An important new paper published today in Global and Planetary Change finds that changes in CO2 follow rather than lead global air surface temperature and that “CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2” The paper finds the “overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere,” in other words, the opposite of claims by global warming alarmists that CO2 in the atmosphere drives land and ocean temperatures. Instead, just as in the ice cores, CO2 levels are found to be a lagging effect ocean warming, not significantly related to man-made emissions, and not the driver of warming. Prior research has shown infrared radiation from greenhouse gases is incapable of warming the oceans, only shortwave radiation from the Sun is capable of penetrating and heating the oceans and thereby driving global surface temperatures.
The highlights of the paper are:
► The overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere.
► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.
► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.
► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.
► Changes in ocean temperatures appear to explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.
► CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2, and changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.
The paper:
The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature
- a Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
- b Department of Geology, University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), P.O. Box 156, N-9171 Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway
- c Telenor Norway, Finance, N-1331 Fornebu, Norway
- d Department of Physics and Technology, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway
Abstract
Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets; 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5-10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes.
i) “The human emissions are one-way”
You missed my proviso that the human emissions themselves provoke a biosphere response that would otherwise not have occurred. On that basis they would not be one way.That makes all the difference. In the business analogy the increase in turnover comes from more business (not an injection of capital) but with extra expenses too for a zero contribution to profit or loss.
ii) “But the system response is of course negative: any increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (whatever the source) leads to an increase of the uptake of CO2 at the sink places into the deep oceans and in the biosphere”
But it takes time, so one can get cyclicity over time whereby at some times ocean release runs ahead of system absorption and at other times runs behind it with the arbiter being the amount of solar energy getting past the changing level of global cloudiness to influence the rate of release in the first place.
iii) “Thus even including the uncertainty of the oxygen measurements, there is little doubt that the current CO2 sink in the biosphere is only a fraction of the human emissions”
For the reasons given I think we currently have a net CO2 source which will fade away over time if the quiet sun continues to lead to increased cloudiness and less energy into the oceans.The net source appears to be about half of the current level of human emissions.
I agree that at the moment I cannot prove this any more than you can disprove it but I am content to wait and see whether the rate of CO2 increase levels off in response to falling ocean heat content. There is some evidence that it is already doing so but it is early days yet.
If it does level off or in due course start to fall then my case will be proved.
The main objections to my proposals are as follows:
i) The isotope ratio.
But not all absorption is by plants. There are many non organic processes involved too as a previous contributor pointed out and we have no idea of the respective proportions.
ii) Henry’s Law.
But the speed of air circulation is capable of causing regional variations and it all takes time so increased wind taking CO2 away from warmed ocean surfaces will allow more out of the oceans before it can all be absorbed elsewhere leading to a ‘backing up’ of the CO2 exchange in the atmosphere which I think is what we are seeing now.
iii) Ice cores:
But they appear not to record atmospheric CO2 variations that last less long than about 800 years. We need to know why.
My main point being that there are too many unproven assumptions being used to overlay the obvious observation that sunlight onto surfaces and into the oceans must be the primary driver of both temperature and CO2 quantities in the atmosphere.
Very cogent Stephen, I agree. I think Ferdinand is making several unsupportable assumptions in his argumentation, and keeps repeating them after they’ve been pointed out to him. A couple of points worth flagging up again:
1) The stomata data from Tom van Hoof agreed well with the Greenland cores *before* they got recalibrated to match the Antarctic cores. This suggests co2 variation is considerably higher than the currently preferred estimates. This means that Ferdi’s Henry’s law argument could be out by a large factor.
2) The volcagenic estimate preferred by the IPCC of 0.26Gt/year globally is based on notoriously unreliable ways of treating data which contains a lot of uncertainty due to inadequate sampling. Recent direct empirical measurement suggests central Italy alone is degassing 9Gt/year. The Mass balance argument is out of the window.
3) If the sources are much (much) bigger than previously thought, then so are the sinks. Since we don’t know what their relative contributions to absorption are, the isotope ratio argument is out of the window too.
4) Since the cloud data as measured by ISCCP shows a bigger drop in the cloud over the tropics than the high latitudes, it is to be expected that the loss of shade in the warm areas will have a bigger effect on the outgassing of co2 than on its re-absorption in the Antarctic southern ocean.
