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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Thanks, Richard, one more question, so any rise or fall in in ocean sea surface temperatures will cause a short term change in atmospheric CO2 levels, but you are saying the biosphere will sequester that additional CO2? On the plot I provided, if you look at the 1998 El-Nino event you can see the warming trend begin and the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels follows within a few months. But when the El-Nino ends and sea surface temperatures drop a year or so later, CO2 levels fall to a level relative to the temperature drop. It would seem if the biosphere sequestered more CO2 when the levels were maximum during the peak of the El-Nino, they should have dropped to a lower level than they were before the El-Nino began.
Well, what does everyone who challenged me think of the responses by milodonharlani and Mike Jonas?
If you think this isn’t an important point, you are woefully uninformed about the green propaganda in the MSM, the alarmists blogs, and the general public’s lack of knowledge and lack of information on this subject.
It is you who are doing a disservice to this blog by capitulating on alarmist math.
“Alarmist math”? Is that something like “Jewish physics”? Wow, again I read something that leaves me flabbergasted.
Look, dude, language is this nifty thing used for communication. Trouble is, it only works when everybody speaks the same one. Mathematical language has the advantage of being comparatively independent of the nuances and vagaries of human language, but it still only works if everybody speaks the same one. So let’s see what the dictionaries (which were not secretly written by “Alarmists” decades ago just so they could be used to corrupt the minds of modern voters) say:
http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Percentage-Increase
http://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/percentage-change.html
http://www.mathgoodies.com/lessons/percent/change.html
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/sets/select/dm_percent_increase.html
(note that this is around 20-25 separate links, all with the same answer)
http://www.purplemath.com/modules/percntof.htm
and I could go on, and on, and on, because this is literally high school algebra. Go find your high school algebra textbook, look this up, and you will find that “percent increase”, “percent decrease”, “percent change” are all given by:
This usage is consistent in the press when speaking of non-climate things like taxes — if you search you can find e.g. articles describing the change in local tax rates from $36 per $100,000 of property valuation to $37 per $100,000 of property valuation as a 2.7% increase (do the math), not a 0.001% increase which is what you claim is the “non-alarmist” mathematically correct statement.
It is perfectly easy to make statements in English — and mathematics — about not the “percent increase” which already has a precise meaning — but about the absolute change in concentration, or the absolute change in tax rates, or the absolute change in percentage in general. Oh, wait, this was in your high school math text too:
http://www.math.umb.edu/~joan/MATHQ114/change.htm
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100422104537AA9jWX4
http://www.acponline.org/clinical_information/journals_publications/ecp/janfeb00/primer.htm
This last one is especially useful, as it was written for physicians who can easily be just as clueless as you appear to be. I quote a very relevant passage from the article:
Both expressions have their place. Without any qualification, both statements (“reduced the risk by 1%” and “reduced the risk by 50%”) could be construed as representing either an absolute or relative difference. But most important, note the difference in “feel.” A statement of “reduced the risk by 1%” does feel like a smaller effect than “reduced the risk by 50%.”
This is, of course, your objection, to the “feel” of public statements made without careful qualification of whether or not it is absolute or relative percentage that is being discussed. Indeed, this is highly important when (for example) examining outcomes using Bayes theorem, because a 50% change in relative risk in a disease that has a 0.0001% prevalence (that is, a change from 0.0001% to e.g. 0.00005%) is for most of us utterly ignorable without some good reason to think that we are in a subcategory of the population with a much higher prevalence. However, these errors are basically never made in published papers because the referees (should and usually do) catch them. Statements are made that are utterly unambiguous, often presenting the actual numbers as well as the computed percentage changes. This is absolutely true in climate science, where only complete idiots don’t know that CO_2 is a very tiny fraction of the total atmosphere and that oxygen itself isn’t even close to being 30% of the atmosphere let alone CO_2. This is basically high school science.
So the “burning issue” you are worried about just doesn’t exist. No scientist or even moderately well educated lay person is going to do a wrong computation based on “30% increase” being interpreted — incorrectly — as meaning “going from 0.03% to 30.03%”. Only a complete idiot is going to make the double error of misusing the high school algebraic definition of percent increase and be so clueless about high school science that they think that there could be 30% CO_2 in an atmosphere that is only 20% O_2 to start with.
