For a another view on the CO2 issue, please see also the guest post by Tom Vonk: CO2 heats the atmosphere…a counter view -Anthony
Guest Post by Ferdinand Engelbeen
There have been hundreds of reactions to the previous post by Willis Eschenbach as he is convinced that humans are the cause of the past 150 years increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. For the (C)AGW theory, that is one of the cornerstones. If that fails, the whole theory fails.
This may be the main reason that many skeptics don’t like the idea that humans are the cause of the increase and try to demolish the connection between human emissions and the measured increase in the atmosphere with all means, some more scientific than others.
After several years of discussion on different discussion lists, skeptic and warmist alike, I have made a comprehensive web page where all arguments are put together: indeed near the full increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by the human emissions. Only a small part might have been added by the (ocean) warming since the LIA. That doesn’t mean that the increase has a tremendous effect on the warming of the earth’s surface, as that is a completely different discussion. But of course, if the CO2 increase was mainly/completely natural, the discussion of the “A” in AGW wouldn’t be necessary. But it isn’t natural, as the mass balance proves beyond doubt and all other observations agree with. And all alternative explanations fail one or more observations. In the next parts I will touch other items like the process characteristics, the 13C and 14C/12C ratio, etc. Finally, I will touch some misconceptions about decay time of extra CO2, ice cores, historical CO2 measurements and stomata data.
The mass balance:
As the laws of conservation of mass rules: no carbon can be destroyed or generated. As there are no processes in the atmosphere which convert CO2 to something else, the law also holds for CO2, as long as it stays in the atmosphere. This means that the mass balance should be obeyed for all situations. In this case, the increase/decrease of the CO2 level in the atmosphere after a year (which only shows the end result of all exchanges, including the seasonal exchanges) must be:
dCO2(atm) = CO2(in1 + in2 + in3 +…) + CO2(em) – CO2(out1 + out2 + out3 +…)
The difference in the atmosphere after a year is the sum of all inflows, no matter how large they are, or how they changed over the years, plus the human emissions, minus the sum of all outflows, no matter how large they are, wherever they take place. Some rough indication of the flows involved is here in Figure 1 from NASA:
From all those flows very few are known to any accuracy. What is known with reasonable accuracy are the emissions, which are based on inventories of fossil fuel use by the finance departments (taxes!) of different countries and the very accurate measurements of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere on a lot of places on earth, including Mauna Loa.
Thus in the above CO2 mass balance, we can replace some of the items with the real amounts (CO2 amounts expressed in gigaton carbon):
4 GtC = CO2(in1 + in2 + in3 +…) + 8 GtC – CO2(out1 + out2 + out3 +…)
Or rearranged:
CO2(in1 + in2 + in3 +…) – CO2(out1 + out2 + out3 +…) = – 4 GtC
Without any knowledge of any natural flow in or out of the atmosphere or changes in such flows, we know that the sum of all natural outflows is 4 GtC larger than the sum of all natural inflows. In other words, the net increase of the atmospheric CO2 content caused by all natural CO2 ins and outs together is negative. There is no net natural contribution to the observed increase, nature as a whole acts as a sink for CO2. Of course, a lot of CO2 is exchanged over the seasons, but at the end of the year, that doesn’t add anything to the total CO2 mass in the atmosphere. That only adds to the exchange rate of individual molecules: some 20% per year of all CO2 in the atmosphere is refreshed by the seasonal exchanges between atmosphere and oceans/vegetation. That can be seen in the above scheme: about 210 GtC CO2 is exchanged, but not all of that reaches the bulk of the atmosphere. Best guess (based on 13C/12C and oxygen exchanges) is that some 60 GtC is exchanged back and forth over the seasons between the atmosphere and vegetation and some 90 GtC is exchanged between the atmosphere and the oceans. These flows are countercurrent: warmer oceans release more CO2 in summer, while vegetation has its largest uptake in summer. In the NH, vegetation wins (more land), in the SH there is hardly any seasonal influence (more ocean). There is more influence near ground than at altitude and there is a NH-SH lag (which points to a NH source). See figure 2:
The net result of all these exchanges is some 4 GtC sink rate of the natural flows, which is variable: the variability of the natural sink capacity is mostly related to (ocean) temperature changes, but that has little influence on the trend itself, as most of the variability averages out over the years. Only a more permanent temperature increase/decrease should show a more permanent change in CO2 level. The Vostok ice core record shows that a temperature change of about 1°C gives a change in CO2 level of about 8 ppmv over very long term. That indicates an about 8 ppmv increase for the warming since the LIA, less than 10% of the observed increase.
