Guest post by Kevin D. Knoebel
How much stupidity is needed to win a Pulitzer? The competition is fierce, apparently certain writers are piling it on high and deep in the attempt.
For example, there is a sterling example of post-modern post-journalistic brilliance that just popped up at Salon by David Sirota, Would we give up burgers to stop climate change? As will be seen, the heaping begins with the subtitle: “A new report suggests that adjusting our diet can slow global warming. Now let’s see if our politics will let us”
The first paragraph is quite revealing:
In case you missed the news, humanity spent the Earth Day week reaching another sad milestone in the history of catastrophic climate change: For the first time, measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million, aka way above what our current ecosystem can handle.
On the NOAA/ESRL Mauna Loa Observatory CO₂ measurements page, currently the last released monthly atmospheric concentration mean was March 2013, 397.34 ppm. Where the “surpassed 400” came from is quite unknown, not revealed. And overall not that important, as about now is when the annual cycle is peaking. The annual mean is far more scientifically relevant, and was 393.82ppm in 2012. The 2013 mean will not be breaking 400ppm. There may indeed have been a recent daily measurement above 400ppm, which shows why they use monthly means due to the range of daily variations. It will be quite surprising if the final April mean breaks 400ppm.
And how has the ecosystem responded to the “earth-shattering” increase? Crop yields up, the Sahel is greening, etc. Perhaps the ecosystem is having the equivalent of a surge of manic behavior right before a nervous breakdown. Sure, it looks great now, but soon it’ll all come crashing down. Yup, any decade now. No longer away than the next century, certainly.
BUT, there is hope! A new report, just as it says, done by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, former advisers to the World Bank, shows us the way. All we have to do, is give up meat. Bold added:
If you find it demoralizing that we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers, here’s that good news I promised: In their report, Goodland and Anhang found that most of what we need to do to mitigate the climate crisis can be achieved “by replacing just one quarter of today’s least eco-friendly food products” — read: animal products — “with better alternatives.”
Does this sound like something you’ve heard before? Guess what, it is! The World Watch institute has the report (pdf). It was published at the end of 2009. For 3 ½ years now, this report has been chewed up, digested, rendered into the appropriate final form. Even a major vegan site found their numbers way too high.
Now, suddenly, Mr. Sirota has become aware of this amazing new report which, in the shadow of a nigh-impossible atmospheric CO₂ measurement of currently unknown origin which clearly shows the ecosystem has been broken, gives us the hope of avoiding planetary incineration by switching to great-tasting better-for-us non-animal foods. Which we would gladly do IF we could only overcome the politics!
Forget the Pulitzer, this stuff is GOLD. This is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize of Journalism. Please, feel free to send your recommendations in to Al Gore, I hear he has some pull with the Nobel Committee.
Also notify the publishers of Roget’s Thesaurus, as Mr. Sirota has revealed two previously unknown synonyms for politics, which is that which must be overcome to avert planetary incineration: physiology and instincts.
“Keeling and his son through Scripps got control of ‘co-ordinating’ carbon dioxide measurements”
Sounds a bit far-fetched. Another paper by some of the same Italians is here: http://www.avvelenata.it/papers/Sendai_CO2.pdf If you can access that, please tell me how the curve shown in figure 2 with the annual cycle and secular rise is created. The normal explanation is that the annual cycle comes from vegetative uptake and release in the NH (this paper has measurements from the Mediterranean ) plus anthropogenic CO2.
The paper describes the measurement device and calibration procedures. I don’t know much about the equipment but the techniques seem reasonable. It is hard to imagine how the Keelings might coordinate or control this measurement and many more like it. A much simpler explanation is that the measurements are independent verification of the Keeling measurements.
eric1skeptic says:
May 9, 2013 at 7:05 pm
“Keeling and his son through Scripps got control of ‘co-ordinating’ carbon dioxide measurements”
Sounds a bit far-fetched.
