The Emily Litella moment for climate science and CO2 ?

Bart says:
August 13, 2011 at 10:55 am
This is gibberish. The sink capacity is quite elastic. It does not penalize the natural CO2 sequestration in order to sequester the human CO2, it expands to accommodate it.
The sink capacity isn’t elastic enough to remove the extra CO2 which is currently in the atmosphere at any high speed. The current 100 ppmv (200 GtC extra) extra removes only 4 GtC extra CO2 out of the atmosphere per year. That is because the increase in growth rate of vegetation is only average 50% if the atmospheric CO2 doubles. In ideal circumstances, which seldom exist in nature. And the other sinks, the deep oceans, have a limited exchange with the atmosphere. Thus any additional CO2 above the real sink capacity of nature leads to an increase in the atmosphere. No matter if that is directly or by occupation of sink capacity.
That is what is observed, no theoretical considerations can change that.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 13, 2011 at 12:08 pm
Myrrh says:
August 13, 2011 at 4:52 am
Myrrh – “Carbon Dioxide is heavier than air.”
Yes, so what? Does that mean that every molecule of CO2, once mixed in the atmosphere, is rapidely falling down again?
Yes! That’s exactly what it means. Just as lighter than air means that every molecule will rapidly rise up through air. Every molecule of methane will rise up through air, but more importantly here, every molecule of water vapour – lighter than air water vapour is constantly evaporating from water, heat speeds this up and is how we get rain as the warm water vapour rises to condense out in the colder higher air – which is where it picks up carbon dioxide, all rain is carbonic acid – and is in this Water Cycle that the Earth is cooled to the average temp we have, without it the Earth would be 67°C think deserts..
When larger amounts of carbon dioxide are produced anywhere it can be a great hazard, because it displaces the lighter oxygen and nitrogen molecules – a danger in brewing beer, and especially a danger around volcanic activity where it flows (gases are fluids) into hollows – displacing oxygen, carbon dioxide suffocates. Read up on Lake Nyos in the Cameroons, the explosion sent it high in the air but it rapidly sank and flowed down the slopes suffocating people in the villages around the crater trapped in the thick layer displacing the lighter oxygen – it is one and a half times heavier than air, therefore it will sink rapidly and layer if in large enough quantities. Some who had their heads above the layer boundary survived, while those sleeping nearer the ground, died. Here: http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Nyos.html
From which: “The CO2-rich cloud was expelled rapidly from the southern floor of Lake Nyos. It rose as a jet with a speed of about 100 km per hour. The cloud quickly enveloped houses within the crater that were 120 meters above the shoreline of the lake. Because CO2 is about 1.5 times the density of air, the gaseous mass hugged the ground surface and descended down valleys along the north side of the crater. The deadly cloud was about 50 meters thick and it advanced downslope at a rate of 20 to 50 km per hour. This deadly mist persisted in a concentrated form over a distance of 23 km, bringing sudden death to the villages of Nyos, Kam, Cha, and Subum.”
That’s a heck of a speed travelling down because it’s heavier than air. Anyone know about gas speeds relative to their weight in air?
Of course not, one finds more or less the same ratio high up to the stratosphere. Only 40 years of lack of wind stirring in an ice core shows a 1% enriching at the bottom, due to gravity.
Due to gravity is weight. How did it get to the stratosphere? Volcanic eruptions, planes? The “same ratio” is myth, that’s what the AIRS concluded. That is was “lumpy” and not at all well-mixed.
Myrrh: “AIRS discovered much too their consternation, this makes CO2 levels lumpy, not well-mixed”
Please look at the scale of AIRS. Well mixed doesn’t mean that everywhere at the same moment all levels are equal. That is only the case if there were no sources and sinks at work. .
Read their conclusions – it was the AIRS which found it was lumpy! The hype still is that CO2 is well-mixed and can’t be unmixed, the same proportions everywhere – that’s how they get the claim that it “accumulates” in the atmosphere, it can’t accumulate because it’s heavier than air.. Stop moving the bloody goalposts. Of course average means average and doesn’t mean it’s the same levels everywhere, ten inches of rainfall a year doesn’t mean rain falls ten inches every day.. (this is the same scenario as the residence time – IPCC actual figures hidden in the bulk of the reports against the spiel of accumulating for hundreds and thousands of years in the atmosphere – see my post above: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/05/the-emily-litella-moment-for-climate-science-and-co2/#comment-714003 Their conclusion was that it is lumpy and not well-mixed and they need to understand winds better..
