From the “if the government won’t visualize it, a climate skeptic will” department.
Guest essay by Erik Swenson
In July of 2014, NASA launched its most advanced carbon dioxide monitoring satellite, The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2). The first OCO burned up on launch. There has been a lot of anticipation regarding the data from this instrument. However, over a year after it launch, there has been little public information presented about its results. The only data made available by NASA has been images showing CO2 from an AGU14 session.
These images are shown below.
Figure 1: NASA-provided OCO-2 data for Oct 1 – Nov 11, 2014
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/mainco2mappia18934.jpg
Figure 2 NASA-provided OCO-2 data for Nov 21 – Dec 27, 2014
Source: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011788/F5a.png
Back in May 2015, there was a release of some visualized data showing mixing ratios of CO2 over the oceans:
For some reason, NASA has not chosen to publish any recent updates of the OCO-2 satellite data. Many people are interested in the data from OCO-2, but have not been able to access the information. NASA has now provided access to the raw data from OCO-2, but the data is in the HDF file format. No common commercial programs such as Excel can access this data in this form.
I have created a program to parse this data, and attempt to graph it in a form that closely matches the output of the NASA images. The data is available from 9/20/2014 – 9/22/2015 as of this writing. I have generated the plots in approximately 6 week intervals. It takes about that much data to cover most of the globe with observational data. You can see how the orbit path is from this NASA visualization story:
A few implementation notes.
The data from each sample is put into an array. Each point is added to the array as a circular blob. The center point of the circle has a weight of 1 for the averaging function. The remaining points in the circle are weighted in a decreasing manner from the center. This choice is based on the images from NASA which show circular artifacts.
All of the images use the same min/max scale of 380 – 415 ppm. This does not give the best dynamic range for each image, but it does present a good range over all of the images.
The NASA images are chopped beyond 60 degrees N and S latitude. I have chosen to show whatever data is there.
All data points are plotted from the OCO-2-Lite files regardless of warn_level. Warn_level is used to judge the quality of the sample. The OCO-2-Lite files say they are the “high-quality” samples, so I chose to use them all.
The data used for these images is from the OCO-2-Lite v7 data set. It can be accessed here:
https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov/#mission=OCO-2
Finished visualizations
The data here is presented without comment. I will leave it to others to decide what this data means. So, without further ado – here is the data I have processed.
Figure 3: Processed data from Oct 1 – Nov 11, 2014
Figure 3 is an attempt to match the first NASA image from Oct 1 – Nov 11, 2014 to see how closely my algorithm matches. Note that NASA has adjusted the data set multiple times since the release of the NASA image. The current version is v7. I am not sure what changes have been made in the data.
Figure 4 : Processed data from Nov 16 – Dec 31, 2014
Figure 5 : Processed data from Jan 1 – Feb 15, 2015
Figure 6 : Processed data from Feb 16 – Mar 31, 2015
Figure 7 : Processed data from Apr 1 – May 15, 2015
Figure 8 : Processed data from May 16 – Jun 30, 2015
Figure 9 : Processed data from Jul 1 – Aug 15, 2015
Figure 10 : Processed data from Aug 16- Sep 12, 2015
UPDATE: Eric Swenson provides this map in comments showing CO2 over the entire year from From September 2014 to October 2015 – Anthony
Also, reader “edimbukvarevic” provides this map of anthropogenic CO2 emissions for comparison:
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It’s Volkswagen’s fault! Their automobiles have been faking (low-balling) emissions tests and over-poluting while on the road for decades!
Ha ha
Gee, why is it taking NASA so long to ” adjust ” their figures ????
Gotta get ’em before you can adjust them. They are still busy spending their first round of budget money.
The high concentrations over the subtropical convergence zones are due to United Arib Emirates WWII diesel powered submarines and China’s coal powered submarines!
Ha ha
Ok somewhat funny, something that crossed my mind though is that in the ME oil zone there is a terrific amount of gas being burned of in the oil fields that is never used for anything. If the Iranians wanted to create electricity could they not use that to run steam turbines rather than spending billions ( returned to them recently) to build nuclear? just wondering.
Very interesting graphics. I wonder if the high NH CO2 spring-early summer levels might be reflections of the very active 2015 forest fire season in the western US and Canada. I recall several weeks last spring when the Midwest was blanketed by a haze of smoke from Canadian wild fires (most started by lightening if I recall, so not “anthropogenic”).
You meant “lightning”. “lightening” would be “anthropogenic”, although I don’t know how wildfires could be caused by making things “lighter”. 😉
Anthony, many thanks for this. There is a lot going on! Mosher once advised me to hang up my spread sheet 🙁 But somehow a couple of years ago I managed to download a net.cdf file for NASA D2 clouds and make this nice pic using Panoply. There’s a lot going on here too.
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/global_D2_cloud_graphic.png
I guess I should have said Erik many thanks for this. You are just short of 365 days cover. Is it possible to create a map that merges the output of your 8 maps to provide a picture of net sources and sinks? By for example extending the time slice to 365 days.
Thanks! I did put an image for that in response to another request. Perhaps Anthony can move that image up into the main article.
Erik, done.
I believe that ‘consensus’ is that CO2 variation is no more than 4-5ppm around the globe. These observations show variations of up to 35ppm – perhaps more.
