Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
From the start, Richard Lindzen, former professor of meteorology at MIT, said about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis: The consensus was reached before the research had even begun. The IPCC virtually ignored evidence that showed the hypothesis wrong, including failed predictions. Instead of revisiting their science, they moved the goal posts from global warming to climate change and recently climate disruption. Mainstream media have aided and abetted them with misleading and often completely scientifically incorrect stories. These are usually a reflection of their political bias.
A recent example appeared from the BBC, triggered by more evidence that contradicts the hypothesis, that human produced CO2 is almost the sole cause of global warming. The egregious example is the BBC report on the first images from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2). See also Anthony Watts’ report from the AGU.
Figure 1
Preliminary evidence essentially exonerates humans as the source of CO2. That is a narrative unacceptable to the IPCC and all their media supporters. As a result the BBC, whose lack of journalistic integrity and political bias, was exposed in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), are obliged to spin the evidence. One comment in the article says,
It is possible to see spikes, too, on the eastern seaboard of the US and over China. These probably include the additional emissions of CO2 that come from industrialisation.
This misinformation is contradicted by the lower than average levels over the UK and Europe. Another comment on Figure 1 says,
Also apparent are the higher concentrations over South America and southern Africa. These are likely the result of biomass burning in these regions.
This misinformation is a contradiction because the area of southern Africa is mostly grasslands and desert. How does that generate “biomass burning”? Figure 2 shows a map of the climate zones of Africa, ironically, it appears in an article pleading for financial help to deal with climate change.
Figure 2
The claim that South American levels are due to forest burning is ridiculous. At any given time, only a small area of the forest is being burned. It was higher in the past because countries like Brazil were encouraged to provide tax incentives to farmers to clear land, with help from the World Bank. The idea was that a country must have a solid agricultural base for a viable economy. The practice was stopped when the environmental finger of rainforest destruction was pointed.
In 2006 a report exposed another misconception about sources and concentrations of atmospheric gases, especially so-called greenhouse gases. Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute determined that the rainforests were a very large source of methane. Keppler,
“…was surprised when he saw signs of methane being emitted by plants he was examining in normal air. “If we were following the textbook, we would have ignored it as a mistake,” he says.”
This is not surprising, given the structure and process of a tropical rainforest. They are an illusion because the soils that sustain them are among the most unfertile in the world. People wonder why agriculture doesn’t flourish, it is because of the poor soils. Many projects have failed with this illusion.
People are familiar with deciduous and evergreen trees. The former have leaves that grow and are discarded with the seasons. Evergreens have needles that remain attached year round but are ready to begin photosynthesizing quickly, thus maximizing the short growing season. Trees in the tropical rainforest are what I call deciduous evergreens. They always have leaves but are constantly shedding and replacing them. This means the leaf litter is constantly supplied to the surface but very rapidly rots, and the tree quickly takes up the nutrients. Laterite soils underlie the rain forest.
Laterite soils are reddish subsoils found in tropical regions that are formed by the rock layer breaking down and leaching through the soil. They are rich in minerals such as iron oxides and aluminum, and most don’t support plant life or vegetation well because they dry hard and compact, and lack organic matter. Laterite deposits can be a few inches or hundreds of feet thick and are normally horizontal. When very wet, laterite soils can be cut into bricks for building.
The important soil formation factors are high temperatures and constant rainfall that literally washes out most minerals essential for plant growth. The various shades of red depend on the percentage of iron.
When the vegetation is removed the soils bake iron hard. They are also very difficult to plow because of quartz particles that wear out a steel plow very quickly. Several schemes failed over the years because they ignored the physical realities of tropical soils. The first major one was Fordlandia, an attempt during the Second World War to grow rubber in the Amazon rainforest. Rubber, a crucial wartime resource, was no longer available from Malaya. They transferred the rubber plants back to South America but farmed it without care to the soil conditions. Look at the inappropriate formal row cultivation in Figure 3.
Figure 3.
After World War II, the drive for increased agricultural production, centered on production of vegetable oil. In Britain they created the Groundnut Scheme in East Africa. Groundnut is the English term for peanut. It was also a disaster, as a 1981 article titled, “The East African Groundnut Scheme: Lessons of a Large-Scale Agricultural Failure” explains.
Another scheme built on lateritic soils without care to their limits, was the 1967 brainchild of shipping billionaire known as the Jari Project. He built a massive processing plant (Figure 4) in Japan and had it towed to Brazil to process a fast growing tree (Gmelina) for pulp and paper. The project staggered along for some years but ultimately failed.
