New book: Slaying the Sky Dragon

From Amazon:
This review is from: Slaying the Sky Dragon – Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory (Kindle Edition)
This book leaves the reader in no doubt that those who subscribe to the IPCC’s global warming consensus have been well and truly conned. The authors have presented their points in a readily understandable manner, backed with superb reference links. The points presented by the authors are not just very persuasive but, in many instances, they also appear to be conclusive. Readers may find it challenging to appreciate the mathematics and physics expressed by some authors, but nevertheless, somehow the authors do get their points across. Many books have been written about climate change and global warming but this book puts together the key elements that get to the heart of the issue. This book will surely be a best seller.
The only adverse comment I make is that at the end of the book it allows the reader to download a complimentary companion eBook in PDF format. I downloaded it but the PDF simply would not open, instead an error message appeared. I downloaded it a second time but the same problem occurred. I have no idea what else I can do

Geologist Timothy Casey in his study of undersea volcanoes, came to similar conclusion regarding a lack of CO2 marker regarding its origin.
His conclusion……

……… there is no fingerprint by which we may distinguish fossil fuel CO2 from volcanic CO2. This leaves us with no empirical method by which we may attribute the 20th century rise in CO2 to human energy consumption.

The carbon ratio argument is usually presented a monotonicity claim which would make it strong proof. The trouble is that the monotonicity argument on its own terms means nothing more than there is fossil fuel being burned.
Supposedly carbon ratios demonstrate that the CO2 level is rising due to the consumption of Fossil Fuels with the rival view being the CO2 level is rising due to ___ (something else). Lets say for instance, ocean out-gassing (I don’t want to argue whether that is true, lets focus just on whether the ratio argument demonstrates anything).
So we have a series of fluxes which when integrated over time give us a CO2 percentage in the atmosphere adjusting a constant initial offset:
Ocean_out – Ocean_in + FossilFuel_Out
The fossil fuel out has depleted 13C. So the argument goes: we see declining 13C/12C ratios, so the extra CO2 comes from the fossil fuels. Almost true except the word “extra”. The decrease in the 12C/13C does arise from fossil fuel consumption, but that does not tell us what determines the equilibrium level of CO2. In particular, whether the ocean is a net sink or net source of CO2, the carbon ratios will fall purely as a consequence of there being fossil fuel consumption.
So the monotonicity argument is a tautology. It tells us only one of the premises: man burns C13 light fossil fuels.
The short-summary here seems to be that the authors are taking a stab at the weaker ‘balance of the fluxes argument’. See if you know precisely what the flux fossil fuel emissions is and its c13/c12 ratio (we don’t), and you know the rate of mixing with the ocean sink (we don’t). You could build a model and back-out how much C13 there should be in the atmosphere. If you could build such a model, you wouldn’t need the ratio argument, you could rule out ocean out-gassing effects per-se without adding the epicycles of discussing C13 ratios.
The C13 ratio argument is a bad one.

I’m suspicious that Oliver K. Manuel is considered nutty because he has different ideas, not because those ideas have been demonstrated to be wrong. Data anomalies aren’t always due to errors in measurement – sometimes they’re due to errors in understanding – Michelson-Morley comes to mind. It seems like the correct response is to consider what he has to say rather than dismiss it because it’s different.
Having said that, I agree that I don’t see how the composition of the sun is relevant to most of the topics discussed on WUWT.

I’ve been meaning to try to understand the IPCC’s reasoning regarding C13/c12 ratios but been unable to find the chapter dealing with it. This new book claims that AR4 says C3 plants are extinct, which is patently false, but again, I find no mention of that “fact” in AR4, chapter 2, p.139 (which they reference) or Chapter 7.
Can anyone point me to the C13/C12 argument in AR4, especially the statement that C3 plants are extinct? Frankly, AR4 is a horrible mess in which to try to find anything.

History shows plenty of smart people with good ideas as well as “nutty ones”. Newton comes to mind. Ad hominems are a intellectually lazy attack.
Regards
Michael

The AR4 chapter is here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/108.htm
I’m afraid the decrease of 13C/12C with increase of CO2 concentration after 1850s does not decisively mean that the increased CO2 is from fossil fuel. The kinetics and the isotope fractionation of CO2 emission and absorption is hard to quantify. It is possible that the increase of CO2 concentration is still a natural process; but burning fossil fuel brought about the isotopic non-equilibrium between the atmosphere and the CO2 buffer.

I also have the Kindle for PC version and find it very, very interesting.
There are many problems with AGW claims discussed in this book.
I am not qualified to comment on the science being discussed but will
say it is much easier for the layman to read than a lot of other
publications, pro or con, on this AGW debacle.

“It would help explain why the sun has a strong magnetic field.
iron loses it magnetic field when heated to above ~770 degrees C.”
The earth’s core is believed to be around 5430 degrees C. So where does the earth’s magnetic field come from?

If the growth/decay cycle of 95% of Earth’s plants (C3) is contributing the same C12/C14 ratio as fossil fuel burning, then that overwhelms (conceals) any human concentration.
BTW, the “20-100” yr. residence time for CO2 in atmosphere is a very soft, dodgy conclusion. Classic references and much current research comes up with a 5-15 yr. range. Which undercuts the mixing ratio assumptions further.

I don’t understand how plants can contribute to an increase of these isotopes. They can’t release what they don’t sequester while alive, and unless the global mass of plant life is in decline it seems to me they should, as a growing population, absorb more than they release (there are more plants sequestering it this year than last so it should be declining in the wild unless there’s another source). If that parenthetic point is wrong then we probably have greater worries than CO2 concentrations. But then I’m a Unix guy, not a rocket scientist.

I feel privileged to have not been banned from WUWT, although I probably came close a couple of times. It should be noted that I have been banned from almost every popular political, economic, and news blog on the net. I’m more of a rabble rouser and promoter of unpopular ideas, should they have merit. I defer more in depth discussions on topics like this to the knowledge base and enjoy reading the comments, for the most part. Interesting topic this one is.

EMS;
shouldn’t really highjack this page for the iron sun stuff, but as I recall the little I’ve read, the posited iron core was there from the beginning, since he posits the sun as a fragment from a supernova type explosion, where the iron was built up. Then the sun (and most stars) accumulate the lighter elements in fractionated layers.
But I may have that wrong.

Robert Wykoff says:
November 29, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Sounds interesting, will pick it up. Question, though…why is it nutty to believe the core of the sun has a significant amount of Iron? ….
To quote the late great, Leslie Nielsen -“you’re outta here” 🙂

just a comment on the C12/C13 issue – as far as I can make out, the errors in measurements, and the scale of the Carbon reservoir (in the atmosphere, oceans, rocks, etc) would make it virtually impossible to determine a human signature.
I can imagine that a very localised effect, e.g. next to a FF power station may be possible to observe by comparison of very careful closeby and remote monitoring. Has anyone done this? Even though of course, different FF’s produce different C12/C13 ratios, at least this would be a demonstrable measurement. And what about doing the same next to active volcanoes, etc – and of course, comparable measurements of changing C12/C13 ratios during photosythensis in different plant environments?
I do find the generally presented C12/C13 argument for AGW, a little obtuse, with weak scientific evidence – but of course the warmist/alarmist types use it as the main so called evidence!

