I’ve been getting a lot of requests to cover this story, probably 20 or so now with wonderings about “why haven’t you covered this yet?”
How quickly you all forget. WUWT was the very first to cover this story back on November 10th, 2009.
Everybody else in the media today is playing catch-up. So if you’d like to read the original press release and participate in the already ripe comments left then, see this WUWT story:
Pamela Gray (08:30:33) :
Most people assume that total atmospheric CO2 is a directly measured data set. It ain’t.
Pamela, CO2 is measured (really measured, not assumed or modelled) at over 400 places on earth. Some 70+ of them are far away from huge sources or sinks, the other 330+ are aimed to measure local/regional CO2 fluxes to gain more insight in the carbon cycle. Besides that, ships measurements, buoys and flights measure CO2 at more places at the ocean surface and over land at different heights.
Of the 70+ “clean” stations, 10 were chosen as “baseline” stations, as these have the longest trends. Their annual averages are within 5 ppmv, of which the largest difference is the NH-SH delay. From flights and oceans we know that 95% of the atmosphere shows the same CO2 level within tight limits (except for a seasonal cycle and the NH-SH gradient). Thus without any model, the average CO2 levels of the 10 baseline stations represent 95% of the atmosphere with +/- 2.5 ppmv (or +/- 0.7% of the absolute value).
For a measurement of something in nature, that is a tremendous achievement.
And indeed also other related measurements like methane, oxygen, isotope compositions and their trends are of the most reliable available.
You may not like the outcome, but as that doesn’t say anything about the influence of increasing CO2 levels on temperature/climate, you should concentrate on that part of the debate. Focusing on something that is not defendable is undermining the credibility of all sceptics…
I would like to add one thing a cordless tele phone @ur momisugly900Mhz can throw on my lights on in low watts too if needed mind you.
The low band has great attribute when configured to one allownce. A direct frequecny to recognize the initerupted power of low band powered frequencies.
I’t not new though, but open to configure better upon the consumers grid bid lists.
Also for water grabbing, and making clean Oxygen was my sector of interests.
They all do go hand in hand right? Dino sours were so big in the early earth why?
Shared atoms. Visit me @ur momisugly http://theproviworld.wordpress.com/ and i will tell you what happens when greed put a chain to an end of not sharing what we can’t see no more.
Willis Eschenbach (11:45:20) :
anna v, a good question. CO2 is what is called a “well mixed” greenhouse gas. Per the map at the head of this thread, it varies less than ± 1% around the globe. If temperature varied this little around the planet, it would certainly be reasonable to measure the temperature in the same way.
Who is calling it a well mixed green house gas? Keeling who oversees everything?
That is the question. From the data of the satellites the variation is much more than 1%, 30ppm over 380 , even 20, is more than 1%.
From the land data the variation is more like 50% , Beck for example.
I am not questioning the measurements, ( though seeing the mess of the surface temperature measurements maybe I should) . I am questioning the assumption of well mixed and the interpretation, that 380ppm is unprecedented as a value, when there are values in the world of 400 much before any fossil fuel exhausts.
Shades of hockey stick come up.
“theproviworld (09:51:28) :
Well you wonderful folk of science,[…]”
It look’s like what you’ve invented is a kind of fuel cell. I recommend to you to go over to http://www.climateprogress.com, they discuss alternative energies a lot. We here are not against new inventions, surely not. But here, we try to explore the reasons for climate fluctuations so climateprogress is really the better forum i think.
Look at these plots for the range of CO2 values from AIRS
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA11186_modest.jpg
Also the Japanese data
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/05/20090528_ibuki_e.html#at1
Makes me suspicious that the top plot has been homogenized . Maybe the Japanese are slow in treating the data trying to homogenize them too. Climategate should make us very suspicious of the whole climate industry.