5) Since the fall of co2 behind temperature change at the end of interglacials lags the temperature by as much as the lag of the rise of co2 at their beginning, it is clear that major sinks and sources take a long time to react to temperature change. Clearly, the outgassed co2 is going to hang around in the atmosphere at the end of a warming period of whatever length, before the system restores the balance through re-absorption.
Incidentally, if the warming effect claimed for co2 were real, then due to the approximately logarithmic response of temperature to co2 this should mean the lag at the end of the interglacial will be different to the lag at the start, but so far as I know, it isn’t.
Hi Tb
There is now strong indication that atmospheric changes in CO2 to a large part could be due to the oceanic out-gassing. Here is quote from JC’s Climate etc blog
vukcevic | September 10, 2012 at 3:56 am |
Dr. Pratt
You say : The good news however is that the thermal impact of CO2 felt in 2100 will be that of the level back in 2085, not 2100, since the delay appears to be around 15 years.
At one or two previous threads we discussed possibility that the Earth’s core oscillations may be source of the multidecadal (and I’ve demonstrated of the decadal too) temperature oscillations.
Your 15 year delay, I found some time ago is also a delay between ‘oceanic floor- to- surface oscillations’ and the natural temperature oscillations.
This would suggest to me that variability of atmospheric CO2 is from the oceanic emissions and stimulated by oceanic oscillation.
Here is a screen shot of an article I wrote some time ago and it appeared as a pre-print last week.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSO-AMO.htm
Stephen Wilde says:
September 10, 2012 at 5:24 am
i) “The human emissions are one-way”
You missed my proviso that the human emissions themselves provoke a biosphere response that would otherwise not have occurred.
– No matter what causes an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, the reaction of the biosphere is exactly the same: more uptake. Thus an increase caused by the oceans or by human emissions would have the same response. CO2 is CO2, no matter what the origin is.
– A CO2 doubling doesn’t induce a doubling of the uptake. The current 30% increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (+210 GtC) causes a 1.6 GtC increase in sink rate in vegetation, by far not enough to remove all extra CO2, even not from one year, in a short time.
– If you have 8 GtC from humans and add any extra amount from another natural source, and you find an increase in the atmosphere of only 4 GtC, then the natural sinks must adjust to accomodate the extra amount from the natural sources + 4 GtC from humans. Be aware, that is the total extra quantity that needs to be removed by the sinks, no matter which exact molecules from which origin are removed.
ii) Henry’s Law.
But the speed of air circulation is capable of causing regional variations and it all takes time so increased wind taking CO2 away from warmed ocean surfaces will allow more out of the oceans before it can all be absorbed elsewhere leading to a ‘backing up’ of the CO2 exchange in the atmosphere which I think is what we are seeing now.
Wind speed plays a role, but you have no indication that the average wind speed increased over the upwelling zones. Wind speed is far higher at the sink area in the NE Atlantic, so much that there is no distinct surface layer. But anyhow, wind speed can’t explain an increase of 100 ppmv in the atmosphere, the equivalent of a global seawater temperature increase of 6°C…
iii) Ice cores:
But they appear not to record atmospheric CO2 variations that last less long than about 800 years. We need to know why.
Depends of the ice core. The best resolution ice cores have a resolution of less than a decade, but are going back only 150 years. That is sharp enough to see any continuous change of 2 ppmv over 10 years or a peak of 20 ppmv in one year.
The interesting one is the medium resolution ice core of Law Dome with a resolution of ~20 years. That shows that the MWP-LIA cooling did give a change of ~6 ppmv in the ice core:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
The long term ice cores have a resolution of 500-600 years, but even these would show a non-cyclic behaviour like the increase of 100 ppmv over the past 160 years, but they don’t. Further, it is known that wind speeds were much higher during the cold glacial periods than during the warmer interglacials, thus contrary to your theory of an increased wind speed in current times…
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 10, 2012 at 12:31 am
Your (and a lot of others) opinion does not matter. Your opinion is uninformed by what is compelled by the data. Why would I give your flight of fancy “a try” when I know that it is contradicted by the record?