Dodgy,
The scales are 380-415 ppmv or roughly +/- 2% of full scale at any moment of the year. For a 20% in/out of CO2 over the seasons between the different reservoirs, that is well mixed. Yearly averages are far smaller and show a lag with altitude and between SH and NH…
Sorry, of course +/- 4% of full scale…
‘Well-mixed’ could mean anything. My understanding, up to now, was that there should be no more than 5ppm difference.
Ferdinand
If CO2 is so well mixed why did the IPCC disregard the Beck chemical analysis of CO2?
Was the old chemical analysis of CO2 dismissed on the basis that CO2 is not well mixed, that there is way too much seasonal variability etc to accept the careful analytic results of CO2 direct measurements?
Dodgy,
The yearly averages between Barrow and the South Pole are not more than 4 ppmv different, despites ~20% (that is 80 ppmv CO2) going in and out over the seasons and the lag between SH and NH due to the only 10% exchange of air masses by the ITCZ.
Richard,
Besides the accuracy of the old methods (+/- 10 ppmv), the main reason that Beck’s compilation doesn’t show “global” CO2 levels is that many of the data were taken over land near huge CO2 sources and sinks. Over land one can find hundreds of ppmv difference within 15 minutes if measured over fresh cut grass or huge diurnal differences in forests with nightly inversion or inside towns… That was the reason that Keeling Sr. looked at spots far away from vegetation and other sinks/sources like the South Pole (which was first) and Mauna Loa, where most of the time the trade winds blow in…
See: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
Hey Ferdinand – I made a mistake on the scale in the images. It should have been 389-406. Last minute change in the graphics to make them look “pretty”. Duh
I am working with Anthony to see how he wants to propagate the update. Everything is correct in the graphics, just the scale is off.
Hi Erik,
Was already taken into account, but the same scales makes a comparison easier. Again thanks for all the work done.
Remains quite a lot of questions to be solved by the OCO-2 people, like the lack of CO2 release from warming oceans in the Pacific…
I have the impression that they didn’t use the possibility of focusing on hot spots until now, probably because they still have a lot of work for calibrating the regular measurements…
Thank you SO much for this effort.
BRAVO !
Staring at those plots, the greatest sources of CO2 seem to be the winter-time Gulf of Alaska, the Canadian, Nordic, and Siberian Arctic, tropical Africa, and China all year-round.
The US north-east (New England) and continental Europe show moderate outputs during the dead of winter, presumably from urban heating. But that’s it. It seems the Arctic land masses (except Alaska), and the north Pacific are by far the greatest annual sources of atmospheric CO2.
North American and European industrialized areas, the American south-west (home to much electricity generation) seem only modest overall contributors.
Japan, which is located downstream from both China and the Siberian Arctic, gets a real CO2 dowsing during Winter. Wonder if their cherry trees have become unaccountably more beautiful since 1950.
Who woulda thought that increasing energy prices in first world countries would cause world manufacturing to all move to China powered by coal?
Ever item you import, you are importing C02 emissions, more than if you’d just made the item locally…
Peter
Wrong. Exporting CO2 emissions. Importing a lot of cheap junk.
It is very clear that, at the very least in the modern era, CO2 is essentially governed by a temperature modulated process, and human inputs are not temperature modulated. The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration is essentially proportional to properly baselined temperature anomaly
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/scale:0.18/offset:0.125/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/derivative/mean:12
The match with the satellite temperatures is best, but for a longer term, there is a pretty good match with Southern hemisphere temperatures
http://i1136.photobucket.com/albums/n488/Bartemis/temp-CO2-long.jpg_zpsszsfkb5h.png
But, that is no surprise since SH temperatures match the satellite record fairly well, with the NH temperatures after 2000 diverging
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4sh/plot/hadcrut4nh/plot/rss/plot/uah
For over 100 years, NH and SH track closely. Then, suddenly, vroom, they diverge. Circumstantial evidence, at least, that the NH temperatures have suffered from dubious and arbitrary “adjustments”.
Getting back to the SH temperature record and the match with the rate of change of atmospheric CO2: it is here, in the rate domain, that the fingerprints of the culprit can be discerned. Attempting to match temperature to CO2 directly in the modern era is a low value exercise – you can match any low order polynomial sequence to it.
It is here, in the rate domain, where the variations can be matched 1:1 with the temperature record. The arrow of causality is obviously from temperature to CO2, as supposing temperatures are related to the rate of change of CO2 leads to the absurd proposition that CO2 could rise arbitrarily high, but once it stopped rising, temperatures would revert to what they were initially.
When you match those variations with an appropriate scale factor, you also match the trend. Human emissions also have a trend. There is little to no room for them which is not already explained by the temperature relationship. Ergo, they have negligible effect.
I suspect the reason that there is an integral relationship is that there is a continuous stream of CO2 into and out of the oceans via upwelling and downwelling. Any temperature induced net imbalance between those flows leads to a persistent accumulation in the surface oceans, and thence to the atmosphere.
Bart,
As usual…
The variability in rate of change is caused by the influence of temperature changes (Pinatubo, ENSO) on tropical vegetation, which is mainly in the Amazon which is mainly in the SH. Therefore the match between temperature and CO2 rate of change variability matches best with SH data.