Mooloo (20:26:33) :
(Dissolved NO2, nitric acid, is the same. )
—————
Slightly pedantic maybe, but NO2 is not quite the same as it reacts with water in a disproportionation reaction, and exits via decomposition of nitric acid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_dioxide
My apologies to my wording. Yes there is a incentive to consumers who can innovate to decrease to impact of environment photothesis in slowing build ups of carbons co2 that corrodes to allow a faster decay of our oxygen bio-mass atmosphere to naturally sustain the current status to clean it’s self at the levels indicated by moecular atoms in sharing the recycled splits of these. My spelling is not good, any carbon delay that that has a element count to mass is indeed to be delayed from such breakdown of lower and middle to upper stratospheres that can spell a surge in radio electromagetic fields that flow it’s way in UV light. This light seeps through ozone crack.
My innovative ideas are like many, and should be encouraged like many others. A comment from from one innovations mentioned to occur on a forum is safe to address the right directions to access the resourses that will assist in creating newly innovative greener products and yes practice. thank you for directing me on the right path. Lauren J. Hendry from theproviworld
anna v (10:18:42) :
Look at these plots for the range of CO2 values from AIRS
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA11186_modest.jpg
Also the Japanese data
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/05/20090528_ibuki_e.html#at1
Makes me suspicious that the top plot has been homogenized . Maybe the Japanese are slow in treating the data trying to homogenize them too. Climategate should make us very suspicious of the whole climate industry
Anna V and others, please!
Have a look at the time span: 1 (one) month for AIRS, 1 (one) week for the Japanese satellite. And even then the whole “non-homogenization” is less than 5% of the value.
“Well mixed” doesn’t mean that everywhere at any time of the year exactly the same level of CO2 is measured. It means that the amounts level out in a not too long time span, all over the world. Like a year for all measurements in one hemisphere and a few years for the whole earth… But if you have huge (seasonal) exchanges at ground level and continuous additions in one hemisphere, there will never be exact the same level at all places.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (07:37:30) :
5.1
You are still seeing this as a static system. It is not. This is like the politicians who believe they can always get more money for public spending simply by raising taxes. But, this does not always work because the pool of taxable funds shrinks due to the taxation itself.
Am I getting through to anyone else out there? I would appreciate some affirmation. This is so obvious to me, and I am feeling a little depressed by my failure to get the idea across.
5.2
“I need to protest against the notion that the ice core CO2 data were advanced to match the atmospheric data.”
Some method has to be used to assign a time tag to specific depths. Whatever that method is, the result is a statistical parameter which has some assignable error bar.
5.et al.
Yada, yada. We are getting bogged down. Let me just issue a blanket proclamation that I believe you are A) expressing a level of certainty in particular data and hypotheses which is not merited and B) ignoring other possible explanations for the observations, as well as counter-evidences.
A problem here is that you are reasoning inductively, while I am reasoning deductively. You are delving into all the minutiae of this and that, attempting a process of elimination, and you are getting lost in the trees. There are certain physical principles, though, which must hold regardless of the details. This gives one a view of the forest and its boundaries.
I can tell you with absolute confidence, based on rigorous mathematics, that it is highly unlikely that the rise in CO2 we have witnessed in the last 1/2 century is due to anthropogenic forcing alone. If the advocates’ camp started their induction with that conclusion, instead of the opposing one, I can guarantee you, you would be focusing on trees of an entirely different variety. That is the weakness of inductive reasoning – it too often leads to confirmation bias.
There is of course a problem with the calculation of e-folding time from the modeling of a sudden plug being added to the biosphere: It doesn’t even remotely represent reality. The notion of e-folding is merely a mathematical wrapping paper for the ridiculous notion that CO2 will always accumulate from man’s emissions even though our emissions represent only 3% of the those from the biosphere. It was required politically as a panic spreader. Exactly the same trick was used with CFC’s to force the Montreal protocol. Of course now though we are told that these everlasting CFC’s are reducing and the replacement HFC’s are incredibly potent greenhouse gases that will also last forever.
