I’m really quite surprised to find this paper in Nature, especially when it makes claims so counter to the consensus that model projections are essentially a map of the future climate.
The Hockey Shtick writes: Settled Science: New paper ‘challenges consensus about what regulates atmospheric CO2 from year to year’.
A new paper published in Nature “challenges the current consensus about what regulates atmospheric CO2 from year to year” and finds “semi-arid ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere may be largely responsible for changes in global concentrations of atmospheric CO2.”
The authors find links between the land CO2 sink in these semi-arid ecosystems “are currently missing from many major climate models.” In addition, they find that land sinks for CO2 are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, thus modeled projections of exponential increases of CO2 in the future are likely exaggerated.
The paper joins many other papers published over the past 2 years overturning the “settled science” of the global carbon cycle.
Climate science: A sink down under
- Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13341
- Published online21 May 2014
The finding that semi-arid ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere may be largely responsible for changes in global concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide has repercussions for future levels of this greenhouse gas.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13341.html
more here: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/
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We see little mention of the Andean Altiplano, where possibly the growth of some species is limited more by CO2 scarcity (partial pressure) than by temperature or rainfall. Current interpretation of mud cores from Lake Titicaca indicates no certain history of Holocene forestation, but oddly enough, introduced eucalyptus (from Australia, of course) has no trouble growing at 4000 meters. It has been in the region for over a century, and is used for firewood and pole wood. If I were concerned with carbon capture I would plant lots of trees up high.
Of course eucalyptus introduces the potential for forest fires, as we have seen in Oakland and recently in Valparaiso. –AGF
David Ball:
“The clue is ppm. Get a clue.”
OK, I give up. Give me a clue. I must need to go back to math class, because I can’t see how increasing anything from 300 to 400, whether ppm, ppb, ppt or (insert your units here), is anything but a 33 1/3% increase.
Am I missing something obvious?
Please show your math.
Here is the math: (400 ppm-300 ppm)/300 ppm = 0.333 = 33.3%
The units cancel in the numerator and denominator during the percent difference calculation.
300/1,000,000 into 400/1,000,000 = ?
But 33 1/3% sounds much scarier.
One can only hope that when the checkmate paper is written, it starts with the words “CO2 is the main driver of global climate change”. That ensures it being published.
Is it William S. Briggs who tallied a list of things caused by global warming? Is anybody keeping a list of everything missing from the climate models?
I’m sorry but claims that an increase from 300 to 400 in units of anything isn’t an increase of 33.3% are just fodder for those who claim WUWT is full of cranks. Stop it.
The paper itself looks quite interesting and is yet another nail in the coffin of ‘the science is settled’. Strange days my friends, strange days.
David Ball
“300/1,000,000 into 400/1,000,000 = ?”
>>>>>>
A percentage or fractional change calculation requires a difference in the numerator between the final and initial state, as others above have noted.
Jonathan Abbott says:
May 22, 2014 at 1:44 pm
Show me the correct math then, Jonathan.
sraynesk says:
May 22, 2014 at 1:21 pm
It is not “cancelled out”.
SCheesman says:
May 22, 2014 at 1:46 pm
Show the calculation.
Mr Ball, you’ve already been given it.
I guess (perhaps not) that you’re going to tell me the correct answer is 0.01%, but that’s the difference, not the increase.
David Ball
“Show the calculation.”
Google “percentage change calculation” and you will find, universally:
% change = ((final – initial) / initial) * 100%
Worthless.
look, get rid of the fraction (convert ppm to decimal)
0.0004 – 0.0003: is the difference, aka the change
/0.0003: expressed as a % of the original value
(the leading zeros cancel, or you can still them, it matters not)
(4-3)/3 = (the change) / the original value = the % change
33.3%
geeesh…..
btw, this was done in Excel. Go tell Bill Gates he doesn’t know math……
kenw says:
May 22, 2014 at 2:33 pm
The difference is 0.0001, which, expressed as a percentage is 0.01%.
Nature and other papers have obviously noticed that CAGW has no future (they are not idiots), but you cannot backtrack and save face at the same time.
So, expect lip service paid to CAGW for a long time, even while published articles go in the opposite direction.
@David Ball
May 22 at 2:41 pm
The difference is 0.0001, which, expressed as a percentage is 0.01%.