The trend is not caused by vegetation, as that is a proven sink by the oxygen balance and the extra CO2 source is in the NH, not in the SH, which has more land than oceans. Your theory doesn’t hold up against the observations…
There is no separation of the trend and the variability. There is no phase distortion. The trend and the variability are part and parcel of the same aggregate process.
The temperature trend explains the trend in CO2. Human sources also have a trend. As it is already completely, or at least overwhelmingly. accounted for by the temperature relationship, human inputs cannot have a significant influence.
@ur momisugly Ferdinand Engelbeen
October 4, 2015 at 10:43 am : The hard work of Murry Salby shows trends more in line with Bart’s ideas. The people who have shown enmity to Murry, tend to stink to high heaven. We should know why.
Bart,
If there is solid proof that the variability is from one (temperature driven) process and the trend is certainly not from the same process, then there is no reason at all to combine these two.
There is no phase distortion if you combine two independent processes, even if both have a common cause (temperature), but large differences in response time, as is the case for vegetation and oceans…
You are attributing the increase to temperature, but you have no proof whatever that this is the case except for an arbitrary match of two slopes, which even is opposite for 35 of the 55 years trend.
To the contrary, all observations show that your theory fails…
Brett Keane,
I have followed the different lectures of prof. Salby in detail and was in London last year for his speech in the Parliament. While in my opinion he was unfairly threatened by his employer, I disagree with several of his points (like the theoretical diffusion of CO2 in ice cores, not repeated in his latest lecture).
The main point in this case is that Salby makes the same error as Bart: he attributes the full CO2 increase to temperature (by integrating the temperature slope + variability), while that is only the case for the variability and a small offset, not the bulk of the trend.
Australian climate loons will go into mourning.
NASA (Goddard ) does have a year long simulation on their OCO website, although the data is apparently from pre-OCO 2006.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=11719
You got to tip your hat to them for their graphics and blood red colors. A lot of the presentation, especially the May part of it, appears to indicate imminent doom for all of us in the Northern Hemisphere! I don’t know how anyone can possibly survive under that sea of blood! I’m certain that effect is entirely accidental though 😉
There is absolutely no logical reason to trust climate data coming from NASA.
The people in charge are biased, and could lose their jobs if they reported anything contradicting the CO2 IS THE CLIMATE CONTROLLER fantasy.
Anyone who trusts NASA, NOAA, and the Obama Administration in general, to be honest and unbiased on the subject of climate change, is a fool.
Oh, by the way, 2014 was the hottest year on record by +0.02 degree C., with a margin of error of +/- 0.1 degrees C. …… if that’s the “science” they INCLUDE in their press releases, can you imagine what they DON’T show us, and how much they “adjust” data to match the climate models?
You must judge the character of Obama, NASA and NOAA before deciding to trust them.
All three have a track record of lying and misleading on the subject of climate change, in an attempt to scare people, and seize more political power over their lives and businesses.
Is this the Richard Greene of the “32 Strategies of Warfare” ?
You are spot on. The way to approach this truth is to elevate a truly independent NGO.
When your opponent has exposed his weakness, it’s best not to bang him in the head with it but to offer a better alternative. Doing it this way will steal his power and he won’t even see it coming.
So what CO2 levels are in the GCMs? Global average? Lol
Why not? CO2 radiation levels hardly change over a year for any spot on earth, so taking the global average CO2 levels will not change much in temperature effect, as far as that is accurate midst a lot of (seldom) positive and (lots of) negative feedbacks…
The planet is about to abruptly cool (there is now observational evidence of the start of the cooling mechanisms which are latitudinal and regional specific). When the planet cools atmospheric CO2 levels will abruptly fall. The increase in atmospheric CO2 has not the cause of the warming in the last 150 years and the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 75 years has not due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
There are dozens of different peer reviewed papers which all support the assertion that the majority of the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 75 years is due to warming of the oceans and a mechanism that increases low C13 emission from the deep earth (CH4, ‘natural gas’ has C13 levels three to four times lower than atmospheric CO2 and CO2 in biological sequestered material. There is no biological mechanism to explain where the super low C13 CH4 comes from based on the late veneer theory of the atmosphere), not due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
There is in the paleo record unexplained cyclic changes in C13. There are also massive deposits of ultra low C13. Both of these observations support the assertion that there is an enormous deep earth source of low C13. A large continual input of new CH4 into the biosphere requires there to be large continual sinks of CO2.
C13 Paradox
Changes in atmospheric C13 levels in the southern hemisphere do not support the assertion that the rise recent rise in atmospheric CO2 is due anthropogenic CO2 emission.C13 in the Southern Hemisphere remains the same for long periods (5 or 6 years) and then suddenly increases. As anthropogenic CO2 emission is constant C13 should if anthropogenic CO2 emission was the cause of the increase in atmospheric C2 increases gradually. That is not what is observed.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EE20-1_Quirk_SS.pdf
What is the missing sink of CO2? Why is the missing sink growing in size?
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php
Thanks, William. Yes, the claim of increasing sink activity is an epicyclic attempt to rescue a failing hypothesis, that humans are the driving force behind the observed rise in CO2.
