By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I have just had the honor of listening to Professor Murry Salby giving a lecture on climate. He had addressed the Numptorium in Holyrood earlier in the day, to the bafflement of the fourteenth-raters who populate Edinburgh’s daft wee parliament. In the evening, among friends, he gave one of the most outstanding talks I have heard.
Professor Salby has also addressed the Parliament of Eunuchs in Westminster. Unfortunately he did not get the opportunity to talk to our real masters, the unelected Kommissars of the European tyranny-by-clerk.
The Faceless Ones whose trembling, liver-spotted hands guide the European hulk of state unerringly towards the bottom were among the first and most naively enthusiastic true-believers in the New Superstition that is global warming. They could have benefited from a scientific education from the Professor.
His lecture, a simplified version of his earlier talk in Hamburg that was the real reason why spiteful profiteers of doom at Macquarie “University” maliciously canceled his non-refundable ticket home so that he could not attend the kangaroo court that dismissed him, was a first-class exercise in logical deduction.
He had written every word of it, elegantly. He delivered it at a measured pace so that everyone could follow. He unfolded his central case step by step, verifying each step by showing how his theoretical conclusions matched the real-world evidence.
In a normal world with mainstream news media devoted to looking at all subjects from every direction (as Confucius used to put it), Murry Salby’s explosive conclusion that temperature change drives CO2 concentration change and not the other way about would have made headlines. As it is, scarce a word has been published anywhere.
You may well ask what I might have asked: given that the RSS satellite data now show a zero global warming trend for 17 full years, and yet CO2 concentration has been rising almost in a straight line throughout, is it any more justifiable to say that temperature change causes CO2 change than it is to say that CO2 change causes temperature change?
The Professor headed that one off at the pass. During his talk he said it was not global temperature simpliciter but the time-integral of global temperature that determined CO2 concentration change, and did so to a correlation coefficient of around 0.9.
I had first heard of Murry Salby’s work from Dick Lindzen over a drink at a regional government conference we were addressing in Colombia three years ago. I readily agreed with Dick’s conclusion that if we were causing neither temperature change nor even CO2 concentration change the global warming scare was finished.
I began then to wonder whether the world could now throw off the absurdities of climate extremism and develop a sensible theory of climate.
In pursuit of this possibility, I told Professor Salby I was going to ask two questions. He said I could ask just one. So I asked one question in two parts.
First, I asked whether the rapid, exponential decay in carbon-14 over the six decades following the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests had any bearing on his research. He said that the decay curve for carbon-14 indicated a mean CO2 atmospheric residence time far below the several hundred years assumed in certain quarters. It supports Dick Lindzen’s estimate of a 40-year residence time, not the IPCC’s imagined 50-200 years.
Secondly, I asked whether Professor Salby had studied what drove global temperature change. He said he had not gotten to that part of the story yet.
In the past year, I said, four separate groups haf contacted me to say they were able to reproduce global temperature change to a high correlation coefficient by considering it as a function of – and, accordingly, dependent upon – the time-integral of total solar irradiance.
If these four groups are correct, and if Professor Salby is also correct, one can begin to sketch out a respectable theory of climate.
The time-integral of total solar irradiance determines changes in global mean surface temperature. Henrik Svensmark’s cosmic-ray amplification, which now has considerable support in the literature, may help to explain the mechanism.
In turn, the time integral of absolute global mean temperature determines the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Here, the mechanism will owe much to Henry’s Law, which mandates that a warmer ocean can carry less CO2 than a colder ocean. I have never seen an attempt at a quantitative analysis of that relationship in this debate, and should be grateful if any of Anthony’s readers can point me to one.
The increased CO2 concentration as the world warms may well act as a feedback amplifying the warming, and perhaps our own CO2 emissions make a small contribution. But we are not the main cause of warmer weather, and certainly not the sole cause.
For the climate, all the world’s a stage. But, if the theory of climate that is emerging in samizdat lectures such as that of Professor Salby is correct, we are mere bit-part players, who strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then are heard no more.
The shrieking hype with which the mainstream news media bigged up Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, ruthlessly exploiting lost lives in their increasingly desperate search for evidence – any evidence – as ex-post-facto justification for their decades of fawning, head-banging acquiescence in the greatest fraud in history shows that they have begun to realize that their attempt at politicizing science itself is failing.
