Correlation of Net CO2 emissions with climate properties shows that the growth in CO2 may be natural
Story submitted by WUWT reader Steve Brown
The narrative of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming has been challenged at many levels but this presentation by Professor Murry Salby, Chair of Climate at Macquarie University rips up the very foundations of the story.
The talk (in the video below) was given at the Sydney Institute 2nd Aug 2011
He elegantly shows that there is a solid correlation between natural climate factors (global temperature and soil moisture content) and the net gain (or loss) in global atmospheric content when the latter is averaged over a two year period. The hanging question remains, if natural factors drive more than 90% of the growth in CO2 how significant is the contribution of human generated emissions. The answer is simple… not very.
The talk has been covered in the past on Judith Curry’s blog, and an abstract of the talk is here . But this is the first time I have encountered a video of the talk or been able to see the slides which he referenced.
Fascinating.
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Allan MacRae wrote:
“I think Ferdinand’s “material balance argument” is incorrect because it inherently assumes that the climate-CO2 system is static, but it is dynamic, and the relatively small humanmade fraction of total CO2 flux may not be significant in this huge system, as it continues to chase equilibrium into eternity.”
The mass balance equation always applies whether it’s a “static” or a “dynamic” system, whether you write the equation as differential equation with time dependent terms, mass balance still applies, or whether you are writing it as an integral over a time period, it still applies.
There is no way around the laws of physics. A hypothesis that violates the laws of physics is bogus. The increase in carbon dioxide mass in the atmosphere can’t be explained as coming from natural sources, since the flux from anthropogenic sources is larger than the carbon dioxide mass change in the atmosphere. The present day net flux – anthropogenic emissions is directed from the atmosphere to the oceans/biosphere. Not the other way around. It’s basic math. If you think first principle and math don’t apply, then I don’t really know what else to tell you.
As a non-scientist, I kind of get increasing CO2 from the oceans by increasing temperatures but, there must be a temperature crossover point where the ocean cools and absorbs CO2 then warms and releases that CO2. I don’t recall ever hearing at what temperature that crossover occurs. What temperature “creates” that change in CO2 behavior?
Thanks for that Superb video. It inspired me to write a letter to the first minister of Scotland (to which I doubt I’ll get a reply), together with a dozen FOI questions .. along the lines of “has anyone in the government ever met any of the scientists x,y,z. who know anything about this?” … “does the government have a clue what they are doing” … “are you even aware that a quarter of Scots died in the 1690s due to cold, and what’s your best estimate of how many die today and will die in the future if there is a maunder minimum”.
Howmany people in Scotland will die early if it gets warmer?
Being that soil is the second largest CO2 sink on the planet, deeper ploughing, forest clearance for agriculture, and increase in forest fires in old peat lands such as Indonesia have contributed greatly to increases in CO2 emissions.
http://www.helsinki.fi/vitri/research/Educational_Projects/forrsa/RE_2_Course%20and%20workshop%20proceedings/lecture/8jan/06co2.pdf
Add Indonesia to the Amazon an African tropical regions, and then include changes in land use in the biggest CO2 soil store, the Boreal forests, and there is potential for release much greater than from burning hydrocarbons.
Ed asks:
If the increase from 280ppm before the industrial revolution to 393ppm today was due to natural sources then what happens to our 30 billion tonnes per year?
It is actually only about 5 gt per year according to the ipcc- a nitpick, I know. In any case, what happens to it is the same thing that happens to all C02. It becomes a very small part (roughly 3.3%) of the total C02 emissions available for carbon sinks. The big point here, that Alarmists don’t want to hear is that natural sources and sinks of C02 are dynamic, not static. A very small change in one can and does dramatically affect the overall balance. Man’s very small contribution of C02 simply gets lost in the noise.
Philip Bradley says: April 19, 2012 at 4:31 pm I was expecting not to be persuaded, and in fact was.
What I found most persuasive was his unwillingness to speculate. If I had been there, I’d have been so tempted to try to draw far more inferences.
It was the statement: “we scientists are here to provide the facts for policy makers, not tell policy makers what to do” (or something like that) which was very telling.
I had another “damascus” moment on solar-activity climate, when I realised my previous dismissal had been based on warmist propaganda and not a proper look at the facts. Likewise, I’ve seen these suggestions before that not all CO2 is human … and I’ve ignored, possibly because, well we should be sceptical.
But, then I realise, that I’ve been dismissing good research … and doing what I criticise government and scientists for doing (who get paid to go out and find the facts, so maybe I’m being harsh on myself).
I particularly liked this graphic:
Oops my previous post failed.
The graphic I particularly liked is this: http://scottishsceptic.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/salby.gif
And if you want to know what it means … don’t be lazy, watch the video.