Sorry folks,
This was already discussed many times in different groups, including my contribution at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-3/
It is simple: there are only two main sources of low 13C in nature: the whole biosphere of recent plants and their users: microbes and animals, including humans, and fossil fuels, which are derived from the ancient biosphere. All other known sources are higher in 13C/12C ratio, including ocean waters, chalk deposits (rock weathering) and volcanic vents.
Thus if there is a decline in d13C (that is a measure for the 13C/12C ratio), then it is either current vegetation decay or fossil fuel burning. How one can make a differentiation? Recent organics contain some radioactive 14C as that is incorporated together with 12C and 13C from CO2 in the atmosphere. That is used to calculate the age of ancient artefacts up to some 60,000 years ago with the carbon dating method. Fossil fuels don’t contain 14C anymore, as that is completely gone over time.
The carbon dating method did encounter problems from about 1750 on, as fossil fuel burning slowly started: they needed to use correction tables until 1950, when another disturbance, atomic bomb testing, doubled the 14C levels in the atmosphere.
Thus the 14C levels since 1750 point to fossil fuel use, but that is not a definitive proof of anything.
What proves that only fossil fuel is the cause of the d13C decline is the oxygen balance: burning fossil fuels uses oxygen. Growing vegetation produces oxygen, but vegetation decay uses oxygen. The balance between these three shows that the biosphere as a whole is a net producer of oxygen: some less oxygen use is noticed than calculated from fossil fuel use. See:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5462/2467.abstract and
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
That gives: the net oxygen production by the biosphere means more CO2 uptake than release (the “greening earth”), but preferential more 12CO2, thus leaving more 13CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus the biosphere currenlty does increase the d13C level, while we see a decrease. That means that the only source of the d13C decrease is fossil fuel burning.
Does that prove that fossil fuel burning is the source of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere? No, but it proves that neither the oceans, nor the biosphere are the sources. These are the only two huge, fast sources which may influence the atmospheric CO2 content. Other sources like volcanoes, rock weathering,… are either too slow or are minor contributors and all have the wrong isotopic composition.
It is unfortunate that the authors still use arguments which are proven wrong. That reduces their credibility for other points where the arguments of the “consensus” are much weaker…
See further:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html

Sorry, I made the same mistake as many before (and after) me by mixing up residence time and excess decay time (even the IPCC does mix up both meanings in the same paragraphs…):
“long residence times” in the last sentence must be “long excess decay times”.

I feel privileged to have not been banned from WUWT, although I probably came close a couple of times. It should be noted that I have been banned from almost every popular political, economic, and news blog on the net. I’m more of a rabble rouser and promoter of unpopular ideas, should they have merit. I defer more in depth discussions on topics like this to the knowledge base and enjoy reading the comments, for the most part. Interesting topic this one is.

Barry, is that you?

It is about time that the GHG hypothesis was shown to be bogus. The carbon isotope ratio was a cornerstone of proving anthropomorphic emissions were bad, though why I could not work out given the fact that we need CO2 in the atmosphere and the miserly volume permitted by the alarmists was based on a fairy story. Historic high volumes of atmospheric CO2 did not cause any climate problems so why would the small volume today be any problem? The ratio given as proving AGW did no such thing due there being too many inputs into the climate system to point to CO2 as the villain. It was always that an environmental hope was driving theory not true observations.
So a welcome book/s which I will try to get.

hunter says:
November 29, 2010 at 9:12 pm
I am very dubious about any book that is going to debunk basic physics.
AGW does not fail because of basic physics.
I would argue that it does; Beer-Lamberts Law renders CO2’s greenhouse effect virtually insignificant above 350ppm. And then even if there had been 1C warming from CO2 concentration rising from 285ppm to 385ppm (more likely mostly due to long term oceanic cycles, bad data and UHI), the negative feedback from increased water vapour / clouds counter-balances. I suppose it depends on how you define ‘basic’, but these topics are hardly on the same level as special relativity or quantum physics. I don’t know anything of the specifics of the C12/C13 issue, or the inner sun. But it is always best to keep an open mind (qualified by critical thinking of course), and sometimes Anthony is guilty of dismissing things which may sound nutty but do have merit.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says at
November 30, 2010 at 12:40 am
quote Does that prove that fossil fuel burning is the source of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere? No, but it proves that neither the oceans, nor the biosphere are the sources. These are the only two huge, fast sources which may influence the atmospheric CO2 content. Other sources like volcanoes, rock weathering,… are either too slow or are minor contributors and all have the wrong isotopic composition. unquote
Unless, of course, there a huge fast sink which is changing rapidly in the other direction. Have you looked for this? And how do you explain the assertion I have seen elsewhere that the ratio doesn’t actually fit the amount of light C emitted by fossil fuel burning? There is, as far as I can see, too much light carbon in the atmosphere and that must have come from somewhere.
Questions: where does the O2 come from, and are we sure that the source is stable? Are you sure you are not making the error of assuming the processes of production and consumption are steady and devations are anthropogenic, rather than the more reasonable assumption that the process of production and consumption varies, with humanity’s contribution too small to be seen? Talking of oxygen production, consider the population collapse of phytoplankton in [Boyce et al, 2010].
A link between vocanoes and the isotope ratios can start at
http://europa.agu.org/?view=article&uri=/journals/gl/gl1019/2010GL044629/2010GL044629.xml
Briefly, volcanic ash fed the ocean in 2008, resulting in a vast bloom of diatoms.
Diatoms are interesting in that they have a metabolic system of C fixation which does not discriminate strongly between the C isotopes (‘C4-like’), unlike the common, unstressed calcareous phytoplankton (‘C3’). Presumably the diatom bloom mentioned in the North Pacific would have pulled down anomalous amounts of heavy carbon, leaving a ‘anthropogenic’ light carbon signal in the atmosphere. I wonder if it’s big enough to show in Alaskan isotope studies?
Is anyone sampling CO2 up there?
JF
I’ve thought of another source of light C: acid rain reduced the metabolisation (sorry, sorry) of methane held in the permafrost. With the controls imposed on sulphur emissions came a release of methane which is being eaten by methanophages. Result, more light carbon CO2.

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 30, 2010 at 12:06 am
Not quite. The muon i>detection rate is, but not the C-14 production rate.
Thanks… I wish I could find summat to read (which I could understand) which would explain why C-14 production rate is not modulated by changes in atmospheric temperature. I guess if I ask, you’re gonna tell me the the same goes for beryllium-10 production rates?

E.M.Smith: I’m very sceptical of your assertion “A spinning sphere of liquid metal generates a magnetic field” if that is to imply that it would self-generate a field where none previously existed. I have spent decades on magnetics and electromagnetics, and can’t see a mechanism for this. Sure, a molten ball of metal with eddies already in a magnetic field will modify the magnetic field and, if one puts work into turning the ball (because there will be resistance which will end up as heat through eddy currents etc) then you might very well get a stronger field than the external one, and (by putting in work) can make it self-sustaining. But you need an external magnetic field to start with. And that is explicit in the paper you referenced, which says
“DTS [Derviche Tourneur Sodium] is an experiment devoted to the study of MHD turbulence in the presence of a strong magnetic field and rotation in the magnetostrophic regime…
2.2 Imposed magnetic field.
…only an imposed magnetic field may change the properties of the hydrodynamical flow of liquid sodium…
The inner sphere is filled with permanent magnets, which impose a strong,
mainly dipolar, magnetic field on the fluid flow…
The magnetostrophic balance can also be tested in smaller scale experiments
with an imposed magnetic field.
From this and the 2008 paper “Generation of magnetic field by dynamo action in a turbulent flow of liquid sodium”
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0701/0701075v1.pdf
it is clear that above a certain threshold there is a dynamo action that takes place, and that it self-generates a magnetic field provided one puts energy into the apparatus. Well, this is not entirely surprising, but what would be surprising would be for this to happen without a magnetic field in place to start with, and the last mentioned article certainly shows that the ambient magnetic field is required:
“Below the dynamo threshold, the effect of induction due to the ambient magnetic field is observed.”
“In the present experiment, fluctuations enter…due to the interaction of the velocity field with the ambient magnetic field. ”
There is no known mechanism, even in the light of these experiments, for getting any planetary or solar dynamos going without the presence of an external magnetic field to start with, or a magnetic field internally generated by current through the bodies.

Tom in Texas says:
November 29, 2010 at 8:36 pm
From Amazon:
The only adverse comment I make is that at the end of the book it allows the reader to download a complimentary companion eBook in PDF format. I downloaded it but the PDF simply would not open, instead an error message appeared. I downloaded it a second time but the same problem occurred. I have no idea what else I can do
Which browzer did you use? – occasionally downloading big pdfs I have had problems using Google Chrome but Microsoft IE (8, 9) worked better.

@Leif Svalgaard says:
November 29, 2010 at 8:50 pm
—–
Thanks, Leif!

As a plant physiologist I can say with confidence that C3 plants are NOT extinct.
In fact they comprise well over 80% of the Earth’s flora. The remainder are C4 and CAM photosynthesis plants.
One possibility is that because C4 plants are more efficient at higher temperatures than C3, the statement (if it is correct) about C3 being extinct reflects the IPCC’s
expectations for a hot Earth.

John,
I find Dr. Manuel very interesting as well, but until recently all he did was carpet bomb threads with the exact same post.
He is clearly bright, but that does not exclude the possibility that he is obsessive, repetitive, and even wrong about the sun.
What is clear is that when he does talk about some of his thoughts on climate issues, he is interesting.
I always apply the cocktail party rule when considering blog manners:
It is the host’s party, guests should not be boorish, and most of all guests should not annoy the host(ess).

Very interesting comment there, Tallbloke…. Sounds a bit like what Leif was saying.

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 29, 2010 at 9:40 pm
“It has been discussed extensively and found to be wanting, not because it is ‘different’ but because it is at variance with observations, e.g. helioseismology, neutrino flux, solar oblateness, other stars, etc.”
As (or if!) I understand it, the iron sun model assumes that the sun has accreted on top of an old neutron star. This seems quite reasonable; there must be a lot of them out there (~1e8 or more in the Milky Way galaxy), and once they have settled down a bit (a matter of a few thousand years) they will be able to accrete gas and debris from the interstellar medium. They could be the seed that initiates gas cloud collapse into a star; alternatively, they could be captured by a cloud already in the process of star formation. Either way, we end up with new stars with a neutron star core. Somewhat more of their early luminosity would be provided by gravitational energy, but once they entered the main sequence they would behave much the same as any other star. Fusion would take place in a shell, rather than a sphere, and the fusion temperatures might be slightly different, but most of the star wouldn’t be able to tell the difference; the neutron star is too tiny. I can see there might be a problem with the solar oblateness/gravitational quadrupole moment, since the rest of the sun would have to be that much more oblate (the neutron star being effectively a central point mass); however, one could possibly get around that by assuming that rotation rates increase with depth, driven by the rapid rotation of the neutron star.

But………..
Quote
The metal returns up the outer cylinder, and electric currents create a magnetic field.
Unquote
Different beast. Same with the natural nuclear reactors. They get hotter towards the core not on the surface.
But not only that, seems we have lost track, is the man made co2 debunked or not. Did the book do that? I liked the references to 1750 and post carbon fuels and deforestation but prior to that date Europe was deforested from about 1300 to 1750 in the same way post 1750 deforested the tropical forests.
Plus is not the Co2 thing only one small part of the books mission?

Carpet bombing leads to hijacked threads and off-topic discussions. Off-topic tends to create a lot of excess verbiage unrelated to the point being made and obscuring the main point. This is almost always counterproductive.
Thank you Anthony.

Paul Birch “There are always magnetic fields, even in interstellar and intergalactic space, which will be amplified many-fold as nebulas condense into stars and planets. This should be plenty to get the dynamo going.”
If there is ‘plenty’ would you care to put a figure on it please (an order of magnitude, with some reference) so that we can do a reality check? What is the strength of the magnetic field permeating our solar system from interstellar and intergalactic space?

“qualified climatologists, prominent skeptic scientists and a world leading math professor.”
Wow, I didn’t know that ‘skeptic’ was now a specialty branch of scientific inquiry like atmospheric physics or climatology. I wonder what Universities are offering post grad work in ‘Skeptical Science’?

tallbloke: the reference you gave was originally from a BBC report – not exactly wonderful or accurate science writing:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3433661.stm
“The metal returns up the outer cylinder, and electric currents create a magnetic field. ” And where do these electric currents come from? Moving molten metal through a magnetic field could certainly cause electric current flow, but, as I see it, without an initial current or external magnetic field to start with any attempt at generating a dynamo effect will be stillborn.

Anthony, sir.
You would be a real gentleman if only you apologized for the mean and uncalled for “nutty” labeling of one of the authors, in your introduction. Aren’t we talking about unsettled science and theories here? I’m obviously not the only one who wishes you didn’t go into ad hominem attacks.
REPLY: No, I think the Iron Sun theory is in fact “nutty”, which is my honest opinion. – Anthony

I must be the dumbest rock in the pile for I fail to understand why there would be any excess CO2 at all; shouldn’t the extra simply be greedily gobbled up by the existing plants?
I know I asked for this subject of carbon isotopes the other day but I didn’t know there was a whole new book out about it.
And I still think they don’t clean their Mauna Loa gauge, so there!

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Yo ho, it’s hot, the sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there’d be no life
Without the light it gives
We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun, without a doubt
There’d be no you and me
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The sun is hot
It is so hot that everything on it is a gas: iron, copper, aluminum, and many others.
The sun is large
If the sun were hollow, a million Earths could fit inside. And yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away
About 93 million miles away, and that’s why it looks so small.
And even when it’s out of sight
The sun shines night and day
The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun’s
Atomic energy
Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.*
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

This discussion seems to have strayed rather far from the book. I’m about halfway through the Kindle version of “Slaying the Sky Dragon.” The Kindle version is the only one offered by Amazon; I don’t know if there exists a dead tree version.
I do find the Kindle version frustrating because a number of the essays rely on charts and graphs which, even with the K3’s zooming and rotating features, are unreadable. It might do slightly better on a Kindle DX but there would still be the problem of the authors’ referring to color, which, of course, the Kindle does not display. Statements like “The blue in this table represents blah blah blah while the orange represents bleh bleh bleh,” are pointless in a Kindle book!
As you might expect from a book with so many authors, the quality of the writing is uneven and it reads more like a collection of essays on a common theme than like a single, sustained, coherent argument.
I’m finding it slow going because so much of the writing is so clunky that I’m in danger of grinding the enamel off my teeth. If the authors plan to release a hard-copy version, I implore them to FIND AN EDITOR first. Someone who understands the use of the apostrophe would be good. Someone who knows how to use commas would be even better.

I can’t seem to get Kindle for PC to work to read a sample; don’t feel like buying vaporware.
Kindle for PC shows up nice and pretty but blank and unresponsive.

Ken Roberts says:
November 30, 2010 at 9:00 am
I must be the dumbest rock in the pile for I fail to understand why there would be any excess CO2 at all; shouldn’t the extra simply be greedily gobbled up by the existing plants?
At last they would, but the emissions are faster increasing than what the plants and the oceans can absorb as extra over a year (after a full cycle of seasons): some 4 GtC/year, about 1/3rd in plants, 2/3rd in the (mainly deep) oceans.
As tests in greenhouses and open air showed: a 100% rise of CO2 gives average some 50% increased growth, not 100%…
And I still think they don’t clean their Mauna Loa gauge, so there!
Well have a read of their testing and calibration procedures: one can only hope that thermometer readings were as rigorously controlled:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html

Margaret Ball says: “ the writing is . . . ”
Nutty ! ?
Thank you.

If anyone wants to get a handle on the percentage of the CO2 content of the atmosphere which arises from the burning of fossil fuels then using C_13/C_12 ratios is a clueless way to go. The whole situaiton is far too complicated to lead to even half decent conclusions. It is far better to use C_14/C_12 ratios which are useable back to some 50,000 years ago. The reason why this is so is because there is NO C_14 in fossil fuels since C_14 is radioactive and has a half life of about 5,730 years. Having set up the first radiocarbkn dating laboratory in Africa I am only too well aware that the burning of fossil fules has thus diluted the percentage of C_14 in the atmosphere. However, from the figures I have seen the AGW fanatics would not be pleased with the results which point to a much smaller fossil fuel CO2 component in the atmosphere than they would like.

The isotopes of carbon are so totally irrelevant for the question of CO2 emissions.
We can simply calculate how much carbon is being added by the industrial and related activity. It’s as simple as measuring how much water you drink every day. Whether there is C12 or C13 or C14 in it is irrelevant. They have the same chemical – and greenhouse – properties because these properties are determined by the electrons, not by the neutrons. After all, the carbon of all isotopes is being used and recycled all the time.
The “extra” CO2 in the atmosphere is not composed of the “same atoms” that were once emitted by humans. The CO2 atoms may have circulated several times. It’s still true that the CO2 concentration would be lower if we didn’t produce it.
Every year, we produce the equivalent of CO2 that would raise the concentration by 4 ppm per year. One half of it, about 1.8 ppm, is indeed added to the concentration, while the rest, 2.1 ppm, is absorbed by the oceans and biosphere. Because the concentration is higher than the 280 ppm equilibrium value, the processes consuming CO2 are strengthened, which adds to reduction of CO2. At this moment, only about 50% of our “emissions” are being abruptly absorbed. Clearly, this percentage would grow higher if the concentration were higher, or if the emissions were lower.
None of these things has any impact on the CO2 warming effects – which are small and surely independent of the isotopic composition of the carbon.
Iron Sun Theory is just nutty. At least the surface layers of the Sun clearly don’t contain any significant iron as can be seen via spectroscopy. About 0.1% of the solar mass is iron, just type a simple Wolfram Alpha query
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=amount+of+iron+in+sun
It’s pretty difficult to run nuclear reactions all the way to iron – which has the biggest binding energy per nucleus, being “most stable” in this sense. That’s why there’s not too much iron in the stars yet. It may change in future stars in a few billion years. But claiming that the surface of the Sun is mostly iron etc. is just nutty – a kind of medieval pseudoscience.

Dave Springer says:
“If someone has an explanation for that higher surface temperature of the earth other than so-called greenhouse effect I’d love to hear it because so far over the course of the last five years in which I’ve taken a keen interest in global warming climate change global climate disruption I’ve yet to see it. ”
Try the simple concept of heat storage by the air and (especially) water, since sunlight can penetrate these materials, unlike the case of the moon. The new book which is the topic of this post has some very thoughtful ideas on why the “greenhouse effect” may not make sense. Can you refute all these ideas?

Dave Springer says:
November 30, 2010 at 11:38 am
“So I’m going to take a pass on this book due to too many red flags on the face of it. ”
Me too. Why this focus on that iron sun stuff?

John F. Hultquist says:
“Margaret Ball says: “ the writing is . . . ”
Nutty ! ?”
I said clunky, not nutty, John. I’ll leave it to physicists to decide which of the many ideas being thrown around in this book have merit and which are merely mixed nuts.
It’s passages like these that annoy me:
“Consensus was a major argument in support of the claim that humans were the primary cause of global warming almost from the inception of the IPCC. It was coincident because it was the people involved with the IPCC that was the consensus.”
I don’t have any quarrel with the assertion that the oft-cited “consensus” is an artifact of the IPPC’s charter, personnel, and process. But the second sentence above is a crime against the English language, and I’m getting tired of mentally rewriting sentences like that as I read through the book.
And this one.
“Rare among compounds, is the fact that water exists in all three phases in our natural environment.”
Or how about this:
“There is largely ignored evidence that the past atmosphere was vastly different than today’s by comparing winged flight.”
By the way, the Kindle informs me that I am now 72% of the way through the book, and the subject of carbon isotopes has yet to come up. Maybe that’s what’s in the mystery PDF file.

The interesting question(s) here is whether or not there actually is a distinguishable difference in the isotope fingerprints between fossil fuel burning and volcanic CO2… and whether or not we actually know just how much CO2 is being leaked out daily from these thousands upon thousands of volcanoes both on land and at the bottom of the oceans… and whether or not oxygen depletion can actually be used as a viable process to determine the manmade signature since its still not fully understood whether or not volcanic CO2 consumes O2 in its processes and/or how much is or isn’t consumed.
Is anyone able to answer those questions with a high degree of confidence and the substantial evidence to back it up ?
Based on that thought process, it may very well turn out that the fossil fuel burning isotope signature is much much smaller than what has been assumed. On the other hand, it may turn out that it’s larger than what has been assumed.
So books like these are a welcome, as they put the spotlight back on to unanswered questions and push for further scientific research to be conducted in order to substantiate and backup the established assumptions.

ScientistForTruth says:
November 30, 2010 at 9:22 am
“Molten metal is hugely lossy due to eddy current flow. Who says that an arbitrarily low initial field can be amplified? References please, not bald assertions.”
I have no interest in argument by authority. And you should note that the original amplification is happening in plasma, not metal. If the dynamo does have the form of a self-exciting system (I do not know whether that is the case) then it will be able to amplify an arbitrarily low field. Field strengths are proportional to the induced currents, and induced currents and voltages are proportional to the field strengths and velocity; thus the induced power goes as the square of the current, as do the losses; so the loss ratio is independent of field strength (assuming constant resistivity). In a metal core, since losses scale with the square of the current, the temperature will increase with field strength, and since resistivity increases with temperature, the loss ratio will also increase with temperature. Thus such a self-exciting system would actually work better the lower the magnetic field.
“One nanotesla? Well, I’d be surprised if you can do a lot with that. And what’s all this about condensation to give fields of 1000 teslas? That sounds like poppycock. Have you discovered magnetic monopoles then?”
The magnetic field is frozen into the ionised medium; if the gas cloud becomes more compact, under the influence of gravity (the mechanism by which stars and planets are formed) the magnetic field will be compressed with it. The density ratio from interstellar medium to star is ~1e24, so even if the excess heat were all radiated away during the collapse, so that the temperature did not rise, the magnetic energy density (scaling as the square of the field) would increase by the same factor. Deep within the cloud, where the temperature does rise during the condensation process, the magnetic field will be even stronger.

Mosh: I could probably even WRITE that book, but I would not believe what I wrote 🙂

Craig said, “Nutty ideas deserve a hearing. They do not deserve acceptance.”
In my ideal world, nutty ideas are not given advertising space. At the most, they should be confined to the back pages of comic books.
That said, nutty ideas have been known to hold accepted, “consensus”, status. So, while I tire of the posts that seem oblivious to the fact they are beating a dead dog, we must accept the notion that all ideas MUST be made public and the underlying data and analysis provided to us, the consumers. And yes, we the reading public, are the consumers of scientific inquiries and discoveries. We have a right to know what you are up to in your Ivory Towers.

“”””” Robert Wykoff says:
November 29, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Sounds interesting, will pick it up. Question, though…why is it nutty to believe the core of the sun has a significant amount of Iron? There is a significant amount of Iron in earths core. A great deal of the asteroids are made of Iron. Why wouldn’t a great deal of them have impacted the sun? It would help explain why the sun has a strong magnetic field. I’m just curious. “””””
Well if the sun did gather up iron meteoroids, they presumably would gravitate towards the solar core; although I don’t know that. But in any case; that iron would not result in any magnetic effects; well any ferromagnetic effects anyway, since the solar temperatures are way above the curie Temperature at which ferromagnetism in iron disappears completely.
Solar magnetic fields are electromagnetic fields generated by flowing electric charges; as in any plasma. You don’t need iron to get magnetic fields, in fact you can get a damn side more powerful magnetic field by getting rid of the iron; or any other ferro-magnetic material.
The University of Canberra (I think) built a proton Synchrotron that was half the diameter of the Bevatron (berserkeley); and they achieved that (Prof Marcus Oliphant) by simply getting rid of the iron core and its 15,000 or so Gauss limiting saturation magnetic field. They simply wound a copper wire core and put a lot of current through it with no iron. The coil only had two turns, but those wires were a foot in diameter; assembled from parallel strands, that were about one square inch cross-section each. To stop the wires from blowing apart due to mutual repulsion, those two wires were embedded in aluminum plates that were about 4 ft square to provide hoop strength to the wires,. Well the two wires actually overlapped like a partial eclipse sort of arrangement; and since the current went in opposite directions in the two turns there was no current in the3 overlap section at all; so they left those strands out, since they were not needed to carry zero current. That gave them a nice little hole around the magnet coils into which they placed the beam vacuum tube. So the two opposing currents provided a parallel field that was perpendicular to the plane of the two wires, to keep the protons or whatever going in a circle.
It took a little bit of power to run up that magnetic field; like eight hundred Volts at six million Amps or 4.8 gigaWatts peak power. This was generated by a faraday disc generator with two sets of counterrotating pairs of plates that were all connected in series from edge to next center and so on so they got 200 Volts per disk. Of course it takes some weird brushes to make contact with a large rotating disk that is about a foot thick, and I think some eight feet or so in diameter. So they used liquid sodium streams to make both the brush contacts and also the on-off switch.
The wound up the two disks counter-rotating with a few horse power electric motors; and then they turned on the sodium to make the electrical connection. Of course when they did that, those disks came to a screeching halt. If they hadn’t used counter-rotating disks that rapid stop would probably have turned the whole building over. Well of course the inductive kick back from that two turn coil then started to wind up the disks in the opposite direction to store the unused energy from the first jolt, and then the electric motors wound them back up to speed. While the kickback and wind up was being done, they reversed the polarity of the power to the magnetic field coils that powered the Faraday disks; so that with the reversed field, and reversed rotation they generated the same polarity output pulse next time.
So you don’t need iron to get a powerful magnetic field. This scheme was so outrageous, that Prof Olophant was able to con somebody into funding the thing; even though some of his colleagues thought it was a huge boondoggle; well they referred to the contraption as the “White Oliphant.”
When I was in College (University), they already had the Faraday disk and Sodium liquid brush system working; and they were in the process of building up the copper wires and aluminum hoop strength plates.
Well I always knew that Australians were stark raving mad anyway; and that machine just proves it; but the damn thing worked.

‘George E. Smith says:
November 30, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Well I always knew that Australians were stark raving mad anyway; and that machine just proves it; but the damn thing woked.’
I would have loved to have been there when they turned it on.

Lubos,
I agree that it is pretty hard to make iron in nuclear reactions. It isn’t made in fission or fusion reactions.

What an interesting and informative thread!
I’m proud of you guys. Thanks to Anthony for creating and managing to sustain this website!
It’s so refreshing to find an oasis of reasoned discourse in a sea of partisan snark.

I’ve read that iron fusion has been proposed as a mechanism leading to neutron star formation. According to the hypothesis, iron fusion initiates then terminates in a sort of endothermic shock resulting in cooling and contraction of the core. The process then repeats until the remaining nuclei degenerate into free-flowing non-bonded subatomic particles.
Off topic as Hell, but by now that shouldn’t matter! 🙂

Ferdinand Engelbeen says: November 30, 2010 at 3:05 am
Thanks for your take on the subject. I respect what you have to say, duly noted. Will try extremely hard to retain it for next time.
Michael, I’ve been banned from all the Mayan 2012 end of the world forums for first appearing like a believer but actually being a debunker. The profit$ of doom$ don’t like debunkers for obviou$ rea$on$.
I don’t miss them in the least, though I do dislike seeing vulnerable people and kids being emotionally screwed up by those [snips]. Kinda like CAGW alarmists. I’d get banned immediately at pro-AGW sites.
I may have been pretty successful, those 2012 forums are really, really dead now.
I do believe Oliver had been warned, repeatedly.

Julian Flood says:
November 30, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
Is that dissolved or is there a solid component? While CaCO3 dissolves below a certain depth, are there components of the solid fall-out which do not dissolve at depth? Does the calcium carbonate fall-out of plankton all get dissolved?
That is for the dissolved CO2 – bicarbonate – carbonate part (DIC), the near 40,000 GtC inorganic carbon dissolved in the deep oceans. d13C from calcite deposits are somewhat higher in d13C, but organic carbon is a lot lower. Both are recycled (at least in part) when they fall out of the upper ocean layer. See the nice introduction by Anton Uriarte Cantolla at:
http://homepage.mac.com/uriarte/carbon13.html
More detailed for the North Atlantic:
http://www.bjerknes.uib.no/pages.asp?kat=8&id=1909&lang=2
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/04/gloomy_emissions_data_shows_me.html has a neat graph up to 2008.
I’ve seen several ‘the sky is falling’ assertions that methane levels are rising.
Yes, but they don’t show you the full picture of the last decades, and only a small range: there is little increase in the past decade, compared with the decades before:
http://zipcodezoo.com/Trends/Trends%20in%20Atmospheric%20Methane.asp
Even more interesting: the Eemian was much warmer than the current warm period, during thousands of years, especially around the Arctic (5-10°C warmer!): trees growing until the Arctic Oceans, as well as in Siberia as in North America. Thus much less permafrost, clathrates decomposed from shallow coasts,…
Despite that, methane levels didn’t reach more than 700 ppbv:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/eemian.html
Thus it doesn’t seem that the sky will be falling (yet)…
At what temperature do deep sea bacteria begin to consume clathrates?
I have no idea…
BTW, I notice that you make no allowance for the fact that the seasonal isotopic variations may not be consistent — C4, CAM and C4-like plants will confuse the figures.
Indeed, there are several influencing factors in the seasonal amplitude of CO2 levels: temperature is one, but precipitation is also quite important in countries with low precipitation. C3 plants are more sensitive for high temperatures and low precipitation than C4 plants and CAM plants can survive even in deserts. That influences the year by year increase of CO2 as variability around the trend and also influences the 13C/12C ratio over the seasons from year to year. But as all three forms preferentially use 12C (at different rates), the oxygen balance shows anyway that vegetation is a net source of d13C increase, thus opposing the d13C decline caused by fossil fuel burning.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:

The C13 ratio argument is a bad one.
It is not a proof in itself, but it adds to the evidence, together with all other arguments.

You make many distracting citations which is a bit of verisimilitude. Lets be clear about the strongest possible conclusion on the basis of your citations if we admit all your precepts without argument: declining C13/C12 ratios is not inconsistent with rising CO2 being driven by fossil fuel emissions.
That statement is so weak, its not even in the same league as your original claim or the IPCC’s claim which is that declining C13 ratios excludes other explanations.
As I stated before, that claim adds basically nothing to the case for AGW beyond whatever first order information exists about CO2 exchange with the oceans. You’ve made an honest effort to prove your point, now don’t turn into a troll refusing to let the argument go.

Northern Exposure says:
November 30, 2010 at 3:17 pm
The interesting question(s) here is whether or not there actually is a distinguishable difference in the isotope fingerprints between fossil fuel burning and volcanic CO2… and whether or not we actually know just how much CO2 is being leaked out daily from these thousands upon thousands of volcanoes both on land and at the bottom of the oceans… and whether or not oxygen depletion can actually be used as a viable process to determine the manmade signature since its still not fully understood whether or not volcanic CO2 consumes O2 in its processes and/or how much is or isn’t consumed.
Is anyone able to answer those questions with a high degree of confidence and the substantial evidence to back it up ?
Volcanic d13C ranges from slighlty positive to -8 ‰. Atmospheric CO2 nowadays is below -8 ‰ and vegetation is average at -26 ‰ (C3 plants -22 to -30 ‰, C4 plants -10 to -14 ‰ and CAM plants inbetween). Thus volcanic CO2 would increase the d13C levels of the atmosphere, while vegetation decay decreases d13C, but vegetation CO2 uptake increases d13C. Fossil fuel use at average -24 ‰ definitively decreases d13C in the atmosphere.
Volcanic CO2 is partly from subduction of carbonates (and organics), partly directly from the mantle. The latter shows the lower range d13C, while the former is at the high side. The organics need oxygen, the cabonates not, and I am not sure if the mantle CO2 is already present as CO2 or carbonate, and probably needs no oxygen.
Anyway, one doesn’t need much oxygen as volcanic eruptions and vents are about 1% of human emissions:
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php
Thus it is quite sure that the oxygen balance is the result of more CO2 uptake than release by vegetation.

ScientistForTruth says:
December 1, 2010 at 7:13 am
“None of the experiments have demonstrated self-excitation, nor does known physics predict it.”
I don’t think you understand what self-excitation means. Self exciting motors and dynamos certainly exist. For those it does not matter how low the ambient magnetic field may be. At least, not classically. There might, I suppose, be a theoretical limit when only a single flux quantum threads the circuit; but even then, so long as there exist fluctuations of this magnitude, the self-excitation can still take off. I do not know the details of the analysis purportedly demonstrating that a massive rotating conducting fluid ball will constitute such a dynamo, so I will accept, for the sake of argument, that this might be mistaken, but worrying about whether the ambient field is strong enough is plain misguided. The initial strength of the field is irrelevant.
PB: The magnetic field is frozen into the ionised medium; if the gas cloud becomes more compact, under the influence of gravity (the mechanism by which stars and planets are formed) the magnetic field will be compressed with it.
“Poppycock. You are talking about the magnetic field as if it is some substance that can be frozen, condensed and compressed.”
It’s a standard metaphor. The magnetic fields in a plasma are generated by electric currents – the motion of charged particles within the plasma. In astrophysical plasmas, viscosity is very low and can usually be neglected; conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum and vorticity then means that the field behaves very much like another gaseous species, in equipartition, moving with the bulk ionised material. When that is compressed, the magnetic field goes with it, and gets stronger. There are two effects: (i) the currents generating the field get squashed into a smaller volume, so they generate a stronger field over that smaller volume; and (ii) as the cloud is compressed, the motion of the plasma through the magnetic field induces currents which make the field stronger. This is basic magnetohydrodynamics.

Paul says:
December 1, 2010 at 7:44 am
You make many distracting citations which is a bit of verisimilitude. Lets be clear about the strongest possible conclusion on the basis of your citations if we admit all your precepts without argument: declining C13/C12 ratios is not inconsistent with rising CO2 being driven by fossil fuel emissions.
I disagree: the 13C/12C ratio doesn’t prove that the rise is only from fossil fuel burning, but the combination of d13C levels and other arguments show that it is:
– The mass balance and the higher d13C level exclude the oceans as source.
– The oxygen balance and the higher d13C level by uptake exclude the biosphere as source.
– The d13C level of rock weathering and volcanic eruptions/vents is too high.
Thus as no other huge sources of low d13C are known, fossil fuel emissions are the only source. That has no influence on the more interesting question what the effect is of the measured increase of CO2 (which I expect to be a minor one).

Ed Murphy says:
December 1, 2010 at 10:56 am
That is so outdated, I have a real problem with that. Before the Pinatubo (6) and Cerro Hudson (5+) eruptions in 1991 there were fewer eruptions and the total VEI was extremely low. After 1991 and particularly after 1995 the yearly total VEI and number of eruptions have increased considerably.
Probably outdated, but even the 1991 Pinatubo with VEI 6 was not visible as increase in the CO2 record: there was even a temporarely drop in the CO2 increase, due to a 0.6°C global drop in temperature caused by the ash cloud. As the VEI scale is logarithmic, A VEI 6 has the same explosive strength as 100 VEI 4 eruptions. Also in 1991, the Hudson, Cerro volcano in Chile had a VEI 5+ eruption. Not bad for one year…
If we may assume that the CO2 releases of the eruptions and the continuous venting years after the eruption are in ratio with the VEI index, thus also logarithmic, then even the sum of all volcanic eruptions of each year between 1991 and 2010 doesn’t reach 10% of what the Pinatubo alone emitted, which didn’t increase the CO2 levels.
Thus the contribution of volcanoes to the rise of CO2 or the decline of d13C is negligible.

Anthony,
You must be really regretting your wholly innocent comment about Oliver K. Manuel’s “nutty iron Sun theory”. It is extraordinary that ¾ of your blog responses are obsessing about this theory rather than about the real subject of the blog – an intriguing new book that forcefully argues against CO2 being a global warming mechanism at all.
Call me narrow minded but, frankly, I really couldn’t care less about what is or is not at the centre of the Sun. However I do care a lot about whether the CO2 warming theory is true or false. What a pity the blog trail was inadvertently hijacked by a completely irrelevant side issue.
I have downloaded and read the electronic version of the book. Oliver Manuel’s chapter is very short, almost completely incomprehensible, and utterly unmemorable. But that is in contrast to the remaining chapters by the other authors, all of which are fascinating, intellectually challenging and written with great clarity and simplicity.
As far as I can gather after a quick initial reading of the book, the thrust of the argument is that that CO2 has no effect on the warmth of the Earth’s atmosphere because any minor effects that the trace gas might exhibit arecompletely negated by the energy transfer balancing effects of water in all its three phases.
In a nutshell, any warming of the oceans (which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface) causes evaporation, causes more cloud cover, causes a raised albedo, causes less radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, causes compensatory cooling. This is a closed loop control system which fortuitously contains an extreme non-linearity (the evaporation of water off the ocean surfaces goes up exponentially with the raised ocean water temperature). This non-linearity is the absolutely perfect ingredient for a very strong and stabilising natural thermostat, far more powerful by a factor of many than any greenhouse gas.
Furthermore, and this is the crucial point, any minor warming effect that additional CO2 in the atmosphere might have is not just insignificant, it is actually fully compensated for by the Earth’s water cycle thermostat. This is because the CO2 warming effect is effectively inside the control loop of the water cycle thermostat. To understand the significance of this, a good analogy would be the effect of turning on a 3kW electric fan heater inside my 40kW centrally heated, and thermostatically controlled, house. The extra 3kW from the fan heater will not raise the temperature at all because the additional heat it supplies will be exactly compensated for by the thermostatically controlled CH boiler system, leaving my house at precisely the same temperature as it was before.
The water cycle natural thermostat is not a new theory – others including me have advocated it many times – but this is the first book I have read in which all these concepts have been explained so clearly and forcefully.
I found the book challenging and compelling. It’s a pity your readers were sidelined onto a completely false trail on an arcane and irrelevant subject rather than addressing (and challenging) the arguments it raises. I urge everyone to read it and comment on it and get a real debate going. This is no side issue – it could well be the end game for AGW.