Whether they like it or not, typhoons are acts of God, not of Man.
I asked Professor Salby whether there was enough information in the temperature record to allow him to predict the future evolution of atmospheric CO2 concentration. He said he could not do that.
However, one of the groups working on the dependence of global temperature change on the time-integral of total solar irradiance makes a startling prediction: that we are in for a drop of half a Celsius degree in the next five years.
When I made a glancing reference to that research in an earlier posting, the propagandist John Abraham sneeringly offered me a $1000 bet that the fall in global temperature would not happen.
I did not respond to this characteristically jejune offer. A theory of climate is a hypothesis yet to be verified by observation, experiment and measurement. It is not yet a theorem definitively demonstrated. Explaining the difference to climate communists is likely to prove impossible. To them the Party Line, whatever it is, must be right even if it be wrong.
The group that dares to say it expects an imminent fall in global mean surface temperature does so with great courage, and in the Einsteinian spirit of describing at the outset a test by which its hypothesis may be verified.
Whether that group proves right or wrong, its approach is as consistent with the scientific method as the offering of childish bets is inconsistent with it. In science, all bets are off. As al-Haytham used to say, check and check and check again. He was not talking about checks in settlement of silly wagers.
In due course Professor Salby will publish in the reviewed literature his research on the time-integral of temperature as the driver of CO2 concentration change. So, too, I hope, will the groups working on the time-integral of total solar irradiance as the driver of temperature change.
In the meantime, I hope that those who predict a sharp, near-term fall in global temperature are wrong. Cold is a far bigger killer than warmth. Not that the climate communists of the mainstream media will ever tell you that.
rgb says:
I agree with the general gist of your comments to Stephen Wilde. I would especially second, “Based on your responses I can only conclude that you don’t understand physics well enough to usefully participate in model building,” although I would probably say physics AND mathematics. In fact, it may be his lack of abilities to translate physics into any sort of mathematical model with equations and look at the implications of those equations that really makes his musings an exercise in nonsense.
I do have a few comments though:
(1) I am a bit confused by your definition of what “adiabatic” and what you mean by the “energy content”. The way I would say it is that “adiabatic” means no transfer of energy via heat; however, energy is still transferred via work, so the energy content does change. In fact, for an ideal gas, the temperature is directly proportional to the internal energy (or do you mean something different by “energy content”?)
(2) As for the adiabatic warming and cooling, I agree with you that it is not due to the conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy. It is due to the gas expanding (as it rises) or compressing (as it falls) and this expansion doing work on the surrounding gas (or compression being work done on the parcel by the surrounding gas). One way I came up with to think about why there is no gravitational potential energy contribution in the derivation of the adiabatic lapse rate (which I think is a correct way to think about it, although I wouldn’t bet my life on it) is that for a neutrally-buoyant parcel of air, the gravitational force and the buoyant force balance, so any work done by the gravitational force will be exactly balanced by work done by the buoyant force of the surrounding air.
(3) I would quibble with your claim that “gravity has nothing to do with it” just because it is the fact that the gas is in a gravitational field that causes the weight of the gas above the parcel to compress it and hence to lead to the density profile with height…And, of course, it is this density profile that leads to the expansion of the parcel as it rises up in the atmosphere. So, indeed “g” enters into the equation for the dry adiabatic lapse rate, but not because of any gravitational potential energy contribution but simply because of the hydrostatic condition (and that is probably the sense in which you mean that gravity has nothing to do with it).
rgbatduke says:
November 12, 2013 at 3:07 pm
“There are no convective rolls For there to be convective rolls, the air at the top has to cool and become more dense to sink, displaced by upwelling warmer air. ”
I don’t understand. The air can cool very effectively at the surface at night (consider a desert like the mojave), especially if there is no IR gas above it. This will cut the air column off at the knees over and over again until the sun changes the direction. The air sinks because of cooling at the surface. There is still plenty of radiative coupling at the surface whose efficacy is enhanced because of the lack of ghg’s above it.