You can see from Keeling’s first paper that there is nothing in there of any science to support his claim that there is a trend of man made increase, just sleights of hand graphs and information which have no bearing on the claim. A magician’s trick, he simply states there is a rise and that it is man made and that he needs more money to continue tracking that annual rise which he hasn’t shown exists and which he can’t tell apart from any volcanic and other natural all of which is what he is measuring. Or rather, from which he cherry picks a annual rise having created the idea of a mythical “well-mixed background” which even if it existed he has not shown man-made from natural and simply uses all of it to claim it is man-made…
The rest, is agenda driven environmentalism creating what it wants to see, not by showing any scientific evidence, but by stating that it exists and in confirmation bias finding it. Callendar was a bit of a joke in those early days, even Ravelle stopped using him (Ravelle who shortly before his death changed his story) and Callendar wasn’t picked up again until Hansen ilk got in on the act – and that began to be put in place by the Club of Rome who were looking for a global scare to their own agenda. From this time on all the big oil and nuclear got involved (they set up CRU for example to fiddle temperature records as proved in NZ and in the climate gate emails and the creating of the Hockey Stick and One Tree Yamal) using the environmentalists’ emotional energy which came for free, because the whole scare was built on carbon dioxide actually driving warming. It’s in that mix of cynical manipulation by bankers/corporations and ideological environmentalist fantasists playing politics that this all grew like topsy. So it’s not far fetched, it’s just damned complicated.
My main interest is how this, and they, changed basic science in the general education system. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing was coming from a Phd in physics teaching at university level and began to explore and found it endemic in general education, and this was what was fuelling the scam, a generation brought up on impossible physics – and of course this brings its own complications, when traditional scientists can spot something amiss is their own fields but take “common knowledge” science basics for granted elsewhere because they have no reason to check these basic claims. Like Corrine above, she takes for granted there is this mythical well-mixed background rising inexorably… Or in a discussion going on elsewhere, think that cold water rises and hot water sinks so explains Trenberth’s latest claim that the missing heat is going down to the bottom of the ocean..
Anyway, understanding the why of it has to take into consideration deliberate and unconscious confirmation bias. These two worth reading for some of the history of science trying to keep this from swamping the system:
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/globwarm.htm
Robert E. Stevenson, an oceanography consultant based in Del Mar, California, trains the NASA astronauts in oceanography and marine meteorology. He was Secretary General of the International Association for the Physical Science of the Oceans from 1987-1995, and worked as an oceanographer for the U.S. Office of Naval Research for 20 years. He is the author of more than 100 articles and several books, including the most widely used textbook on the natural sciences. The following report first appeared in 21st Century Science and Technology in the Winter 1996-1997 issue.
“The science of climate has been buried alive by an avalanche of ideology-based computer models.”
….
“Working Geophysical Scientists” Respond
I must say, also, that the “working geophysical scientists”–the oceanographers, the meteorologists, the atmospheric chemists and physicists, and the basic climatologists–were all caught by surprise by the vast publicity that spread through the media and popular press from what were clearly speculations–speculations that were publicized, even though there was no suitable scientific research to support the claims. But, how was the the public to know that? Furthermore, it seemed that journalists, editors, and publishers, as well as the electronic media, had turned overnight from reporters into advocates.
Reputable scientists disagreed that an atmospheric crisis was at hand. Nils-Axel Morner, from Stockholm University, at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York, scorned the prediction of rising sea levels. He noted that there was simply not enough water in mid-latitude glaciers to cause such a rise (of several meters), and that a 4° Celsius increase in temperature (the modellers claim for the year 2050) might result in sea level rising 4 inches. Morner got no play in The New York Times the next day, or elsewhere.”
