Ed suggested this would be a good addition to the new WUWT CO2 reference page, and I agree, but thought it should get front page attention first. It is a condensed version of an essay published earlier this year. – Anthony
Guest essay by Ed Hoskins
The following calculations and graphics are based on information on national CO2 emission levels worldwide published by BP[1]in June 2014 for the period from 1965 up until 2013. The data is well corroborated by previous similar datasets published by the CDIAC, Guardian [2] and Google up until 2009 [3]. These notes and figures provide a short commentary on that CO2 emissions history.
The contrast between the developed and developing worlds is stark in terms of their history of CO2 emissions and the likely prognosis for their future CO2 output.
Since 1980 CO2 emissions from the developed world have shown virtually no increase, whereas the developing world has had a fourfold increase since 1980: that increase is accelerating.
Similarly the CO2 output per head is declining in the developed world whereas it is accelerating the developing world.
These notes divide the world nations into seven logical groups with distinct attitudes to CO2 control:
developed
§ United States of America, attempting CO2 emissions control under Obama’s EPA.
§ The European Union, (including the UK), currently believers in action to combat Global Warming.
§ Japan, the former Soviet Union, Canada and Australia are developed nations, rejecting controls on CO2 emissions.
developing
§ South Korea, Iran, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia and Taiwan: more advanced developing nations, still developing rapidly, (KR IR ZA MX SA BR ID TW).
§ China and Hong Kong: developing very rapidly.
§ India: developing rapidly from a low base.
§ Rest of World (~160 Nations): developing rapidly from a low base.
In summary the current CO2 emission and emissions per head position in 2013 was as follows:
These graphs of total CO2 emission history show that up until 2013:
§ There is stabilisation or reduction of emissions from developed economies since 1980.
§ The USA, simply by exploiting shale gas for electricity generation, has already reduced its CO2 emissions by some 9.5% since 2005[4]. That alone has already had more CO2 emission reduction effect than the entire Kyoto protocol[5] [6].
§ CO2 emissions from the developed economies rejecting action on CO2 have hardly grown since 2005.
§ The European Union (27) has reduced its CO2 emissions by ~14% since 2005.
§ CO2 emissions from the developing world as a whole overtook the developed world in 2007 and are now a third larger than the developed world’s CO2 emissions.
§ there has been a very rapid escalation of Chinese CO2 emissions since the year 2000[7].
§ China overtook the USA CO2 emissions in 2006, and Chinese emissions are now ~62% greater than the USA, the escalation in Chinese CO2 emissions continues. Chinese emissions have grown by +75% since 2005 and China continues to build coal fired powerstations to supply the bulk of its electricity as demand grows.
§ India has accelerating emissions[8], growing from a low base by +63% since 2005. India too is building coal fired powerstations to increase the supply of electricity as 25% of its population still has no access to electric power.
§ there is inexorable emissions growth from the Rest of the World economies, from a low base, they have grown by +30% since 2005.
So any CO2 emissions reduction achieved by the Developed Nations will be entirely negated by the increases in CO2 emissions from Developing Nations.
Probably more significant than the total CO2 emissions output is the comparison of the emissions/head for the various nation groups.
§ The EU(27) even with active legal measures have maintained a fairly level CO2 emission rate but have managed to reduce their CO2 emissions/head by ~16% since 2005. Much of the recent downward trend is largely attributed to their declining economies.
§ The USA has already reduced its CO2 emissions/head by ~22% since in 2005, mainly arising from the use of shale gas for electricity generation. And now Mr Putin is actively involved in backing anti-fracking campaigns in Europe so as to protect his large Gasprom market and to have an energy stranglehold on the West, as he has demonstrated recently in the Ukraine[9].
§ Russia, Japan, Canada and Australia have only grown their emissions/head by ~1% since 2005.
§ China’s CO2 emissions/head have increased ~11 fold since 1965. China overtook the world-wide average in 2003 and surpassed the rapidly developing nations in 2006. China’s emissions / head at 7.0 tonnes / head are now approaching the level of the EU(27) nations.
§ India’s CO2 emissions have grown by 4.7 times over the period and are now showing recent modest acceleration. That increasing rate is likely to grow substantially with increased use of coal for electricity generation[10].
§ The eight rapidly developing nations have shown consistent growth from a low base in 1965 at 5.6 times. They exceeded the world average CO2 emissions level in 1997.