As one can see in Fig. 3 below, there is a variability of +/- 1 ppmv (2 GtC) around the trend over the past 50 years, while the trend itself is about 55% of the emissions, currently around 2 ppmv (4 GtC) per year (land use changes not included, as these are far more uncertain, in that case the trend is about 45% of the emissions + land use changes).
We could end the whole discussion here, as humans have added about twice the amount of CO2 to the atmosphere as the observed increase over the past 150 years, the difference is absorbed by the oceans and/or vegetation. That is sufficient proof for the human origin of the increase, but there is more that points to the human cause… as will be shown in the following parts.
Please note that the RULES FOR THE DISCUSSION OF ATTRIBUTION OF THE CO2 RISE still apply!
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Sun Spot says:
August 5, 2010 at 10:12 am
Questions for Ferdinand Engelbeen:
a) What is the NATURAL base line atmospheric ppmv of CO2 to be for planet earth ???
b) Is the natural atmospheric CO2 level dependant on temperature ???
c) What is the optimal atmospheric CO2 level for life on earth ???
d) What is a dangeruosly low atmospheric level of CO2 for life on earth ??
e) If we don’t have answers to the above questions how could we possibly engineer an atmospheric CO2 level that is correct for planet earth as proposed by the IPCC ???
a) No idea, but I should say (if I was a plant): the higher the better…
b) Yes, for the past 800,000 years aboyt 8 ppmv/C on long term.
c) See a)
d) 180 ppmv seems to be te lowest level that many plants can survive, but even if that is measured in the background atmosphere (like in ice cores), that doesn’t apply to the local near ground atmosphere over land, which in general shows higher levels of CO2.
e) Good question for the IPCC…
Fuerther to Caleb’s point about whether ice-core data is reliable, and to Slioch’s reiterating the pre-industrial CO2 level at 280ppm, there are some who question this figure and the reliance on ice-cores. TonyB is the man who knows all about this – where’s he gone? Are you there, Tony?
Engelbeen concludes:
“We could end the whole discussion here, as humans have added about twice the amount of CO2 to the atmosphere as the observed increase over the past 150 years, the difference is absorbed by the oceans and/or vegetation. That is sufficient proof for the human origin of the increase, but there is more that points to the human cause… as will be shown in the following parts.”
Maybe the later parts will add more to this account but, as it stands, it is an application of brute force, the use of a sledge hammer to kill a flee. The argument is very simple. The present mass of CO2 is greater than preindustrial times, the present mass is less than what was added by mankind and, therefore, the oceans took on some of man’s excess but not all. See the sledge hammer. Is there anything in this argument that can be associated with the subtlety of science? Are there any physical hypotheses of note? Has our scientific understanding of the behavior of CO2 in Earth’s many environments been increased. No. Is there a simple logical objection to this sledge hammer argument? Yes. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the rate at which the oceans absorb CO2 increases much faster. So, the argument raises more questions than it answers. Does the author present reasonably confirmed hypotheses about varying rates of absorption of CO2 by the oceans? Well, of course not. He could not make this sledge hammer argument if he did. Do we have such well-confirmed hypotheses? No. In sum, this argument exhibits all the defining characteristics of Warmista argument.
RHS says:
August 5, 2010 at 10:20 am
My only objection to the statement the CO2 cannot be created or destroyed (law of mass conservation) is that neither the Carbon or the Oxygen can be destroyed.
You are right, therefore CO2 is mostly expressed in GtC, as the carbon balance must be right, wherever the CO2 is absorbed or released, no matter in what form. For CO2 in the atmosphere itself it doesn’t matter, as there are no destruction or release reactions, except for a small contribution from the oxydation of organics (methane, natural VOS).
Theo Goodwin says:
August 5, 2010 at 11:43 am
In sum, this argument exhibits all the defining characteristics of Warmista argument.
BINGO! All the defining characteristics of a belief system.