Figure 4
I am aware that there were other factors involved in the failure, but the common denominator and primary factor was the limitations of the tropical soil.
The few people that survive in the tropical rainforest know the limitations of the soils. They developed slash and burn agriculture in which a small are is cleared and the vegetation burned to provide briefly a higher level of nutrients sufficient to grow crops for one or two years. The area is then abandoned back the rainforest.
Methane (CH4) was targeted before CO2 in the environmentalists rush to blame humans for every change detected. Much of the focus was the role of cattle that received attention from Jeremy Rifkin’s fantastical book and campaign titled “Beyond Beef”. He effectively blames cattle for all the failures of civilization.
The problem was that methane was a minute fraction of the atmosphere and greenhouse gases. Methane is 0.00017% of all atmospheric gases and only 0.36% of the total greenhouse gases. Like CO2 they have inflated the warming potential by claiming it is 20 times more effective than CO2. Despite this, it can’t be very important because in an article about methane “leaking” from the sea floor, Andrew Weaver, Lead Author and contributor on computer modelling for four of the IPCC Reports said,
“[Methane] was not considered in any of the predictions at all.”
That didn’t stop the journalist from fear mongering.
“But one thing is certain: The fact it hasn’t been factored into previous global warming predictions means forecasts even as recent as the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are too conservative.”
A disturbing remark, but not as intended. If it isn’t factored in, then it indicates all previous estimates of greenhouse effects are wrong and the effect of other variables including CO2 are overestimated.
Other sources were blamed before cows, each tied to some human cause. A 1982 Science paper argued that termite numbers were increasing commensurate with clearing of forest and bush. Disclosure of a calculation error in the numbers pushed the termites aside. Increasing beaver populations briefly became the target. Expanding wetlands resulted from reduced trapping and the consequent population explosion. Thawing permafrost is raised occasionally as a source of increased methane, but a study by Georg Delisle rejects the alarmism.
He studied time periods from the last 10,000 years when the global temperature was warmer than today for several thousand years by as much as 6°C. Ice cores that had been extracted from Antarctica and Greenland provide exact information about the composition of the atmosphere during the these warm periods. His conclusion: ‘The ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica provide no indication of any elevated release of greenhouse gases at any time even though back then a deep thawing of the permafrost when compared to today would have been the case.’ This was clear to see on the poster he used for his presentation. Obviously CO2 and methane are much more stable in the ground also when it thaws (sic).
Reports of methane bubbling up in the Arctic Ocean triggered a new spate of articles. Most stories are alarmist.
“Far more of the greenhouse gas methane is seeping from seabed deposits in the Arctic shelf into the atmosphere than previously thought.”
Some reports take a reasoned view. A New Scientist article says,
“The trouble is, nobody knows if the Arctic emissions are new, or indeed anything to do with global warming.”
The reality is they don’t know how much there is.
“Estimates of how much is out there are vague. There could be anywhere between 500 to 10,000 gigatonnes of carbon in the hydrates and another 7.5 to 400 gigatonnes in the permafrost.”
Another problem that likely influenced decisions to ignore methane was the IPCC chart depicting global levels over time (Figure 5).
Figure 5
This underscores their failed projections shown in Figure 6 from Assessment report 5 (AR5).
It’s not surprising because all greenhouse gas numbers are very crude estimates for each source. The only table, to my knowledge, that pulls together the various “source” estimates, was produced by Dr. Dietrich Koelle for 2010 data.
The error range of two natural sources, Ocean outgassing (tropical areas) and Ground bacteria, rotting and decay, exceed the total human contribution. The latter supposedly includes what goes on at the surface under the tropical rainforest. It is a vast natural composting process producing nutrients to sustain the vegetation.
The satellite data is only a surprise to the IPCC supporters, because it completely contradicts their assumptions and narrative. Once again, as it has from the start, the evidence contradicts the consensus assigned to the IPCC hypothesis. Instead of acting in a scientifically appropriate manner and re-examining their science, they misinterpret and mislead through a compliant, politically biased messenger, the mainstream media.
The Catholics are responsible, or the Jews, certainly not us red-bloodied twice-born Republicans. Hey, did you notice it is getting warmer?
Nope.
Maybe on your planet it is.
I see several recurring themes here. Two are whether rain forests are net absorbers or emitters of gases, and the same thing for the African Savannah. From our basic ecology class we remember this: Once any ecosystem becomes fully mature and attains the status of a “climax community”, it does not change any further. That means no added or reduced biomass, no source or sink for gases, or anything else for that matter. To sum it up, there is no change of anything over time. So we can say dX/dt = 0, always, at least on an annual basis. This is where X = anything you want, annualized.
