Via press release from the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science
New carbon dioxide emissions model
Meteorologists have determined exactly how much carbon dioxide humans can emit into the atmosphere while ensuring that the earth does not heat up by more than two degrees
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated projected temperature changes for various scenarios in 2007 and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg have now gone one step further: they have developed a new model that specifies the maximum volumes of carbon dioxide that humans may emit to remain below the critical threshold for climate warming of two degrees Celsius. To do this, the scientists incorporated into their calculations data relating to the carbon cycle, namely the volume of carbon dioxide absorbed and released by the oceans and forests. The aim of the international ENSEMBLES project is to simulate future changes in the global climate and carbon dioxide emissions and thereby to obtain more reliable threshold values on this basis. (Climatic Change, July 21, 2010)
Fig.: Evolution of the carbon dioxide emissions calculated by the model (left) and the temporal development of the global mean annual temperature (right). In order to achieve the long-term stabilisation of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, fossil carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to around zero by the end of the century. The black lines represent the observed values. (GtC/year = gigatons carbon/year)
Image: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by the combustion of fossil fuels (gas, oil) has increased by around 35 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. If carbon dioxide emissions and, as a result, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations continue to increase unchecked, a drastic increase in the global temperature can be expected before the end of this century. With the help of new models for a prescribed atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, scientists from all over Europe have now calculated for the first time the extent to which the global carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to halt global warming.
“What’s new about this research is that we have integrated the carbon cycle into our model to obtain the emissions data,” says Erich Roeckner. According to the model, admissible carbon dioxide emissions will increase from approximately seven billion tonnes of carbon in the year 2000 to a maximum value of around ten billion tonnes in 2015. In order to achieve the long-term stabilisation of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, the emissions will then have to be reduced by 56 percent by the year 2050 and approach zero towards the end of this century. Although, based on these calculations, global warming would remain under the two-degree threshold until 2100, further warming may be expected in the long term: “It will take centuries for the global climate system to stabilise,” says Erich Roeckner.
The scientists used a new method with which they reconstructed historical emission pathways on the basis of already-calculated carbon dioxide concentrations. To do this, Erich Roeckner and his team adopted the methodology proposed by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for simulations being carried out for the future Fifth IPCC Assessment Report: earth system models that incorporate the carbon cycle were used to estimate the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions that are compatible with a prescribed concentration pathway. In this case, the emissions depend solely on the proportion of the anthropogenic carbon in the model that is absorbed by the land surface and the oceans. Repetition of the experiments using different pre-industrial starting dates enabled the scientists to distinguish between anthropogenic climate change and internal climate variability.
The model used for this study is based on a low-resolution spatial grid with a grid spacing of around 400 kilometres, which takes the atmosphere, plus the land surface, the ocean, including sea ice, and the marine and terrestrial carbon cycle into account.
The overall aim of the study is to simulate future changes in the climate and carbon dioxide emissions in a single scenario in which the carbon dioxide equivalent concentrations in the atmosphere are stabilised in the long term at 450 parts per million (ppm), so that global warming increases to a maximum of two degrees above the pre-industrial level. The data are currently being evaluated by other European climate centres. “As soon as all of the results are available, we can evaluate the spread between the models,” says Erich Roeckner. “The more significant the data we have, the more accurate our forecast will be.”
Related links:
[1] Website of the ENSEMBLES project
Original work:
Erich Roeckner, Marco A. Giorgetta, Traute Crueger, Monika Esch, Julia Pongratz
Historical and future anthropogenic emission pathways
Someone as great a thinker as Max Planck deserves better people running an Institute named after him. It’s just sad.
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science advances models which advance policies of impoverishment of daily life for all people.
This could not be a clearer statement of what is now meant by the term Science. It is highly politicized and lost.
And more people haven’t figured out that physics is just as dysfunctional, and that the patent office may be just as politicised.
“they have developed a new model that specifies the maximum volumes of carbon dioxide that humans may emit to remain below the critical threshold for climate warming of two degrees Celsius”
Yes, but …
“a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.
[…]
“But this is scientific nonsense. “Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.”
“Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,687259,00.html
Maybe the folks at Max Planck need to have a chat with the folks at PIK?!
As for me, I think I’m going to stick with the advice of Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, (Nobel co-recipient in Physics, 1998):
“Climate change … is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself. […] The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/what-the-earth-knows/
“According to the model, admissible carbon dioxide emissions will increase…to a maximum value of around ten billion tonnes in 2015.” “… the emissions will then have to be reduced by 56 percent by the year 2050 and approach zero towards the end of this century.”
Well that is looking a bit logically inconsistent and politically expedient, isn’t it?
Gail Combs says:
August 3, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Merovign says:
August 3, 2010 at 6:29 pm
At what point does someone claim they need to manage the relation between plant and animal biomass to control CO2?