OK, I get it. You think a percentage change is exactly the same as the absolute difference in concentration times 100. I guess when you define your own terms you can get any answer you want.
As I stated already 0.01% is the difference between the two percentages, not the percentage increase. Atmospheric CO2 has increased by 33.3% from 0.03% to 0.04%. Anyone who is going to bother to read anything about global warming that contains any numbers at all will understand this. Claiming the percentage increase is 0.01% is fodder for those who criticise WUWT.
Hey, I cannot believe that half of the comments about this post relate to the difference between “percentage” and “percentage points”.
Of course when an opinion was supported by 40% of the population and now 60% of people support it, we have a “50% increase” in its support, AND / OR a “20 percentage points” increase of the same.
C’mon, guys, let’s not spend time and energy in such things.
Can we move on, now?
Wayne Delbeke says:
May 22, 2014 at 11:49 am
(Age must be making me cynical).
And in your case age has made you wise.
Quite aside from the ado about percentages, the biggest question that occurred to me reading the top article was: Huh? I plot:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1960/to:2015
and try to see some feature in this bland, monotonic curve that demands explanation. But I fail.
Whatever mechanism they claim to have discovered doesn’t appear to be new, or rapidly varying, or exciting — given this data. Don’t get me wrong — I’m far from convinced that the Bern model is correct. But that’s because there is a near-infinity of possible explanatory models that can fit the data linked above, and there is absolutely no structure in the data that can be used to differentiate between them. That means one has to construct a teeter-totter argument on top of Bayesian priors and assumptions or independent observations (like this study) that, in the end, don’t really change the curve compared to other sets of assumptions that already do pretty well explaining it. This gives one little chance of falsifying (in a Bayesian sense, altering posterior probabilities) the assumptions of any one of the hypotheses.
What is needed is for a nice, big bolus of CO_2 to be injected into the system all at once — a good sized meteor strike on a large coal field that burns all of the coal at once, for example. The closest we’ve come to that is the first Gulf War, when Iraq torched a huge set of oil wells which then burned unchecked for weeks.
The really interesting thing is that the only real structure I can see in the plot above is that it flattens, very slightly, for almost a decade after the Gulf War. This sadly confounds any effort to try to learn something about the relaxation times of the underlying processes, at least if one reasonably assumes that there should be a POSITIVE direct response to burning roughly 800,000 cubic meters of oil a day for around 200 days — roughly 150 megatons of oil. Of course, this is still only about 1% of the annual consumption of oil and it was delivered on annual time scales, so it still doesn’t count as a proper bolus, so the dip is likely a coincidence (and due to unknown causes as I can’t imagine that consumption of carbon based fuels had anything like a mirroring flattening over that interval, and if anything temperatures were sharply rising towards the 1998 ENSO event).
So I guess that the top article is “interesting”, but I don’t see it as being at all relevant to any assertions of future warming or lack thereof.
rgb
Ok, I get it. You guys think a change from 0.03% to 0.04% is an increase of 33.3%. I guess when you define your own terms you can get any answer you want.
David Ball says:
May 22, 2014 at 3:09 pm
How about looking at it this way? The top two GHGs are H2O & CO2; the others occur in such minute quantities as not to matter for this purpose. Average concentration in the air of H2O is about 30,000 ppm or more; of CO2 now ~400, up from ~300 over roughly the past century. The GHG gain from 30,300 to 30,400 ppm equals 0.33%. Scary!
David Ball – Please allow me to clear this up for you: At 0.03% of atmosphere, there are about 2,300Gt of CO2. At 0,04% of atmosphere, there are about 3,100Gt of CO2, ie, around 30% more. Note that the 30% relates to the “2,300Gt” base. An increase from 0.03% to 0,04% is similarly an increase of about 30%, because it relates to the “0,03%” base.
Mathematical convention requires that you state explicitly if your comparison of two percentages relates to the original base, by using the term “percentage points” or explicitly referrring to the base. Thus, while an increase from 0.03% to 0,04% is an increase of around 30%, it can also be expressed as an increase of 0.01 percentage points, or as 0.01% of the atmosphere.
Now, to get back to the real subject, I see no numbers. By how much does this arid-land growth change the 3,100Gt of atmospheric CO2? I suspect that is negligible.
[Sorry about commas instead of dec pts in the prev post – my keyboard has now shrunk to the point where I can’t distinguish them. I think it’s caused by climate change.]