CO2 needs 1-2 years to reach the South Pole, as most human sources are in the NH.
Well, here’s the thing. How exactly does it do this (apart from the fact that it is continually sinking to the ground and coming down in the rain when it is not being acted on by other work such as wind)?
Know any weathermen? S’far as I know, winds stick to their own hemisphere except for a bit of mixing at the equator and most winds are westerlies or easterlies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_prevailing_winds_on_earth.png
And in the global circulation, the winds come from the poles – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Global_Circulation.jpg
“Polar easterlies Main article: Polar easterlies
The polar easterlies, also known as Polar Hadley cells, are dry, cold prevailing winds that blow from the high-pressure areas of the polar highs at the north and south poles towards the low-pressure areas within the Westerlies at high latitudes. Unlike the Westerlies, these prevailing winds blow from the east to the west, and are often weak and irregular.[41] Because of the low sun angle, cold air builds up and subsides at the pole creating surface high-pressure areas, forcing an equatorward outflow of air;[42] that outflow is deflected eastward by the Coriolis effect.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind
My bold. So what happened when the wind stopped blowing for 40 years? The local produced CO2 didn’t move away from the pole, volcanic, and formed your 1% enriched layer in the ice core..?
Myrrh: “The Beck and stomata data are much more sensible to CO2 levels, production is mostly local. The Mauna Loa data is suspect because of this.”
Many of the historical data and stomata data are suspect, because taken nearby huge sources and sinks, not well mixed and highly variable even over a day. Mauna Loa and 70 other stations, airplane and seaship measurements show very little variability and represent the bulk (95%) of the atmosphere.
Sigh, they show local production, precisely, because, carbon dioxide, doesn’t travel easily. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it does not rise readily in air. It likes to be where plants can eat it. Stomata are on the underside of leaves because the bulk of carbon dioxide is not in the air where plants don’t live, but at ground level where it will be moved by local winds and warmth, quickly dropping back to start the cycle again, by its own weight and in readily mixing with any water in its local air, rain, dew. Mauna Loa is a joke, as are some of the other stations, they decide when they stop measuring the carbon dioxide falling to the ground from the huge amount of locally produced in the ongoing volcanic activity and thousands of earthquakes a year in the warm seas around the great hot spot creating the islands, and the increased plane traffic day and night – while sitting on the worlds largest active volcano.. What possible ‘well-mixed background CO2’ can they be measuring? You can tell just from the Keeling curve they keep producing that it bears no relation to anything except their agenda – read how they make the choice for cut-off point, they arbitrarily decide when ‘volcanic’ stops…
Myrrh “The Antarctic cores do not show the responses to the LIA and MWP and others which Greenland does.”
Depends of the resolution. The medium resolution (40 years) Law Dome ice core shows the difference between the MWP and LIA: 6 ppmv less CO2 for about 0.8 degr.C cooling:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
Well, I was thinking of the WUWT discussions on this a little while ago – the Greenland cores show bigger differences and unambiguous relation to the great up and down temps of these periods, as I recall, my question is why the difference? Because more in the thick of life producing CO2 in the land masses around Greenland and, in the wind system?
Wasn’t it Law Dome where they altered the time frame because they couldn’t get one to agree with other cores? Vague memory of something like that.
Looking at your diagram. Doesn’t it look strange to you? Is there really that much more CO2 there now compared with the MIA? And of course, my question here – where does it come from?

