A graphical look at worldwide CO2 numbers

Matt G says:
November 25, 2012 at 1:14 pm
Regarding sinks it doesn’t matter whether human caused or not. If increasing the CO2 increases the uptake, then that will happen regardless. Existing plants increase their intake of CO2 up to 1500 ppm, we are still well short of this value.
I have a feeling that this is more a discussion of the meaning of words, not of what really happens…
The human caused CO2 movements are largely a one-sided addition of extra CO2 from the far past, not balanced by much human effort to remove a substantial part of that addition.
On the other side, the natural input is more than balanced by the natural sinks, including removing a part of the human input in total quantity, no matter which exact molecules are removed. Thus nature is a net sink for CO2, not the cause of the increase in the atmosphere.
Plants indeed increase their uptake at higher CO2 levels, as good as oceans do. But human emissions of 8 GtC by humans over a year is only 1% of the atmospheric level, leading to a 0.5% increase in uptake by plants (a 100% increase of CO2 leads to an average 50% increase in uptake by plants) and a similar increase in uptake by the oceans, no matter which the origin is of the CO2 molecules. Thus at the end of the year 50% of the human emissions as mass (not necessary as original molecules) still is left in the atmosphere and does add to the total atmospheric level.
If the human emissions would be reduced to the same amount as removed by the natural cycle, currently some 4 GtC/year, then the CO2 levels in the atmosphere would stay forever at the same level as today, at about 100 ppmv above the temperature dictated dynamic equilibrium.
That means that it takes quite a lot of time to remove any excess amount of CO2 above the equilibrium, even if we would stop all emissions today: the sink rate is about 4 GtC/year at a CO2 level above equilibrium of 100 ppmv or 210 GtC. That gives an e-fold time of about 53 years or a half life time of about 40 years for an extra injection of CO2 in the atmosphere, whatever the origin.

Is Global Warming Caused by the Effect of Human Generated CO2
–or Is It Just a Human Population Effect?
Just as CO2 has measurably increased since man began burning first coal and then petroleum, global human population has increased exponentially from a level of about one billion people before 1800 to near seven billion at present, with half that increase occurring after 1967. I think one could just as easily attribute the 0.8 degree observed ‘Global Warming’ to the gross effect of human population on the planet, or at least on those parts of it where that temperature increase was measured. That could include land use change, deforestation, road-building, continuous industrial activity, and even the increased heat caused by local combustion.
All I am saying here is that I think a case could be made for this that might be more credible than blaming ‘Global Warming’ on the logarithmic effect of CO2. As Dr. Svensmark’s theory appears to have been shot down by the near perfect failure of recent low-cloud cover data to have any correlation with cosmic ray activity, it is hard to blame the sun for this effect.

Spector says:
November 25, 2012 at 9:10 pm
“As Dr. Svensmark’s theory appears to have been shot down by the near perfect failure of recent low-cloud cover data to have any correlation with cosmic ray activity, it is hard to blame the sun for this effect.”
While probably unintentional on your part, that is repeating false CAGW-movement propaganda. The graphs you see spread by their team members claiming overall divergent trends are based on what the ISCCP headquartered at Hansen’s GISS puts out. (Climate4you.com , while mostly a good site, also fell for that).
As noted at http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/further-attempt-to-falsify-the-svensmark-hypothesis/ , there was an “accidentally” uncorrected error from change in ISCCP satellite viewing angle, and, as a graph there illustrates, other cloud cover datasets show trends over those years going the opposite direction from what the ISCCP claims. Trends in the other cloud cover datasets are more consistent with the picture suggested by albedo trends ( http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/albedo.png )
Hansen’s GISS (and the ISCCP headquartered at it) is a compromised untrustworthy source in general; a quick smoking gun illustration with temperatures is http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/fig1x.gif versus http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.gif where the former shows shows the 5-year mean of U.S. temperature in the high point of the 1980s was 0.4 degrees Celsius cooler than such in the 1930s but the latter is fudged to make the same less than 0.1 degrees Celsius apart. When people happily flock to employment at such an institution’s climate departments even now and rise to the top in the current political climate, fitting in, to expect them to be unbiased would be like expecting Greenpeace leadership to be unbiased.
For actual reality, see http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg (click to enlarge).
Spector says:
November 25, 2012 at 9:10 pm
“That could include land use change, deforestation, road-building, continuous industrial activity, and even the increased heat caused by local combustion.”
Those are indeed factors too, especially for temperature stations more likely to be in a city or at an airport than in the middle of nowhere.

“CO2 should be plotted against per capita GDP.”
You’re missing the eco-fascists’ goal — suppression of capitalism and GDPs.