So we can say for the African savanna, CO2 production by termites must be offset by biomass production. The same can be said for the tropical rain forests. They can not be net sources or sinks of anything, unless you set them on fire. But if you did that, the forest would not be a climax community anymore. None of this is magic, just mass balance.
It will be interesting to see how the mass balance for various regions dominated by climax communities works out after the satellite has been up for a year.
Pssst…little secret…there are NO CLIMAX COMMUNITIES.
The environment is DYNAMIC and if it wasn’t, it would be dead. Climax community is just another over simplification.
Biomass burning tends to be associated with fires. Strangely enough the Aqua and Terra mapping of fires during October pretty much overlaps the strongest CO2 emissions in the OCO map.
Why send up a satellite that passes over head every day to get ‘dynamic’ data, and then release an image which is an aggregate of six weeks data?
I’ll grant that it may be preliminary information, but treating it this way just doesn’t seem logical captain.
michael hart,
If you look close, you can see circular blotchy areas in the image which look to me like artifacts from the process of producing a composite image from multiples. I don’t think it takes 6 weeks to get full global coverage in the polar orbit they’re using, but I’m inferring that the aggregates are needed to get a reasonable sample size so as to whittle down uncertainty.
Could someone please ring up NASA OCO-2 and let them know there is a lot of volcanic activity on Iceland right now, which other people might want to see?
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/clip_image0022.jpg
Look closely, the area is even covered up some. only place on the map the line comes down.
I have been asking around why is it covered up some and no one knows.
https://twitter.com/NJSnowFan/status/545728194373230593
Very interesting blotch on the volcanic CO2 plume, yes indeed. This will have to be “fixed”.
Let’s see, scratch, scratch.
That’s messed up.
In fact, scanning the black border of the image shows this “blotch” is not seen elsewhere in the image. Have the data redactors been practicing their arts here?
Zeke, njsnowfan, mpainter,
The OCO-2 instrument relies on reflected sunlight to take its spectral soundings. The latitudes you guys are interested in is in perpetual darkness this time of year. The only data redactor here is the axial tilt of the Earth.
Every four or five hours of sunlight can help, in scientific observations. Esp. when taking world averages.
OCO-2 is clearly picking up the signal of the volcanic source of CO2, as it moves south.
http://www.icelandreview.com/news/2014/11/11/eruption-emitting-60000-tons-so2-day
Volcanism does contribute to hemispheric cooling. It tends to amplify the cooling trend.
Not to mention The Aleutian Islands Are Waking Up
http://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/volcano-pavlof.jpg
Gates misses the point again.
Zeke,
And every instant, pretty much exactly 50% of the planet is sunlit, obliquities and surface features aside.
Which is entirely not unexpected as it has been known for some time that CO2 concentrations peak in the SH between Sep-Oct and bottom out in the NH during the same time period.
Sulfur dioxide aerosol does that.
mpainter,
Did I? I thought the argument here is that NASA is trying to hide CO2 from volcanoes. Pretty clever those rocket boys to send up a CO2 sniffer which can only reliably see the stuff in relatively clear sky conditions with ample sunlight, innit? How they’re going to hide mountains blowing their lids closer to the equator is anyone’s guess, but I’m sure you guys will figure out something:
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/1/9/1389292638225/ash-and-lava-during-an-er-005.jpg
Another miss by Gates.
“Africa is mostly grasslands and desert. How does that generate “biomass burning”?”
Wouldn’t dung qualify as biomass?
It is summer in the southern hemisphere, so an alternative explanation to the idea that farmers are burning fields is…plants exhale co2 at night.
There could be some algal blooms in the ocean contributing co2, since they photosythesize.
The whole point is that NASA and all of the scientific establishments are attempting to generate a public panic over gases that are part of enormous, natural cycles. Human contributions are negligible. Carbon dioxide is part of the cycle of seasonal vegetation, animal respiration, creation of rich humus, and volcanism.
Methane is also part of the natural cycle – many studies show that the ultraviolet in sunlight causes plants to emit methane. The sun is a variable star in the UV and EUV spectrum. Who knows how much methane there is on the planet, and where.
ref search:
https://www.google.com/search?q=methane+emissions+from+plants+ultraviolet+light&client=opera&biw=1241&bih=600&source=lnms&sa=X&ei=0JmXVLvsOM21oQS4pIKwAw&ved=0CAUQ_AUoAA&dpr=1.1
pick your own source
Can anyone clarify a few facts?
