There is quite a bit of buzz surrounding a talk and pending paper from Prof. Murry Salby the Chair of Climate, of Macquarie University. Aussie Jo Nova has excellent commentary, as has Andrew Bolt in his blog. I’m sure others will weigh in soon.
In a nutshell, the issue is rather simple, yet powerful. Salby is arguing that atmospheric CO2 increase that we observe is a product of temperature increase, and not the other way around, meaning it is a product of natural variation. This goes back to the 800 year lead/lag issue related to the paleo temperature and CO2 graphs Al Gore presented in his movie an An Inconvenient Truth, Jo Nova writes:
Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.
Salby is no climatic lightweight, which makes this all the more powerful. He has a strong list of publications here. The abstract for his talk is here and also reprinted below.
PROFESSOR MURRY SALBY
Chair of Climate, Macquarie University
Atmospheric Science, Climate Change and Carbon – Some Facts
Carbon dioxide is emitted by human activities as well as a host of natural processes. The satellite record, in concert with instrumental observations, is now long enough to have collected a population of climate perturbations, wherein the Earth-atmosphere system was disturbed from equilibrium. Introduced naturally, those perturbations reveal that net global emission of CO2 (combined from all sources, human and natural) is controlled by properties of the general circulation – properties internal to the climate system that regulate emission from natural sources. The strong dependence on internal properties indicates that emission of CO2 from natural sources, which accounts for 96 per cent of its overall emission, plays a major role in observed changes of CO2. Independent of human emission, this contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide is only marginally predictable and not controllable.
Professor Murry Salby holds the Climate Chair at Macquarie University and has had a lengthy career as a world-recognised researcher and academic in the field of Atmospheric Physics. He has held positions at leading research institutions, including the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado, with invited professorships at universities in Europe and Asia. At Macquarie University, Professor Salby uses satellite data and supercomputing to explore issues surrounding changes of global climate and climate variability over Australia. Professor Salby is the author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, and Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate due out in 2011. Professor Salby’s latest research makes a timely and highly-relevant contribution to the current discourse on climate.
Salby’s talk was given in June at the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysic meeting in Melbourne Australia. He indicates that a journal paper is in press, with an expectation of publication a few months out. He also hints that some of the results will be in his book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate which is supposed to be available Sept 30th.
The podcast for his talk“Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources” is here (MP3 audio format). The podcast length is an hour, split between his formal presentation ~ 30 minutes, and Q&A for the remaining time.
Andrew Bolt says in his Herald Sun blog:
Salby’s argument is that the usual evidence given for the rise in CO2 being man-made is mistaken. It’s usually taken to be the fact that as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, the 1 per cent of CO2 that’s the heavier carbon isotope ratio c13 declines in proportion. Plants, which produced our coal and oil, prefer the lighter c12 isotope. Hence, it must be our gasses that caused this relative decline.
But that conclusion holds true only if there are no other sources of c12 increases which are not human caused. Salby says there are – the huge increases in carbon dioxide concentrations caused by such things as spells of warming and El Ninos, which cause concentration levels to increase independently of human emissions. He suggests that its warmth which tends to produce more CO2, rather than vice versa – which, incidentally is the story of the past recoveries from ice ages.
Dr. Judith Curry has some strong words of support, and of caution:
I just finished listening to Murry Salby’s podcast on Climate Change and Carbon. Wow.
If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science. Salby and I were both at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the 1990′s, but I don’t know him well personally. He is the author of a popular introductory graduate text Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. He is an excellent lecturer and teacher, which comes across in his podcast. He has the reputation of a thorough and careful researcher. While all this is frustratingly preliminary without publication, slides, etc., it is sufficiently important that we should start talking about these issues. I’ll close with this text from Bolt’s article:
He said he had an “involuntary gag reflex” whenever someone said the “science was settled”.
“Anyone who thinks the science of this complex thing is settled is in Fantasia.”
Dr Roy Spencer has suspected something similar, See Atmospheric CO2 Increases: Could the Ocean, Rather Than Mankind, Be the Reason? plus part 2 Spencer Part2: More CO2 Peculiarities – The C13/C12 Isotope Ratio both guest posts at WUWT in 2008. Both of these are well worth your time to re-read as a primer for what will surely be a (ahem) hotly contested issue.
