Physicist Luboš Motl of The Reference Frame demonstrates how easy it is to show that there is: No statistically significant warming since 1995
First, since it wasn’t in his original post, here is the UAH data plotted:
By: Luboš Motl
Because there has been some confusion – and maybe deliberate confusion – among some (alarmist) commenters about the non-existence of a statistically significant warming trend since 1995, i.e. in the last fifteen years, let me dedicate a full article to this issue.
I will use the UAH temperatures whose final 2009 figures are de facto known by now (with a sufficient accuracy) because UAH publishes the daily temperatures, too:
Mathematica can calculate the confidence intervals for the slope (warming trend) by concise commands. But I will calculate the standard error of the slope manually.
x = Table[i, {i, 1995, 2009}]
y = {0.11, 0.02, 0.05, 0.51, 0.04, 0.04, 0.2, 0.31, 0.28, 0.19, 0.34, 0.26, 0.28, 0.05, 0.26};
data = Transpose[{x, y}]
(* *)
n = 15
xAV = Total[x]/n
yAV = Total[y]/n
xmav = x - xAV;
ymav = y - yAV;
lmf = LinearModelFit[data, xvar, xvar];
Normal[lmf]
(* *)
(* http://stattrek.com/AP-Statistics-4/Estimate-Slope.aspx?Tutorial=AP *)
;slopeError = Sqrt[Total[ymav^2]/(n - 2)]/Sqrt[Total[xmav^2]]
The UAH 1995-2009 slope was calculated to be 0.95 °C per century. And the standard deviation of this figure, calculated via the standard formula on this page, is 0.88 °C/century. So this suggests that the positivity of the slope is just a 1-sigma result – a noise. Can we be more rigorous about it? You bet.
Mathematica actually has compact functions that can tell you the confidence intervals for the slope:
lmf = LinearModelFit[data, xvar, xvar, ConfidenceLevel -> .95]; lmf["ParameterConfidenceIntervals"]
The 99% confidence interval is (-1.59, +3.49) in °C/century. Similarly, the 95% confidence interval for the slope is (-0.87, 2.8) in °C/century. On the other hand, the 90% confidence interval is (-0.54, 2.44) in °C/century. All these intervals contain both negative and positive numbers. No conclusion about the slope can be made on either 99%, 95%, and not even 90% confidence level.
Only the 72% confidence interval for the slope touches zero. It means that the probability that the underlying slope is negative equals 1/2 of the rest, i.e. a substantial 14%.
We can only say that it is “somewhat more likely than not” that the underlying trend in 1995-2009 was a warming trend rather than a cooling trend. Saying that the warming since 1995 was “very likely” is already way too ambitious a goal that the data don’t support.
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2nd oops — insert “wrong” after “their judgments that our side is “
RACookPE1978 (22:07:27) :
When your AGW propaganda is going to destroy the world’s economy for ….. nothing? When tens of millions have already been killed by false enviro theories, you consider energy and food and power and transporation for the world’s deperate poor a “waste of time” ??? I pity your lack of morals.
You have evidence for yor comments that you would care to share?
destroy the world’s economy ???
tens of millions have already been killed by false enviro theories???
Again: Give me specific proof of any of your generic (general) statements. I’m working 80+ hour weeks trying to improve real power plant efficiencies to deliver real power to realpeople so real people don’t freeze in the dark and starve.
I would be interested in this (seriously!) as I thought the only significant improvement used in power generation was CCGTs.
I assume you have proof you can offer for your “there is no (insignificant) AGW statements?
I … care about your biased “faith” in … “scientists” who have produced no evidence in the past – nor can they produce any evidence now – that supports any of your conclusions.
So you say the scientists are all part of a massive conspiracy to do (something?). Again I challenge you to produce you evidence.
Remember you may be asked to produce this in court should one of these scientists you have defamed go in that direction.
savethesharks (22:10:46) :
…Ahhh…the climate models. …
What is your agenda, kdkd???
Is AGW your personal religion, and is that why you feel you need to defend it?
Anyways….the burden of proof is on YOU. You espouse a fantastic theory, then you have to prove it.
STS The same can be said of your stance as a AGW denier (you certainly are not a skeptic).
If I say that the temperature is increasing by 10C per decadeyou have denied yourselves (and me) the tools to prove that the statement is wrong/right:
Ice cap -its cyclical
Glaciers – it’s cyclical and cherry picked
GISS CRU HADCRUT GHCN etc temps – they are invalid
Tree rings – They are invalid, cherry picked, and conlcusion drawn up by fraudsters (not my words!!)