Based upon what I’ve read, the IPCC wanted a “consensus” on climate change’s causes, before the causes were scientifically established. True or false?
Prior to the IPCC’s call for a consensus, the claim that human C02 was causing climate warming was voiced by very few scientists. True or false.
James Hansen was one of these few scientists. True or false.
James Hansen got all his physics degrees at U Iowa. He never got into bachelor’s or PhD physics programs at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Caltech, Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell, or Columbia or any other schools with Nobel Laureates in physics. True or false.
Michael Mann took 5 years to earn a bachelor’s at Berkeley graduating at age 23, when most students got through in 4 years and prodigies were graduating at age 19-21. True or false.
Michael Mann earned “honors” at Berkeley, one step above “undistinguished” when some of his classmates graduated with “Highest Honors” and “High Honors.” True or false.
Others in Michael Mann’s graduating class went on to graduate studies at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Caltech, Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell and Columbia. True or false.
When Michael Mann went to Yale-Physics, the department’s faculty at that time had won ZERO Nobel Prizes, and had only four National Academy of Sciences-Physics Section members. True of false.
Michael Mann took 9 years to get his PhD, compared to 3-4 years for the “superlative students”, 5-6 years for “average” students. True or false.
Michael Mann jumped on tree rings from a small set of bristleecone pines in the White Mountains. To verify their import, he studied tree rings from bristlecone pines 80 miles away, and then studied bristlecone pine tree rings 250 miles away in Eastern Nevada (Great Basin Nat’l Park) which had 3000+ year old tree rings, to corroborate or rebut. He studied these tree other bristlecone rings, because he was honestly looking for evidence of human-caused global warming. He also examined other old tree-rings, as in Sequoia and redwood tree rings, to dig deep back into history, more than 1000 years. True or false.
Upon the IPCC’s call to create a consensus that humans caused global warming, a lot of third-rate university faculty who had no careers ahead of them doing first-rate science, because they didn’t have first-rate intellects, jumped on the bait, especially because no bait was being offered to perform research to provide countervailing evidence, arguments and conclusions. True or false.
Carbon dioxide is not as environmental pollution.
http://www.vedur.is/photos/eldgos_calpuff/141221_1200_18.jpg
Correct. Without it life as it exists on this planet is impossible.
That graph is for October and 1/3 of November, only. In the southern hemisphere Oct/Nov is springtime. The oceans, lakes & rivers are warming, and when they warm they outgas CO2 (and other dissolved gasses). So in Oct/Nov the southern hemisphere shows slightly higher levels of CO2 than the northern hemisphere. Six months earlier or later the opposite is true. That’s why there’s an annual 6-7 ppmv zig-zag in Mauna Loa CO2 readings. How is any of this surprising?
To call that “evidence [which] essentially exonerates humans as the source of CO2” is absurd, unless by “the source” Dr. Ball means “the only source,” in which case it’s a strawman, because nobody claims that.
That statement is wrong on another level, too. The word “exonerates” implies a crime or a problem, i.e., that CO2 is a problem. It’s not. Saying there’s too much CO2 is like saying there’re too many flowers.
-position statement signed by over 30,000 American scientists
Readers might be interested in the following article published in January 2014:
http://www.principia-scientific.org/japanese-space-agency-agrees-with-skeptics-on-climate-change.html
Folks
There is a lot of discussion about why can’t we see high concentrations of manmade CO2 over the industrial heartlands of the developed world.
But is not the point, that manmade CO2 emissions only account for about 3% of the total CO2. Ijn other words manmade emissions are dwarfed by the CO2 emissions from natural sources so without extremely fine resolution, we are unlikely to readily see manmade emissions showing up.
This is particularly so since manmade emissions are made up of many activities, eg. car transport, ship transport, air transport, industrialisation, crop burning etc. Each of these would have a different geographical ‘hot spot’ but one is then only talking of say 40% of 3%, or 20% of 3%, or 10% of 3% etc such that each ‘hot spot’ is only a miniscule proportion of total CO2 emissions being measured. .
Richard Verney
That is exactly the point. Anthropogenic CO2 is so inconsequential that it cannot be detected by this satellite.
It is a tool for the skeptics in countering the propaganda hype of the alarmists.
We point to the image and say “Show where the AGCO2 is coming from” and they can’t.
