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 22, 2010 at 7:22 am “Isotopic tracers demonstrate that over the last couple of centuries, there has been a net transfer of CO2 from the biosphere and fossil fuels to the atmosphere and oceans. ”
No, they don’t. There are innumerable phenomena that can change isotope ratios in either direction (and I mean this literally – that we cannot enumerate them all), especially when the gross flows are very much greater than the net variations. The shifts that you and Ferdinand rely upon do not prove what you want them to.
Ah yes, so Paul Birch knows better than the hundreds of scientists who’ve actually studied these systems, does he? Isotopic tracers, and actually many other lines of evidence, do indeed show that the rise in CO2 in both atmosphere and oceans is unequivocally attributable to the burning of fossil fuels. Perhaps you could tell me which papers you’ve read about this, and specifically which ones you disagree with, and which ones support your view.
Above all mentioned statements the fact is that we deforested more than 30% of rains forests and exterminated almost 500 species of animals. As the human population grows we need more space to live, more food to eat, more energy to use. The question is: how to reach sustainable growth with minimum impact on the planet?
All scientists have the right to talk freely about their knowledge and the right should be claimed also in Canada…
Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:02 pm
97% certainly ARE emissions as well as “part of the cycle”. Manmade emissions are “part of the cycle” no more an no less. CO2 is CO2 no matter what source sources it or what sink sinks it. The carbon cycle is 97% natural and anthropogenic activities ostensibly adds 3% on the emission side annually without adding anything on the sink side. This is, more or less, in IPCC AR4 which has a nice diagram showing the gigatons of carbon coming and going from each source and sink.
Dave, circulating 10,000 liter per minute over a fountain with a big pump thus “adds” 10,000 liter per minute to the cycle, while adding 1 liter per minute with a hose is only 1/10,000th of the cycle and thus negligible.
But I am pretty sure that if the reservoir overflows, because someone forgot to close the valve of the hose, that the 10,000 liter per minute “addition” of the big pump has nothing to do with it…
Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Unless you’re looking at a different dataset than me 1928 and 1948 are almost identical as are all the years in between. While the absolute error in any one year might be off by 1% the trend should not be unless the experiment was so sloppily done it couldn’t achieve better accuracy from one test to the next. You have not explained a thing in your response.
I had no time yesterday to look at the original article of Etheridge e.a. (1996) about the Law Dome ice cores. The abstract says:
The Law Dome ice core CO2 records show major growth in atmospheric CO2 levels over the industrial period, except during 1935-1945 A.D. when levels stabilized or decreased slightly, probably as a result of natural variations of the carbon cycle on a decadal timescale.
May be right, but hardly provable. The natural variability over the past 50+ years was +/- 1 ppmv, but that lasts not more than 1-2 years (Pinatubo, El Niño). On the other side, emissions were still low in the period 1935-1945 (even in the war period), about 0.5-0.6 ppmv/year, which should result in an average atmospheric increase of 0.25-0.3 ppmv/year. Over the 10 year period of interest that is 2.5-3 ppmv, which is the increase shown 10 years later in 1955. It seems that some extra sink of 3 ppmv over a decade was at work…
As we haven’t accurate direct measurements of that period (the historical chemical measurements were +/- 10 ppmv), neither an indication of a 10-year cold period, I simply have no idea why the decadal CO2 leveling happened.
Bart says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Once again, I am leaving aside arguments I feel will lead nowhere. I make this disclaimer because some people have suggested that, when I have moved on from previous explanations in other fora which were not making headway, they thought I was conceding the point.
“What do you have with models? I have no model.”
Your model is everything of which you have taken consideration.
“The possibility that two curves in nature match each other with 99.66% ánd without showing much variability simply is zero. “
Nonsense. They don’t match nearly that well. We went over this with Willis’ analysis way back when. Not only do they not match all that well over lower frequencies, but they share essentially no commonality in the higher frequency realm. You are using statistical methods which are not up to this task. You need more sophisticated tools.
