by Jonathan Huddleston
Current attempts by national governments worldwide to control industrial CO2 emissions following the recommendations of the IPCC could be viewed within the scientific paradigm as the projection of a large scale experiment on the earth’s climate system to validate the hypothesis that anthropogenic CO2 emissions through the burning of fossil fuels and land use changes (inter alia) are a major factor driving climate change. If such policies are to be effective, it is hypothesized here that periodic global economic and industrial fluctuations in activity of sufficient magnitude should be capable of producing a signal detectable by atmospheric CO2 monitoring programmes.
Here, the preliminary identification of several candidate signals of large scale economic fluctuations discovered in the atmospheric CO2 record from the Mauna Loa observatory are discussed. More detailed and extensive analysis of these signals by workers in the field may be expected to reveal important insights into biospheric responses to human induced environmental change and allow more detailed assessment of the outcome of programmes designed to control GHG emissions.
Results and Discussion
One of the most robust pieces of scientific evidence concerning recent changes in the global climate system is represented by the 52 year record of atmospheric CO2 concentration collected at the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO).2, 3 A rather striking feature of the MLO CO2 record is the continuous year on year fall in the annual increment to the measured concentration of atmospheric CO2 at MLO that took place between 1987 and 1992. Curiously this fall in the excess amount of CO2 arriving in the atmosphere coincided with a global economic recession which occurred over almost the same period of time. This economic recession began on “Black Monday”, October 19th 1987 when the Dow Jones Index fell by nearly 23%. This was later followed by the Gulf War of 1990 which profoundly affected oil prices. 4 The concomitant financial contagion affected Global industrial output and as a result annual growth in global industrial CO2 emissions began to slow and then to briefly fall (Figure 1).5
Figure 1. Annual Increment to Atmospheric CO2 determined at Mauna Loa Observatory (ppm) and the annual change in industrial CO2 emissions (millions of metric tonnes of carbon).
In addition the recession immediately affected the annual growth in global consumption of NPK fertilisers which stalled and then quickly turned negative as the recession progressed. Once again the coincidence of these effects alongside a falling annual atmospheric CO2 increment is very striking (Figure 2).6
Figure 2. Annual Increment in Atmospheric CO2 at MLO (ppm) and annual change global NPK consumtion (000’s tonnes).
It may be asserted that choice of NPK growth rate is selective since in any economic recession the growth of many products and services inevitably follow the trajectory of the economy as a whole. The critique is certainly sound; however, NPK fertilisers have profound effects on natural ecosystem processes, including release of methane, reduction of soil carbon fixation, eutrophication of water courses and coastal aquatic ecosystems among many others.7 Unlike direct CO2 emissions to the atmosphere NPK fertilisers influence biological reaction rates which drive parts of the modern carbon cycle. In addition anthropogenic inputs to the global carbon cycle are still small (ca 5%) compared to inputs to the global nitrogen cycle (ca 200-300%).1,7 As a potential source of atmospheric CO2 emissions and other GHG missions the effects of NPK fertilisers may be quite significant. They may also perhaps be thought of as an easily available representation of certain types of land use change. Thus a connection to GHG emissions is not easy to completely dismiss.
A number of earlier studies of the atmospheric CO2 record have concentrated on the evolution of the amplitude of the seasonal CO2 cycle at Mauna Loa.3, 8 The seasonal CO2 cycle at Mauna Loa is characterised by an annual rise to a maximum seen in May followed by a rapid fall in concentration to a minimum in October, although the exact month of the inflexions can vary slightly from year to year.3 The seasonal cycle has been characterised as representing the balance of ecosystem CO2 exchange arising from the net balance of ecosystem respiration and photosynthesis although it is recognised that the air masses sampled at Mauna Loa also show seasonal changes and variations from year to year. This seasonal cycle is superimposed upon a background of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration believed to be a result of increased CO2 emissions caused by human industrial and agricultural activities.3 The evolution of this cycle over time is shown in Figure 3. where it can be seen that the amplitude has gradually increased over the years. This has been extensively discussed elsewhere; in particular the rapid decline in amplitude from the mid 1990’s to the mid 2000’s has been ascribed, inter alia, to the influence of drought in the United States.3
Figure 3. Seasonal CO2 cycle amplitude at MLO (ppm) and R/F Ratio – the ratio of annual CO2 rise and fall over the seasonal cycle.
Also shown in Figure 3 is the changing ratio of the rise in CO2 (from annual minimum to maximum) to the corresponding fall (from maximum to minimum) each year – the R/F ratio. A value of 1.0 for this ratio represents the condition in which there would be an annual increment of zero ppm to the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Such has never occurred over the entire length of the MLO record and in general the ratio has increased with time indicating an increase in the excess of CO2 arriving in the atmosphere over that removed year on year. It is noticeable that the decadal fluctuations in the seasonal cycle amplitude and the R/F ratio are out of phase. Whenever the SCA reaches a local maximum the R/F ratio is approximately at its local minimum. Together these cycles determine the annual increment to the atmospheric CO2 concentration and the striking feature of a marked decline in the annual increment to CO2 concentration noted earlier is also very apparent in the R/F ratio which declines markedly between the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
By means of a simple procedure to remove the steadily rising trend from the R/F ratio this variable may be more easily compared to changes in global industrial activity represented by annual changes in fossil fuel emissions (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Smoothed and de-trended CO2 R/F Ratio at MLO and annual change in global fossil fuel emissions (millions of metric tonnes of carbon)and indicating selected major recessions.
It is immediately apparent that changes in the annual rate of fossil fuel emissions appear to be reflected in changes in the R/F ratio. As the annual rate of fossil fuel emissions slows and occasionally turns briefly negative the R/F ratio declines and vice versa. The decadal cycles in the R/F ratio are approximately in phase with the changes in annual growth of CO2 emissions but with the fossil fuel emissions changes leading changes in R/F ratio. It appears that every major recession since the late 1960’s is reflected in fluctuations in the R/F ratio which is in line with the hypothesis outlined above; that major fluctuations in global industrial activity of sufficient magnitude would be reflected in signals detectable by atmospheric CO2 monitoring programmes. Figure 5 shows similar data for annual changes in global NPK consumption for the reasons outlined above and in which similar relationships are readily apparent.
Figure 5. Smoothed and detrended R/F Ratio at MLO and annual change in global NPK consumption (000’s tonnes).
Conclusions
The global economy is currently undergoing a renewed period of financial crisis. This crisis began almost 3 years ago with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and has not yet been wholly “contained”. It is expected to be deeper and to last longer than the crisis of the 1990’s.9 Its effects on industrial output, CO2 emissions, NPK consumption, amongst a host of other effects may be expected to be profound. The observations made here suggest that the various recessions of the late 20th century can be viewed as experiments on the global climate system and that another experiment is now underway. Taken together a more detailed analysis of the effects of these recessions on the global climate system and in particular on the growth and sequestering of atmospheric CO2 may produce a wealth of information to the benefit of both science and economic policy. The effects of the current deep recession on the CO2 record at various global monitoring stations will no doubt be followed with interest. Since the current recession is unlikely to develop in exactly the same manner as previous recessions and that each recession proceeds from a different baseline of Global CO2 emissions, comparison and detailed analysis of the effects of each recession may provide significant new information to the benefit of science and public policy.
On a final note it is likely that a deep economic recession will place science budgets under pressure. It would seem to be the height of folly to allow such pressures to affect the continued development and improvement of environmental monitoring programmes such as those discussed here.
Methods
Data for the monthly Atmospheric CO2 concentration and the Annual Increment to CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa Observatory and Industrial CO2 emissions were obtained from CDIAC. The amplitude of the seasonal CO2 cycle was taken to be the difference between the annual monthly maximum concentration (usually found in May but sometimes occurring in neighbouring months) and the average between the minimum concentration of that year and that of the previous year. The R/F Ratio for each year was calculated from the rise in CO2 concentration from the previous minimum to the following maximum and the fall from maximum to minimum of that year expressed as a ratio. Data for the global consumption of NPK fertilizer in the form of the total mass of N2, P2O5, and K was obtained from the International Fertiliser Trade Association. In Figures 4 and 5 emissions and NPK consumption are expressed as annual changes from year to year. The detrended R/F ratio is expressed as the residuals obtained after fitting a 2nd order polynomial to the trend in R/F ratio. All data in these figures has been smoothed by fitting a cubic Loess function with a sampling factor of 0.25. Figure 3 was constructed similarly by recombining the de-trended smoothed data with the polynomial function describing the trend.
References
1. IPCC (2007). IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (AR4). Cambridge University Press.
2. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_growth
3. Buerman, W., Lintner, B. R., Koven, C. D., Angert, A., Pinzon, J. E., Tucker, C. J., Fung, I. Y., The changing carbon cycle at Mauna Loa Observatory, PNAS, vol. 104, no. 11, pp4249–4254, 2007
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession
5. Boden, T., Marland, G., Andres, R., CDIAC, ORNL, 2011. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/meth_reg.html
6. International Fertilizer Association, IFADATA, 2011.
7. Galloway, J. N., Townsend, A. R., Erisman, J. W., Bekunda, M., Cai, Z., Freney, J. R., Martinelli, L. A. , Seitzinger, S. P., Sutton, M, A. Transformation of the Nitrogen Cycle: Recent Trends, Questions, and Potential Solutions. Science, Vol. 320, p 889,2008.
8. Keeling CD, Chin JFS, Whorf TP (1996) Nature 382:146-149.
9. Some Economist or DT piece?
Biosketch. Jonathan Huddleston is an ecologist and biochemical engineer who was formerly a research scientist with the Millipore Corporation, in the Center for Green Manufacturing at The University of Alabama and in The Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Birmingham (UK).
email: jhuddles at tioli.co.uk
Doesn’t CO2 fluctuate as much as 2ppm daily or weekly?
What’s your point?
That CO2 fluctuates more in a week (and daily at other monitoring stations – I haven’t checked the Mauna Loa daily) than it does in a year.
Do those weekly fluctuations mean anything? Why do they fluctuate so much. Do they correlate with industrial output, wind speed or just CO2 from the active volcano?
The great danger is instabilities induced in social and economic systems by unscientific dogma that our world leaders have believed to represent scientific fact and the public recognizes as absolute “bunkum”, rot, BS!
That is the danger we face, and the only solution is to face reality.
Unfortunately the public are right, and leaders of the Wester scientific community will probably all have to be replaced because they foolishly believed that their alliance with the politically powerful could protect than from reality.
Nope. It won’t work. Sorry about that.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for NASA
you forgot to mention something something about the iron sun and how the UN and NASA have conspired to keep it a secret
I thought it was a neutron star, and the iron sun was the cover story?
So hard to keep it straight.
If your weight fluctuates up a pound one week and down a pound the next week, but increases a quarter pound each week overall, you’ll weigh twelve pounds more at the end of the year. Ultimately, we care only about the running total – the short-term variation is trivial.
You may only care about the running total … I care why things change.
The consensus argument as to why there is a noticeable up and down signal in the yearly graph:
“The sawtooth pattern represents the natural carbon cycle. Every summer in the northern hemisphere, grass grows, leaves sprout, and plants flower. These natural processes draw CO2 out of the air. During the northern winters, plants wither and rot, releasing their CO2 back into the air. This sawtooth pattern shows the planet breathing.”
How bogus since the planet seems to breathing in and out daily or weekly … I want to know why.
It’s the fat-tailed impulse response, with a delta part allowing fast transients to pass through and a long tail which unfortunately generates an inertia in the build-up of excess CO2. So the identifiable cyclic behavior are due to natural variations as you say, and aren’t really that mysterious. I went through the complete analysis in the CO2 residence time thread from last week.
Other signal processing engineers might want to nod their heads at this point.
30ppm differences are explained how?
https://data.gosat.nies.go.jp/GosatBrowseImage/browseImage/XCO2_L3.gif
Bruce,
Local measurements over land near sources and sinks may give a change of hundreds of ppmv CO2 in less than 15 minutes time, as C.D. Keeling experienced himself in the 1950’s. If you go over a few hundred meters, the variability is reduced and levels out to a few ppmv over an hour to a day. Higher up, that are a few ppmv over days to weeks, etc. If you measure at Mauna Loa, two local sources/sinks may interfere with the measurements: downwind from the volcanic vents (+4 ppmv) or upwind from the vegetated valleys (-4 ppmv). These interferences are easely detected in higher variability of the 10-second samples of the continuous measurements. These measurements are not used for daily, monthly and yearly averages, but including or excluding them doesn’t change the average or trend of the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The latter is what is important. After all we are interested in “background” CO2 levels not what a local volcano or vegetation is doing (which BTW also is monitored in a lot of places).
See the difference in raw data of Mauna Loa with and without outliers for the year 2004:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/mlo2004_hr_raw.jpg
and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/mlo2004_hr_selected.gif
The rules for including or excluding local outliers and the calibration procedures for Mauna Loa (and other stations) can be found here:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
CO2 doesn’t fluctuate that much at Mauna Loa: this graph shows last year’s daily, weekly, and monthly means: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html. But Mauna Loa was intentionally situated at a high altitude away from major sources or sinks (and yes, the volcano is not a major source), so is not affected by small scale fluctuations.