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http://enthusiasmscepticismscience.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/madrid-1995-and-the-quest-for-the-mirror-in-the-sky/
“But this human impact is not detected when Callendar claimed to find it. Rather, our Mirror in the Sky pattern at the top of this blog—the one that had such an impact at Madrid—this gives the warming since 1963. [Santer 1995b pdf, also Karoly 1994] That is, the signal only emerges from the depth of those harsh winters—the very year of the Big Freeze—that helped kill off human attribution the first time around. The rejection of earlier attribution is not entirely about diminished data. As the IPCC moved with increasing conviction towards human attributing of the later warming, it simultaneously moved to attribute most of this earlier warming to natural causes [see e.g., TAR p699]. And so, after the false start under Wigley, casting and recasting the argument on new evidence, the IPCC arrived at a consistent vindication of Hansen’s testimonial: the human signal is detectable, but only in the 2nd half of the 20th century. And this is perhaps why you still hear a lot about Hansen’s heroic (but dubious!) attribution argument, and why the pioneering work of Guy Callendar is left out in the cold. Yes Callendar was an outsider, but he also cuts a dismal figure shovelling snow off the human warming theory while it lay buried in the ditch of the Little Cooling.”
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“Why this pattern analysis failed to gain traction at this time is unclear. Where Callendar was noticed by professional climatologist it was often with derision. Even after sending Keeling off to set up the monitoring station on Mauna Loa, Roger Ravelle would not even let Callendar off first base, refusing to believe that CO2 could have increased as much as Callendar claimed (and as is now confirmed)”
Note the now confirmed – how? By Keeling following Callendar’s determination to show it.
Another paper by some of the same Italians is here: http://www.avvelenata.it/papers/Sendai_CO2.pdf If you can access that, please tell me how the curve shown in figure 2 with the annual cycle and secular rise is created. The normal explanation is that the annual cycle comes from vegetative uptake and release in the NH (this paper has measurements from the Mediterranean ) plus anthropogenic CO2.
The paper describes the measurement device and calibration procedures. I don’t know much about the equipment but the techniques seem reasonable. It is hard to imagine how the Keelings might coordinate or control this measurement and many more like it. A much simpler explanation is that the measurements are independent verification of the Keeling measurements.
From which: ah, it says copying allowed, but copies in some strange script.
“1. INTRODUCTION … unprecedented in the last 400,000 years”
This is from Vostok which clearly shows massive changes in and out of glacials with carbon dioxide lagging behind 800 years. (Gore hid this in his presentation by separating them out and I’ve even seen one presentation of it from Australia which simply flipped it over so it appeared carbon dioxide was driving temperatures. ) So first of all, the very statement they make falsifies the claim that carbon dioxide drives teperatures, if it hasn’t done so for the last 400,000 years, shows it is irrelevant to driving temperatures which we can see from the graph and know were huge rapid rises and dramatic changes into interglacials, which caused gazillions of tons of ice miles high to melt and raised sea levels c350 feet. So what does it matter if carbon dioxide levels are, unproven, “unprecedented” now, even if true? The trace gas has shown no inclination to drive temperatures in the past. Only in the minds of AGW fantasists is carbon dioxide magically driving temperatures 800 years in the future, in their topsy turvy world of cause coming after effect.
“3. ANALYSIS .. 2. Some general characteristics of the series may be outline: a progressive increase is evident,”
Fig 2. No it isn’t. It’s showing a temporary increase around 98 after which it appears to be heading back to the lower levels.
The Met having finally admitted there’s been no increase in temperature for the last 17 years, the anomaly of the 98 El Nino year makes no difference to this, it’s a blip. And so in their fig 2 – even though in 97 they added collection at 2 metres to get the heavier than air carbon dioxide to try and boost their figures – they have nothing to show out of the ordinary in their neck of the woods, or rather ocean, that isn’t accounted for in their premise analysis that “The CO2 growth rate appears to be related to large scale dynamic phenomena, like EL Nino/Sourthern Oscillation (ENSO), and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In particular, an evident signature of the 1997-98 El Nino event is found on the CO2 record.”
