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…”
Dave Springer says:
August 8, 2011 at 2:52 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
The author of that article makes a fundamental error: Henry’s Law has nothing to do with quantities, only with a ratio between what is in the liquid and in the gas phase above it for a certain substance. It doesn’t make any difference for a (full) bottle of equally carbonated soda, if it contains 0.5, 1 or 1.5 liter water if they have the same small volume of CO2 above it: at equilibrium, the same quantity and pressure of CO2 will be there at the same temperature, except for a small difference because of the relative loss of CO2 in the water (of course, the more empty the bottle gets, the more the difference will increase).
Thus whatever the quantities in the oceans, if the oceans in average increase with 1 degr.C, the CO2 pressure, which tend to push that out of the surface, increases with 16 microatm. If the atmospheric CO2 increases with about 16 ppmv, we are just back at the state before the temperature increase. It doesn’t matter where the extra CO2 in the atmosphere comes from: the ocean surface, the deep oceans or human emissions. The latter can provide the necessary quantities in only 4 years.
Michael D Smith says:
August 8, 2011 at 7:08 pm
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.
From ice cores, we have a pretty good idea what the equilibrium point is for any given temperature, the slope being 8 ppmv/degr.C. That is about 270 +/- 10 ppmv over the Holocene. The 8 ppmv holds for 800,000 years glacial/interglacial transitions and for the MWP-LIA transition, the latter with a resolution of 30-40 years. That doesn’t hold anymore for the past 160 years:
ftp://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_010kyr.jpg
That is the result of different ice cores with different accumulation rates and different climatological regimes…
Thus according to the ice cores, we now sould see an increase of maximum 8 ppmv since the LIA, if the increase was 1 degr.C (probably less).
The response of the ocean surface is quite rapid: about 1.5 years to level of any differences between the atmosphere and the mixed layer, but other responses (like vegetation and ice sheet area, changes in the deep water flows) react much slower.
the slope of the reaction is 0.693ppm/mo/°C, or 8.3ppm/YEAR/°C.
That is also what Salby (and Dr. Spencer in the past) thinks, as you do, he uses this slope to calculate the trend over 50 years, but that is projecting a short term trend (which reverses in the next year(s)) to a long term one. In the real trends you have periods of cooling and periods of strong warming. Despite that, the CO2 levels go up all the way, steadily accellerating. The difference in behaviour between emissions and increase and temperature and increase is striking:
ftp://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
and
ftp://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_co2_1900_2004.jpg
In the latter, one can see that a temperature change of near halve the scale has a small influence (indeed of about 4 ppmv/degr.C in one year), but at the same time, the longer term trend would be 80 (and more) ppmv/degr.C over decades, but the very long term trend would be back to 8 ppmv/degr.C for centuries to hundreds of millennia. That would need a lot of explanation.
The emissions on the other hand explain everything, from the mass balance to the isotope ratios and the increase of biomass and amount of carbon in the upper oceans.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 8, 2011 at 11:32 pm
To avoid any misunderstanding, in:
the same small volume of CO2 above it: at equilibrium, the same quantity and pressure of CO2 will be there at the same temperature
only the pressure is important for Henry’s Law, not the volume or quantity, but the volume/quantity together with the pressure is what governs the amount of CO2 that must be delivered from the water to build up the pressure (or reverse).
Michael D Smith says:
August 8, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Michael, to address your points
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.
Correct the 50 Quatloos prize goes to you This tells us that if MSU temperatures fell to the mean temp for the 1981-2010 period and remained there i.e. there was no temperature change (no warming or cooling) the CO2 concentration would still increase by 15.6 ppm over the following decade. This rise cannot be temperature driven because there has been no change in temperature. It is driven by human emissions.
There are a number of other points I ‘d like to address but am going to resist because there is one particular point where you’ve really lost the plot and it is rather crucial. It relates to this response to me (not e your comments are in bold)
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!
Firstly, Michael, the ‘YEAR’ term is simply an arbitrary time period. In this case it’s meaningful because of the annual CO2 carbon cycle but as far as the temperature increase is concerned it’s irrelevant. A one deg rise from one year to the next should ultimately give us the same result as a 0.1 deg rise in 10 consecutive years. Let’s look at another of your comments to illustrate the point
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 your calculations (in bold), i.e.
