Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement, calling it a ‘corrupt social phenomenon’.
He writes this in an essay on science trust issues plus adds this powerful closing passage about climate science:
And there is a thorough critique of the science as band wagon trumpeting and interested self-deception [4]. Climategate only confirms what should be obvious to any practicing scientist: That science is a mafia when it’s not simply a sleeping pill.
Now he thinks that fossil fuel burning isn’t a problem of significance based on the scale. Excerpts below.
Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?
by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.
After all, the Earth is a planet. Is even the presence of humans significant on the rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?
We certainly make every effort to see ourselves as significant on this spinning ball in space. We like to point out that the lights from our cities can be seen from our extra-atmospheric “spaceships” at night and that we have deforested continents and reduced the populations of large wild mammals and of fishes but is all this really significant in the planetary web known as the biosphere?
INSIGNIFICANCE OF FOSSIL FUEL BURNING ENERGY RELEASE
The present (2010) historic maximum of anthropogenic (caused by humans) fossil fuel burning is only 8% or so of global primary production (GPP) (both expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y). GPP is the rate at which new biomass (living matter) is produced on the whole planet. And of course all biomass can in principle be considered fuel that could be burned with oxygen (O2) to produce CO2 gas, H2O water, energy, and an ash residue.
This shows the extent to which anthropogenic energy production from fossil fuel burning is small in comparison to the sun’s energy delivery to Earth, since biomass primary production results from the sun’s energy via photosynthesis.
…
In summary, the total amount of post-industrial fossil fuel burned to date (and expressed as kilograms of carbon) represents less than 1% of the global bio-available carbon pools.
More importantly, bio-available carbon is a minor constituent of the Earth’s surface environment and one that is readily buffered and exchanged between compartments without significant consequences to the diversity and quantity of life on the planet. The known history of life on Earth (over the last billions of years) is unambiguous on this point.
…
This ocean acidification side show on the global warming science bandwagon, involving major nation research centers and international collaborations, is interesting to compare with the 1970s-1980s hoax of boreal forest lake acidification. [1][2]
More importantly, scientists know virtually nothing about the dynamic carbon exchange fluxes that occur on all the relevant time and lengths scales to say anything definitive about how atmospheric CO2 arises and is exchanged in interaction with the planet’s ecological systems. We are barely at the point of being able to ask intelligent questions.
…
For left progressives to collaborate with First World governments that practice global extortion and geopolitical wars in order to pass carbon schemes to undemocratically manage and control the developments of non-First-World communities and sovereign states is obscene, racist, and cruelly cynical.
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RW says:
September 21, 2010 at 2:00 am “Measurements show that the oceans are absorbing CO2, not outgassing it.”
They are doing both, and there is no reason to believe that the isotopic ratios must be the same in both directions. They will naturally vary over time, and by time of day, season of year, latitude, temperature and a thousand other factors. The net effect of the oceans on the isotope ratios could go either way, and could easily account for the observations by themselves, let alone in concert with all the other poorly understood factors.
Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:40 am
Sure. It hasn’t even come close to tracking it. Atmospheric CO2 has increased by only a small fraction of total fossil fuel combustion.
Come on Dave, what about the increase tracking the emissions with a ratio of 53%, good to explain 99.66% of the increase? See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
Any natural cause which would track the emissions at such an exact ratio?
We know, thanks Al, that increases in atmospheric CO2 lag rising temperature by about 800 years. Now when was that MWP again?
My (vague) acceptance of CO2 as a driver of global temperature vanished when I considered how small a component of the atmosphere it is at 0.039%. You would have to believe that CO2 was a catalyst of some sort, like platinum say, to do anything and the “forcing” hypotheses all seem very far fetched to me.
I live on a continent that seems to burn to a cinder every year yet nobody even counts that in the great equation, all that seems to matter is “fossil” fuel. It’s all just a crock.
As I have said in the past on here , I have lived in this climate for over 60 years. Every year is different but in the same way. A little hotter, colder, wetter, dryer, later earlier but always much of a muchness. In the meantime the one thing that is driving poverty, pestilence, hunger and despair is bad governance.