REPLY: Nope, I don’t regret it at all. My opinion of the iron sun theory as being “nutty” is unchanged. One reader said that is in the book, the question remains: why? – Anthony

Interestingly Discover Magazine gave a very honest discussion about Dr. Manuel,
An iconoclastic theory of the solar system’s origin shows how science tests its truisms (Discover Magazine, March 2002)

In the late 1960s, chemist Oliver Manuel made a small but staggering discovery about meteorites. He noticed that the abundances of certain elements in meteorites were distinctly different from those in the Earth and much of the solar system. This observation spurred research showing that our solar system probably formed from material generated in many different stars. For Manuel, it also spawned a radical theory about the origins of our solar system, which he has doggedly pursued for forty years. Nearly all astronomers agree that the Sun and the rest of the planets formed from an amorphous cloud of gas and dust 4.6 billion years ago. But Manuel argues, based on his compositional data, that the solar system was created by a dramatic stellar explosion–a supernova–and that the iron-encased remnant of the progenitor star still sits at the center of the Sun. Manuel fits a popular stereotype, the lone dissenter promoting a new idea that flies in the face of the scientific establishment. In the real world, some of these theories eventually have been proven right but vastly more have been proven wrong. Manuel is under no illusions about the popularity of his idea. “Ninety-nine percent of the field will tell you it’s junk science,” he says. The evidence weighs in heavily against him. If he’s right, however, we need to completely rethink how planetary systems form. Even if he’s wrong, some scientists say, at least he has made people think. Astrophysicists don’t deny the validity of Manuel’s original meteorite data. “It was a good observation,” says cosmochemist Frank Podosek of Washington University. “This was something we hadn’t observed before. It was a fruitful thing to notice, but he picked it up and ran with it very much farther than the basis could justify.” To support his theory, Manuel pieced together bits of information from history, astronomy, biology and physics. He founded his theory on isotopes, variants of an element that have different atomic weights but the same basic chemical properties. On Earth, isotopes have consistent, well-known relative abundances. Manuel cited unusual mixes of isotopes in meteorites and possibly in the atmosphere of Jupiter as evidence that those objects formed from the outer layers of a supernova, where such strange isotope ratios would be the norm. The inner planets, made from rocky debris, formed from heavy elements in the inner part of the supernova, he says, where more familiar isotope concentrations prevailed. And the Sun, which Manuel argues is iron-rich, formed around a neutron star, the collapsed remnant of the exploded star. “This is not a news flash,” he says. “This is my conclusion from 42 years of measuring the abundance of isotopes.” Manuel’s insistence both infuriates and amuses others in the field. Scientists who know him talk about him in a tone that is both weary and indulgent, as they would describe an eccentric relative. “I happen to like Oliver,” says Donald Burnett, professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. “I don’t agree with anything he says, but I find him a colorful character.” There is one widely accepted element in Manuel’s scenario. In the universe, many elements heavier than iron are thought to have been forged in supernovae. But the evidence increasingly seems to rule out Manuel’s supernova-genesis theory. At the start of the 20th century, many scientists believed the Sun was made mostly of iron. Manuel cites the historical support for an iron-rich Sun as evidence for his theory. “A high iron content for the Sun is not revolutionary but is actually quite compatible with the history of solar research,” he says. But in 1925, astronomer Cecelia Payne analyzed the light of our star and proposed that the Sun was most likely a burning ball of hydrogen. By the late thirties, the case was nearly settled. The surface of the Sun has been proven to be mostly hydrogen, and many subsequent studies have led to extremely detailed models of the hydrogen fusion reactions that power our star. “We can make an explicit model of the Sun, putting its mass and brightness into the computer, along with the laws of physics and that then produces right amount of Sunshine and brightness,” says Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. These models also explain the various stages of stellar evolution that astronomers can observe. And the principles of hydrogen fusion are well established, both in the laboratory and in the detonations of hydrogen bombs. According to theory and experiment, light hydrogen atoms in the Sun fuse together to form helium atoms, releasing bursts of energy in the process. All of the evidence points to our Sun being made primarily of hydrogen. Manuel argues that the surface is made up mostly of hydrogen only because elements in the Sun separate according to mass. Hydrogen, the lightest element, floats to the surface, while heavier elements huddle below. But his theory creates another problem: If the Sun isn’t made of hydrogen, how does it generate its energy? Fusing a heavy and stable element like iron consumes more energy than it releases. In his theory, Manuel relies the neutron star at the center to make up for energy lost when hydrogen is taken out of the picture. The neutrons that make up the star have higher energy than free neutrons, he says, so a neutron escaping from the star releases energy. The free neutron then decays into a proton as it migrates toward the surface, again releasing energy. The proton, which is a hydrogen atom minus an electron, fuses to form helium and releases even more energy. He supposes that some of the decayed neutrons stick around as protons and account for the abundance of hydrogen on the surface of the Sun and in the solar wind. Manuel’s colleagues are skeptical about this elaborate and unproven explanation. Many scientists also find it improbable that our solar system could have formed quickly from the debris of a supernova. They have only found one system in which planets formed around a neutron star, and it looks nothing like our solar system. On the other hand, astronomers have spotted innumerable stars forming out of clouds of gas and dust and find strong indications that planets are forming around these protostars. Finally, there is persuasive evidence that our solar system contains the remains of many different supernovae. Ironically, Manuel’s own discovery contributed to this understanding. Chemists have traced the strange isotopic concentrations Manuel first observed to individual grains within meteorites. The proportions of each isotope vary from grain to grain. If the solar system formed from a single supernova, all the grains should have roughly the same abundances of isotopes. Since they don’t, most scientists view the isotopes in a particular grain as a clue to its origin, and, hence, as evidence that meteorites, and most other bodies in the solar system, are made of heterogeneous material derived from many stars. That makes Manuel’s theory look less likely than ever. “Fifteen years ago, I would have kept a question mark in my mind,” said cosmochemist Roy Lewis, of the Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. “I would have said well he’s almost certainly wrong but by golly if he turns out to be right, won’t that be interesting.” Although most scientists don’t believe Manuel’s theory, they all acknowledge that outlandish hypotheses have been proven correct in the past. It seems especially unlikely in Manuel’s case, however. In addition to citing the contradictory evidence, many scientists also dismiss the iron-Sun theory on the grounds of simplicity. Most observations of our solar system can be explained by fairly common processes, so why evoke rare and complicated explanations? Still, some scientists see fringe theorists like Manuel as an asset, as they make people reassess long-held theories. “Manuel is a little off the wall,” Lewis says. “But science is filled with people a little off the wall. Our great strength is to allow them to express their views.” Manuel’s views got an airing again at the January meeting of the American Astronomica
l Society meeting in Washington, DC, where once again they received little notice. Meanwhile, Manuel continues to argue his theory with an air of implacable certainty, believing that solar physics is on the verge of a revolution. He talks as though scientists need only to come to their senses and reassess the data. “I’m not trying to refute the professional careers of the scientists whose shoulders I’m standing on,” Manuel says. “My work depends on their evidence. It’s just a different interpretation.”