The mass balance claim is a non sequitur. We know that the total fluxes are far higher than the anthropogenic flux and we know that many of the other components are variable, but we do not know how variable. We simply do not know how much CO2 there would have been in the atmosphere at this time in the absence of anthropogenic emission. CO2 levels might have risen at the same rate, or stayed constant, or even gone down. They might even have risen faster! That CO2 levels have increased by a roughly constant third of the emissions is suggestive but not conclusive. Over so short a period, corresponding to an apparent warming trend over the past century, the correlation could easily be no more than coincidence. On this basis it’s more likely than not that the increase is man made, but it’s by no means certain. It’s an obvious conclusion that it is – but the obvious isn’t always correct.
Isotope ratios can’t answer the question either. Leaving aside important caveats about the various natural phenomena that can mimic fossil fuel emissions, all they could tell us is the fraction of CO2 currently in the atmosphere that comes from fossil fuel emissions. It still wouldn’t tell us how much CO2 there would have been in their absence. There is no reason to believe that the various fluxes are independent of each other (and strong reason to suppose that they’re not).
Dave F says:
August 5, 2010 at 8:57 am
What is known with reasonable accuracy are the emissions, which are based on inventories of fossil fuel use by the finance departments (taxes!) of different countries…
Could you please elaborate on how this is done? Is the dollar amount of taxes received for the sales tax on fossil fuel used? Is there some other method?
The sales of all fossil fuels (and a lot of other commodities, even eggs) are followed by the statistics departments, in early days mainly part of the different ministeries of finances, as these have a high interest in receiving their (un?)fair share of the profit on sales. E.g. for the UK that was connected with the finance department, but nowadays that seems to be the department of energy and climate change (oh, help!):
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/business-energy/index.html
You are the real ‘Science Guy’, Anthony!
Thanks for ‘doing what you do’ so well!
And Thank You to Mssrs. Engelbeen and Vonk, for their most interesting posts!
Werner Weber says:
August 5, 2010 at 10:26 am
The linear increase of CO2 is your problem, or what is equilibrium, part II.
That is for part 2, but I have no problems with a linear increase of CO2 (in fact it is slightly exponential, together with the emissions, see: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_emiss_increase.jpg )
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 5, 2010 at 8:33 am (Edit)
tallbloke says:
August 5, 2010 at 8:17 am
Julian Flood posted here last week and said that there are different types of plankton in the ocean which prefer different isotopes of carbon. If I understood him correctly, at the moment, the plankton type which preferentially absorbs the ‘natural’ carbon isotope is in the ascendency. This leaves more of the ‘fossil fuel’ isotope in the atmosphere as the alleged fingerprint of human co2 emission being the cause of increased levels in the atmosphere.
This first part is only about the mass balance, without looking at the isotope ratio’s. Only based on the mass balance, there is no room for any additional CO2 from nature. In one of the next parts, the isotope balance and the oxygen balance will be interpreted. These add to the evidence of the human origin, but don’t give absolute proof. But the mass balance does…
Ferdinand, thanks for the reply and my apologies for introducing this query too early in your series. I will find the actual post Julian made and reintroduce it at that point.
I don’t see how “natural sink” data could be used in good faith when there is no certain understanding of how much CO2 is really being absorbed by the biosphere (and, what is most important, how much CO2 will be absorbed by the biosphere if the atmospheric content of CO2 will keep rising).
Ferdinand
The logic of your oft-repeated statement (below) is wrong if the system involves feedback mechanisms. If a system involves feedback mechanisms, it does NOT always follow that removing one source (or sink) would cause the net to decrease (or increase) by the flux associated with the removed source (or sink).
“… we know that the sum of all natural outflows is 4 GtC larger than the sum of all natural inflows. In other words, the net increase of the atmospheric CO2 content caused by all natural CO2 ins and outs together is negative. There is no net natural contribution to the observed increase, nature as a whole acts as a sink for CO2. “
Anthony, there was a very high quality exchange a few months ago on the AirVent about this issue and Dr. Beck was intervening.
@EthicallyCivil
Although isotopes are said to be “chemically identical” they do respond differently to some chemical reactions. The reason is that a complex chemical reaction can depend on precise timing and energy of the reactants. A heavier atom will be slower and may not have the same energy to achieve the required reaction potential.
