From the “fun with conjecture department”, another graduate school paper parroting the claim from NOAA’s Susan Solomon that excess man-made CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years.
From CO2science: In a paper recently published in the international peer-reviewed journal Energy & Fuels, Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh (2009), Professor of Energy Conversion at The Ohio State University, addresses the residence time (RT) of anthropogenic CO2 in the air. He finds that the RT for bulk atmospheric CO2, the molecule CO2, is ~5 years, in good agreement with other cited sources (Segalstad, 1998), while the RT for the trace molecule CO2 is ~16 years. Both of these residence times are much shorter than what is claimed by the IPCC.
It seems to me that Gaia does a fine job of respirating CO2. It doesn’t just “sit there”, as you can see the process is quite dynamic:
More at NOAA ESRL Carbon Tracker
Via Eurekalert: If greenhouse gas emissions stopped now, Earth still would likely get warmer
While governments debate about potential policies that might curb the emission of greenhouse gases, new University of Washington research shows that the world is already committed to a warmer climate because of emissions that have occurred up to now.
There would continue to be warming even if the most stringent policy proposals were adopted, because there still would be some emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. But the new research shows that even if all emissions were stopped now, temperatures would remain higher than pre-Industrial Revolution levels because the greenhouse gases already emitted are likely to persist in the atmosphere for thousands of years.
In fact, it is possible temperatures would continue to escalate even if all cars, heating and cooling systems and other sources of greenhouse gases were suddenly eliminated, said Kyle Armour, a UW doctoral student in physics. That’s because tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols, which tend to counteract the effect of greenhouse warming by reflecting sunlight back into space, would last only a matter of weeks once emissions stopped, while the greenhouse gases would continue on.
“The aerosols would wash out quickly and then we would see an abrupt rise in temperatures over several decades,” he said.
Armour is the lead author of a paper documenting the research, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. His co-author is Gerard Roe, a UW associate professor of Earth and space sciences.
The global temperature is already about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution, which began around the start of the 19th century. The scientists’ calculations took into account the observed warming, as well as the known levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols already emitted to see what might happen if all emissions associated with industrialization suddenly stopped.
In the best-case scenario, the global temperature would actually decline, but it would remain about a half-degree F higher than pre-Industrial Revolution levels and probably would not drop to those levels again, Armour said.
There also is a possibility temperatures would rise to 3.5 degrees F higher than before the Industrial Revolution, a threshold at which climate scientists say significant climate-related damage begins to occur.
Of course it is not realistic to expect all emissions to cease suddenly, and Armour notes that the overall effect of aerosols – particles of sea salt or soot from burning fossil fuels, for example – is perhaps the largest uncertainty in climate research.
But uncertainties do not lessen the importance of the findings, he said. The scientists are confident, from the results of equations they used, that some warming would have to occur even if all emissions stopped now. But there are more uncertainties, and thus a lower confidence level, associated with larger temperature increases.
Climate models used in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments take into consideration a much narrower range of the possible aerosol effects, or “forcings,” than are supported by actual climate observations, Armour said. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel, sponsored by the United Nations, makes periodic assessments of climate change and is in the process of compiling its next report.
As emissions of greenhouse gases continue, the “climate commitment” to a warmer planet only goes up, Armour said. He believes it is helpful for policy makers to understand that level of commitment. It also will be helpful for them to understand that, while some warming is assured, uncertainties in current climate observations – such as the full effect of aerosols – mean the warming could be greater than models suggest.
“This is not an argument to say we should keep emitting aerosols,” he said. “It is an argument that we should be smart in how we stop emitting. And it’s a call to action because we know the warming we are committed to from what we have emitted already and the longer we keep emitting the worse it gets.”
The paper was published in the Jan. 15 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.
If greenhouse gas emissions stopped now, Earth still would likely get warmer
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Myrrh;
Yeah, once in a while some of the actual science done makes it through the IPCC political screen unnoticed. Elsewhere, all we get to see are the holes in the cheesecloth.