The sinks haven’t really changed. In fact, human generated CO2 is removed from the atmosphere just about as quickly as it is added, now and previously. The divergence between human additions and observed concentration is simply because the two are essentially unrelated. Temperatures have simply paused, and as a result, atmospheric CO2 is increasing less rapidly.
Bart, be careful who you choose as companion in your zeal. I had lots of pages of discussion with William. Not the company I would choose to convince others of my rightness…
William: My compliments. Thoroughly documented and logically consistent. There is a gaping hole in the AGW hypothesis..
Crispin, sorry but what William writes is many times refuted in the past. He simply repeats it again and again, without any acceptance of any argument that refutes what he says…
If the planet does start to cool, it will be interesting to consider how CO2 levels respond. Does CO2 continue to rise at present rates, or does it increase but at a slower rate, or does CO2 levels actually fall.
Much might be learnt from the manner in which Co2 behaves in a cooling world (always assuming that you are right and the world does begin to cool as you suggest).
CO2 rates will decelerate in the face of declining temperatures. It would take an almost 0.7 degC fall to reduce the rate to zero, and then a little more for it to start falling.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/offset:0.694/scale:0.18/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/derivative/mean:12
I doubt temperatures will fall that much. I hope temperatures drop enough to decelerate the rise sufficient to discredit epicyclic hypotheses of increasing sink activity.
Richard,
The historical influence of temperature on CO2 levels is about 16 ppmv/K, which is right in the ball park of Henry’s law for seawater (4-17 ppmv/k in the literature). Thus you need some 0.12 K decrease per year (!) to stop the current ~2 ppmv/year increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. There is already some 18 years of no temperature increase, while CO2 levels continue to rise.
Bart’s assumption is that there is a continuous increase of CO2 for a fixed temperature offset. That is impossible, as that doesn’t take into account the influence of the increasing CO2 pressure in the atmosphere to the ocean releases (in the tropics) and uptakes (near the poles).
William,
You are repeating a lot of nonsense that was already refused years ago.
– Tom Quirk was completely wrong with his SH source: the δ13C changes show that the variability is from tropical (SH) vegetation, but the main source is in the NH, not in the SH.
– Essenhigh and many others confuse residence time, which doesn’t remove any gram of CO2 out of the atmosphere with the necessary e-fold decay time of an extra amount of CO2 above equilibrium. And a missing sink? Where? We are 2015, not 1996 anymore…
At some point in this debate, on the part of those who want humans to be in the driver’s seat, you will encounter the faux “mass balance” argument. This argument goes as follows.
We have natural inputs N, natural sink activity S, and human inputs H. The rate of change of atmospheric level L is then
L = N + H – S
It is observed that L is approximately 1/2 of H, hence
N – S := -0.5*H
Since natural sources are less than natural sinks, nature cannot be the driving force.
Tommy rot. Sink activity is a dynamic feedback response. As such, there is a portion of the sinks which responds to natural forcing, call it SN, and a portion that responds to human inputs, call it SH. We have
N – SN := -0.5*H + SH
SH can be any value between 0.5*H and total H. If it is greater than 0.5*H, then nature on its own is a net source.
People invested in the naive, stupid, and jejune “mass balance” argument have a mental block. They ask, how is it possible for the rise to be natural if nature in its entirety is a net drain? After all, you cannot increase a quantity if you are always subtracting away from it.
The answer is that this is a problem in dynamic flows. There is a consistent flow into the system, and a consistent flow out. When you have such a flow regime, there are two ways that you can increase the amount in the reservoir: 1) put more flow in, 2) take less flow out. Nature then can be seen as the source of the rise if it is taking less out than it otherwise would be, i.e., if N – S is less negative than it would be if nature on its own were not a net source.
The temperature relationship above establishes unequivocally that the observed rise in atmospheric CO2 is essentially entirely a natural process. Facile arguments like the faux mass balance above are rationalizations using flawed logic to establish original sin in the CO2 religious canon.
Bart,
The crux is in
N – S := -0.5*H
That is a false assumption, as N-S can be any value from -20*H to +20*H or beyond.
Sinks don’t discriminate between N and H and both are equally fast or slow removed, depending of the total pressure beyond the dynamic equilibrium for the current temperature.
Further N and S are the result of many processes, each with their own source/sink rate, depending of temperature for the seasonal processes and for the year by year variability. The seasonal swings are good for ~110 GtC in and out (ocean surface and fast growth and wane processes in vegetation) with little change over the past 55 years. There is also a ~40 GtC continuous exchange between equatorial upwelling zones and the polar sinks, again with little change over the past 55 years.
The fast variability is +/- 2 GtC/year and is the effect of temperature changes on tropical vegetation.
Human emissions are currently ~9 GtC/year, dwarfing the fast variability in sink rate, which is indeed around 50% of the human emissions, or about 4.5 GtC/year, but that is no “must”.
Human emissions are independent of temperature and so is the overall sink rate which is mainly pressure dependent, only slightly temperature dependent.
The historical CO2 levels for the current weighted average ocean temperature are around 290 ppmv (also per Henry’s law and confirmed by several million seawater samples). Any increase in the CO2 pressure in the atmosphere above that level will push more CO2 in the oceans per Henry’s law. No matter if that is static or dynamic. Your theory of piling up CO2 from the deep ocean upwelling is completely bogus and violates Henry’s law and about all other observations.