What would they write now instead of “a high correlation between the global average temperature and the 12-month average carbon dioxide growth rate also exists.”? Knowing that it’s finally been admitted there was no temperature increase since at least 95?
Callendar cherry picked an unrealistic low number and Keeling turned this into the mythical “well-mixed background which could be measured anywhere” and was determined to show an annual increase, he and his son ran Scripps. This Italian study shows what carbon dioxide they get is what comes in on the winds, particular to their area, so their “local”. There is nothing to suggest that it wasn’t this 100 years ago.
Which is what AIRS found, though they won’t release top and bottom of troposphere so we can get the picture they saw immediately.., that carbon dioxide is lumpy, it is local. This island producing nothing much of its own is simply getting it in descrete volumes, winds are volumes of air on the move, in which there is a level of carbon dioxide depending on the source of the wind, being carried in the volume of wind.
The only bright light in studies such as these, if you can read beyond the obligatory pc AGW memes, is that they do tell you what they have done so you can read through the hype. We still have accurate records here, unfortunately not from Keeling and Scripps which set the “standard”, and not in temperature measurements where the AGW agenda spent the majority of its efforts to the point of corrupting past data. A gross insult to the scientists in the past who were dedicated to keeping as accurate records as they could for the benefit of future unknown to them colleagues in science. Planting pears for heirs.
The original graph you posted is the Keeling Curve, compare with http://sync.democraticunderground.com/112741902
Where is the Argentinian data, they were there from 1953?
mwhite posted http://drtimball.com/2011/ernst-georg-beck-a-major-contributor-to-climate-science-effectively-sidelined-by-climate-deceivers/
“Ernst Beck re-examined the 19th century data as his friend Gartner describes,
“With his special meticulousness, Beck collected and analysed thousands and thousands of older measurements of the CO2 content of the air and found out that such content has been sometimes higher than today in the first half of the 20th century and also partially in the 19th century.
“He found the pre-industrial level little different from the current level, and the variability from year to year was much wider than the ice core and Mauna Loa record showed. He put all the data together in Figure 2.”
But there’s more to this, how does it really compare with air samples? Like barren islands in the middle of the ocean, Antarctica has no vegetation producing its carbon dioxide, what it gets is from volcanic production and surrounding waters and whatever it can glean from the winds. I recall seeing some measurements from Antarctica which didn’t show the the now CSIRO controlled GASLAB Flask Sampling Network which adjusts for storage.. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/csiro/csiro-casey.html
But where to find unadjusted data from Antarctica now, I don’t know.
And how to find it among all this confusion?:
“However, in the topsy-turvy field of climate science, “skeptic” is a term of opprobrium and to be labeled a skeptic is to be dismissed as a hack. Being a skeptic concerning global warming today is akin to being a heretic in the Middle Ages — you may not be literally burned at the stake, but your reputation will be put to flames.In response, many scientists whose research calls into question one or more of the fundamental tenets of global warming orthodoxy, have learned to couch their conclusions carefully.” http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.ie/2008_03_01_archive.html
“The three peer-reviewed articles show that the Global Climate Models weren’t able to predict climate in 1997. They show that in the next five years, the operators decoupled their models from the ocean and the sun, and converted them into models to support the greenhouse gas catastrophe. They have since restored some solar and ocean effects, but it is a token and a concession to their critics. The GCMs still can’t account for even the little ice age, much less the interglacial warming.” http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html#IV_A
The build up of arguments and the attacks on any real scientists daring to put their heads above the parapet became very loud and very emotional from the 90’s and deliberate and unconscious biases thrown into the mix kept the whole thing going, even while those who were pushing rising temperatures knew that no such thing was happening, like the Met.. It’s difficult to conceive that these once great institutions got ‘infiltrated ‘ by the this AGW agenda, but it is clear they were. I was shocked when I discovered NASA pages changing even as I was reading them, from giving traditional science basics on light and heat to the fake fisics of the AGW agenda, and this was only a couple of years ago.