§ The Rest of the World (~160 Nations), 36% of world population, have grown CO2 emissions consistently but only by 2.6 times since 1965, this group will be the likely origin of major future emissions growth as they strive for better standards of living.
§ Overall average world-wide emissions/head have remained relatively steady but with early growth in the decade from 1965. It amounts to 1.6 times since 1965.
When the participating nations particularly EU(27) are compared with Chinese CO2 emissions/head, an interesting picture arises:
§ Chinese CO2 emissions at 7.01mt/head for its 1.3 billion population are already ~43% greater than the worldwide average. Those emissions are still growing fast.
§ At 5.5mt/head, France, with ~80% nuclear electricity generation, has the lowest CO2 emission rates in the developed world and is at only ~12% above the world-wide average.
§ China’s CO2 emissions/head exceeded France’s CO2 emissions/head in 2009 and are now 22% higher.
§ China’s emissions per head are now very close to the UK and are rapidly approaching the EU(27) average.
§ The UK at 7.2mt/head is now only ~48% higher than the world-wide average and only about ~3% higher than China. So China is likely to overtake the UK in the near future.
§ Germany, one of the largest CO2 emitters in Europe, has emissions/head ~100% higher than the worldwide average and is still ~49% higher than China. Germany’s emissions/head have increased recently because they are now burning much larger quantities of brown coal to compensate them for the “possibly irrational” closure of their nuclear generating capacity.
This must question the logic of Green attitudes in opposing Nuclear power. Following the Fukushima disaster, the German government position of rapidly eliminating nuclear power in a country with no earthquake risk and no chance of tsunamis should not be tenable.
If CO2 emissions really were a concern to arrest Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming / Man-made Climate Change, these results particularly from France show starkly the very real advantage of using Nuclear power for electricity generation.
The underdeveloped nations are bound to become progressively more industrialised and more intensive users of fossil fuels to power their development and widen their distribution of electricity.
This point is re-emphasised above, by cross comparing the annual growth in emissions from China and India with the full annual emissions from key European countries. Chinese CO2 emissions growth in some years can exceed the total UK and French emissions level and even approach the German level on occasions.
REFERENCES:
[1] http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/31/world-carbon-dioxide-emissions-country-data-co2#data
[3] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdFF1QW00ckYzOkZqcUhnNDVlSWc&hl=en#gid=1
[4] http://www.c3headlines.com/2013/07/a-fracking-revolution-us-now-leads-world-in-co2-emission-reductions-.html
[5]http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/project_syndicate/2012/09/thanks_to_fracking_u_s_carbon_emissions_are_at_the_lowest_levels_in_20_years_.html
[6] http://www.oilandgasonline.com/doc/u-s-fracking-has-carbon-more-whole-world-s-wind-solar-0001
[7] http://www.pbl.nl/en/news/pressreleases/2011/steep-increase-in-global-co2-emissions-despite-reductions-by-industrialised-countries
[8] http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-06-10/global-warming/29642669_1_kyoto-protocol-second-commitment-period-
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10911942/Russia-in-secret-plot-against-fracking-Nato-chief-says.html
[10] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/India-invokes-right-to-grow-to-tell-rich-nations-of-its-stand-on-future-climate-change-negotiations/articleshow/36724848.cms
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The first two graphs say strongly that screaming about global warming is GENOCIDE.
Alarmists hate human beings–and anything else alive. Notice again that they point to melting glaciers as a disaster. What do those pictures show? Trees! What a disaster. catastrophe. something is alive.
I am a carbon-based life form; I LIKE life (most of the time, anyway) and my purpose is making MORE living things.
Only “fossil” fuels make more living things on Earth. They are a BLESSING.
Nuclear reactors threaten the well-being of Earth’s creatures. The challenge is NOT technology. Those problems have been (almost) solved, except for waste. The problem in nukes–including Thorium–is psychology. Nuclear engineers are LIED to about the dangers. A dozen years ago, I read a library book on nuclear safety, written for the industry. It said two people died at Chernobyl. Two plant engineers were exposed to thousands of roentgens and died almost immediately, 30 more were exposed to levels over 600 roentgens; two survived. Thousands of clean-up crew died, and there were many, many thyroid cancers. It is guessed that a million people died from Chernobyl. The Russian economy and life expectancy dropped at that point also, and the loss of a little bit of electricity cannot account for that.
