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…”
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DirkH says:
August 5, 2011 at 6:47 am
“long term correlations between a very long term temperature average and the temperature trend ”
Sorry, i meant to say between a very long CO2 emissions average and the temperature trend.
Luis Dias says:
August 5, 2011 at 3:55 am
Those are proxy co² measurements with a huge range of uncertainty. Try again.
The thing of it is, no matter how you slice it or dice it, anthropogenic CO2 emission is a matter of fact. One might argue on the exact quantity but the bottom line remains is that we pretty much know how much oil, natural gas, and coal is taken out of the ground every year and burned. The total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is also a matter of fact.
Annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions are close to 3% of the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been very consistently rising by 1.5% every year. These are not speculations or numbers obtained through proxies. They are facts which any hypothesis must explain. This ratio of annual atmospheric CO2 rise being half of anthropogenic CO2 emission is quite consistent over the past 50 years.
The null hypothesis based on empirical observation is that annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions are twice what natural sinks can absorb in that same year.
It does not appear to me that Salby has falsified the null hypothesis. All he has done is cast doubt upon C12/C13 being proof of the null hypothesis. I never took C12/C13 ratios as being credible confirmation of the null hypothesis due to a number of factors including difficulty in accurate measurement of these ratios and inadequate understanding of how natural CO2 sources and sinks operate. But that does nothing to falsify the null hypothesis.
kramer says:
August 5, 2011 at 6:05 am
No. What we see in the 800 year lag is the smoothed rate of change over a long period. The fact that this is shorter periodic change does not change the result.
Well it has been obvious to me for some time that the CO2 record from Mauna Loa has no relation to human produced CO2 output since the Mauna Loa record has no change points/points of inflexion in it whilst human produced CO2 has not followed the same curve, having a pronounced dip round about the 70’s when the OPEC oil embarge cut off supplies of oil to the developed world and caused a major global recession.
Here is the total human output of CO2 with a nice dip in the late 70s (another one in the early 90s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.svg
And here is the Mauna Loa CO2 record proudly forging upward regardless of what humans are doing:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide-en.svg
richard verney says:
August 5, 2011 at 6:03 am
“It is implausible, that the planet has similarly greened (in like linear fashion) each year. Indeed, it is almost certainly the case that there must have been years when de-forestation more than offset any natural greening in other areas, yet one still sees that the sink capacity has increased. ”
Deforestation does not mean that all the carbon contained in the trees turns into CO2 at once; wood is used for construction and the paper industry. Deforested areas don’t turn into deserts but are re-used for agriculture, or for industrial forestry, or for grasslands, all of which will consume CO2 as well. Björn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist has a section about this (not CO2 related, but just a discussion of the typical “deforestation scare”).
But that only goes to the sensitivity issue which is not the important finding. So what if the sensitivity is less than first thought ? That does not affect the basic contention that the isotope ratios have been wrongly interpreted.
That may be true and I’m waiting for the actual evidence to come out of this finding. However, the claim that CO2 rises due mostly to the temperature simply falls down flat with this simple reasoning. At most, the temperature would have only affected 10% of the CO2 rise. Where did the other 90% come from? “Natural variability”? I can eat that, the problem is how on earth will you show such a thing to be true.
And given the “hockey stick nature” of the CO2 rise in this century, there’s little evidence to support it.
So I guess the next step for the skeptics is to undermine the hockey stick of the CO2 record.
I listened to the podcast on Judith Curry’s blog. Wow! Judith Curry said ‘Wow’ too.:-) It woud be great to see the graphs discussed.
Having failed to block the publication , anyone want to take a bet on how long before the ‘Team’ starts attacking the author ?
“atmospheric CO2 increase that we observe is a product of temperature increase”
Well, duh.
See Dr. Jeff Glassman’s paper “The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide”,
http://rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html#more
also successfully defended against Gavin Schmidt
http://rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/11/gavin_schmidt_on_the_acquittal.html
Luis Dias
In reply to [] Gavin Schmidt’s point about the ice age data not making sense – that is exactly the point that Murray Salby was making. You cannot point to ice core data and say that atmospheric levels of CO2 were-such-and-such so many years back. All you can say about ice core data is that changes is CO2 lagged changes in temperature, and also that there must be large natural feedbacks present that prevents this planet from having runaway temperatures and ever increasing levels of atmospheric CO2.
We, Schmidt, Salby do not know what the atmospheric levels of CO2 were in the past …. but what we can directly infer from Salby’s research using satellite data is they must have been a lot higher during warm phases than indicated in the ice core data.
The game changer in all this is that science has not changed – man is not interfering with the global climate – as ever it is natural changes in temperature that is driving changes in atmospheric CO2.
I didn’t catch what is the journal where it will be published.