The current 400 ppmv is 110 ppmv above the dynamic equilibrium. That pushes some 2.15 ppmv/year into the various sinks. That gives an e-fold decay time of the current CO2 levels to equilibrium of 110/2.15 = 51.2 years. Fast enough to follow (Little) Ice Ages, but not fast enough to remove all human emissions in each year that they are emitted. Thus that continues to pile up in the atmosphere.
The net sink rate is surprisingly linear with the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere above steady state as the calculation of Peter Dietze with 1988 figures show an e-fold decay rate of 55 years, see:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm
Thus the sinks expand as simple linear feedback to the increased CO2 pressure in the atmosphere above steady state. That is the most simple feedback one can find in nature…
The only reason that N-S still is about half the human emissions is that human emissions increased somewhat quadratic, a fourfold increase in the past 55 years. So did the increase in the atmosphere and so did the net sink rate. The latter only depends of total CO2 above steady state, not the momentary natural or human input.
If some natural source was the cause of the increase, dwarfing human emissions (with the help of extremely fast responding sinks), that source MUST have increased a fourfold since 1960, or there can’t be a fourfold increase in the CO2 rate of change or a fourfold increase in net sink rate. For which is not the slightest indication (which should include a fourfold reduction in residence time…).
It seems the atmosphere in the high latitudes north and south is loaded with CO2 in preparation for Spring, and that both marine and terrestrial photosynthetic organisms draw it down.
We try to survive the Winter. We draw on carbon sources to do so. A squirrel may consume the acorns it has stored releasing CO2. Once Spring arrives, CO2 starts being put back into plants.
Figures 9 & 10 show elevated CO2 in Southern high latitude winter waters where there are no people. Figure 5 shows the opposite in the Southern high latitude summer.
““NASA has now provided access to the raw data from OCO-2, but the data is in the HDF file format. No common commercial programs such as Excel can access this data in this form.”
hmmm not so sure about that..
If you go to the JPL site it looks like you may be able to can retrieve the data in CSV.
Just walk through the menus
Start here
https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov/#mission=OCO-2
Select the “customize page”
https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov//build/?dataset=OCO2L2Stdv7&product=FULL
Go through the menus and select the variable you want
You are given a choice
csv. hdf, netcdf
Then you will get a confirmation mail
Your job has been submitted: you can monitor your job at: http://co2web.jpl.nasa.gov/regrid/jobstatus/pywps-144398220067?dataset=OCO2L2Stdv7&processingLevel=L2&size=6.71267228651e+11
Job parameters:
Dataset=OCO2L2Stdv7
Variables=[‘xco2’]
Longitude: min=-180.0 max=180.0 delta=10.0
Latitude: min=-90.0 max=90.0 delta=10.0
Time: min=2014-09-05T00:00:00 max=2015-09-28T23:59:59 delta=full
Warning level=0 bias correction=True
Requested processing level=L2, format: CSV
Looks pretty slow.. we will see, maybe maybe not
Well there you go, Mr. Mosher discovered something useful just now and presented it. Too bad NASA hasn’t made this clear on their own web page. It would save people a lot of trouble if NASA made such thing clearly available to the public in addition to the HDF format.
I wonder too why NASA didn’t do the graphics work that Erik Swenson has kindly provided us?
I mean, they did it before on first release.
Would it surprise you to know that many public servants all over the world might fear retribution for speaking out of line ? It certainly exists in the corporate world. Why wouldn’t that same fear exist in public servants ? Surely you realize this. Have you ever been afraid for your job ?
The creative health of any institution can be measured by how it encourages dissenting opinion and trial and error approaches to fixing problems.
Want to figure out how to blow the doors off this CO2 ruse ?
Figure out how to create safe haven for dissenters.
Knute,
Ah, there’s the dilemma. How do we make it safe for scientists to voice their honest scientific opinions without retribution?
I don’t know the answer. Or rather, I can give an easy solution. But they won’t do it for the simple reason that the “carbon” scare is politics, backed by propaganda and oodles of grant money. They do not tolerate any other points of view discussed, except their own.
Scientists, especially those employed by universities and government agencies, have much to fear by giving their honest opinion. It’s not necessarily that they will lose their job (but it’s always possible — look at the despicable treatment of Dr. Murry Salby). They also fear not getting their next pay raise, or their next promotion, or a coveted job they’ve been working toward.
Those are real concerns for scientists employed by government supported organizations. And ‘.edu’ rent-seeking schools, and gov’t bureaucracies are becoming very, very political. Scientists are no different from the rest of us. They have families, reputations, and bills to pay. So most keep silent, rather than poke the snoozing rattlesnake with a stick.
Instead, we get the truth mostly from retired scientists. Many of them speak out, labeling the ‘climate change’ scare what it is: a hoax intended to get carbon taxes passed.
Unfortunately, the only media (with a few exceptions) that speaks the truth is online. This site is one; WUWT encourages all scientific points of view. Readers can then decide what sounds credible, and what sounds like posturing.
I don’t have the answer to how we can get real free speech back. Maybe an agreement signed by the .edu establishment schools, and government bureaucracies, stating they will not retaliate against those with a scientific point of view that conflicts with the organization’s?