I’m pretty sure Australian bloggers John Cook at Skeptical Science and Tim Lambert at Deltoid are having conniption fits right about now. And, I’m betting that soon, the usual smears of “denier” will be applied to Dr. Salby by those two clowns, followed by the other usual suspects.
Smears of denial and catcalls aside, if it holds up, it may be the Emily Litella moment for climate science and CO2 – “Never mind…”
Richard S Courtney says “So, the rise of dissolved CO2 in the ocean could be a response to altered biological activity in the ocean surface layer (I don’t think it is but we do not know sufficient to say it is not) and – if so – then that could be the reason for increased atmospheric cO2 concentration.”
Oh give me a break – a MASSIVE shift in the biology of organisms in a very short (evolutionary speaking) time as a way of not acknowledging our changing the chemistry of something as vast as the ocean via the CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere.
Let’s see the evidence for that Richard…
Dave Springer
Here’s another question for you. In an earlier post you wrote
Note in 1997 atmospheric CO2 increase was about 2ppm. In 1998 it was 5ppm. In 1999 it was 2ppm again.
Why didn’t CO2 decrease in 1999? After all SST in 1999 was cooler than in 1997. You see, you are happy to accept as perfectly natural a situation where delta_CO2 only ever seems to go up.
If it’s warm CO2 goes up; if it cools CO2 still goes up but by a smaller amount.
When does it actually go down, Dave?
@John Finn
“Not an experiment but actual data, i.e. the Law Dome ice core record. Although there is ~8 year smoothing but you can clearly see a drop of ~10ppm from MWP to LIA. But Micahel Smith’s graph (and others like it) is the real clincher.”
Data is acquired by experiment. You really don’t understand the scientific method at all do you?
But more to the point your hypothesis is that absent anthropogenic CO2 emission atmospheric CO2 would be stable in the range of 278-282ppm. You can’t just presume that everything else was equal in the past except for anthropogenic CO2 emission. Assumptions like that are no proper way to isolate variables. Isolating variables might also be a foreign concept to you.
But let’s talk more about ice core data. The data indicate that during interglacial periods CO2 is stable around 280ppm and during glacial periods it is about 200ppm. How on earth is there such a small difference (80ppm) when ocean surface temperature varies by 10C over that same period and while Henry’s Law predicts that the ocean will outgas or take up 1500ppm of atmospheric CO2 for a 10C change in surface temperature.
There is quite clearly a great attractor of some sort in the carbon cycle which is poorly understood. My guess is that during ice ages, both interglacial and glacial periods, the atmosphere and the biosphere is starved for CO2. Outside of ice ages, which is beyond the reach of ice cores into the past, CO2 proxies in the geologic column indicate stable levels of CO2 at around 2000ppm persisting for tens or hundreds of millions of years with temperate zones extending to the poles and a complete absence of arctic zones. Yet global average temperature in those long epics is only about 8C above modern interglacial temperature. Actually that lines up pretty well with Henry’s Law. It’s the tiny difference between modern glacial and interglacial CO2 level that’s the real head scratcher. Personally I think the answer lies in biological sensitivity to carbon dioxide not climate sensitivity. But that’s just another just-so story like yours only mine is a different story. The cool thing about just-so stories is everyone and anyone can make them up and they’re all equal.
@Finn
Hard to say. I believe the great attractor is average ocean temperature top to bottom and that it takes tens of thousands of years for it to equalize in response to changes in forcing. The deep ocean is still outgassing CO2 due to a positive change in surface forcing that began over 10,000 years ago. The average temperature of the global ocean is 4C which can only be explained as the average temperature surface layer temperature over a complete glacial/interglacial cycle which is long enough for the deep ocean below the thermocline (90% of the ocean lies below the thermocline). This the only explanation I can come up to explain why there’s so little difference in CO2 level between glacial and interglacial periods. Ten thousand years of mildly elevated surface temperature isn’t long enough to have much effect on total ocean average temperature.
John Finn says:
August 8, 2011 at 10:27 am
“Why didn’t CO2 decrease in 1999? After all SST in 1999 was cooler than in 1997. You see, you are happy to accept as perfectly natural a situation where delta_CO2 only ever seems to go up. If it’s warm CO2 goes up; if it cools CO2 still goes up but by a smaller amount. When does it actually go down, Dave?”