The Stevenson website presents wholesale atmospheric CO2 ignorance just like your first post in this thread. He says: “The ocean’s summer warming, or warming by water-mass intrusions, or El Niños, makes the ocean a source of CO2 rather than a sink, as is usually supposed” If oceans are a sink, how come independent measurements show rising levels? Why don’t you simply answer that question? I don’t need links to websites full of mish mashes of misunderstanding, it’s a waste of my time. Just answer the question: what causes the independently measured rise? Is is fraud or fakery? Is it misunderstanding? Is it volcanoes? Are the volcanoes local or global? If volcanoes are global is CO2 well mixed showing similar measurements worldwide? If volcanoes are local, I have same question, why are the measured rises so similar?
The answer to the 800 year lag is simple: temperature (warming oceans) drives CO2 production. Then CO2 slowly amplifies the original warming from a warming source (e.g. solar) folllowing fast amplification (e.g. albedo changes). Nowadays the fast amplifiers like albedo don’t count which is why the paleo estimates of sensitivity are inapplicable. Also CO2 amplification of warming is minimal and easily countered by many natural effects. For example the rise from glacials is often punctuated by drops back into glacial conditions. CO2 is obviously unable to prevent that.
In the graphic from your link: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/csiro/CSIROCO2CASEY.JPG What caused the rise and what causes the annual wiggle? Why is the wiggle much smaller in Antarctica than on Mauna Loa? The enthusiasmscepticismscience website says that CO2 is measured accurately. Do you dispute that assessment? Do you think Ernst Beck is a better source than modern assessments? Do you think Beck accounted for diurnal and local variations? He talks about them, but doesn’t account for them, just lists loads of high CO2 measurements without any further analysis of why they were high.
The Pete’s Place link has nothing original AFAICS. The Glassman paper in your last link is about the only potential alternative explanation that I can see. I am only guessing because he leaves so much out. It could be inferred from his article that the wiggle could be seasonal ocean warming. But that doesn’t explain why the wiggle is stronger in Hawaii which has less of a seasonal variation and weaker in Antarctica which has more seasonal variation. If the wiggle comes from the ocean than the rise would come from ocean warming. However from what I have read, the observed ocean warming (about 1C) only explains about 5-10 ppm of the atmospheric rise. I have not verified those numbers, only read them in several papers. So my question to you would be rephrased: how does a ocean rise of just 1C or so cause an observed rise of 100ppm? Alternatively, what caused the 18 ppm rise in Casey Antarctica (link above) over a 10 year period?
A couple typos in my previous post, so let me ask this way.
1) Is the steady rise in CO2 caused by (a) volcanoes (b) ocean warming (c) both (d) something else (e) the measurements are wrong (CO2 is not rising steadily). My answer is 1d: anthropogenic emissions. My reasoning is that a steady rise matches steady emissions and rules out uneven temperature changes and mostly rules out volcanic activity which is also uneven.
2) is the the annual wiggle caused by (a) seasonal ocean warming (i.e. southern hemisphere), (b) NH vegetation (c) both (d) something else (e) the measurements are wrong. My answer is 2b because the wiggle is much more prominent in the NH and matches plant growth and death.
eric1skeptic says:
May 10, 2013 at 5:17 pm
The Stevenson website presents wholesale atmospheric CO2 ignorance just like your first post in this thread. He says: “The ocean’s summer warming, or warming by water-mass intrusions, or El Niños, makes the ocean a source of CO2 rather than a sink, as is usually supposed”
Yet the italian study you got me to read says the same thing, that their carbon dioxide comes in with the El Ninos as they point out is clearly seen in the graph where the spike showed increase in 97/98.
Carbon dioxide is part and parcel of volumes of air, it is carried in volumes of air which are winds. Winds are volumes of air on the move.
This is what AIRS concluded – that carbon dioxide is local, lumpy, and that they would need to go and study what winds do.
