Some people claim, that there's a human to blame …

About stomata data:
Stomata data are a proxy for current and past CO2 levels, but have there problems, as good as any other proxy.
The main problem is the same as for many of the historical measurements: plant with stomata grow by definition on land (sea creatures don’t need stomata), where CO2 levels are not very well mixed. Diurnal differences of over 200 ppmv in summer are not uncommon in vegetated areas. That alone gives a positive bias against “background” CO2 levels. That is not a problem itself if this was constant. Nevertheless, the stomata data show a resonable fit (+/- 10 ppmv) if calibrated against MLO and ice core data over the past 100 years.
According to the stomata people, stomata (index) density is defined by the average CO2 level of the preceding growing season. That fits reasonably good for the past 100 years. But the problem is in the past: how do we know that the landscape (and accordingly the CO2 levels) didn’t change over time? For several countries, we know that there was a huge evolution in landscape: from marshes to forests and to agriculture, all in the main wind direction of some of the stomata proxy places.
The same for weather influences: a warmer/colder climate may influence local/regional flora and thus CO2 levels far more than the “background” CO2 levels.
Thus while stomata data have their pro’s (a better resolution than ice cores), there are a lot of problems too, which make that past absolute levels or variability mainly reflect local/regional CO2 levels and should be taken with a grain of salt for “global” CO2 levels…

Ferdinand Engelbeen says on 6/20/10 at 4:02 pm said,
>> Yes, the IPCC does attribute the total of the rise to aCO2. That is about the increase of the total amount. That doesn’t mean that all individual molecules of aCO2 emitted in the past 150 years or so, still are in the atmosphere. Most of them were exchanged by “natural” CO2 during the seasonal exchanges at a rate of near 20% per year or about 150 GtC/800 GtC in the atmosphere (or a half live slightly over 5 years). But seasonal exchanges don’t change the total amount of CO2 (whatever the source) in the atmosphere when in equilibrium.
I don’t believe anyone said all the “individual ACO2 molecules” are still in the atmosphere. That would be silly. The molecules from any source, if they could be tagged, would be absorbed randomly, some almost instantaneously, and some never because of the tail of the absorption probability curve. We can only deal profitably with means, and the mean for the molecule is the mean for the slug, and is derived from the mean of the slug.
When we speak of a molecule of ACO2 and nCO2, we are making an approximation because the two species of CO2 are indistinguishable in the first order process of dissolution in the waters, and they balance in the terrestrial flux. The two species are different mixes of 12CO2:13CO2:14CO2. Some plants are fractionating, favoring one molecule over the other, and an argument can be made that the mechanical process of dissolution should depend on molecular weight. But these are fifth order conjectures or less, well lost in the noise of estimating the primary effects of temperature, pressure, wind velocity, and salinity.
What IPCC needed to have done is publish its mass balance analysis on which it claims to have based its carbon cycle model of AR4, Figure 7.3, p. 515. In that model the flux from fossil fuels is about 6 Gt/y, mixed in with about 120 Gt/y from land, and 91 Gt/y from the ocean, but omits the 270 Gt/y from leaf water claimed in the TAR. That puts fossil fuel emissions at about 3% of the total without leaf water, and 1.3% with. Expect the mass balance analysis to show that that fraction is the amount that any increase in the atmosphere CO2 concentration could be attributed to ACO2. That should be the result even when the model accounts for 12CO2 and 13CO2 separately (14CO2 concentration being lost in the noise).
More importantly, IPCC needed to make the outgassing of CO2 from the ocean temperature dependent. It is a positive feedback that IPCC overlooked, and one that confounds its conjecture that ACO2 is the cause of global warming.
And as far as mistaken attribution is concerned, IPCC zeroed the natural rise in temperature occurring at the start of the industrial era. That natural temperature rise should have continued for another 3ºC or so, extrapolating from the Vostok record. By zeroing it, IPCC then attributed that on-going, natural temperature rise to the CO2 rise at MLO, which it wrongly attributed to a global rise and wrongly to ACO2.
By the way, the atmosphere is never in equilibrium, unless you have a definition of equilibrium that is different than thermodynamic equilibrium.
You say,
>> But we know from the CO2 emissions inventory and the CO2 measurements (at a lot of places) that nature aborbs about halve the emissions (as mass!): nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2.