50/0.4/29 = ~4.3ppm/degC (i)
100ppm/0.7°C/108 years = 1.32ppm (ii)
Michael, you’ve used the delta_T over the entire period – you need to use the annual rate rise . The MSU trend is 0.014 deg per year . The calculation for (i) should be
50/0.014/29 = 123 ppm/deg C (the ‘year’ term is cancelled out)
Your calculation assumes there has been a 0.4 deg increase EVERY year. Work it through from scratch. According to you the relationship is 4.3 ppm/deg C. After year 1 we get a temp rise of 0.4 deg so dCO2 is 1.72ppm. Now in year 2 we get another 0.4 deg rise so another 1.72 ppm is added to the atmosphere and so on. After 29 years we’ve got an increase of 50 ppm and a temperature rise of 11.6 deg .
Oh dear – I had such high hopes for you, Michael.
Michael D Smith says:
August 8, 2011 at 7:32 pm
Thanks Ferdinand, Richard, John and everyone else for this interesting discussion.
You’re welcome, Michael. However, I do strongly urge you read my post August 9, 2011 at 12:54 am.
George E. Smith says:
August 8, 2011 at 10:39 pm
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 .
Since Henry’s Law essentially describes how a system establishes equilibrium why would it only apply to a system which is already in equilibrium?
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 8, 2011 at 11:32 pm
“Henry’s Law has nothing to do with quantities… the same quantity and pressure of CO2 will be there at the same temperature … if the oceans in average increase with 1 degr.C…”
Hmmm…. Wanna’ take a mulligan and try again?
“The emissions on the other hand explain everything, from the mass balance to the isotope ratios and the increase of biomass and amount of carbon in the upper oceans.”
So does God. So do Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. So does the number “42”.
Your mass balance argument is foolish. An eminent climate scientist is calling into question your fanciful isotope ratios. The rest is part of the feedback loop sequestering the added carbon. The foundation of your house of cards rests on sand.
George E. Smith says:
August 8, 2011 at 10:39 pm
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.
Henry’s Law only says where the equilibrium setpoint is, that is all. What we know from chemistry is that if the real pressure in the atmosphere is higher than that setpoint (as is the case now: 100 ppmv above the temperature dictated equilibrium), the system tries to fight the disturbance in the direction of the setpoint. That is Le Chatelier’s Principle. Thus the system increases the flows out of and decreases the flows into the atmosphere, as far as physically and chemically possible.
Biological processes in the ocean surface anyway play a role, by altering the chemical composition of the oceans, including free CO2 at the surface, thus by Henry’s Law, changing the setpoint. But millions of measurements simultaneous of ocean water and above air pCO2 show an average 7 microatm difference between air and oceans. Thus the average flow is from the atmosphere towards the oceans, not reverse. See Feely e.a.:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/feel2331.shtml
George E. Smith:
Thankyou for your post at August 8, 2011 at 10:39 pm.
I write to assure you that you did not “put words in [my] mouth”. You quoted me accurately and you explained the clear meaning and implication of those words.
Perhaps wrongly I assumed that everybody could see the troll had deliberately and grossly misrepresented what I had written and had presented that misrepresentation in a defamatory way.
Your post states the physical facts for the benefit of any who may have been misled by the troll.
Thankyou.
Richard
Ferdinand:
At August 8, 2011 at 7:08 pm you say to Michael D. Smith:
“From ice cores, we have a pretty good idea what the equilibrium point is for any given temperature, the slope being 8 ppmv/degr.C. That is about 270 +/- 10 ppmv over the Holocene. The 8 ppmv holds for 800,000 years glacial/interglacial transitions and for the MWP-LIA transition, the latter with a resolution of 30-40 years. That doesn’t hold anymore for the past 160 years:”
Oh dear! So much trust in so unreliable a source.
There could be no debate about the ice core data if that were all we had: one has to cope with what little one has.
But the stomata data also exists, and it contradicts the ice core data both in terms of atmospheric CO2 concentration and variability in the past.
The leaves of plants adjust the sizes of their stomata with changing atmospheric CO2 concentration and this permits the determination of past atmospheric CO2 concentrations by analysis of leaves preserved, for example, in peat bogs.
(e.g. Retallack (2001), Wagner et al. (2004), Kouwenberg et al. (2003)).
The disagreement of stomata data with the ice core data is clearly seen in all published studies of the stomata data. For example, as early as 1999 Wagner reported that studies of birch leaves indicated a rapid rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration from 260 to 327 ppmv (which is similar to the rise in the twentieth century) from late Glacial to Holocene conditions. This ancient rise of 67 ppmv in atmospheric CO2 concentration is indicated by the stomata data at a time when the ice core data indicate only 20 ppmv rise.
Please note that this discrepancy in the indicted variation at that time is a factor of more than 3.3.