Richard S Courtney says:
So, let’s say I had a fountain which spits out water iat the rate of 10 gallons per minute, that water goes into the pool, down the drain at a rate of 10 gallons per minutes and then gets recycled back up to the fountain head to be emitted again. Next, let us say that someone has put a hose into the pool of water and that hose is adding 1 quart per minute of new (not recycled) water to the fountain and as a result of this, my fountain pool has started to overflow.
In the bizarro world of Richard S Courtney, in diagnosing the reason that the fountain is overflowing, it would be irrelevant to mention anything but the fact that the fountain is adding water to the pool at a rate that is 40 times that at which the hose is adding. The fact that the fountain is just recycling water that has gone done the drain of the pool at that same 10 gallons per minute rate would be as irrelevant as bringing the Eiffel Tower into it!
It also requires external energy and an independent source of work to send the water (heat) back up the gradient, lol. Silly people.
Poor joelshore. He lives in such a two dimensional, black and white world, not understanding that the biosphere reacts to more CO2, and the fact that the effect of CO2 is logarithmic.
There are also unknown unknowns, otherwise we would have the planet’s climate figured out by now. But we are not even close.
joeldshore says:
November 12, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Except that the fountain isn’t overflowing, despite more water being added from whatever source.
Nick Stokes says:
November 12, 2013 at 5:38 pm
“When we dig up and burn carbon, that is not part of a coupled process… Unlike the natural cycling, it is new carbon added to the system.”
This is simply regurgitated narrative. There isn’t a shred of proof for it. A couple of guys thought it sounded good, and they got a couple of friends to buy into it, and so on, and so on, until it became a fundamental and widely spread assumption.
But, it is apparent now that the planet’s carbon cycling system is a a great deal more complicated and dynamic. The evidence Salby has amassed says the narrative is wrong. The obvious dependence of CO2 on temperature says it is wrong.
Moreover, it is completely incompatible with your preceding comment:
“They have been proceeding for millenia in balance, and there are strong reasons for that.”
Natural systems do not stay in balance spontaneously. Equilibria are created only when there are equally powerful forces dynamically opposing one another. I.e., when the equilibrium is disturbed, the force opposing the change pushes back harder to reestablish the equilibrium.
When there are no opposing forces, systems tend to wander randomly, exhibiting greater and greater extremes over time. This is as fundamental as Brownian Motion. In fact, Brownian Motion is a particular manifestation of the phenomenon.
joeldshore says:
November 12, 2013 at 7:03 pm
“So, let’s say I had a fountain which spits out water iat the rate of 10 gallons per minute, that water goes into the pool, down the drain at a rate of 10 gallons per minutes and then gets recycled back up to the fountain head to be emitted again. “
The fountain analogy is facile and inapplicable. To make it vaguely applicable, you would need to include a drain.
milodonharlani says: November 12, 2013 at 7:17 pm
“Except that the fountain isn’t overflowing, despite more water being added from whatever source.”
No, but the water in the pond is rising.
dbstealey says: November 12, 2013 at 7:10 pm
“the biosphere reacts to more CO2, and the fact that the effect of CO2 is logarithmic”
Yes, the biosphere reacts:
“The land biosphere plays a substantial role in the global carbon cycle. In the 1990s, an average of 6.4 PgC/yr (billion tons per year) were emitted from fossil fuel burning. Net carbon uptake by the land is estimated as 1.0 ± 0.8 PgC/yr (Bopp et al., 2002; Plattner et al., 2002; House et al., 2003).”
We’re at about 10 PgC/yr now. The biosphere can’t save us. As for logarithmic, I’m not sure you know what it means. It has little effect in going from 280 ppm to 400 ppm.
rgb.
Nowhere do I say that rising or falling air changes its total energy content. It simply becomes cooler or warmer because KE is shifted to PE or PE to KE.
Temperature rises with height in the stratosphere, falls in the mesosphere and rises in the thermosphere. The rise with height in stratosphere and themosphere is due to direct effects of sunlight on constituent molecules due to different chemistry in the separate layers.
The molecules in an atmosphere will rise to a height dependent on the kinetic energy that can be induced at the surface as a result of mass, gravity and insolation as per the Gas Laws.
There is no conflict with the laws of thermodynamics in anything I have said.
If you can’t follow the logical implications of the above three points then there is no point me trying to address your other misunderstandings.