What you cite is IPCC dogma. It is but a coincidence of numbers, and not a cause and effect model. IPCC says that 70 PgC/yr of nCO2 is absorbed into the ocean from 597 PgC in the atmosphere, which is 11.83%. For ACO2, IPCC numbers are 22.2 PgC/yr absorbed from 165 PgC, which is 13.45%. One might consider these numbers close enough (a ratio of 1.138:1) for a carbon cycle budget, but that would be naïve. The difference between nCO2 and ACO2 is a delta 13C of -25‰ vs. -8‰, respectively. That’s a ratio of 13CO2 in the total CO2 of 1.0838% vs. 1.1924%, respectively (a ratio of 1.012:1). IPCC’s discrepancy in absorption is far greater than the delicate difference in mix between nCO2 and ACO2.
If the absorption of nCO2 and ACO2 were to be different, the only known physical difference is the mix ratio of 13CO2:12CO2. Suppose we postulate different solubility coefficients for 12CO2 and 13CO2, itself not implausible though likely unmeasurable, and solve so that the bulk of the ACO2 absorbed is IPCC’s 13.45% of its atmospheric concentration per year, and IPCC’s corresponding number is 11.83% for nCO2. The solubility coefficient for 12CO2 turns out to be -.0826 and for 13CO2, 86.33. Regardless of the units lost in percentages, the solution to IPCC’s model is that the ocean must outgas 12CO2. Ignoring that little difficulty, the conjecture is that ACO2 and nCO2 are dissolved in water, but that water fractionates, changing all the mixes in the atmosphere and the water.
In summary, IPCC’s model cannot be solved under the laws of solubility. This explains why IPCC does not use Henry’s Law and does not supply its mass balance analysis. The best explanation for IPCC’s irregular fluxes is that the concept of a molecule of ACO2, a mix, and of nCO2, a mix, has no more meaning than a molecule of the atmosphere.
Your model by analogy to banks and factories is as worthless as the other analogies suggested in this thread. But that is the usual fate of all scientific models by analogy.
You conclude,
>> there is zero net contribution by nature to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and humans are (near) totally responsible for the increase.



The greenhouse gases of water vapor and CO2 come from surface waters, the latter principally in accord with the law of solubility (Henry’s Law is for equilibrium, and the atmosphere and ocean surface are never in equilibrium), and the concentrations of those two GHGs are dynamic feedbacks of the surface temperature. Man’s contribution is negligibly small, especially in consideration of the noise in the variables. The surface temperature in Earth’s warm state follows the radiation of the sun, filtered by ocean currents, amplified in the short term, most probably by cloud albedo, and regulated in the longer term by the negative feedback of cloud albedo. Humans are not involved.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says on 6/20/10 at 12:00 pm said,
>> You overestimate the role of Henry’s Law for seawater: that plays a very tiny part of the whole equation. Most of the CO2 of seawater is not CO2 in solution, but in form of carbonate and bicarbonate. pH, DIC (total dissolved inorganic carbon) play a much larger role and of course temperature, but also biolife. Seawater contains much more CO2 in different forms than fresh water or Henry’s Law will show.
IPCC needed CO2 to accumulate in the atmosphere for its AGW conjecture to work. It tried to resurrect the buffer factor, the Revelle & Suess conjecture that failed. When it tried to measure the buffer factor, it exhibited the temperature dependence of solubility. This appeared in a draft to AR4, which IPCC promptly removed and suppressed.
IPCC reinforced the buffer factor with the model that the surface water is in equilibrium. With that assumption, it applied the chemical equations of equilibrium. The solution to these equations is the Bjerrum plot. The equations showed that the surface layer would be a buffer against CO2 dissolution, and in the bargain, that what CO2 was absorbed would cause a nice, alarming increase in ocean acidity.
Of course, the surface layer is not in equilibrium. It is not in equilibrium even in the most stagnant pool.
If one made a solubility measurement in IPCC’s surface layer model, he would find that Henry’s Coefficient depends not just on temperature, pressure, and salinity, but also on the state of the surface layer according to the Bjerrum plot. This is novel physics, invented to make AGW work.
A far better model, one consistent with all physics but not AGW, is that the surface layer is not in equilibrium. Instead it contains a surplus of molecular CO2, sufficient to preserve Henry’s Law and to itself be a buffer for the ions in the chemical equations. The buffer is not in the atmosphere; it is in the surface layer.

Jeff Glassman says:
June 20, 2010 at 2:16 pm
If one made a solubility measurement in IPCC’s surface layer model, he would find that Henry’s Coefficient depends not just on temperature, pressure, and salinity, but also on the state of the surface layer according to the Bjerrum plot. This is novel physics, invented to make AGW work.
Jeff, one need to make a differentiation between what is measured, what can be calculated and what is speculation in climate science. Besides temperature plots, most direct measurements are done by people interested in good data, whatever these show. That the IPCC (and some intermediates) manipulate the interpretation of the data is of a different category (including the GCM’s and other computer games).
Ocean pCO2 (the result of all factors in seawater: DIC, pH, salinity, biolife,…) were sporadically measured at a lot of places by ships and systematically nowadays and on a few fixed places on earth. E.g. in Bermuda:
http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/IntDecVar_OCC.html
That gives (as sent in a previous message) that we know with reasonable accuracy where the outgassing is from the oceans and where the sinks are. And the intermediates (source in summer, sink in winter). The flux measurements in and out are more difficult to estimate, as wind speed is a huge factor in the exchanges, as simple diffusion and surface crossing is quite slow (there is average only 0.000007 bar difference in pCO2 pressure between the atmosphere and the upper oceans).
All measured pCO2 changes are positive in both air and oceans. The upper oceans track the air concentrations or reverse, but as any (deep) ocean burp would increase the d13C level of the atmosphere (including the sea-air fractionation), and we see the reverse, that proves that the flow is from the atmosphere into the oceans, not the reverse. Moreover, the pH is getting lower while DIC increases. If the lower pH would be the cause of more outgassing (converting -bi-carbonate into CO2, thus increasing oceanic pCO2), that would reduce the DIC content, but we see the reverse.
Thus there is overwhelming evidence that the oceans are not the source of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere, but a net sink.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says on 6/20/10 at 2:16 pm said,
>> Jeff, one need to make a differentiation between what is measured, what can be calculated and what is speculation in climate science. Besides temperature plots, most direct measurements are done by people interested in good data, whatever these show. That the IPCC (and some intermediates) manipulate the interpretation of the data is of a different category (including the GCM’s and other computer games).
We seem to be converging here, which is quite encouraging. My work in this area arises out of what I considered gross errors in the scientific method evident in IPCC reports. In particular, I find the use of an unvalidated model for public policy a breach of ethics for a scientist, and a fraud for personal gain. My observations is that there would be no climate crisis, and especially no CO2 crisis, but for IPCC. I am focused entirely on exposing the IPCC fraud. The rest of climatology can wander over the domain as it might choose, and I might look in on their work from time to time with amusement.
You said,
>>Ocean pCO2 (the result of all factors in seawater: DIC, pH, salinity, biolife,…) were sporadically measured at a lot of places by ships and systematically nowadays and on a few fixed places on earth. E.g. in Bermuda:
http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/IntDecVar_OCC.html
>>That gives (as sent in a previous message) that we know with reasonable accuracy where the outgassing is from the oceans and where the sinks are. And the intermediates (source in summer, sink in winter). The flux measurements in and out are more difficult to estimate, as wind speed is a huge factor in the exchanges, as simple diffusion and surface crossing is quite slow (there is average only 0.000007 bar difference in pCO2 pressure between the atmosphere and the upper oceans).
I think that Takahashi, et al., have done a commendable job in assembling those data into a beautiful model. It is AR4, Figure 7.8, p. 523. The sum of all the individual cells in the Takahashi diagram is correctly the net uptake of the ocean. However, Takahashi’s positive and negative partial sums are not faithful to the uptake and outgassing fluxes used by IPCC in Figure 7.3, p. 515. Therefore, the Takahashi model needs recalibration. I provided an example on my blog. See Rocket Scientist’s Journal, “On Why CO2 Is Known Not To Have Accumulated in the Atmosphere, etc.”, Figure 1A.