Bad governance around the world leads to misery and despair for many, many people yet the UN can do bugger all about it. Nothing. Yet the UN pretends that it can control the climate by introducing world wide de-industrialization. Just look at the stupid initiatives they try in Africa that all assume Africa is a playground for bizarre experiments in “appropriate technology” that just keep Africans at the bottom of the development tree while leaving bad, corrupt, incompetent governments in place.
In other words the UN wants to bring bad governance to the whole world by reducing us all to the lowest common denominator, poverty. The UN was set up to prevent war in the world, well they have seriously failed on that count. In fact it is very difficult to point out any success story from the UN except for those instances where the USA has stepped up and done what was right.
A small coterie of seriously deluded but very clever men have made a vigorous attempt to establish themselves at the very top of the food chain for their own benefit and if this had happened before the advent of the internet they would have found it very easy indeed.
CO2 is not the enemy, bad government is.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:13 am
“That humans are not the only cause of the increase easely can be falsified, if the measured increase in the atmosphere was larger than the calculated emissions. As long as that is not the case, the emissions are the sole cause. It is that simple.”
Are you still spouting that idiotic logical fallacy? You still can’t see that in a complex continuously varying system with feedback or adaption it is meaningless to label any one thing as the “sole cause” on the basis of an underspecified simple sum? How can you call anything a sole cause when you simply do not know what would have happened in its absence? You don’t know what the CO2 concentration would have been. You don’t know what the isotopic ratio would have been. I guess I was right to ignore your parts 2 and 3. You are just making the same egregious blunders all over again.
Paul Birch says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:34 am
They are doing both, and there is no reason to believe that the isotopic ratios must be the same in both directions. They will naturally vary over time, and by time of day, season of year, latitude, temperature and a thousand other factors. The net effect of the oceans on the isotope ratios could go either way, and could easily account for the observations by themselves, let alone in concert with all the other poorly understood factors.
Indeed oceans release and absorb CO2, but the net effect over a year and the past decades is more absorption than release. That is measured in two long-term series (Bermuda and Hawai) and several other shorter series + more sporadic ships measurements. See the increase in DIC (CO2 + bicarbonate + carbonate) at Bermuda:
http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/IntDecVar_OCC.html
The isotopic fractionation is not the same in both directions, but the average decrease from a back-and-forth transfer is -8 per mil between water and air. That means that deep ocean water upwelling would be break-even for the current atmosphere, but that surface water exchanges would increase the d13C level of the atmosphere. And as there is slightly more uptake than release by the oceans, the oceans are a net increaser for 13C in the atmosphere. As we measure a decrease, as well as in the atmosphere and with some delay in the ocean’s mixed layer, the oceans are not the cause of the d13C decline, neither of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere.
See further the previous discussion at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-3/
Mark S says:
September 20, 2010 at 4:10 pm
@mkelly
I had the entire thing memorized at one time so I know what it was they were saying. However, my point was, re: the refrain, is that anti human ideas go back a long way.
Be glad your dog now gets more cheese.
Paul Birch says:
September 21, 2010 at 7:01 am
Are you still spouting that idiotic logical fallacy? You still can’t see that in a complex continuously varying system with feedback or adaption it is meaningless to label any one thing as the “sole cause” on the basis of an underspecified simple sum? How can you call anything a sole cause when you simply do not know what would have happened in its absence? You don’t know what the CO2 concentration would have been. You don’t know what the isotopic ratio would have been. I guess I was right to ignore your parts 2 and 3. You are just making the same egregious blunders all over again.
We have a pretty good idea what would happen today without human emissions: we would see a decrease of CO2 levels. Most skeptics and warmers alike agree on this, they only disagree on the speed of decrease.
That is based on 800,000 years of relative equilibrium between temperature and CO2 levels over the glacials and interglacials, where the previous interglacial was warmer than today with 290 ppmv CO2.
The same for isotopic levels, which were quite stable for the last 600 to 11,000 years, but suddenly start to decline since about 1850, just by coincidence (?) together with the increase of fossil fuel use…
And as I have seen many times in my professional carreer, the simple answers many times are the right ones…
In this case, still:
8 GtC/year emissions – 4 GtC/year increase = 4 GtC/year natural sink rate
Thus nature as a whole is a net sink, not a source, whatever the individual natural inflows and outflows might be or may have changed over the past at least 50 years.