This not to say that the stomata data can be trusted more than the ice core data. Both should be subject to questioning and doubt. But it is a direct proof that the ice core data are not the incontrovertible evidence of paleo atmospheric CO2 that many (including you) claim it to be.
And it does show how ‘evidence’ is selected to fit a narrative by many (e.g. the IPCC and you) who fail to mention the stomata data or merely mention it together with unsubstantiated doubts of its validity while proclaiming certainty concerning the ice core data.
Your statement places complete trust in the ice core data.
OK then let us put similarly unjustifiable complete trust in the stomata data.
The stomata data shows that when ice core data indicates a rise of 20 ppmv the stomata data indicates a rise of 67 ppmv and this is a direct factor over of 3.3
You say the ice core data indicates “what the equilibrium point is for any given temperature, the slope being 8 ppmv/degr.C”.
Convert that to stomata data variation (by multiplying by 3.3) and you get 26.4 ppmv/degr.C.
8 ppmv/degr.C or 26.4 ppmv/degr.C, which is right?
I do not trust either value. You say you trust one and ignore the other.
Richard
(full refs. Retallack G, Nature vol. 411 287 (2001), Wagener F, et al. Virtual Journal Geobiology, vol.3. Issue 9, Section 2B (2004), Kouenberg et al. American Journal of Botany, 90, pp 610-619 (2003), Wagner F et al. Science vol. 284 p 92 (1999)).
Thanks Ferdinand. You’re finding the same thing as me. The longer the term, the lower the slope, which I think is being reduced by noise and an equilibrium effect… (your last charts show something like 0.8ppm/C/year). Agree total emissions and total CO2 match well. Should be able to deconstruct some flow rates from all of this, but I won’t have much time this week, then on vacation for 11 days… Mike S.
PS – please replace ftp: with http: otherwise it asks for authentication…
This is why I read WUWT. I sincerely appreciate the debate/discussion that Ferdinand Engelbeen and Richard Courtney have carried out. It is very educational.
Ferdinand:
At August 9, 2011 at 2:04 am you say:
“Biological processes in the ocean surface anyway play a role, by altering the chemical composition of the oceans, including free CO2 at the surface, thus by Henry’s Law, changing the setpoint.”
Not even close.
Henry’s Law states:
‘At a constant temperature, the amount of a given gas that dissolves in a given type and volume of liquid is directly proportional to the partial pressure of that gas in equilibrium with that liquid.’
We are discussing your calculations for air/ocean exchange rate in a system that is NOT at constant temperature, is NOT at equilibrium, and where the amount of CO2 in the solution is affected by the biota in the solution so never achieves an equilibrium.
At August 8, 2011 at 1:53 am you wrote:
“That is true and false and also what Salby expects: any temperature increase (or decrease) has a longer term influence on CO2 levels. But that can’t be right, because it violates Henry’s Law.”
And at August 8, 2011 at 3:18 am I replied saying:
“Sorry, but, NO!
The data clearly proves that Henry’s Law is not applicable in this case. Please read what I wrote.
The fact is that the change in atmospheric CO2 concentration at times of ENSO changes proves that Henry’s Law does not apply.
We can argue until ‘the cows come home’ as to why Henry’s Law does not apply in this case, but the data proves it does not. Therefore, any calculations based on Henry’s Law (including yours) are wrong.”
Indeed, I fail to understand why anybody would think Henry’s Law is applicable in this case.
I can understand that the matter is way beyond the learning and comprehension of the troll, John Finn, but you surely do understand it.
Richard
Why don’t we say that Henry’s Law one of many laws that must be factored into the carbon cycle at different times in different places. Henry’s Law only gives us a theoretical equilibrium point in a static system over a great amount of time. The reality of the situation is that the system is far from static with both fast acting (days) and slow acting (millions of years) players of many different kinds and modes of operation throwing the system out of equilibrium. From winds and waves to convection currents to coriolis currents to clouds to ENSO to biology to chemistry both organic and inorganic to volcanoes and solar activity and even position in the galactic orbit and cosmic ray flux. Along with, undoubtedly, things yet to come that are complete surprises. Just about everything has a bearing on how fast or slow Henry’s Law is allowed to work towards a constantly changing equilbrium point.
Dave Springer:
re: your post at August 9, 2011 at 11:03 am
Excellent! Thank you.
Richard
Richard S Courtney says:
August 9, 2011 at 2:30 am
re; stomata
I’ve been over this before but perhaps not with you unless you were a chearleader for stomata density as a proxy for CO2 concentration. It’s no better at that than tree rings are as a proxy for temperature.