The telling slide in the presentation is the Japanese satellite that shows global CO2 emissions by region. Net CO2 increase is not coming from the industrialized regions of the world. The CO2 increase is coming from the tropical regions. The jungles of the Amazon and the Congo. How can this be due to burning fossil fuels?
The other graphic that I found compelling was the graph of the net increase in CO2 by year, which varies widely, in step with temperature and soil moisture, while the increase in human CO2 by year is constant.
The Debunker No 2 BS (@No2BS) says: “just make that clear the entire CO2 pattern comes from that one measuring station in Hawaii.”
No, this is not correct, there is a global network of CO2 monitoring stations, they all say pretty much the same thing, the Mauna Loa series is the one most frequently used, but only because it is the first and hence longest of the reliable observational records.
@ur momisugly Jan P. Perlwitz
Although I am a skeptic regarding the sensitivity of climate change to changes in CO2, I appreciate the level of rigor you bring to the conversation and hope you will continue to do so. Thanks.
“It is actually only about 5 gt per year according to the ipcc- a nitpick, I know. In any case, what happens to it is the same thing that happens to all C02. It becomes a very small part (roughly 3.3%) of the total C02 emissions available for carbon sinks. The big point here, that Alarmists don’t want to hear is that natural sources and sinks of C02 are dynamic, not static. A very small change in one can and does dramatically affect the overall balance. Man’s very small contribution of C02 simply gets lost in the noise.”
Sorry, I should have said 30 gt carbon dioxide, not carbon, as 30 gt of carbon dioxide is 5gt of carbon. But anyway, roughly half of that carbon/carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere by carbon sinks, mainly the ocean.
You still haven’t explained how nature can be the source of the roughly 15 gt per year increase in atmospheric CO2, which Salby claims, when we are emitting 30 gt per year, meaning nature must be absorbing the other 15 gt. The dynamism of sinks can’t explain it away – in fact its dynamism surely explains why the more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, the more in absolute terms the sinks absorb. Even though we pour more CO2 into the atmosphere, roughly half is still absorbed by the fast carbon cycle.
The other problem for this theory (apart from the declining oxygen, decline in C-14, recent increase in carbon dioxide accumulation but slowing of warming, and need for negative concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere at the last glacial maximum) is that after being relatively stable at around 280 ppm through the Holocene, carbon dioxide started increasing when fossil fuels started being widely burnt in the industrial revolution and then increased in accumulation as more and more fossil fuels have been burnt, and also just happened to match the rate at which the fuels have been burnt.
To believe that it just happened to start increasing then, because of increasing temperatures (no physical reason given for this mysterious warming, which is large enough to warm the Earth but too enigmatic to pinpoint), and to disregard all the other independent lines of evidence isn’t skepticism, it’s plain refusal to accept reality.
The fact that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is due to anthropogenic emissions is so widely scientifically accepted it isn’t really questioned. I think the onus is on those who want to challenge it to provide evidence against it – are there any peer-reviewed sources that cast doubt on it?
The key question for Prof. Salby (and indeed anybody that argues that the rise in CO2 is natural) is to explain how atmospheric CO2 rises less each year than the amount of anthropogenic emissions in that year, without the natural environment being a net carbon sink (or alternatively how the natural environment can be causing the rise while taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it puts in). Good luck with that.
Lets be clear: if nature was a net source of atmospheric CO2, the observed increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would be greater than the rate at which it is emitted by man.
We emit 30 gt of CO2 per year. Therefore for nature to be a net source of CO2 at the moment, we would have to observe more than a 30 gt/yr increase in the atmosphere. Yet we only measure a 15 gt/yr increase. It’s simple arithmetic.
Either the CO2 content of the atmosphere measured by many stations at isolated points all over the world is wildly wrong, or the records of fossil fuel production is wildly wrong or there is some unexplained disappearance of 30 gt/yr of CO2 that isn’t into the atmosphere or rest of the fast carbon cycle, or Salby is wrong. Take your pick.
To add to what Ed says, Prof. Salby is very clear in his talk that the CO2 measurments and fossil fuel emissions data are reliable. I agree with him there.
– isn’t this OLD NEWS : the lecture was in August 2011 & was discussed on Judith Curry’s blog August 4th just as the video came available. ..And the paper has still NOT BEEN PUBLISHED… normally going straight to the media & having a press conference before publishing in a peer reviewed journal is a sure sign of suspect science.
– Although in the video Salby was very very convincing. All through I expected him to come out and say “fooled you I haven’t really been converted, actually I love the IPCC & found no errors in their reports”, but he just continued rubbishing their attitude without being insulting.