Any CO2 monitor near a source or sink (say, anywhere near the ocean, a city, a forest, or, really, pretty much anywhere that isn’t a barren mountaintop) will see fluctuations due to changes in wind direction and speed because the wind can blow the high CO2 from a combustion source either at the measurement device or away from the device (or the low CO2 from a CO2 sink). Indeed, these fluctuations are used to understand how sinks work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eddy_Covariance_IRGA_Sonic.jpg shows a CO2 measurement device and an anemometer above a forest canopy. When the wind is down, the device measures CO2 from higher altitudes. When the wind is up, the device is measuring CO2 from the forest. By looking at the difference, it is possibly to determine how fast the forest is sucking down CO2…
It fluctuates as much as 2.3ppm in a week.
Also, similar fluctuations are seen in Antarctica.
Judith,
The diagrams are not working for me, they seem to be linked back to your mailbox.
Alex
working on it . . .
Thanks
You know whats really interesting?
How A peak and fall of of Cosmic Rays from 1987 to 1992 matches up with CO2.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/Sz5FktlWA0I/AAAAAAAAAe8/YV5k3MUebm4/s1600-h/neutrons.gif
Muana Loa
1987 2.33
1988 2.12
1989 1.31
1990 1.28
1991 0.98
1992 0.46
1993 1.36
Bruce,
It seems you have a new experiment to propose to CERN: Check cosmic rays effect on CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
Yup. Or maybe cosmic rays damage CO2 detectors. :)
Where can I get the figures? They are not showing.
Judith, no bravo on this one either. He goes way off the rails in the first paragraph where he says:
First, what is the “projection of a large scale experiment” when it is at home, and how does the “projection” of an experiment differ from the experiment itself?
Second, while we may or may not be able to “validate the hypotheses that … CO2 emissions … are a major factor driving climate change”, how on earth can investigating whether CO2 emissions fluctuate with economic activity “validate” whether CO2 changes are a “major factor driving climate change”? That makes no sense at all.
So his fundamental, basic claim is badly flawed, he can’t get where he’s going from here.
Finally, without the figures (none of them show up) it’s hard to tell what he’s on about. Not that I care much, proving that atmospheric CO2 concentrations vary with human CO2 emissions and that human emissions vary with economic conditions is a meaningless exercise to me, we’ve known that for years.
w.
If CO2 levels fluctuate that rapidly with industry, that kinda kills the whole idea of CO2 residence time of 5 years; which is a reasonable time. Just based on that, I am highly skeptical of these results.
That’s an inferred [= unproven, modelled] residence time. It’s probably the data show Nature telling you [us, them] that it’s much shorter.
Agg, typo: “the data showing Nature …”
“If CO2 levels fluctuate that rapidly with industry”
CO2 levels don’t. The rate of growth of CO2 does. The two things are very different, just like acceleration is different from velocity.
Evidence please. Just saying it doesn’t count. I mean that the growth rate fluctuates with “industry”.
Weekly CO2 levels fluctuate up and down .
Week starting Jan 2 2011 – 391.78
Week starting Jan 9 2011 – 390.73
A drop of 1.03ppm in 7 days
You can see rise of 2.3ppm in 7 days and drops of 2.39ppm in 7 days.
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_weekly_mlo.txt
Pay attention to the data, not what believers say.
Pay attention to all the data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
Even Antarctica data (with no nearby forest) fluctuates over 2pm daily.
What silliness. The rate of CO2 in (and out) controls the levels of CO2. As, “rate of” is just the derivative. They are not at all different, as one depends on the other. Of course, going backwards–that is integration–is not deterministic like taking the derivative is, so we cannot say “we know the rate of and thus we know of the levels of”. For the RATE to change, the levels must ALSO change, correspondingly. If levels dropped, the rate dropped. If levels raised, the rate raised. This ignores the out rate for CO2 from the atmosphere, as the in and out rates are in interplay (basic kinetics). But if industry is such a major driver as this article is trying to claim–that is, if industry’s in rate for CO2 to the atmosphere is the main control that drives its levels–then CO2 levels must be fluctuating that rapidly with industry for there to be any signal in the first derivative, which is rate.
So, to put it all succinctly: levels and rate are NOT different. They are the same thing, rate is just the first derivative of levels. They tell us different things, but they are the exact same number source.
IPCC actually believes in a residence time this short. What is important however is the adjustment time, which has a fat tail that extends for hundreds of years. The adjustment time is the time it takes the deep carbon cycle to operate. We talked about this on the CO2 residence time thread.
BTW, a short residence time is why you can see these transients pass through. A single-pole filter with a time constant of 5 years will let through signals with periods shorter than 5 years, as any signal processing engineer will tell you.
I guess I get to ask the trillion dollar question: since neither of the recessions mentioned managed to turn the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere negative, how would we get actual reductions without severe economic disruption?
I’m sure the New Order carbon taxes will feed you and your family. You’re focused on Old Speak narratives.
Google seems to think world GDP growth rate was rising during 1987 and stayed above 1.5% until
Obama>/del>2007/2008.http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_kd_zg&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=gdp+growth+us#ctype=l&strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_kd_zg&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&ifdim=country&tdim=true&hl=en&dl=en
Google seems to think world GDP growth rate was rising during 1987 and stayed above 1.5% until
Obama>2007/2008.Recessions slow CO2 emissions; that’s doesn’t mean slowing CO2 emissions causes recessions.
Granted. However, if major systemic shocks produce mediocre cuts to CO2 growth, that would suggest that more substantial reductions could be extremely expensive.
Wills Eschenbach says:
CO2 emissions … are a major factor driving climate change”, how on earth can investigating whether CO2 emissions fluctuate with economic activity “validate” whether CO2 changes are a “major factor driving climate change”? That makes no sense at all.
He has a point – the real point I was trying to make – and probably this comment shows I have made it badly – You have a CSTR on which a control was tweaked a few times at random and a sensor produced an identifiable ouptput- from there some further analysis ought to be possible relevant to current proposals to limit CO2 production.
CSTR??
w.
Thanks, Jon. A couple of issues.
1. The swings in the Mauna Loa (MLO) record are a small part of the global swings. There is an excellent depiction called a “rug diagram) of those swings here at different latitudes. From the graph, the size of the annual swings up and down, and your ratio of them (interesting idea, but subject to hidden limitations), appears to depends critically on the choice of latitude where you are measuring CO2. You need to show that you get (or don’t get) the same results at other latitudes.
2. The hidden limitation I spoke of earlier is that although we have good information on CO2 swings on a monthly basis, the same is not true of energy use. However, if we look at the US annual emission cycle, the wintertime peak emissions are about 125% of the summertime emissions. However, and most importantly, the relative size of these peaks varies greatly depending on (inter alia) the Northern Hemisphere winter weather. Because you are using annual averages, you have a hidden weather-emissions effect that is not accounted for in your analysis.
3. The CO2 swings are an oddity in themselves. I’ve never heard a really convincing explanation for the fact that the further north you measure, the greater the swing in CO2 …
4. Let me suggest that you use a common metric. Generally I convert everything into giga-tonnes of C, with (from memory) 1 ppmv = 2.18 giga-tonnes of C. This lets you look at the actual flows of carbon into and out of the atmosphere.
It clarifies things immensely, because what you see is that of every 10 kg of C emitted, only about 4 kg remain in the atmosphere. The rest is sequestered, but here’s the issue—the sequestration percentage is quite variable. In some years, most of what we emit is immediately sequestered, while other years not much is immediately sequestered. Nobody knows why. It may be errors and year-over-year changes in the data collection methods and results. It may be temperature related. It may relate to the “missing carbon sink” which, despite many claims that it has been “solved”, still bedevils climate researchers.
5. Significance, significance, significance. You can’t just look at two series and assert that they are related. Measure the relationship (correlation). Then see if it is statistically significant. In doing that, you need to account for the autocorrelation of each of the two datasets. I use the method of Quennouille, which calculates an “effective N” or number of data points (or degrees of freedom) depending on the autocorrelation structure of the two datasets being compared. There’s likely better methods.
6. Temperature. If you are looking for a signal of emissions, then as Tallbloke pointed out above, you need to address the issue that changes in temperature are known to cause changes in CO2.
In any case, given the short period of record and the huge variation in annual sequestration rates, digging a statistically significant economic/emissions signal out will be problematic.
It is a novel analysis, and has possibilities, but you have a lot of work ahead of you to make it anything other than an interesting idea.
w.
” In some years, most of what we emit is immediately sequestered, while other years not much is immediately sequestered.” That’s almost right… but the sink is being driven not by what is emitted this year, but rather by the difference between the atmospheric concentration and the ocean concentration, and this sink varies between, say, 2 GtC and 8 GtC per year. It is just chance that the sink has never been larger than our emissions, which allows for the (mis)perception that it is this year’s emissions which is being sequestered. The concept of “airborne fraction” doesn’t really help with this misperception.
The key point being that if we reduced our emissions to zero for a year, there would _still_ be a sink, and it would _still_ be between 2 and 8 GtC per year (slowly shrinking over time as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere drops, and the amount in the ocean rises, until someday the sink will average zero GtC when the ocean and atmosphere are in long-term equilibrium).
That’s the key misunderstanding. The sink is driven by the CO2 atmosphere-to-ocean ratio, which is driven by temperature. We have a test in the making (cooling in the next few decades).
“which is driven by temperature”. No. CO2 concentration has been rising since the Industrial Revolution started, first slowly, and then more and more rapidly. This long-term rise is 95+ percent due to human emissions (the long term temperature rise might be responsible for a few ppm… though even that is partially driven by the CO2 rise, so one could argue we’re at nearly 100%).
There is year-to-year variability, and that variability is almost entirely due to natural causes (eg, ocean cycles and temperatures, and ecosystem photosynthesis and release due to precip, temperature, and other factors).
“No. CO2 concentration has been rising since the Industrial Revolution started, first slowly, and then more and more rapidly. This long-term rise is 95+ percent due to human emissions (the long term temperature rise might be responsible for a few ppm… though even that is partially driven by the CO2 rise, so one could argue we’re at nearly 100%).”
M,
I disagree with all of it. Regarding attribution, I think CO2 emissions (especially since the Industrial Revolution!) caused insignificant change in atmospheric CO2. It’s mostly climatic factors. I would say 95+ percent due to climatic factors.
“I’ve never heard a really convincing explanation for the fact that the further north you measure, the greater the swing in CO2 …”
I haven’t actually looked at this, so take this answer with a grain of salt, but… the difference between winter and summer plant growth is going to be larger as you go north due to the much larger daylight differences at high latitudes. Just think about the Alaskan spring, and how vigorously plants grow once there’s enough heat and light, until it gets dark and they all die again.
http://www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/papers/ccurry/pdf/aror09.pdf seems to suggest that models do a pretty good job getting the latitudinal and seasonal cycles right…
It’s kind of fortunate that this sink occurs, otherwise we would be at much higher CO2 concentrations by now. But then again, because of inertia in the fat-tail response it will take a long-time to get back to a low steady-state.
This mystery as to why 40% remains in the atmosphere after several years does not bedevil me. It is essentially the solution of the diffusion-only Fokker-Planck equation which goes as
Work out the diffusion problem for an concentration impulse located at the interface to a porous media and that is what you will get.
Good post.
The swings and their latitude distributions are indeed interesting. The “rug diagram” is a good depiction, but I also find this animation interesting:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/globalview/co2/co2_intro.html
The annual maximum for NH is in May and the minimum is in Sept/Oct. The increase from the minimum to the maximum is ~7 ppm. SH is very different. During the NH decrease (May-Sept, ~ 5 ppm), SH concentration rises (~2 ppm). From Sept to May it’s almost unchanging (during the NH ~7 ppm increase).
I wonder, is there a “rug diagram” or some kind of animation for temperatures?
“I’ve never heard a really convincing explanation for the fact that the further north you measure, the greater the swing in CO2 …”
Willis,
Could it be that the swings are simply driven by the seasonal cycles of hemispheric temperatures. See figure 7 here:
http://seaice.apl.washington.edu/Papers/JonesEtal99-SAT150.pdf
Willis
Re: “I’ve never heard a really convincing explanation for the fact that the further north you measure, the greater the swing in CO2 …”
The best evidence/explanation I have seen is Fred Haynie’s Future of Global Climate Change http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf
Slide 10 & 14 of 59 document the variations of CO2 at Alert Canada (82 N) vs Mauna Loa vs “South Pole”.
Slide 16 graphs the CO2 variation vs latitude.
See slide 15 “The shapes of the Arctic carbon dioxide curves are very similar to the Arctic sea ice extent curve. The same parameters give excellent fits to both curves.”
Note Haynie’s explanation on slides 18, 26, 28:
Note Haynie’s evaluation of fossil emissions vs SST for CO2: slides 33,34
See also below: manacker | September 7, 2011 at 7:03 pm |
For showing del CO2 vs del temperature.
PS You might find it interesting to compare Haynie’s arctic CO2 changes with your tropical cloud analysis from buoy temperatures.