Bottom line: I have demonstrated that your “mass balance” argument has no teeth. It does not constrain the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration over the last century to have been human induced. None of your arguments are dispositive, they only serve to construct a narrative of how things might be. But, the affine relationship between temperature and CO2 rate of change contradicts them.
tallbloke says:
September 10, 2012 at 7:30 am
1) The stomata data from Tom van Hoof agreed well with the Greenland cores *before* they got recalibrated to match the Antarctic cores.
The Greenland ice cores CO2 data are unreliable: ice cores, especially coastal, contains some seasalt dust, including carbonates. That is normally not a problem for the CO2 measurements in Antarctica, but that is a problem for the Greenland cores, where frequently highly acidic dust from Icelandic volcanoes is settled. That causes in-situ increase of CO2 levels, which renders the data useless. Thus the Greenland ice core CO2 data are not recalibrated, they are simply not used, because of unreliable.
Stomata data have their own problems… Including a local/regional bias of the CO2 levels and a large margin of error. The bias can be taken into account, by calibrating the stomata data against ice cores and direct measurements over the past century, but that doesn’t assure you that the bias didn’t change over previous centuries, because of huge changes in landscape and land use in the main wind direction. Even the main wind direction may have changed between the MWP and LIA…
2) The volcagenic estimate preferred by the IPCC of 0.26Gt/year globally is based on notoriously unreliable ways of treating data which contains a lot of uncertainty due to inadequate sampling. Recent direct empirical measurement suggests central Italy alone is degassing 9Gt/year. The Mass balance argument is out of the window.
The mass balance is not at all affected by the new findings. All what this proves is that since this natural source is larger than estimated, some of the sinks must be larger than estimated. Which ones is not important, as we know the difference at the end of the year: 4 +/- 2 GtC/year more sink than source.
3) If the sources are much (much) bigger than previously thought, then so are the sinks. Since we don’t know what their relative contributions to absorption are, the isotope ratio argument is out of the window too.
Sorry to disappoint you, there are mainly two sources of low 13C carbon: fossil organics and new organics. All the other sources, like volcanic vents/eruptions, (deep) oceans, carbonate sediments, rocks and their weathering all have higher d13C levels than the atmosphere. Thus can’t be the cause of the observed decrease.
We know from the oxygen balance that the whole biosphere is a net source of oxygen, thus a net sink for CO2 and thus a net sink for preferentially 12CO2. Thus that leaves relative more 13CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus the biosphere is not the cause of the observed decrease in the atmosphere, which BTW is in exact ratio with human emissions of fossil fuels.
4) Since the cloud data as measured by ISCCP shows a bigger drop in the cloud over the tropics than the high latitudes, it is to be expected that the loss of shade in the warm areas will have a bigger effect on the outgassing of co2 than on its re-absorption in the Antarctic southern ocean.
There is no mechanism that releases more CO2 by more sunshine. More sunshine causes warming of the oceans and that causes more CO2 releases. But not more than 16 ppmv/°C.
5) Since the fall of co2 behind temperature change at the end of interglacials lags the temperature by as much as the lag of the rise of co2 at their beginning, it is clear that major sinks and sources take a long time to react to temperature change. Clearly, the outgassed co2 is going to hang around in the atmosphere at the end of a warming period of whatever length, before the system restores the balance through re-absorption.
The lag during a glacial-interglacial transition is 800 +/- 600 years. The lag during the last interglacial-glacial transition was near 5000 years, that is quite a difference. But the transitions themselves did also take 5000 years for a CO2 change of 100 ppmv. Now we have had 150 years for a 100 ppmv change. That is an enormous difference in speed…
BTW, I don’t think that the influence of CO2 on temperature is that high, probably a lot less than the minimum of the climate models / IPCC. But that doesn’t include that we aren’t responsible for the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere…
“None of your arguments are dispositive, they only serve to construct a narrative of how things might be. But, the affine relationship between temperature and CO2 rate of change contradicts them”
That is pretty much how I see it.
More sunshine into larger areas of water all around the globe, as was observed, just has to have the expected consequence of more CO2 leaving the water.
All further consideration of the issue must recognise that simple fact and any propositions that deny it must be suspect.