RE: Henry Clark: “November 26, 2012 at 5:59 am”
“ ‘As Dr. Svensmark’s theory appears to have been shot down by the near perfect failure of recent low-cloud cover data to have any correlation with cosmic ray activity, it is hard to blame the sun for this effect.’
“While probably unintentional on your part, that is repeating false CAGW-movement propaganda. The graphs you see spread by their team members claiming overall divergent trends are based on what the ISCCP headquartered at Hansen’s GISS puts out. (Climate4you.com , while mostly a good site, also fell for that).”
On this site, David Archibald and Dr. Leif Svalgaard, especially the latter, referenced the official ISCCP data as authoritative evidence that the Svensmark theory had been “falsified” because the supposed correlation ‘disappeared as soon as it was discovered.’
Later, as a personal project, I checked the data myself and found that, despite some initial appearance of correlation, over the whole range there appeared to be almost zero net correlation between the variation from average of the ISCCP low cloud data and the data from the Oulu Cosmic Ray Station in Finland. Unless someone like Steven McIntyre could *prove* that the ISCCP data has been purposely manipulated to produce this result, I have to assume that the Svensmark theory is dead.
I filtered both data sets with one year moving averages to remove annual effects before attempting to calculate the cross-correlation using Microsoft Excel. I also calculated an accurate approximation function for the Oulu data so I could match the time scales.

Of course, the MODTRAN terrestrial radiation emission calculator program developed as a calibration tool for the Air Force using atmospheric gas absorption and emission line spectra data, which is available as a web-tool from the University of Chicago, seems to predict a one degree C raw temperature increase for each *full* doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, a relation that holds from CO2 concentrations from 20 PPM to well over 1000 PPM. At this time it appears doubtful that man will find enough economically recoverable, combustible carbon in the Earth’s crust to reach ever 560 PPM (required for a raw one degree C, human caused temperature increase.)
A Wikipedia MODTRAN spectrum plot shows the 15 micron, or 666 cycles/cm, CO2 absorption band limited to an effect like a one-foot diameter tree in the middle of a ten-foot wide stream of thermal energy leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. The difference between energy flow for 300 PPM CO2 concentration and 600 PPM is limited to a very small region on the very edges of the CO2 band. Thus it seems to me that all this concern over what to do about human CO2 generation is an exercise in futility.
MODTRAN Calculated Radiative Forcing – Double CO2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ModtranRadiativeForcingDoubleCO2.png

Matt G says:
November 26, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Problem with the natural side this assumption balanced by natural sinks doesn’t explain increases and decreases between 180 ppm and 7000 ppm.
The discussion is about the increase of CO2 levels in the past 160 years, not over geological times. During the Cretaceous, lots of CO2 was buried into sediments, some of it later pushed up and still visible as the white cliffs of Dover (UK) and at lots of other places. That makes that the equilibrium shifted from 10-12 x current CO2 and much higher temperatures in the Cretaceous to the pre-industrial high correlation between temperature and CO2 at a much lower CO2 levels, about 180-310 ppmv, over the temperature swings over the past few million years. Only in the past 160 years we see a steady increase of CO2 over the equilibrium level for the current temperature trend, which should be between 290-300 ppmv.
Nobody knows how much human CO2 is used in plants immediately and recycled back in the air/ocean the next year.
Most of all CO2 removed by plants during their growing season is released back to the atmosphere within one to a few years. Based on the oxygen (and 13C/12C) balance, some 60 GtC is taken away, mainly by mid-latitude plants, during the growing season and some 61 GtC is released by the breackdown of leaves, stems and wood over all seasons by bacteria, molds, etc. A large quantity already within a year, the rest over several years. Only a small part, 1 +/-0.6 GtC/yr is buried in longer lasting carbon storage: humus, roots, peat, (brown)coal… See:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
Human CO2 is a fraction of that, thus that hardly matters for the calculations, as most of it simply gets back into the atmosphere within a year.
The oceans surface (the upper few hundred meters) also is in fast equilibrium with the atmosphere: 1-3 years is sufficient to get in equilibrium for CO2 levels and 13C/12C ratios. As the oceans buffer factor is at work, any change of concentrations in the atmosphere leads to a 10% of that change in the oceans surface (the Revelle factor). Again no big deal for human CO2.
Of more interest are the deep ocean exchanges: what goes into the deep oceans at the near polar sink places is a reflection of the current atmospheric compostion. What comes out at the deep upwelling places near the (Pacific) equator reflects the atmosphere of 800-1200 years ago (plus some mixing within the deep oceans). Thus not influenced by any human emissions. That is of particular interest to estimate what the deep ocean exchanges may be. Human emissions have a low 13C/12C ratio, compared to the atmosphere. The breakdown of vegetation too has such a low ratio, but as the oxygen balance shows, since about 1990, there is more uptake by vegetation than release, so that doesn’t give a decrease.
With that in mind, we can look at the 13C/12C behaviour in the atmosphere for known human releases at different atmosphere – deep ocean exchanges:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/deep_ocean_air_zero.jpg
Thus the human releases together with some 40 GtC of CO2 circulation over the deep oceans, can explain the current trend in 13C/12C in the atmosphere. The discrepancy until 1970 is probably from vegetation, which is supposed to have been a net source of CO2 until then. From 1990 on, it was a net sink for CO2.