The bumps and wiggles in the human production of CO2 do not show up in the measurement data. It follows that the atmospheric CO2 system is an efficient regulator which attenuate this input handily. It follows that the increase in atmospheric concentration over the past 50 odd years is from an entirely different source. And, that’s just all there is to it.
Feet2theFire says:
February 18, 2011 at 2:07 pm
I have to retract parts of my comments: the carbon tracker film is not from satellite measurements (which started in 2002, not 2000), but from ground based stations, including flux measurements and (modelled?) flux estimates and modelled air circulation patterns. That makes the film nice for illustration but not really accurate for many parts of the globe. The real stuff is from AIRS (2002-2009) which can be found here:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/news_archive/2010-03-30-CO2-Movie/
The differences between the carbon tracker film and the AIRS film are minor, but one should be aware that the carbon tracker is animation, only partly based on real data.
Feet2theFire says:
February 18, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Two things (at least)…
“…starting half-way”? See, that is the point – you pick a convenient starting point and think we are too inert to recognize that you leave out what is inconveniently true. For example, the chart labeled “CO2 Trend at Mona Loa Observatory” begins in 1960, right in the middle of the 1940-1970 [BTW, I actually meant “1940-1976ish”] period I mentioned, the time of the decline.
As I have said, the influence of more CO2 on temperature is a matter of debate. The influence of temperature is no matter of debate anymore. That part can be found in the second halve of Pieter Tans’ slides. That doesn’t mean that I agree with the first part.
But if you want a comment on the first part:
I certainly disagree with his CO2 decay model (which is a variant of the Bern model).
The cooling in the period 1940-1975 is about 0.2°C. If we may assume a maximum influence of 8 ppmv/°C, the net result of the temperature drop is 1.6 ppmv less CO2. In the same period, human emissions were about 40 ppmv, which did result in an (approximately) 20 ppmv increase. Thus the influence of temperature on CO2 is completely overwhelmed by the human emissions.
Further, the CO2 curve is mainly based on ice cores, which are quite reliable because these are direct measurements in ancient air, including a 20 year overlap with the South Pole direct air measurements. Confirmed by other, less reliable proxies like sediments, stomata index data, coralline sponges d13C data,… The CO2 HS is real, the temperature HS is not. For coralline sponges, see:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif
The LIA is visible in the high resolution Law Dome ice core as a drop of 6 ppmv (for an appr. drop of 0.8°C) with a 50 years lag, thus again (as over the past 800,000 years) a ratio of about 8 ppmv/°C:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
Bart says:
February 18, 2011 at 10:25 pm
The bumps and wiggles in the human production of CO2 do not show up in the measurement data. It follows that the atmospheric CO2 system is an efficient regulator which attenuate this input handily. It follows that the increase in atmospheric concentration over the past 50 odd years is from an entirely different source. And, that’s just all there is to it.
Bart, we have had that discussion already several times: your frequency analyses is not applicable, simply because the resulting amplitude in the measurements is below the measurement accuracy. And it simply is impossible that any other sources of CO2 is the cause of the increase, as long as the increase is less than the emissions. As long as there is no destruction of matter.
kforestcat says:
February 18, 2011 at 5:01 pm
One of the more interesting things about NOAA’s CO2 weather tracker is that high CO2 concentrations are not occurring where fossil plants are located or at the times when electrical production is at peak.
Human production of CO2 is more or less evenly distributed over a year, some more in winter, some less in summer (except for airco’s…), but in total currently some 8 GtC/year. Ocean releases are about 90 GtC, mostly when the mid-latitude oceans are warming up and reverse when cooling down. Vegetation releases are opposite: continuous decay in colder months, high uptake in warm months (some 60 GtC back and forth). Thus on short term, the influence of continuous emissions is hardly visible in the much larger “noise” caused by the seasons. On longer term (after 2-3 years) it is quite clear:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/mlo_co2_seasons.jpg
that needs some update, but see the year by year increase, vs. the seasonal amplitude…
DocMartyn says:
February 18, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Dear Ferdinand I see you are in favor of a bucket and sponge model; the free water is the atmosphere and the sponge is the oceans. You note the water level, add water and again measure the water level, anything that does not match goes into the sponge.