In fact, the AGCO2 contribution may be far less than the presently given figure of ~3%, in view of the information provided by this satellite image.
mpainter: wrong reasoning. It is not because it is only 7% or 3% or 0.3% of the natural cycle that it can’t cause the increase. The point is that the human addition is not part of the cycle, it is additional. As the natural cycle only absorbs halve of the yearly emissions (in quantity, not the original molecules), the other halve adds to the increase, which therefore is (near) 100% caused by the human emissions…
Ferdinand,
Do you exclude anthropogenic CO2 from the carbon cycle?
I would consider this approach as mistaken. The carbon cycle does not distinguish between natural and manmade sources but you do.
You can hardly maintain that the carbon cycle is well understood, or that we know with certitude the amount of CO2 released in nature. To assume otherwise is error, IMO.
Mpainter, the amounts of CO2 circulating through the various reservoirs are roughly known, be it not exactly, based on O2 (vegetation) and δ13C changes (both oceans and vegetation). That is not the point. What is exactly known is the human contribution (10 +1/-0,5 GtC/year) and the increase in the atmosphere (5 GtC/year and +/- 2 GtC/year natural variability with an accuracy of +/- 0.4 GtC of the measurements).
Thus the net contribution of the full seasonal cycle is exactly known and that is all what is needed: it doesn’t make any difference if there is going 100 GtC natural CO2 in and 105 GtC out in 2014, or 200 GtC in and 205 GtC out. Or that the distribution of the 5 GtC sink was 90% in the oceans or 90% in vegetation. Or that the oceans were a net source of 10 GtC/year and vegetation a net sink of 15 GtC/year or reverse… That is only of academic interest.
All what counts is the 5 GtC extra sink capacity, which means that there is zero contribution from nature as a whole to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere… already 55 years for sure.
Take a look at the CO2 data for Grifton, NC. http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/wdcgg/pub/data/current/co2/event/itn435n00.noaa.as.fl.co2.2006.ev.dat. NC probably has one of the highest population densities of coal fired power plants in the nation, yet most of the time the CO2 concentration closely tracks global background levels for time of year and latitude. I observe peaks only when the wind is coming from the SW (where a 15W power plant is in Kinston, 7Km upwind). Local sinks must be strong enough to rapidly bring down the concentration to background levels. I suspect the strongest local sinks are cold water clouds followed by vegitation and moist soil.
Ian W said: “The carbon in volcanic CO2 is the same isotope as ‘fossil fuel’ burning. So you need to rebalance your assumptions.”
Not so. Magmatic, volcanic and fossil fuels are well depleted of C14 because they are old enough to have lost virtually all of their C14 by decay to nitrogen.
Clark & Fritz (1997) have documented that there is no volcanic emission of 14C.
Clark, I., & Fritz, P., 1997, Environmental Isotopes in Hydrogeology, Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton
http://library.dmr.go.th/library/TextBooks/2984.pdf
C13 is stable and less depleted during photosynthesis in marine and C4 plants, such as corn (maize) compared with C3 plants (wheat etc).
One interesting question that I have yet to see answered is why have the volume iof carbon sinks increased over the past 50 or so years?
This is an important question since if oceans are warming, they are out gasing more and more CO2 so their capacity as a sink is probably getting less and less, not more and more.
One part explanation is that of farming in the developed world. That the developed world’s increase in agriculture has permitted more and more crops to be grown annually and these crops are taking up ever more amounts of CO2.
One often talks about farming on an industrial scale. And this expression is interesting, because there is a deep truth in it. In the developed world, we can only have farming on an industrial scale, because of industry and the industrial revolution. They go hand in hand.
It may well be the case that the industrialisation of the developed world has not resulted in much in the way of increased net CO2, since such CO2 emiisions resulting from industrialisation have largely been taken up by the increase in agricultural productivity and the ever amounts of crops that we are growing annually.
Accordingly, it may be that we in the developed world are largely carbon neutral. Would that not be ironic.
If we were to scale back our industry, we would eventually be forced to scale back our farming since farming today is energy intensive, and without the ready availability of energy, farming will inevitably be adversely affected.
The explanation is that carbon uptake is a function of atmospheric CO2 levels; the higher the atm. CO2, the higher the uptake as plants take advantage of the atmospheric CO2 “fertility”.
To add further we have evidence that the biosphere has been greening over several decades.
[Fig. 3. Fossil fuel CO2 emissions (left scale) and airborne fraction, i.e., the ratio of observed atmospheric CO2 increase to fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Final three values are 5-, 3- and 1-year means.]
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2013-03-31-ScreenShot20130331at4.19.41PM.png
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-james-hansen/doubling-down-on-our-faustian-bargain_b_2989535.html
Thanks. I am aware that that is one mechanism put forward, but I do not consider that we properly understand the carbo cycle and the carbon sinks.