The great wind systems which are born from intense heating of land and water at the equator which causes the volumes of the fluid gas air above to be heated which means that it will expand and become less dense and rise and flow to the cold poles, heat flows spontaneously from hot to cold, where these volumes lose their heat and so condense, becoming heavier they sink and flow back towards the equator. That is basic well understood meteorology. The great wind systems do not cross hemispheres.
If oceans are a sink, how come independent measurements show rising levels?
“Sink” is a term produced by AGWScienceFiction to avoid real physics of the properties of gases, to avoid mentioning cycles. AGWSF does not have any rain in their carbon cycle, they don’t even have the Water Cycle. Instead, magically in their world, carbon dioxide somehow gets to “sinks”.
How much do these “independent measurements show rising levels”?
Why don’t you simply answer that question?
I’ve been endeavouring to answer to answer all your questions.., I’m spending a considerable amount of my time on this when I should be doing other things.
I don’t need links to websites full of mish mashes of misunderstanding, it’s a waste of my time. Just answer the question: what causes the independently measured rise? Is is fraud or fakery? Is it misunderstanding? Is it volcanoes? Are the volcanoes local or global? If volcanoes are global is CO2 well mixed showing similar measurements worldwide? If volcanoes are local, I have same question, why are the measured rises so similar?
As I’ve been trying to explain, it’s a complex mixture of all this.
The measurements from Keeling/Scripps can’t be trusted, and as I have shown in the example you gave of Jubany, from the rise in vested interests taking over the initial scam this is now co-ordinated at government sanctioned level – which adjusts data. Didn’t you ever follow the Hockey Stick arguments? We need to see unadjusted data to understand what is going on.
The answer to the 800 year lag is simple: temperature (warming oceans) drives CO2 production.
Yet you’ve just dismissed this (first para). What caused the warming in the first place? 800 years of warming without any changes in carbon dioxide.
– Then CO2 slowly amplifies the original warming from a warming source (e.g. solar) folllowing fast amplification (e.g. albedo changes).
How does a trace gas which is less than 99.95 of the atmosphere with no heat capacity to speak of, it releases any heat gained practically instantly so cannot store it, which is heavier than air and is in all the rain that falls, carbonic acid, so cannot accumulate in the atmosphere, capable of doing this?
How?
Nowadays the fast amplifiers like albedo don’t count which is why the paleo estimates of sensitivity are inapplicable.
What do you mean here?
Also CO2 amplification of warming is minimal and easily countered by many natural effects.
What amplification, even if minimal? Carbon dioxide is fully part and parcel of the Water Cycle which cools the Earth.
For example the rise from glacials is often punctuated by drops back into glacial conditions. CO2 is obviously unable to prevent that.
Gosh, so how is it driving the dramatic and rapid rises into interglacials from full blown glacials with gazillions tons miles high ice squashing down land?
800 years before it makes its first appearance.
800 years, nearly a thousand years it does nothing. While the rapid rise in temperatures are busy melting gazillions tons of ice and raising sea levels 350 ft, it does nothing.
Carbon dioxide is irrelevant to driving temperatures. You can’t show how it is even minimal.
In the graphic from your link: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/csiro/CSIROCO2CASEY.JPG What caused the rise and what causes the annual wiggle? Why is the wiggle much smaller in Antarctica than on Mauna Loa? The enthusiasmscepticismscience website says that CO2 is measured accurately. Do you dispute that assessment? Do you think Ernst Beck is a better source than modern assessments? Do you think Beck accounted for diurnal and local variations? He talks about them, but doesn’t account for them, just lists loads of high CO2 measurements without any further analysis of why they were high.
What don’t you understand about the AIRS conclusion “Carbon dioxide is not at all very well mixed, but lumpy”, i.e. local, and, the so called trend of the Keeling Curve is shown to be an illusion created by the unproven claim of “well-mixed background”?