You mention “all the factors”, with examples, but excluding dissolved molecular CO2. In my model, I rely on Henry’s Law, with the ocean surface layer a compliant, instantly available buffer. CO2 rich water rises at the end of the subsurface THC in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific (EEP) to outgas at the warmest prevailing SST of the day. (In an equivalent view, the THC can be considered a continuous path, closed by a branch over the surface of the ocean.) A warm air mass, heavily laden with CO2, rises, divides north and south, to enter the Hadley cells, which then carry the gas into the trade winds. This creates a plume of CO2 in the atmosphere that descends across Hawaii. That plume I imagine to be a ridge that can wander with the prevailing wind at MLO, causing it to have a seasonal cycle. (It’s too bad that the MLO data do not seem to include wind measurements.) MLO data represent a major source of atmospheric CO2.
That CO2 then wanders across the surface of the globe with natural wind currents. Meanwhile, the ocean surface layer moves poleward, cooling and reabsorbing CO2. These currents flow to the poles, where the surface water made dense by cooling (always to ice water temperatures) and especially by CO2, and somewhat by salinity (the conventional model), descends to depths as the headwaters of the THC. The polar regions represent major sinks of atmospheric CO2.
The THC subsurface current has many branches by which it reemerges, but a dominant branch leads to the EEP about a millennium later. The lag and the solubility curve shape is measurable in the Vostok record. See http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com, “The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide”.
Some conclusions: surface waters are the major source of atmospheric CO2, and the mean trends of CO2 concentration measured at MLO and the South Pole should not match.

“A warm air mass, heavily laden with CO2, rises, divides north and south, to enter the Hadley cells, which then carry the gas into the trade winds. This creates a plume of CO2 in the atmosphere that descends across Hawaii. That plume I imagine to be a ridge that can wander with the prevailing wind at MLO, causing it to have a seasonal cycle.”
I like that description but how does it square with the similar record at Barrow and other locations ?

Willis Eschenbach says:
June 20, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Mean residence time is the time an average molecule stays in a reservoir. It is calculated as mass divided by throughput. IT DOES NOT HAVE A HALF-LIFE.
While true for identical molecules, there still is a kind of half-life for a pulse of a different isotope (like 14C or 13C)…
For the sake of clarity I have plotted what happens if you add a pulse of “human” aCO2 of 100 GtC at once to the pre-industrial atmosphere containing 580 GtC:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/fract_level_pulse.jpg
Where FA is the fraction of “anthro” CO2 in the atmosphere, FL in the upper oceans, tCA the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and nCA the amount of “natural” CO2 in the atmosphere, the difference being anthropogenic.
It is easy to see that after a pulse the total amount is of course the old amount + the amount in the pulse, which brings the fraction of aCO2 to about 14%. This fraction is fast reduced to near zero in 40-50 years, simply by exchanges with natural CO2 through the permanent and seasonal exchanges between (deep) oceans and vegetation. The reduction of the extra CO2 from the pulse to near zero takes much longer, but despite that there is near no aCO2 left in the atmosphere, the origin of the increased CO2 level compared to the equilibrium still is 100% caused by aCO2.

Steven Wilde on 6/20/10 at 10:53 said,
>>I like that description but how does it square with the similar record at Barrow and other locations?
I rely almost exclusively on IPCC reports, and on papers cited there. I did not find Point Barrow CO2 there. My opinion about the Barring Head CO2 record is the same as that for the South Pole, below.
Re Ferdinand Engelbeen 6/21/10 at 8:36 am
I did not say that the CO2 flow originating at the Equator was the cause of the seasonal fluctuations. My model says that those fluctuations are due to the seasonal fluctuations in the prevailing wind at MLO, which modulate standing waves or gradients in the atmospheric CO2 concentration there.
The model that the CO2 seasonal fluctuations at MLO are due to terrestrial vegetation cycles is IPCC’s model, but it is a weak conjecture. Seasonal fluctuations are seen all over the globe, but they are not in sync. Investigators are still testing the terrestrial model for CO2 fluctuations. You might want to look at Keeling, CD, The Concentration and Isotopic Abundances of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere, Tellus, v. 12, no. 2, 6/60, and Manning, AC and RF Keeling, Correlations in Short-Term Variations in Atmospheric Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory, a Scripps publication, 11/8/60 for four decades of uncertainty in the model.
That the modulation is terrestrial seems implausible because of the massive natural flow that should be dominating MLO concentrations.
At the same time, the MLO concentrations reported by IPCC and in the journals is simply too pat. The record there and at the South Pole looks as though someone had deconstructed the data into a roughly exponential trend line plus a seasonal component, smoothed them both, put them through a recalibration, and then reassembled them. Each series is too perfect, and the comparisons too coincidental. Real data don’t do that.