I also read a book that year by a Russian nuclear scientist about the reactor design. I think it was a sound design, and the industry wants to avoid facing the real issues by blaming a design they need not use gain.
Chernobyl happened when a test was being prepared that should have been done before the reactor was started in the first place. It was skipped because of enormous Soviet incentives to open the plant on time, and now they were shutting the reactor down for refueling–a good time to do the test. [b]Almost every safety system was shut down for that test.[/b] Only–things went wrong and caused delays. You’ve probably heard that there was gruesome operator error in that disaster. Indeed. Chernobyl happened at two o’clock in the morning to a day crew that was up very very late the second night running. I am sure Soviet nuclear people were lied to about the dangers as well. They took chances.
I have another reason for opposing nuclear energy that you have never heard before. It is our starship fuel and should not be wasted here on Earth. Both the soviets and the Americans developed nuclear-driven spaceships during the moon race. The only nations with nuclear power plants should be those with a space program, currently the US, Russia, and China.
England and Israel should join America’s space program, and the rest of Europe should join Russia’s. The rest of the world should join China’s. We should have a three-way race for building two each nuclear-powered shuttles from Earth-orbit to moon-orbit and Earth-orbit to Mars orbit with some fancy prize for the winners. The shuttles throw down
materials for building a moon colony and a Mars colony. Russia picks their sites first as a prize for Sputnik, America chooses second as a prize for Apollo 11, and China chooses third. Low elevations are not allowed on Mars, because we are going to mine the asteroid belts for water and build seas on Mars.
These nations need nuclear engineers. America should be building two nuclear plants each decade, no more and no less.
Ed suggested this would be a good addition to the new WUWT CO2 reference page, and I agree, but thought it should get front page attention first. It is a condensed version of an essay published earlier this year. – Anthony
Ed Hoskins – British Petroleum Statistical Review – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Ed Hoskins – British Petroleum Statistical Review – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Ed Hoskins – British Petroleum Statistical Review – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Ed Hoskins – British Petroleum Statistical Review – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Ed Hoskins – British Petroleum Statistical Review – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Ed Hoskins – British Petroleum Statistical Review – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Ed Hoskins – British Petroleum Statistical Review – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
I’ve added a new section to the WUWT CO2 Reference Page, “Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions By Geography/Country” and included Ed’s graphics below there. Ed, if you have any suggested changes to the graphs or labels, please let us know.
1965 – 2013 CO2 Emissions Developed World vs. Developing World:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
1980 – 2013 CO2 Emissions and Emission Per Capita/Head Developed World vs. Developing World:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
1965 – 2013 Cumulative CO2 Emissions Developed World vs. Developing World:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
1965 – 2013 CO2 Emissions For Selected Countries:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
1965 – 2013 CO2 Emissions Per Capita/Head For Selected Countries:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
1965 – 2013 CO2 Emissions Per Capita/Head For Selected Countries:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
1965 – 2013 Annual CO2 Emissions Growth vs. Total For Selected Countries:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="542"]
Thanks
Is there a trend graph somewhere showing relative proportions of all major sources of CO2 including man made? If we contribute 3-4% then where does the remainder come from?
Steve P says:
August 3, 2014 at 5:04 pm
Definitions vary, and not all reports have been accurate. But, bottom line, how many people died? Only one death potentially due to direct radiation exposure (and, they’re not really sure of direct attribution for that one), 6 people who exceeded lifetime dosage guidelines (for which, there is really no particularly sound basis), and a few hundred who got higher than usual doses. Compared to the 15,000 or so who died or went missing from the earthquake and tsunami itself… pffft…
Compared to the number of people who experience respiratory failure every year because of air pollution from fossil fuel combustion, not really many at all. Not really all that many even compared to the number in China who have been poisoned by the toxic waste from manufacture of solar cells.
Compared to the number of highway deaths every year, miniscule. I live about 20 miles from a Gen II reactor which supplies power to my region. I’m far more worried every time I get on the highway than I am about that. There are risks all over the place in modern industrial society. Fixating on nuclear power as a threat, when other activities we routinely engage in carry far greater risk, is irrational.
Bart@6:38pm says
You seem unconcerned to have been found presenting such twisted tales as facts.