Well, maybe. But personally, I think that battle is lost. $Billions annually in federal grant money buys the Party line.
It’s very frustrating. But it could get even worse: there are moves afoot to control free speech on the internet. And based on the way this Administration loves crises, I can easily imagine them pointing to one article out of thousands, and saying, “Aha! Look at that! We can’t have that kind of rabble-rousing and (fill in the blank _____.) These websites are engaging in hate speech! For the good of all, they must be silenced. Therefore, I am issuing an Executive Order…”
Twenty or thirty years ago that would have sounded preposterous. Now, not so much, eh?
DB
First of all. Thanks for taking the time to understand my perspective. Secondly, thanks for turning me onto the Salby link. Utterly disgusting and one of many I’m sure.
You are right. The system is broken, misused and abused. There is a screaming need for a new independent peer review forum. The rules to good science; replicable, known rate of error, experiment designed without bias to a conclusion are known principles that worked for a long time. They gave us the Frye Test and then Daubert Principles.
Bring them back.
Who ?
Perhaps retired scientists who can’t be bought with other retired scientists who are responsible for auditing the integrity of the peer review process.
An NGO perhaps.
Union of Retired Scientists for Scientific Integrity.
Court cases would eventually elevate their importance because the Daubert principles have not changed. Build it and they will come because there is a market for such independence.
That’s one prong of the attack.
The second is a harder fix. As the rich got richer, too many boats were left behind. That’s a problem. It allows opportunistic organizers the opportunity to fill the void with their own nefarious purposes.
Yes, an independent review organization can be had easy enough. Leading the disenfranchised members of society to a better future is harder and will take longer. Though deserving a conversation more than a simple blog, I’d argue that the same people who became extra rich off the scam can be enticed to lead towards a better world for the disenfranchised if there is profit for them.
This time there needs to be rigorous separation between the new independent reviewers and the money changers.
Could be that I missed that. Thanks for the input. I did see that when you choose the “custom” data product, some items are not there. For instance, the “warn_level” field, which is a measure of the quality of the point, is not available in the custom data set. In any event, it is pretty tough to visualize in Excel or something since it is a multi-dimensional data set.
It would be great if someone else could do the same exercise and see if they get the same results. I went to great pains to try to get my graphics to match the NASA images. The raw data looks pretty lousy if you just graph it. The circular averaging method really made the images pop.
Imagine if you will all the people on WUWT pouring over the latest data that shows CAGW was ruse. Imagine you are all in a room and the world awaits you outside.
You draw straws and select a spokesman. He comes out and describes the latest scientific analysis of the data and that it demonstrates CO2 concerns were all a bunch a hooey.
For a moment there is silence.
The Social Justice Warriors Foundation for the Forgotten People are in attendance and claim your analysis is skewed and fraught with uncertainty. Until you can prove that the poor are not going to suffer because of your uncertainty they will continue to push for the cash for CO2 program.
And the money changers will probably be paying them to make that position loudly and proudly.
They are too institutionally entrenched at this point. If you are going to try to kill the CO2 ruse you have to offer a new solution for both the disenfranchised and the money changers.
And if you tell me that you are a scientist and not a public policy maker, you truly have not learned how you are being abused.
Knute,
Report at once to Peoples’ Re-Education Camp #14. ☺
2+2=5…
Impressively low and consistent CO2 levels over Australia, apparently the result of their stringent global warming policies. I can only imagine how warm it would be if they had not taken the actions they did. The world should thank them for the sacrifices they made for the rest of us. (sarc)
While sarcastically delivered you can bet your bottom dollar that this reply is already being sculpted. So what should a skeptics answer be ?
“CO2 was never scientifically validated as a precursor to warming so we are not surprised”
The warmista will trot out the corrupt arm of science that says it was. See what happens when you go all science on them ?
How about ..
“Geeesh, ya know, it appears things are cooling down but does that really matter ? What matters is you want a better life so how can we achieve that.”
If I was Australian, I would be wanting reparation from the net carbon emitters.
Interesting, of course, that their has been a change in leadership just at a time when Paris is coming up, and Paris is supposed to be dealing with reparation. Oh, I am just being cynical but I suspect that the OCO-2 data would have been welcomed by Abbott and reinforced his views.
“For some reason, NASA has not chosen to publish any recent updates of the OCO-2 satellite data. ”
I can tell you the reason… it doesn’t conform to what they want it to produce so they are busy trying figure out how to spin it. If the author of this post really wants to make nasa’s hate list you could compare the fantasy computer model that claims the US and so forth are evil vs the real world data. I’ve done a little bit and its clear the model is a compete joke.
https://www.nasa.gov/press/goddard/2014/november/nasa-computer-model-provides-a-new-portrait-of-carbon-dioxide/#.VhF0pit3vRY
direct youtube video from story
If I understand this video, someone needs to record thIs later usage before NASA takes it down or revises it. It’s NASA’s model of annual CO2 worldwide. My sense is that this model, and some of the key ‘factual’ statements made by the NASA climate scientist about CO2 worldwide behavior and emitters will be proven otherwise with some of this OCO2 data. It’s early, and one more AGW model failure is possible here, but I wouldn’t rely on the Wayback machine to preserve this gem and it’s transcript. Drip, drip drip…
I’m not so worried about it disappearing until they figure out how to spin the CO2 data… mainly because when OCO-2 and dropped the first set of data which i think was sep 12- nov 24, I went over and looked at it. Compared it to the model and saw that the model basically invented reality. So alot of cultists where having cult parties to celebrate the data…. and lets just say I crashed about 30 of those parties and posted this info. They were none to happy.