Willis
The variation in Co2 with latitude is dynamically portrayed at
GLOBALVIEW-CO2 that shows the Arctic “heartbeat” pulsing the CO2. Fred Haynie explains that as due to the Arctic ice oscillations pulsing the ocean temperature.
The CO2 swings are an oddity in themselves. I’ve never heard a really convincing explanation for the fact that the further north you measure, the greater the swing in CO2 …
The CO2 levels are taken at ground level in the high north (Barrow, AK, USA and Alert, NWT, Canada), these receive huge air masses from the mid-latitudes via the Ferrel cells air circulation. The measurements at Schauinsland (at 1,000 m altitude in southern Germany midst the Black Forest) did show a higher amplitude than in the high north.
Further, ice cover is not the cause of the high amplitude CO2 changes, as the 13C/12C fingerprint is hardly influenced by ocean absorption, but highly influenced by plant growth / decay, which is the case during seasonal changes. In this case the hughe change in CO2 absorption/release by vegetation in the NH overrules the opposite changes by the oceans.
Ferdinand
Thanks re Schauinsland CO2. I found the following at CDIAC:
Schauinsland CO2 graph
Schauinsland CO2 data
Any references to analyses of CO2 driven by ocean temperature versus plant growth to compare with Fred Haynie’s analysis?
Haynie’s slide 14/59 shows CO2 amplitude increasing from south pole to Arctic. That appears to show more arctic ice driven than northern hemisphere biomass since that would be driven by a lower latitude.
See Further CO2 discussion
In particular see the phase or lag discussion at David L. Hagen | September 24, 2011 at 3:45 pm |
That appears to show CO2 has the same lag as temperature which are both ~90% degrees (~3 months) lagging from the insolation peaks in the Arctic vs Antarctic respectively.
A simple question on this topic– We know that humans are emitting CO2.
We know that non human emissions as well as absorption rates vary over time, but we do not know by what amounts.
If the percentages of total atmospheric CO2 changes- how do we know that the change is due to humans and not due to either a change in either the emissions rate or the absorption rate of non humans?
a. Isotopic signatures of various sources.
b. We have a good enough handle on what our emissions are.
a. is a canard.
b. is irrelevant
a) There are crops that treat C13/C12 differently. I don’t think isotopic signature tells you anything anymore. C3/C4 metabolism.
b) Really? I don’t think so. I think there a bunch of WAG’s around.
Eli
Here is a simple follow on question to your simplistic and incorrect answer.
Do you believe we can determine the percentage of human caused CO2 in the atmosphere at any time with any reasonable accuracy???
If your answer was yes—which would be wrong—we should be able to definitely state what the percentage of human caused CO2 was in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2011.
We can’t—and you know it—and you like to pretend that we can which is a lie.
I know a thing or two on how convolution works so I can take the carbon emissions estimated over the last 150 years and use that as a forcing function to the IPCC CO2 impulse response function. The accuracy to which this fits the measured atmospheric CO2 concentration over the years is striking. See the link in my comment handle for details on how I worked this out.
Eli
Perhaps you would be willing to define the specific data that your are referencing and review the margin of error in the estimates. As a reasonably bright guy, you must know the accuracy is not there.
You state you have a good enough handle on our emissions? That is true if you are satisfied with a estimate that is no more than =/- 20%
Rob, the human emissions are about 8 +/- 1.6 GtC/year (includes errors in estimated emissions, probably more underestimated than overestimated).
The measured increase in the atmosphere is 4 +/- 2 GtC/year (includes natural variability and measurement error).
That makes that nature is a net sink of 4 +/- 3.6 GtC/year.
Thus the measured increase in the past 50+ years is (near) entirely due to human emissions. That doesn’t mean that every single “human” CO2 molecule still is in the atmosphere, because about 20% per year of all atmospheric CO2 is exchanged with molecules CO2 from other reservoirs. That is the throughput or exchange rate with a half life time of 5 years, where a lot of people is focusing on. But that has nothing to do with how long it would take to reduce the total amount of CO2 in excess of the old (temperature controlled) equilibrium.
Ferdinand,
The human emissions are rising (~2.5 GtC in 1959 and ~9 GtC in 2010). The measured increase in the atmosphere is very variable (0.4 – 3 ppmv/year, thats 0.85 – 6.9 GtC/year). So, the natural net sink is variable too and is global temperature dependent. The anthropogenic CO2 ratio remaining in the atmosphere (atmospheric CO2 annual change : annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions) varies between 15% and 80%.
Data (from manacker’s post):
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6088/6125488794_8ef0233067_b.jpg
Edim, I agree with your remarks, but as you show too, nature was a net sink over the past 50+ years (with a few years borderline), not a source. In graph form:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg
The question of Rob Starkey was if we can know the percentage of human caused CO2 each year.
That is about 100% of the measured increase, because nature in the past 50+ years was a net sink. Temperature only modulates the year by year sink rate of nature, but doesn’t make it a source.
I think it is almost the reverse. We have a very good handle on fossil fuel emissions but can only infer approximately the amount from natural sources. In reality the evidence points to that the natural sources have balanced in the carbon cycle to a steady state (whatever that value is) and the perturbation from man-made sources is measurable and causative.
WebHubTelescope:
We have a very good handle on fossil fuel emissions but can only infer approximately the amount from natural sources.
The amount from natural sources is not important, because that is part of the throughput and doesn’t add to the total mass of CO2 in the atmosphere, as the natural sinks exceed the natural sources. It doesn’t matter that the natural sources are 100 or 1000 GtC/year, as the sinks currently are about 4 GtC larger than the natural sources…
Except if one is interested in how much of the original “human” CO2 still resides in the atmosphere. That can be calculated from the 13C/12C ratio, which shows that about 1/3rd of the human emissions still is in the atmosphere. The rest is exchanged with CO2 from other reservoirs.
My key word is “infer”. We can’t record natural sources and sinks as directly as we can FF emissions, so we need to infer it from other methods and models.
Milk toast weak, false co2 assumption, co2 changes with industrial output and consumption.
Expect this thread to dive into boredom 3….2….1….
Massive thread jack potential as well.
Boring is good as far as science is concerned. It means that we understand the carbon cycle very well and can predict the average atmospheric CO2 years from now, with only the knowledge of projected fossil fuel carbon emissions.
Here’s an alternative explanation for the fall in co2 level rise rate 1987-1993:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1987/to:1993/plot/uah/from:1987/to:1993/trend
Nothing to see here folks, the global climate is a big beast, and the natural carbon cycle dwarfs what mankind emits.
These correlations look really poor at first sight.
Nevertheless, seeing the figure 1 again, it seems that the annual CO2 increment is driving the annual CO2 emissions change. Wow!
As dead and dying Old Europe continues to get ‘deader’ and as their comrades in the secular, socialist government bureaucracy continue to cram suicide pills down the throats of the productive in America, we should all pause just for a moment to consider who the real beneficiaries of solar power subsidies really are: the manufacturers of solar panels in China.
Wagathon
Not sure what brought on this outburst, but one recommends to not mix tequila and absinthe, in particular at early hours of the day.
Wouldn’t the beneficiaries of solar power subsidies be the manufacturers of GHGs in China?
While none of this is new, think it merits looking more deeply into data such as the national GHG inventories, and perhaps checking the sensitivity of the model to removing various national economies from the trends to determine if the correlation can be improved by determining which of the national economies most dominate this connection.. if it’s really there.
Might also work to try to distinguish fossil emission from land use economic trends.
Also worthwhile to note, strong economies can flourish while lowering GHG emissions and becoming more robust and energy independent, which tends to indicate this connection reveals weakness in economies that are least robust and most dependent on others for energy.
Mauna Loa may be pointing an accusatory finger at the bad economic policies of nations, if we can learn to read the entrails of the atmosphere.
Knowledge of climate change is more reliable than knowledge of economics.
That’s because economic science is so much more deeply loaded and invested within subjective ‘fantasy’.
Replace ‘knowledge’ with ‘opinion’ and ‘science’ with ‘raving’ and you have a valid point.
NPK is a fertilizer. Fertilizers are used for growing plants. Plants have something to do with CO2 right?
So CO2 measurement at Mauna Loa is a just a proxy for global fertilizer use which grows plants which produce Co2.
Cool!
Did we forget that this whole climate change farce is about projected catastrophic global warming from human sourced increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration. What these graphs show me is that from the start of these graphs in 1960 to 1975 there was continued increase in CO2 concentration as the world cooled, and with HadCRUT3 monthly global temperature data showing global cooling since 2002 this increase in CO2 concentration with global cooling is happening again.
If we are already cooling with increased CO2 emissions for the past nine years (as well as during the 33 years from 1942 to 1975) what possible purpose is served by reducing CO2 emissions to prevent catastrophic global warming as the globe continues to cool with both increased CO2 emissions and CO2 concentration??
“If we are already cooling with increased CO2 emissions for the past nine years”
Well we aren’t. Nine years is too short to achieve statistical significance.
Co2 is a mysterious gas. The higher the amount, the less warmer it gets.
Norm,
It is very rare for AGW faithful to admit that their movement is based on apocalyptic beliefs about the climate and CO2.
Figure 1 is silly.
Annual change in industrial CO2 emissions is in 100s of MtC and 100 MtC is approximately 0.05 ppm. Furthermore, if the annual atmospheric CO2 increment is caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, it should correlate with CO2 emissions, not with the annual change in CO2 emissions. But it doesn’t. It correlates very well with global temperature.
Yes and no.
Yes, the annual change in CO2 emissions is much smaller than the year-to-year fluctuations. Therefore, the correlations shown in the top post are just tricks of the eye, and indeed, the annual sink depends on global temperature.
But no, the annual growth would not happen without CO2 emissions: remove the gigatons of carbon we emit, and we’d be seeing a sink every year (still with year-to-year variability). Its like the equation: X(t+1) = X(t) + human-emissions/2.12 + random(-8 to -2).
(2.12 being the conversion from GtC to ppm) (i’m guesstimating on the -8 to -2)
M,
The factor random(-8 to -2) is obviously not random! It’s temperature dependent. It’s also dependent on human emissions.
Edim, the year by year change in absorption rate indeed is highly dependent of temperature (and to a certain extent precipitation). Based on the 1992 Pinatubo cooling and the 1998 El Niño warming, about 4 ppmv/°C. On the other side, the increase in the atmosphere follows the human emissions with an incredible fixed ratio (about 53% of the emissions for accumulated emissions vs. increase in the atmosphere, see: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg ). Thus the following formula describes most of what happens over time:
dCO2(atm) = 0.53*dCO2(emissions) + 4*dT
That formula holds for periods from years to millions of years (in the latter case the factor 4 for temperature changes increases to 8 for periods from centuries to multimillennia).
Interesting. I have to look into it before commenting. Thanks anyway.
Ferdinand, in your formula CO2(emissions) is cumulative emissions?
Yes it is.
The total emissions over the past 100+ years is about double the total increase in the atmosphere, as good as the emissions per year are average double the measured increase, be it far more variable. But the latter (mainly temperature induced) levels out over more years, as is the case for temperature. Only a slight increase (maximum 1°C since the LIA, thus about +8 ppmv, if the glacial/interglacial ratio still holds) over the past decades.
Too many people is focused on the year by year increase (which is in fact the derivative of total emissions) while one should compare total increase in the atmosphere with total emissions.
That says something about all variables that influence the year by year increase in the atmosphere, but nothing about the cause of the trend, because the trend is effectively removed by looking at the derivative.
Where is the signal for the rapid industrialisation of 1/3 of the worlds poorest over the very short period of the last thirty or so years?
A steady 2 ppm per year since the industrial revolution and the MLO record we are told, for the last 50 years or so only shows the same 2 ppm per year rise in CO2.
Where is the signal for the rapid industrialisation of India and China over the last three decades?
This is more people than even existed globally before the industrial revolution.
Claiming to be able to detect from the CO2 data, a downturn in western economies, while failing to detect the industrialisation of 1/3 of the worlds population is beyond words.
Absolutely true. China’s economy only recently took off, and that should have been a clear signal, but it isn’t. Throw in India on top of that, and this whole idea presented in this article falls apart even regardless of all the other gaping flaws.
Indeed, as I understand it the annual US coal burn has been about one billion tons for the last decade. During that period China’s coal burn went from one billion tons to about three billion tons today, perhaps exceeding the rest of the world combined. Better numbers would help, but clearly this is a huge spike in human carbon output.
I think China was at 48% in 2010 and the amount burned doubled in 7 years. It went up 10.2% from 2009 to 2010.
It is also important to point out that this failure to detect the industrialisation of about 2 billion people in such a short period as three decades is one of the more obvious inconsistencies in the AGW hypothesis.
Excellent observation.
I wonder how the AGW promotion industry will rationalize that away.
The signal can only be found in the CO2 emissions and fossil fuel consumption record. If it wasn’t for the likely possibility that over 95% of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to increased outgassing from the world’s oceans; the emissions record could be seen in the MLO CO2 record, but as this is clearly not the case we are forced to use conventional economic markers instead.
Excellent point Will.