All Ferdinand’s counterpoints, if correct, would infer that more sunshine into larger areas of water has either a zero effect or a negative effect which I aver is not possible.
Thus there must be faults in his preferred narrative.
Bart says:
September 10, 2012 at 9:16 am
Bart, a simple calculation shows that your argument is nonsense:
The human emissions are 8 GtC/year. According to your theory, there is no room for a human contribution. But let us assume that only 1% of the trend is caused by the human contribution and 99% by some natural extra source.
That would imply that the extra natural input is 99 times larger than the human input to fulfill the huge sink capacity that is responsible for the near complete disappearance of the human input. Thus the extra source is good for 792 GtC. And the extra sink is good for 788 GtC.
The current estimates of the carbon cycle are 150 GtC back and forth. Thus some natural source alone would suddenly give 5 times the estimated total carbon cycle, and a similar increase in sink capacity, leaving only 1% of the difference in the atmosphere.
Well I wish you good luck to find that extra source and the correspondenting sinks…
Stephen Wilde says:
September 10, 2012 at 10:20 am
More sunshine into larger areas of water all around the globe, as was observed, just has to have the expected consequence of more CO2 leaving the water.
Please Stephen, show me the mechanism that gives more CO2 releases directly from more sunlight. Such a mechanism doesn’t exist (CO2 molecules may warm up extra by certain IR wavelengths, but these are not in sunshine). What happens is that the surface waters heat up with more sunlight and higher temperatures give a higher pCO2 in seawater and thus a higher release of CO2 where the upwelling places are and less uptake where the sink places are.
Thus I fully agree that less clouds will give more CO2 releases and thus more CO2 in the atmosphere, but not more than 16 ppmv/°C, or you are violating Henry’s Law. Thus not 100 ppmv from the maximum 1°C increase in sea surface temperature since the LIA. That is the whole point…
Ferdinand.
In providing those figures you make a shedload of assumptions that are questionable.
When sunlight penetrates the ocean surface waters by up to 200 metres then sure it warms the water beneath the surface and CO2 must be released from the surface.
However one also sees faster upward conduction and more and faster evaporation from the surface and that extra evaporation sucks energy out of the water and converts it into latent form for little or no change in the temperature of the air at the surface.
So you can have a significant amount of CO2 ejected from the ocean surface waters without a large temperature response in the air.
That is only one way in which your calculations may not reflect reality but there are many others as I touched on previously.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 10, 2012 at 10:33 am
I estimate somewhere between 3-6% of the trend is human induced, and all the math works out. What I have stated is that there is no room for significant human forcing. Less than 10% is insignificant.
vukcevic says:
September 10, 2012 at 7:57 am
vukcevic says:
September 10, 2012 at 7:57 am
Hi Tb
There is now strong indication that atmospheric changes in CO2 to a large part could be due to the oceanic out-gassing. Here is quote from JC’s Climate etc blog
The whole discussion at JC’s blog is about the cause of the temperature changes, but there is hardly any indication that the influence of temperature on CO2 levels is huge. Ice cores show 8 ppmv/°C over 800,000 years and over the MWP-LIA transition for the whole earth. Henry’s Law gives 16 ppmv/°C for seawater alone. Far from sufficient to cause the 100 ppmv increase over the past 160 years…
“Thus not 100 ppmv from the maximum 1°C increase in sea surface temperature since the LIA. That is the whole point…”
The cooling effect of more evaporation ?
And taking into account the solar effect to a 200 metre depth around the entire globe 100ppm would not be difficult.
So more sunlight acting on 200 metres of depth ejects 100ppm but evaporation which occurs only at the surface involves an enthalpy of 5 (the energy required by the phase change) to 1 (the energy required to provoke the phase change) keeps the surface temperature only 1C higher.
“the molecules in liquid water are held together by relatively strong hydrogen bonds, and its enthalpy of vaporization, 40.65 kJ/mol, is more than five times the energy required to heat the same quantity of water from 0 °C to 100 °C (cp = 75.3 J K−1 mol−1)”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization
Lets see, 16ppm per 1C multiplied by 5.39 = 86.24ppm.
Not far out given the tentative nature of the numbers.