My probably is that I can’t easily translate the data but if they author can match and color scheme up and make an adjusted to scale them together(video is scaled at 377-395 a diff of 18 vs the data which a 380-415 a diff of 35) you can then combine each data into a gif which could be run side by side with the video to show just how bad the model is.
But that aside just have a short frame showing of aug 15-sep 12 shows massive CO2 along a south band of the world. The model shows nothing of the sort. So basically for about a month the model is completely invented from reality.
Hmmm — I went to that URL about hdf files. On that page, I went to link that says: “Get more information or download view_hdf” The link URL is https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/HPDOCS/view_hdf.html
When I click the link, my browser says:
Redirect Loop
“Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page. This may be caused by cookies that are blocked.
The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.
Have you disabled or blocked cookies required by this site?
NOTE: If accepting the site’s cookies does not resolve the problem, it is likely a server configuration issue and not your computer.”
I am not blocking cookies.
It looks like that page is redirecting to itself:
There are a few broken pages lurking at NASA…
You can get an HDF viewer from here:
https://www.hdfgroup.org/products/java/hdfview/
You can visualize the ‘xco2’ variable in there, but it won’t (I could not see it anyway) graph it against lat/lon, so it is pretty useless.
I used the HDF library to parse the HDF files directly. That part is marginally interesting. As I said above, it is the visualization code that is the interesting (and fun!) part. I used an OpenGL shader to render the color map. Since it is in OpenGL, I can easily render it on a sphere as well. Pretty, but less useful.
Most interesting – thanks for this post and the work behind it.
Those looking for the origins of excess CO2 are going to have a hard time drawing firm conclusions just yet, but there are some very intriguing things about it.
What is going on in equatorial West Africa? Why the ‘lumps’ of CO2 in the middle of the ocean.?
Nobody has discussed the effect of trade winds on the longitudinal patterns we see. Anybody volunteer to integrate those winds? Or does CO2 mix/dissipate so quickly for the wind patterns to be relatively unimportant?
Wait doesn’t this need to be adjusted up like everything else they do?
It will be, just give it time.
This data graphically demonstrates the extent of seasonal variability to CO2 and to what extent it is a well mixed gas.
Many claim (such as Ferdinand) that CO2 is a well mixed gas, and that seasonal variability in absolute terms is small. Well this depends of course upon how one defines ‘well mixed’ and what extent of variation should fall within the definition small.
But this begs the question why did the IPCC dismiss empirical evidence for CO2 levels in the latter half of the 19th century, and through to the mid 20th century which were obtained by very carefully conducted sampling and chemical analysis. I am of course referring to the chemical analyses that are the subject of the Beck paper. Indeed sometime back WUWT had an article on Beck: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/25/beck-on-co2-oceans-are-the-dominant-co2-store/
Now my understanding is that the IPCC dismissed these analyses essentially on the basis that they were not representative due to seasonal conditions and locations in which the samples were taken. If that argument is sound, the IPCC is essentially contending that CO2 is not well mixed and it is this variance that has distorted the results of the chemical analysis and render the analysis unsound.
Well now we can see the annual variations. Beck should correlate the OCO-2 data with the various chemical analyses undertaken (location, time of year of sampling, seasonal variance at that location at that time of year when the sample in question was taken).
But if the variance is in the order of only a few percent, as the OCO-2 data suggests, then why is the result of the chemical analysis out by more than a few percent?
I think that it is time that the 19th and 20th century chemical analyses were revisted. Perhaps the actual experiment should be replicated, ie., a sample taken in 2015 or 2016 at the same location and at the same time of year and then re-analysed using the same equipment and methodology to see what results are now obtained.
Of course, it may be that the location is now fundamentally different due to urbanisation, or deforestation, or agriculture, but that will not impact upon all of the numerous chemical analyses that were undertaken in the 19th & 20th Century.
my guess is that with the results from OCO-2 it will now be more difficult to dismiss the old chemical analyses. .
Richard,
The main problem is that CO2 is well mixed within a few ppmv above the oceans and above a few hundred meters over land. It is very badly mixed in the first few hundred meters over land, due to a lot of fast sources and sinks, mainly vegetation and little vertical mixing at low wind speeds.
That is exactly where most of the 1942 “peak” in the late Beck’s compilation is based on. One of the main stations was at Giessen, semi-rural, mid-west Germany, where the longest series was based. Fortunately we have a modern station that takes half hour CO2 samples, not far from the original point, at Linden-Giessen which still is a semi-rural place. Here a few days in summer from Linden-Giessen under nightly inversion, compared to Mauna Loa, Barrow and the South Pole for the same days (all raw data):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/giessen_background.jpg
The historical data were taken three times a day, of which two at the flanks of the peaks… That alone gives a bias of +40 ppmv. The historical variability (that is a sure sign of local contamination) was 68 ppmv (one sigma), the modern station is around 20 ppmv and Mauna Loa at 6 ppmv, including all outliers and seasonal changes…
I suppose that OCO-2 takes the CO2 column data, thus averaging the local peaks over a larger column, which gives less variation.