In 2000, Coal consumption was 2399 Million tonnes oil equivalent and in 2010 it 3555 – a 50% increase.
Oil consumption went up 10% since 2000.
NG was up 30%. since 2000.
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2011/STAGING/local_assets/pdf/coal_section_2011.pdf
Where did that extra CO2 go?
We could just look at this instead of speculating
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
And the rate of CO2 rise has increased. In the 90s the average rate of CO2 increase was 1.5ppm
In the 00s it was about 1.9ppm
So a 1.99ppm annual rise over 10 years produces ZERO temperature increase, while a 1.5ppm annual rise over a decade produces a very large increase. Or was it just that large 1998 rise that cause the temperature rise?
Mysterious.
lolwot | September 6, 2011 at 5:11 pm | Reply
You are missing the point.
The point is simply that our emissions do not have any kind of signal in the global atmospheric CO2 record. They are therefore insignificant.
Your link simply confirms what I have already said. That human emissions have increased substantially yet do not show up in the global data.
If the industrialisation of an extra 2 billion people cannot be detected in the Global Atmospheric CO2 Data then that much industrialisation, if the so called “greenhouse effect” hypothesis is correct, which it certainly is not, cannot possibly effect temperature.
Linking to human emission data is simply a circular argument. Another in the box of tricks of logical fallacies on which the entire AGW hypothesis has been clumsily built upon.
All the warmist’s have, is the claim that temperature has increased by 0.7º C in the last 100 years or so. Which, considering the error margin of the global temperature data is at least 1.3º C that is a stretch by itself. Then they claim that because our emissions have increased, it is therefore likely that we are to blame.
To call this kind of logic a scientific argument, is to insult the entire field of scientific endeavour.
The insignificant increases in human emissions of CO2, so tiny they do not register in the global atmospheric CO2 data, will be entirely consumed by the small increase in global biospheric expansion that they produce as a result.
Now that is a robust, verifiable scientific argument.
“That human emissions have increased substantially yet do not show up in the global data.”
What do you mean they don’t show up in the global data? The rate of CO2 rise has increased. That’s exactly the signal to expect.
I have no idea what signal you expect, but seeing as you deny the greenhouse effect I don’t expect much common sense from you anyway.
lolwot;
Back to the carbon cycle, for the #75402345675676909 since 1985 I suspect.
Try this analogy and nothing has been “proven” on this topic;
You have a large sponge, it’s a little wet as water is absorbed better in that condition. It’s very large sponge mind you. You take a small cup of water and drop it on the sponge, no problem all the water is absorbed. Then you add 5% more to the sponge and repeat, the sponge has no problem.
The sponge is the global carbon sink and the water is co2. The sponge processes daily, weekly, monthly it doesn’t care if amount is 1 or 1.05 units which is all the added human input of co2 represents. There is no real compounding of co2 due to human activity. The sink and the total co2 are fluctuating for their own reasons in long cycles that probably have more to climate changes than impacting climate changes as is indicated in many related charts.
Distorting the co2 residence time is critical piece of disinformation for this reason;
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7895f54970b-pi
The sink and total natural co2 output are both far greater than anything man is producing. That’s why relate human output of co2 to net co2 observed without contortions is attempted in the link by the IPCC 2007. I don’t say the sink might not fluctuate or that natural carbon doesn’t fluctuate as well. It’s just vastly larger in scale compared to human inputs.
Then you have the issue of relating this to warming itself as a positive input, another can of worms.
“The rate of CO2 rise has increased. That’s exactly the signal to expect.”
CO2 increases at 2 ppm per year. That has been the rate of increase since the industrial revolution and as directly measured for more than the last 50 years at Moana Loa and according to the official record is still 2 ppm per year.
What increase in “increase” are you talking about?
“but seeing as you deny the greenhouse effect I don’t expect much common sense from you anyway.”
I am not obliged to believe any hypothesis. I prefer to wait until an hypothesis becomes proven fact.
The problem with the so called “greenhouse effect” is that I currently know of many significant reasons why it will and can never be proven as fact. Therefore I have a duty to point out that this hypothesis is a fallacy.
“CO2 increases at 2 ppm per year. That has been the rate of increase since the industrial revolution”
Not remotely correct. At the start of the Mauna Loa record it was rising at about 0.5ppm per year
My apologies, I meant since before the recent industrialisation of India and China.
Form the Moana Loa Data I have seen, 2 ppm per year is more or less the trend from 1957 onwards. If as you say at the start it was only rising at 0.5 ppm a year, what was the cause of the 1 ppm – 1.5 ppm increase during the first 5 years at Moana Loa?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide-en.svg
Because whatever may be the cause of the spike you allude to, will have no comparison to the industrialisation of more than 2 billion people from between 1980-1990 and the present and still ongoing, where there is no break from the 2 ppm per year trend whatsoever.
the annual CO2 rises at mauna loa are given in this graph:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.png
orange | September 8, 2011 at 11:25 am |
Yes and clearly the rapid and still ongoing industrialisation of 2 billion of some of the worlds poorest in India and China, from about 1980 onwards, does not appear to have any signal.
Yet according to the official narrative, the industrialisation of far less people taking five times as long during the 150 years prior to 1980, was enough to push global CO2 levels from 280 ppm to 340 ppm.
The trend, which was clearly well established according to Moana Loa data well before 1980, has simply continued.
What we should see is something similar to the original industrial revolution compressed to 1/5 of the time frame minus the slow ramp up in population, over and above the initial established trend.
The fact that there is no additional increase to the already established trend can only be the result of the following:
That,
A) Moana Loa CO2 data is fraudulent.
B) Human CO2 emissions are too insignificant to effect global CO2 levels.
Or
C) Both.
Personally, I like C.
the graph shows that the rate of CO2 rise has gone up since the 80s by about 20%
“the graph shows that the rate of CO2 rise has gone up since the 80s by about 20%”
Yes and that is a continuation of the 22% increase since 1957-8, which I repeat is a trend that was already in place before the industrialisation of India and China.
http://www.oism.org/pproject/Slides/Presentation/Slide17.png
You have simply reaffirmed my point. Thank you.
your own graph shows that emissions are in line with the rate of CO2 increase.
Round and round the AGW fruit loop.
Circular arguments are simply logical fallacies.
Correlation is not causality.
Once again, the industrialisation of India and China since the 1980\s must appear as an extreme departure from the global atmospheric CO2 trend, similar in magnitude to the amount of CO2 emissions “officially” attributed humans since the industrial revolution. Somewhere in the region of 60 – 90 ppm increase over and above the established trend over the last 30 years.
“The Inconvenient Truth” is that this signal is missing from the data.
This is proof that human CO2 emissions are too insignificant to effect global atmospheric levels.
Ignoration is futile! (Ignoratio elenchi)
Fascinating to watch the evolution of Will’s foregone conclusion.
He begins with no signal of accelerating CO2 increase in the observations, arguing an asserted flat 2 ppm rise.
Presented a change from 0.5 ppm to 2 ppm rise, Will asks what about the time from the first five years, when the rise took place from 0.5 to 2 ppm?
Shown the data again, Will suggests 1980. 1980 must be the time the observed data has been flat since.
Explained the different yet again, Will’s impossible to meet with observation, fact or logic foregone rationalizations kick into high gear.
This belongs in a textbook of invincible ignorance.
Will invariably twists semantics and mathematics toward one end only, to buttress his sure conviction that he and those sharing his delusion are right.
No doubt they’ll even find some way to be persecuted or deceived by this observation.
To them, nothing is fact until proven to support their case, or to be dismissed by their logic as immaterial.
I’ve had long discussion in past with Ferdinand Englebeen, and considered it a great privilege to be on the wrong side of the learned gentleman, having gained much from his very advanced and thoughtful responses. Easily one of the great, and most patient, contributors to this site. And I say this with utmost respect from across a divide of opinion with the good scholar.
The marked contrast with Will is itself enlightening.
“the industrialisation of India and China since the 1980\s must appear as an extreme departure from the global atmospheric CO2 trend”
No because India and China have simply taken over from europe and the US. European and US emissions rose very high in the 50s-70s but since then they’ve slowed down. India and China have taken over.
In total global emissions since 1950 have gone up at a linear rate with a slight slowdown in the 80s:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
Therefore I would expect the annual rate of CO2 increase to go up at a linear rate, which it has.
“No because India and China have simply taken over from europe and the US. European and US emissions rose very high in the 50s-70s but since then they’ve slowed down. India and China have taken over.”
Yet more logical fallacies.
Western Industrialisation has continued unabated. To claim that emissions from the west have simply been “taken over” by India and China is about as desperate as you can get. I wonder, which orifice you plucked that AGW claim from?
The entire annual human contribution to the global atmospheric CO2 content is no more than 4 ppm, including India and China.
Natural daily fluctuations of atmospheric CO2 content are many times our annual output.
Natural atmospheric CO2 levels can fluctuate by more than 100 ppm in 24 hours.
In any 24 hour period, total human CO2 emissions are somewhere in the region of 0.010958904 ppm.
Even if the entire western world ceased emitting CO2 or indeed the whole of humanity, you would not see the signal of that, above natural variation.
The error for measuring daily CO2 levels at Moana Loa is 4 ppm, the annual human contribution.
The latitude correction is 3.6 ppm
You seriously need to get some perspective.
You need to actually look at the data, not make assumptions about stuff you’ve read in popular magazines.
Here is some actual data on emissions. Here you can see that European emissions increased from 1950 to 1980 very sharply, but have been flat since, contradicting your claim that “Western Industrialisation has continued unabated”
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/weu.html
And Eastern Europe and the USSR have even gone into decline since 1980:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/cpe.html
US emission growth has slowed down since the 80s:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/nam.html
Basically there’s not a jot of truth to your claim that “Western Industrialisation has continued unabated”
And this is why you are flat out wrong that global emissions have accelerated upwards. In fact bizarrely I’ve linked to the graph of global emissions several times now that show global emissions have not accelerated. Yet you ignore it. Well here it is again. You claim that emissions must have risen faster since 1980 than they did from 1940-1970 due to industrialization of China and India. Yet clearly they haven’t:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
Those are global figures of carbon emissions. The period 1945-1980 actually saw a larger increase in emissions than the period 1980-present. Instead of just assuming, look at the graph:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
There is no massive acceleration in global emissions since 1980 that you claim should exist. Again instead of assuming, actually look at what the data show.
CO2 is rising 2ppm per year. Humans are emitting 4ppm of CO2 per year. Therefore your claim about daily emissions that if we stopped emitting CO2 rise would be unaffected is mathematically bogus. You are basically claiming 2 – 4 = 2. Go back to school.
lolwot,
In the last decade (2000-2010), the human CO2 emissions increase was the highest of all previous decades:
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6088/6125488794_8ef0233067_b.jpg
You have linked to data from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and North America and claim this represents the entire industrial world, sans India and China.
You keep linking to data which I am challenging and claim that it proves your point because here is the data. My data is correct because my data is correct, is a circular argument. A logical fallacy.
As I have said above, I believe this data to be irrelevant and I have given clear logical reasons for this which I have no need to repeat.
“CO2 is rising 2ppm per year. Humans are emitting 4ppm of CO2 per year. Therefore your claim about daily emissions that if we stopped emitting CO2 rise would be unaffected is mathematically bogus. You are basically claiming 2 – 4 = 2. Go back to school.”
To claim we are responsible for the 2 ppm annual rise in CO2 due to our 4 ppm annual emissions, would mean that only 50 % of our emissions are sequestered each year and none of the millions of other much larger sources of CO2 emissions, contribute any increase to atmospheric levels whatsoever.
LMAO
Ignoratio elenchi abunantia.
Number one, you have lost some credibility among the engineers and experimental scientists here by bolding a case of absurdly excessive precision of 8 significant digits.
Engineers also understand that a feedback control system can settle to a steady state that is stable against regular and predictable fluctuations but will adjust markedly to perturbations. In other words, the effects of these perturbations are readily detected from the steady state response. Our steady state conditions have had a long time to settle down, but the perturbations occur over a relatively short time period and thus we see the hockey stick in atmospheric CO2 concentration due to fossil-fuel carbon emissions.
Whatever Will, this conversation is terminated.
lolwot | September 10, 2011 at 9:37 am
Finally!
WebHubTelescope | September 10, 2011 at 9:17 am
LMAO
Will, Go to the bottom of this thread if you want to watch how exploratory data analysis is done. You might learn something, instead of treating this subject as “LMAO”.
WebHubTelescope | September 10, 2011 at 1:11 pm
I LMAO at you, not this subject but at you, because you are ridiculous and all I can do is laugh at you.
You try every logical fallacy in the book to imply Correlation equals causality and do not have even the wit to appreciate that every argument you can possibly muster in support of AGW are always based on most ridiculous circular logic, so blatant it would embarrass even a child.
And yet you still have the arrogance to claim you can teach me something.
And I LMAO at you.
The very basis on which the so called “greenhouse effect” hypothesis was based has long since been conceded and yet you are completely oblivious to it.
And I LMAO at you.
You and the rest of the proponents of AGW do not have a shred of credibility left and yet you have no choice but to continue to dig yourselves a deeper hole.