Heavy water acts different than regular water and is toxic for this reason.
As with conventional separation methods the percentage difference in mass between the isotopes makes the chemical response in lighter elements more dramatic although there are processes that can even enrich uranium.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 5, 2010 at 8:33 am
mass balance: in this case small difference between large numbers known very imprecisely. and we do not even know if we ALL the factors.
that is not balance. that is just a whole lot of …..
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 5, 2010 at 12:07 pm
(oh, help!): http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/business-energy/index.html
Thanks for the link – makes interesting reading – especially in you live in the UK.
Inland Energy Consumption, 1980 to 2008 (million tonnes of oil equivalent)
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/resources/inlandenergyconsumption_tcm119-23574.jpg
Overall, consumption has grown by 19.7 mtooe (9.63%) in 28 years!
Of that increase 5.3 mtooe has come from Renewables and 3.7 mtooe from Nuclear.
So carbon emitting consumption has increased by 10.7 mtooe (5.23%) in 28 years.
However, the “dash to gas” reduced coal consumption by 48.43% (73.3 down to 37.8)
So I doubt the UK has had an upward impact on the Mauna Loa CO2 readings.
I wasn’t aware that the “natural” carbon cycle was invariant.
What was the heat content of the ocean during the little ice age? In calories would be fine. What is it today?
What is the total amount of carbon that gets chemically locked up and sinks out of sight at plate boundaries vs. the amount of carbon that is released at oceanic ridges?
What was the total biomass of the planet in 1880 and what is it today? Is total biomass growing or falling?
Seems to be a rather bold leap into the geologically, biologically, and chemically ludicrous.
There’s so much missing data that these hasty conclusions trying to be passed off as settled science is laughable.
Frank Lansner says:
August 5, 2010 at 10:57 am
Hi Ferdinand 🙂 Good to see you again in the debate!
Indeed, good to see you (and others) again. Even if we still have a few unresolved disputes… About your last remark:
Finally, with just a simple trend through CO2 measurements of the ocean, it appears that the CO2 content in upper layers of oceans are indeed not rising in the latest decade.
You are looking at pCO2, but that is only about 1% of total carbon (CO2 + bicarbonate + carbonate) in the (upper) oceans and heavily influenced by temperature and alkalinity. In this case, the total carbon at Bermuda increased (until 2004, the last figures I have), while total alkalinity increased, causing a drop in pCO2:
http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/IntDecVar_OCC.html
Gary Pearse says:
August 5, 2010 at 9:22 am
Heck, we get diffusion of elements through solid rock and crystallized minerals (eg: in pegmatites the lithium aluminum silicate mineral spodumene has been invaded by sodium solutions and replaced by the sodium aluminium silicate mineral albite in part or wholly without destroying the original crystal shape – ice wouldn’t be so formidable a barrier to diffusion.
Correct. Essentially, glacial ice is considered a metamorphic rock. Temperature and pressure of metamorphism can be calculated using the amount of diffusion of metal ions (Fe-Mg ratios between garnet-biotite pairs and Ca activity between garnet-plagioclase pairs) between adjacent mineral pairs. However, for example in the pressure calculations using Ca, if Ca has been remobilized during a subsequent metamorphic event, the pressure calculations are invalid. As an example, I had one mineral pair that gave me a negative pressure, which indicated that the rock had been metamorphosed in outer space! There is no reason why CO2 molecules could not be remobilized due to changes in pressure and or temperature or by the introduction of water from another source following fractures through the ice.
The bottom line for me however is the indisputable record contained in the geologic column. A warmer earth with an atmosphere richer in CO2 is a greener earth. Compared to biosphere hay days like the Eocene optimum the present interglacial period looks close to death from exposure to the cold.
I mean to say if you prefer rocks and ice to plants and animals then be all means advocate reducing atmospheric CO2 and whatever else you can to cool the surface down. However, if you prefer a great abundance of plants and animals to rocks and ice then when it comes to fossil fuels —- Burn baby, burn!