Ice-off days – natural cycles
The weather – well it’s just weather not climate.
Sea levels – invalid
Sea temperatures – invalid
etc.
Ah! you say – there is the satellite record since 1997. However you conveniently forget that the temperatures are derived from mathematicaql models. So that is gone to skepticism too.
Now prove to me that there is no 10C or 0.1C per decade warming.
By your view of all climate scientist who suggest that AGW is possible i.e. they are liars with an agenda and all part of some world domination conspiracy. The skeptical scientists are, in your view whiter than white.
RACookPE1978 (22:17:51) :
With low water vapor, the CO2 concentration is higher, and thus the theoretical effect of 0.003 some-odd percent of CO2 in the air is expected to be higher than in the mid-latitudes, where water vapor is even higher a percent of total greenhouse gases.
CO2 concentration of dry ir is constant over the globe:
http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/9698/manyco219992001.jpg
but the ONLY parts of the Arctic that indicate rising temperatures are those parts of the former USSR which we now find (through the Soviet Union’s formal complaints to the IPCC and GISS and Hadcrut offices,
I think you may find that the complaints had nothing to do with the Russian Met office, byt were from a right wing “think tank”
… I challenge you to show me why your vaunted (theoretical hand-waving about ice melting by politicians who failed divinity school) yielded HIGHER ice regions in 2008 and 2009 than 2007.
I beleive that no one beleives 2007 to be a “normal” year It was an outlier on a steady downward trend
If low ice is to create a positive feedback, somebody forgot to tell nature. Because the ice coverage in April and May 2009 set all-time highs for coverage. (When using the same instruments form the same platform – do you want me to go into how previous ice calculations weren’t based on same data elements?
Oh dear – cherry picking or what!!!!!!!!!
From JAXA site the AMSRE record
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/6582/amsreseaiceextent.png
If cherry picking is now valid then I would chose 13th November and 12th December and 23rd December as dates to prove that Ice coverage is less than any other year (including 2007) in the AMSRE record!!!!!!!
Chosing anything but min ice extent NH and max ice extent SH is very dubious. Arctic ice maximum is limited by being unable to freeze land and Antarctic ice mininimum is limited by not being able to unfreeze land.
Smokey says:
Complete and pernicious nonsense. That chart that you show compares apples-to-oranges. While the exchange between the atmosphere and the upper ocean is relatively fast, that is not what controls the decay of most of an amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere (from a source outside the biosphere / atmosphere / upper oceans). Instead, the major rate-limiting step is the transfer of that excess CO2 into the deeper ocean. As a result of this, decay of an excess amount of CO2 is highly non-exponential, which means that it can’t be properly modeled as one single decay time (and, in fact, the carbon cycle models that the IPCC considers don’t contain only a single decay time, despite what Lawrence Solomon says). 100 years is a reasonable middle-of-the-road estimate if one is forced to give a single time. But the fact is that such a number will underestimate the decay in excess CO2 at short times and considerably overestimates the decay at long times. See here for a discussion of the actual science http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-long-will-global-warming-last/ or read Archer’s book “The Long Thaw” or any introductory climate book, such as L.D. Danny Harvey’s “Global Warming: The Hard Science” for details.
It’s about time youse guys following this blog who have significant statistical and climate science skills came up with a “correct” or “best” way to analyse the available global temperature record. Hey, then you could build a consensus (on the way that the science *should* be done). Btw, you can have several “best” ways, as long as the differences between them are clearly explained and justified.
I have to count myself out – on the stats, I would have been up to it forty or so years ago, but now…. As to climate science, I’m still using seaweed (I’m a believer in the notion that while climate and weather are different, the former has some implications for the latter – and probably vice-versa given the nature of the climate system – a complex non-deterministic system if ever there was one).
tfp formerly bill (10:54:18) :
“Again: Give me specific proof of any of your generic (general) statements. I’m working 80+ hour weeks trying to improve real power plant efficiencies to deliver real power to real people so real people don’t freeze in the dark and starve.
I would be interested in this (seriously!) as I thought the only significant improvement used in power generation was CCGTs.”
—…—…—
Combined cycle plants are good: clean coal and coal gasification with secondary heat recovery is even better because you recover more of the heat form tars and residue than you can in conventional coal burners: but that would involve burning “evil” coal and so the enviro’s prohibited building the plant we designed a few years ago.