Your description of the atmosphere that you think would result from the absence of GHGs appears to be some sort of halfway house between the isothermal atmosphere proposed by Roy Spencer and others and the fully convective atmosphere envisaged by me and others. I think it must fail on that basis.
Interestingly the points where Nick Stokes quibbles with the comments of rgb are more significant than when he agrees with him because those quibbles overlap with points I would have made had I possessed the will to do so.
I am content to wait until (hopefully) the obviousness and simplicity of my proposals becomes abundantly clear as a result of actual observations of atmospheric behaviour.
The radiative theory of gases has obviously confused too many for the importance of mechanical processes to be properly appreciated for some time yet.
Nick Stokes says:
November 12, 2013 at 7:41 pm
The “water” CO2 is rising, but shows no correlation with the “water” temperature in joeldshore’s childish analogy. There was a brief, accidental positive correlation between CO2 & temperature at points during the interval c. 1977 to 1996, but only after a period of negative correlation between c. 1944 to 1976. Before that in the 20th & late 19th centuries, flat CO2 occurred during periods of cooling, warming & flatlining (as now, although cooling appears to have set in, again despite rising CO2).
Going back farther in time produces the same lack of correlation on most if not all time scales & specific intervals.
IOW, CACA fails epically from the git-go. The null hypothesis has never been shown false.
I should expand this point:
“The molecules in an atmosphere will rise to a height dependent on the kinetic energy that can be induced at the surface as a result of mass, gravity and insolation as per the Gas Laws.”
If anything other than mass gravity or insolation (such as radiative capability) affect the energy carried by molecules then they will rise higher instead of warming the surface.
rgb did correctly pick up on one fault in my earlier point which I was aware of.
GHGs do of course radiate equally up and down at whatever height they may be. What I mean is that they will rise to a height where the net thermal effect of energy sent out to space will match the net thermal effect of energy sent down to the surface. I had meant to make that clear by the use of the word ‘directly’ but that was obviously insufficient.
Another point he made was that different types of molecules do not self differentiate within an atmosphere and I did deal with that in my fuller work by pointing out that the extra energy would be shared with surrounding radiatively inert molecules to affect atmospheric volume as a whole.
It is going to take some time and some effort for those who are radiatively focused to disentangle themselves from the resultant confusion.
Well Stephen as the radiative theory of greenhouse heating doesn’t even exist in a real greenhouse, and has otherwise never actually been demonstrated empirically, then yes climate science seems to be a strange oddity indeed. I mean just look at what it has done – people now think that water can magically flow against the gravitational gradient. Why might water do that? Because it is what is required for the radiative greenhouse effect. Fini. Perfect (circular, meaningless) logic. Then we have the other proposition that the atmosphere doesn’t emit by itself at all, implying it must have zero emissivity…well that’s not a greenhouse either. Maybe, since, the whole idea is about heat in the climate, then maybe it would be good to use the field of heat flow – thermodynamics – in climate science. Start with the 2 basic Laws, perhaps.
milodonharlani says: November 12, 2013 at 7:58 pm
“The “water” CO2 is rising, but shows no correlation with the “water” temperature in joeldshore’s childish analogy.”
Temperature has no role in Joel’s excellent analogy. It simply illustrates conservation of mass, which most of the world understands without difficulty. The water level rises as new water is pumped in. It did not rise while the same water was being recycled. Not hard.
Well Anomalatys, what the radiative chaps just cannot get their heads around is that the extra energy at the surface (beyond S-B) that they bang on about is just the extra kinetic energy needed to hold the weight of the atmosphere off the surface.
The system only appears to breach S-B because being constantly recycled adiabatically between surface and atmosphere that energy is no longer available for radiative transfer.
If one deducts that energy from the radiative equation then the surface is indeed at the temperature predicted by S-B.
If one then proposes additional downward IR from radiative gases then that is the true breach of S-B because the surface is then too warm for radiative equilibrium unless another adjustment occurs and according to the Gas Laws that further adjustment has to be a change in volume which is the only way to return the surface temperature to that required by the S-B constant.
If the volume change failed to make that adjustment then the surface would be permamantly too warm for S-B, energy out at top of atmosphere would always be greater than energy in and the atmosphere would eventually congeal on the ground.
Essentially the radiative theory is illogical.