If I let a bottle of beer warm up it outgasses a lot of CO2 in a short period of time. If I put the glass of flat beer in the fridge it won’t become very carbonated again. The ocean has a huge reservoir of dissolved CO2 at depth due to very high pressure. Indeed droplets of liquid CO2 were recently discovered in deep ocean trenches. When the surface layer warms it is rapidly depleted in CO2 and isn’t replenished from below because warm water rises. As the ocean cools the surface layer sinks and is replenished by CO2 rich water from the lower reserves. Thus the partial CO2 pressure in the surface layer rapidly depletes into the atmosphere while warming and is replenished from below, not from the atmosphere, during cooling.
It all makes sense if you know some basic physics and pause long enough to think it through.
Water runs the climate parade on this planet. Once you understand the physics of water everything makes sense. The atmosphere’s main role is providing enough surface pressure for water to be liquid over a range of 0-100C allowing a global ocean to exist in the first place. The sun’s main role is providing enough energy to the ocean to keep somewhere in that range. It’s largely a self-regulating system after that with negative feedback from clouds that prevent runaway greenhouse. Unfortunately there’s nothing stopping a runaway freeze as once water turns to ice the albedo changes radically and it doesn’t absorb enough energy to melt until, it is believed, volcanic activity over millions of years darkens the surface with soot and builds up non-condensing greenhouse gases until the combined effect is enough to initiate a melt.
Dave
I wasn’t sure where to start to respond to your post(s). I’ve plumped for the little gem above. So let’s just take in some of the detail. First, you say that ocean temps varied by 10 deg C over the glacial/interglacial period. This is possibly true at a regional level but I’m not sure it’s as high as that globally but we’ll let that pass. You then go on to say
Henry’s Law predicts that the ocean will outgas or take up 1500ppm of atmospheric CO2 for a 10C change in surface temperature
Right then, Dave, so when the next ice age comes around and surface temperatures have dropped, say, 6 degrees below those at present we can expect atmospheric CO2 levels to be what exactly? Bear in mind that they are ~390 ppm at the moment. It’s just that by my reckoning you are expecting a 900 ppm drop.
Do you think it’s possible you haven’t really understood Henry’s Law when applied to the CO2 exchange between ocean and atmosphere. Just a thought
Data is acquired by experiment. You really don’t understand the scientific method at all do you?
I admit to be a bit bemused by your particular brand of science, Dave. I wouldn’t let it worry you, though, you’re not alone.
Fun Facts For Finn
1) warm water rises
2) cool water sinks
3) volcanoes emit CO2
4) vast majority of earth’s volcanoes are underwater where new crust is formed
5) due to extremely high pressure deep ocean can hold a huge amount of CO2 in solution
6) exchange rate between deep ocean and surface layer is limited by temperature stratification
Now let’s go over once again what happens to the surface layer as it warms and cools with regard to dissolved CO2. As the surface layer warms it remains at the surface because warm water rises. As it warms its ability to hold CO2 in solution declines according to Henry’s Law. If offgasses CO2 to the atmosphere as it warms. As the ocean cools the surface layer sinks and is replaced by deeper water. The deeper water is richer in CO2 because of higher pressure. Thus the equilibrium pressure between atmosphere and ocean is reestablished during cooling not by absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere but rather by CO2 rich water from below rising to replace the CO2 deficient water at the surface.
Any questions?
I’d be really amused if you somehow tried to argue the basic physics involved here so feel free to try disputing the Fun Facts For Finn enumerated above. And if you don’t care to go there, thanks for playing.
@Finn
“Do you think it’s possible you haven’t really understood Henry’s Law when applied to the CO2 exchange between ocean and atmosphere. Just a thought.”
Not at all. It won’t decline to zero because the oceanic CO2 reservoir is constantly replenished by deep sea volcanoes which ring the earth like the seams on baseball.
I’m still waiting for you to somehow dispute the physics of dissolved CO2 level in ocean surface layer in response to warming and cooling. The physics say that partial pressure in the surface layer outgasses rapidly to the atmosphere during warming because warmer water doesn’t sink but during cooling the partial pressure rises by the cool water sinking and being replaced by CO2 rich water from deeper down.
That’s what the physics have to say. If you have something different to say I’d love to hear it. I’ll take silence to mean you now understand the physics but are embarassed to admit I had to explain it to you. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I can spoon feed this stuff to you if you stop making faces and spitting it out.