Very sophisticated
Except that in this case the change of water mass in the sponge is measured too. See the change in DIC of seawater at e.g. Bermuda:
http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/IntDecVar_OCC.html
For the uptake/release of CO2 from vegetation, that is more difficult (several stations are used to measure CO2 fluxes over land), but there is an indirect method by measuring O2 changes and d13C changes in the atmosphere, both are influenced by vegetation growth and decay.
Myrrh says:
February 18, 2011 at 6:32 pm
These are the most INCREDIBLE. No scientist worth his paypacket would declare after less than 2 years work that he had found a definite annual increase trend in measuring anything. This is what Keeling did. He had an agenda, to prove man-made emissions of CO2 were a problem. The idea of some mythic “background of well-mixed CO2″ still hasn’t been shown to be proved, and even if such a critter did exist then trying to find it in the middle of an area of such immense volcanic activity and from under the summit of the largest active volcano in the world is silly. Claiming that he found this is obvious nonsense. How can anyone believe this makes sense? Because we’re told it does.
Myrrh, comments like these of yours make me sad and nearly ashamed to be a (real) skeptic (to both sides). If you had read some of the literature, you should have known that Keeling was only interested in good measurements of CO2, hardly interested in “global warming”, which was not even a topic in the late fifties. See his struggle with the different administrations for the continuous support of the MLO measurements in his biography:
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/publications/keeling_autobiography.pdf
After two years of accurate measurements, indeed he could see that the CO2 levels were increasing, simply because his new method was far more accurate (+/- 0.2 ppmv) to detect an increase of 1 ppmv/year than most of the old chemical measurements (+/- 10 ppmv).
Further, you should have known that the South Pole measurements were first, far from any volcano or vegetation. The only reason that MLO is mainly used as reference is that it has the longest continuous record (except a few months), while SPO has a gap of a few years. The official “global” CO2 record doesn’t contain MLO data, but is the average of several near sealevel stations.
In fact it doesn’t matter at all, as the differences in absolute value between the stations are within 5 ppmv and the trends are all similar: + 60 ppmv since 1958.
You should have known that MLO easely can detect that the incoming air is not “pristine” but influenced by downwind volcanic CO2 (+4 ppmv) or upwind vegetation CO2 depleted (-4 ppmv). These data are rejected (but not deleted, they are still available in the hourly average record) and not used for averaging. See:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
His son controlled Scripps and he oversaw, still does?, Mauna Loa. Keep the con in the family, the data from all the stations is manipulated just as Keeling manipulated it from the beginning
10 stations are overlooked by the NOAA, 60 others are maintained by other organisations (Japanese, European). Scripps takes its own (flask) data independent of NOAA at MLO and other places. Please enlighten me how the data can be manipulated for so long, even without any single whistleblower in all these organisations reporting the scam.
Further, your source of geological information is completely incorrect: the d13C level of almost all volcanic vents is much higher (near zero per mil) than of fossil fuels (-24 per mil) see e.g.:
linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0377027399000761
Myrrh says:
February 18, 2011 at 6:39 pm
And re residence time: the IPCC also says it’s only a few years: http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php
Thinking of that graph showing IPCC out of kilter with the other studies, but the IPCC shorter residence times are buried in the bulk of the report.
As said before, Segalstad is completely wrong: there is not the slightest connection between the residence time (which is about 5 years, also according to the IPCC, governed by the exchange rate of 150/800 GtC) and the time needed for an excess amount of CO2 to return back to the temperature driven steady state level (governed by the current removal rate of 4/800 GtC). This is so basic physical knowledge, that I don’t understand why Segalstad insists on an irrelevant residence time, while it takes a lot more time to remove an excess amount of CO2.
“Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
there is not the slightest connection between the residence time (which is about 5 years, also according to the IPCC, governed by the exchange rate of 150/800 GtC) and the time needed for an excess amount of CO2 to return back to the temperature driven steady state level (governed by the current removal rate of 4/800 GtC). ”
Ferdinand, you are being disingenuous. You present a bucket and sponge model and claim that it can explain the residency of bulk CO2 in two systems, atmosphere and water. You even present summative human generated CO2 vs keeling and generate a partition coefficient.