Whoops, permanently not permamantly. Trying to type too fast 🙂
Bart says: November 12, 2013 at 7:37 pm
“The evidence Salby has amassed…”
Where is it written?
“Equilibria are created only when there are equally powerful forces dynamically opposing one another.”.
Joel’s fountain is in equilibrium. I showed the balance mechanism in the two main parts of the “natural” carbon cycle. Respiration/combustion has to match photosynthesis. It can’t exceed it, and if it falls short then reduced carbon will rapidly pile up. 100 Gt/yr is a lot; even a fraction can’t just hide somewhere. And seasonal changes have to balance. You can’t have a random walk when there is mass to be conserved.
Nick Stokes says:
November 12, 2013 at 8:19 pm
It’s an ludicrous analogy for CO2 in the atmosphere, mixing metaphors.
richardscourtney says:
November 11, 2013 at 6:31 am
david:
In your post at November 11, 2013 at 6:19 am you assert
Going back to the evidence that Ice Core samples present in terms of the Co2 lag against temperature rise there can be no correlation with recent times when Man has emitted huge amounts of it …
Please define what you mean by “huge”.
Nature emits 34 molecules of CO2 to the air for each molecule of CO2 emitted by human activity.
Richard
If that is correct then it also absorbs 34.5 molecules of CO2 from the air for each molecule of CO2 emitted by human activity, for a net uptake 0f 0.5.
I am having a holiday and can see the ocean from the house’s deck
they placed a concrete viewing seat right in front of the house for passersby on the street below to rest and enjoy the view [that I am having]
however….. the seat is overgrown with shrubs. There is no way for any view. The shrubs stand two meter above the seat and have almost engulfed the whole seat. In fact they put another seat 20 meters further on….
I suspect the seat was build some 10 or 20 years ago.
In my view, there are only two reasons for the shrubbery to have increased by this much.
1) more rainfall
2) more carbon dioxide
rainfall is much down [for this southern part of South Africa] the past decades
we need in fact more rain.
it follows that the increase in shrubbery must have been caused by the increase in carbon dioxide.
This is just a simple lesson from nature as to why we need more carbon dioxide, not less.
sorry, I forgot to give a link to prove my point (on my previous post)
here it is
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
Friends:
Some realities are such inconvenient truths that they enrage extreme propagandists of the AGW scare.
At November 11, 2013 at 6:31 am I pointed out the truth that the anthropogenic CO2 emission to the air is a tiny and probably trivial addition to the natural CO2 emission to the air.
Ferdinand Engelbeen is not an AGW supporter or propagandist but he and I disagree about what available information can indicate about behaviour of the carbon cycle. He responded to my point at November 12, 2013 at 11:20 am when he attempted to dispute my point by a surreptitious reintroduction of the silly mass balance argument.
So, at November 12, 2013 at 4:07 pm I provided a complete rebuttal of Ferdinand’s response to my true and irrefutable point. This link jumps to that refutation
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/10/towards-a-theory-of-climate/#comment-1473590
It is now clear that my refutation of Ferdinand’s response must have been cogent because warmunists joined the thread in attempt to support Ferdinand’s post.
Nick Stokes (at November 12, 2013 at 5:38 pm), joeldshore (at November 12, 2013 at 7:03 pm) and Phil. (at November 12, 2013 at 9:50 pm) made posts which ONLY contained points I had refuted in my refutation of Ferdinand’s post!
I ask onlookers to assess this by considering two things
1.
Please read my refutation: I have provided a link which jumps to it in this post.
2.
When reading the responses to my refutation, please remember that a falsehood is not converted to a truth by persistent repetition; i.e. recognise and ignore Goebbels’ ‘Big Lie’ method of propaganda.
Richard
Nick Stokes:
Your post at November 12, 2013 at 8:29 pm continues your support of the silly ‘mass balance argument’ which has been repeatedly refuted in this thread. Your post says in total
Firstly, as to “Where is it written?”, if you had read the thread then you would have seen my post at November 11, 2013 at 5:52 am which said
And your assertion that “You can’t have a random walk when there is mass to be conserved” is a ludicrous oversimplification. There is no single and simple “balance mechanism” in the carbon cycle because the carbon cycle is far too complex for such oversimplification to be possible. I explain this as follows:
The IPCC reports provide simplified descriptions of the carbon cycle. In our paper, (referenced for you in this post) we considered the most important processes in the carbon cycle to be:
Short-term processes
1. Consumption of CO2 by photosynthesis that takes place in green plants on land. CO2 from the air and water from the soil are coupled to form carbohydrates. Oxygen is liberated. This process takes place mostly in spring and summer. A rough distinction can be made:
1a. The formation of leaves that are short lived (less than a year).