@John Finn
There’s an old saying, John, that you can’t draw blood from a turnip. Prior to the most recent ice age atmospheric CO2 was, according to the geologic column, 1500ppm higher. Henry’s Law works perfectly well. It’s just that it doesn’t work at the same rate in both directions due to the physical properties of water. Offgassing happens fast because the warming ocean surface layer is trapped on the surface. Absorption happens very slowly because the cooling surface layer sinks and is replaced by CO2-rich water from below. Moreover there appears to be a floor on how low CO2 can get which is damn fortunate because below 200ppm plants start dying for lack of it. The ocean would still have enough to sustain aquatic life but it’d a real bitch if terrestrial life gets wiped out during an ice age and has to crawl out of the ocean all over again. Whether the floor is established by the slow exchange between deep CO2-rich ocean water and surface layer or by surface volcanic activity or some combination of both I haven’t a clue. All I know is that something keeps it fluffed up enough so that terrestrial life isn’t completely wiped out.
Dave Springer says:
August 8, 2011 at 9:14 am
See Knorr 2009 figure 2 which shows ~5ppm increase in atmospheric CO2.
Dave, Knorr uses GtC as unit, 1 ppmv is about 2.1 GtC…
But in fact it doesn’t matter, as John Finn already said, if that is a one-year extra increase, there were at least 48 years of far less increase than the emissions…
Bystander:
I understand the tactic of trolls acting as a relay team. John Finn has exhausted my patience but Dave Springer continues to engage with him by ‘rubbing his nose’ in his own nonsense.
I have read your posts on WUWT and elswhere. If you think I am going to help you to ‘pick up the baton’ dropped by Finn then you are very much mistaken. I have much, much better things to do with my time.
Richard
Not at all. It won’t decline to zero because the oceanic CO2 reservoir is constantly replenished by deep sea volcanoes which ring the earth like the seams on baseball.
Oh Goody.
Right – so to what level will it decline? And about these volcanoes – how much CO2 do you think they need to emit to offset the removal of 600-700 ppm from the atmosphere by the oceans.
A bit more on Law Dome data for you
http://www.john-daly.com/bull120.htm
This is a paper by Vincent Gray (a sceptic). If you read the whole paper inlcuding comments you might notice the name of a regular poster praising the paper. The key point, though, is the delta_C02 of ~10 ppm over the period of the period of the MWP and LIA (1006-1800). Vincent Gray makes the following comment:
There was variability in the order of 10ppmv between 1006 and 1800.
That’s a bit less than the ~150 ppm per deg C that you claim. There’s no easy way to say this, Dave. Your understanding of Henry’s Law is screwed. Ferdinand Engelbeen has posted on Henry’s Law either on this thread or on the corresponding one at Jo Nova’s (link at top of page). Find it and read it.
Dave Springer says:
August 8, 2011 at 10:02 am
While difficult to estimate the CO2 outgassing according to Henry’s Law it estimated that a 1C rise in ocean surface temperature will raise atmospheric CO2 by 150ppm.
Dave, where did you obtain the 150 ppmv? According to measurements, the pCO2 of the oceans in average increases with 16 microatm for each degr.C. That means that a 16 microatm increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (about 16 ppmv, minus water vapour pressure) is sufficient to reach a new equilibrium between pCO2(aq) and pCO2(atm).
The pCO2(aq) is measured by bringing seawater in contact with a small portion of air. After thorough mixing, the CO2 in the above air is measured (after drying over a cold trap). Thus that measures what the equilibrium CO2 in the atmosphere is for the CO2 pesent in the ocean water at the temperature in the water. That equilibrium tells you how much the atmospheric CO2 pressure should increase or decrease to reach a new steady state with the oceans.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 8, 2011 at 12:48 pm.
…..
Dave, Knorr uses GtC as unit, 1 ppmv is about 2.1 GtC…
But in fact it doesn’t matter, as John Finn already said, if that is a one-year extra increase, there were at least 48 years of far less increase than the emissions
I didn’t actually look at the Knorr stuff though I did think the numbers quoted by Dave were a bit off. Now I know Knorr uses GtC as the unit that explains a lot. On a separate issue can you direct Dave to your post on Henry’s Law. Dave seems to think that 150ppm/deg C is consistent with Henry’s Law.