Now, could you please stop using up valuable bandwidth arguing about something that a) doesn’t matter; and b) is without question incorrect. If you want to start a thread on the dialectic of climate change, by all means, write an article and submit it to Anthony, but don’t hijack a science thread to promote “denier doublethink” just because you want to pretend that an absolute change of 0.01% cannot possibly have any effect. Or, if you want to convince people that an absolute change of 0.01% cannot possibly have any effect, write a science article and attempt to prove it, but — if you manage to get Anthony to post it, which you won’t unless it is excruciatingly well documented and filled with really good math — be prepared for me and several others familiar with the science to eviscerate the article and probably in at least some cases make fun of you in the process.
rgb
Mod help, please. Friggin’ $#&@ur momisugly closing tags. Could you please close the italic tag right after “all given by:” in the previous post.
rgb
[Done. ~ mod.]
As mentioned previously Australia is a carbon sink yet the idiots in the last government introduced a carbon tax and other stuff that costs a motza. The top of Australia receives enough rainfall in the monsoons to green the entire land mass. Green BS has prevented the capture of said water.
Most of the soil in inland desert Australia is of good quality just add water. Most of my long life I have advocated doing something to make our land blossom, for we do not lack sunshine.
Sunshine, water and CO2 is all it needs, our new government has a plan for a few hundred dams in our tropical north to create a bread basket for Asia, that would be a start.We have an abundance of water falling on our land, we just need to over ride the green crap.
If we do bloom our deserts we would welcome the CO2 output of our neighbours as fertiliser.
LT:
Thankyou for your response at May 23, 2014 at 5:25 am in response to my attempt an answer for you here that was at May 23, 2014 at 12:39 am.
Your response says and asks
.
It is not that simple.
And nobody understands the system behaviour sufficiently to make a confident assertion of what “should” happen in relation to ENSO or any other change.
Any change in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) will induce a change to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Each year the oceans net emit more than an order of magnitude more CO2 than the annual increase of CO2 in the air, and they sequester it back later in the year. Hence, at least in theory, this mechanism alone could induce a rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration which is an order of magnitude higher than has happened since 1958 (when CO2 measurements began at Mauna Loa).
However, any change to atmospheric CO2 concentration will vary all the other effects listed (and numbered) in my above post at May 22, 2014 at 11:59 pm which is here.
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.
Processes 1 to 5 are obviously coupled by mass balances. Our paper (which discussed this) 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.
Modeling this system is a difficult because so little is known concerning the rate equations. However, some things can be stated from the empirical data.
At present the yearly increase of the anthropogenic emissions is approximately 0.1 GtC/year. The natural fluctuation of the excess consumption (i.e. consumption processes 1 and 3 minus production processes 2 and 4) is at least 6 ppmv (which corresponds to 12 GtC) in 4 months. This is more than 100 times the yearly increase of human production, which strongly suggests that the dynamics of the natural processes listed as 1-5 can cope easily with the human production of CO2. A serious disruption of the system may be expected when the rate of increase of the anthropogenic emissions becomes larger than the natural variations of CO2. But the above data indicates this is not possible.
The accumulation rate of CO2 in the atmosphere (1.5 ppmv/year which corresponds to 3 GtC/year) is equal to almost half the human emission (6.5 GtC/year). However, this does not mean that half the human emission accumulates in the atmosphere, as is often stated. There are several other and much larger CO2 flows in and out of the atmosphere. The total CO2 flow into the atmosphere is at least 156.5 GtC/year with 150 GtC/year of this being from natural origin and 6.5 GtC/year from human origin. So, on the average, 3/156.5 = ~2% of all emissions “accumulate”.
The above qualitative considerations suggest the carbon cycle cannot be very sensitive to relatively small disturbances such as the present anthropogenic emissions of CO2. However, the system could be quite sensitive to temperature. So, our paper considered how the carbon cycle would be disturbed if – for some reason – the temperature of the atmosphere were to rise, as it almost certainly did between 1880 and 1940 when there was an estimated average rise of 0.5 °C in average surface temperature.
Summarising the above, I don’t know the answer to your question because there is insufficient data to say, but I have explained the complexities which prevent anybody knowing the answer to your question without much more information. Much, much more knowledge of the carbon cycle needs to be acquired. (And I do know this response is not what you wanted; sorry.)
Richard
It is time now for some reprioritization of the dwindling federal research money from the flawed and observationally deviated CGMs & ECIMs to studies of all source and sinks of carbon dioxide in the Earth Atmosphere System. Need prioritization of the Carbon Cycle in research. N’est ce pas?
John
richardscourtney says: May 22, 2014 at 11:59 pm
————————
Your list of processes, at least, left off geochemical processes that mobilize CO2 from bedrock & soils.