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 13, 2011 at 12:13 pm
“They didn’t calibrate their calculated pCO2 to the ice core records.”
What part of “Presently the reason for this discrepancy remains unresolved. However, it is clear that the use of empirical calibration curves…” did you not understand?
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 13, 2011 at 12:31 pm
“The sink capacity isn’t elastic enough to remove the extra CO2 which is currently in the atmosphere at any high speed.”
This is not a statement of fact, but of what you wish to be true.
“The current 100 ppmv (200 GtC extra) extra removes only 4 GtC extra CO2 out of the atmosphere per year. That is because the increase in growth rate of vegetation is only average 50% if the atmospheric CO2 doubles.”
No, this betrays a lack of understanding of how influx is partitioned between the oceans and atmosphere.
Why in the world am I arguing such trifling silliness? You are so out of the ballpark, you are not even in the same city.
No, Ferdinand… you just do not understand feedback systems. Case closed.

Bart says:
August 13, 2011 at 5:40 pm
“They didn’t calibrate their calculated pCO2 to the ice core records.”
What part of “Presently the reason for this discrepancy remains unresolved. However, it is clear that the use of empirical calibration curves…” did you not understand?
If you omit relevant information, then you can prove anything you want. That is the same tactic Greenpeace often uses. The previous sentences which you didn’t copy simply show that the “empirical calibration curves” have nothing to do with ice cores, but with the calibration of boron isotopes with current day pH and thus with current day pCO2:
Empirical calibration with live cultured planctic foramins and corals has shown that the isotopic composition of biogenic carbonates falls close to the isotopic composition of borates in seawater (5-8), although the empirical d11Bcarbonate/pH relationship is not as steep as predicted by the isotopic fractionation between borate and boric acid in seawater (3). Presently the reason for this discrepancy remains unresolved…
What part of “Empirical d11B/pH… isotopic fractionation… in seawater” did you not understand?
They compared their calculated d11B/pH from live cultures to the real d11B/pH in seawater. Not to any ice core.
This is not a statement of fact, but of what you wish to be true.
No, this betrays a lack of understanding of how influx is partitioned between the oceans and atmosphere.
Whatever the underlying processes involved, the outflux to oceans and vegetation follows the increase in the atmosphere at an exact linear rate. That means that the exchange flows are limited in flexibility and that the pCO2 difference between atmosphere and oceans (and vegetation alveoles) is the main driving force.
You are much better in theoretical considerations, but I have a lot of experience with real life processes…

Matt G says:
August 13, 2011 at 4:57 pm
These were covienently not used or high data points removed with the intention of supporting the AGW movement later.
As said to Myrhh before: Greenland CO2 is not reliable due to acidic dust from Icelandic volcanoes. Extreme values in the Neftel Byrd station ice core were found where also drilling fluid was found in the ice (via cracks). Several measurements over the same ice layers did give a wide range of values, including the similar values in line with samples before and later in depth/time. Normally, one should delete the whole range, as the sample was clearly contaminated and doesn’t show the real values of CO2 of that period, except the lowest values. Neftel decided to keep the lowest values. That is all.
Of course if one is interested in discrediting the ice cores as valid information of ancient atmospheres, this is an ideal case…
But see further my take of Jaworowski, who is behind all these stories:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 14, 2011 at 12:53 am
“…the outflux to oceans and vegetation follows the increase in the atmosphere at an exact linear rate. That means that the exchange flows are limited in flexibility…”
Again, this is not a statement of fact, but of what you wish to be true.
“…the “empirical calibration curves” have nothing to do with ice cores…”
They have a curve which is empirically derived. That curve necessarily has significant uncertainty in it – there is not a unique fit as it is unmoored from physical principles. They chose the fit which gives them replication of the Vostok ice core. The Vostok ice core is thereby used for validation. Ergo, the result is highly correlated with, essentially a fit to and replication of, the Vostok ice core.
And, so, I maintain a reasonable wariness regarding the proxy reconstructions. However, I do wish to point out that, while I believe it is likely that the ice core CO2 data record is unreliable, the validity of fast CO2 response does not hinge on the validity of the ice core data. It merely would require a more complicated than mere low pass response. That is, a response in which very fast and very slow inputs are attenuated, but in which medium rate processes are passed through.
I have been fiddling with this idea and, it turns out that it is very easy to create such a “bandpass” response in a coupled land-ocean-atmospheric model. Indeed, it is difficult not to have some finite band of relative amplification if the parameters of the system are essentially a random draw from a hat. I may post more on this later here or in a future thread when I have had time to work out all the implications.