E.M.Smith says:
August 3, 2014 at 2:37 pm
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In search of an honest man. Thanks for the on topic statement that is a great reflection of how it is, not how it should be …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope
mpainter says:
August 3, 2014 at 7:01 pm
Why do you have this irrational fear? Why do you think there is no difference between the generations? You’re like the first caveman warning others that fire is bad, and we should just avoid it no matter what precautions we take. “Hey, Og: talk to me when you have Gen XLVII fire.” It’s ridiculous.
It was a freaking 9.0 earthquake, guys. And, today’s stuff is better, and tomorrow’s will be even better. Get a grip.
There is another aspect to all this which I find curious. The claim is mankind’s emission amounting to about 4% of natural emissions is causing atmospheric CO2 levels to continuously ramp up, doubling in about a century and even if we stopped emitting right now the elevated levels would remain for 1000 years or more. That implies a completely open loop system, no stabilising feedback. After all, the output variable is atmospheric CO2 and how much feedback does it take for a 100% change in the output variable to change the input balance by 4%. Yet the same people claim CO2 levels were stable for 10,000 years before mankind started emitting. That means emission and absorption were exactly balanced to better than 0.01% for the preceeding 10,000 years (if 4% gives a 280ppm change in 100 years for a linear system with no feedback 0.01% over 10,000 years would give 70ppm change). Really!!! A natural system with all the vagaries remains balanced to 1 part in 10,000 or better. What about volcano’s, were they part of the emission/absorption balance? How does that work given the variation in size and timing of erruptions? Did such a precarious balance come about by pure chance? After all the slight change in either the emission or absorption processes in the absence of feedback would cause the atmospheric CO2 levels to either ramp down to 0 or up to Venus type levels. Was it maybe set by god?
Then again, the NASA satellites show a 30% greening of the planet in the mid latitudes. Greening means more plant matter and part of that plant matter is fixed carbon. Where did the additional carbon come from and why is greening occuring? The cabon could not have come from the atmosphere and the extra growth could not have been from increased atmospheric CO2 because that would be negative feedback and we just declared there is no feedback. Or are we maybe saying the increased carbon absorbed is balanced by more carbon emitted by decaying vegetation in which case one can say the same of all vegetation on Earth with the conclusion that vegetation on earth emits as much CO2 as it absorbs. That of course means there is no mechanism to absorb animal emissions and as we have declared atmospheric CO2 levels have been stable for 10,000 years there must be no animal emissions and hence there must be no animal life on earth.
A bit flippant? Probably but when a proposition is so absurd, “reduco ad absurdum” seems to be the only answer and in this case the required step is a miniscule one.
nc says:
August 3, 2014 at 7:47 am
“Pamela well put. I have found it interesting that all this bs about man’s c02 emissisions always leaves out the ratio between anthropogenic and natural…..”
That ratio is quite well known, though it’s very inconvenient for the global warming cult.
Nature emits roughly 30 times more CO2 than mankind. So, if CO2 is a pollutant, Nature is by far the biggest polluter.
It does seem odd that CO2 has increased by around 50% after mankind increased total emissions by just 3%, particularly as the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is probably just a few years.
In the BBC Horizon program a few years ago (“Science Under Attack”) the NASA climate scientist told an outrageous lie. As the main part of his ‘proof’ of global warming, he stated that mankind emitted 7 times more CO2 than Nature. The sad thing is that the great majority of the audience wouldn’t know any better and would simply assume he was telling the truth.
How appropriate that his ‘proof’ should depend on an outrageous and completely provable lie.
And, yes, science is under attack. But the attack doesn’t come from the sceptics, who are fighting to regain the integrity of science. The attack comes from scientists who care more about their own vested interests and green fantasies.
Chris
Slightly off-topic but I’m not sure where else to comment: “Diesel ‘deadlier than petrol'”, http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/article1396924.ece
“YEARS of official efforts to encourage motorists to switch to diesel cars have backfired spectacularly, according to new evidence from government scientists.
They have found that the engines are responsible for most of the pollution that is causing 29,000 premature deaths a year in Britain and which has left the country facing legal action by the European Commission.”
All this to reduce CO2 “pollution”. I wonder how many premature deaths the extra CO2 from petrol engined cars would have caused had the car buyers bought petrol engined instead of diesel; anyone good with stats care to suggest a number?
I don’t think it is fair to say ‘that increase is accelerating’ looking at the first chart.
Chris, I believe he was referring to the yearly increase in the CO2 measurement. It is thought that most of that increase is anthropogenic, meaning that were it not for humans, CO2 would show a flat up and down rhythm. I disagree with that notion but I think that is where that scientist got such a statistic.