Complex interactions between geochemical & biological processes that mobilize CO2 from bedrock & soils. [biological production of acids, root action, etc.]
Both of these are likely associated / rate constrained by temperature and moisture.
I think it is quite interesting that CO2 measuring satellites show such significant CO2 production rates over rain forest.
BioBob:
Thankyou for your comment at May 23, 2014 at 7:07 am on my post at May 22, 2014 at 11:59 pm.
Your comment says to me
Yes, and there are also some others which I did not list.
As I said
Subsequently, at May 23, 2014 at 6:20 am, I explained the complexity of interactions between the processes which I listed.
The important point – which I keep stating – is
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
Friends:
I write to make a point which it seems is being overlooked by some participants in this thread; viz.
Flow rates are more important than “Sources” and Sinks” in the carbon cycle.
For example, deep ocean is not a “source” or “sink” of atmospheric CO2 concentration, but almost all the CO2 is in the deep ocean and, therefore, atmospheric CO2 concentration is affected by (and is probably determined by) the net rate and direction of flow between ocean surface layer and deep ocean.
Richard
richardscourtney says: May 23, 2014 at 7:34 am
————–
Thanks for responding & helping with my failure of reading comprehension, heh.
I agree with your points (and their importance to this whole endeavor) except to ponder how anyone could determine which processes are most significant, given the sad state of pertinent attempts at measurement vs the breadth of measurements required. At any rate, I have always wondered about the vast global scale of acidic precipitation, both ‘natural’ (carbonic acid, etc) plus human induced, added to those geochemical processes acting on carbonate bedrock & soils hidden from obvious view. Yet carbon cycling studies call these effects minimal. This conclusion does not seem intuitive or likely to me simply because of the global scale of such processes and abundance of such substrates.
To the extent that some plant species’ growth may be limited by CO2 partial pressure and hence altitude (ignoring temperature and precipitation constraints), a 33% increase in CO2 concentrations allows that plants which formerly grew near sea level could now grow at 3000m, and plants which were limited to 2000m could now grow at 4000m. And tropical highlands present situations where freezes are rare at 4000m. –AGF
richardscourtney says: May 23, 2014 at 7:56 am
almost all the CO2 is in the deep ocean
—————-
I agree flux rates are important when we are considering atmospheric CO2 concentration. However, water is a wonderful solvent and life can mobilize carbon from whatever source is available. Perhaps a significant amount of ‘CO2’ has been transformed into carbonate & other carbon containing sedimentary deposits versus that currently dissolved in ocean water ? And perhaps the abundance of such deposits act as a continual source and sink maintaining a certain equilibrium with ocean water and it’s contributors ? Rivers are said to be the kidneys of the world, most making their carbon deposits into the ocean.
If one leaves behind the intentionally constricted IPCC thinking and its beloved naïve carbon cycle cartoon (Bern Model of the carbon cycle), then a whole new research world on the natural sources and sinks of the carbon cycle lays bright and promising before the eyes of the independently skeptical researcher.
I suggest a very significant shift in federal research money from faulted GCMs & ECIMs to new focus on the carbon cycle’s natural sources and sinks. It seems new researchers must always have a strategy to ignore completely the journals that have shown consistent tendency toward cloaked and biased gatekeeping behaviors.
John
Richard,
Actually this was very helpful, thank you for your time. I have been asking this question for a while and you are the only one that could provide any insight whatsoever. I think it can be said with confidence that global temperatures drive atmospheric CO2 levels at all time scales, and CO2 levels are a metric that define the activity of the biosphere. The next question is “is the ratio of atmospheric CO2 molecules trapped in a million year old air bubble from Antarctica the same as a sample taken from the top of mountain in Hawaii?” 🙂
@ur momisugly richardscourtney
I like this one:
all of the six models match the empirical data. However, they provide very different ‘projections’ of future atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration for the same assumed future anthropogenic emission. And other models are probably also possible.
The ability to model the carbon cycle in such a variety of ways means that according to the available data
(1) the cause of the recent rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is not known,
(2) the future development of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration cannot be known, and
(3) any effect of future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide on the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration cannot be known.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2759764/replies?c=13
That about sums it all up. Heh
BioBob:
Thankyou for your interest. Indeed, I am pleased at the interest in carbon cycle studies in this thread: until now – excepting people taking sides between Ferdinand and Bart with me in the middle – few have expressed much interest in carbon cycle studies.
Perhaps the carbon cycle is an interest which has ‘reached its time’.
At May 23, 2014 at 8:07 am you discuss acidity within the carbon cycle. It is an interesting point.