A good argument can be made that the temperature reconstruction in the Vostok record is global. That is not true of the CO2 record, which is local, sampled inside the CO2 sink of the Antarctic. Both are heavily smoothed, low pass filtered by the fern closure time. The fact that all ice core records exhibit a hockey stick effect when merged into the instrument record is likely due to the difference in filtering plus IPCC data doctoring. What varies with SST is the outgassing in the EEP, which then has a profound effect on MLO. The uptake at the poles is at a constant temperature around 0º to 4ºC which means the ice core records have low variance, independent of SST.
Henry’s Law must have a profound effect for two reasons. One is that it has not been repealed. The other is that the notion that the surface ocean is a bottleneck, making CO2 queue up in the atmosphere waiting for slow sequestration processes to make room for it, is based on the assumption that the stoichiometric equations of equilibrium apply. A far better model that requires repealing nothing is that the surface layer is a buffer for molecular CO2 that allows the flux with the atmosphere and the dissociation, currents, and sequestration all to proceed independently and at their own pace. Atmospheric CO2 is uncoupled with sequestration.
It’s also worth noting that IPCC’s model gives the absorption of CO2 three time constants. This is nonsense, tending to invalidate its model. It is equivalent to having three separate reservoirs and circuits for the CO2. The fastest time constant would dominate the emptying of the reservoir, and that time constant is much faster than IPCC’s fastest. Henry’s Law is a law of equilibrium, but we know from experience that the equilibration time for CO2 dissolution is instantaneous compared with even short term climate.
One more thing is worth stating. The replenishment of CO2 in the surface waters is quite slow because the cooling of the layer is slow as the waters find their way back to the poles. A reasonable model is that Henry’s Law is satisfied everywhere along the path.

Jeff Glassman says:
June 21, 2010 at 4:54 pm
My model says that those fluctuations are due to the seasonal fluctuations in the prevailing wind at MLO, which modulate standing waves or gradients in the atmospheric CO2 concentration there.
As the data from a lot of stations shows the same pattern (and a reverse pattern in the SH), the assumption that prevailing winds are the cause of the seasonal variability at MLO is questionable:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/month_2002_2004_4s.jpg
As all exchanges are at the surface, it is normal that the largest seasonal changes are seen near ground and that there is some lag with altitude (here for the NH):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/seasonal_height.jpg
That the modulation is terrestrial seems implausible because of the massive natural flow that should be dominating MLO concentrations.
While the flows are massive, these are composed of a relative constant term, as emissions from the warm equator and sinks in near the poles are rather constant: the SST’s near the equator and near the poles are relative constant and don’t change much over the seasons, only the position changes somewhat. The main variability is in the mid-latitudes, where temperature and biolife govern the pCO2 of the oceans. But the seasonal trend is opposite to what one expect from higher temperatures in summer: CO2 is lower in summer than in winter. Thus the variability is caused by vegetation, not by the oceans, as also O2 and 13C trends show. Even if these (still) have large margins of error, the mass trend is clear.
At the same time, the MLO concentrations reported by IPCC and in the journals is simply too pat.
Before you accuse someone of manipulating the data, please have a look at the (raw) data yourself. These are available on line for four stations: Barrow, Mauna Loa, Samoa and South Pole:
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/
These are the calculated CO2 levels, based on 2 x 20 minutes 10-second snapshots voltages of the cell + a few minutes voltages measured from three calibration gases. Both the averages and stdv of the calculated snapshots are given. These data are not changed in any way and simply give the average CO2 level + stdv of the past hour.
Some of the data are “flagged”, if the stdv within an hour is high, the difference between subsequent hours is high, with upwind conditions, etc… These “flagged” data are excluded from daily, monthly and yearly averaging, because these represent local contamination and only data deemed “background” are used for averaging. Does that influence the average and trend? Hardly. With or without outliers, the shape and trend is hardly different, only less variable around the (seasonal) trend:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/mlo2004_hr_raw.jpg
for 2004 including all data
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/mlo2004_hr_selected.gif
excluding “flagged” data.
Please check it yourself…
More later…

Further reactions…
A good argument can be made that the temperature reconstruction in the Vostok record is global. That is not true of the CO2 record, which is local, sampled inside the CO2 sink of the Antarctic.