1b. The formation of tree branches and trunks, that are long lived (decades).
2. Production of CO2 by the metabolism of animals, and by the decomposition of vegetable matter by micro-organisms including those in the intestines of animals, whereby oxygen is consumed and water and CO2 (and some carbon monoxide and methane that will eventually be oxidised to CO2) are liberated. Again distinctions can be made:
2a. The decomposition of leaves, that takes place in autumn and continues well into the next winter, spring and summer.
2b. The decomposition of branches, trunks, etc. that typically has a delay of some decades after their formation.
2c. The metabolism of animals that goes on throughout the year.
3. Consumption of CO2 by absorption in cold ocean waters. Part of this is consumed by marine vegetation through photosynthesis.
4. Production of CO2 by desorption from warm ocean waters. Part of this may be the result of decomposition of organic debris.
5. Circulation of ocean waters from warm to cold zones, and vice versa, thus promoting processes 3 and 4.
Longer-term process
6. Formation of peat from dead leaves and branches (eventually leading to lignite and coal).
7. Erosion of silicate rocks, whereby carbonates are formed and silica is liberated.
8. Precipitation of calcium carbonate in the ocean, that sinks to the bottom, together with formation of corals and shells.
Natural processes that add CO2 to the system
9. Production of CO2 from volcanoes (by eruption and gas leakage).
10. Natural forest fires, coal seam fires and peat fires.
Anthropogenic processes that add CO2 to the system
11. Production of CO2 by burning of vegetation (“biomass”).
12. Production of CO2 by burning of fossil fuels (and by lime kilns).
Several of these processes are rate dependant and several of them interact.
At higher air temperatures, the rates of processes 1, 2, 4 and 5 will increase and the rate of process 3 will decrease. Process 1 is strongly dependent on temperature, so its rate will vary strongly (maybe by a factor of 10) throughout the changing seasons.
The rates of processes 1, 3 and 4 are dependent on the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The rates of processes 1 and 3 will increase with higher CO2 concentration, but the rate of process 4 will decrease.
The rate of process 1 has a complicated dependence on the atmospheric CO2 concentration. At higher concentrations at first there will be an increase that will probably be less than linear (with an “order” <1). But after some time, when more vegetation (more biomass) has been formed, the capacity for photosynthesis will have increased, resulting in a progressive increase of the consumption rate. n.b. This complicated dependence of Process 1 on the atmospheric CO2 concentration is alone sufficient to refute your silly assertion of “balance”.
Processes 1 to 5 are obviously coupled by mass balances. Our paper assessed the steady-state situation to be an oversimplification because there are two factors that will never be “steady”:
I. The removal of CO2 from the system, or its addition to the system.
II. External factors that are not constant and may influence the process rates, such as varying solar activity.
Modelling this system is a difficult because so little is known concerning the rate equations. And your response is to ignore all that is not known, to apply an oversimplification to one part of the carbon cycle, and – on the basis of that – to assert,
Your assertion is complete balderdash.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
November 13, 2013 at 1:00 am
So, at November 12, 2013 at 4:07 pm I provided a complete rebuttal of Ferdinand’s response to my true and irrefutable point.
Sorry Richard, but that isn’t a rebuttal. Joeldshore is completely right with his analogy: you can’t deduce the cause of an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere by only looking at the ratio of the input flows. You have to look at the whole balance. Which shows that nature is a net sink for CO2.
It doesn’t matter at all if the natural circulation is 23 or 34 times the human input, it matters that the outputs are higher than the inputs with 0.5 times the human input. That is what changes the total carbon/CO2 content in the atmosphere, together with the one-sided human input.