OK, my “model” is the simple plotting of the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere versus the accumulated CO2 emissions:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
In another way: temperature (yearly and smoothed with a 21 one years moving average, as that was used by some to “prove” temperature as cause of the CO2 increase), CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere and accumulated CO2 emissions versus years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_emiss_increase.jpg
No filtering applied, no smoothing in any way for the CO2 data, no statistical tools of any kind used. Simply plotting and R^2 calculated. If one magnifies the graph over only 5 years or so, one still can see the year-by-year variation in accumulation in the atmosphere.
I didn’t find back your discussion with Willis, but I have some suspicion that you were looking at the rate of increase, which indeed doesn’t match that good with the emissions and better with temperature changes. But as said before, then you aren’t looking at the trend, but at the derivative of the trend…
Btw, both warmers and skeptics alike agree that the increase rate is largely influenced by temperature changes. See e.g. Pieter Tans at:
http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf from page 11 on.
Some skeptics then jump to the conclusion that temperature is the main cause of the increase itself. But a derivative of a trend doesn’t tell anything about the cause of the trend…
Dave Springer says:
September 22, 2010 at 3:54 am
The notion that the global ocean does nothing but absorb CO2 is ludicrous.
Nobody syas that. There are a lot of inflows and outflows. Both continuous between the equator and the poles and discontinuous at mid-latitudes over the seasons. But for any change in amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, all what counts is the difference in inputs and outputs. Thus the net addition or uptake. And oceans show a net uptake.
While in any one year the net of emission and absorption by the ocean may be a positive or negative number the difference is only a tiny amount of the whole annual exchange. When we say that anthropogenic CO2 is only a small fraction (roughly 3%) of total annual emissions that is a true statement. Moreover, total annual emission is only a tiny fraction of the total biologically available carbon. The author of the OP is quite correct in this regard.
How much carbon is available in other reservoirs than the atmosphere is completely irrelevant, even if it is 10,000 times the amount in the atmosphere. How much is exchanged over the seasons and within a year is completely irrelevant, even if it was 100 times the CO2 content of the atmosphere or 10,000 times the human emissions. Only the difference between inputs and outputs is important, as that is what changes the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Anyone with a household budget should (and mostly does) understand that…
And the CO2 balance was always negative for atmosphere-ocean exchanges at least over the past 50+ years. The oceans didn’t add one gram of CO2 in net amount to the total mass of the atmosphere over the past 50 years.
Paul Birch says:
September 22, 2010 at 4:59 am
In point of fact, it is not even known for sure that the oceans are a net sink from the atmosphere. They probably are, most of the time, since they are a continuing net source for the bottom ooze, which this material has to be come from somewhere; but it is not certain. Once one considers CO2 from sub-sea volcanoes and tectonic boundaries, as well as organics, carbonates and reduced carbon washed in from the land, it is quite possible that they are a net source to the atmosphere. There are other natural sinks, magnitude unknown, which may dominate, such as the sequestration of biomass by infilling of post-glacial lakes, and the sequestration of reduced organic carbon as finely divided particles throughout the soil and continental crust (which alone contains tens of thousands of times more carbon than the atmosphere).
Paul, the oceans are impossible as source of extra CO2 for several reasons:
– The isotopic composition is too high. Any extra release of oceanic CO2 would increase the d13C of the atmosphere, but we see the oppsoite: the drop of d13C in the atmosphere leads to a drop in the (upper) oceans.
– An extra amount from the oceans would increase the atmospheric CO2 content higher that 4 ppmv/year (the human addition), except if another fast source would absorb the extra CO2 from the oceans + halve the human emissions. The only other fast source/sink is vegetation. But the oxygen balance only shows an absorption of about 0.6 ppmv net by vegetation, only a fraction of the human emissions.