The Pete’s Place link has nothing original AFAICS. The Glassman paper in your last link is about the only potential alternative explanation that I can see. I am only guessing because he leaves so much out. It could be inferred from his article that the wiggle could be seasonal ocean warming. But that doesn’t explain why the wiggle is stronger in Hawaii which has less of a seasonal variation and weaker in Antarctica which has more seasonal variation. If the wiggle comes from the ocean than the rise would come from ocean warming. However from what I have read, the observed ocean warming (about 1C) only explains about 5-10 ppm of the atmospheric rise. I have not verified those numbers, only read them in several papers. So my question to you would be rephrased: how does a ocean rise of just 1C or so cause an observed rise of 100ppm? Alternatively, what caused the 18 ppm rise in Casey Antarctica (link above) over a 10 year period?
The “observed rise of 100ppm” is not proven. Regardless who uses it.
Callendar cherry picked the 280ppm from two discredited studies and by throwing out everything that didn’t fit – he was a fanatic and became a laughing stock as he kept pushing rising carbon dioxide driving temperatures, which couldn’t be shown man made and a trend contrived by Keeling cherry picking a trend out of the abundance of volcanic , driving temperatures which then dropped dramatically – hence the picture of him shovelling snow. The science world then went into ‘coming into another LIA scare at best, beginning of end of Holocene at worst’. And that lasted until temps again began to rise in the 70’s – by which time there was a powerful monied agenda around which was looking for a global scare to control economy and society. That’s just the simple history of this. When we dissect this all the claims disintegrate into bs fisics and manipulated data, it grew because different agendas came into play at government level which had the power to set up the IPCC to push the fakery.
And real science and real data gathering has been swamped by this. Science has been corrupted.
How can you even begin to ask why there’s a wiggle here and not there when all this is in play?
By ‘coincidence’, the, later than Callendar’s cherry picking of number, ice core data appeared to confirm Callendar – but this was disputed by the world’s leading expert on the subject. The propaganda of the IPCC agenda of AGW had to ignore this – because it was busy creating “consensus” of more ‘evidence’ based on the Callendar cherry picking.
That’s why they changed the real consensus of the scientists in the 95 report, they changed it from “no man made discernible” to the Houghton/Santer fraud of “all the fault of man made”.
That’s simply a fact of history.
If you really want to understand about carbon dioxide and what it can and can’t do and how much or little it is changing, then you cannot ignore this history. You cannot simply take the measurements given by the now IPCC driven agenda at face value. They have proved themselves corrupt re temperature data, the Hockey Stick and One Tree Yamal and UHI and changing past temperarure records and refusing to give unadjusted data, etc. etc., why would you take the data they provide for carbon dioxide at face value when it is siamese twin to their temperature claims?
For example:
Stomata:
1.”Nature’s CO2 meter:
“A standardized way of counting stomata– called the stomatal index ( SI [%] )– has been found to be a good way to estimate the CO2 content of the atmosphere when the plant was alive. The SI-CO2 relationship varies according to plant species, habitat altitude, and other factors.
” Correlation charts are constructed using modern plant specimens by determining their SI numbers and corresponding CO2 concentrations. When SI and CO2 ranges are fully characterized for a plant species, the charts are used as to estimate CO2 levels for related species in the geologic past.
“To determine plant age Carbon14 methods are usually used to about 40,000 years ago. For older material, other dating methods are used.
“Because plant stomata numbers do not change after the leaves or needles fall from the parent plant, they make a good indicator or proxy of atmospheric CO2 in Earth’s past. ”
And:
2.”PLANT STOMATA
Stomata are microscopic pores found in leaves and the stem epidermis of plants. They are used for gas exchange. The stomatal density in some C3 plants will vary inversely with the concentration of atmospheric CO2. Stomatal density can be empirically tested and calibrated to CO2 changes over the last 60 years in living plants. The advantage to the stomatal data is that the relationship of the Stomatal Index and atmospheric CO2 can be empirically demonstrated…”
1.http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html
2.http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/co2-ice-cores-vs-plant-stomata/
eric1skeptic says:
May 10, 2013 at 5:39 pm
A couple typos in my previous post, so let me ask this way.
