New paper in Nature on CO2 amplification: "it's less than we thought"

Ok, from the world of crazy talk… quoting the BBC article above:
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““…”It might lead to a downward mean revision of those (climate) models which already include the carbon cycle, but an upward revision in those which do not include the carbon cycle.
“That’ll probably even itself out to signify no real change in the temperature projections overall,” he said. “”
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So explain this to me…. how can a model that doesn’t use the carbon cycle be affected upward, or AT ALL, by a correction to the CO2 sensitivity model? If it is affected at all by changes in CO2 sensitivity then by simple deduction it must include the carbon cycle in it’s model somewhere.

A couple of thoughts. First of it is saying the scientists’ orginal positive feedback was over stated by aprox 5.2 times.
(This stands in sharp contrast to the recent estimates of positive feedback models, which suggest a release of 40 parts per million per degree; the team say with 95% certainty that value is an overestimate. ) vs their estimate of 7.7 ppm.
Secondly though we are talking about the degree of feedback from 1 degree of warming. But we are still waiting for our first ONE degree. After 150 years of waiting. So it is pretty meaningless in that sense……Sincerely, John

Suddenly the views of skeptics are being published. Are editors starting to sense the winds of change?

Richard Garnache (13:39:35) :
All this discussion assumes we know what the temperature is and has been. We don’t!!
Naw, apparently, we just need one thermometer that measures anomaly. Given that we all have a proximity from each other, we can extrapolate the warmer and colder stuff for the planet. Not very tricky if in the proper number changing hands. 🙂 /(sarc off.)

When water freezes, the gases dissolved in it will degas out. You might have experienced that if you ever froze a beer and opened the bottle/can. Not much fizz left in the liquid part. The same goes for liquid water in the atmosphere that would turn to ice (i.e. snowing). Moreover, as the Earth freezes, less plants vegetation will be able to transform the CO2 in the atmosphere back to O2. From these simple observations, you can bet that as the planet freezes, the concentration of CO2 will rise way up. But even this rise of CO2 is not enough to bring the sort of positive feedback they always talk about. If that was the case, there would never be ice ages.

If I am not mistaken this is just one of several positive feedbacks the scientists use in their models to show such a large expected increase in Global Tempertures that are caused by increasing co2. And this feedback is a very small one. I see this as no game changer. But it is refreshing that the “Science is not Settled”!!!!!!!!!!……..John…..

@Jeff L (13:58:40) :
If I understand correctly, I think they only reduced 40% of the feedback by 80%. . .
. . . as to someone else’s question about how climate models that don’t use the carbon cycle could now go up. . .I suspect the commentator was thinking they weren’t represented in those models because the modellers didn’t have confidence in the current carbon-feedback models. . . but now as a result of this study they might and thus might add them in.
Tho one wonders what those non-carbon-cycle models were looking like up to now, and how they got them even close while ignoring that large a known factor (even if exactly how large was unclear).

Coals (13:38:54) : “Is this paper saying that since warming itself is not the cause of as much of the observed C02 buildup as previously thought then the measured increase of atmospheric C02 must be coming more from anthropogenic sources?”
My thoughts exactly. It seems they are simply saying a temperature rise influences a rise in CO2 but not as much as was thought. So what does that imply about the the rise in CO2 influencing a rise in temperatures?

“Using 200,000 data points, the study – believed by Nature to be the most comprehensive of its kind so far – compared the Antarctic ice core record of trapped CO2 bubbles with so-called proxy data like tree rings, which are used to estimate temperature changes.”
I would like to know how this probabilistic analyses deals with the centuries long lag between global temperature and CO2.

“Brent (12:51:54) :
At least they got the general flow right. If you increase temperature….. you increase as co2 as it comes out of solution from the ocean
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So the oceans become less acidic? It casn’t be dissolving into and coming out at the same time 🙂
cheers David