And I LMAO at you.
Fine. I am getting my dose of a intellectual challenge looking at the interesting data the other commenters are providing.
All the evidence has to interlock to eventually make sense.
Will, neither the emissions nor the increase in the atmosphere were constant over time. Both increased from near zero 160 years ago to 8 GtC/year (4 ppmv/year) for the emissions and 4 GtC/year (2 ppmv/year) for the increase in the atmosphere nowadays. The total emissions and increase in the atmosphere are slightly exponential increasing over time:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_emiss_increase.jpg
Over the past 50 years the increase in emissions is from 1.3 ppmv/year to 4 ppmv/year while the increase in the atmosphere is from 0.7 ppmv/year to 2 ppmv/year:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg
Ferdinand Engelbeen | September 10, 2011 at 6:14 am
Please see above:
Will | September 10, 2011 at 6:51 am |
Will, I have read it.
You are confusing between noise and signal. Any measurements you take anywhere shows some noise, be it of the instrument itself, and/or local disturbances.
The instrument error of CO2 measurements is less than +/- 0.2 ppmv, thanks to continuous calibration (with three calibration mixtures) every hour. Local disturbances at Mauna Loa are mainly volcanic vents (+4 ppmv) with downwind conditions from the volcano or upwind conditions (mainly in the afternoon at -4 ppmv). These represent local disturbances, not anything you can link to global CO2 levels.
Here the hour by hour plot of raw CO2 measurements and “cleaned” daily and monthly averages at Mauna Loa compared to South Pole measurements:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_mlo_spo_raw_select_2008.jpg
As you can see, the hourly variability at the South Pole is far less than at Mauna Loa, because there are no local sources/sinks (except the energy use of the base itself), but mechanical problems in the harsh conditions may give some disturbances. And you see the opposite seasonal changes and the lag of the South Pole.
The trends of all stations as far away as possible from sources and sinks are identical:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends.jpg
In detail for a past decennium:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends_1995_2004.jpg
There is a lag between ground level and altitude and a lag between the NH and the SH.
Clearly you have not read it all.
You are simply using the same tired old cherry-picking technique.
It doesn’t matter if the error of the instruments per sample are 4 ppm or 0.2 ppm.
Human emissions of 0.010958904 per day against natural variation or 100 ppm per day will still be undetectable.
Clearly it is you who is confusing signal with noise.
Will, according to your reasononing, it is impossible to detect any sealevel change of a few mm/year (either way), because the “noise” in this case is +/- 2 meter every minute when a wave is passing or +/- 5 meter every 12 hours for the tides.
Indeed in that case, one need about 25 years of measurements to (statistically!) detect the signal in the huge noise. In the case of CO2 measurements, 2-3 years are sufficient. In the hourly to monthly data, the noise is larger than the signal, but even if you look at one year increments (human emissions are only known per year), the signal is clear:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/mlo_co2_seasons.jpg
BTW, I don’t know of any baseline station where the natural variation is 100 ppmv/day. The global amplitude of the seasons is 6 ppmv for a temperature change of 1°C, the local noise at MLO is not more than +/- 4 ppmv/hour and +/- 2 ppmv/day. At the South Pole even a lot less.
Englebeen, your logic is so flawed it is difficult to know where to start.
The biosphere is an expanding an contracting CO2 sink. The higher the atmospheric CO2 content, the larger this sink becomes. Human emissions are simply too insignificant to overwhelm the expansion of the biosphere. It is simply a question of capacity.
Increasing CO2 levels by 4 ppm per year to a biosphere, regardless of scale, is not sufficient to cause an increase in atmospheric levels. This is why commercial growers employ a technique called three fold enrichment. They increase CO2 levels x3 in order to achieve optimal growth. This has to be sustained throughout the entire growing cycle, which on Earth is all year round.
In any environment with such a biosphere, you have a carbon sink which is expanding in line with CO2 increases. The Earths biospheric expansion potential is currently at much less than 1/3 its optimal condition.
Recent studies have shown the biosphere may indeed be currently expanding. But remember, just to achieve optimal atmospheric CO2 levels for plant growth, threefold enrichment must be reached and sustained for considerable time.
In such an environment, with an expanding biosphere, and a claimed steady atmospheric CO2 content of 285 ppm, an additional 4 ppm per year would simply result in a slight expansion of the biosphere. To increase atmospheric levels beyond that which the biosphere can and does adjust to, a much larger source of CO2 would be required. Atmospheric CO2 levels would need to be sustained at much higher levels than the optimum level for optimum biospheric growth. This would be somewhere above 1200-1500 ppm. Every available inch of growing space on the land would need to be packed with giant plants and trees all achieving optimal growth rates.
In this situation, it might be possible to increase global atmospheric CO2 levels by adding small increases but the amount required to achieve an overall increase would also depend upon the conditions of other major CO2 sinks such as the oceans. The last time such conditions were met was during the Jurassic period from about 200-150 m.y.a. In fact this was the last time in the historical record where we do see atmospheric CO2 levels actually going up.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100207004957/http://www.junkscience.com/images/paleocarbon.gif
Just as predicted above, right before levels begin to increase, most of the conditions required for atmospheric increases are met. There is a 60-70 million year period of sustained CO2 levels of above optimal i.e. above 1000 ppm, beginning in the Triassic period. There is steady global average temperature of around 20-21º C turning the oceans carbon net neutral/carbon source. Thus providing the optimal growing conditions to achieve maximum biospheric expansion. After these conditions are sustained for a period of more than 70 million years, causing massive expansion of the biosphere resulting in giant plant and animal life, we do indeed see a significant increase in CO2 from around 1000-1200 ppm to over 2500 ppm.
In conclusion, current human CO2 emissions are far too insignificant to induce a rise in global atmospheric CO2 levels. The only effect that such tiny amounts can have is a small and likely, undetectable increase in global biomass.
If global atmospheric CO2 levels really are increasing, and this depends entirely on whether one believes the official narrative or applies ones own logic to such a question, then clearly there must be another cause.
If however, as is obviously so in your case, the science has been corrupted by sophists, relentlessly spewing logical fallacies, circular arguments cooked books, then it is quite likely that the recent “official” global atmospheric CO2 record is a worthless fraud much like the “official” global temperature record.
W.R Pratt
Author of CO2 The Debate Is Not Over.
“In the hourly to monthly data, the noise is larger than the signal, but even if you look at one year increments (human emissions are only known per year), the signal is clear:”
The annual signal of global atmospheric CO2 variation is clear, this I do not dispute. But the human contribution is much too small to detect.
To get the daily human emissions 4 ppm / 365 = 0.010958904 ppm.
Which is exactly why we do not see the industrialisation of India and China in the data.
Human emissions are undetectable and you cannot prove otherwise.
All you have is a circular argument. Human emissions are increasing, and global levels are rising, therefore we are to blame.
Not very convincing. Correlation does not equal causality.
“BTW, I don’t know of any baseline station where the natural variation is 100 ppmv/day”
So! Try looking at some Moana Lao data pre AWG Fraud.
Steinhauser Wien: May-Aug 1957 + Nov-Feb 1957/58 Measurements made once a day at 25m height. Measurements vary from 280 ppm – 480 ppm within days of each other.
BTW, I don’t know of a conspiracy to take over the world but it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
youtube.com/watch?v=mtudNpL30BU
Will, if humans add 4 GtC/year to the atmosphere and one measures an increase of 2 GtC/year, then nature is a net sink of 2 GtC/year and doesn’t add one molecule, gram or tonne to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is the result of a simple mass balance: what humans emit doesn’t escape to space, thus must be absorbed somewhere. It doesn’t matter where in nature, although the likely candidates are oceans and vegetation (which is measured for both).
As long as the increase in the atmosphere over full seasonal cycle is less than the human emissions over the same time frame, nature is a net sink and humans are fully responsible for the increase. It is that simple.
About measurements: I am not aware of such huge variability in the daily data of any “baseline” station far away from local sources and sinks. But I am very aware of huge variations everywhere over land. Reason why you don’t see any baseline station on land, except at high altitude, where the CO2 from different sources and sinks is already mixed to a large extent. Measurements in Vienna are worthless, because what you are measuring is the result of traffic, heating and vegetation, depending of day/night, wind speed and wind direction. It is the equivalent of measuring regional temperatures midst of an asphalted parking lot…
See here the difference in measurements of a few days in the life of modern (continuous) measurements in (semi-rural) Giessen (Germany) and three baseline stations (Barrow, Mauna Loa, South Pole), all unaltered raw data:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/giessen_background.jpg
Measurements over the oceans or coastal with wind from the seaside or over 500-1000 m above land show similar values, that is for 95% of the atmosphere. Measurements over land up to 200 m altitude show any value you may wish, but that has nothing to do with what is measured in the bulk of the atmosphere. See the variability of CO2 measurements at different heights at Cabauw (Netherlands) up to 200 m:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/cabauw_day_week.jpg
“Will, if humans add 4 GtC/year to the atmosphere and one measures an increase of 2 GtC/year, then nature is a net sink of 2 GtC/year and doesn’t add one molecule, gram or tonne to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is the result of a simple mass balance: what humans emit doesn’t escape to space, thus must be absorbed somewhere. It doesn’t matter where in nature, although the likely candidates are oceans and vegetation (which is measured for both).”
Wow, Englebeen, way to delude yourself.
To claim we are responsible for the 2 ppm annual rise in CO2 due to our 4 ppm annual emissions, would mean that only 50 % of our emissions are sequestered each year and none of the millions of other much larger sources of CO2 emissions, contribute any increase to atmospheric levels whatsoever.
What kind of individual could come to such an astonishingly ridiculous conclusion.
Continuous volcanic eruptions, rotting biomass from trees that began life before the industrial revolution, natural oceanic outgassing with the 800 year lag shown by the Vostock Ice cores, the result of the medieval warm period, peat bogs, algae blooms, exhalation of every air breathing animal on the planet, every insect on the planet, (do some research on how much CO2 termites alone produce), natural fires . . . .
None of these things add any CO2 to the environment? Really?
How the hell do you explain all the previous historical variations in atmospheric CO2 levels if as you claim, “nature doesn’t add one molecule, gram or tonne to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere”????
If you think you can convince anyone of that, you are seriously deluding yourself. But hey, go ahead and try, what have you got to loose?
Absolutely nothing by the looks of it.
The insignificant increases in human emissions of CO2, so tiny they do not even register in the global atmospheric CO2 data, will be entirely consumed by the small increase in global biospheric expansion that they produce as a result.
Will, the word of interest here is that nature is a NET sink for CO2. There are lots of natural CO2 circulating through the atmosphere: from oceans to vegetation and back, depending of the seasons, but the net result over a year is 4 GtC (2 ppmv) more natural sink than source. Thus there is zero NET addition from nature to the atmospheric amount of CO2.
Whatever the amounts of natural CO2 going in and out, that is not of the slightest interest, as long as the amounts emitted by humans are larger than the measured increase in the atmosphere.
There are only three possibilities:
– The increase in the atmosphere is larger than the human emissions:
That means that the increase is caused by human emissions + natural sources and the natural sources are larger than the natural sinks.
– The increase in the atmosphere is equal to less than the human emissions:
That means that the increase is only caused by human emissions and the natural sources are smaller to equal than the natural sinks.
– There is a decrease in the atmosphere:
That means that the decrease is caused by natural sinks which are larger than the natural sources + human emissions.
The Vostok and other ice cores show a very regular near-linear ratio of CO2 levels to temperature changes: about 8 ppmv/°C. With an 800 year lag during the glacial-interglacial transition, up to several thousands of years for an interglacial-glacial transition. Even over the MWP-LIA transition the same ratio is measured with some 50 years lag. That means that the LIA-current warming of maximum 1°C would give not more than 8 ppmv CO2 increase. Not the 100+ ppmv we have until now.
To give a kind of comparison:
Take a fountain where a huge pump circulates water at 100 or 1000 l/min from the bassin over the fountain. Nothing happens with the level (except for a small loss by evaporation) in the bassin. Add a small amount of 1 l/min by a hose in the bassin. At a certain moment the bassin will overflow at the same time span, no matter how much circulates over the fountain, even if the additional flow is only 1% or 0.1% of the circulating flow. The insignificant addition is unmeasurable in the huge instant flows, but nevertheless leads to an overflow…
Something similar is at work in the atmosphere: huge CO2 flows are going back and forth over the seasons, but the net (calculated, not modeled) result in this case is a net loss of CO2, slightly variable, but always a loss over the past 50 years, while the human addition is twice the increase in the atmosphere and also twice the average net uptake by nature.
BTW, the amounts sequestered by the biosphere can be calculated from the oxygen use. About 20% of the human emissions (as quantity) is taken away by vegetation, about 30% by the oceans. See:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
Complete BS Englebeen. Like I said, if you think you can convince anyone of your ridiculous circular go ahead and try. You have nothing to loose.
I have pointed out the clear floors in your silly arguments and all you can do is ignore the facts and continue on spewing logical fallacies.
How’s that working for you so far?
Please explain how volcanoes recycle CO2 thus avoiding adding “one molecule, gram or tonne to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere”.