Matt G. – Thank you.
Ferdinand – As said to Myrhh before: Greenland CO2 is not reliable due to acidic dust from Icelandic volcanoes. Extreme values in the Neftel Byrd station ice core were found where also drilling fluid was found in the ice (via cracks). Several measurements over the same ice layers did give a wide range of values, including the similar values in line with samples before and later in depth/time. Normally, one should delete the whole range, as the sample was clearly contaminated and doesn’t show the real values of CO2 of that period, except the lowest values. Neftel decided to keep the lowest values. That is all.
Remind me, where did you say this to me before?
How does this compare with sulphuric acid levels in Antarctica? And how does this affect carbon dioxide levels?
WINDY BITS

Composition
Air is a mixture of several gases. When completely dry, it is about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. The remaining 1% is other gases such as argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium, and others. However, in nature, air is never completely dry. It always contains some water vapor in amounts varying from almost none to 5% by volume. As water vapor content increases, the other gases decrease proportionately.
…
Air is matter and has weight. Since it is gaseous, it is compressible. Pressure the atmosphere exerts on the surface is the result of the weight of the air above. Thus, air near the surface is much more dense than air at high altitudes.
…
What causes wind?
Differences in temperature create differences in pressure. For example, local winds along lake and ocean shores are the result of the temperature differences between land and water, which cause a pressure difference and wind. These pressure differences drive a complex system of winds in a never-ending attempt to reach equilibrium. Wind also transports water vapor and spreads fog, clouds, and precipitation.
Convection currents
When two surfaces are heated unequally, they heat the overlying air unevenly. The warmer air expands and becomes lighter or less dense than the cool air. The denser, cool air is drawn to the ground by its greater gravitational force lifting or forcing the warm air upward much as oil is forced to the top of water when the two are mixed. The rising air spreads and cools, eventually descending to complete the convective circulation. As long as the uneven heating persists, convection maintains a continuous convective current.
The horizontal air flow in a convective current is wind. Convection of both large and small scales accounts for systems ranging from hemispheric circulations down to local eddies. This horizontal flow, wind, is sometimes called advection. However, the term advection more commonly applies to the transport of atmospheric properties by the wind, i.e., warm advection; cold advection; advection of water vapor, etc.
Because of uneven heating of the Earth, surface pressure is low in warm equatorial regions and high in cold polar regions. A pressure gradient develops from the poles to the equator. If the Earth did not rotate, this pressure gradient force would be the only force acting on the wind. Circulation would be two giant hemispheric convective currents. Cold air would sink at the poles; wind would blow straight from the poles to the equator; warm air at the equator would be forced upward; and high-level winds would blow directly toward the poles. However, the Earth does rotate; and because of its rotation, this simple circulation is greatly distorted.
Coriolis force: it modifies wind direction
…
The Coriolis force affects the paths of aircraft, missiles, flying birds, and ocean currents, and is most important to the study of weather and air currents. The force deflects air to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. This text concentrates mostly on deflection to the right in the Northern Hemisphere.
…
As air is forced aloft at the equator and begins its high-level trek northward, the Coriolis force turns it to the right or to the east.
Read more: Weather Fundamentals – average, low, world, daily, high, The earths atmosphere, Temperature, Atmospheric pressurethe barometer, Wind http://www.weatherexplained.com/Vol-1/Weather-Fundamentals.html#ixzz1V3GU4onz
http://www.weatherexplained.com/Vol-1/Weather-Fundamentals.html