Does anyone know?
richard verney says:
August 5, 2011 at 3:37 am
I attribute it to there being a natural equilibrium point of 280ppm during interglacial periods. The more a system is thrown out of equilibrium the harder it tries to get back to equilibrium. A good example is when you put two objects in contact where one is hotter the than the other. The equilibrium point is when both objects are the same temperature. When the temperature disparity is greater the race towards equilibrium is faster and when the disparity is less the slower the race. In fact the two objects will never reach absolute equilibrium because the energy exchange gets smaller and smaller as they approach equilibrium. The classic example of never quite reaching equilbrium is taught as two objects approaching each other in stepwise fashion where each step halves the distance between them. They will never actually meet and the speed of approach diminishes with each step.
Some here have suggested that this paper, when it is released, will be shot down by Team AGW in the usual manner, i.e. employing the usual ad hominems. I suspect that will be the case, but I don’t buy that it will therefore have no impact. For one thing the likes of Gavin Schmitt, Michael Mann et al are coming across more and more like ranting maniacs. Their attempts to defend their own science by making personal attacks on their critics are calling their own motivations into question. Open minded people will start to question what is really going on. Open minded scientists will start to question whether they have had the wool pulled over their eyes. They will start to look at the data for themselves to see if they have chosen to be on the wrong side. Once this starts to happen the game is up for Team AGW, and it has already started to happen. More and more papers are questioning the basic foundations of AGW theory and the extent of the danger.
We will not change the mind of people like Michael Mann and others like him. They are zealots. But we don’t need to change their minds. They will simply become irrelevant as the truth unfolds. And that is what they are most scared of.
Don’t like the premise.
Yes there is natural variation.
But less than half of annual anthro CO2 remains, so the remaining half
satisfies Occam’s razor.
And CO2 increase mirrors that of CH4 and N2O, amongst others.
Global warming is -not- a hoax of principle, but is rather a hoax of exaggeration.
Some supporting info to look at while you listen to the talk here:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Note the cyan CO2 growth rate chart which shows the 92 dip coinciding with Pinatubo cooling and 1998 El Nino warming. By contrast human CO2 emissions increase smoothly throughout.
KnR says:
August 5, 2011 at 7:05 am
Is Salby is known to believe in God? If he does that seems to be a fashionably acceptable way for climate boffins to attack scientific research – discredit the author’s science for totally unrelated philosophical beliefs.
Dave Springer says:
August 5, 2011 at 6:52 am
“The null hypothesis based on empirical observation is that annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions are twice what natural sinks can absorb in that same year. ”
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Yeh, this is a tricky subject. I often find myself on the other side of people whose opinions I respect…… but, that’s the process, no?
So if we were to cut our emissions in half, atmospheric CO2 would be come quasi static?
Nope, not even close. As shown earlier, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Carbon_Emissions.svg ) , we can see that our emissions were half no[t] so long ago, yet, the rate of rise hasn’t changed much. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/plot/esrl-co2/from:1970/to:1990/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1990/trend
So, what were the sinks doing in the 70s? Just hanging out waiting for the millennium?
jason says:
August 5, 2011 at 4:33 am
“Gavin has already dismissed it completelely in the “unforced variations” thread over on nasas unofficial propoganda blog. Amazing as the paper is not out for six weeks.”
The Warmista are everywhere. Their reflex is to quash anything that might conflict with their dogma. At Curry’s site, some are begging her to come back from the Dark Side while others are demanding that she post disclaimers whenever she posts material like Salby’s.
It certainly doesn’t revolutionize AGW. It does revolutionize GW theory, but it removes the “A” from AGW. This would be falsification not “revolution”. Judith is being much too kind and diplomatic. Of course, the paper must stand, or we are all whistling dixie.
Refusing proper debate, is going to cost a lot of scientists plenty. I try to maintain some compassion for their predicament, but it may be beyond my capabilities. The most, I can muster, is amusement, as one by one, these scientists, realize they have been standing, in full view, as naked as a jaybird. GK
re. the 800 year lag between temperature and CO2 concentration.
Prof. Salby commented on ice cores. With time, CO2 diffuses across layers. It is seen by the fact that recent short term fluctuations can be seen in the cores but as you go back in time, they get averaged out.
My comment is that, if the CO2 preferentially diffuses up through the ice column, then the 800 year lag would be overstated. That seems reasonable because the pressure in the ice column increases with depth and CO2, a gas, would diffuse toward a lower pressure region (ie. upward).
Roger Knights says:
August 5, 2011 at 7:08 am
It takes a lot of arrows to kill an elephant.
But they’re accumulating. Jumbo is becoming a pincushion.
One “last-straw” arrow will put him on his knees. Then it’s all over but the dining.
====================================
Paging David Appell … another “Death Threat” for your collection.
/sarc
People should go back and listen to what I said at the Heartland in Washington recently. There is no record for any period of any duration in which CO2 increase precedes temperature increase. It is what I have researched and written about for several years. Apart from my presentation all the presentations were built around the idea that CO2 and especially human CO2 were causing warming. It is difficult to be a sceptic among sceptics. Fortunately, away from the podium I was involved in several discussions with an increasing number of people who are recently to the climate and CO2 issue who are questioning the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas.