Jo Nova writes:
Murry Salby was sacked from Macquarie University, and Macquarie struggled to explain why, among other things, it was necessary to abandon, and strand him in Paris and hold a “misconduct” meeting in his absence. Since then he has been subject to attacks related to his previous employment. I’ve asked him to respond, which he has at length in a PDF (see below). The figures listed below refer to that PDF, which encompasses 15 years of events.
I don’t have the resources (unlike the National Science Foundation, the NSF) to investigate it all, but wanted to give Murry the right of reply.
On closer inspection the NSF report used by people to attack Salby does not appear to be the balanced, impartial analysis I would have expected. Indeed the hyperbolic language based on insubstantial evidence is disturbing to say the least. Because of the long detailed nature of this I cannot draw conclusions, except to say that any scientist who responds to a question about Murry Salby’s work with a reference to his employment is no scientist.
Remember the NSF report was supposedly an inhouse private document. It was marked “Confidential”, subject to the Privacy Act, with disclosure outside the NSF prohibited except through FOI. Desmog vaguely suggest there “must have been an FOI”, but there are no links to support that. In the end, a confidential, low standard, internal document with legalistic sounding words, may have been “leaked” to those in search of a character attack.
My summary of his reply:
See: http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/murry-salby-responds-to-the-attacks-on-his-record/
The PDF:
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Nick Stokes says:
August 12, 2013 at 2:49 pm
“Yes it does. The extra CO2 is there because we put it there.”
“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – A. Einstein
The simplest explanation that we stay anchored to the ground is that the Earth is flat. Occam’s Razor does not demand the simplest explanation, it recommends the simplest explanation consistent with theory and observations.
The hypothesis that we are responsible for a significant portion of the atmospheric CO2 rise is inconsistent with those.
FerdiEgb says:
August 12, 2013 at 3:21 pm
I cannot argue this further with you along these lines. What you are arguing is unmoored to physical reality.
Bart says:
August 12, 2013 at 2:27 pm
A) the temperature relationship holds across all frequencies – the rate of change of CO2 with temperature matches in phase in both the long term trend and in the short term variation. That’s all you need to fit it the whole thing.
The temperature relationship holds for the short term variation, it is already more problematic for the period before 1960 and absurd for ice ages – interglacials. Except if one accepts that different processes are at work.
B) For your idea to work, there has to be high pass filtering of the temperature related processes, and blending with low pass filtered human inputs.
Again, no filtering at all, only a limited capacity of the fast response processes on temperature changes. And little effect of temperature on the slower processes, which are mainly pressure dependent.
atmospheric CO2 is the result of a temperature dependent process which is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and that process is effectively independent of human activity.
The atmospheric CO2 increase is the result of human emissions pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the removal of which is a pressure dependent process, quite independent of temperature.
Bart says:
August 12, 2013 at 3:35 pm
I cannot argue this further with you along these lines. What you are arguing is unmoored to physical reality.
Bart, all you have is a good fit of a curve. And from that you insist that temperature is the only variable that counts and all other variables that may do the same job as good, or even better, don’t count.
That your solution does violate all other known observations is of no interest.
That your solution doesn’t take into account that any increase in the atmosphere also influences inflows and outflows is of no interest.
Which solution is unmoored in physical reality?
FerdiEgb says:
August 12, 2013 at 3:39 pm
“Except if one accepts that different processes are at work.”
Nope. Just assuming Salby has things right.
“Again, no filtering at all, only a limited capacity of the fast response processes on temperature changes.”
Nope. If a sink has limited capacity, then once it is saturated, it is saturated. It will not continue to function on short timelines but not on longer ones. It will simply cease altogether.
This is the kind of thing I mean. Your viewpoint is unphysical. It is a mishmash of things you want to believe, but it has no anchor in physical reality.
“…the removal of which is a pressure dependent process, quite independent of temperature.”
Now that truly is absurd.
FerdiEgb says:
August 12, 2013 at 3:51 pm
“Bart, all you have is a good fit of a curve.”
It is an excellent fit of the curve. Too good to be happenstance. And, it accounts for everything.
I cannot get it across to you because you do not have the experience I have. But, it is also fully consistent with the behavior of feedback systems in general.
It has always been a stretch to believe the conventional wisdom that CO2 levels have been remarkably stable for millennia, yet humans have upset that balance in just a few decade’s time. The notion of a rock-steady stable equilibrium co-existing with such hair-trigger sensitivity to external perturbation – these are just not two properities which go together. They are very much mutuallly exclusive in real world systems.
Bart says: August 12, 2013 at 4:00 pm
“It is an excellent fit of the curve.”
Not really. And it requires cherry-picking a hemisphere. A very good hemisphere, mind you – one of the best. But the NH doesn’t fit well at all. Not even if you re-fudge.
Nick Stokes says:
August 12, 2013 at 4:22 pm
“Not really.”
Really. The correlation is especially good with the highest accuracy measurements.
And, it isn’t cherry picking to go where the action is, which is with the oceans. That’s like saying proving gravity by throwing a ball up in the air and watching it come back down is cherry picking because you are doing the experiment on a massive object.
Bart says: August 12, 2013 at 4:47 pm
“And, it isn’t cherry picking to go where the action is, which is with the oceans. “
Well, why not go with global SST? Again, the El Nino peaks line up, but that’s about all.
Nick Stokes says:
August 12, 2013 at 5:15 pm
Because it obviously suffers from resolution problems, but it’s not too bad a fit for all that.
What is your point, anyway? Finding a better fit with SH data merely means that is where the action is mostly occurring. Finding a worse one in the NH does not negate the excellent fit in the SH, any more than finding a black hole negates propagation of light from the Earth. If you look for something, and find it, why would you continue looking, suggesting that if you do not find it elsewhere, you never found it there? This is bizarre.
But, if you insist, how about using the best data we have? This is a slam dunk.
Ferdi says:
“The atmospheric CO2 increase is the result of human emissions pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the removal of which is a pressure dependent process, quite independent of temperature.”
You probably know more than I do about this, but when I look at this 50+ year chart, I see that CO2 levels appear to be entirely temperature dependent — both rising and falling ∆CO2 levels. CO2 follows ∆T, both up and down, no?
[If you have a comparable chart showing empirical observations of ∆CO2 vs ∆pressure, I would like to see it, please.]
Bart says: August 12, 2013 at 5:42 pm
The point is, as Ferdinand says, if you rely on curve fitting, that’s all you’ve got. And if the fit fails, you have nothing.
What you have is a reasonable alignment at high frequency – basically ENSO. And for the SH air temp, there is not too bad alignment at multi-decadal. From that you want to make an inference that temperature controls CO2. Of course this completely disregards elementary mass balance. But if the multi-decadal alignment fails rather frequently, as with global air temp or SST, then there’s no basis for inference at all.
dbstealey says: August 12, 2013 at 6:27 am
Allan MacRae says:
“…I am increasingly convinced that since atmospheric dCO2/dt changes almost contemporaneously with temperature, and CO2 lags atmospheric temperature by about 9 months, this is compelling evidence that CO2 drives temperature – not the reverse as the popular consensus falsely dictates.”
Then how do you explain this? It is clear that ∆T is the cause of ∆CO2.
____________________________
Hello DB – I looked at this data very closely in 2008 and cannot agree with the argument you presented above.
I do not have the time to dissect exactly what is wrong with your argument but am quite sure it is wrong. It could be an error introduced by differences in the exact time that the measurements were taken.
In 2008 I carefully examined these parameters using both CO2 data from Mauna Loa and also the Global CO2 numbers, and also temperature data from Hadcrut3 surface temperatures (ST) and the better quality UAH Lower Tropospheric (LT) temperatures. All the data and analyses are included in a spreadsheet with my icecap.us paper. Have a look if you want to pursue this further.
Originally, my conclusion was derided as wrong, but later it was grudgingly accepted as correct and then dismissed by the warmists as a “feedback effect” – a thoughtless “cargo cult” explanation that is without merit, in my opinion.
Remember, dCO2/dt changes almost contemporaneously with LT temperature, and the integral CO2 has inflection points about 9 months later. So you cannot day that there is evidence that CO2 drives temperature.
Staff in academia often get treated differently according to the whims, prejudices, bias, misperceptions, etc of those in senior management. It’s human nature. For some its simply routine procedure to blackball those outside the ‘click’; that is the extent of their understanding of human beings and society-if you are different, you are no good. But of course this means that sometimes people make gross mistakes on how other people are treated etc, but what I really don’t get is, why there isnt procedures and ways to reduce such mistakes, to strengthen the internal processes and regulation etc of such administrations, so that such is less likely to occur. Why are university administrations so able to ignore the values which are already established in the rest of the community?
” The Law Dome ice core CO2 records show major growth in atmospheric CO2 levels over the industrial period, except during 1935-1945 A.D. when levels stabilized or decreased slightly.”
Etheridge et al. 1998
“The stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentration during the 1940s and 1950s is a notable feature in the ice core record. The new high density measurements confirm this result and show that CO2 concentrations stabilized at 310–312 ppm from1940–1955. The CH4
and N2O growth rates also decreased during this period, although the N2O variation is comparable to the measurement uncertainty. Smoothing due to enclosure of air in the ice (about 10 years at DE08) removes high frequency variations from the record, so the true atmospheric variation may have been larger than represented in the ice core air record. Even a decrease in the atmospheric
CO2 concentration during the mid-1940s is consistent with the Law Dome record and the air enclosure smoothing, suggesting a large additional sink of 3.0PgCy-11 [Trudinger et al., 2002a]. The d13 CO2 record during this time suggests that this additional sink was mostly oceanic and not caused by lower fossil emissions or the terrestrial biosphere [Etheridge et al.,1996; Trudinger et al., 2002a]. The processes that could cause this response are still unknown.”
Meure et al 2006
Finally I note that the (negative) ‘offset’ i.e the fraction of the global surface average CO2 (ppmv) by which the average near surface CO2 level over the entire great Southern Ocean and Antarctica (below 30 S) CO2 level lags below that global average has been falling from -0.33% in 1982 nearly every single year for at least 3 decades until it is about -0.60±0.10% now. If anyone doesn’t believe me then they can simply get all the NOAA data for all the relevant SH stations and prove it to themselves. The negative offset from the global average over this vast area now more or less matches the offset at the centre of the South East Pacific gyre (Easter Island Station; EIC) which has always averaged around -0.65±0.10% since complete annual records began there in 1994. Meantime, the (positive) offset i.e the fraction of the global surface average CO2 (ppmv) by which the average near surface CO2 level at the NH Mauna Loa Station (MLO) leads the global average has remained about +0.20±0.10 over 3 decades since 1982.
World War II emissions effects, shipping effects (noting e.g. bunker oil had much higher Fe and S levels prior to the 1960s when oil desulfurization took off etc? Slow SH oceanic cold water cyanobacterial biomass adaptations etc?
Regardless, there clearly are, and have always been, many more things going on in ‘heaven and earth’ with respect to atmospheric CO2 than Mr. Engelbeen has yet dreamed-of.
Allan MacRae says:
“…you cannot say that there is evidence that CO2 drives temperature.”
I’m not saying that. I am saying exactly the opposite: that temperature drives CO2 levels, as this chart shows.
So it appears we are saying the same thing. Anyway, the more I look at that chart, the more obvious it appears that ∆CO2 is caused by ∆T. If I’m wrong, please show me where.
dbstealey says:
August 12, 2013 at 8:42 pm
Allan MacRae says:
“…you cannot say that there is evidence that CO2 drives temperature.”
I’m not saying that. I am saying exactly the opposite….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I think in Allan’s first comment on CO2 in his first paragraph, he inverted the meaning by mistake. This is the exact comment:
If CO2 LAG by nine months then it is driven by temperature.
Bart says:
August 12, 2013 at 11:12 am
//////////////////////////////////////////////
The effects of the late 1970s recession can be seen clearly in the plot of manmade CO2 emissions for the period say 1978 to 1990, whereas there appears no change and in particular no corresponding dip say between 1978 to 1982 in the ML accumulated emissions plot.
That observational fact supports the general thrust of the point made by Bart, but of course, it could have something to do with sink responses, or by chance some change in natural variation (eg., a boom in ant/termite population which emiited correspondingly more CO2 than usual during those years thereby offsetting the reduced manmade CO2 emissions – an unlikely co-incidence but changes in natural variation must be a possible reason especially as man emits only a small percentage of annual global CO2 emissions).
@Gail Combs says:
August 12, 2013 at 11:13 pm
/////////////////////
Further to the point made by Gail, whilst I do not like interpreting what other meant to say, I concur with her view that Allan in effect made a simple typo in his comment (Allan MacRae says:
August 12, 2013 at 3:48 am) and did not mean to suggest that CO2 drives temperature, but rather the other way around (ie., temperature drives CO2).
This mistake is apparent from his concluding observation “not the reverse as the popular consensus falsely dictates.” ,ie., he was taking a position opposite to that of the consensus and additionally he was agreeing with the view expressed by Bart.
@Steve Short says:
August 12, 2013 at 8:22 pm
////////////////////////////
But manmade CO2 emissions because of the additional industrial activity significantly increased during the run up and throughout the war, ie., during the period 1935 to 1945 and the fact that this increase is not seen in the ice data is of concern.
The observation about shipping (“…shipping effects (noting e.g. bunker oil had much higher Fe and S levels prior to the 1960s when oil desulfurization took off etc?…”) is a patently bad one, Whilst it may be the case that bunker fuel, back then, had higher sulphur and iron levels, that has no bearing on the amount of CO2 emitted upon burning the bunkers. These aerosols may have had an effect on incoming solar and created some form of shading, thereby possibly cooling temperatures, but they do not mean that less CO2 was emitted during the war years.
It is an inescapable fact that there was a significant increase in industrial activity and a significant increase in the amout of shipping and shipping movements with a corresponding increase in manmade CO2 emissions. If the increased CO2 emitted during this period is not seen in the ice core record, there is reason to be cautious as to how accurately the ice records capture changes in CO2 emissions at least in relatively short time scales.
Nick Stokes says:
August 12, 2013 at 7:18 pm
///////////////////////////
Nick
The very same point can be made with equal force against your assumption that CO2 drives temperatures given that there is no correlation in the thermometer record (or sat record) between CO2 and temperature. For example whilst CO2 emiisions increased during the period 1880 to 1910, 1940 to 1975, temperatures fell. During the period late 1990s to date, temperatures have remained about static not withstanding a steady and unrelenting increase in CO2 9together with such CO2 that remained residenct from emissions taking place earlier within the 20th Century).
The same appears to be the case in the paleo record when there are several examples of anti correlation, ie., periodas when CO2 levels are rising and yet temperature is falling, and periods when CO2 levels are falling and temperature rising. Then on top of that you have the problem that it appears the case that CO2 lags temperatures by about 600 to 1000 years.
On the basis of your own argument “…then there’s no basis for inference at all.”
Bart says:August 12, 2013 at 3:35 pm “Occam’s Razor does not demand the simplest explanation, it recommends the simplest explanation consistent with theory and observations. The hypothesis that we are responsible for a significant portion of the atmospheric CO2 rise is inconsistent with those.”
No it isn’t because we know that when we burn hydrocarbons CO2 is one of the byproducts. There is no great mystery there nor is there any great mystery as to whether we have actually been burning fossil fuels. For humans *NOT* to have contributed significantly to the rise in CO2 you’d need a mechanism that removed the additional CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels + some other mechanism that added a similar amount of CO2.
Now perhaps that is exactly what has happened but without some startling observational data and some pretty solid theoretical work the scientifically parsimonious explanation is that the rise in CO2 has, to a large degree, come from human activity.
Richard
“Whilst it may be the case that bunker fuel, back then, had higher sulphur and iron levels, that has no bearing on the amount of CO2 emitted upon burning the bunkers.”
Nope….
(1) Fe and S emitted by bunker fuel combustion gets trapped by sea spay and in low clouds and ALL eventually gets rained-out onto the surface of the sea.
(2) Fe and S (and Si) are critical nutrients for oceanic cyanobacteria (aka blue-green algae). These constitute ~47% of world’s photosynthetic biomass.
(3) Ocean cyanobacterial primary productivity has a powerful effect on oceanic surface CO2 levels (as the algae absorb dissolved CO2 and bicarbonate and respire O2).
(4) My father served in the Pacific in WWII. In the 1960s he told me that the effect of shipping was very noticeably:
* streams of low level (cumulus) clouds behind fleets
* smell of sulfur due to bunker oil combustion and oily sheen following fleets
* increased algal blooming – often most noticeable in moonlight due to increased predation by luminescent bacteria (principally Vibrio spp).
Finally (with apologies):
a PhD isotope in biogeochemistry (;-)
DB and Gail – thank you for your corrections – we agree.
Correcting my post of August 12, 2013 at 3:48 am:
To be clear, I am increasingly convinced that since atmospheric dCO2/dt changes almost contemporaneously with temperature, and CO2 lags atmospheric temperature by about 9 months, this is compelling evidence that temperature drives CO2.
Note to file: Do not post at 3:48am – you make too many errors pre-coffee..
What time is it now? 3:45am local time – darnit!
Nyq Only:
I don’t know if the recent observed rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration has a wholly natural cause, or a wholly anthropogenic cause, or some combination of natural causes. Nobody knows and nobody can know
(ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005) ).
But at August 13, 2013 at 1:50 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/11/murry-salby-responds-to-critics/#comment-1388297
you write
Oh! But there is much such “startling observational data”!
For example, atmospheric CO2 concentration follows global temperature at all time scales.
Ice cores indicate that at the longest time scale the lag is ~800 years, and Mauna Loa data indicates that at the shortest time scale the lag is ~9 months. This latter finding was first reported in 1990
(ref Kuo C, Lindberg C & Thomson DJ ‘Coherence established between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature’, Nature 343, 709 – 714, 22 February 1990)
and has been confirmed by several subsequent studies of other atmospheric CO2 data sets but the subsequent studies show the time of the lag varies between 6 and 9 months depending on latitude..
A cause cannot follow its effect, and this implies the observed rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is induced by global temperature rise.
However, this does not exclusively show Bart is right (see the first reference above which is to one of our papers).
Richard
Bart says:
August 12, 2013 at 3:53 pm
Nope. Just assuming Salby has things right.
Salby is of the same kind as you: extremely good in theory, but lacks insight in what happens in nature. Like calculating a huge non-existing diffusion in ice which should give negative values for CO2 in several periods…
Nope. If a sink has limited capacity, then once it is saturated, it is saturated. It will not continue to function on short timelines but not on longer ones. It will simply cease altogether.
It ceases at longer timelines but still works on short ones, because that are equilibrium reactions: both the oceans surface and vegetation growth/decay react on temperature changes up and down. The sink may become a source and vv.
This is the kind of thing I mean. Your viewpoint is unphysical. It is a mishmash of things you want to believe, but it has no anchor in physical reality.
There is plenty of literature out that shows the short term response of the ocean surface to changes in the atmosphere. And the short half life (~1 year) to equilibrium. And the saturation, because of the Revelle factor. Your view that only temperature is responsible for all processes is unphysical.
“…the removal of which is a pressure dependent process, quite independent of temperature.”
Now that truly is absurd.
That only shows that you have no idea what happens in natural processes. The uptake and release of CO2 to/from the oceans is mainly pressure dependent. If there is no pressure difference between the atmosphere and the ocean surface, then there is no uptake or release.
Of course, temperature governs the pCO2 of the ocean waters, but that is not more than 16 microatm/K. As the real pressure difference in the tropics is ~350 microatm and near the poles ~250 microatm, a 16 microatm change hardly plays a role.
Moreover, 3-4 years of human emissions already exceeds such a change…