Rewiring a generator can raise its output 1.5 – 2% On a 1200 Meg nuclear or fossil plant, that a lot of new “free” energy that is available: more than an entire wind farm, for example. And the output is available 92 (service factor) percent of the time, vice a wind farm’s average out of 21% to 23% availability. Changing transformers can get 1/2 of 1 percent efficiency improvements. Too often though, the “evil” trace PCBs prevent transformer replacement – again, we could improve efficiency, but enviro extremism prevents it.
Changing blade design can add 3-4 percent gains. (It’s more expensive, but the utilities don’t get money for improving efficiency (in fact they have to PAY to improve efficiency and pay a LOT for the new enviro reviews and paperwork), but only the enviro’s get green money for their projects and for delaying and preventing new energy projects.
Changing pipes in a cooling system, changing and cleaning oil and steam heat exchangers, changing gland seals or steam reducers and steam traps? Fixing insulation can help. (But that’s illegal too in many areas because of disposal costs. Again, enviro rules prevent real improvements.)
Replacing burners and heat treatment ovens in a aluminum forge plant. But treating that Aluminum (or steel) in China or India (at the UN IPCC’s leader’s steel mills and refineries, for example) requires them to use older, less effective burners and very, very dirty life-threatening emissions. Guess the enviro’s don’t mind killing Chinese coal miners – at a average rate of 6 per day. 365 days a year.
Changing fuel and gas mixes can be very effective. Fixing simple leaks? – But again, that costs money that is wasted on enviro research and “green projects” in universities. Did I mention that the enviro’s are in it for THEIR money?
Solar? Only useful output in spring and fall of 6 hours per day. $-1/2 per day in winter – IF the sun is shining. If you have clouds/fog/snow/rain/drizzle? You get nothing from your millions of wasted money but clouds/fog/snow/rain/drizzle for the farmers. (Which isn’t bad of course, but they can’t farm because you took their flat land for the solar collectors, and few things can grow under the shade of a solar collector.
It’s better in the summer (North hemisphere point of view): some solar collectors can actually get almost 7 hours of productive power a day. The rest of the time you need a regular plant. Again, nothing if there is clouds, rain, fog.
So you end up with a muddy parking lot full of dead plants nder your solar collectors. Or you can pave the farmland with rocks and asphalt. I’ve seen that many times as well. At least under a wind farm the cows can live in the sunshine-fed grass, and they don’t mind the noise and dead birds..
—
Yes, we are told that CO2 levels are constant worldwide – at least factoring in the seasonal up and down change in the hemispheres as plants grow in the spring and summer, then die off and release CO2 in the fall and winter. (But I though we were told by the IPCC that CO2 has a hundred year half life, so how come it really changes significantly every six months? Funny, the half life experiments “I” ran never behaved that way when “I” ran them….)
But in the Artic, lower water vapor plus a constant CO2 measn the relative perrcents of CO2 in the total water vaopr-dominated gas mix rise. Therefore, the mid-troposphere atmosphere in the Arctic “should be” higher earlier than it will be elsewhere in the planet according to AGW theory since the relative concentration of CO2 is higher there.
But it isn’t. And ground level temperatures have been steady since they began measuring them in the mid-70’s.
As to the CO2 breathing in an annual cycle.
http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/9698/manyco219992001.jpg
1. the maximum breath is taken in the north. The further south you go the less the dip. Only the south pole station shows a southern dip 6 months anti-phase to the NH
2. It is not the dissolutuion in the ocean as this would be greater in winter not summer as is shown in my plot
3. Sary Taukum is as far from sea as is possible and shows a similar dip although the fall is slower and the rise faster than Pt Barrow.
4. It is not plant growth as the autumn die back in winter would be slow and unlikely to complete before the freeze.
Is it plant respiration O2 to CO2 at night CO2 to Growth during daylight? In polar region long nights=high CO2
Is it summer rain absorbing CO2 (snow will not absorb as much(??))
What is obvious is that the amount of CO2 absorbed during June to August is, as near as can be eyeballed, returned in August to January.
There is an overall effect on atmospheric CO2 of Zero over the 8 months from June to January. I.e. there is no effect on the half life in terms of ppm.
All the dip shows that there is some mechanism that could remove 12 years of CO2 increase in a matter of 3 months (if you could stop it being released again!!!!