…Things to watch for in AGWScience fiction memes

The prominent meteorologist William W. Kellogg, for one, told a 1975 World Meteorological Organization symposium not to worry. He noted that industrial aerosols, and also the soot from burning debris where forests were cleared, absorbed sunlight strongly — after all, smog and smoke are visibly dark. They would thus retain heat. He calculated that the chief effect of human aerosols would be regional warming (although he admitted that the calculation relied on properties that were poorly known). Anyway, as Kellogg also pointed out, rains washed aerosols out of the lower atmosphere in a matter of weeks. Eventually the warming due to the increase in CO2 — a gas that lingered in the atmosphere for centuries — must necessarily dominate the climate.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/aerosol.htm

Hmm, a prominent meteorologist who doesn’t know that rain is the carbon dioxide washing aerosols out of the lower atmosphere in a matter of weeks…?
It’s when you get down to the basics that AGWScience fiction beomes so amusingly surreal.

Myrrh says:
August 14, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Myrrh,
If Brownian motion works for – relative heavy – particles in a fluid, please give me a reason why it would not work for a molecule of CO2 in a fluid, surrounded by 300 times more molecules of other gases. Have you ever put a few drops of a perfume on a floor and didn’t you smell the scent a few minutes later at the other side of the room, even at 1.5 meters height or wherever your nose is? That is Brownian motion at work, even for scent molecules which are many times heavier than air.
I have been working in a chlorine factory. To protect workers and the neighbourhood, a network of chlorine monitors was installed, including a program to calculate the spread of any leak. The latter was expected to be thinned with between the 2nd and 3rd power of the distance. If it was only dispersed over the ground, it would be the 2nd power only, but as it is dispersed also in height, the 3rd power is involved, be it not complete. Chlorine is a lot heavier than CO2 (m.w. 71 vs. 44).
Further, have a look at the data: CO2 levels at 3,400 meter at Mauna Loa exactly follows the Cape Kumukahi CO2 levels at ground level in Hawaii, see the “carbon tracker” overview:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/
And for yearly averages, all stations, from ground level in the far North (Barrow, Alaska) to Mauna Loa at 3,400 m high to the SH stations at ground level (Samoa) to the South Pole at 3,000 m high follow each other with a maximum lag of a few years, over 50 years now since the measurements started at the South Pole (which was before Mauna Moa, but has a gap of a few years, later on):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends.jpg
in detail for the period 1995-2004:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends_1995_2004.jpg
Thus Mauna Loa at 3,400 m lags Barrow at sealevel with some 9 months, while the South Pole lags Barrow with about 2 years.
The increase in the past 50+ years in all stations is over 80 ppmv. Compare that to the variability discovered by the AIRS satellite: +/- 3 ppmv at mid troposphere (about 5,000 m. Hey, how comes CO2 that high at such a high ppmv level?). The variability in the mid-troposphere is of academic interest, but completely irrelevant for the global increase of CO2 over the years and its long term distribution over the globe…

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 15, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Myrrh says:
August 14, 2011 at 4:14 pm
If Brownian motion works for – relative heavy – particles in a fluid, please give me a reason why it would not work for a molecule of CO2 in a fluid, surrounded by 300 times more molecules of other gases. Have you ever put a few drops of a perfume on a floor and didn’t you smell the scent a few minutes later at the other side of the room, even at 1.5 meters height or wherever your nose is? That is Brownian motion at work, even for scent molecules which are many times heavier than air.,
CO2 is the fluid, it’s part of the gaseous atmosphere. Er, The other fluids in the atmosphere are lighter than CO2 – how are they going to bounce it around? The technical description is that it displaces air, the basic oxygen and nitrogen which are around the same weight. It’s dramatically noticeable when in large amounts, but that’s because each molecules has that effect in air. This is a well understood effect, fires can be put out with extinguishers of CO2.
I said something on ‘scent in air’ above: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/05/the-emily-litella-moment-for-climate-science-and-co2/#comment-715670
I’ll put in the extract about diffusion here for ease of reference:

“While Brownian motion of large molecules is observable under a microscope, small-molecule diffusion can only be probed in carefully controlled experimental conditions. Under normal conditions, molecular diffusion is relevant only on length scales between nanometer and millimeter. On larger length scales, transport in liquids and gases is normally due to another transport phenomenon, convection.
Therefore, some often cited examples of diffusion are wrong: If cologne is sprayed in one place, it will soon be smelled in the entire room, but a simple calculation shows that this cannot be due to diffusion; the cause can only be convection. If ink is dropped in water, one usually observes an inhomogeneous evolution of the spatial distribution, which clearly indicates convection; diffusion dominates only in perfect thermal equilibrium.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion

Like the movement of air in our atmosphere, it’s first and foremost about convection which comes about from temperature differences because of the scale, and work done to spread something, heat, external motion such as fan or movement of people in a room and energy by spraying and so on. Alcohol is very volatile for example, that creates heat and heat makes gases less dense, it’s the major constituent of most scents, and also, it has the effect of breaking the surface tension of water also an ingredient which is already evaporating at room temperature and water vapour is considerably lighter than air – all this helps spread the scent around the room (which is why these ingredients are chosen, more expensive perfumes with less or even no alcohol rely on close up heat from the body to make their point..). But especially remember scale. Brownian motion works on nanoscale – the volume and weight of the fluid it is in will restrict this movement over distance. The particles of dust from Africa reaching Florida haven’t got there by less than millimetre random movements.., but in volumes of wind, volumes of air on the move, through convection – the room is that on a smaller scale. Rooms are heated by convection, as warm air rises and the denser colder air sinks beneath it to be warmed in turn. How long would it take to get to Florida if it was Brownian motion?
I have been working in a chlorine factory. To protect workers and the neighbourhood, a network of chlorine monitors was installed, including a program to calculate the spread of any leak. The latter was expected to be thinned with between the 2nd and 3rd power of the distance. If it was only dispersed over the ground, it would be the 2nd power only, but as it is dispersed also in height, the 3rd power is involved, be it not complete. Chlorine is a lot heavier than CO2 (m.w. 71 vs. 44).
As with the scent in the room, there are other things that have to be taken into consideration, its properties and environment. Carbon monoxide monitors are placed on the wall iirc two or three feet above floor level because appliances which can malfunction also give off carbon dioxide and as this readily sinks to the floor it not recommended to plug the monitor into the floor socket because there might be enough CO2 to block the carbon monoxide from getting to the monitor. Breweries monitor carbon dioxide from ground level.
So, chlorine. It has an atomic weight half that, as there are two atoms in a covalent bond

“but fluorine, though consisting mostly of di-atomic molecules, contains some mono-atomic ones ; and chlorine, bromine, and iodine, though probably CJ 9 , Br 2 , and I 2 at low temperatures, dissociate into molecules identical with their atoms if the temperature is sufficiently raised. The fact of reduction in the molecular complexity of the molecules of elements prepares us for the existence of elements which in the gaseous state are already mono-atomic ; and many such are known.” http://www.molecularstation.com/wiki/Molecular_weight