I’m not kidding, you know it’s occurred to someone.
Reply: Once we have stabilised the climate there will be no need for climate scientists.
There will be a large qty of these by that time therefore I suggest the meat of the day will be them. QED
cheerio
Jim
Gargbage in, garbage out.
The Max Planck Institutes get a lot of EU research money, German research funds, and a lot of payments from industry to help in developing and evaluating green technology. EU means: not democratically accountable; Crazy Connie from Denmark; you know the drill. It’s not a gravy train; it’s a gold rush. Max Planck has the biggest innate interest to perpetuate that.
Plink, plonk, plunk.
This latest CO2 outgassing from our warmist elite deserves only one response from me.
FUBAR!
Arno Arrak says:
August 3, 2010 at 7:33 pm
I don’t think you will get much of a response regarding Miskolczi. Most of the people here know about his work, and the AGW advocates don’t know how to respond. I’ve noted before that there has been no peer reviewed response to Miskolczi’s 2007 paper. Judith Curry said that it’s because it was published in an obscure journal. I think it’s because they don’t really know how. And the failure to respond just increases his credibility.
I think they need to get out a little more than perhaps they do just now!
I could be wrong here but I think there is a Max Planck Institute which is the educated part of the use of the name. These wassocks are something else. Perhaps a socialist think tank?
They should change their name to Pol Pot Institute.
@DirkH says: August 4, 2010 at 12:10 am
Precisely! This paper from these Thick as Planks clowns has absolutely NOTHING to do with science. Follow the money!
Essential reading and an excellent place to start:-
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/43291
‘Data’, which my dictionary informs me is ‘factual information taken from direct observation or measurement’ is NOT produced by models of any kind. Data produced by models is not data at all, it is nothing more than ephemera similar to the fairies that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used to watch in his rest periods taken after writing his Sherlock Holmes novels.
I am sure that the authors of this current opus are all correctly-validated science people with Phuds and all sorts of other impressive personal credentials, but are they sane? If they are, they must all be rolling around the floor laughing at how stupid people are that have taken them seriously. Either that, or the lunatics have taken over that particular asylum.
The emissions must be around zero, ideally negative. Humans will have to switch from breathing to photosynthesis. All of us should be replaced by the extra trees above our graves. Prof Schneider has already been transmuted in this way
.
This made my day 🙂 Let’s start the photosynthesis training TODAY !
The Aliens are CO2 intolerant.
Here we go again!!. Can ANYONE here help me with the questions that I have been posting ?
A few months before Climategate broke, I started my own investigations to see if my carbon footprint (CO2) really causes global warming, as claimed. To start off with, I found Svante Arrhenius’ formula completely wrong and since then I could not find any correctly conducted experiments (tests & measurements) that would somehow prove to me that the warming properties of CO2 (by trapping earth’s radiation between the wavelengths 14-15 um) are greater than its cooling properties (by deflecting sunlight at various wavelengths between 0 – 5 um). Even more disconcerting to me was finding that pupils at school and college are shown experiments with 100% carbon dioxide (representing earth’s atmosphere of only 0.04% or 380 ppms CO2!) and a light bulb as an energy source (representing the sun!). Obviously such crude experimentation can only lead to incorrect results and completely incorrect conclusions…e.g. what about the IR and near IR absorptions of CO2 and the UV absorptions of CO2 that have only been discovered recently and that also deflect sunlight?
I also found untruths in Al Gore’s story (An Inconvenient Truth). A lot of CO2 is dissolved in cold water and comes out when the oceans get warmer. Any chemistry student knows that the first smoke from the (warmed) water in a kettle is the CO2 being released. So, quite a number of scientists have reported that the increases of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past lagged the warming periods by quite a few hundred years… Cause and effect, get it? Smoking causes cancer but cancer does not cause smoking. But Al made it look from the past that our CO2 output must be the cause of global warming.
Just to put the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere into the right perspective: it has increased by about 0.01% in the past 50 years from ca. 0.03% to 0.04%. This compares with an average of about 1 % for water vapor in the air. Note that most scientists agree that water vapor is a very strong green house gas, and a much stronger green house gas than carbon dioxide… (if indeed carbon dioxide is a green house gas, which, like I said before, has yet to be proven to me). It is also logical for me to suspect that as a result of human activities relating to burning, bathing, cooking, boiling, countless cooling processes (including that for nuclear energy), erection of dams and shallow pools, etc. a lot more water vapor than carbon dioxide is put up in the air.