RW says:
September 22, 2010 at 12:52 pm
“Ah yes, so Paul Birch knows better than the hundreds of scientists who’ve actually studied these systems, does he? ”
If hundreds of scientists commit a logical error, it is still a logical error. Appeals to authority leave me cold. Especially when I suspect that you are radically misinterpreting those authorities, who are generally not claiming what you think they are claiming. In any case, most other scientists would agree with me on this; they know how limited our knowledge of the oceans is, how complex the “carbon cycle” is, and how easily isotope ratios can mislead. There is a fundamental epistemological problem with isotope ratios, which is that one can seldom if ever be sure that the signal one thinks one sees is not an artifact of some unrelated phenomenon; as here, it is too easy inadvertantly to assume one’s conclusions. Isotope ratios can be useful in checking for or warning of inadequacies in a model or in our understanding of a planetary environment or history; but they have almost no reliable predictive or discriminatory power.
Paul Birch says:
September 22, 2010 at 10:46 am
No, they don’t. There are innumerable phenomena that can change isotope ratios in either direction (and I mean this literally – that we cannot enumerate them all), especially when the gross flows are very much greater than the net variations. The shifts that you and Ferdinand rely upon do not prove what you want them to.
Yes they do. Please do read my part 3 about the isotopes of carbon and the oxygen balance, before you discuss this further:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-3/
On this topic (ways to look at the relative significance of the amount of CO2 we are releasing in comparison with the “natural” flows) I wrote something here some time ago. My ideas haven’t changed, so I copy it below.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/16/another-look-at-climate-sensitivity/
Regarding our release of carbon that had been locked away… just like you point out that our energy use is tiny compared with what we get from the Sun, I shall point out that our release of carbon is also tiny compared with the vast transactions between the different parts of the system. This NASA chart of the carbon cycle is illustrative for piece of mind, if viewed with proper calm:
http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/ocean-earth-system/ocean-carbon-cycle/
From that chart, you see that total amount of carbon in the extant fossil fuels still in the ground is roughly 1/8 the amount of carbon in the active system. The amount we are recycling annually back into the system is about 0.015% of the total carbon in the system.
The cause for alarm, it seems to me, comes only if you adopt the assumption that our modest recycling program represents a very grave disturbance to a static and balanced system, whose balance coincides with its state around 1850. I consider this assumption to have no rational or scientific basis whatsoever. It is merely ideological.
To begin with, the carbon we are releasing was once part of that dynamic system. We are recycling it back into life at what appears like a reasonable rate.
A few years ago there was some talk of a “missing sink” to refer to the supposedly surprising fact that about half the CO2 we release does not accumulate in the atmosphere. This nonsensical phrase has now been sensibly dropped. How can sinks be missing? The surprise came only from the unwarranted assumption that the other entities that hold CO2 should refuse to take any extra amounts, on some kind of unwritten principle of carbon austerity by plants and oceans.
But why on earth would it be surprising that the plants take notice of variations in what is available for them to take – and proceed take it – as they are indeed taking it. Didn’t they once hold much of the very carbon we are now putting back in circulation? And why would it be surprising that the oceans also “take notice” of variations in the partial pressure of this gas in the atmosphere, and open their huge arms accordingly?
Alternatively, for illustrative purposes, you could look at the atmosphere as a giant pool with huge drains and pipes leading in and out of two other giant pools represented by the oceans and the plants/soil. So now we add our own little dripping faucet contribution to this giant global commerce, and we take ourselves so seriously that we assume the huge drains of this pool will be overwhelmed by our contribution, which will thus accumulate indefinitely. There are ribald jokes about ants having grandiose perceptions of their sanitary relations with elephants, or ants standing on a railway track and worried sick that they may cause a catastrophic derailment of the next train. I find them appropriate, sometimes, to the AGW discussions.
I think it could probably be demonstrated that even a doubling of CO2 concentrations from current levels is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, as a strict consequence of our contribution.
First, for the record, I object to the use of the Greenhouse Gases (GHG) terminology, which is an unscientific misnomer. The debate about anthropogenic global warming will benefit by the abandonment and halt to reinforcing the popular usage of such an unscientific and misleading term of reference.