What was the size of the Carbon Sink when Mauna Loa figures first came on line? What is the size of the Carbon Sink today? Precisely why and how has it changed?
We know that atmospheric CO2 concentrations is not rising as fast as the estimated manmade emissions which means that the volume of carbon sink is increasing faster than the rate of manmade emissions. Every year it is able to absorb an additional 1 to 2ppm of CO2 otherwise we would be seeing (if our estimates of manmade CO2 emissions is correct) an increase in CO2 of ~3.5 to ~4ppm annually rather than a little under 2 ppm annually .
But if global temperatures have been increasing these past 150 or so years then ocean CO2 out gasing must have also correspondingly increased, so carbon sinks have to .absorb not only all the additional ocean out gassing but also approximately 50% of the manmade emissions.
I accept that the planet has been greening, certainly these past 20 or so years, notwithstanding the increase in manmade deforestation that has taken place, but do we know that that accounts for all the additional carbon sink capacity.
I do not think that we really know with enough acuracy precisely what is happening and why. Perhaps this new data source will provide us with better understanding.
carbon sinks were about 0.5 ppmv/year (1 GtC/year) in 1959 increasing to about 2.5 ppmv/year (5 GtC/year) in 2012, still around 50% of human emissions. The sink rate is directly proportional to the atmospheric pressure of CO2 (where ppmv ~ μatm) minus the equilibrium pressure for the current temperature which is modulated by the 2-3 years response of (tropical) vegetation to temperature (and drought) as result of mainly ENSO:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em4.jpg
where the red line is the calculated airborne fraction taking into account the difference between pCO2(air) and equilibrium pCO2 for the actual temperature (about 8 ppmv/°C).
The distribution of sinks is currently about:
– 1 GtC/year in the biosphere (based on the oxygen use balance)
– 0.5 GtC/year in the ocean surface layer (due to buffer saturation)
– 3.5 GtC/year in the deep oceans (the balance as all other sinks are too small or too slow)
The deep oceans are the main sink and the oceans as a whole are net sinks, not sources. If they were the main source, the 13C/12C of the atmosphere would go up, while we see a firm drop…
I agree with Richard Verney that our understanding of the carbon cycle is imperfect. This satellite image gives me to understand that natural carbon sources are far underestimated and that anthropogenic CO2 is much smaller, proportionately.
Sea water near ice will always be a strong sink. Phytoplankton blumes make them even stronger sinks. In the Arctic, the area of that sink changes with the seasons. CO2 builds up as the sink is being covered with ice and decreases as the ice melts and phytoplankton comes to life. It reaches it’s minimum for the year in September when the ice is a minimum. In contrast. the cold circumpolar current around Antarctica is never covered. It just shifts northward.
Has anyone considered comparing co2 emissions to population
This is a surprising, unsupported, statement which would benefit from some elaboration, but, after making it, the author chooses to ramble on about something else.
These CO2 distributions are not new, are seasonal, and should not come as a surprise to informed people. Many previous studies which have reported similar results and some are referenced by commenters here.
The really disappointing thing is how many people who don’t understand appear willing to latch on to this unsupported statement a refutation of AGW; it isn’t.
However, I do thank Ferdinand Engelbeen for his informative comments which prove that it is still possible to learn something in spite of everything and that makes this site useful.
Thanks for your kind words…
Here is Hansen on the settled science. He says that the decline in co2 airborne fraction is caused by the burning of coal!
This thing is bugging me, this satellite.
What exactly is it trying to do? OK it makes pretty pictures of the CO2 in atmospheric column between itself and the ground, but what use is that. Taking my conjecture (even for a split second) that a lot of CO2 is coming from farmer induced soil erosion, how do you tell that apart from power stations, houses, factories or road traffic. The thing has not got the resolution to see that, not least because people tend to live, work, generate/use power where their food resource is.
And then, I have just driven into town in my little truck. in the current weather conditions, within a couple of hours the CO2 it emitted (Gawd how I’m coming to hate that word) will be most of the way to Norway and if it gets up a-height near the jet-stream it could be over Moscow in a similar time. What does a satellite seeing that tell you, its only adding confusion.
We need CO2 meters, on the ground, local and in weather stations. Period.
Another thing. If I understand GHG theory in any small way, wouldn’t locally high concentrations of CO2 be causing locally elevated (atmospheric) temperatures? Doesn’t the CO2 thermalise upwelling radiation?