Interesting thread.
Oliver was incesant. IN fairness, Anthony gave full and fair warning to knock it off
but he didn’t listen. He also got booted off of Tallblokes but reason unknown. I liked
Oliver; he was pleasant and interesting but no one liked his theory.

Anthony,
You must be really regretting your wholly innocent comment about Oliver K. Manuel’s “nutty iron Sun theory”. It is extraordinary that ¾ of your blog responses are obsessing about this theory rather than about the real subject of the blog – an intriguing new book that forcefully argues against CO2 being a global warming mechanism at all.
Call me narrow minded but, frankly, I really couldn’t care less about what is or is not at the centre of the Sun. However I do care a lot about whether the CO2 warming theory is true or false. What a pity the blog trail was inadvertently hijacked by a completely irrelevant side issue.
I have downloaded and read the electronic version of the book. Oliver Manuel’s chapter is very short, almost completely incomprehensible, and utterly unmemorable. But that is in contrast to the remaining chapters by the other authors, all of which are fascinating, intellectually challenging and written with great clarity and simplicity.
As far as I can gather after a quick initial reading of the book, the thrust of the argument is that that CO2 has no effect on the warmth of the Earth’s atmosphere because any minor effects that the trace gas might exhibit arecompletely negated by the energy transfer balancing effects of water in all its three phases.
In a nutshell, any warming of the oceans (which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface) causes evaporation, causes more cloud cover, causes a raised albedo, causes less radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, causes compensatory cooling. This is a closed loop control system which fortuitously contains an extreme non-linearity (the evaporation of water off the ocean surfaces goes up exponentially with the raised ocean water temperature). This non-linearity is the absolutely perfect ingredient for a very strong and stabilising natural thermostat, far more powerful by a factor of many than any greenhouse gas.
Furthermore, and this is the crucial point, any minor warming effect that additional CO2 in the atmosphere might have is not just insignificant, it is actually fully compensated for by the Earth’s water cycle thermostat. This is because the CO2 warming effect is effectively inside the control loop of the water cycle thermostat. To understand the significance of this, a good analogy would be the effect of turning on a 3kW electric fan heater inside my 40kW centrally heated, and thermostatically controlled, house. The extra 3kW from the fan heater will not raise the temperature at all because the additional heat it supplies will be exactly compensated for by the thermostatically controlled CH boiler system, leaving my house at precisely the same temperature as it was before.
The water cycle natural thermostat is not a new theory – others including me have advocated it many times – but this is the first book I have read in which all these concepts have been explained so clearly and forcefully.
I found the book challenging and compelling. It’s a pity your readers were sidelined onto a completely false trail on an arcane and irrelevant subject rather than addressing (and challenging) the arguments it raises. I urge everyone to read it and comment on it and get a real debate going. This is no side issue – it could well be the end game for AGW.

maksimovich says:
December 1, 2010 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for the background, which adds to the evidence that volcanic events are not the cause of the CO2 increase.
BTW, I also read somewhere of another (additional?) reason for the CO2 drop after the Pinatubo eruption: small particles in the stratosphere makes that incoming sunlight is partly scattered in all directions. That makes that leaves which are part of the day in the shadow of other leaves for direct sunlight, receive more indirect sunlight, thus increasing total photosynthesis…

This has been a very revealing thread.

Moshpit: Someone still needs to explain to me why it is so much hotter in Phoenix than in Atlanta on a sunny summer day. Same elevation and latitude, but Atlanta has 4 times as much “greenhouse gases.” It seems to me that the radiation cartoons can’t explain this.
AGW radiation cartoons are produced the other side of the looking glass, in this case the opposite effect of “greenhouse gases” is touted as ‘real’, and all arguments then based on this, pro and con. Water is the greenhouse gas of our real greenhouse world, the greenhouse being the whole atmosphere, without it our world would be hotter, not colder, in other words, real greenhouse gases primarily cool the atmosphere, they don’t warm it. All the ‘back-radiation’ arguments are irrelevant.
The difference between the two places is percentage of humidity. The higher the humidity, the cooler the local atmosphere. Water vapour as the major real greenhouse gas in our real world and not the world we step into with Alice, absorbs the greater heat from the sun in more humid areas and because water vapour is lighter than air and heat rises and so on as in real world physics, takes that heat up and away (bringing it down as rain as it reaches colder higher levels and washing the dirt out our atmosphere in doing so, the cool wash recycle programme..). Without water our world would be some 20-30oC hotter. Hotter AGW claims it would be some 20oC colder. Our world would turn into a desert without water to cool us down from the effects of the sun.
That’s why it’s taken out of AGW cartoons and models, so the modellers can continue to pretend that water does not have a significant role to play in cooling the earth, it’s best to ignore it altogether.
What’s more difficult to understand is why anti-AGWScience protagonists join in by arguing from the AGWScience premise that water is a greenhouse gas in the AGWScience sense, that “greenhouse gases warm the earth and without it the earth would be colder”. So the arguments roll on, that AGW doesn’t take into account the greater direct warming potential of water vapour v CO2, and that greenhouse gases actually cool the earth in our wonderful greenhouse is excised …
I can only imagine that the AGWScience from the other side of the mirror has so successfully inculcated their impossible looking glass premise into ‘general knowledge’ that even otherwise real science antis take it as read.

oneuniverse, Thank you for the information.
Trial begins for retired professor Manuel (The Missouri Miner)
This is unreal. How come this was never brought up before?
REPLY: It has been, but in other places, and it didn’t get “legs” as they say in the news business. It’s been on Scienceblogs/deltoid in comments in 2008 as well as Physorg.com http://www.physorg.com/news163863704.html in 2009. It is an ugly situation, and had I known about it I would have banned Dr. Manuel long before I did. Unfortunately like you, the comment from “oneuniverse” is the first I heard of it.
– Anthony

Poptech says:
December 2, 2010 at 8:38 am
oneuniverse, Thank you for the information.
Trial begins for retired professor Manuel (The Missouri Miner)
This is unreal. How come this was never brought up before?
REPLY: It has been, but in other places, and it didn’t get “legs” as they say in the news business. It’s been on Scienceblogs/deltoid in comments in 2008 as well as Physorg.com http://www.physorg.com/news163863704.html in 2009. It is an ugly situation, and had I known about it I would have banned Dr. Manuel long before I did. Unfortunately like you, the comment from “oneuniverse” is the first I heard of it.
– Anthony

Now that’s disturbing. I had no idea. Thanks for posting these links. Dr. Manuel’s behavior seemed odd — I have seen his iron sun ‘carpet bombing’ on other blogs. This is the first I’ve read of the charges and trial. I’m not sure what to make of all of this, but I’ll certainly keep it in mind.
Anthony, good on you for banning OKM if indeed he was carpet bombing your blog the way I’ve seen on Judith Curry’s blog. After the first few comments on Judith’s blog that seemed to be copy-and-paste templates promoting his theories, I just started to scroll past them without reading — ironic, as I doubt he understands he causes readers to tune out by his ham-fisted promotional antics.

Sad indeed to have the thread highjacked… I was hoping for a review of various aspects not Dr. Manuel’s sun theory.
REPLY: Hope elsewhere, because there’s no way in double hockeysticks it will ever be discussed here again. – Anthony