Too many different things beyond just CO2 have a great influence on stomate density. Here’s an example: water
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2529243/
There are also phenotype responses at work. Evironmental conditions continuously select for seed with stomal characteristics most successful in prior generations. With everything from sunlight to water to soil to temperature to CO2 concentration playing a role in that selection.,
Please. Ice cores are much more amenable to isolation of variables.
I can understand that the matter is way beyond the learning and comprehension of the troll, John Finn, but you surely do understand it.
Richard
Ok – I accept you lack the guts, knowledge and intelligence to take me on head to head but it’s a bit childish resorting to indirect snide rmarks.
Richard
You’ve backed a number of posters against me in recent online discussions. To date they are :
1. P.Wilson who expects CO2 to continue rising several hundred years even if human CO2 production ceases. It doesn’t seem to bother him (or her) that human emissions are greater than the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and this is therefore a somewhat dubious assumption. I take it you agree wth him, though.
2. Dave Springer who quite happily cites a CO2-temperature sensitivity of 150 ppm/deg. I don’t mind people getting calculations wrong but when they are so obviously out of touch with reality I do expect them to question the results (as a sceptic might). All did eventually become clear as Dave provided us with the source for his figures. He’s used what has to be one of the worst climate-related sites on the web.
3. Michael Smith did show some promise and he does at least accept that sensitivity figures of the order of magnitude that Dave Springer cites are complete garbage, but he has struggled with rates of change and time periods. Using Michaels method of calculation the ~50 ppm rise since ~1979 should have been accompanied by an 11.6 deg rise in temperature.
You appear to want to silence me in favour of the error strewn nonsense described above. In all my time posting on climate-related blogs only 2 people have attemped to silence me, they are:
Michael Mann when I challenged him in 2004 on the inconsistency between tree-ring proxy data and actal temperature observations – otherwise known as the ‘hide the decline’ trick. This , though, was 5 years before ‘climategate’. I also had a post removed (after it had been published) due to a ‘technical glitch’. Fortunately Steve Milloy retrieved a cached copy.
Tamino actually did manage to silence me in that he banned me from his blog for suggesting and continuing to argue that ocean circulation may have contributed to the early and late 20th century warming trends.
Welcome to the club, Richard.
Henry’s law is thermo (the force that drives toward equilibrium). The kinetics of diffusion, convection, absorption, etc. are the rate controlling factors. Think about how CO2 leaves the saturated warm ocean surface and is soon absorbed by cold unsaturated water in clouds. I think that clouds are controlling the atmospheric concentration of CO2. That is not an easy task to model: certainly not on a global average scale.
Bart says:
August 9, 2011 at 1:38 am
Your mass balance argument is foolish. An eminent climate scientist is calling into question your fanciful isotope ratios. The rest is part of the feedback loop sequestering the added carbon. The foundation of your house of cards rests on sand.
An eminent climate scientist who hasn’t read the relevant literature about carbon isotopes in the past decade? See:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5462/2467.abstract (free abstract) and
http://bluemoon.ucsd.edu/publications/ralph/25_Partition.pdf
BTW, let’s have the discussion about mass balances and feedbacks on Judith’s blog, I just added some note there…
Dave Springer and John Finn:
Dave,
At August 9, 2011 at 11:27 am you say to me:
“I’ve been over this before but perhaps not with you unless you were a chearleader for stomata density as a proxy for CO2 concentration”.
Cheerleader? Me?
Did you read what I wrote at August 9, 2011 at 2:30 am? For example,
this
“OK then let us put similarly unjustifiable complete trust in the stomata data.”
and this
“I do not trust either value. You say you trust one and ignore the other.”
If you think that makes me a “chearleader then I am loath to consider what you think a doubter might say.
John Finn’
Thankyou for the belly laugh you gave me at August 9, 2011 at 12:47 pm where you write to me,
“I accept you lack the guts, knowledge and intelligence to take me on head to head but it’s a bit childish resorting to indirect snide rmarks.”
It seems you really don’t understand, so I will spell it out for you.
I am tired of amusing the children and I am spending time playing with the grown-ups. Now tidy up your toys and play somewhere else.
I hope that is now clear to you, John.
Richard
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 9, 2011 at 1:21 pm
“An eminent climate scientist who hasn’t read the relevant literature about carbon isotopes in the past decade? See: (links)”
Hmm… I did not see anywhere in those sources where it is claimed that Dr. Salby never read them. But, necessarily, you (and they) have never read Dr. Salby’s analysis, which has not yet been released, n’est-ce pas?