The very slight yearly increase is far too steady to be tied to the ups and downs of human industrial endeavors related to fossil fuel use. In fact, the lack of noise in the data is an odd thing in nature and is in contrast to just about everything else we measure in-situ.
That’s a good point Chris. I rarely see Henry’s law mentioned when people discuss if the increase in CO2 is manmade or natural but I think it’s potentially important. Henry’s law governs the dissolution of gases in water and states that the concentration of a gas in water is proportional to its partial pressure adjacent to the solvent. At the average surface temperature of 15C Henry’s law implies that there must exist about 50 times more CO2 in the oceans than the atmosphere. This is often described as the 1:50 ‘partitioning ratio’. This implies that if you increase CO2 in the atmosphere – when equilibrium is reached – the oceans must absorb 98% of human CO2. I have seen arguments that because of dissociation constants it takes a while for this equilibrium to be established, but if that were true then brewery manufacturers would be out of business and soda siphons would not work. Open a bottle of coke and the CO2 in the water reaches a new equilibrium with the CO2 in the air within hours as the drink goes flat. By my understanding when CO2 dissolves in a bottle of coke it dissociates into HCO3 (bicarbonate ions) and CO32 (carbonate ions) as it does in the oceans also. I have yet to see a reasonable argument as to how human CO2 can accumulate in the atmosphere for centuries without obeying the fast-equilibrium of Henry’s law. The IPCC argue that the oceans cannot absorb CO2 because of the Revelle Factor, but the Revelle Factor seems wrong to me. For one thing it appears to be discriminating between natural and human CO2. The Revelle Factor implies that at the current DIC ratio the surface oceans can only absorb ~10% of anthropogenic CO2. But according to the IPCC’s figures in AR4 the oceans are annually re-absorbing 99% of all natural CO2 they outgas. So on one hand they can only absorb a small fraction of human CO2 due to this ‘chemical back-pressure’ from the Revelle Factor but on the other hand they are re-absorbing practically all of the natural CO2 that they are outgassing. Natural CO2 obeys the fast-equilibrium of Henry’s law but human CO2 appears not to. When the IPCC tested for the Revelle Factor they re-discovered Henry’s law but deleted the results from the final IPCC report as Jeff Glassman explains: “Neither Salby nor the IPCC refers to the solubility of CO2 in water, or to Henry’s Law. In trying to rehabilitate the Revelle Factor for AR4, an IPCC author showed that it was temperature dependent, and as can be seen, resembling Henry’s coefficient for CO2 in water. Expert reviewer Nicolas Gruber explained that this dependence was a “common misconception”. Thereupon the IPCC editor deleted the figure for the final report “in order not to confuse the reader”, supposedly with uncomfortable solubility effects”.
Sorry for the large wall of text ^^^
michael hammer says:
August 3, 2014 at 9:37 pm
“A natural system with all the vagaries remains balanced to 1 part in 10,000 or better.”
Spot on. I’ve been pounding that drum for some time. A model of a rock solid equilibrium, with simultaneous high sensitivity such that our puny emissions send it right off, is completely inconsistent with basic stability theory.
All atmospheric gases: 100.00%
Total CO2: 000.04% (now +/- 390 ppm so this is a generous estimate)
Estimated change in atmospheric CO2 since onset of the Industrial Revolution:
000.012% (+120 ppm, or 280 ppm pre-industrial era increased to now 400 ppm or so)
And the problem is……………………………………..what?????????
The problem with academic classification of countries like this is that developed and developing are not complimentary categories. They should use undeveloped and developed, or undeveloping/static/developing. Or better yet, three or more GDP per capita classes.
Another problem is countries never move out of the undeveloped category. Why is S Korea there? Taiwan had chip foundries in the 1990s. China recently caught up with them.
There is an article in the Aug issue of “Chemistry world” ( house journal of the Royal society of Chemistry) by a certain James Hansen whose name may be familiar to some of you .
It is written from a smog encircled Beijing and argues for the return of nuclear energy to create a carbon- free world .
He complains of the loss of US nuclear research into fast breeders due to decisions by Carter and Clinton primarily and points out that just one of the 2 AP-1000 nuclear plants being built in China by Westinghouse yields as much electricity as 10 of the Ivanpah solar plants recently opened in the US South West , with a much lower land footprint.