Alex Harvey (08:00:19) :
Thats partially my point: We don’t know what the co2 volume cycle is – given that there are 1000 gt’s at sea surface levels – of course, if seas warm and becomes a net emission then its going to go somewhere else, and even if upwelling c02 from ocean depths introduces into the system, only a small fraction will remain airborne – so I’m sceptical that we really have the entire c02 cycle accounted for. That would explain the missing sink that the IPCC trumpet. They call it a missing sink but what occurs to me is that we simply don’t know what happens to c02
PS – thats why its better used as a coefficient than a constant law (Henry’s)
P Wilson (11:37:02)
oops.. thats addressed to Ferdinand Engelbeen
For whomsoever it might interest, the following is an outline of my overall reasoning.
Based on this “forest rather than trees” outlook, I am necessarily led to the following deductive conclusions:
Bottom line: You cannot have a situation in which, in the facile position put forward by many advocates, the natural sources and sinks balance out, and the anthropogenic input simply accumulates on top of that. That is simply not how a dynamic feedback system works in the real world.
Bart (11:29:47)
Yes I’d accept that the c02 cycle is not static/fixed and that consequently, a lot of spurious correlations between oxygen and c02 isotopes can be made. Its not helped by the fact that c02 exchanges are not measured – they are assumed. Similarly with airborne c02 molecules. No one has measured then cycle of a c02 molecule to verify the airborne duration, which I imagine varies enormously accoring to altitude, wind, air pressure, and all the exchange cycles that we know about
Ferdinand Engelbeen (09:56:30) :
Ok, but that’s rather like saying the answer is 388, (a direct measurement) without the equations that led to the figure. It is the dynamics that are not being measured. Its impossible to – being an invisible gas – to see what c02 does to produce this sum of 388, which is why some people here are questioning too precise a set of maths. Whilst some say that 288 and 100 make 388, others say that 370+18 make 388 (ppm)
Ferdinand
It is far better to measure CO2 by using all measurements, confirm it gives a gaussian distribution and then use the 5% cutoff as your minimum value. That is what is done with mechanical engineering data. If engineers arbitrarily decided what data to use based on whimsy assumptions of whose data was more reliable or not then there would be a lot more engineering failures in the world. That is, Becks method is far closer to standard practice than Keeling or Callendar. Why is wind-driven data from the sea better than land data when the land flux is 300Gt and the sea flux is 400Gt compared with the human addition of 27Gt? Obviously it even depends on the direction of the wind. As I understand it ML even reject 80% of the data before it even goes into their statistical sausage machine, according to the wind direction. They get what they want to see all right.
Well here is a nice background CO2 test in a desert, which one might reasonably assume is without any CO2 vegetation or factory sources:
http://www.unlv.edu/Climate_Change_Research/NDFF/co2_treatment.htm
No data was rejected. We can assume though that the ambient was correctly measured since the experiment itself would have been affected. Now knowing that 40% of the land mass on earth is arid and using well-mixed CO2 “trick” to assume that this result represents the entire globe gives the result of no change in background CO2 in 10 years. Crucially this place is also well away from the sea. Callendar and Keeling may easily have chosen exactly the worst selection criteria. Who’d really know for sure? But if they had used standard procedures and hence NOT rejected data they didn’t like then it wouldn’t have mattered at all.
Despite that i agree with you that there it is far more potent to argue about the crazy residence time which is based on even worse procedures, loopier assumptions, and even more arbitrary fiddle factors. I’d also argue we hammer home on the fact that they still project net deforestation in a planet that is demonstrably greening
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalGarden/
and they then use this false conclusion to postulate that there is a bigger missing sink thanks to deforestation. In fact if the land assumptions are corrected to reflect reality then there is no need for a warming sea to be called a net sink. Try it!
Bart (12:00:44) :
Bottom line: You cannot have a situation in which, in the facile position put forward by many advocates, the natural sources and sinks balance out, and the anthropogenic input simply accumulates on top of that. That is simply not how a dynamic feedback system works in the real world.
————————
Absolutely clear to me, but then I got my head around drug pharmacokinetics over the years and there are certain similarities re. multi-phasic clearance mechanisms.
Perhaps it might be instructive to consider the time in history when humans were adding an extra 0.00001% to the atmosphere and the annual emissions became 100.00001% of natural emissions. Anyone believe that the kinetics changed at that point ??