Please explain how millions of acres of ancient forests which began life long before the industrial revolution do not add to atmospheric CO2 levels.
Please explain how CO2 absorbed into the oceans during the LIA before the industrial revolution do not add to atmospheric CO2 levels.
Please explain how the continual release of CO2 from rotting biomass in soil laid down many hundreds and in many cases thousands of years ago, do not contribute to atmospheric CO2 levels.
We only need to be talking about sources of CO2 locked away prior to the industrial revolution to show you are wrong Englebeen, just try and bare that inconvenient little fact in mind.
Will, it is really as simple as 4 – 8 = -4:
atmospheric increase = human emissions + natural sources – natural sinks
or
atmospheric increase – human emissions = natural sources – natural sinks
or
4 GtC/year – 8 GtC/year = natural sources – natural sinks = -4 GtC/year
Thus with all the volcanoes, burning forests, ocean releases, rotting wood, humans and animals breathing which all temporarely adds to the atmosphere, the natural sinks like (deep) ocean uptake and vegetation growth simply remove 4 GtC more out of the atmosphere in one year than all the above natural sources together add to the atmosphere in the same year. Thus the NET addition (that is sources – sinks) of nature to the CO2 level in the atmosphere is zero, nada, nothing.
You may have missed the same discussion at WUWT some time ago:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/05/why-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-1/
and further more reasons why humans are responsible for the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/20/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-2/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-3/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/24/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-4/
I refer you back to my previous point,
“We only need to be talking about sources of CO2 locked away prior to the industrial revolution to show you are wrong Englebeen, just try and bare that inconvenient little fact in mind.”
You deliberately ignored that one didn’t you?
Will | September 10, 2011 at 6:09 pm |
We only need to be talking about sources of CO2 locked away prior to the industrial revolution to show you are wrong Englebeen, just try and bare that inconvenient little fact in mind.
Again you forget that any carbon which is stored and released was picked up from the atmosphere somewhat earlier and that process still is going on. Except for volcanoes, where the time span is much longer, natural carbon releases are from sources which captured the carbon out of the atmosphere some relative short time before. It is proven (from the oxygen balance) that vegetation at this moment is a net sink for CO2 (the “greening earth”), thus CO2 releases from rotting wood/vegetation of any age is overwhelmed by new growth vegetation which captures more CO2 than is released. Even for the oceans, the release or uptake of CO2 is not influenced by the release or uptake of 800 years before, but by the sea surface temperature of today, as the concentration of carbon in the deep ocean upwelling is hardly influenced by any change in uptake at the sink places, but the release and uptake of CO2 is mainly influenced by SST.
The current increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, some 100+ ppmv above the temperature controlled equilibrium of about 290 ppmv, can only be reached by “stored” natural carbon if you burn 1/3rd of all vegetation on earth (which would be temporarely, as that regrowths quite fast) or 1000 volcanoes burst out at the same time continuous over 150 years or if the ocean surface temperature increases with 12°C. Not very likely that happened somewhere in the past in such a short time span.
Natural forests are mostly in CO2 equilibrium and only a small part is really stored as more permanent carbon (peat, browncoal, coal). Volcanic vents and eruptions emit less than 1% of what humans emit. The oceans are the main sources and sinks, depending of temperature, but the temperature changes in the past millenia were at maximum 1°C, good for 8 ppmv increase in the atmosphere.
Ice cores of various resolution show no huge variability in CO2 levels other than a dependence of temperature of about 8 ppmv/°C over the past near million years. The best resolution ice cores (less than a decade over the past 150 years) from Law Dome are sensitive enough to detect a change of 20 ppmv sustained over one year or 2 ppmv sustained over 10 years. Even the low resolution ice cores of Vostok and Dome C (about 600 years) would detect a peak value of 100 ppmv over 150 years and back. But that is not observed.
Thus talking about releases of stored carbon without taking into account the other side of the balance of ongoing storing of carbon doesn’t make any more sense than looking at your sales and forget the costs of your bussiness…
Sorry, wrong position.
Englebeen, your logic is so flawed it is difficult to know where to start.
The biosphere is an expanding an contracting CO2 sink. The higher the atmospheric CO2 content, the larger this sink becomes. Human emissions are simply too insignificant to overwhelm the expansion of the biosphere. It is simply a question of capacity.
Increasing CO2 levels by 4 ppm per year to a biosphere, regardless of scale, is not sufficient to cause an increase in atmospheric levels. This is why commercial growers employ a technique called three fold enrichment. They increase CO2 levels x3 in order to achieve optimal growth. This has to be sustained throughout the entire growing cycle, which on Earth is all year round.
In any environment with such a biosphere, you have a carbon sink which is expanding in line with CO2 increases. The Earths biospheric expansion potential is currently at much less than 1/3 its optimal condition.
Recent studies have shown the biosphere may indeed be currently expanding. But remember, just to achieve optimal atmospheric CO2 levels for plant growth, threefold enrichment must be reached and sustained for considerable time.
In such an environment, with an expanding biosphere, and a claimed steady atmospheric CO2 content of 285 ppm, an additional 4 ppm per year would simply result in a slight expansion of the biosphere. To increase atmospheric levels beyond that which the biosphere can and does adjust to, a much larger source of CO2 would be required. Atmospheric CO2 levels would need to be sustained at much higher levels than the optimum level for optimum biospheric growth. This would be somewhere above 1200-1500 ppm. Every available inch of growing space on the land would need to be packed with giant plants and trees all achieving optimal growth rates.
In this situation, it might be possible to increase global atmospheric CO2 levels by adding small increases but the amount required to achieve an overall increase would also depend upon the conditions of other major CO2 sinks such as the oceans. The last time such conditions were met was during the Jurassic period from about 200-150 m.y.a. In fact this was the last time in the historical record where we do see atmospheric CO2 levels actually going up.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100207004957/http://www.junkscience.com/images/paleocarbon.gif
Just as predicted above, right before levels begin to increase, most of the conditions required for atmospheric increases are met. There is a 60-70 million year period of sustained CO2 levels of above optimal i.e. above 1000 ppm, beginning in the Triassic period. There is steady global average temperature of around 20-21º C turning the oceans carbon net neutral/carbon source. Thus providing the optimal growing conditions to achieve maximum biospheric expansion. After these conditions are sustained for a period of more than 70 million years, causing massive expansion of the biosphere resulting in giant plant and animal life, we do indeed see a significant increase in CO2 from around 1000-1200 ppm to over 2500 ppm.
In conclusion, current human CO2 emissions are far too insignificant to induce a rise in global atmospheric CO2 levels. The only effect that such tiny amounts can have is a small and likely, undetectable increase in global biomass.
If global atmospheric CO2 levels really are increasing, and this depends entirely on whether one believes the official narrative or applies ones own logic to such a question, then clearly there must be another cause.
If however, as is obviously so in your case, the science has been corrupted by sophists, relentlessly spewing logical fallacies, circular arguments cooked books, then it is quite likely that the recent “official” global atmospheric CO2 record is a worthless fraud much like the “official” global temperature record.
W.R Pratt
Author of CO2 The Debate Is Not Over.
“The biosphere is an expanding an contracting CO2 sink. The higher the atmospheric CO2 content, the larger this sink becomes. Human emissions are simply too insignificant to overwhelm the expansion of the biosphere. It is simply a question of capacity.”
That idea is refuted by many lines of real world observations.
1) The total biomass on earth is about 560 billion tonnes carbon and humans have emitted about 340 billion tons carbon over the past 250 years from CO2. So what your argument implies is that 60% of the world’s biosphere didn’t exist 250 years ago and that all that extra amount is due to man. Which is of course ridiculous.
2) You don’t take into account how staggeringly fast a 2ppm/year rise is. Geologically speaking there is no known precedent. The past CO2 rises out of glacial periods were on the order of 0.02ppm/year. How funny that this staggeringly fast rise happened in Earth’s history just when man started pumping out CO2? Many would call that a coincidence too far. It also defies your assumption that the biosphere would be able to cope with a 4ppm human emission, when a 2ppm/year rise is not a small number.
3) The law dome ice core show CO2 at around 280ppm for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution. Then whoosh we jump up in an accelerating curve to todays value of 390ppm. You have to believe that timing is coincidence too.
4) The epica and vostok ice cores shows CO2 below about 300ppm for hundreds of thousands of years. The only known point where it jumps to 390ppm happens to be post-industrial revolution. Yet *another* coincidence?
5) You are arguing that nature is a sink of human CO2 emissions, but a source of the atmospheric CO2 rise. That would mean the biosphere is a sink of CO2 over the the last 10 years for example and *something else* is a source of the 2ppm/year CO2 rise.
5a) For that “something else” to be the cause of the 2ppm/year CO2 rise it will have to be emitting a LOT more than 4ppm/year, otherwise it would just be absorbed by the biosphere according to your argument. You don’t explain how much you think it’s emitting. 20ppm/year?
5b) You don’t explain what the *something else* is. It can’t be the oceans because they are a net sink. It can’t be volcanism because it’s emissions can’t explain even an absolute 0.1ppm/year rise, let alone an *increase* of 20ppm in 100 years.
In conclusion your argument amounts to ignoring what’s staring you in the face and choosing to believe a completely unbelievable and vague fantasy instead. Presumably this goes hand-in-hand with denying inconvenient data like my guess is you deny the ice core records. Naturally I question your motives.
scratch point 1 – I think that 560 billion figure is too low by several times.
lolwot | September 11, 2011 at 7:06 am
“That idea is refuted by many lines of real world observations.
1) The total biomass on earth is about 560 billion tonnes carbon and humans have emitted about 340 billion tons carbon over the past 250 years from CO2. So what your argument implies is that 60% of the world’s biosphere didn’t exist 250 years ago and that all that extra amount is due to man. Which is of course ridiculous.”
I do not need to respond to your logical fallacies any further, but I will give an example of such from the above quote.
The total biomass on Earth is not known. 560 billion tonnes is merely an estimate. Of what it is an estimate is not quite clear but it is certainly not an estimate of the Earth’s biomass.
For example soil and therefore rock, is biomass and is a source and sink of CO2 . I would be very surprised if all the worlds soil alone contained a mere 560 billion tonnes of carbon.
As for the rest of your post, I will not waste any more of my time on it.
lolwot, if the natural carbon sources/sinks are static, then how do you explain how the sinks are now suddenly able to absorb an extra ~2ppm/year (around half anthropogenic emissions)?
And if they’re not static then how did the sinks track the sources to within an extremely narrow range for hundreds of thousands of years?
One possible explanation for the last point is that CO2 levels are close to the lower limit for the survival of the biosphere – at which plants, starved of CO2, die out and change from sinks into sources.
That should really establish the biotic steady-state. In physics there is a theory called Principle of Least Action, and in life sciences there is the Principle of Least Effort, and in jargon these are often referred to as the path of least resistance. In general it describes taking a path that is deviating the least from physical laws (for example the trajectory of a thrown ball). By the same token, opportunistic biota will collectively try to maximize energy use which is the greedy path. The greed ends however when they start to exceed the carrying capacity. This explains how a steady-state use of CO2 may come about.
So that is the biological path which is of relatively short duration in comparison to the glacial time periods involved in getting the carbon sequestered into deep stores. Any talk of “missing carbon” needs to be put into that context.
I placed the following argument in another thread, but want to put it here as well because of the interesting correlations that Peter mapped out at the bottom of this thread. It is really fascinating stuff that I don’t think has been looked at from such a fundamental level.
My explanation of the “missing carbon”
Certain laws of physics can’t be denied and the model of the carbon cycle is really set in stone. The fundamental law is one of mass balance and every physicist worth his salt is familiar with the master equation, also known as the Fokker-Planck formulation in its continuous form.
What we are really interested in is the detailed mass balance of carbon between the atmosphere and the earth’s surface. The surface can be either land or water, it doesn’t matter for argument’s sake.
We know that the carbon-cycle between the atmosphere and the biota is relatively fast and the majority of the exchange has a turnover
of just a few years. Yet, what we are really interested in is the deep exchange of the carbon with slow-releasing stores. This process is described by diffusion and that is where we can use the Fokker-Planck to represent the flow of CO2.
This part can’t be debated because this is the way that the flow of all particles works; they call it the master equation because it invokes the laws of probability and in particular the basic random walk that just about every physical phenomenon displays.
The origin of the master model is best described by considering a flow graph and drawing edges between compartments of the system. This is often referred to as a compartment or box model. The flows go both ways and are random, and thus model the
http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/9016/co250stages.gif
That shows how you would solve the system numerically. The basic analytical solution to the Fokker-Planck assuming a planar source and one-dimenional diffusion is the following:
Consider that x=0 near the surface, or at the atmosphere/earth interface. Because of that, this expression can be approximated by
where n(t) is the concentration evolution over time and q is a scaling factor for that concentration.
First thing one notices about this expression is that n(t) has a fat tail and after a rapid initial fall-off only slowly decreases over time. The physical meaning is that, due to diffusion, the concentration randomly walks between the interface and deeper locations in the earth. The square root of time dependence is a classic trait of all random walks and you can’t escape seeing this if you have ever watched nature in action. That is just the way particles move around.