As L.B. Klyashtorin and A.A. Lyubushin note in their “On the coherence between the dynamics of the world fuel consumption and global temperature anomaly”, Energy & Environment, Vol. 14, No. 6 (2003), world fuel consumption since the mid-1850s has not been linear – in fact, it has been anything but. As they state (from the graph on page 775), global consumption of fossil fuels (world fuel consumption, or WFC) rose slowly from 1861 to about 1950, rose very rapidly from about 1950 to the late 1980s, declined briefly, and then began rising again in the mid-1990s. If increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration were principally due to anthropogenic carbon emissions, then changes in CO2 concentration would correlate closely with changes in aggregate WFC. It does not.
It’s also worth noting that, historically, energy consumption declines markedy in response to shattering economic catastrophes. We saw significant declines, for example, in US energy consumption during the 1973 oil shock, the 84-84 recession, and as a consequence of the collapse of the dot-com bubble and 9/11. Energy consumption has been declining again in the US and other western countries for the past 18 months as a consequence of the current economic crisis – and yet atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue trickling steadily upward, following the same cyclical annual pattern they have followed throughout the observable record. Where’s the deflection in the rate of change in CO2 concentrations correlating with changes in energy consumption that we would expect if the latter caused the former?
(Of course, the broader point of the K&L argument is that the lack of any detectable correlation between delta CO2 and delta T over the entire period of human industrialization precludes the possibility of a causal relationship between the latter and the former. That of course is a different discussion.)
Malaga View says:
August 5, 2010 at 10:59 am
NO – you are not correct.
You have no idea what caused the observed increase and you have no idea whether your observed increase is correct.
Lets assume your formula is correct and your Carbon Cycle graphic is vaguely realistic
So the 5.5 “fossil fuels and cement production” (EM) in the graphic equals 8GtC.
Therefore, the ocean outgassing (OO) of 90 in the graphic equals roughly 131.
So lets retry your equation for ocean outgassing:
4 GtC = CO2(in1 + in2 + in3 +…) + 131 GtC – CO2(out1 + out2 + out3 +…)
See your problem?
CO2(in1 + in2 + in3 +…) – CO2(out1 + out2 + out3 +…) = -127
I don’t see any problem at all. If we didn’t know what the human emissions were, there would be a problem. Then we can’t know the result of the emissions. But we know that the emissions are double the measured increase in the atmosphere: in your example, the one known extra natural input from the oceans is 131 GtC/year, the net result is an increase of 4 GtC/year, thus the sum of all outputs (to the oceans and vegetation) must take away 127 GtC/year extra to compensate for the increased ocean input. But one of the other inputs, human emissions, is 8 GtC, whatever one of the in’s (in1, in2, in3,…) it is. Thus the real natural output, whatever the extra more or less outgassing of the oceans is, must be 4 GtC more natural outs than natural ins.
Take it in another view: if there were no human emissions in the past years and today, would the CO2 level in the atmosphere have increased, decreased or stayed level? And next year(s)?
I haven’t read all the comments so if this is a repeat apologies but thanks for putting up both articles – even if they are a slightly, not quite, maybe, counter each other. Both are excellent in their own right. This is the kind of science most of us skeptics kind of expected the UN (and member states) funded organisations to engage in. But they haven’t.
James Sexton says:
August 5, 2010 at 11:38 am
I see you answered part of my questions with a response to another person. Thanks, but if… [snipped]… is true then how did we get to 2000 ppmv CO2 100 million years ago?
Different times: different arrangement of the continents, different temperature/humidity, less calcite deposits,… The 8 ppmv/C only is for the last near million years, more ice age than interglacial, everything before that can’t be compared with current times…
Ferdinand, this AR4 illustration (2007) goes a bit further than 2004, and its quite clear that both the Atlantic and Pacific stations used in AR4 shows no rise in pCO2 in surace water for a decade.
Why?
How much can atmospheric CO2 rise when ocean surface pCO2 has stoped rising?
And Ferdinand, even though this pCO2 of the ocean is measured in upper ocean layers, be aware that upper layers should be even easier to affect for human CO2. So still a stagnating ocean pCO2 is a nasty problem to get around if one believe that human CO2 rules the CO2 levels today.
The obvious and “too easy” explanation for the stagnating pCO2 is of course a fast growing biosphere that “threatens” to make the Earths CO2 levels dive in not so distant future. A dive that pehaps has some implications not so welcome for food production around the world.
K.R. Frank Lansner