So the sun would have warmed the ocean surface by 5C but for more evaporation and the CO2 comes from the entire 200 metre depth below that surface.
Sounds entirely plausible to me.
Friends:
Several here suggest that the delay of atmospheric CO2 behind global temperature is 15 years.
I think the delay is ~30 years.
Please see
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.png “
and compare those decadal averages shifted back in time ~30 years
to
mean global temperature (e.g. HadCRUT, see
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ ) .
So, on the basis of that, if there is a direct global temperature effect on the atmospheric CO2 then we have ~15 years to wait before the present temperature stasis is observed as a halt to rising atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Richard
Stephen Wilde says:
September 10, 2012 at 10:59 am
So you can have a significant amount of CO2 ejected from the ocean surface waters without a large temperature response in the air.
Sorry Stephen, but that can’t be true. More water is evaporated by sunlight (because water absorbs several fractions of sunlight in the skin layer), without changing the temperature (even somewhat cooling). That is because water is a liquid and it costs a lot of energy to get it into gaseous form. Dissolved CO2 is already a gas and doesn’t need any transition. All what is important is the temperature (and salt content) as that affects how many CO2 molecules are leaving the water vs. how many return. That is what Henry’s Law is about…
I am a little tired of these continuous recurrent discussions. Even if you don’t like any pillar of the AGW hypothesis, you are doing a disserve to the credibility of the skeptics by hammering on a point where the “consensus” is very strong. Humans have emitted twice the amount of CO2 as observed as atmospheric increase. It would be an incredible coincidence that any natural release would mimic the human releases, both accumulation and 13C/12C ratio and all other observations, in exact ratio to the human emissions, while the human emissions simply disappear into some unknown sinks. If you believe that, then I have some tendency to believe that the Lewandowsky Survey was not that far off… (be reassured, only a tendency…).
richardscourtney says:
September 10, 2012 at 11:35 am
“Several here suggest that the delay of atmospheric CO2 behind global temperature is 15 years.”
The delay is 90 degrees of phase, reflecting the integral relationship. That implies a variable delay which depends on frequency. When a particular frequency component appears prominent, you should observe approximately the delay associated with that frequency.
Unfortunately, your links are not working for me. But, if you can determine a rough period P for the component you are looking at, the delay should be roughly pi/2 (90 deg) divided by 2*pi/P, or P/4 (a quarter wavelength).
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
September 10, 2012 at 11:40 am
“It would be an incredible coincidence that any natural release would mimic the human releases, both accumulation and 13C/12C ratio and all other observations, in exact ratio to the human emissions, while the human emissions simply disappear into some unknown sinks.”
Not really. It’s essentially a coin flip. Considerably less likely a coincidence is that the temperature and rate of change of CO2 match in almost every detail without this being the dominant influence.
It is probably not a coincidence, BTW, that 15 years is 1/4 of the wavelength of the ~60 year oscillation in temperature.
Stephen Wilde says:
September 10, 2012 at 11:27 am
And taking into account the solar effect to a 200 metre depth around the entire globe 100ppm would not be difficult.
– Again there is NO, NONE, ZERO solar effect on CO2 molecules, dissolved or not, from sunlight.
– There is a huge effect of sunlight on water molecules in liquid form. A lot of that energy is absorbed, some in the skin, some at a few meters depth, some over a few hundred meters.
– As long as the temperature of the water-air surface doesn’t change, there is no more release of CO2.
– You are making the same mistake as many before you that the CO2 content in the whole water column is important. Only the pCO2 concentration is important. It doesn’t matter if you shake a 0.5 or 1.0 or 2.0 liter bottle of coke: at the same temperature, the same pressure below the cork will be reached in equilibrium with the concentration in the coke, regardless of the total CO2 content.
Thus for a 1°C increase in sea surface temperature since the LIA, the maximum release is 16 ppmv of CO2. No matter how much extra sunlight is penetrating the oceans.