For CO2 concentration this in fact describes the evolution of the adjustment time, and it accurately reflects the infamous IPCC curve for the atmospheric CO2 impulse response. It is called an impulse response because that is the response that one would expect based on an initial impulse of CO2 concentration.
But that is just the first part of the story. As an impulse response, n(t) describes what is called a single point source of initial concentration and its slow evolution. In practice, fossil-fuel emissions generate a continuous stream of CO2 impulses. These have to be incorporated somehow. The way this is done is by the mathematical
technique called convolution.
So consider that the incoming stream of new CO2 from fossil fuel emissions is called F(t). This becomes the forcing function.
Then the system evolution is described by the equation
where the operator * is not a multiplication but signifies convolution.
Again, there is no debate over the fundamental correctness of what has been said so far. This is exactly the way a system will respond.
If we are now to put this into practice and see how well it describes the actual evolution of CO2, we can understand ever nagging issue that has haunted skeptical observers. It really all becomes very clear.
For the forcing function F(t) we use a growing power law.
where N is the power and k is a scaling constant.
This roughly represents the atmospheric emissions through the industrial era if we use a power law of N=4. See the following curve:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_csV48ElUsZQ/S-DLIeFygSI/AAAAAAAAARs/zsfTRgmzy9Y/s1600/emissions.gif
So all we really want to solve is the convolution of n(t) with F(t). By using Laplace transforms on the convolution expression, the answer comes out surprisingly clean and concise. Ignoring the scaling factor :
With that solved, we can now answer the issue of where the “missing” CO2 went to. This is an elementary problem of integrating the forcing function, F(t), over time and then comparing the concentration, c(t), to this value. Then this ratio of c(t) to the integral of F(t) is the amount of CO2 that remains in the atmosphere.
Working out the details, this ratio is:
Plugging in numbers for this expression, q=1, and N=4, then the ratio is about 0.28 after 200 years of growth. This means that 0.72 of the CO2 is going back into the deep-stores of the carbon cycle, and 0.28 is remaining in the atmosphere.
If we choose a value of q=2, then 0.56 remains in the atmosphere and 0.44 goes into the deep store. This ratio is essentially related to the effective diffusion coefficient of the carbon going into the deep store.
Come up with a good number for the diffusion coefficient, which is related to q, and we have an explanation of the evolution of the “missing carbon”.
WebHubTelescope | September 11, 2011 at 1:22 pm
We can’t account for the missing carbon and its a travesty that we can’t.
LMAO at you!
Will, I will try to react on your basic sentence only:
Increasing CO2 levels by 4 ppm per year to a biosphere, regardless of scale, is not sufficient to cause an increase in atmospheric levels.
This simply is not true. A doubling or tripling of CO2 levels doesn’t double or triple the CO2 uptake by plants. In controlled circumstances with optimal temperature, humidity, sufficient fertilizers, minerals and water an average 50% increase in carbon uptake by plants happens for a CO2 doubling. That simply means that plants in the best circumstances only absorb halve the increase, not 100%. The 30% increase in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution did lead to an increase of about 3% in uptake by plants, not 30% (because a lot of other limits play a role in nature, besides CO2) or about 20% of the current emissions, not 100%. The rest of the emissions (minus the ocean uptake at 30%) remains in the atmosphere.
As said before, the real net uptake (with large margins of error) of CO2 in the biosphere can be calculated from the oxygen use, thus is quite well known.
The same point for the oceans: the ocean surface does absorb about 10% of the emissions, which happens quite fast (1.5 years half life time). But then the surface waters are in dynamic equilibrium with the atmosphere again. The rest of the difference is going into the deep oceans, but the exchanges between deep oceans and atmosphere are limited in quantity. Thus that takes more time.
And please have some very solid arguments before you want to accuse serious scientists of cooking the CO2 books. CO2 measurements are the most solid and rigourisly controlled ones one can think of. Measured and controlled by many groups working for different labs in different countries. If anyone should change the figures, it would be very strange that nobody, even retired, would protest against such a scientific fraud.
One can only hope that one day temperature measurements were done in the same way…
Englebeen,
I am just going to drill down to the first couple of paragraphs to expose your blatant and sloppy technique of switching frames of reference so as to show just how dishonest and/or ignorant you are.
“This simply is not true. A doubling or tripling of CO2 levels doesn’t double or triple the CO2 uptake by plants. In controlled circumstances with optimal temperature, humidity, sufficient fertilizers, minerals and water an average 50% increase in carbon uptake by plants happens for a CO2 doubling. That simply means that plants in the best circumstances only absorb halve the increase, not 100%.”
I use an example of a biosphere, and you switch the frame of reference to individual plants.
How many plants are you talking about, what plants are you talking about, what size were they when the tests were carried out, what time scales were these tests carried out over, how large was the environment, what were the total yields achieved, how large were the plants at the end of the growing period, how long were the CO2 increases sustained for? All of this information is missing.
Clearly in the paragraph above you are referencing a controlled environment with an unspecified number of plants, an unspecified growing period and selectively specified conditions. There is absolutely no information of any value in this paragraph whatsoever.
In my example it is clearly stated that the example is a biosphere and therefore obviously the time scale is the full life cycle of that biosphere.
“The 30% increase in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution did lead to an increase of about 3% in uptake by plants, not 30% (because a lot of other limits play a role in nature, besides CO2) or about 20% of the current emissions, not 100%. The rest of the emissions (minus the ocean uptake at 30%) remains in the atmosphere.”
Now you have switched the frame of reference from what may as well be mould growing on the handkerchief up your sleeve one sunny day, to a global scale biosphere spanning a century and a half, as a comparison.
A biosphere willbsorb small carbon dioxide increases because the biosphere will grow larger. A single plant may or it may not.
Switching the frames of reference half way through your point is a particular form of well known logical fallacy which result false analogies known as inductive fallacies. Sometimes referred to as a red herring Englebeen.
Further more,
“The majority of the stomatal frequency-based estimates of CO2 for the Holocene do not support the widely accepted concept of comparably stable CO2 concentrations throughout the past 11,500 years.”
F. Wagner, et.al., 2004
Paleoecologist and stomata research scientist (13)
Will | September 11, 2011 at 5:38 pm |
Will,
All I have done is to show you that many types of plants in the best circumstances don’t double or triple their uptake of CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 levels double or triple (with a few exceptions). That is measured for hundreds of plant types from tomatoes to trees with experiments in glass houses, open fields and forests. You may know and trust the source:
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject_a.php
In less optimal circumstances, that is the full biosphere, the effect of more CO2 is even less, because other constraints (lack of sufficient minerals, fertilisers, sunlight, water, temperature…) may be more important than lack of CO2.
Thus if the plants don’t increase their uptake at the same rate as the increase in the atmosphere, you can’t say that all human emissions disappear in a growing biosphere. Because that is impossible if there is no 30% increase in uptake for the current 30% increased CO2 level.
Moreover, the increase in uptake of the global biosphere is known, as that can be calculated from global oxygen use. And that shows that the biosphere indeed is a net sink for CO2, but only for 12.5 +/- 7.5% of the human emissions, by far not 100%:
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject_a.php
That is the reason that I switched from many individual plant experiments to the full biosphere: both most plants and the whole biosphere don’t catch an increase of CO2 (whatever the source) in the atmosphere to the full extent. Thus part of human emissions stay in the atmosphere. Not forever, but it will take more time than the biosphere (and oceans) can cope with on short time (years to a few decades).
That means that your theory:
A biosphere will absorb small carbon dioxide increases because the biosphere will grow larger.
is rejected by the facts.
Further, stomata data have the advantage over ice cores that they have a better resolution, but the disadvantage that they are taken over land, where a positive bias and a huge variability is common, compared to CO2 levels in the bulk of the atmosphere. The bias can be compensated for by calibrating the stomata index (SI) data against… ice cores and direct measurements over the past century. But there is no way to know how the bias changed over the previous centuries.
One of the main places where SI data were extracted is St. Odiliënburg in SE Netherlands. The landscape in the main wind directions (SW to NW) changed enormously over the centuries from sea to land and forests to agriculture and industry. Even the main wind direction may have changed in certain periods (more East during the LIA?). That has consequences for the regional CO2 levels and thus for the SI data…
The second reference (about the sequestering of CO2 by the biosphere) should be:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
Englebeen, Englebeen, Englebeen,
Your intellectual dishonesty seems to know no bounds. Because of this and the fact that I have already exposed you for using numerous tired, centuries old, logical fallacies, rest assured this will be my last communication to you. I am beginning to feel the need to disinfect my keyboard with every word I type in response to your deceptions.
“All I have done is to show you that many types of plants in the best circumstances don’t double or triple their uptake of CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 levels double or triple (with a few exceptions). That is measured for hundreds of plant types from tomatoes to trees with experiments in glass houses, open fields and forests. You may know and trust the source:”
Here you have taken me completely out of context and then stuffed my mouth full of your own slippery words.
I never once claimed that “plants double or triple their uptake of CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 levels double or triple”. Again you have flipped the frame of reference in order to discredit not only a perfectly valid point but in doing so, you are in complete denial of reality. An obvious indication of your level of dishonesty.
What I said was, as CO2 increases, the biosphere expends and that that process of expansion continues until CO2 levels have reached a steady state well above the optimum level for plant growth, which is 1000-1200 ppm. You simply need to scroll back up to see how you have deliberately taken me out of context. A deliberate use of a well known logical fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_quoting_out_of_context
Also your link is not what you claim it to be. It does not show hundreds of studies for double or triple CO2 levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
“In less optimal circumstances, that is the full biosphere, the effect of more CO2 is even less, because other constraints (lack of sufficient minerals, fertilisers, sunlight, water, temperature…) may be more important than lack of CO2.
Thus if the plants don’t increase their uptake at the same rate as the increase in the atmosphere, you can’t say that all human emissions disappear in a growing biosphere. Because that is impossible if there is no 30% increase in uptake for the current 30% increased CO2 level.”
Quite simply, in this statement you are comparing percentages of one phenomena, human CO2 emissions over a century and a half, to the percentage of another phenomena, the annual uptake of individual plants.
The percentage of CO2 uptake of an individual plant is determined by species. Whether that plant is a seedling or a 250′ tree the percentage may remain approximately the same. But the actual amount of CO2 that individual plant will consume most certainly will not.
Yet in the quote above, this is exactly what you are attempting to imply. You have explicitly stated that a 30% increase in atmospheric CO2 over 150 years must be matched by a 30% increase in uptake of individual plants.
Quote: “Thus if the plants don’t increase their uptake at the same rate as the increase in the atmosphere”
This level of deliberate misrepresentation of reality is breathtaking Englebeen.
I think at this point I’m going to leave it there. I am disgusted at your level of dishonesty. I think I have done more than enough to show that you are deliberately using fallacious arguments with the intent to deceive. Therefore by definition you are a sophist Englebeen.
My point stands unchallenged. Human CO2 emissions are too insignificant to cause an increase in global atmospheric CO2 levels. The best they can do is cause a slight, possibly undetectable, expansion in the Earth’s biosphere as described above:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/09/06/detection-of-global-economic-fluctuations-in-the-atmospheric-co2-record/#comment-111218
For a comprehensive list of logical fallacies employed by sophist like Ferdinand Englebeen, including the fallacy of Jerome Ravetz’s “Post Normal Science” which is defined perfectly by the logical fallacy of Special Pleading see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
Will | September 13, 2011 at 5:48 am |
I may have slightly misinterpreted what you said (English is not my native language), no reason to use big words, but simply ask for some clarification. Let us look at what you say:
What I said was, as CO2 increases, the biosphere expends and that that process of expansion continues until CO2 levels have reached a steady state well above the optimum level for plant growth, which is 1000-1200 ppm.
I interpreted “expands” as more growth, simply because expansion as growing area is not very likely from more CO2 alone (except somewhat in deserts due to better water efficiency), without accompanying temperature increase (more area where ice sheets or permafrost are present). Thus there is hardly any expansion in growth area possible, let it be a doubling if CO2 doubles. There is not twice the amount of land available.
The only alternative is that plants expand in growth on the same area. Which is observed in most experiments on individual plants, but again no doubling for a CO2 doubling. Thus that makes it very unlikely that the total biosphere (the sum of all plants) would double its uptake when CO2 in the atmosphere doubles.
That is a logical buildup of arguments: if individual plants don’t double their CO2 uptake for 2xCO2, and there is no double area available for plant growth, then it is perfectly logical that the biosphere as a whole doesn’t double its CO2 uptake for a CO2 doubling in the atmosphere.
The next logical step is to look at the uptake of the whole biosphere. Fortunately we have oxygen measurements since 1990, accurate enough to see how much the biosphere produces (or uses). For each 1.2 molecules of oxygen produced (or used), 1 molecule of CO2 was captured (or released). That shows that the net CO2 uptake by the whole biosphere increased from near zero (estimates from a few samples before 1990) to currently 1 GtC/yr. That is less than 1% increase over the 120 GtC absorbed and released each year by all land plants together, even less if you account for the whole biosphere.