Now, for your next trick, show a summative plot of 14C that the bomb tests generated vs the levels of 14C in the atmosphere.
As always, it is always a pea in a shell game.
Your sponge in a bucket model generates the answer you like, and so you ignore its inability to answer the disappearance in 14C, instead you hand wave.
Ferdinand, I’m not going to argue with you about Mauna Loa, as I described, there’s some that see it as if it’s rational and continue to make excuses for it and some that see it for the nonsense it is. The ‘Green’ movement against coal, it was against coal note as it continues to be, not CO2 which was a fortuitous scapegoat, began in the Thirties, and it was these people that drew Keeling in. Of course all the stations are of one mind about CO2 levels..
Anyway, what I was interested in coming back to before I saw you post to me, was the graph you linked here: Further, the CO2 curve is mainly based on ice cores, which are quite reliable because these are diret measurements in ancient air, including a 20 yer overlap with the South Pole direct air measurements. Confirmed by other, less reliable proxies like sediments, stomata index data, coralline sponges d13C data,.. The CO2 HS is real, the temperature HS is not. For coralline sponges, see: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif
So anything that doesn’t fit with your AGWScience doctrine, is unreliable?
Am I really seeing what I think I’m seeing? Seriously, can anyone help here?
What I see in that graph, is that without interference from the AGWScience Manipulators in its Back Data History Office, from the time Keeling et al came into the game, Jamaica, Pedro and Atmospheric would have continued in the high 350-360+ ppm…
How really weird though that if I’m reading this right, we end up with a reverse Keeling at the end, taking CO2 levels back to the pre-Industrial 280 ppm (which Keeling cherry picked as his starting point) but 200 years late at 2000 AD- I thought the AGW story was that CO2 was in the 380 ppm now?
Have you never wondered how come all these other disparate sources “unreliable” CO2 studies are in general agreement and it’s AGW data which sticks out like a sore thumb ‘gainst them?
See http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html for a different view of
DocMartyn says:
February 19, 2011 at 6:04 am
I am aware that it seems very difficult for a lot of people to understand the difference between a residence time and an excess decay time. Let us try again:
The throughput of a factory can be expressed in amount of goods (or expressed as capital) coming in and out of the factory. What is going in is coming out minus some waste and the goods involved has some potential added value. One can calculate the residence time of the materials in hours, days or months of the materials (and capital) involved. That results in a turnover time of goods and capital.
Most shareholders are not very interested in the turnover time (they better should). They are interested in the gain (or, oh horror, loss) of their invested capital. Is there any connection between the two? Hardly. If the factory can sell their products at a higher price than it costs to manufacture the goods (raw materials + energy + maintenance + labour), there will be a gain. If they double the troughput (halve the turnover time) they may double the gain, but also make a loss, because the market collapses from overproduction…
The same for CO2, with stricter (non-market) rules:
The residence time is ruled by the troughput: what goes in goes out at more or less the same amounts. That doesn’t change the total CO2 in the atmosphere with one gram, as long as input and output are equal. Even if all CO2 in the atmosphere was exchanged within one day, that reduces the residence time to one day, but that doesn’t change the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Any additional input of CO2 would stay in the atmosphere forever, whatever the residence time, being one day or one millennium. Thus the residence time is completely irrelevant for the decay of any additional CO2 (whatever the source). What is relevant is the imbalance between inputs and outputs. Which is currently 4 GtC/year more natural sink than natural source. As the sink rate is directly proportional to the partial pressure difference between atmosphere and oceans, the decay half life time of the 200+ GtC extra CO2 is about 40 years, far beyond the 5 years residence time, but far below the hundreds of years of the IPCC. See Peter Dietze:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm
The fate of 14CO2 is quite simple: the total amount generated by the nuclear tests was in the order of 10^-12 ppmv, thus didn’t add any substance to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Deep oceans have a 14C/12C ratio which is near the pre-bomb test level. Ocean surface uptake and release are fast (1-2 years) thus follow the bomb tests more closely. Vegetation also follows the bomb tests more closely, as most decay follows in a few years after uptake. Thus mainly the deep ocean-atmosphere exchanges are of interest. These are about 40 GtC/year. Which means that the residence time of 14CO2 is about 20 years. Essenhigh in the before mentioned essay of Segalstad finds 16 years. Not bad for my first estimate…
Ferdinand – re residence time of CO2. If you’ve ever done or seen being done housework, you might have noticed that daily cleaning compared with weekly doesn’t mean that more dust is removed. CO2 in the atmosphere is like that dust, most of it is locally produced and being heavier than air it does not readily rise into the atmosphere. If it does, by wind and so on, it doesn’t make any difference to the amount that’s up there already because whenever the winds drop or it rains, it will all come down together.