3 times a day at I think it was 4 heights was the long run data over 18 months. Kreutz also measured every 3 hrs for week periods. You only extract information at suits your purpose. Further, Beck and a Prof from France looked at correction using wind data to determine a corrected background CO2 level.
Pretty shocking these huge variations at ground level over different day timings. Lots of options for “play” with data processing. How reliable are those pre-Moana Loa, pre-hourly measured data?
cementafriend,
Indeed it was three times a day at 4 heights, see:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/literatur/kreutz/Kreutz_english.pdf in English translation. In particular look at the CO2 variability at Fig. 3 (Abb. 3) showing daily averages (Tagesmittel) between roughly 200 and 700 ppmv (marked as 0.020 to 0.070%) for the 14-meter intake. Not really suitable to have any idea what the “background” CO2 levels were in that period.
The height of the intake doesn’t make much difference: the variability is as high and the lower levels have some positive bias (soil bacteria?).
Even the high sampling every 1.5 hour during 4 days (Abb. 1 – Fig. 1) shows values below 400 ppmv to over 700 ppmv…
The “French” professor who worked with Beck on the influence of wind on the averages is actually from Luxembourg, professor Massen, who made a lot of CO2 and other meteorological observations in Diekirch, Luxembourg, see:
http://meteo.lcd.lu/papers/co2_patterns/co2_patterns.html
If the wind speed is over 4 m/s the mixing with higher air layers (the bulk of the atmosphere) gets better and if you have enough data, one can calculate the theoretical “background” CO2 level from that period.
Unfortunately, there are too few data from Giessen with high wind speed and even these have a high scattering, as is clear in the report of Kreuz.
As you can see in the map, Linden is a suburb of Giessen and the modern station is at the edge of Linden, only a few km from the historical site.
AntonyIndia,
The better measurements were accurate to about +/- 10 ppmv, if taken with a lot of care, skill, fresh chemicals etc… Current measurements (NDIR and GC) are better than 0.2 ppmv…
But the main problem of the historical measurements is where was measured: the local variation at many places over land are enormous, especially within forests, agriculture and towns…
The historical measurements taken over the oceans or coastal with wind from the sea are all around the ice core CO2 data for the same periods. Unfortunately there are no ocean area data in the period after 1935.
The greening of the planet has been noted, but what is not expressed is that this new green should accelerate the sinking of CO2. Little green plants become bigger plants and the shade, etc retains more moisture giving rise to expansion and densification of the greening. Most attention to this phenomenon is given to Sahel, Australian Outback, etc., but existing forests’ trees are also growing in girth (Harvard’s research forest in NE USA, IIRC) and presumably increasing plankton populations….I believe I have been given the green light propound a brand new hypothesis: The Pearse hypothesis of CO2 trending to equilibrium with its sinks.
The biosphere will, over time, expand in mass to balance the increased flux in CO2. Any reviewers out there?
Of course, ocean uptake through dissolution according with increased partial pressure of CO2 will be a contributer as well. Indeed, partial pressure is probably a mechanism in the biosphere sinks as well. Well, it is a new hypothesis, so it needs patching!!
Gary – not as outrageous as you yourself probably think!
I have great respect for Ferdinand Engelbeen’s sensible overviews but I’ve never been remotely impressed by what is called the ‘mass balance’ argument. CO2 is, as you infer, very likely in a complex dynamic equilibrium with the biosphere and, though I’m happy to see temperature playing a part in this, I don’t see the cause-and-effect relationship in the way it is usually portrayed. There’s a lot more to be discovered here.
Gary,
As you wish:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5462/2467.short
and
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
The calculations of the net uptake/release from the biosphere as a whole is based on its O2 use or release, after accounting for the O2 use by burning fossil fuels…
BTW, you are a little late in the equilibrium play, the e-fold decay rate of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere was calculated time ago by Peter Dietze:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm
Nothing changed much since that time, as the current net sink rate (oceans + biosphere) still is slightly above 50 years…
Of course.
Once you realise that atmospheric CO2 has been at pretty much base plant survival levels for hundreds of thousands of years… its not at all surprising that plant life will gradually expand to gobble up as much CO2 as we can give it.
“Of course.
Once you realise that atmospheric CO2 has been at pretty much base plant survival levels for hundreds of thousands of years… its not at all surprising that plant life will gradually expand to gobble up as much CO2 as we can give it.”
Wow .. just for a moment listen to yourselves.
“WE” are controlling the amount of plant life on earth by the amount of CO2 we give it.
You wonder why people are just tired of listening to scientists when at the same time you pound the table about climate change being a natural phenom.
Pheeeew, I’m glad I still have cherry picked hockey sticks to scoff at and looooong term temperature ice cores to marvel at.
Scientists literally can set themselves up for getting hammerred. No wonder you guys have such a hard time even when you are right.
Easy prey.
Stop overcomplicating the facts.
Your desire to understand increasing levels of minutia is your worst enemy.