Fred H. Haynie says:
August 8, 2011 at 7:49 am
The question we need to answer: is the long term fossil fuel signal detectable when deluted by a long term cycle of upwelling? Also:What are the natural cycle lengths for upwelling?
Depends of the height of the upwelling. Some time ago I have estimated the current deep ocean – atmosphere exchange (upwelling and sink) at around 40 GtC/year, based on the dilution of the d13C signal from fossil fuel burning:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/deep_ocean_air_zero.jpg
To make the fossil fuel signal completely unmeasurable seems impossible to me, because even with ten times more upwelling, the trend still can be detected.
About the cycle lengths, all I know is that there is a seasonal cycle in the THC, and you have ENSO, which frequently alters upwelling. But I have no knowledge how other (longer) cycles influence upwelling.
John Finn says:
August 8, 2011 at 1:24 pm
On a separate issue can you direct Dave to your post on Henry’s Law. Dave seems to think that 150 ppm/deg C is consistent with Henry’s Law.
See above, but here is the text I made for JoNova:
“The amount in the surface layer is about 1000 GtC, in the atmosphere about 800 GtC. Any increase in temperature of the surface layer of 1 degr.C will increase the CO2 pressure of the oceans in equilibrium with the atmosphere with about 16 microatm. Thus an increase of 16 microatm (about 16 ppmv) or 32 GtC in the atmosphere is enough to fully compensate for the temperature increase, so that no more CO2 is released from the oceans. But the increase in the atmosphere is over 100 microatm. That means that more CO2 is going into the oceans than is coming out… That is observed by regular ships measurements and buoys and by a few longer term series.”
The latter series are in Bermuda and Hawaii. Here a nice overview:
http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/IntDecVar_OCC.html
Ferdinand:
As usual, you provide an honest answer when you reply to Fred H. Haynie by saying;
“About the cycle lengths, all I know is that there is a seasonal cycle in the THC, and you have ENSO, which frequently alters upwelling. But I have no knowledge how other (longer) cycles influence upwelling.”
As you already know – but others reading this may not – your answer goes to the heart of our long-standing disagreement.
I say that the gaps in our knowledge prevent any meaningful assessment by accountancy of flows into ‘sources’ and ‘sinks’.
You say (as your reply to Fred illustrates) that those gaps are so unlikely to be significant that the accountancy of flows into ‘sources’ and ‘sinks’ provides useful information.
Richard
Richard S Courtney says:
August 8, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Bystander:
I understand the tactic of trolls acting as a relay team. John Finn has exhausted my patience but Dave Springer continues to engage with him by ‘rubbing his nose’ in his own nonsense.
Would that be Dave “150ppm per deg” Springer, Richard?
Bystander
You need to be aware that Richard has derived a special case of Henry’s Law known as Courtney’s Law. Courtney’s Law quite clearly states that Henry’s Law does not apply when it is inconvenient to the argument proposed by Courtney.
Actually Courtney’s Law can be extended across virtually any area of climate science, so when you ask Richard for actual evidence for his assertion (as you did in your post) you are violating the very essence of Courtney’s Law.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 8, 2011 at 2:05 pm
See above, but here is the text I made for JoNova:
Ok – so it was at JoNova’s. I couldn’t remember where I’d read it – thanks.
The latter series are in Bermuda and Hawaii. Here a nice overview:
http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/IntDecVar_OCC.html
Thanks also for this.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 8, 2011 at 1:11 pm
150ppm is theoretical offgassing if entire ocean surface to 30 meters rises by 1C.