Myrrh says:
February 19, 2011 at 7:40 am
Ferdinand – re residence time of CO2. If you’ve ever done or seen being done housework, you might have noticed that daily cleaning compared with weekly doesn’t mean that more dust is removed. CO2 in the atmosphere is like that dust, most of it is locally produced and being heavier than air it does not readily rise into the atmosphere. If it does, by wind and so on, it doesn’t make any difference to the amount that’s up there already because whenever the winds drop or it rains, it will all come down together.
Myrrh, you really need to read more about the fate of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 indeed is heavier than air, and large quantities released at once can suffocate people (as happened near some African ond other volcanic lakes). But once mixed in, it stays mixed in (except when catched by a tree or water), as all molecules, whatever their relative weight, are colliding with each other, going randomly everywhere. See the Brownian motion for particulates even much heavier than air:
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/brownian.htm
The continuous addition of CO2 shows up near ground as good as at 12 km height, but that takes time, as also the seasonal changes, which occur at ground level show:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/seasonal_height.jpg
Rain indeed brings some CO2 down from higher altitudes, but the amounts first were released when the ocean waters were evaporating. That doesn’t change the amounts that much (no measurable change in CO2 at ground level or 3,400 m height when it rains).
And have a look at the CO2 trends at different heights from ground stations (sea level and mountain), airplanes and satellites… Here for ground stations and aircraft data:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/iadv/
@ur momisuglyferdinand meeus 2:26am:
It would be more accurate to say, “The influence of temperature on CO2 is interpreted that it is completely overwhelmed by human emissions.”
But with human emissions being so small compared to natural CO2 emissions, I would argue this point. A ~1% variation in natural CO@ur momisugly emissions would swamp human emissions. That is why skeptics dispute this: The AGW assumption that the total of all natural emissions is a completely constant value. No process in nature is that constant. I’ve not seen one AGW paper that gives even a LITTLE on this (i.e., that some of the increase of CO2 is from natural sources) – they all assume absolute constancy. Any assertion by AGW people that the increase is all from human sources is thus received by skeptics as false confidence.
There are papers that show that this is not true. It takes many years for the snow to get packed down to firn and then solid ice. The assumptions made about the air being trapped have been shown to be not as accurate and precise as claimed, even if this info never made it onto RC’s web page. I am asserting this without being able to provide sources, sorry. All proxies are of low resolution and low precision, no matter the claims. Else we wouldn’t see those huge error bars on the graphs. One notable example of proxies is that Briffa’s tree rings that didn’t even match recent decades’ instrument record and which had to be left off the “hide the decline” graph for the IPCC. Just the very existence of such a variance – tree rings going down while CO2 and instrument temps were going up – should have everyone going back and challenging their assumptions. But, no. They don’t even dive in to find out what the discrepancy comes from. …And they wonder why we don’t accept their assertions…
Wow. A drop of 0.8°C created the LIA? Then the 0.7°C rise since 1900 did what? Bring us out of the LIA? That is what many skeptics have been asserting – that all we are doing is recovering from the LIA. You seem to be making their point for them. I think it is a bit more complicated than that, but it is a valid point that AGW-ers blow off without even a comment. Myself, I don’t see a 0.8°C rise or fall being sufficient to create an MWP or a LIA. I base that on the year-to-year variations that don’t cause the accumulation of ice even remotely close to causing a climate collapse on the scale of what the global average – as compiled (which I don’t believe is correct) – tells us. My gut – which is not sourced…lol – says nothing less than about 4°C would cause a LIA. I DO think it is significant that the NH-SH air mixing is so low, so I do think the NH can wander considerably from what the SH is doing, making the signal in the SH less clear, though some SH cooling would occur. Some of that SH moderation would be from the oceanic sink; localized cold spots simply occur less due to dissipation.