Second, your proposition erroneously assumes there is a correlation between changes in the atmospheric concentrations of certain gases such as carbon dioxide and methane and resultant global air temperatures and sea temperatures. Paleontological and geological evidence demonstrates no such correlation. On the contrary, the changes in global air temperatures and sea temperatures have been demonstrated to be highly uncorrelated and often counter-trending. AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) proponents like to dismiss the evidence prior to their favorite recent time period, such as the last 160 years, using the argument that circumstances have changed with increased human additions of these gases from the combustion of fossil fuels.
The fatal problem with arguing for a changed situation with anthropogenic influences is the unchanging laws of physics that were just as applicable in the recent past as they were for billions of years before. If there were any validity to the AGW argument and assumption/s about a correlation between the gases and global temperatures, the changes in these gas concentrations and global temperatures would have to have been virtually as well correlated in all past time periods of the Earth’s present third atmosphere as any putative correlations are now, including the effects of other confounding factors. Geological evidence and paleontological evidence unmistakably rule out this possibility.
No one has shown any ability whatsoever to take the claimed warming rates for the recent past under scrutiny for human influences, apply the same first principles to the gas concentrations of the Phanerozoic Eon, and obtain calculated results that are not orders of magnitude too high and too low in relation to the observed conditions (wildly wrong). No matter whose proposed warming rate is used for the gas concentrations under discussion, they always result in proposed paleoclimate temperatures far in excess of the 20-22C mean observed in the evidence from the natural past. The only rational conclusion is to find the proposed warming rates and claimed correlations to gas concentrations are simply invalid in the absence of a correlaton in application of the rules of physics for present and past.
D. Patterson
re; greenhouse effect
It’s not that bad of misnomer. Glass lets shortwave pass through and blocks longwave just like atmospheric gases. It’s true that the major effect of the glass in warming the greenhouse is convective cooling but that doesn’t mean it has no other effect at all. In fact it has quite an effect and you can see it all around where I live. Naive people build some grand houses with magnificent south facing views here in the Texas hill country and before the second summer passes by you’ll see sunscreens blocking the view out those windows. The sunscreen isn’t blocking convection it’s blocking light because that light is being absorbed inside the house and re-reradiated in longwave which doesn’t make it back out through the window. The house is being made warmer in exactly the same way that greenhouse gases do it.
Ferdinand Engelbeen Said
September 21, 2010 at 3.30am
“CO2 from natural or 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. That doesn’t change the CO2 content, neither the isotopic composition of the current atmosphere, except if there is an unbalance. The unbalance can be measured from oxygen use: there is a small deficit, compared to the calculated use of oxygen by fossil fuel burning. That means that all biolife together is a net producer of oxygen, thus a net sink for CO2 (and preferentially of 12CO2).”
This statement is very important because it directly contradicts IPCC and CAGW propagada. IPCC is saying everyone should be vegetarian to save the world. I live in New Zealand where an Emissions Trading Scheme has just been established, although not unduly onerous at this time. In 2015, agricluture is due to start coming in at 5% of its emissions each year. Farmers here are saying that if we have the same numbers of livestock as we had 20 years ago, how can we be penalised for our “gross emissions” when the amount of methane being released has not increased – therefore not causing GW. I, along with many others, have tried to point this fallacy out to our government but it is totally ignored.
IPCC is saying the world should go vegetarian to save the world. Of course this will excuse rice growing, a major emitter of methane but what the heck. The other line of logic used by farmers is that a cow cannot manufacture carbon. It has to have come from the atmosphere in the first place (given that soil carbon has not changed). Again ignored. And our last line of defence is that sure cows emit methane, but so do wetlands (and India’s cows). So why don’t we drain half the wetlands and kill the indian cows? Ah – we want biodiversity and we don’t want productive cows. It is like trying to have a discussion with a lunatic.
Alan Sutherland
Language matters. When a pseudo-scientific term such as Greenhouse Gas and Greenhouse Effect is used without challenge as false propaganda to mislead, deceive, and indoctrinate the general public for the purpose of gaining their trust for implementing policies that result in the mass killings of human beings, it stands to reason the term is a very very “bad misnomer.” We only need to look at the death toll from Mao’s Great Cultural Revolution for the practical results of such usages of terminology, or George Orwell’s newspeak for the theory. Your own comments illustrate the problem when they repeat the pseudo-scientific myths associated with the terminology. A search of the terms “Greenhouse Gas” “misnomer” provides some informative pro and con viewpoints on the subject.