As for the discussion at Judith’s, there is my riposte. Conclusion:
You really have no possible way of denying this anymore, beyond childish refusal to admit defeat. You made a broad claim, I showed an exception. QED. End of discussion.
Michael D Smith says:
August 7, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Myrrh says:
August 7, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Thanks for the info
You’re welcome. Sorry I couln’t get back to this earlier.
The mass of CO2 is meaningless at normal temperatures on earth. Diffusion will mix CO2 (and any other gas, even Xenon) to an even distribution so fast you won’t believe it. It can’t “settle out”, it’s constantly being bounced around and mixed by the property of having temperature. The molecules will be a long way away from where they started before you know it. I could see gravity taking over at something near absolute zero, but, really, for all practical purposes, gravity has nothing to do with it. I don’t remember the substance, but the science teacher opens a bottle of something smelly with a very small molecule size, and you could smell it in the back of the room in a few seconds. The lightest molecules do diffuse the fastest, but they ALL diffuse too fast to prevent rapid mixing.
Sorry to have to tell you, I’m getting used to not being thanked for it.., that you’re another victim of AGWScience fiction infiltration into the education system. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air by a long way, one and half times heavier, it separates out as a matter of course because it is heavier than air, it displaces air and sinks to the ground. This is observed in ordinary real life in situations such as brewing and mining and around volcanic activity. The demonstration you got at school is typical AGWScience fiction meme dis-explanation by taking a known effect and and substituting the known cause of the effect with a different and illogical and non-physical science fiction explanation. The scent was spread by convection and lighter than air vapour.. And unless your teacher opened a really expensive bottle of perfume, the major ingredient would have been alcohol.
Two things at play here, scent is mixed with alcohol and water, but it’s the alcohol which is very volatile this means that it evaporates more quickly than water (water being the standard here against which volatility is measured). Water itself is constantly evaporating, and water vapour itself is lighter than air.
Alcohol evaporates even more readily than water (related to its lower boiling point), also, alcohol breaks the surface tension of water, speeding up evaporation (see tears of wine), one of the main reasons why cheaper scents have lots of alcohol – because it it evaporates quickly and spreads the scent.
Gases have volume, they take up space, they expand and contract, they have different weights relative to each other and they interact with each other, attraction etc., they are not characterless dots of the volumeless imaginary ‘ideal’ gas as pushed by the AGWScience meme.. No real gas obeys the ‘ideal gas’ law. We have quite a long history of exploring gases, and real gases do not ‘diffuse through the atmosphere by bouncing off each other in elastic encounters as if ideal, imaginary, gases’. This is AGWScience misinformation. As with the residence time of CO2, you’ll have to dig a bit deeper to see the con.
The italics is in the original. This is also as it says, about scale, molecules may well be moving as great speeds, but that doesn’t mean they are all moving at speed over distances. Sound travels as the gas Air is compressed causing the molecules to vibrate and the vibration is passed along through the air, and the molecules return to ‘rest’ – constrained by the density of the molecules around them; similar to a wave passed along in a body of water. The fluid volume water doesn’t itself move far, neither does the fluid gas air when sound moves through it . Air on the move is wind, that is, volumes of the gas air moving in relation to other volumes of air in convective currents caused by temperature differences. Within all that, lighter than air gases will rise, heavier than air gases will sink.
AGWScience fiction is skilled at taking physical properties and processes out of context, it’s sleight of hand.
The other example of equal ludicrousness to a heavier than air gas ‘accumulating for hundreds and even thousands of years in the atmosphere, is the deliberate disinformation about the energy we receive from the Sun – the AGWScience fictional teaching is now well on its way to dumbing down this and the next generation, leaving them without a sensible grasp of reality. (See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-710287 for a discussion on this, and especially the summary http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-711886 for NASA’s complicity in this.)
Bart:
re: your post at August 9, 2011 at 2:41 pm, I am sure you know – but others may not – that the important point is the reliance of the IPCC on the ‘mass balance idea’ because the IPCC uses the Berne Model of the carbon cycle. The Berne Model is basically a mass balance model similar to that developed by Ferdinand.
Disproof of the ‘mass balance idea’ is a disproof of all – yes, ALL – IPCC ‘projections’.
Richard
A bit more of interest re scent spreading through the room via alcohol and weight of gases:
http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5315235_evaporation-cause-cooling.html
http://www.ucc.ie/academic/chem/dolchem/html/comp/ethanol.html
http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/E/EVA/evaporation.html for a look at the history