Calculations here: http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-flux.htm
Obviously in an El Nino event only a small fraction of ocean surface is involved and the El Nino, if I recall correctly, is defined as a 0.5C or greater warming and is confined to the top 30 meters which is as deep as sunlight effectively penetrates. So we get a spike of a couple ppm in that year. It appears to remain resident in the atmosphere for quite some time due to difference in exchange rate between top 30 meters of water and below in cooling vs. warming surface water. During warming that surface layer gets trapped. Upon cooling into a La Nina the surface layer sinks and deeper water rises. CO2 is stratified so the deep water rising has greater partial pressure of CO2 than the surface water descending. The greater partial pressure of the rising water means the ocean/atmosphere is less out of equilibrium than happens when the surface layer is warming. Indeed carbon sequestration schemes are being suggested that pipe CO2 to a depth below 3000 meters where it becomes a liquid denser than water due the pressure at that depth and sinks to the bottom forming a lake of liquid CO2. No one knows how long it takes to migrate back up to the surface but the general consensus is a thousand years or more. I believe we need a lot better handle on how much CO2 is injected into the ocean by deep sea volcanoes and how long it takes to migrate to the surface. Presumably when surface temperature is colder CO2 uptake from the atmosphere rises (or outgassing slows which has the same effect) while undersea volcanic activity is independent of surface temperature. That would slow the migration rate of dissolved CO2 upward from the sea floor so total ocean reservoir rises and when surface warms up it declines. The hysteresis is not the same rate in both directions due to change in convection from surface to depth surface warming vs. surface cooling i.e. it outgasses fast and ingasses slow but in the end Henry’s Law prevails. I think this handily explains why there’s very little CO2 change (~80ppm) when moving from glacial to interglacial period and back but why there’s a gigantic change of near 2000ppm when moving from ice age to non-age and back. You have to look at rocks to get CO2 levels before the present ice age. No ice cores are that old.
As for accumulation of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere I believe it does accumulate due to the simple fact that absorption and emission rates of the ocean differs under a warming or cooling regime. What I can’t explain, an no one can explain either, is why more of the short term emissions aren’t sticky. We’ve got to have net ocean outgassing if it’s true that ocean surface temperature worldwide has risen almost a full degree C in the past century. Something else is sequestering CO2 faster as temperature rises. I think it’s a biological response. As carbon from dead plants and animals (tissue and carbonate shells) sink to the bottom of the ocean relatively quickly and where that sequestration on the bottom of the ocean takes a thousand years to migrate back to the surface it would seem to explain the situation.
Yes I have suggested that in a warmer world the increased atmospheric CO2 energises the entire biosphere including organisms in the oceans but sequestration rates lag behind so that there is more night time CO2 released from more and larger plants and organisms and more and larger dead plants and organisms decaying at the surface.
Effectively the entire biosphere becomes a net source as a positive feedback to more oceanic CO2 release and that swamps anything that humans produce. In due course cooling occurs and sequestration catches up or even overtakes oceanic CO2 release and again our emissions are as nothing in the face that process.
So I don’t think there is ever an accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere for long from any cause whether human or not. There is a balance set by the physical properties oceans and air (primarily mediated by temperature) which the biosphere responds to but which the biosphere (including humans) cannot disrupt for long because sequestration rates change accordingly and much of the CO2 sequestered only comes back on geological timescales.
Salby must have some persuasive data in that direction.
John Finn:
Your post at August 8, 2011 at 2:29 pm demonstrates that you are an offensive little oik with less understanding of science than a peanut. Other than that, it is content free.
Take your nonsense elsewhere.
Richard
John Finn:
I’m sorry, mate, but unless I’ve misunderstood you, you seem to be heading completely off track. If you are referring to your graph the “very slight rising rate” you refer to is the rate of the annual growth rate NOT the rate of accumulation in the atmosphere.
No one is going off the track, John, you’re just finally starting to understand what I’ve been saying all along. I know there is a previous post, but let me respond to this one first.
1) Read the chart. Don’t read into the chart. You seem to now be interpreting correctly, but you were applying it incorrectly and leaving out a term before, which I’ll get to later.
2) You are correct that you are seeing a slope in the derivative. This indicates acceleration in the primary function. What did you think the derivative would look like? We do see this acceleration, do we not?
3) Answers to your questions (a) straight across at 0.13 ppm per month, (b) 390+0.13*120=405.6. Note that since we have eliminated the upward slope in the first derivative, this now becomes a linear increase in CO2 level, instead of an accelerated one.
4) You make the claim at August 8, 2011 at 5:06 am in this quote “Plot delta_CO2 (not CO2) and the temperature anomaly (from 1) on the same graph. Michael Smith has already done this using MSU data using 12 month moving averages. (The close correlation completely debunks the notion that current CO2 levels are responding to Delta_T from previous decades or centuries).”
I was thinking just the opposite. Please explain you you can come to this conclusion from the data provided. The relationship remains in effect until the entire system reaches equilibrium. The problem is, we don’t know where the equilibrium point is because the temperature response of the ocean is so slow. But we do know that the air temperature was lower during the LIA and has been increasing ever since. As I mentioned earlier, if we simply apply the rates per month from the chart to an increasing slope over time, you get CO2 at 748ppm. So maybe you still don’t get the chart, I can’t tell.