Indeed it is that simple…
I view fossil fuel burning as tapping into nature’s piggy bank of stored photosynthetic energy and nutrients. During better times for the biosphere (read not in an ice age like we’re in now) an abundance of plants and animals, they say the earth was lush from pole to pole, expired and decomposed in anaerobic conditions into an energy & nutrient rich mix of solids, liquids, and gases. Putting it back into the biosphere during an ice age seems like a good thing for as long as we can manage it. The biggest problem in my estimation is the piggy bank has a bottom and when we get close to it that’s when the real trouble begins. Unless of course a supervolcano, big asteroid or comet impace, coronal mass ejection, nearby supernova, disease, or things of nature don’t take out modern civilization first. Life is robust and has survived these assaults countless times. Civilization is what is fragile.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 7:17 am “…”
I quickly lost count of the number of non sequiturs and contradictions in that comment. It would be pointless trying to point them out to you, since you are still mired in your basic logical error. The fact of the matter is that neither the magnitude nor the sign of the effect of the oceans on isotope ratios is known; the data to determine them do not exist and are unlikely to do so for the forseeable future. The observations that have been and are being made are fundamentally incapable of settling the question, because they are compatible with multiple contradictory hypotheses.
A greenhouse with a huge hole in its roof (ozone layer) is not a greenhouse. There can be no greenhouse effect without a greenhouse.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 2:15 am
“Compare that to a fountain with a huge pump circulating the water in the reservoir with some 10,000 liter per minute, while you add 1 liter per minute in the reservoir with a hose. The addition is only 1/10,000th of the total “addition”, but even so the content of reservoir will increase from the 1 liter per minute, not from the 10,000 liter which circulates.”
This is not an apt metaphor. The fountain has a drain.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 3:48 am
“The historical record is smoothed … indeed there are competing processes, which maintain a rather tight equilibrium: oceans and vegetation counteract each other for temperature changes…”
It is the nature of feedback systems, Ferdinand, that they do not react one way to normal inputs, and another way for others. If a tight equilibrium is being maintained, then the system has the bandwidth for low sensitivity to exogenous inputs.
“No, the year by year natural variation is not more that +/-2 GtC, compared to an increase of nowadays 4 GtC/year from 8 GtC/year human emissions.”
That is almost pure conjecture. It amazes me how you cannot see the number of thinly supported assumptions you implicitly make in such statements.
“There is little doubt that the historical record is wrong.”
I’d agree with you there, but I suspect you typed in haste.
“There are no signs that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is decelerating, it follows the accumulated emissions with an extremely constant rate:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
Although I haven’t the latest emissions figures…”
Plot the annual mean growth here. It is quite obvious.
With the possible exception of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps, there isn’t a square mile of land that hasn’t been seriously affected by human action, going back at least two thousand years and probably more than fifteen thousand.
~wolfwalker 9:29
You should come to Alberta or B.C. Canada, maybe take a drive up the Alaskan Highway.
You’d see so much untouched wilderness from the car you would probably soil your pants in fear.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 3:30 am
“CO2 from natural of non-natural bush fires, wood burning, exhaling CO2 from all lifeforms, vegetation decay,… doesn’t count: it is all recirculating CO2 which was captured a few days to a few hundred years ago from the same atmosphere.”
And, if that captured “a few hundred years ago” were suddenly to be released?
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:13 am
“That humans are not the only cause of the increase easely can be falsified, if the measured increase in the atmosphere was larger than the calculated emissions. As long as that is not the case, the emissions are the sole cause. It is that simple.”
This is logically flawed. All the measured increase shows is that, at least temporarily, the net sinks are less than the net sources. But, it does not say anything about the internal composition of sinks and sources.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:36 am
“Any natural cause which would track the emissions at such an exact ratio?”
Any affine trend slope is a precise ratio of any other trend slope. This is a tautology.