BTW, some interesting comparison: during glacials, there was far less evaporation and precipitation everywhere, thus far less clouds. That led to far more dust settling down in Antarctic ice cores, including the deep inland cores. But far less clouds means far more sunlight all over the globe. That should have lead to increased CO2 releases, if we may believe your theory. But we only see a direct, surprisingly linear relationship between temperature (proxy) and CO2 levels…
This graph seems to support our position:
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/land-use-modification-co2.png
Despite the title of the image, I suspect this graph has less to do with land use modification than with tropical ocean outgassing of co2.
Ferdinand, one step at a time.
The sun warms down to 200 metres. The lower layers know nothing of the evaporative cooling at the top and will behave as if there were none.
So the CO2 in that 200 metres will be driven off at the rate of 5.39C of warming for every 1C warming of the evaporative layer.
That gets us mighty close to observations based on Henry’s Law as I said in my above post.
” You are making the same mistake as many before you that the CO2 content in the whole water column is important. Only the pCO2 concentration is important. It doesn’t matter if you shake a 0.5 or 1.0 or 2.0 liter bottle of coke: at the same temperature, the same pressure below the cork will be reached in equilibrium with the concentration in the coke, regardless of the total CO2 content.”
Ok, I’m not 100% sure of my proposition, just putting it forward to be knocked down or not.The answer may well be helpful to others either way since there are ‘many before me’.
There is no cork on an ocean so I’m not sure that the bottle analogy is helpful.
If solar energy hits water at say 200 metres depth will it raise the temperature and reduce the concentration of CO2 at that depth or not ?
The point I’m trying to resolve is whether or not it is reasonable to multiply the 16ppm per 1C warming of the surface by 5.39 in order to arrive at the true potential for solar input to a depth of 200 metres to release CO2 to the surface.
I’m not sure but it seems reasonable, and the fit to observations is intriguing.
Bart says:
September 10, 2012 at 11:10 am
I estimate somewhere between 3-6% of the trend is human induced, and all the math works out. What I have stated is that there is no room for significant human forcing. Less than 10% is insignificant.
OK, let us assume 5% as a reasonable estimate.
Thus the current increase in the atmosphere over a year is from the human 8 GtC + 160 GtC from a natural source. Thus an extra input of 168 GtC and an extra sink of 164 GtC, leading to an increase in the atmosphere of 4 GtC.
Besides the fact that 160 GtC from the 168 GtC inputs (164 GtC output) is simply throughput and there still is no real contribution of the natural cycle to the increase in the atmosphere, there are some other problems:
The 160 GtC can’t come from the biosphere, as that is about 30% of all land vegetation (per year!). Or it should be source and sink, but that is already accounted for in the regular seasonal cycle.
They can come only from the deep oceans, as even the ocean surface only contains 1000 GtC and can’t be the source of 160 GtC/year, year after year (or it should be source and sink, but that is already accounted for in the regular seasonal/permanent cycle).
Thus the deep oceans provide the extra CO2 input (and output?).
Let us see what then happens with the 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere:
Starting at the current -8 per mil d13C level of the 800 GtC in the atmosphere, -24 per mil for 8 GtC from human emissions and zero per mil for 160 GtC from the deep oceans:
The human addition alone gives a DEcrease from -8 per mil to -8.2 per mil in the atmosphere. The combination of the two extra CO2 injections gives an INcrease to -6.8 per mil. But we observe a DEcrease…
As someone else may have said: only one observation that doesn’t fit a hypothesis, kills even the most beautiful hypothesis…
richardscourtney says:
September 10, 2012 at 11:35 am
Friends:
Several here suggest that the delay of atmospheric CO2 behind global temperature is 15 years.
I think the delay is ~30 years.
Please see
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.png “
and compare those decadal averages shifted back in time ~30 years
to
mean global temperature (e.g. HadCRUT, see
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ ) .
Uhh?? You are comparing dCO2 (i.e. the rate of growth) with temperature.
If your “30 year delay” holds water the CO2 growth should have stopped in ~1975 (i.e. 30 years after 1945) . After that growth should have been NEGATIVE until around 2000 due to the 1945-70 ‘cooling’..
The fact that Mauna Loa data shows that atmospheric CO2 levels have increased year on year without interruption since measurements began in 1958 means there’s either no delay or temperature has had very little influence on CO2 levels. Actually since 1958 sits slap bang in the middle of the post-war cooling period – both conditions are probably true.