————
I will ignore your jaundiced view of environmental protection, a rather essential part of life, which is a sad reflection on your supposed care for humanity.
Smokey says the glaciers can be cherry picked. This is true, but there are three problems with this as applied to the key data sets of the World Glacier Monitoring Service.
1) Most of the long term glaciers in the mass balance data set were selected during the IGY in the late 1950’s. Not cherry picked after climate change.
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb10/sum07.html
2) The terminus retreat records from places such as the North Cascades, Switzerland, Austria and Norway were begun long before we could have thought to cherry pick them. In the North Cascades all 47 glaciers we examine were retreating in 2009, but when we began in 1984 only 32 were
http://www.nichols.edu/departments/Glacier/Bill.htm
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/hinman-glacier-disappers/
In Switzerland of course 2003 was the first year with no glacier advancing in the century, these were not cherry picked.
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/messnetz/lengthvariation.html
3) Glacier termini respond to longer term climate change, temperature is not all that matters and depending on their size their is a lag. However the smaller glaciers such as in the Alps or North Cascades follow the temperature trends very nicely, indicating they do reflect temperature note the swiss record linked before. This is why they are used as a climate indicator, they do not need an urban heat island adjustment either.
mspelto:
Despite the denial, here is a good lesson on how the alarmist crowd cherry picks glaciers. Note that mspelto carefully selected 2003 — implying that all glacier advances have stopped [“in the century” – which is only over the past 9 years].
Why try to make a natural event into an alarming-sounding crisis? Looking at mspelto’s Swiss link, the cyclic rise and fall of glaciers as a function of warming from the LIA and changes in precipitation at higher altitudes is evident.
And picking 2003 as an indicative year is surely cherry-picking. Why? Because 2008, for example, had five advancing glaciers: click. Maybe glaciers are beginning to advance again, no?
You can go to any year in that link and count the advancing glaciers [note that many glaciers are not monitored]. Also keep in mind that Switzerland is a very small country. Most of the planet’s glaciers are on the Antarctic continent, which has been cooling for the past fifty years.
When the warmists come up with empirical evidence connecting atmospheric CO2 with glacier retreat, I will sit up straight and pay attention. Until then, pictures of retreating glaciers are propaganda, just like pictures of polar bears.
We’re setting records for cold but the Temp Anomaly is up 0.5C?
Am I missing something?
AMS November of 1980 Says:
“Evidence has been presented and discussed to show a cooling trend over the Northern Hemisphere since around 1940, amounting to over 0.5°C, due primarily to cooling at mid- and high latitudes – Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society – November 1980”
So North America has now come back .5C. Hey, were right back where we started.
To address Rachel Carson “legacy” of death:
See:
Rachel Carson’s Ecological Genocide By: Lisa Makson
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, July 31, 2003
A pandemic is slaughtering millions, mostly children and pregnant women — one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually; and over 100 million people since 1972 –but there are no protestors clogging the streets or media stories about this tragedy. These deaths can be laid at the doorstep of author Rachel’s Carson. Her1962 bestselling book Silent Spring detailed the alleged “dangers” of the pesticide DDT, which had practically eliminated malaria. Within ten years, the environmentalist movement had convinced the powers that be to outlaw DDT. Denied the use of this cheap, safe and effective pesticide, millions of people — mostly poor Africans — have died due to the environmentalist dogma propounded by Carson’s book. Her coterie of admirers at the U.N. and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund have managed to bring malaria and typhus back to sub-Saharan Africa with a vengeance.”
—
Carson = 100 million dead worldwide. Her facts were wrong by the way. The EPA ruling against DDT (in the US) was a political decision, by a politician who subsequently provided for, was promoted by, and was funded by the environmental groups he ruled in favor of. Against the prevaling science and the scientific data – then as now, the enviro groupthink does not permit facts to get in the way of their agenda.
Mao = 63 Chinese killed
Stalin = 23 million killed
Leaves the rest of the world’s evil socialists/communists rulers far behind.
To show that glaciers are retreating due to global warming – you must show that the increase in temperature of 1/2 of one degree since 1970 caused the retreat: That is, how many million tons of ice are melted in a glacier by a 1/2 degree rise in temperature, if the average temperature of the ice at that elevation is xxx degrees?
It is the AGW crowd who is using localized glacier retreat to “prove” there is global warming everywhere … But they have not ever established that the only temperature change that has actually happened is enough to cause the effect we are supposedly seeing.