Now, does this mean that the 0.8°C at Law Dome might indicate a seriously larger deltaT in the NH? I would suggest that it could, and that it might be worth looking into. (If I had a university behind me and/or Mann-ish funding it is one of the subjects I would tackle.) The Arctic-Antarctic ice extent/ice mass see-saw suggests this NH-SH imbalance as well. Due to the low NH-SH air mixing, I have always taken assertions of “global” based on data from one hemisphere as being inherently “assumptive”: I don’t accept them at face value.
Ferdinand (3:30am) –
I want to jump in with one note in this discussion with Myrrh.
You say this to Myrrh:
Even though that full article is behind a paywall, the abstract does have one point I noted. (Aside: WHY in heaven’s name do those journals do that? Is it just so they can exlude the rabble from informing themselves? Do they think they are going to make money off us if we start to inquire? I might understand if they do it with newer articles – that would be the same reason the late owner of the Chicago Balck Hawks used to black out home games – but I have tried to access papers from 1932 and they are STILL behind a pay wall!)
The article is at least in part about the Furnas caldera in the Azores and C14:C13 ratios.
This would argue against your applying these results across any broader spectrum – especially against making sweeping statements.
On its face, this in the abstract completely falsifies the statement you make that “the d13C level of almost all volcanic vents is much higher…” The full text may support your assertion, but I can’t get to the whole. Perhaps they are talking of two different things, thought it does not appear so. If you’d care to quote the passage you base your statement on, it would be appreciated.
“Myrrh says:
February 19, 2011 at 7:40 am
CO2 in the atmosphere is like that dust, most of it is locally produced and being heavier than air it does not readily rise into the atmosphere. If it does, by wind and so on, it doesn’t make any difference to the amount that’s up there already because whenever the winds drop or it rains, it will all come down together.”
Gases do not respond to buoyancy in the same way solids in liquids do. If they did, you would never see CFCs high up in the stratosphere. The only gas molecule that is NOT more or less uniformly distributed in the atmosphere is water vapor since it condenses as it gets colder. And there is a lot more carbon dioxide that is at much higher levels than the clouds.
“Feet2theFire says:
February 19, 2011 at 9:20 am
But with human emissions being so small compared to natural CO2 emissions,…”
Over the last 260 years, humans have burned many hydrocarbons to produce a lot of CO2. This CO2 has to go somewhere. I agree that natural emissions and sinks are much greater every year. However this does not disprove the fact that the extra CO2 that we humans put in does not have a cumulative effect over the centuries. I have no problem accepting that due to human emissions since 1750, the CO2 went up from 280 ppm to 390 ppm. The real question is how much has this extra CO2 influenced temperature. In my opinion, about 0.2 C so it is nothing to worry about.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
February 19, 2011 at 2:31 am
“…the resulting amplitude in the measurements is below the measurement accuracy.”
False. I demonstrated this.
“And it simply is impossible that any other sources of CO2 is the cause of the increase, as long as the increase is less than the emissions. As long as there is no destruction of matter.”
Absurd. I still goggle every time I see you insist on this elementary logical fallacy.
Ferdinand, you have to explain your kinetics of the bucket and sponge for both 14CO2 and bulk CO2.
You state that 45% of all the human generated CO2 is in the ocean and 55% in the atmosphere. This is you claim.
Therefore, 55% of the 14CO2 generated in the bomb tests should be in the atmosphere and 45% in the oceans.
This is not the case. I don’t want words, give me the maths, you were good enough to do a sumative plot of man made CO2 vs Keeling, now do a plot of man made sumative 14CO2 vs the atmospheric level.
You bucket and sponge states they should be the same.