So, where is the temperature map to overlay the CO2 map. It would surely be proof positive of the CO2 induced greenhouse effect. yes/no
There are a lot of stations on ground level, including tall towers, which measure the CO2 gradient between ground and several hundred meters height. These can be used to calculate CO2 fluxes over a large area. See:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2141884/
CO2 has some (physical based) absorption of near IR waves, which causes about 0.9°C warming, all other things being equal (which never is), But that is over the full 70 km air column. If the near-ground CO2 levels are elevated, but the rest of the bulk atmosphere isn’t, that has very little effect on temperature. Based on Modtran (absorbance) calculations, even if the first 1000 meters is increased to 1000 ppmv, that only gives some theoretical 0.1°C extra warming…
Suppose human emissions of CO2 are all sequestered in the surrounding regions by enhanced plant growth thus increasing the natural land based sinks. That would explain why there are no plumes of CO2 downwind of human population centres.
At the same time, more sunlight into the oceans (as a result of solar variations) is causing reduced oceanic absorption beneath the subtropical high pressure cells where sunlight is at its strongest. That would explain why there are plumes of CO2 downwind of such sun warmed ocean surfaces.
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/evidence-that-oceans-not-man-control-co2-emissions/
That also deals with the mass balance argument because the enhanced land based sinks balance our emissions leaving the reduced power of the ocean sinks to permit all or most of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2.
Since that artificially enhanced (by humans) biomass activity reduces C13 there is your explanation for falling C13 amounts rather than the proposed reduction in C13 from our burning of fossil fuels.
One could still say that the fall in C13 is caused by us but the benefit we get in exchange is a human induced greening of the local and regional environments.
The mass balance refutes the complete uptake of all human emissions by plants: human emissions are about 10 GtC/year, the net uptake by the biosphere is 1 GtC/year and mostly in the warm seasons. Moreover as plants prefer 12CO2 over 13CO2, the extra uptake will increase the 13C/12C ratio, not decrease it…
That extra uptake of total CO2 will result in greater 13CO2 depleted emissions from decaying leaf litter a few years later, which is not accounted for in your mass balance. These plumes indicate these emission rates are greater than the rates the canopy leaves are absorbing.
Ferdinand, you said above:
” both C3 and C4 plants have a lower δ13C ratio than the atmosphere and all fossil fuels are (much) lower.”
Fossil fuels produce much more 12C relative to 13C than the biosphere and plants prefer to take up the 12C so plants are going to mop up our emissions as a priority are they not?
The net uptake of the whole biosphere is not representative of local and regional CO2 exchanges since our biosphere is relatively starved of CO2 compared to previous CO2 rich epochs. I see no problem with the local and regional sinks absorbing our emissions as fast as we produce them without having much effect on the global net balances since our emissions are trivial compared to the global carbon cycle.
A global net uptake of 1Gt/year is not necessarily inconsistent with our gross 10Gt/year being absorbed locally or regionally by the biosphere because the global exchange is so much larger.
You can’t mix up global net and local gross numbers in such a vast and complex system of carbon exchange.
If enhanced plant growth locally and regionally is preventing our emissions from altering the 12C/13C ratio by absorbing 12C in priority for 13C then we must look elsewhere for the global fall in 13C relative to 12C.
What about biological activity in the oceans affecting the isotope ratio?
What is the isotope ratio for the CO2 absorbed by, and released by, organic material in the oceans?
Ferdinand rejects the notion that an anthropogenic CO2 reduction would only be reflected proportionately in overall CO2 growth, that is ~3%. There are other factors that we are unaware of or unaccounted for. For example, artificial nitrogen fertilizer increases soil bacteria by a prodigious amount.
The use of this has increased manifold over the decades. I am sure there are others.
fhhaynie, the plant decay emissions come after the extra CO2 uptake by plants, thus the net balance of 1 GtC/year extra uptake by the biosphere gives more 12CO2 uptake by the plants and thus relative more 13CO2 in the atmosphere is left. The problem with the satellite data is that they are only for 1.5 month, thus you see only a small part of a season where the same emitting surface (forest or ocean) can be a net absorber if you look at a full seasonal cycle…
Stephen Wilde, plants use preferentially 12CO2, but that is in ratio to the supply of the moment: plants near volcanic vents show a higher 13C/12C ratio than the same plants further away. That is used to calculate the average ratio between CO2 from the volcano and that of the rest of the atmosphere.