@Engelbeen
Air entrapment in ice cores occur at depths of 60 to 100 meters. The oldest & longest core taken is 3000 meters and the bottom is ostensibly dated at 160,000 years barely reaching back into the prior interglacial. Anyhow, if the dating is accurate the average deposition time for a meter of ice is about 5 years and entrapment doesn’t occur for 300 – 500 years and that’s assuming gas migration and chemistry with and through the ice stops at that point even under tens and eventually hundreds of bars of bars of pressure where ice acts like a slow moving liquid with horizontal flow confounding things. Thus any reading of atmospheric gases in entrapped bubbles is an average of those gases at best of 300-500 years. Short term fluctuations such as might be driven by climate cycles less than a century in duration, like the decadal oscillations of ocean surface temperatures cannot be read from ice cores.
I understand that laboratory measurements of CO2 began about 200 years ago and contrary to indirect or proxy paleoreconstructions CO2 in the past 200 years has been recorded as high as 400ppm. Warmists dismiss these with a wave of their hand saying there must be some kind of mistake made in the measurement despite the fact that beginning around 1850 it was a standard chemical test with 3% or better accuracy.
So bascially thousands of lab measurements of CO2 for more than 100 years before Mauna Loa became the yardstick are being ignored and in this same period ice core data is missing because it takes at least 300 years for entrapment.
Paul Birch says:
September 21, 2010 at 7:56 am
The fact of the matter is that neither the magnitude nor the sign of the effect of the oceans on isotope ratios is known; the data to determine them do not exist and are unlikely to do so for the forseeable future. The observations that have been and are being made are fundamentally incapable of settling the question, because they are compatible with multiple contradictory hypotheses.
Have you read any of the more recent works on ocean chemistry? They follow the fate of human CO2 into the depth of the oceans, thanks to the isotope changes as tracer (and modern non-natural chemicals like CFC’s). See chapter 4 of:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~gruber/publication/pdf_files/gruber_thesea_02.pdf
There is little variation in deep ocean d13C (as can be deduced from carbonate sediments) over the past millions of years, there may be some more in surface waters, but that depends mainly on net biogenic production. There is little change over the past 11,000 years since the start of the Holocene in atmospheric d13C. Thus the combined influence of ocean temperature and biolife on d13C levels in the atmosphere was minimal. Until around 1850, when d13C levels in the atmosphere and the oceans mixed layer start to decline. Because there is no source of low d13C in the oceans (and carbon levels increase in the mixed layer), the source is in the atmosphere, not in the oceans.
And if you have references to some of the contradictory hypothesis, I am very interested.
Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:00 am
Claims need to be tested. How do you propose to test that one?
The very same radiative transfer equations which are validated by observations. Radiation ar t frequnencies which can be absorbed by water vapour can also be absorbed by other ghgs. Remove all water vapour and ~36% of the greenhouse effect would be lost, i.e. ~64% would remain. Remove all other ghgs except for water vapour and ~66% would remain. That, of course, assumes it would be possible to remove all other ghg AND retain the current concentration of water vapour.
In fact the claim that water vapor dominates the greenhouse effect to that proportion was experimentally tested and confirmed over 150 years ago by John Tindall.
The presence of water vapour in the atmosphere relies on (a) warming at the surface and (b) a relatively wam atmosphere to hold the water vapour. The average residence time for water vapour molecules is a matter of days. Water vapour is essentially a feedback. Without the other ghgs the surface and atmosphere would be colder and the concentration of water vapour would be reduced.
” Humans have devastated the natural order of things over most of the globe. With the possible exception of the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps, there isn’t a square mile of land that hasn’t been seriously affected by human action, going back at least two thousand years and probably more than fifteen thousand.”
Whoever said this does not get out much. Humans are by and large concentrated in the cities. Come on out to the Rockies for a different perspective.
Bart says:
September 21, 2010 at 9:26 am
This is not an apt metaphor. The fountain has a drain.
Yes, but that doesn’t change the basic error of Dr. Rancourt: that he counts the input of the circulation as “addition”, while the only real addition is what is supplied by the hose and the drain only removes halve of what is added, still resulting in an increase of the reservoir…
It is the nature of feedback systems, Ferdinand, that they do not react one way to normal inputs, and another way for others. If a tight equilibrium is being maintained, then the system has the bandwidth for low sensitivity to exogenous inputs.
Agreed, but you need to take into account the time frame: in the past near million years, temperature was leading the dance and CO2 levels followed with a lag of about 800 years (warming) to several thousands of years (cooling). Thus while the equilibrium was tightly maintained, it needed many hundreds of years to reach the 100 ppmv difference between cold and warm periods. Recently we released some 200 ppmv in only 160 years (mostly in the second halve). Almost asking for a pulse response, compared to the past changes. But with a half life of only 40 years, this excess would disappear in only a few hundred years, peanuts compared to the timeframe of a glacial-interglacial or reverse changes.
That is almost pure conjecture. It amazes me how you cannot see the number of thinly supported assumptions you implicitly make in such statements.
The emission rates are based on fossil fuel sales (taxes!), the increase is what is observed in the past 50+ years and the variability in sink rate is the difference between these two. No assumptions at all. Only maybe some underestimates of the fuel use due to under the counter sales… See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg
I’d agree with you there, but I suspect you typed in haste.
Indeed, the opposite was intended, but have you any indication that the ice core record is wrong (besides what Jaworowski says, but that was discussed in my part 2).
Plot the annual mean growth here. It is quite obvious.
You are looking at the derivative of the increase, the increase rate, which is heavily influenced by (temporal) temperature changes like El Niño’s and Pinatubo eruptions. These make that there is a variability around the trend, but that doesn’t say anything about the cause of the trend itself, see the previous figure.
Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 10:06 am
…..
I understand that laboratory measurements of CO2 began about 200 years ago and contrary to indirect or proxy paleoreconstructions CO2 in the past 200 years has been recorded as high as 400ppm. Warmists dismiss these with a wave of their hand saying there must be some kind of mistake made in the measurement despite the fact that beginning around 1850 it was a standard chemical test with 3% or better accuracy.
So bascially thousands of lab measurements of CO2 for more than 100 years before Mauna Loa became the yardstick are being ignored and in this same period ice core data is missing because it takes at least 300 years for entrapment.
Oh dear – I sense the Beck measurements are about to make an unwelcome comeback. These are the measurements which show some years had CO2 increases (and decreases) of anything up to 100 ppm. Let’s just say there is possibly a lack of consistency in the choice of locations for the measurements.
Bart says:
And, if that captured “a few hundred years ago” were suddenly to be released?
That would be noticed in a sudden increase of CO2 levels, if that was a high enough quantity. But most of the recent organics are recycled within a decade or so.
Still there are discrepancies in the definition:
600 years old peat burning is added to human use of “fossil” fuel, while burning 600 years old wood (old house,…) is counted as “natural”.
This is logically flawed. All the measured increase shows is that, at least temporarily, the net sinks are less than the net sources. But, it does not say anything about the internal composition of sinks and sources.
As long as we are talking about “our” contribution against natural contribution, it doesn’t matter how the sources and sinks are distributed in nature. All we know is that nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2 (and in detail the oceans as well as vegetation). I have used the bank account comparison (too) many times:
If you bring your reserve money of each month to the bank and you figure out in their yearly balance that the bank has an enormous turnover, but that their profit is less than your deposit that year, don’t you think that it will be safe to get your money back as soon as possible and look for another bank? Whatever what the other clients may have done in that year…
Any affine trend slope is a precise ratio of any other trend slope. This is a tautology.
In general yes, but in this case both are slightly exponential and while in many cases correlation is not causation, in this case it is very likely that the emissions cause the increase, as there is a simple physical explanation for it: the oceans are slow emitters/uptakers of CO2 and vegetation growth responds to higher CO2 levels, but a 100% increase in CO2 doesn’t double the uptake. Further, compare the same for temperature changes (also increasing in the period 1975-2000):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_co2_1900_2004.jpg
Which shows the “normal” natural variability…
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Can you comment on this paper Ferdinand. I’ve been aware of it since it first appeared. Do you know of any followup information on this information.
George
Science 16 October 1998:
Vol. 282. no. 5388, pp. 442 – 446
DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5388.442
Prev | Table of Contents | Next
Reports
A Large Terrestrial Carbon Sink in North America Implied by Atmospheric and Oceanic Carbon Dioxide Data and Models
S. Fan, M. Gloor, J. Mahlman, S. Pacala, J. Sarmiento, T. Takahashi, P. Tans .
Accordning to this paper; the USA far from being the world’s biggest carbon polluter; is actually the only sizeable land area that is NOT a carbon polluter.
George
Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 10:06 am
Air entrapment in ice cores occur at depths of 60 to 100 meters. The oldest & longest core taken is 3000 meters and the bottom is ostensibly dated at 160,000 years barely reaching back into the prior interglacial. Anyhow, if the dating is accurate the average deposition time for a meter of ice is about 5 years and entrapment doesn’t occur for 300 – 500 years and that’s assuming gas migration and chemistry with and through the ice stops at that point even under tens and eventually hundreds of bars of bars of pressure where ice acts like a slow moving liquid with horizontal flow confounding things. Thus any reading of atmospheric gases in entrapped bubbles is an average of those gases at best of 300-500 years. Short term fluctuations such as might be driven by climate cycles less than a century in duration, like the decadal oscillations of ocean surface temperatures cannot be read from ice cores.
You haven’t read my part 2 about ice cores at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/20/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-2/
In short: there are enormous differences in accumulation rate between ice cores, from near the Antarctic coast (Law Dome: 1.2 meters ice equivalent/year) and high altitude inland (Vostok: a few mm/year). That results in very fast to very slow closing of the gas bubbles. For the fastest Law Dome ice cores: 8 years, for Dome C: 540 years average.
Opposite is the length of the record: Law Dome only 150 years back for the deepest usable core sections, while Dome C goes 800,000 years back in time.
The objections of Jaworowski against the reliability of ice cores are completely outdated and already disputed by the work of Etheridge (1996!).
I understand that laboratory measurements of CO2 began about 200 years ago and contrary to indirect or proxy paleoreconstructions CO2 in the past 200 years has been recorded as high as 400ppm. Warmists dismiss these with a wave of their hand saying there must be some kind of mistake made in the measurement despite the fact that beginning around 1850 it was a standard chemical test with 3% or better accuracy.
So bascially thousands of lab measurements of CO2 for more than 100 years before Mauna Loa became the yardstick are being ignored and in this same period ice core data is missing because it takes at least 300 years for entrapment.
Some of the methods were simply not accurate enough, but that is not the main problem with the historical measurements. The main problem is where was measured: in towns, fields, under and inbetween the leaves of growing vegetation,… Only measurements over the oceans or coastal with wind from the seaside would give reliable “background” measurements. And these show values around the ice core measurements for the same gas age…
RW says:September 21, 2010 at 2:00 am
Measurements show that the oceans are absorbing CO2, not outgassing it.
Cooler water absorbs more CO2. Hmmmm, is that your point?
Ferdinand,
I do not want to continue debating items on which we will never agree, so I will just address a few of your assertions.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 11:52 am
“You are looking at the derivative of the increase…”
That would be why I stated “…it is abundantly clear that it is decelerating…”.
“… that doesn’t say anything about the cause of the trend itself…”
If you filter out the variability, you will see a clear deceleration. Or, if you are not familiar with designing and implementing filters, perhaps you can just do a 2nd order polynomial curve fit. What curvature do you get?
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 21, 2010 at 12:14 pm
“But most of the recent organics are recycled within a decade or so.”
Source? What are the error bars? Why do you trust the source?
“All we know is that nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2…”
You do not, in fact, know that. What you know is that your model for natural influences as a whole is a net sink.
“…but in this case both are slightly exponential…”
Saying they are “slightly exponential” only sounds like it conveys more information than “they have the same curvature sign.” It’s really not as portentous as you imagine. The odds of finding two such similarly progressing signals at random are about 50/50.
“Which shows the “normal” natural variability…”
How do you allocate which part is “natural” and which is not? Do you assume that natural variability is just the high frequency zig-zaggy part, and the rest is not “natural”? On what basis do you render such a judgment?
George E. Smith says:
September 21, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Can you comment on this paper Ferdinand. I’ve been aware of it since it first appeared. Do you know of any followup information on this information.
It is possible that the increase in certain parts of the earth of vegetation growth encompasses the releases of CO2 in the same area. But I think that the time frame in this case was rather short.
Meanwhile more measurements are available and I did find an update:
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/48/18925.abstract
where North America still is a source of CO2. Further, a period of drought has a huge impact on CO2 sequestering by vegetation…