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics. Version 4.0 (January 6, 2009) replaces Version 1.0 (July 7, 2007) and later. Electronic version of an article published as International Journal of Modern Physics
B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275{364 , DOI No: 10.1142/S021797920904984X,
Scientific Publishing Company, http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb.
R. W. Wood. “Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse”, Philosophical magazine 17
319-320 (1909).
Niels Bohr. On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules, Part I. Philosophical Magazine Series 6, Volume 26 July 1913, p. 1-25.
If your remarks about d13C ratio being evidence of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in the Northern Hemisphere had any validity, there could be no positive and negative excursions in the atmospheric d13C levels. In your remarks, you made claims that the d13C levels were in decline in concert with anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the statements of fact you use as the basis for your entire argument are invalid, and obviously so. The atmospheric levels of d13C have been documented to vary with a wide variety of known factors such as Solar activity on 11 year and multi-century scales, krumholz and tundra soil changes, changes in planktonic activities in the oceans, changes in calcerous planktonic activities, changes in sea levels, changes in marshland areal extents, and much much more. Investigators have also commented upon the tremendous lack of knowledge we have about other factors still waiting to be explored in their most fundamental aspects for there potential impacts upon the use of d13C in radiocarbon dating. Suffice it to observe, major excursions of d13C concentrations in the atmosphere do happen, have happened, and are the subject of much past scientific investigations. I can only wonder how and why you would choose to claim this smoothed decline in d13C contrary to all of this contrary scientific research.
Dave Springer says:
September 21, 2010 at 4:56 pm
@Engelbeen
Unless you’re looking at a different dataset than me 1928 and 1948 are almost identical as are all the years in between. While the absolute error in any one year might be off by 1% the trend should not be unless the experiment was so sloppily done it couldn’t achieve better accuracy from one test to the next. You have not explained a thing in your response.
You seem to be trying to make a big deal about the lack of a significant trend in CO2 concentrations during the 1930s and 1940s. Consider the following:
Currently we emit ~7GtC per annum. The net increase in the atmosphere due to these emissions is ~2ppm. Some years (e.g. El Nino years) it will be more than 2 ppm – some years (e.g. La Nina years) in will be less. In the 1928-48 period CO2 emissions were ~1 GtC. Using the above ratios we might expect the annual increase in the 1928-48 period to be ~0.3 ppm. However, because of the fluctuations in ocean conditions (e.g. ENSO) we might also expect a drop in CO2 in some years. The 1928-48 period spans a period when a “PDO” shift resulted in a change in the El Nino/La Nina frequency. For most of the 1928-48 period the CO2 trend was consistent with what we might expect, i.e. it increased at ~0.3 ppm per annum. The trend flattened as the upper ocean cooled.
In a nutsell, ocean conditions could easily mask the CO2 increase in these relatively low emission years.
However, if human emissions had no effect then we would actually expect immediate post-war atmospheric CO2 concentrations to be slightly lower than pre-war concentrations. They weren’t. In fact, as emissions grew in the 1950s we observed an increased rate of accumulation in the atmosphere. In the mid-1950s global emissions exceeded 2GtC per year; by the mid-1960s they had exceeded 3GtC and by the 1970s CO2 global emissions were more than 4GtC.
By some strange “coincidence” the rate at which CO2 concentrations accumulated in the atmosphere also increased over the same period.
The only times that ice core data shows a CO2 increase which is anywhere near comparable to the increase seen in the last 50-100 years were following ice ages. But that took a 5-6 deg swing in temperature and several thousand years before the increases was fully realised.
Francisco says:
September 22, 2010 at 4:34 pm
The cause for alarm, it seems to me, comes only if you adopt the assumption that our modest recycling program represents a very grave disturbance to a static and balanced system, whose balance coincides with its state around 1850. I consider this assumption to have no rational or scientific basis whatsoever. It is merely ideological.