– Over on SkS (NON-Skeptical, NON-sense) I expected them to have found flaws in the science, but right from the start without even beginning to get into the lecture their strongest argument was “the guys obviously an idiot cos everyone know in the last 200 years climates been following CO2”.The way they can be SO CERTAIN without debunking the details really knocks their own credibility …as ever.
… I see the same suspects making the same type of posts they did there 8 months ago.
– Pity the paper isn’t out I would have liked to have seen them getting their teeth into it.
… is it being SUPPRESSED cos it’s too hot ? Or HELD BACK cos it’s too flawed ?
The Debunker No 2 BS (@No2BS) says:
April 20, 2012 at 6:26 am
– just make that clear the entire CO2 pattern comes from that one measuring station in Hawaii.
============
Which is on the Earth’s largest active volcano… There is no way that they can get a ‘background well-mixed’ carbon dioxide reading – they make it up by arbitrarily deciding what is ‘volcanic’ and then saying the rest is ‘background’. It is nonsense. They are supposed to have these stations in “pristine environments without local carbon dioxide interference” – and claim that Mauna Loa is such!
Keeling chose it because it was a place where he could create his own numbers, and it continues. The Keeling curve is created out the imagination, not out of any physical data of ‘background’.
http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/hawaii/kilauea/current-activity.html
http://www.westhawaiitoday.com/sections/news/local-news/mauna-loa-kilauea-may-be-dueling-volcanoes.html
http://www.khon2.com/mostpopular/story/Earthquake-swarm-continues-between-Kilauea-and/CEHnn2aZCkmI1buW123KzA.cspx
This is one of the world’s most active volcanic areas – actively creating islands. There are thousands of earthquakes every year besides the venting and the ongoing eruptions, and all in a warm sea ..
It is simply ludicrous to think that such a high carbon dioxide production area is capable of providing real logical data on carbon dioxide separate from the local events. Their ‘well-mixed background CO2’ is a fib.
“To add to what Ed says, Prof. Salby is very clear in his talk that the CO2 measurments and fossil fuel emissions data are reliable. I agree with him there.”
In that case, the fossil fuel emissions must disappear somewhere outside the carbon cycle, or Salby must have overturned elementary arithmetic if he’s correct that nature is a net source of CO2!
[SNIP: If you want to make a substantive reply, check the site policy and drop the insults. -REP]
Plants breath out carbon dioxide. Which is why the Japanese study makes sense, more plants, more carbon dioxide breathed out and more from all the associated processes and there are more plants than anthropogenic burning of them.
Which is how levels of carbon dioxide lag temperature rises after sudden rises into interglacials, it takes time for plant life to develop from the small beginnings in warmer conditions to the spread of forests. Life produces carbon dioxide and uses it to produce it.
“Which is on the Earth’s largest active volcano..”
Mauna Loa is not the only CO2 record, it’s just the longest. There are many others at isolated stations such as Antarctica and the Aleutians and they all agree well with Mauna Loa. The CO2 record isn’t in serious dispute – for example Salby accepts it. If Keeling was just making up the numbers, then all the other agreeing stations must be too… then you’re into mass conspiracy territory.
The Mauna Loa record is characterised by a long, relatively smooth increase with a distinct seasonal cycle superimposed, the seasonal element explained by seasonal plant growth and decay in the northern hemisphere. If it was really contaminated by the volcano it would mean that not only is the volcano smoothly emitting more CO2 year after year since 1959 but also regularly more in the spring than the autumn. That would be a most curious volcanic pattern and not consistent at all with the more random CO2 ‘pulses’ that you might expect.
Mrrh, I seem to recall that WUWT published a very good series of articles a while back (by Willis?) explaining why the CO2 data are reliable, even though Mauna Loa happens to be a volcano. Note also that Mauna Loa isn’t the only station where CO2 measurements are made, and you get essentially the same result if you look at the other stations not sited on volcanos.
“Plants breath out carbon dioxide.”
Well, they do in the sense that they respire, so they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and they put it back in at the same time. Yet, when growing they take more out than they put back. That’s where the carbon plants are partly made of comes from.
Or are you claiming that plants are a net source of CO2? If so, where do the carbon compounds they are made from come from? Again, it’s elementary conservation of mass and arithmetic.
@Debunker Actually SkS did point out the flaw in Prof. Salby’s argument. Several articles have been written there addressing this particular canard, one of them was written by myself as a result of having published a peer-reviewed article adressing the errors in a previous paper by Prof. Essenhigh. Prof. Salby’s conclusion, as Ed and others have pointed out violates the principle of conservation of mass. If the natural environment were a net source of CO2 into the atmosphere then CO2 levels would be rising faster than anthropogenic emissions (as both the net natural and anthropogenic sources would be contributing to the rise). However, we know that isn’t the case, so the hypothesis cannot be correct.