5) Then you go on to talk about rates from other sources, but mix it up with my results. You just need to understand, the slope of the reaction is 0.693ppm/mo/°C, or 8.3ppm/YEAR/°C. So if the surface temp suddenly increased by exactly 1°C, and that held steady for 1 year, how much would the ppm rise? 8.3ppm. Very simple.
But in your post of 2:04 am, and I quote “If ocean warming were responsible for the post-1979 increase in atmospheric CO2, the relationship would need to be ~125 ppm/deg C i.e. (50/0.4). Things are no better if we look at the longer term. The post-1900 CO2 increase is ~100 ppm. Temperatures have risen ~0.7 deg over the same period of time. This yields a relationship of ~143 ppm/deg C . These figures are so far removed from reality they are simply not credible.”, you claim that the total effect is somehow out of the bounds were describing, but you left out the YEAR term!
Really, to do it correctly, you would need to assume equilibrium first, because you’re working with a rate from that, whatever it is. The more the temperature increases, assuming the ocean won’t move much, the larger the effect will be, which will give the accelerating primary function again (unless the ocean reacts quickly to reduce the distance to equilibrium, but it would have to be mighty quick to prevent an accelerating function). But let’s pretend we don’t care about that, and use your example. Post 1979 is, say, 29 years (my data ends in 2008). So the required rate is 50/0.4/29 or 4.3ppm/°C/year. (good answer, wrong method) Now, the other one… 100ppm/0.7°C/108 years = 1.32ppm/°C/year. You have to apply the rate to the years over which the temperature differential to equilibrium was active in order to integrate this.
Note that the rate is lower the longer we look. This might be consistent with a system reacting to the impulse and moving toward equilibrium (since we know the instantaneous rate is much higher). What is removed from reality and not credible is your application of the math… 😉
Thanks Ferdinand, Richard, John and everyone else for this interesting discussion. There is a lot of knowledge here. Now I understand why nothing useful comes of climate science. Just kidding, but there certainly are a lot of factors and opinions. It would be quite interesting to take all these discussions and simply list out the factors, what influences what, what are the constraints, how good is the data, how recent, etc. From the sounds of it, we know quite a lot, we just need to put it together. Taking the entire globe, temperatures, seasons, ocean flows, bio, etc and making assumptions about factors such as ocean skin thickness, etc would go a long way toward reproducing a representation of the record and seeing what is possible under what assumptions. Great ideas on what factors are important here. This entire question is a matter of a huge collection of rates acting on each other. Probably unbelievably difficult to separate factors, but we do have quite a few “knowns” as well… Fun stuff…
“”””” content/uploads/2009/11/knorr2009_co2_sequestration.pdf
Richard S Courtney says:
August 8, 2011 at 9:57 am
Ferdinand:
You say to me:
“Sorry Richard, but I never heard of one case where Henry’s Law is not applicable. Only that it may take some time to reach an equilibrium, but Henry’s Law still holds for all situations. Including ENSO changes”
No! Henry’s Law is ONLY applicable to chemical interactions. It says nothing whatsoever about biological responses. The biosphere is a major part of the carbon cycle on land and in the oceans. “””””
I can’t read his mind; but I suspect that a point that Richard is making here, is that “Henry’s Law”
(I’m not a Chemist, so I don’t know.) is a law relating to a system in equilibrium . And I’m with Richard, in believing that the ocean chemistry is likely never in equilibrium, and that biological activity, and variation is just one reason why it never can be.
There iws also that slightly inconvenient factoid, that ocean currents are at most a few knots, while atmospheric wind speeds, can be orders of magnitude higher, so the atmosphere, and the ocean surface, don’t even remain in contact for large scale equilibrium per Henry’s law to establish.
As John Christy et al reported in 2001, the oceanic surface water Temperatures, and the lower troposphere air Temperatures, are not even in equilibrium; they aren’t even correlated, which is why most of the historic record data of oceanic Temperatures deduced from surface water Temperatures, is simply bogus; the water Temperatures and the air Temperatures are’t the same, so I suspect that something more elaborate than Henry’s Law is necessary to deduce CO2 partitioning between the two media, is required..
None of which is intended to put words in Richard’s mouth; just my observations of what I read between his lines.