OK, then work your way up to 103% and voila – did we cross a tipping point in the kinetics between 100.00001% and 103%. Nope.
Bart (11:29:47) :
Ferdinand Engelbeen (07:37:30) :
5.1
You are still seeing this as a static system. It is not.
Not one of the few hairs left on my head thinks that the CO2 cycle is a static system. Of course it is a dynamic system, more or less in equilibrium for a given temperature, as long as humans don’t add some extra…
That is clear from the ice cores over the past 800,000 years.
5.2 about ice cores (again):
Please read the literature. The scientific world didn’t stop after 1992, when Jaworowski wrote his last report. In 1996, Etheridge produced a very detailed report of three ice cores drilled at Law Dome, using different (wet and dry) methods, avoiding cracks and clathrates, sampling CO2 from the ice bubbles but also from the firn (again with different materials) from the surface to bubble closing depth. See:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1996/95JD03410.shtml
The ice core air bubbles had the same CO2 level as the stil open air inclusions from the firn at closing depth. The CO2 level at 72 m closing depth was the same as air at the South Pole of 7 years before. Thus the gas phase in the ice core was average 7 years old. There were 40 counted ice layers at the same depth. Thus the difference between measured gas age and measured ice age was 33 years. And the ice core gas age data had an overlap of 20 years with the South Pole data. Nothing arbitral, nothing modeled, everything measured. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_overlap.jpg
5.x
In my former working life I was process engineer, later process automation engineer. My strength was that I was able to find a problem in a process (or computer program) much faster than others, simply because I was always eliminating the impossibilities, instead of looking at the possibilities first.
It is physically impossible that the oceans are the main cause of the recent increase. It is physically impossible that the biosphere is the main cause of the increase. It is highly improbable that huge amounts (equivalent to 1/3rd of all vegetation on earth) entered the atmosphere within a few years around 1942, but it is physically impossible that the same amount disappeared in a few years… I can add a few more, but now it’s your turn: show me your mathematics which make you sure that the increase is not (alone) from the emissions…
Bart (12:00:44) :
To my conclusions, I should also have added:
3) Assuming smooth dynamics and reasonable positive feedback, the majority of the rise in atmospheric CO2 we have observed in the last 1/2 century is natural, and the C13/C12 ratios provide no additional information except that we do not know as much about the entire carbon cycle as some would like to believe
This conclusion, based as it is on fundamentals, leads me to question any data which purports to contradict it. If a person proffering such evidence looks deeply enough, I am confident he or she will find flaws in the analysis or processing of the data, or in the underlying assumptions. I expect to be vindicated in time when the atmospheric CO2 begins to decline again even as we keep pumping more in.
Scott says:
Good question. Unfortunately, I am not sure about a good paper that you can easily get your hands on. My reference, as I noted, is the book “Global Warming: The Hard Science” by L.D. Danny Harvey, which is quite good…although it was published in 2000, so it is not the most up-to-date.
You might try looking at this paper by Harvey: http://faculty.geog.utoronto.ca/Harvey/Harvey/papers/Harvey%20%282003a,%20C%20sequestration,%20GRL%29.pdf and the references therein and the citations that have been made to it: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5076057463512281645&hl=en&as_sdt=2000
Bart (12:00:44) :
For whomsoever it might interest, the following is an outline of my overall reasoning.
B) Anthropogenic CO2 production is a few percent of natural production
C) In a system governed by smooth differential equations (and, the Bristol study lends credence to that assumption), this requires that anthropogenic CO2 by itself cannot be directly responsible for a rise in overall level by more than a few percent
The problem is right in B: Anthro CO2 is a few percent of natural production Anthro CO2 is additional, natural production is part of a cycle, a dynamic equilibrium, while anthro CO2 is a disturbance of the equilibrium.
Take into consideration a fountain where a huge pump drives water to the top from the basin below. A perfect dynamic equilibrium (besides some evaporation). Add a small flow of water with a hose. You will see that the level in the basin will increase, even overflow, although the additional flow is only 1/100th of what the pump “produces”.