The logical, scientific basis is in the (geological recent) past: the ice ages and interglacials show a quite linear relationship between temperature and CO2 levels, where CO2 levels lag temperature. Which means that all natural processes together led to a dynamic equilibrium, which was quite stable over the past 800,000 years, only influenced by temperature changes. We are now 100+ ppmv above that equilibrium…
To begin with, the carbon we are releasing was once part of that dynamic system. We are recycling it back into life at what appears like a reasonable rate.
Yes, most was buried many millions of years ago at CO2 levels 10-12 times current. But the recycling rate is a little faster than the burying rate, some million times… And the difference in atmospheric change rate is about 100 ppmv in 160 years now, compared to 100 ppmv in 5,000 years during a glacial-interglacial transition…
D. Patterson says:
September 23, 2010 at 1:05 am
If your remarks about d13C ratio being evidence of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in the Northern Hemisphere had any validity, there could be no positive and negative excursions in the atmospheric d13C levels. In your remarks, you made claims that the d13C levels were in decline in concert with anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the statements of fact you use as the basis for your entire argument are invalid, and obviously so. The atmospheric levels of d13C have been documented to vary with a wide variety of known factors such as Solar activity on 11 year and multi-century scales, krumholz and tundra soil changes, changes in planktonic activities in the oceans, changes in calcerous planktonic activities, changes in sea levels, changes in marshland areal extents, and much much more.
As the Epica ice core shows, the largest change in d13C was between the deepest cold period (LGM) and the current warm period, the Holocene. That shows a change of +0.5 per mil d13C in the atmosphere over a period of about 5,000 years. See:
http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Khl2004e.pdf
That includes all the above changes you did cite…
The last 11,000 years in ice cores show a natural increase of 0.25 per mil in the d13C level in the first part of the Holocene, while the last part shows a drop of 0.05 per mil.
See: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/nature08393.html
Only in the last 150 years there is a sudden drop of -1.6 per mil in atmospheric d13C level, far beyond the natural variability of +/- 0.1 per mil in the centuries before the post-1850 period. Do you really think that any natural process is responsible for this drop, while there is an obvious cause present in the form of fossil fuel use?
Francisco says:
September 22, 2010 at 4:34 pm
That read very well. Thanks. Great comment on the subject.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 23, 2010 at 2:58 am
“The logical, scientific basis is in the (geological recent) past: the ice ages and interglacials show a quite linear relationship between temperature and CO2 levels, where CO2 levels lag temperature. Which means that all natural processes together led to a dynamic equilibrium, which was quite stable over the past 800,000 years, only influenced by temperature changes. We are now 100+ ppmv above that equilibrium…”
Actually what you can see from ice cores is that temperature swings wildly from ice age to interglacial while CO2 remains relatively stable and what variation there is in the CO2 level is a result of temperature swings not a cause of them.
The lack of ability to influence temperature becomes much more dramatic when looking at the geologic column outside of ice ages where we see that CO2 levels up to 20 times higher didn’t result in detrimental overheating but rather accompanies the most verdant periods in the earth’s history where the earth is green from pole to pole and where the fossil fuel beds were laid down in the first place like a person in their peak earning years saves for retirement.
John Finn says:
September 23, 2010 at 2:51 am
It demonstrates that sinks and sources of CO2 vary independantly of anthropogenic emissions on decadal timescales. Combine this with the fact that ice cores going back in time more than 1000 years don’t have the temporal resolution to record decadal changes as the gas diffuses before sealing and sealing can take centuries.
It’s a big deal if you happen to be in the business of promoting narratives that say natural sinks and sources are constants and anthopogenic sources are the variable.
Glad you mentioned that. While atmospheric CO2 was growing consistently during those decades there was no increase in global average temperature which again shows that rising CO2 doesn’t precipitate higher temperatures but rather higher temperatures precipitate higher CO2 concentrations.