“DocMartyn says:
February 19, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Ferdinand, you have to explain your kinetics of the bucket and sponge for both 14CO2 and bulk CO2.
You state that 45% of all the human generated CO2 is in the ocean and 55% in the atmosphere. This is you claim.
Therefore, 55% of the 14CO2 generated in the bomb tests should be in the atmosphere and 45% in the oceans.
This is not the case.”
This is Werner Brozek asking for a clarification of your question. Suppose I started working in 1960 and worked every year and received 100 pennies each year and that the pennies were for the year I worked. So in 1960, I would receive 100-1960 pennies and in 1961 I would receive 100-1961 pennies and so on. Let us suppose I spent 45 pennies each year and saved the other 55. Assuming my saved pennies are well mixed, are you asking why I do not have 55 pennies from 1960 in 2010?
I dunno if anybody noticed, but you can get shades of the Quasi Biennial Oscillation within that CO2 animation…
Feet2theFire says:
February 19, 2011 at 9:20 am
But with human emissions being so small compared to natural CO2 emissions, I would argue this point. A ~1% variation in natural CO@ur momisugly emissions would swamp human emissions. That is why skeptics dispute this: The AGW assumption that the total of all natural emissions is a completely constant value. No process in nature is that constant.
Nobody says that the natural CO2 emissions are constant, neither skeptics or the IPCC. The variability in natural imbalance is measured since the SPO/MLO measurements started and is +/- 1 ppmv (+/- 2 GtC), while the emissions are currently at 4 ppmv/yr (8 GtC/yr) and the trend in the atmosphere is +2 ppmv/yr (4 GtC/yr). In the past 60 years, the natural balance was always negative: more sink than source, with only 1973 borderline zero. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg
Why the natural variability is quite small, compared to the huge (seasonal) flows involved? That is mainly because the two main components of in/outflow work countercurrent: an increase in temperature (the main cause of the variation) increases outflow from the oceans, but also increases the uptake by vegetation…
There are papers that show that this is not true. It takes many years for the snow to get packed down to firn and then solid ice. The assumptions made about the air being trapped have been shown to be not as accurate and precise as claimed, even if this info never made it onto RC’s web page. I am asserting this without being able to provide sources, sorry. All proxies are of low resolution and low precision, no matter the claims.
The only source of the allegations against ice cores I know of are from Jaworowski. Completely outdated (nothing new since 1992) and completely refuted by the work of Etheridge e.a. on the Law Dome ice cores in 1996. Besides a small fractionation of the isotopes (for which is compensated) and a fractionation of the smallest molecules (O2, Ar,…) at closing time, the enclosed bubbles still show the air composition at the time of closure. Be it with a resolution between 8 and 600 years, depending of the accumulation speed (1.3 m/year ice equivalent for Law Dome to a few mm/year for Vostok). See more about Jaworowski and ice cores here:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
Ice core CO2 thus is not a proxy, but a smoothed real measurement of ancient CO2 levels.
Wow. A drop of 0.8°C created the LIA? Then the 0.7°C rise since 1900 did what? Bring us out of the LIA? That is what many skeptics have been asserting – that all we are doing is recovering from the LIA. You seem to be making their point for them.
I did say the reverse: the temperature drop of 0.8°C caused the 6 ppmv CO2 drop, with an about 50 year lag. I am sure that a 6 ppmv in/decrease of CO2 has hardly an effect on temperature, but I am not sure what the influence of 100 ppmv extra will do. Probably little (0.9°C for 2xCO2 is the basic radiation balance effect), as there is little evidence from any CO2 influence in the past…
DocMartyn says:
February 19, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Ferdinand, you have to explain your kinetics of the bucket and sponge for both 14CO2 and bulk CO2.
You state that 45% of all the human generated CO2 is in the ocean and 55% in the atmosphere. This is you claim.
Therefore, 55% of the 14CO2 generated in the bomb tests should be in the atmosphere and 45% in the oceans.
This is not the case. I don’t want words, give me the maths, you were good enough to do a sumative plot of man made CO2 vs Keeling, now do a plot of man made sumative 14CO2 vs the atmospheric level.