The Bristol study concluded that the increase in the atmosphere is still the same percentage of the emissions, not of the total input (natural + human). Thus the natural equilibrium reacts to the (only) disturbance like a simple linear, first order process. No need for exotic explanations.
[REPLY – Right. ~ Evan]
Mooloo, Phildot, and Englebeen
If the solubility of CO2 is fairly (a quantitative term, I know) low, then why is the ice core data considered a reflection of atmospheric CO2? Especially since Englebeen said all the CO2 is squeezed out when measuring which would be what is dissolved plus what’s in the air bubbles. Wouldn’t that dilute the total and be less than what the atmosphere was holding?
Bart says:
Bottom line: You do not sufficiently understand the system that you are talking about. Forget about the transfers back-and-forth between the atmosphere, biosphere, soil, and mixed layer of the ocean. As L.D. Danny Harvey explains in the quote that I made above, the transfers between these are fast enough that they can essentially be considered as one reservoir (with some further calculations discussing the partitioning between the different “parts” of this one reservoir). Once you consider this as one reservoir, all you have are two terms:
(1) The input term representing the release of CO2 that has not been part of this system into the system through the burning of fossil fuels.
(2) The output term representing the mixing of the carbon down from the mixed layer into the deep ocean.
Then, it becomes very clear why the release of the fossil fuel CO2 is what is causing the increase in the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I also recommend that you really think about Ferdinand’s statement that “Focusing on something that is not defendable is undermining the credibility of all sceptics…” (and Willis’s similar statement). Personally, since I don’t really have much emotionally invested in you guys being credible, I don’t really care what you do. But, I will just tell you that focusing on all of this nonsense really does make it easy to dismiss you guys as the equivalent of flat-earthers. Better to focus on the actual issues that there is some legitimate scientific debate on, e.g., what the feedbacks and resulting climate sensitivity are, rather than issues that were perhaps the subject of scientific debate half a century ago but are not today. At least there you have a prayer of seriously influencing the scientific community.
Ferdinand Engelbeen (13:39:15) :
“It is physically impossible that the oceans are the main cause of the recent increase. It is physically impossible that the biosphere is the main cause of the increase. It is highly improbable that huge amounts (equivalent to 1/3rd of all vegetation on earth) entered the atmosphere within a few years around 1942, but it is physically impossible that the same amount disappeared in a few years…”
There are necessarily assumptions required with which these absolutist statements must be qualified. You will note, I always try to state such qualifications in my own pronouncements. I suggest you review the underlying assumptions in your statements, perhaps in a role-playing mode as a skeptic, and see if you do not discover weaknesses in them. I have tried to point some out to you, but I think it is impossible to make any headway that way because of the adversarial dynamics which inherently arise.
I can add a few more, but now it’s your turn: show me your mathematics which make you sure that the increase is not (alone) from the emissions…
See Bart (14:51:01) .
Ferdinand
1. “It is physically impossible that the oceans are the main cause of the recent increase.
2. It is physically impossible that the biosphere is the main cause of the increase.
3. It is highly improbable that huge amounts (equivalent to 1/3rd of all vegetation on earth) entered the atmosphere within a few years around 1942, but 4. it is physically impossible that the same amount disappeared in a few years”
http://nasascience.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/ocean-earth-system/ocean-carbon-cycle/ask-a-scientist
Look at the actual numbers and get it right! What isn’t shown there though are the error bars for ocean and plant fluxes, both of which are rather larger than man’s puny contribution.
As for the disappearance after the 40’s. I admit to some skepticism about that too but there was a sharp decrease in temperature then which has definitely been adjusted out to a large extent. Everywhere I look I see a linear correlation with CO2 – Endersbee, Beck, and the “pause” in CO2 that I demonstrated above. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Vostok lag was only in reality a few years: One of the few things I agree with Wm Connolley about. Heck they seem to adjust that x-axis in ice core data willy-nilly.
It’s a lot easier to imagine though when you a) calculate the vegetation correctly or b) realize just how much CO2 is already stored in the ocean. You might then wonder why the CO2 level is so curiously constant. Of course there are geological data – that you reject – that says it can vary quite a lot.