This would have to be taken into consideration in monitoring chlorine (http://www.health.state.ny.us/environmental/emergency/chemical_terrorism/chlorine_tech.htm etc.). It’s a gas at room temperature, that heat will break it down to a one atom molecule and not much heavier than air, that the force bonding the two atoms is relatively weak, that it’s volatile like alcohol which means that the latent heat released when it turns into gas from liquid has to be considered as well as tthe force which would expel the chlorine from the factory, the height at which this would happen, the amount likely to be expelled, and so on.
What is at play here is that such examples and demonstrations as scent spread through a room and ink mixing in water to stay ‘thoroughly mixed and can’t be unmixed, same proportion throughout’, while giving the explanation ‘Browninan motion or ideal gas’, must have been originally created by someone or more who know real physics extremely well… The subtle tweaks to real physics, the swapping of properties and processes and cherry picking out of context laws are too consistent to be co-incidence. That this is spread in ignorance by those who take this on trust is the real tragedy in this, a whole generation now with a completely illogical understanding of basic physics and consequently living in a fictional Alice through the looking glass impossible world. No need to slaughter all the teachers and burn all the books, and turn everyone except the elite themselves into controlled serfs, the techniques developed in Marxist inspired ideolgies earlier in the last century being played out on a grand scale. No difference between the Fabians and Fascists and Natzis, between Cameron and Blair – the science doesn’t matter here, the more confusing they can make the better it suits. If you ever see a talk a glassy-eyed Gordon Brown gave in Australia you’ll find other techniques in play, in five minutes so many repetitions of new world order and variations, language never used in his career before becoming prime minister, not one record of such in Hansard. But I digress.
Will have to come back to this later, but I hope the Brownian motion thing has been explained well enough here now to see how shocked they were in the AIRS to find reality not as the AGWScience fiction memes have been propagated.

Myrrh says:
August 15, 2011 at 8:10 pm
Myrrh, please. Brownian motion keeps very heavy particles in the air. Brownian motion keeps very heavy scent molecules in the air. And brownian motion keeps CO2 and chlorine in the air. The movement of these molecules is together with the air molecules by convection and wind. If you were right, then the scent molecules would drop out of the air far more rapid than the minute convection in a room, but that is not the case.
Further, there may is dissiciation of Cl2 molecules with very high temperatures, but that must be a very small portion at room temperature (actually, your reference gives no dissociation up to 200 degr.C). Chorine molecules don’t attack gold, but when in status nascendi (single atoms) it does. But even so, Cl2 has a molecular weight of 71, a single atom is 35.5, still heavier than oxygen or nitrogen molecules.
But you haven’t answered the main question: if all CO2 remains at ground level, why it is possible that CO2 levels increase up to 5,000 meter (AIRS) as good as at ground level from near the North Pole to the South Pole at about the same rate?

Matt G says:
August 16, 2011 at 4:21 pm
I think that I have misinterpreted your question:
With me been aware of this thats why I brought this up because with Antarctica, how is it possible to know that errors with drilling only cause them to have higher data results and not lower data results?
If you have a data series and some of the data show values extremely outside the range of the other data, it is prudent to assume that these are outliers, not the reverse, but one need to check if that is plausible. In the case of the Neftel work at the Siple Dome ice core, the layers where the outliers were found were examined in detail and showed contamination with drilling fluid in cracks. Further examination of the same ice layers with smaller samples did show an enormous variation of CO2 levels, including values in the “normal” range. Thus it was clear that the contamination was the source of the extra CO2 levels in some samples. Many years later, a new core was drilled at Siple Dome and no increased values were found over the same ice age where the previous contamination was found…
That contamination leads to higher results is because the current atmosphere is already 100-200 ppmv higher than what is found in ice core bubbles and drilling fluid may dissolve even more CO2 out of the atmosphere, compared to dissolved O2/N2 (but I haven’t seen any figures yet about the solubility of CO2/O2/N2 in such fluids). The CO2 measurements are done under vacuum, CO2 dissolved in drilling fluids would come out and enrich the levels, if O2/N2 are less soluble.
It would be quite remarkable that CO2 migrates from lower to higher levels, and at the same time O2/N2 doesn’t migrate, thus decreasing the ratio in the bubbles. I do expect the reverse, if there was any migration at all, as CO2 has more affinity with ice/water than O2/N2, thus migrating less fast or not at all, which should lead to too high levels, which is not observed.