At no location anywhere have temp’s gone higher than 1/2 of one degree. The glacier in Europe that are retreating are exposing building, icemen, trees, and grassy araes that -by definition! – have been exposed before to the air.
So why should we believe that “man-caused” global warming did not happen before at even higher temperatures?
Joel Shore (11:09:13):
Wrong again, but what’s new about that?
Here’s Prof Freeman Dyson, referring to the Keeling Mauna Loa chart and explaining exactly why a century-long CO2 residence time assumption is wrong:
As always, the question comes down to who we should believe. In this case, is it Prof Freeman Dyson? Or Joel Shore?
There are other papers showing that a relatively short residence time for CO2 means a low climate sensitivity number, which in turn means there is nothing alarming about an increase in atmospheric CO2. Its climatic effects are so insignificant that any changes in CO2 can be safely disregarded — as planet Earth is clearly showing us.
Finally, enough of the endless realclimate promotions. [Link to a book through Amazon if it’s supposedly that great.] I understand that realclimate needs all the help it can get. The problem is that the people running realclimate are the same crooked clique revealed by the CRU emails, and like their petty tyrant pals at Wikipedia, they heavily censor scientifically skeptical comments debunking CO2=AGW — and they do it on government [taxpayer-paid] time. How does RC’s constant censorship of opposing views fit in with the 1st Amendment? Or is the Constitution just too old timey for these rent-seeking scientists on the grant gravy train?
Why do alarmist sites censor skeptical comments? Because in a free marketplace of ideas, like WUWT, their repeatedly falsified conjectures – like their preposterous, evidence-challenged belief that a very minor trace gas controls the entire Earth’s climate – are routinely destroyed in a free debate. Joel Shore couldn’t ever get a comment posted at realclimate, if the tables were turned and he was a skeptic. Here, he is free to post. [But Joel isn’t getting any converts, so the marketplace of ideas is obviously favoring the skeptics’ reasoning; people regularly comment that when they looked closely into the AGW claims, they’ve ended up accepting the scientific skeptics’ arguments.]
So enough of the unmerited free promotion of the odious realclimate crew. Until they consistently allow opposing views – and put WUWT on their blogroll, like Anthony does for them – they lack credibility.
Joel Shore (11:09:13) :
As a result of this, decay of an excess amount of CO2 is highly non-exponential, which means that it can’t be properly modeled as one single decay time (and, in fact, the carbon cycle models that the IPCC considers don’t contain only a single decay time, despite what Lawrence Solomon says). 100 years is a reasonable middle-of-the-road estimate if one is forced to give a single time. But the fact is that such a number will underestimate the decay in excess CO2 at short times and considerably overestimates the decay at long times.
—————————–
Since every carbon atom on the planet has most likely been in the atmosphere at some point, why don’t you propose a decay time in the billions of years Joel ??
What counts for alleged AGW, is the decay time above 280 ppm – you know, that legendary number when the climate was perfect. Young politicians reveling in their paradise of swimming in the sea in summer, auburn and red autumn/fall leaves dropping during the scheduled week, and snowball fights in winter.
So what’s that number Joel, besides single digit years ??
Any decay time below that idyllic number is a veritable “Russian nested doll” set of strawmen as it relates to purported AGW, and the people who imply otherwise are disingenuous snips.
The math here is no different from the pharmacokinetics of human therapeutics that have multi-phasic clearance. The administered dose is based primarily on the short half-life, to get the target therapeutic levels. The residual longer half-lives of lower drug concentrations, while noted and quantified, play a small part in the choice of dose (in life or death decisions sometimes).
Smokey (18:47:26) :
“As always, the question comes down to who we should believe. In this case, is it Prof Freeman Dyson?”
Actually, as Dyson contradicts himself in a clarification of this article, the question is which of his statements should we take to be correct.
In the original article your bolded text is critical. Dyson writes:
“This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years.”
He writes in response to Professor May who questions Dyson on this point:
“My residence time is the time that an average carbon dioxide molecule stays in the atmosphere before being absorbed by a plant. He is talking about residence with replacement. His residence time [of 100 years] is the average time that a carbon dioxide molecule and its replacements stay in the atmosphere when, as usually happens, a molecule that is absorbed is replaced by another molecule emitted from another plant.”
See: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21882
But Dyson’s residence time as he originally stated was the “average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released” not just the capture time. He has contradicted himself.
In any event, the residence time Dyson is talking about is not the residence time of CO2 at present, but a hypothetical time “if we replaced all plants by carbon-eaters which do not reemit the carbon dioxide that they absorb.” Such plants do not yet exist.
The currently applicable 100-year residence time that “measures the rate at which the total amount would diminish if we stopped burning fossil fuels” is not disputed by Dyson.
You have completely misunderstood Dyson’s argument, if you read it at all in the first place.
Tom P,
Your conclusions are questionable: “Dyson is talking about is not the residence time of CO2 at present, but a hypothetical time ‘if we replaced all plants by carbon-eaters which do not reemit the carbon dioxide that they absorb.’ Such plants do not yet exist.” A 2,000 year old redwood tree or bristlecone pine are carbon eaters that for all practical purposes do not re-emit the CO2 they absorb, and carbon rich organisms that fall to the ocean floor are sequestered. And there are numerous similar examples.
Making a major issue out of Lord May’s quibble while glossing over Prof Dyson’s reply avoids what Dyson clearly stated:
Not only is Lord May wrong, but he failed to explain how the UN/IPCC arrived at its politically motivated assumption that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for a century on average. The South Pacific above ground atomic bomb tests in the 1950’s showed conclusively using carbon isotopes that CO2 is re-absorbed by the oceans/biosphere in a relatively short time. That fast absorption rate answers the central question in the AGW debate. AGW alarmism fails without a century long CO2 persistence time, so the IPCC has no choice but to claim a false century long CO2 residence time.
Smokey (06:41:38) :
Dyson clearly states in his article that new, genetically engineered plants would be required for additional sequestration:
“one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species…”
The current residence times are the result of the all the existing sequestration that takes place – your “numerous examples” are irrelevant to an improvement here. As Dyson himself wrote:
“Natural plant communities fail by a large factor to sequestrate as much carbon as they absorb.”
You later say:
“Not only is Lord May wrong…”
Dyson does not dispute May’s figure, only the relevance of it in his context of a hypothetical genetically engineered solution. There is indeed no contradiction between Dyson’s figure of about 12 years for the biospheric uptake of CO2 and a much longer average lifetime for the effect of the introduction of a CO2 molecule from the burning of fossil fuels.
“Tom P (08:40:12) :
[…]There is indeed no contradiction between Dyson’s figure of about 12 years for the biospheric uptake of CO2 and a much longer average lifetime for the effect of the introduction of a CO2 molecule from the burning of fossil fuels.”
I looked into this David Archer paper here
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2009.ann_rev_tail.pdf
wondering how they come to the conclusion of that near-eternal residence time of man made emissions in the atmosphere. Their trick seems to be this (I’m using “trick” here in a colloquoial way, like in “a smart way to do it”, you know, not like in… aeh… “tricking you”):
They assume a yearly uptake rate of 2 Pg/year by oceans and 2 Pg/year by terrestrial plants.
Now these are NET numbers. The gross carbon exchange between oceans and atmosphere is, like, way bigger. The NASA should know shouldn’t it:
http://nasascience.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/ocean-earth-system/ocean-carbon-cycle
And given that even the realclimate goons talk about the stored heat in the ocean we can deduce the ocean gets slightly more warmer, expands, rises a little and releases more CO2, shouldn’t that be the case? And from there Archer’s trickery (“trick” as in, you know, see above) starts taking a nosedive in my opinion, but what do i know, i’m not a physicist, this guy is and he can explain it better:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073/
Somewhere in the presentation he shows a differential of the Keeling curve and correlates it with something else that is not the CO2 emissions of humanity. And finds a way better match.
DirkH (09:20:33) :
I’m afraid I can’t follow your explanation.
“…but what do i know, i’m not a physicist, this guy is and he can explain it better…”
Where Kirby talk about CO2 lifetimes? You might like the video, but it’s irrelevant to this discussion.
RACookPE1978 says:
I am surprised that you have so uncritically accepted such lies and nonsense. Perhaps because they re-enforce what you want to believe? The actual facts are these:
(1) DDT was never banned worldwide. The U.S. EPA banned it in the U.S. where malaria was eradicated already.
(2) The campaign against malaria failed for a variety of reasons. One of the major reasons was the development of resistance by mosquitoes to DDT and other insecticides. For example, the explosion of malaria deaths in India in the 1970s occurred at a time when DDT use was high and continuing to increase. Such resistance occurs to the greatest extent when DDT is used extensively outdoors as in agriculture, and in fact, this is precisely one of the things that Rachel Carson warned about in “Silent Spring”. If her warnings had been better heeded, perhaps many lives could have been saved.
(3) There is general agreement that the use of DDT for indoor spraying in areas where there is not resistance is sometimes advisable, although there is disagreement on exactly when and where the benefits (and, specifically, the benefits relative to other options) outweigh the risks.
(4) The fact that outdoor spraying of DDT had very detrimental effects on some wildlife is not disputed even by the organization Malaria Foundation International, which campaigned (successfully) against a “ban” (actually phase-out) of DDT in the International Treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP’s) negotiated in 2000. They say, “It cannot be seriously disputed that DDT has devastated some wildlife populations, such as birds of prey.” ( http://www.malaria.org/DDT_open.html ) They also do not dispute that DDT has health risks to humans, saying “There is no doubt that there are health risks associated with DDT use”, although they argue that the benefits of its use against malaria where it is effective outweigh those risks. They also argue that the restriction on DDT in the POP’s treaty to use only against disease “is is arguably better than the status quo going into the negotiations over two years ago. For the first time, there is now an insecticide which is restricted to vector control only, meaning that the selection of resistant mosquitoes will be slower than before.” ( http://www.malaria.org/DDTpage.html )
(5) The whole DDT saga serves as a telling example of how there is a strong anti-environmental movement that is willing to lie and rewrite history in the service of their ideology and that there are plenty of people who will uncritically accept their lies. A good dissection of the lies is here: http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm and http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ddt/
CO2 residence time…
Essenhigh (2009): 12CO2 ~5 years, 14CO2 ~16 years.
Segalstad (1992): ~5 years.
Murray (1992): ~5 years.
Stumm & Morgan (1970): ~5 years.
IPCC (Houghton et al., 1990): 50 to 200 years.
Source: Correct Timing is Everything – Also for CO2 in the Air by Tom Segalstad
As is so often the case, the IPCC’s preferred number sticks out like a sore thumb and must be correct because the IPCC said so.
David Middleton:
There seems to be a propensity on this site to repeat nonsense long after it has been corrected. As both I and Tom P have explained, the number that you quote from IPCC is NOT a residence time. It is a rough estimate of the decay time for the CO2 concentration given an excess amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere, which is eventually determined not by exchange between the atmosphere and the upper ocean but by slower processes like exchange with the deep ocean. (And, it is really only a rough estimate because the decay is actually not exponential. Hence, a single decay time will overestimate the CO2 concentration at short times and will underestimate the CO2 concentration at long times, which is why Solomon et al. )
@joel Shore (13:27:03) :
I believe that the IPCC number is a residence time. http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/CDIAC_94/CDIAC.html>CDIAC also says that CO2 has a residence time measured in decades to centuries…
The atmosphere contains ~388 ppmv CO2 (~820 Gt C).
Total annual carbon—>atmosphere sources:
820/218 = 3.76
If CO2 had a “decades to centuries”residence time in the atmosphere, CO2 levels would be rising a heck of a lot faster than they have been over the last 150 years.
The Earth started to warm up out of the Little Ice Age 260 years before CO2 levels started to rise…
Moberg & CO2
The really funny thing is that before 1960, CO2 levels were rising at a faster rate than anthropogenic emissions were rising…
Emissions vs Atmos. Conc.
The warming started before the CO2 started to rise.
The CO2 started to rise before anthropogenic emissions started to rise.
That’s because the atmospheric CO2 has been rising mostly because the Earth has been slowly warming since the 1600’s.
Atmospheric CO2 would be somewhere between 330 and 370 ppmv (or higher) right now if man had never discovered fire.
The plant stomatal data clearly show that CO2 levels have routinely risen to >360 ppmv in response to warming episodes over the last 10,000 year.
There seems some confusion of c02 residence time: 100 years refers to atmospheric half life, derived by mathematical rates, and don’t necessarily apply to the nature of climate as a constant, since the c02 moelecules constantly exchange – not to be confused with aerial residence, which is diurnal-annual-decadal-centennial. However, the Anthropogenic c02 airborne percentage hasn’t changed since 1850.
Joel Shore (13:27:03)
“There seems to be a propensity on this site to repeat nonsense long after it has been corrected. ”
Alas not always an easy task