David Ball says: The difference is 0.0001, which, expressed as a percentage is 0.01%.
This is a dazzlingly fallacious argument. This particular fallacy is known as equivocation. You’ve used “percentage” in a different way than is ordinarily understood by humans all over the planet. The true percentage is the difference compared to the original concentration, times one hundred. What you’ve done is express the difference as a percentage of 1.0, which is utterly meaningless.

Anecdotal evidence follows. Last spring I went back to the Cooper Basin in central Australia for the first time in 15 years. Previously i worked there for 7 years. My first observation which i commented on to old colleagues still there was that there was more growth. Not just grasses which come and go with floods and droughts but shrubs and trees were lusher and proliferating. So if someone else concludes that there is CO sink out there I won’t disagree with them.

It has always bothered me why CO2 growth does not trend with emissions, using the woodfortrees app one can clearly see that CO2 growth rate appears to follow most temperature pulses. Unless I am doing something wrong.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1978/mean:12/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1978/derivative/mean:12/normalise

Yep, but Australia has always been a sink, not just because of recent rains.
‘Australia has 149 million hectares of forest. Of this, 147 million hectares is native forest, dominated by eucalypt (79%) and acacia (7%), and 1.82 million hectares is in plantations[i]. Grassland covers around 440 million hectares of land in Australia[ii]. ‘
‘ Science tells us that the range for forests with continuous canopies is about 0.5-2 tonnes of carbon per year for each hectare. Grasslands may have a similar annual rate of net carbon uptake[i], but the long-term storage of carbon per hectare of grasslands is less than that over an average hectare in woody trees. ‘
http://www.chiefscientist.gov.au/2009/12/which-plants-store-more-carbon-in-australia-forests-or-grasses/
wiki says 2012 estimated emissions 430Mt CO2.

milodonharlani:
Your post at May 22, 2014 at 6:40 pm says

As I’ve often said, until climate “science” is able to buy a clue as to the carbon dioxide sinks that exist in nature, CACA will remain voodoo at best, & probably worse than voodoo. Fundamental research remains to be done in spades before GCMs have a chance of reflecting however dimly the mere shadow of reality.

YES!!
I have been saying that in many places (e.g. WUWT, HI Conference, etc.) for many years.
Please see my above post at May 22, 2014 at 12:30 pm which is here and follow its links.
For now, I provide the CO2 sources and sinks which we considered to be most important – so we assessed – in our paper referenced in my above post.
MECHANISMS OF THE CARBON CYCLE
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 processes
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. And the rate constants are not known for most of these processes. Also, annual the rate of change to atmospheric CO2 (measured at Mauna Loa since 1958) shows small change with time (i.e. the recent rise in atmospheric CO23 concentration is approximately linear).
As I said in my above post, we demonstrated that any one of three natural mechanisms in the carbon cycle alone can each be used to account for the observed rise. Our cited paper provides six such models with three of them assuming a significant anthropogenic contribution to the cause and the other three assuming no significant anthropogenic contribution to the cause. Each of the models matches the available empirical data without use of any ‘fiddle-factor’ such as the ‘5-year smoothing’ the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses to get its model (i.e. the Bern Model) to agree with the empirical data.
So, if one of the six models of our paper is adopted then there is a 5:1 probability that the choice is wrong. And other models are probably also possible. And the six models each give a different indication of future atmospheric CO2 concentration for the same future anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide.
Data that fits all the possible causes is not evidence for the true cause. Data that only fits the true cause would be evidence of the true cause. But the above demonstrates that there is no data that only fits either an anthropogenic or a natural cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Hence, the only factual statements that can be made on the true cause are
(a) the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have an anthropogenic cause, or a natural cause, or some combination of anthropogenic and natural causes,
but
(b) there is no evidence that the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration has a mostly anthropogenic cause or a mostly natural cause.
Hence, it cannot be known what if any effect altering the anthropogenic emission of CO2 will have on the future atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Robert Brown makes the same points in his post at May 22, 2014 at 3:09 pm here when he writes concerning the Nature paper reported in the above article

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.

And he concludes his post saying

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.

which echoes the finding of our paper that I have here reported, and it is similar to the conclusion of my above post which said

I explained some of the evidence which refutes the Bern Model (i.e. the carbon cycle model used by the IPCC) during subsequent argument in that thread.
The recent paper in Nature will become very important if it induces a true consideration of the carbon cycle which is sorely needed and over the years has been prompted without success by our paper, by Salby, by and etc.

Richard