The article is entitled , with to my mind a touch of unconscious irony: ” The energy to fight injustice”
chipstero7 says:
August 4, 2014 at 7:46 am
I rarely see Henry’s law mentioned when people discuss if the increase in CO2 is manmade or natural but I think it’s potentially important.
It is important, but in a different way than you see it:
Henry’s Law is for pressure differences, not for quantities. It doesn’t matter if the amounts in the (deep) oceans are 50 times that in the atmosphere, it matters what the pressure difference is between CO2 in the atmosphere and CO2 in the ocean surface.
Take a Coke bottle of 0.5, 1 and 1.5 liter, shake them at the same temperature and if they are filled from the same batch, you will find hardly any difference in pressure under the screw cap.
Currently the pressure in the atmosphere, as area weighted average, is slightly higher than in the ocean surfaces. That means that in average more CO2 is entering the oceans than is released by the oceans:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml and following pages
Further, while the ocean surface is quite fast equilibrating with the atmosphere, the deep oceans exchanges are quite limited. The ocean surface can absorb only 10% of the change in the atmosphere, due to constraints in buffering (the Revelle/buffer factor), that is about 0.5 GtC/year of the 9 GtC emissions. That factor is in fact how much more CO2 can dissolve in seawater than in fresh water: in fresh water only 1% of the atmospheric change shows up, due to the low pH of the solution and no buffering.
No problem for the deep oceans, but the exchange rate is much slower and the change in pressure difference over time only shows some 3 GtC/year extra uptake by the deep oceans.
The difference between the huge seasonal exchanges (mainly from the ocean surface) and the uptake of extra CO2 is that the seasonal exchanges are temperature dependent, while the extra uptake is pressure dependent. Temperature increases drives CO2 out of the ocean surface at high speed, but up to maximum 17 ppmv/°C before reaching a new equilibrium (yes, Henry’s Law). Because the temperature change is only over half a year and vegetation acts in opposite way, the amplitude is about 5 ppm/°C, where the (NH extra-tropical) vegetation is dominant, not the oceans. But still the exchanges are huge. The difference after a full seasonal cycle is what matters for any removal, and that is mainly pressure (difference) dependent, less temperature dependent.
The remaining difference between human emissions and what is found as increase in the atmosphere is taken away by (land) plants (sea plants have plenty of CO2 available): some 1 GtC/year:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
That makes that about halve of the extra CO2 induced by humans is taken away (as mass, not as original molecules) by different other reservoirs. Not fast enough to remove all extra CO2 within short time, but fast enough to follow temperature over MWP-LIA or ice ages.
The estimate of the average e-decay rate of any extra CO2 in the atmosphere is over 50 years:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm or a half life time of ~40 years.
Much faster than the IPCC hundreds to thousands of years, as these are based on the Bern model, which implies a saturation of the deep oceans, for which currently is not the slightest indication.
michael hammer says:
August 3, 2014 at 9:37 pm
That implies a completely open loop system, no stabilising feedback. After all, the output variable is atmospheric CO2 and how much feedback does it take for a 100% change in the output variable to change the input balance by 4%. Yet the same people claim CO2 levels were stable for 10,000 years before mankind started emitting.
That is a matter of decay rate: a decay rate of ~52 years (~40 years half life time) is too slow to accommodate for the human emissions, but by far fast enough to accommodate for the hundreds of years MWP-LIA transition or the thousands of years glacial-interglacial transitions. Even if the latter gives a change of ~100 ppmv, the rate of change was not more than 0.02 ppmv/year. Doesn’t need a huge feedback…
The natural short term year by year variability is around +/- 1 ppmv over the past 55 years, but averaging out after 2-3 years. No big deal from that. Long term changes were around 8 ppmv/°C and mainly deep ocean dominated.
While volcanoes were huge players in certain periods of time (Deccan Traps), they aren’t today. Even the Pinatubo eruption doesn’t show up in the CO2 record, except strongly negative: more CO2 uptake (probably by more photosynthesis due to diffuse sunlight).
In summary: there is a quite effective feedback by the deep oceans and vegetation, but both need time to remove the extra CO2 out of the atmosphere…
Pam;
We need a letter- writing campaign to thank the Chinese for their contributions to near- and mid-term plant growth, notably in their own arid regions, and to encourage them to redouble their efforts. cc the newspapers and EPA.