The CO2 record is even more global: today there is hardly any difference in CO2 levels between the North Pole and the South Pole, for 95% of the atmosphere (only over land up to up to 1,000 m there is a lot of noise). There is only a small (14 months) lag between the NH and the SH if one looks at yearly averages, see the difference between the yearly averages of several stations:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends.jpg
Thus the Vostok CO2 record simply represents the global CO2 levels of that time, be it smoothed over about 600 years, as that is the time that all gas bubbles need to be fully closed.
The fact that all ice core records exhibit a hockey stick effect when merged into the instrument record is likely due to the difference in filtering plus IPCC data doctoring.
There is not the slightest role of the IPCC in this case, as the ice core data are sampled by different drilling and measurement teams from different countries. That the different ice cores show the same hockeystick, despite huge differences in accumulation rate, temperature, (coastal) salt inclusions, etc. only strengthens the case that there is a real hockeystick (confirmed by other proxies like d13C changes in sponges) in this case. The ice cores with the best resolution (8 years) show the same trend as those with the worst one (600 years) for the same average gas age and overlap with some 20 years with the direct data of the South Pole:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_001kyr_large.jpg
Henry’s Law must have a profound effect for two reasons. One is that it has not been repealed. The other is that the notion that the surface ocean is a bottleneck, making CO2 queue up in the atmosphere waiting for slow sequestration processes to make room for it, is based on the assumption that the stoichiometric equations of equilibrium apply.
Again you are missing a lot of factors in the exchange of CO2 between oceans and atmosphere. Henry’s Law still is working, but the amount of free CO2 at the surface is not only influenced by temperature, but by a host of other factors. At last it is the real partial pressure of free CO2 in the last few cm of water which decides which way CO2 will go: in or out of the waters, if the difference with pCO2 of the atmosphere is higher or lower. And even then, the flux involved is secondary to wind speed: even if the upper few cm are rapidely in equilibrium with the atmosphere, the diffusion speed to supply CO2 for more emissions or take in CO2 for more uptake is very, very slow. It is the wind/waves which mixes the layers which rules the uptake/release speed.
It’s also worth noting that IPCC’s model gives the absorption of CO2 three time constants. This is nonsense, tending to invalidate its model. It is equivalent to having three separate reservoirs and circuits for the CO2.
In fact there are three reservoirs involved: the ocean surface (+ vegetation), the deep oceans (+ longer term coalification of vegetation) and (silicate) rock weathering. That doesn’t mean that I agree with the Bern model, as the second and third term are only of interest if we should burn all available oil and a lot of coal. Then one would see an important increase of even the deep ocean CO2 content, which shows up in the equatorial upwelling of the THC.
But your fastest time constant is wrong, as it is based on the residence time, not the decay time needed to reduce any excess CO2 above (dynamic) equilibrium.

Jeff Glassman says:
June 22, 2010 at 7:42 am
Even if what you say were true about North Pole and South Pole data, that does not make any South Pole data, today or in the paleo past global. That is not supported by logic. IPCC admits that a measurable east-west gradient exists in global CO2, and that the north-south gradient is 10 times as great as the east-west gradient.
The NH-SH gradient in yearly averages is less than 5 ppmv on a level of 390 ppmv or less than 2%. I call that well-mixed, which is true for 95% of the atmosphere, from the North Pole to the South Pole, including MLO. Well mixed doesn’t imply that at all places on earth at the same time one can find exactly the same levels. But away from huge sources and sinks, within a reasonable mixing time, the levels are within small boundaries.
Thus if the South Pole data are within 2% of the North Pole data within a year, with increasing emissions in the NH today, I may assume that the ice core data from Antarctica represent 95% of the ancient atmosphere, be it smoothed over a long(er) period.
IPCC alters its data to make MLO look smooth, and then alters the records at the South Pole and Baring Head to overlap the MLO and to look indistinguishable in the trend line.
Sorry, this is a bridge too far. The raw hourly data, not adultered or changed in any way, including all outliers are available for checking and comparison for anyone like you and me, at least for four stations, including MLO (I even received a few days of the raw 10-second voltage data for check of the calculations, on simple request). If you have any proof that the data were changed by anyone, or even that the selection procedure has any significant influence on the level, averages or trends, well then we can discuss that. If you have no proof, then this is simply slander.