1) Is the steady rise in CO2 caused by (a) volcanoes (b) ocean warming (c) both (d) something else (e) the measurements are wrong (CO2 is not rising steadily). My answer is 1d: anthropogenic emissions. My reasoning is that a steady rise matches steady emissions and rules out uneven temperature changes and mostly rules out volcanic activity which is also uneven.
You cannot prove they are anthropogenic emissions because you have never shown them distinct from volcanic activity.
And the volcanic activity has been deliberately supressed, to fit in with the agenda. Read Casey on this:
You don’t know how much volcanic activity is involved here,
It is a lie that fossil fuel combustion can be told apart from volcanic.
– it would need specific fingerprinting to every volcanic source to even begin to tell the difference.
Keeling simply made the claim that it was anthropogenic to the Callendar/Keeling greenie agenda of the time – but he was measuring volcanic and other local, and he had a huge production of volcanic to adjust from to create his mythical trend.
2) is the the annual wiggle caused by (a) seasonal ocean warming (i.e. southern hemisphere), (b) NH vegetation (c) both (d) something else (e) the measurements are wrong. My answer is 2b because the wiggle is much more prominent in the NH and matches plant growth and death.
They haven’t excluded seasonal ‘wiggles’, the adjustments are more subtle than that…
The adjustments are geared to show a “trend of rising man made” – where are the Argentinian data?
Since the CO2 rise is from volcanoes as you say, the next question is are the volcanoes world wide and CO2 well mixed, or does each independent CO2 measurements get polluted by a nearby volcano and adjusted / cherry picked like the Keelings in Hawaii? Since all these independent measurements show the same smooth rise, I would conclude that worldwide volcanoes are causing it and CO2 is well mixed.
If you disagree with my conclusion, please show how each of the independent measurements, e.g. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/csiro/CSIROCO2CASEY.JPG (Casey Antarctica) or e.g. http://www.avvelenata.it/papers/Sendai_CO2.pdf (Lampedusa Italy) is polluted by a nearby volcano and how (e.g. in the latter paper) their measurement technique makes that possible. If you know the volcano please point that out, but in the case of Lampedusa, well upwind from Sicily I do not see any relevant local volcanoes.
As for the wiggle I assume that your theory is that the same adjustment used to produce the rise from nearby volcanic pollution is also used to cherry pick the wiggle. Please show any paper where any measurement technique could produce that result. Alternatively show any paper where any measurement technique could be used to cherry pick a trend and wiggle. You can start with the Lampedusa measurements if you like, under section 2, measurements. I would like know how those scientists cherry picked their measurements so that all independent scientists were able to reproduce the exact same rise and wiggle.
Your stomata link points to work by Wagner, e.g. http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/33/1/33.abstract Although I only have that as an abstract, it is clear that they are pointing out fluctuations from 300 to 320 ppm, not fluctuations up to 400. The current rise to 400 is well beyond any historical or prehistorical plant stomata estimate. Your second link points to Kouwenberg 2005 and shows a chart with some historical measurements reaching 350 ppm. Still not 400, so the current level is unique.
I agree with those websites that ice core records are smoothed and cannot capture all the fluctuations. But Greenland ice cores with clear annual layering would have captured anything like the current spike if it had happened in the last 20k years.
For the 350 claim, I only have this: http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/LawDomeMLOKouwenberg800.png Searching for Kouwenberg 2005 takes me to Wagner and Kouwenberg 2004 which claims a high end of 320 ppm, not 350. I can’t find the source of the data in the figure above. If you can find it in an academic paper, please link. I don’t need more crappy websites full of misunderstandings and misinformation. Only academic papers such Ernst Beck are acceptable (published in Energy and Environment). But Beck did not account for location and diurnal fluctuations in his conclusions.