The paper that confirmed to me that CO2 is (also) cooling the atmosphere by re-radiating sunshine is this one:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/644/1/551/64090.web.pdf?request-id=76e1a830-4451-4c80-aa58-4728c1d646ec
they measured this radiation as it bounced back to earth from the moon. So the direction of the radiation was:sun-earth-moon-earth. Follow the green line in fig. 6, bottom. Note that it already starts at 1.2 um, then one peak at 1.4 um, then various peaks at 1.6 um and 3 big peaks at 2 um.
This paper here shows that there is absorption of CO2 at between 0.21 and 0.19 um (close to 202 nm):
http://www.nat.vu.nl/en/sec/atom/Publications/pdf/DUV-CO2.pdf
There are other papers that I can look for again that will show that there are also absorptions of CO2 at between 0.18 and 0.135 um and between 0.125 and 0.12 um.
We already know from the normal IR spectra that CO2 has big absorption between 4 and 5 um.
So, to sum it up, we know that CO2 has absorption in the 14-15 um range causing some warming (by re-radiating earthshine) but as shown and proved above it also has a number of absorptions in the 0-5 um range causing cooling (by re-radiating sunshine). This cooling happens at all levels where the sunshine hits on the carbon dioxide same as the earthshine. The way from the bottom to the top is the same as from top to the bottom. So, my question is: how much cooling and how much warming is caused by the CO2? How was the experiment done to determine this and where are the test results? (I am afraid that simple heat retention testing might not work here, we have to use real sunshine and real earthshine to determine the effect in W/m3 [0.03%- 0.06%]CO2/m2/24hours). I am also doubtful of just doing analysis (determining surface areas) of the spectral data, as some of the UV absorptions of CO2 have only been discovered recently. Also, I think the actual heat caused by the sun’s IR at 4-5 maybe underestimated, e.g. the amount of radiation of the sun between 4 and 5 maybe small but how many Watts does it cause? Here in Africa you can not stand in the sun for longer that 10 minutes, just because of the heat of the sun on your skin.
Anyway, with so much at stake, surely, someone actually has to come up with some empirical testing?
If this research has not been done, why don’t we just sue the oil companies to do this?? It is their product afterall.
I am going to state it here quite categorically again that if no one has got these results, then how do we know for sure that CO2 is a greenhouse gas? Maybe the cooling properties are equal to the warming properties?
I have also been thinking of the ozone concentration in the air: Assuming that its cooling properties are higher than its warming properties (did anyone test that?), then lower concentrations, as in the past, before CFC’s were banned, can be a cause for global warming; increasing levels, as noted in the past 10 years can be a cause of global cooling?
So the net effect of the increases in CO2 and ozone is close to zero or even cooling?
(I have no financial interest in any of this, I just started my investigations because I felt a bit guilty about driving my car)
Arno Arrak says:
August 3, 2010 at 7:33 pm
It sounds like the sort of thing I should know more about. I’ve heard the general point made before, but not with 61 years of data. You’d *think* all those iconoclastic sciencey-types would want to follow up on that, but perhaps that’s just a little conceit.
Gail Combs says:
August 3, 2010 at 8:26 pm
I’d actually heard about the “must get rid of livestock” thing before, but was too lazy to look it up. Thanks and sorry. 🙂
As far as BMI, the whole idea is critically offensive, they’ve managed to wrap up an invasion of privacy (obvious), rampant bureaucracy (those collecting and collating for no good reason), unfunded mandates (reporting requirements), bad medicine (judging health based on a single meaningless number), and junk science (the “BMI” measurement itself is meaningless rubbish – a large number of fit people are “obese” under that standard, and they changed the definitions in 1997, declaring 30 million people newly “overweight” in one day) – all that combined in one simple, stupid action.
Sorry for the diversion, but junk science really ticks me off, and it’s *everywhere*.
“The answer, sir, is in the plural. And they bounce.”
W. S. Churchill.
Isn’t the AGW theory dependent on a long co2 residency time in the atmosphere? The IPCC says a maximum of 100 years while most put the maximum at 25 years or less. Am I wrong here? Maybe the Max Planck Society has a different number of years.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5e507c9970c-pi
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef800581r
I’ll shut off my gas and electricity right after AlGore shuts off his. And right after Brad Pitt stops flying around in a private jet.
Hmm, the last figures I looked at put human contribution to annual CO2 at 3.5%.
Residency time for CO2 has been measured several times and pans out between 5 and 13 years. The Hockey Schtick blog has one such study on it’s front page as I write.
Given the well documented, in peer review papers, observations above this latest model would appear to be, ( at my most diplomatic here ), rather badly flawed.
UK Sceptic says:
Close… when someone tells me I need to stop emitting ANY CO2 while I live in a winter climate and need to drive several miles to work every day, I don’t think FUBAR… I think FOAD.
New carbon dioxide emissions model
And they’re still messing around with 1:1,000,000 scale. At this rate, it’ll take them *forever* just to get to 1:72…