To the contrary, and as my remark stated, IPCC merged the ice core records into the instrument records. This is unacceptable science. What the laboratories did in creating laboratory data is quite unimportant. The fraud starts with the IPCC.
The merging of the ice core data and the instrument record is acceptable, as that is based on a 20 year overlap of the ice cores from Law Dome with the South Pole direct measurements. There is no difference between CO2 at the South Pole and at the top layer of the firn at the drilling site. There is a small gradient (about 10 ppmv) in the firn from top to start closing depth, which means that the CO2 level at closing depth is about 7 years older than in the atmosphere and there is no difference in CO2 levels between open (firn) air and already closed bubbles in the ice at closing depth. The average closing time is 8 years. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_overlap.jpg
The original article from Etheridge e.a. from 1996 (unfortunately after a paywall) is at:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1996/95JD03410.shtml
Further, there are succesively overlaps between ice cores, all within a few ppmv for the same gas age. That means that CO2 levels were (smoothed) between 180 and 310 ppmv for the past 800,000 years, except for the past 150 years where they reached 335 ppmv in 1980 (ice cores) to 390 in 2010 (firn and air). Nothing to do with (much) higher levels many millions of years ago, when geological conditions were quite different.
As there is a rather linear correlation between temperature and CO2 (Vostok, Dome C) of about 8 ppmv/K, there is no reason to expect that the current increase is caused by temperature (which should imply a 12 K increase to explain the 100 ppmv increase of the past 150 years).
Actually the partial pressure of a gas in water is a fiction. It is taken to be the partial pressure of the gas in the gas state in contact with the water and in equilibrium with it.
The partial pressure of CO2 in water may be a fiction (I don’t thinks so), but the equilibrium with the air above is measured (since many decades) nowadays continuously on seaships and is the driving force for uptake or release of CO2 from/to the air above it. Much more realistic than some theoretical calculation from Henry’s Law which doesn’t take into account other factors than temperature. It can also be calculated from all other components, including temperature. See:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1679548
As I said before, Takahashi got the net flux right. He did not get the 90 to 100 PgC/yr up and down fluxes right.
As Al Tekhasski said under a previous treat, while the Feely e.a. calculation is wrong, as they used (local) averages for pCO2 difference and wind speed for the calculation, while one needs an average of momentary pCO2 difference and momentary wind speed, which is quite different…
In the same spirit of repetitiveness, no decay time is involved. Dynamic and equilibrium are contradictory. You might be referring to a dynamic steady state, which is acceptable on climate scales as a description of the surface layer.
As a (retired) chemical engineer, I have seen hundreds of chemical reactions in dynamic equilibrium, where the equilibrium is shifted by either changing the concentration of one of the components and/or temperature and/or pressure. The whole CO2 cycle behaves as a simple linear first order process, where the “normal” equilibrium was ruled by temperature, now disturbed by the addition of more CO2 from outside the normal cycle. The fact that only halve the amount added is showing up in the atmosphere in an extreme linear way for the past at least 100 years supports that “model”:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
Or do you think that any natural process would follow the human emissions in such an exact way?
You are trying to defend IPCC’s model that ACO2 accumulates in the atmosphere to drive the climate, while nCO2 does not accumulate, but remains in a perpetual dynamic steady state. This model is indefensible.
I never said that aCO2 is accumulating and nCO2 not, to the contrary. In fact aCO2 in first instance adds to the total mass (thus is the cause of the increase), but is readily exchanged by nCO2 on short term. The exchange itself doesn’t change the total mass, but about half of the initial increase (a mix of aCO2 and nCO2) is absorbed by oceans and vegetation, because a slightly higher pCO2 in the atmosphere decreases the outgassing at warm places (where the temperature/Henry’s Law/pCO2 didn’t change) and increases the uptake at colder places (something similar for vegetation alveoles).
You are trying to prove that the extra human CO2 added doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere (as mass! not as individual molecules), despite that all known observations support that, probably because that is one of the cornerstones of the AGW hypothesis. Without accumulation, the AGW hypothesis fails.
I try to see what can be supported and what not on scientific grounds, in the case of accumulation, the IPCC is right. But for the other cornerstone, the effect of the accumulation, the IPCC is wrong (IMHO).