For example. if the pH of the ocean surface layer reduced by an average of 0.1 then that change would be far too small for it to be observed, but that pH change would alter the equilibrium between ocean surface and air to provide an alteration of atmospheric CO2 greater than is claimed to have happened since the industrial revolution. And that would have happened whatever changes to anthropogenic and natural CO2 emissions had also happened.
Such a pH change could occur as a result of increased sulphate ions from deep ocean volcanism. And the sulphur-induced pH change of the ocean surface layer would not be significantly affected by the carbonate buffer.
Merely accounting sources and sinks of atmospheric CO2 would indicate nothing about such alterations to equilibria in the carbon cycle.
Richard
Thanks for the CO2 discussion. I’ve only been able to skim, but have bookmarked and will read when I have time. Lots of time.
Atmospheric CO2 considerations suffer from the failure to take account of its status as a “trace” constituent of the gas mixture. Chemical & physical behavior of “trace” substances differs, often wildly, from the parameters of the same substance, as a macro-component of the mix.
The classic Lab 101 example is the drying of clothes. The modern clothes-dryer dries fabrics down to about 4-6% moisture. At that level of water-content, no further reduction of the moisture content can be had (under the same T-P), due to fundamental changes of the physical chemistry of water, at the reduced percentage.
CO2 is plainly highly sensitive to minor fluctuations of acid-base balance, among other considerations. The best technical analogy, is that of semiconductor physics. CO2 in the atmosphere is essentially a gas-phase “dopant”, in the semiconductor sense.
To obtain any given particular solid state semiconductor materiel behavior, requires extremely precise control of component mix ratio (esp. of the dopant).
Flip it around the other way – slight changes of dopant-levels lead to large changes of macro-behavior of the bulk mix.
My guess is, CO2 behavior will prove to diverge flamboyantly for many reasons, under fine-grained variations & gradations of the ambient-anything.
Sorry, this will be a short reply as I am travelling around and don´t have access to my files, will be back on Sunday…
In short, the article is about the year by year variability and doesn´t address the increasing trend of CO2, which still is near fully human. About half of the 9 GtC per year human emissions are absorbed by nature, about 1 GtC per year by the biosphere and 3.5 GtC per year by the oceans. Both are variable and heavily influenced by short term temperature variations, but in general that levels out in 2~3 years.
More details next Sunday…
@ur momisugly richardscourtney
Yes, virtually all rain is acidic and some very much so, and the composition is pretty well known for both human and natural components. Organic compounds are quite often acidic. I haven’t seen much about the action of either on mass balance / flux of CO2 in soils, and other surface & subsurface substrates, nor is it likely to be easily distinguishable from associated biological (perhaps geochemical as well) processes. While the areal unit flux is possibly small, the surface area with such effects is global in 3 dimensions.
It is certain that the warmists think the whole carbon cycle topic so critical to our understanding of CO2 and it’s importance or lack thereof, that they (warmists) have no problem going absolutely postal on anyone who actually dares to investigate. So I wish you great felicity and my support (which is worth absolutely nothing) in the face of what would appear to be certain scientific death [snort].
When the US gov’t AGW funding is withdrawn like it has been in OZ, we can get back to science and the warmists can return to 3-card-monty, ponzi & pyramid schemes, Nigerian letters, and other pastimes that their qualifications pertain.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says: [ … ]
It’s all good!
Ferdinand Engelbeen says: May 23, 2014 at 12:42 pm
9 GtC
—————–
let me see, 6.5 Gtc they used to say versus 9 Gtc — why that’s a 38.5 % increase in such a short time – it can’t be more than a few years — we are certainly doomed. If not from CO2 then certainly by the effects of 1800 ppb methane, which is 29 times more effective as a greenhouse gas.
So what part of the estimated total global carbon cycle production is 9 Gtc ? 3% plus or minus 3% or perhaps 4% plus or minus 4%
IMO science hasn’t yet accounted for all CO2 sinks, so can’t say how long it would take for the climate system to adjust to whatever human contribution has been through deforestation, agriculture, burning fossil fuels, etc. But IMO within at most several centuries atmospheric levels will return to whatever they would be based solely upon natural temperature. Humans probably won’t always perturb the CO2 cycle to the same extent as now, not that there’s a great deal wrong with what we’re doing at present.
Bump
milodonharlani:
In your post at May 23, 2014 at 1:17 pm you say
Humans may be disturbing the carbon cycle but there is no evidence that we are.
Some people wrongly assert that ice core data is such evidence, but that is refuted by stomata data.
Richard