The 13C/12C ratio in plant leaves in general follow the ratio in the bulk of the atmosphere, but I suppose that plants growing just near a huge human emission spot will show lower ratio’s. For most plants during the day and sufficient wind speed, the atmosphere around plants is quite identical to the bulk of the atmosphere, so human CO2 is readily mixed in. Stack exhausts are in general warmer, thus industrial emissions spread fast into the higher layers of the atmosphere…
About oceans: CO2 in the deep oceans is around zero per mil δ13C. In the surface layer it is +1 to +5 per mil, due to bio life where some of the low-13C organics drop out of the surface layer and sink into the deep oceans. It is the combination of high δ13C in the surface layer and a drop of average -8 per mil δ13C in CO2 circulating between the atmosphere and the (deep) oceans which made that the pre-industrial level in the atmosphere maintained a level of around -6.4 +/- 0.2 per mil δ13C over the whole Holocene. Since the use of fossil fuels, the drop is 1.6 per mil in complete ratio to human emissions. I don’t see how any natural cause (equivalent to burning 1/3rd of all land vegetation) can do that…
Funny how the Climatist gang desperately want and need for man to be responsible for the increase in CO2, which to them is an evil, polluting gas, while for Climate Realists, it would also be nice to know that we are responsible, but for the opposite reason; which is that the increase in CO2 has been nothing but a boon to the biosphere, and to mankind. They irrationally want to blame man, while we rationally would like for man to take at least some of the credit for the increase. Irony.
The range in that map is ~15 ppm CO2. That’s roughly the amplitude in the annual atmospheric CO2 cycle in northern latitudes. The monthly change in atmospheric CO2, even at MLO is at the ~2 ppm/month and greater during summer decline. The human emissions are around 37 Gt CO2 annually (2014) and that’s 4.7 ppm/year or 0.4 ppm/month. The net flux of 2 ppm/month is 5 times the human input of 0.4 ppm/month. Even if the human emissions were the only significant factor affecting the atmospheric CO2 and its change, it couldn’t be seen in that image of averaged CO2 1 Oct to 11 Nov.
I think you would see plumes of human emissions downwind of population centres at times of year when natural CO2 fluxes are near net zero but no sign of it.
We would see plumes of net CO2 flux (increased CO2 concentrations). At the monthly resolution the local human flux is much smaller than the net flux (~0.4 ppm/month compared to 2 and more ppm/month). A bit more orange in already yellow-orange, but still overwhelmed by the net (natural + human) fluxes.
One of the interesting issues when you have media oligarchies due to economies of scale precluding almost all new entrants, society then has to ask: ‘How important is the Freedom of the Press, when so often they misuse that freedom not to inform and educate, but to misinform and endanger?’
We all have the freedom simply to switch off, not to buy papers, to try and find alternative sources. But for the vast majority, they have neither the time nor energy to do all that. They need reliable sources if they are to function properly as citizens. They have kids to feed, bathe and clothe. They have all the daily tasks to finish. They have 10 hr work days and children taxi driver jobs to do. They want their news sources to be trustworthy and, as far as possible accurate.
Today in the UK, we are seeing that Saturn on nations, North Korea, cited by the Daily Telegraph (a front organisation for third rate CIA/MI6 moles) for the second day in a row being about to launch pre-emptive war strikes on the USA.
Have you ever read anything more ridiculous in your life?? North Korea is a domesticated pussy cat and the USA is the world’s most voracious piranha. All cats who want to live a long life don’t jump into the pool with the piranha.
But we the public are expected to swallow this tripe.
Russia is also announced as being ‘in full scale meltdown’ as it funds one of its smaller banks £343m. That’s under half a billion.
Remind me, how much was it we in the UK, a much smaller country, pumped into our failed banks?? That would be £50bn – about 150 times as much. Yet we were ‘responsible government preserving our AAA status’ (well, for a while anyway).
More tripe. Come back and tell me when they’ve pumped in £25bn. Then I’ll sit up and take notice.
Regardless of the message, every single ‘climate’ graph now has to be taken with a pinch of salt due to endless manipulations according to the motivation/s of the body presenting said data.
A sad state of affairs.
Exactly.
And they are at it again with sea water temps, as Bob notes in his next post Quick Look at the DATA for the New NOAA Sea Surface Temperature Dataset
Almost all data sets have become horribly corrupted by endless adjustments all in the supposed guise of homogenisation.
Clearly, human CO2 emissions are to blame for the 18+-year Halt in the warming:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/co2-temp-rss.png
We were warming up nicely before, then boom, it stopped. If we want more warming, which human history shows is entirely beneficial, we need to spend multi-$trillions to get our “carbon” emissions under control.
Or, we could just adapt.
Tough choice.
Biomass burning? I can’t wait to see the winter map. Somebody is going to look awfully stupid.