You bucket and sponge states they should be the same.
Werner Brozek (thanks!) already answered the question, but here some addition:
You state that 45% of all the human generated CO2 is in the ocean and 55% in the atmosphere. This is you claim.
That is not what I claimed. 45% of the increase in total CO2 mass caused by humans end mostly in the oceans, but that may be the original human CO2 molecules or natural one’s. The decrease in total mass is independent of which molecules of what origin are absorbed.
In the case of 14C, there is no increase in total mass, thus any change in total mass of CO2 doesn’t play a role in this case. Thus only the concentration of 14C in the reservoirs and the amounts exchanged with these reservoirs play a role. The 14C concentrations in the upper oceans and vegetation follow closely the atmosphere, thus don’t influence the 14C levels of the atmosphere that much. The deep oceans are more important in this case.
I haven’t made a plot of the fate of 14C, but did make a plot of the fate of 13C, if you add 100 GtC “fossil” CO2 to the pre-industrial atmosphere at once, based on realistic exchange and decrease rates:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/fract_level_pulse.jpg
Where FA is the remaining fraction of “fossil” CO2 in the atmosphere, FL the same in the ocean mixed layer (the upper few hundred meters), tCA total CO2 as carbon in the atmosphere and nCA “natural” CO2 in the atmosphere, the amount of “fossil” CO2 is of course the difference between tCA and nCA.
What can be seen is that the fraction of “fossil” CO2 rapidely declines from the initial 15% and after some 40-50 years is completely replaced by “natural” CO2. That is based on the exchange rate / throughput / residence time, where 20% per year of all CO2 in the atmosphere is replaced by “natural” CO2 from other reservoirs (in fact less, as mainly the deep oceans give the largest contribution of “natural” CO2). Independent of the decline in fraction of “fossil” CO2, the total mass of CO2 doesn’t decrease that fast, as that is only governed by the half life decay time of about 40 years of an excess amount of CO2 over the temperature controlled equilibrium.
The same excersize can be done with the real emissions over the past 160 years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/fract_level_emiss.jpg
While the emissions are 200% of the observed increase in the atmosphere, only some 9% of the original fossil CO2 molecules remain in the atmosphere, but still (near) 100% of the increase is caused by the emissions.
One can calculate the theoretical d13C of the atmosphere and ocean mixed layer over time, based on the emissions and exchange rates with the (deep) oceans:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/d13c_calc_obs.jpg
Although not perfect (the exchanges with vegetation are not taken into account), it gives a quite good match.
In summary: CO2 isotopic changes are governed by the residence time / throughput and the isotopic levels in the different reservoirs, total CO2 mass changes are governed by the decay rate, which depends on the difference between total inputs and total outputs. Both differ more than an order in magnitude.
Bart says:
February 19, 2011 at 12:02 pm
“…the resulting amplitude in the measurements is below the measurement accuracy.”
False. I demonstrated this.
At second thought, your demonstration was wrong too. The variability of the emissions is less than 10%, compared to a least squares quadratic curve. The latter is the most probable real emissions scenario. Your decomposition demonstrated a 30% variability in one of the terms (if I remember well), but that is only one term of the curve fitting and has no bearing with a real, measured variability. Of course it is a real feature of the curve fitting / decomposition, but not a measurable feature in the amounts released.
A 10% variability means +/- 0.8 GtC or +/- 0.4 ppmv at current emissions levels (less in history), or after absorption of about 50% in other resevoirs, borderline the accuracy of the measurements (+/- 0.2 ppmv). Even without any filtering caused by the countercurrent huge natural flows or overclassing by the natural variability (+/- 2 ppmv), it would be near impossible to detect.
“And it simply is impossible that any other sources of CO2 is the cause of the increase, as long as the increase is less than the emissions. As long as there is no destruction of matter.”
Absurd. I still goggle every time I see you insist on this elementary logical fallacy.
Sorry, I can’t help you in this case. But of course, if your bank makes a gain which is less than what the total sum is of your personal savings over a year, I am sure that you think that their bussiness is going fine…