Well this whole question of “feedbacks” is quite hokey in my view.
If you absorb radiant energy in some components of the atmospheric gases, whether incoming solar spectrum (short wave) or surface emitted (or atmosphere emitted) Thermal radiation (long wave), the net result is a temperature increase of the whole atmosphere (in the vicinity of such energy absorptions) as a result of molecular collisions.
Trace gases like CO2 are so sparse, that a CO2 molecule, is not even aware that anything else like it even exists. It is about 13.7 molecular layers in any direction to the next CO2 molecule (on average), so CO2 collides ONLY with N2, O2, and Ar molecules, and the kinetic energy transferred to those gases raises the atmospheric temperature. Statistical mechanics, and quantum theory say that so long as the mean free path between collisions, is small compared to the distances, over which gross changes in atmospheric properties occur, such a s a temperature or compositional change; then the atmosphere is in a state of local equilibrium (with a photon flux) and under those conditions; the atmospheric gas mass (N2, O2, Ar ) has a Maxwellian statistics for particle momentum, and it emits black body like thermal radiation just the same, as a red hot lump of iron would.
I don’t know why people keep insisting that gases don’t emit thermal continuum radiation. Yes they do have discrete line spectra both in the IR (moloecular) and shorter wavelengths for atomic transitions, and all the way out to RF frequencies, in fact porobably down to but not including DC; but those discrete quantum level transitions also exist in the solid state, but get smudged into “valence” and “Conduction” bands by the sheer density of states, and overlapping intrinsic line widths. The fundamental source of the continuum emissions is believed to be simply that due to acceleration of electric charge, due to the kinetic energy of thermal motion.
It is one of the fundamental tenets of quantum Physics, that accelerated charges radiate. That is the whole reason why large electron particle accelerators are always linear accelerators; like the two mile long Stanford machine. If you try sending relativistic electrons round in a circle like what happens at CERN with heavier particles, the acceleration due to the circling causes the electrons to radiate; and if they radiate all the energy that they were goosed with on each revolution of the track; then they reach a limiting energy beyond which you can’t go withough building a bigger radius machine.
In any case, as a result of atmospheric heating by any mechanism, at any altitude, you get thermal continuum radiation from the atmosphere solely due to its mean temperature (in the vicinity). Now at very high levels in the stratosphere, where the molecular density gets low enough so the mean free path is no longer short compared with gross variations in the atmopshere, then the GHG excited molecules or atoms do spontaneously emit a line spectrum, as they return to something like the ground state, or at least some non-fobidden transition level. By that time, the amount of mass we are talking about is so small, that that mechanism cannot be a very significant source of radiant energy. Yes because of the low local mass, even that miniscule amount of energy can significantly raise the local temperature, and at high enough altitudes, the temperature does eventually increase, rather than decrease.
On the sun, the temperature in the near vaccum of the outer corona, can reach millions of Kelvins, compared to the 6000 odd K at the surface; and we can detect million degree black body radiation fromt he corona; but it is usually way down in the mud because of the small emitting mass.
Well that is all Leif’s bailiwik, and I likely have already put my foot through several holes in the ice; but I am sure Leif can correct that.
My point is that the radiation from the heated atmosphere, carries no signature of the prime cause of the heating; whether it was water absorption of incoming solar spectrum energy longer than 750 nm or whether it was LWIR emitted from the surfae, and absorbed by CO2, or H2O or O3. To me it is simply assinine to imply that the CO2 is the prime keeper of the temperature knob and it tells water in the ocean whether to evaporate or not. Same thing goes with CO2 emission froma warmer ocean.
So they claim (in the present paper) that the “feedback” enhancement of CO2 emitted from the ocean, turns out to be less than THEY previously thought.
I accented the THEY, because I never ever thought that.
In fact I would like to collect a dollar from everyone; for each time that I have argued here, that the downward emitted LWIR from the warm atmosphere, is mostly absorbed in the top 10 microns of the ocean surface, and results in very prompt surface evaporation of kinetic energy enhanced surface molecules, which promptly adds to the water vapor content of the atmosphere, plus conveys huge amounts of Latent heat of evaporation (545 Cal/gm) back into the atmosphere to be convected back to higher altitudes and finally lost to space.
And as I have also opined, the increasing solubility of CO2 in colder waters, results in aocncentration gradient of CO2 in the surface waters, which depletes the warmer surface waters of CO2 and pumps the excess CO2 to colder deeper waters because of that concentration gradient. So the warmer surface waters tend to be CO2 depleted, while trying to maintain Henry’s law equilibrium with the atmospheric CO2.
So just how would you expect such an ocean surface to be a source of increased atmospheric CO2 solely due to downward LWIR from the CO2 GHG effect.
Well as I have said, I DON”T EXPECT that to happen; and it is nice to see that the “ancient astrologers” are slowly coming to that realization.
So NYET ! on the rate of CO2 feedback enhancement; that simply cannot be an operating process.
The warming of the oceans is almost solely due to deeply penetrating solar spectrum radiation, that goes hundreds of metres deep; it is NOT due to LWIR absorption froma warmed atmosphere.
What happens on land, may be something different, but it cannot happen in the oceans.