So in your opinion can anthropogenic GHG contributions terminate the ice age and return the earth to being green from pole to pole and persisting in that stable state for many millions of years? One can only hope it can but I fear it cannot.
D.Patterson
The “greenhouse” term used in relation to atmospheric gases dates back to the mid-1800’s when it was believed that water vapor had this effect. In 1859 the great experimenal physicist John Tyndall proved it by measuring the longwave absorptive properties of gases in a series of thousands of experiments with varied gases, pressures, and longwave radiation sources.
The greenhouse effect is not something either recently coined or recently adopted by scientists although it’s probably only recently popularized among those with comparatively little knowledge or interest in physics and engineering. In this day and age of instantaneous global electronic communications to the masses lots of things get popularized very quickly.
The objection you raise I understand is quite old as well as urban legend has it that someone constructed a greenhouse using panes of rock salt instead of glass and it still worked as a greenhouse. I doubt anyone actually built a whole greenhouse of rock salt though but in principle it still would keep the temperature up in the winter somewhat although not as much as one made of glass.
By the way, a greenhouse in the summer can get much warmer than the air outside it. That’s because convective and radiative cooling is stopped but radiative warming has not been stopped. This is most dramatically illustrated by the normal and frequent observation of what happens to the inside temperature of a car when the windows are rolled up on a hot summer day parked in the sun.
Kind of OT but not really, I thoroughly enjoy threads with differing opinions and prospects. The truth is interpreted and digested so differently it opens up ones mind and understanding. A few years ago we had lots of intermingling of opinions here on WUWT and then the last couple was like preaching to the choir. Boring.
I’m so happy to have and read posts from the CAGW side without being censored. We may differ in our understanding, but we are all here for the same reason. Truth.
You are very welcome here and make this site better, just thought I’d let you know. 🙂
Cheers
Lance
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 23, 2010 at 2:58 am
Yes but on average some or all of the the CO2 sinks have been growing parallel with increasing anthropogenic CO2 contribution. It’s a well known fact that CO2 is plant food and more of it causes accelerated plant growth until something else (temperature, sunlight, water, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, iron, etc.) becomes the limiting factor. More CO2 doesn’t slow plant growth and indeed in any circumstance it brings about more efficient transpiration and decreased water use per unit of plant growth so in any situation where water is the limiting factor increased CO2 still accelerates plant growth.
A reasonable view of what’s happening is human CO2 emission, which happens close to the ground in the immediate proximity of plants that will benefit from it simply increases the total biomass of the planet with some lag time of probably no more than several years before the biosphere grows enough so that other limiting factors come back into play. In fact this has been known for quite some time and small scale experiments in ocean fertilization with chelated iron have been conducted. In the global ocean iron is often a limiting factor in plant growth so that seemed like a quick & easy way to sequester a lot of CO2 in diatom skeletons (which contain about 10% of the carbon the diatom uses during its life) that sink to the bottom of very deep water.
I’ve yet to find any net downside to a warmer earth with higher CO2 concentration regardless of the factors causing it. I hope it continues because there is a huge downside to falling temperatures and falling CO2 unless you happen to prefer a surface covered in ice and rocks to one covered by plants and animals. You’re not an ice hugger are you? I’ve actually little doubt that anthropogenic activity is to some significant extent responsible for the rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as the correlation is very compelling. Where correlation is conflated with causation (hasty conclusions) and other contributing factors are either poorly characterized or completely ignored then I begin to object.
Historical narrative is difficult to test by the scientific method which demands, among other things, isolation of variables and repeatable experiments. There is no way, even in principle, to go back in time and stop fossil fuel consumption and see what happens as a result. Any account of what would happen is conjecture. My guess is that the atmospheric carbon cycle today would be 993 gigatons instead of 1000 gigatons and the observable change in the biosphere and the climate would be negligible. On the other hand the slight increase in the carbon cycle may have been just enough to end the Little Ice Age and without it the Holocene interglacial might be coming to a rapid ending and then we’d be in a real world of hurt along with the rest of the living world.