a good chance of escaping, the average temperature is about 33 K colder than it is at the Earth’s surface.
Tom P said:
“Until you address the agreement of the actual data I have presented, from land stations, satellites and glaciers, rather than repeat your tired litany of why all the data must be wrong, if not meaningless, you are willfully embracing ignorance rather than the knowledge that is clearly available.”
If data is wrong, inaccurate, misleading, limited or pointless, it is hardly a tired litany to point that out. If a global temperature is a false concept then it’s a false concept whether it comes from a satellite or twenty stations.
Presumably you believe in the infallibility and accuracy of global satellitte sea level data as well, despite its inherent inaccuracies and problems?
I have cited numerous links which you have self evidently not read, otherwise you would have a much better idea of where I am coming from. Twenty links covering a vast range of information is hardly being repetitive, is it? Again I would ask you to think in a broader historic context than citing figures from 1979 that you appear to be increasingly fixated on.
Our exchange of information seems one sided, with you sniping at the information I provide whilst wilfully ignoring the points I make.
I posed and answered 10 questions in my 6 11 06, so perhaps you will tell ME what your answers are. Then I can see where you are coming from.
tonyb
Joel Shore (13:49:34) :
at normal temperatures, the equation doesn’t work and overestimates by ten times so I quote:
“Here’s the problem with the Stephan-Boltzmann constant: Satellite measurements indicate that the sun’s energy approaching the earth is 1366 watts per square meter. The amount reflected away is said to be 26%. The amount absorbed into the atmosphere is said to be 16%. (See NASA chart). That’s 1366 minus 26% minus 16% = 792 W/m2. That’s how much radiation would fall on a black asphalt surface at the equator at noon. The Stephan-Boltzmann constant indicates that in a dark basement, a concrete wall at 59°F (the global average temperature) would emit 390 W/m2. That’s 49% as much radiation emitted from a dark, cold basement as falls on a black surface at the equator. It isn’t happening. shows 459 watts per square meter being given off at room temperature of 27°C. That’s almost five 100 watt bulbs from half of a table top. Night vision equipment shows it isn’t happening.”
so the equation doesn’t represent nature in this case. If it did, the water would never freeze as radiation would interfere with the freezing process.
Further
“Outdoors, the differences are even more extreme, because there are no opposite walls. Shade on a hot day shows that there is a lot of difference between areas radiated by the sun and those that are not. The sun’s energy will typically be two or three times the amount as the black body radiation on the earth’s surface as indicated by the Stephan-Boltzmann constant. This means that there should be a very significant differential due to black body radiation apart from the sun’s energy. If so, a thermometer in the shade would not give an accurate measurement of air temperature. But the thermometer is considered to be equilibrated with the air temerature. Almost a complete absence of black body radiation would be required to get such an equilibration with air temperature in the shade.
In other words, if normal temperature matter were really giving off a significant amount of infrared radiation, as the Stephan-Boltzmann constant indicates, a thermometer in the shade would not show a reliable temperature, because radiation would be altering its temperature.”
So the equation works for incandescent material, such as the sun, but not for normal temperature matter.
I don’t see how the figure of 3% is deceiving. According to the US department of energy, 770GT’s of c02 was natural, whilst humans added 23GT’s during the 90’s, and the ratio’s haven’t changed today.
its important to remember that most heat leaves the earth through conduction, convection, and not through Longwave radiation, so the Boltman constant cannot be applied to this as it gives absurd results. Even at warm summer temperatures, of 30C, there is very little radiation picked up by night vision eqiupment. If it did, bnearly everything would show white light.
Its also vital to remember that c02 circulates beetween oceans and air and biomass, and that oceans contains 38,000GT of carbon dioxide, so are a huge source and a huge sink, depending on SST’s. Perhaps this explains why c02 is recorded in even the recent past as being more considerable than today, such as from the period 1810, which are valid measurements across the northern hemisphere and even India – at odds with ice core measurements of course, although ice core measurements show trends and not exact records of average global c02