As I have repeatedly said: the seasonal changes are huge, fast and limited in capacity. That is a matter of buffer capacity: the ocean surface can’t absorb or release more than 10% of the change in the atmosphere. Thus the seasonal capacity of the ocean surface doesn’t say anything about the capacity of the deep oceans to absorb: the difference is that the oceans surface are fast and limited in capacity, while the deep oceans are slow(er) but near unlimited in capacity. That makes that besides the whole biosphere (at about 1 GtC/year), the ocean surface absorbs about 0.5 GtC/year and the difference with human emissions (9 GtC/yr emissions – 4.5 GtC/yr increase in the atmosphere – 1.5 GtC/yr in other reservoirs) of 3 GtC/yr goes into the deep oceans.
That is what the mass balance says. There is no way to interprete that different: nature is a net sink for ~4.5 GtC/yr of CO2.
Now the related question if human CO2 is the main cause of the increase.
As all known observations match that conclusion, it is quite strongly supported.
There is one pure theoretical alternative, as Bart and Salby suppose: that the natural circulation increased enormously by the temperature increase in the past 50 years ánd the sinks increased so rapidely in concert, that all the increase in the atmosphere is caused by the increase in circulation, dwarfing the human input to negligible. The problem is that such an increase violates near all observations.
The biosphere is certainly not the cause, as that is a proven sink.
The oceans may be the cause, but that needs a sevenfold (!) increase in emissions since 1960 from the upwelling areas and a conequent increase in sinks (still matching the 3 GtC/yr more sink than source) to match the human input and the observed increase in the atmosphere. But there is not the slightest indication that there is such an increase of upwelling-circulation-downwelling:
– That is not observed in the pCO2 of the oceans at the upwelling places
– That is not observed in the residence time
– That is not observed in the 13C/12C ratio’s
– That is not observed in the 14C/12C bomb spike decay
– That is not observed in ice cores of any resolution over the past 800 kyrs
Thus the alternative theory is herewith at least 5 times refuted.
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Your post begins saying at November 13, 2013 at 2:57 am
Ferdinand, I refuse to get into a childish ‘yes it is’ and ‘no it isn’t’ argument. People can judge the cogency of my rebuttal for themselves; this link jumps to it
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/10/towards-a-theory-of-climate/#comment-1473590
And, as I said, it is clear that joeldshore, Nick Stokes and Phil thought my rebuttal was very cogent because they jumped in with iterations and expansions of your case which completely ignored my rebuttal of it.
Contrary to your assertion, Joeldshore’s analogy is complete nonsense and is not applicable for several reasons; e.g. if it were “completely right” then the rise in atmospheric CO2 would equal the anthropogenic CO2 emission but they are not equal.
That discrepancy alone is sufficient to demonstrate the ‘mass balance argument’ is plain wrong.
And nobody disputes that “nature is a net sink for CO2”. For example, the simple fact that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is less than the anthropogenic CO2 emission can be said to suggest that “nature is a net sink for CO2”. But so what?
The issue is simple. As I said in my rebuttal at November 12, 2013 at 4:07 pm
At issue is how the CO2 in the atmosphere would be changing in the absence of the anthropogenic CO2 emission. That depends on how and why the equilibrium of the carbon cycle is changing. And the silly ‘mass balance argument’ is wrong and is an irrelevance which distracts from consideration of the reasons for that equilibrium change. Iterating the nonsensical ‘mass balance argument’ does not make it right and does not provide it with any relevance.
Richard
tichardscourtney wrote “And nobody disputes that “nature is a net sink for CO2”. For example, the simple fact that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is less than the anthropogenic CO2 emission can be said to suggest that “nature is a net sink for CO2”. But so what?”
For most, the fact that the natural environment is taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it puts in (i.e. it is a net sink) would imply that the natural envrionment is opposing, rather than causing the rise in atmospheric CO2. To suggest otherwise seems a rather counter-intuitive use of “causing the increase”.
For instance, if Mrs Marsupial takes more money out of our joint bank account each month than she puts in, but our balance still rises because I put more money in than I take out, it would be deeply counter-intuitive to argue that she is causing the increase in our bank balance. Yet those who agree that the natural environment is a net sink, but nevertheless is the cause of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is making a statement of just that form.
Perhaps it would help to make your position if you could give a famailiar example where X consistently takes more Y out of Z than it puts in over some interval of time, where it would be correct to say that X is nevertheless the cause of the increase of Y in Z.