Thus the increase of 30% CO2 in the atmosphere over 150 years time did lead to less than 1% more CO2 uptake by the whole biosphere
This simply proves that the biosphere doesn’t expand fast enough to cope with any increase (whaterver the cause) in the atmosphere. Even if ultimately plant growth would match the increase in the atmosphere, it is lagging now and in the far foreseeable future.
Humans currently emit 8 GtC/year, that is 8 times more than the whole biosphere does absorb as extra today. Thus at least 7 GtC/yr is NOT absorbed by the biosphere and, besides the part that is absorbed by the oceans, that is accumulating in the atmosphere.
Thus your
Human CO2 emissions are too insignificant to cause an increase in global atmospheric CO2 levels.
is proven false.
Argumentum ad nauseam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_repetition
and again
Taking me out of context and deliberately misinterpreting what I have said. Using the excuse that English is not your first language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_quoting_out_of_context
and above all
Ignoratio elenchi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi
Optimisation of CO2 has the effect of doubling and even tripling crop yields. That is a fact of which you deny.
http://www.undp-adaptation.org/iccd/files/docs/publications/Crop%20response%20to%20elevated%20CO2%20and%20world%20food%20supply.pdf
Quote: “Specifically, the two non-FACE datasets mentioned above provide, under doubled CO2 concentration, crop yield enhancement factors of 33% (many-crops analy- sis, Kimball, 1983) and 31% (wheat analysis, Amthor, 2001), respectively. Scaling these responses to 550 ppm and reference concentrations of 350ppm provides a useful basis for com- parison to FACE data. Depending on whether straight lines, rectangular or non-rectangular hyperbolas are used for such scal- ing, the following “predictions” at 550 ppm CO2 are made: the 33% enhancement of Kimball (1983) scales to 20%, 21% or 23%, respectively. The enhancement for wheat, 31% (Amthor, 2001), scales to 18%, 21% or 24% (Fig. 1).”
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m35386k257823764/
Quote:
“The increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration probably will have significant direct effects on vegetation whether predicted changes in climate occur or not. Averaging over many prior greenhouse and growth chamber studies, plant growth and yield have typically increased more than 30% with a doubling of CO2 concentration. Such a doubling also causes stomatal conductance to decrease about 37%, which typically increases leaf temperatures more than 1 °C, and which may decrease evapotranspiration, although increases in leaf area counteract the latter effect. Interactions between CO2 and climate variables also appear important. In one study the growth increase from near-doubled CO2 ranged from minus 60% at 12 °C to 0% at 19 °C to plus 130% at 34 °C, suggesting that if the climate warms, the average growth response to doubled CO2 could be consistently higher than the 30% mentioned above. Even when growing in nutrient-poor soil, the growth response to elevated CO2 has been large, in contrast to nutrient solution studies which showed little response. Several studies have suggested that under water-stress, the CO2 growth stimulation is as large or large than under wellwatered conditions. Therefore, the direct CO2 effect will compensate somewhat, if not completely, for a hotter drier climate. And if any climate change is small, then plant growth and crop yields will probably be significantly higher in the future high-CO2 world.”
Will | September 13, 2011 at 6:43 pm |
Will, did you read and understand your own references?
From the first reference
the following “predictions” at 550 ppm CO2 are made: the 33% enhancement of Kimball (1983) scales to 20%, 21% or 23%, respectively. The enhancement for wheat, 31% (Amthor, 2001), scales to 18%, 21% or 24% (Fig. 1).
At 550 ppmv, that is about a doubling, or 100% more CO2 compared to pre-industrial CO2 levels, the increase of crop yield is 18-24%, in at least halve the cases for seeds, even not for total carbon uptake (most new varieties have less stem, thus less total carbon uptake). Even if agricultural crops are helped with all necessary ingredients like fertilisers, minerals and water.
Your second reference makes it even more clear:
Most crops show that for any given level of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), increasing the CO2 level to 1,000 ppm will increase the photosynthesis by about 50% over ambient CO2 levels. For some crops the economics may not warrant supplementing to 1,000 ppm CO2 at low light levels.
Thus for a more than tripling of CO2, the photosynthesis, that is the total carbon uptake, in average is increased with 50%, far from the 300% necessary to absorb all extra CO2…
The same in your third reference:
Averaging over many prior greenhouse and growth chamber studies, plant growth and yield have typically increased more than 30% with a doubling of CO2 concentration.
Again, no doubling in growth when CO2 levels double.
Thus if humans or volcanoes or the oceans add more CO2 to the atmosphere, that leads to more plant growth, but not enough to capture the full increase.
Simply said, your theory that any increase of CO2 caused by humans or natural causes should be fully taken away by more plant growth doesn’t show up in your own references…
In reality, the current increase in vegetation growth is only 12.5% of the human emissions. That are the proven facts, not theory or phantasy.
Incidently Englebeen,
your post @ Ferdinand Engelbeen | September 13, 2011 at 2:17 pm
is a repeat of the same fallacious arguments for which I have already pointed out the flaws.
All you have done here is rephrased your original logical fallacies and repeated them again.
It is impossible to increase CO2 levels by adding 4 ppm per year in an atmosphere where there is a biosphere with an optimum requirement of three times current levels.
You are denying the fact that in elevated levels of CO2, plants will grow larger and more prolific and the consequence is that more CO2 is thus consumed.
In the following study, Total biomass increased by 44% when the subject plants were exposed to optimum CO2 levels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2qVNK6zFgE
On a global scale, until optimum levels are reached and sustained for enormous periods of time, any small amounts of additional CO2 below the optimum level of 1000-1200 ppm will simply be consumed by the biosphere. Therefore the 4 ppm per year from human emissions can only cause a slight increase in biomass. In order to be responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, humans would need to be producing and sustaining quantities of CO2 far above the optimum requirements for the maximum growth of the biosphere.
This fact is supported by historical evidence.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/09/06/detection-of-global-economic-fluctuations-in-the-atmospheric-co2-record/#comment-111218
It also explains why the recent and rapid industrialisation of at least 2 billion people in India and China over the past 30 years, does not have a signal over and above the apparent trend in the official CO2 record.
It is therefore logical to conclude that the official CO2 record is a fraud.
Englebeen,
“At 550 ppmv, that is about a doubling, or 100% more CO2 compared to pre-industrial CO2 levels, the increase of crop yield is 18-24%, in at least halve the cases for seeds, even not for total carbon uptake (most new varieties have less stem, thus less total carbon uptake).”
This argument is based on circular logic. There is only one source for the claim that pre-industrial levels of CO2 were 280 ppm. That is the dubious ice core data.
There are over 90,000 separate direct atmospheric chemical analysis measurements (direct air samples) from the 1800’s which show CO2 levels have never been stable at 280 ppm. The “official” narrative claims a steady 280 ppm. All the independent evidence suggests otherwise.
You are entitled to believe the ice core data Englebeen, that is your choice, but no one is actually obliged to do likewise.
Englebeen
“Thus for a more than tripling of CO2, the photosynthesis, that is the total carbon uptake, in average is increased with 50%, far from the 300% necessary to absorb all extra CO2…”
By your own logic Englebeen, in a greenhouse environment, it should be possible to increase CO2 to optimum levels of 1000-1200 ppm and then maintain then maintain and even increase them simply by adding 4 ppm per annum.
Wow, have you tried informing the Royal Horticultural society?
By the same flawed logic, it should be possible to increase CO2 levels from any starting point by simply adding 4 ppm per annum.
Yet in the link I gave you: http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
it clearly states “Any actively growing crop in a tightly clad greenhouse with little or no ventilation can readily reduce the CO2 level during the day to as low as 200 ppm.”
That is from an ambient level of 340 ppm. A 140 ppm decrease in under 12 hours Englebeen.
In this environment, what do you think your 4 ppm additional CO2 per annum will achieve?
Do you see how far off you are with your flawed logic now Englebeen?
That indeed is an interesting little experiment.
Next, what we do is extend this as a thought experiment. The greenhouse obviously must have a ceiling that is of a certain height, otherwise it can’t be “tightly clad”. The height controls effectively how much carbon is in the air and how much can get trapped in the vegetation in the steady state.
Now we consider what happens if we raise the ceiling of the greenhouse to the edge of the troposphere, keeping the footprint area of the greenhouse constant. To first order, if we wanted to see the concentration of the CO2 in the greenhouse to drop to 200 ppm, then the vegetation would have to grow insanely tall and thick. I would think we would need a huge amount of fertilizer in the soil and massive amounts of water to keep up with transpiration losses.
These kinds of experiments are great for learning how nature operates, don’t you think?
.
Will | September 14, 2011 at 6:19 am |
Will, I am pretty sure that the logical problems are at your side:
It is impossible to increase CO2 levels by adding 4 ppm per year in an atmosphere where there is a biosphere with an optimum requirement of three times current levels.
You are denying the fact that in elevated levels of CO2, plants will grow larger and more prolific and the consequence is that more CO2 is thus consumed.
In the following study, Total biomass increased by 44% when the subject plants were exposed to optimum CO2 levels.
I don’t deny anything. You simply don’t understand what your own references say. In the above sentences it is clearly stated that at a 300% CO2 level only an increase of 44% in CO2 uptake by plants happens. Thus at “optimum” CO2 levels the increase is at maximum 44 to 50%, according to different sources.
What you think that happens, is that smaller increases of 1% or 10% lead to 1% or 10% more plant growth until the optimum CO2 level is reached. But that is not observed anywhere in any experiment on individual plants or group of plants or the biosphere as a whole. At lower increases of CO2 levels, some relative more CO2 is captured, but not 100%. Look at Figure 1 in your own reference:
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
The drop of plant growth from 340 to 200 ppmv CO2 is about 20%, as much as the increase from 340 to 1300 ppmv, again 20%. An increase from 340 to 390 ppmv, that is 14% (as was the case from 1981 to 2011) gives an increase of plant growth with not more than 5%. Not 14%. Again not for lots of plants and not for the biosphere as a whole (where it is calculated from the oxygen use as less than 1%).
Thus again, you have not the slightest proof that all human CO2 is captured by an expanding biosphere, all observations show that the biosphere is growing, but not fast enough to do that job.
Further, I have had a lot of discussion with the late Ernst Beck about the historical measurements. The main problem is that many of these measurements were taken on land, nearby huge sources (and sinks). The equivalent of taking temperature readings on a hot asphalted parking lot. That doesn’t say anything about the real background CO2 levels of that time. The only useful historical measurements (even then with some instrument troubles) were on board of ships and coastal with wind from the seaside. And these are all around the ice core CO2 levels for the same period. See further:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
Will | September 14, 2011 at 7:03 am |
“Any actively growing crop in a tightly clad greenhouse with little or no ventilation can readily reduce the CO2 level during the day to as low as 200 ppm.”
As WHT already said, the real greenhouse earth is a little grown up. In reality, the biosphere absorbs about 121 GtC per year, and releases about 60 GtC + 60 GtC by soil bacteria. In a glass greenhouse, rotting and eated plants and soil rests are removed and release their CO2 somewhere else…
Thus what you forget is that the real biosphere is huge in CO2 uptake, but also huge in CO2 release. The net effect at the end of the year, after a full seasonal cycle, is that only 1 GtC per year of CO2 net is captured, while humans emit 8 GtC/year. 8 times more than the greening earth captures…
“The drop of plant growth from 340 to 200 ppmv CO2 is about 20%, as much as the increase from 340 to 1300 ppmv, again 20%. An increase from 340 to 390 ppmv, that is 14% (as was the case from 1981 to 2011) gives an increase of plant growth with not more than 5%. Not 14%. Again not for lots of plants and not for the biosphere as a whole (where it is calculated from the oxygen use as less than 1%).”
Thank you Englebeen.
This thread is now in my archives and will be referenced in future as an example of the kind of creative accounting which has lead the entire world into global conspiracy of AGW fraud.
W.R.Pratt
Will, as a final note:
If you think that any additional CO2 (by humans or volcanoes or oceans) will be absorbed by an expanding biosphere, why isn’t the expanding biosphere pulling the current increasing CO2 levels (80 ppmv since Mauna Loa and other stations are measuring) in the atmosphere to near zero?
Engelbeen
As I have made perfectly clear above, I believe the “official” CO2 record is as fraudulent as the “official” temperature record, perhaps more so.
Multiple sources of independent data indicate that this is indeed the case. As does my own analysis as presented above.
There is nothing further I have to add. The example of your creative accounting which I have highlighted is verification of your dishonesty. There is nothing further I need to discuss with you Engelbeen. I have what I came for.
Thank you
W. R. Pratt
Will | September 16, 2011 at 6:46 am |
Will if lost of people of different organisations from different countries (USA, Europe, Japan,…) find the same values of “background” CO2 +/- 3 ppmv for yearly averages and similar trends all over the world, then the conspiracy is only in your head, not in the real world…
See: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/iadv/
That are direct measurements with very accurate (+/- 0.2 ppmv) equipment, not chemical methods accurate to +/-150 ppmv (some methods) or at best +/- 10 ppmv taken at nearby huge sources (and sinks). Not indirect proxies like stomata data taken at nearby huge (and variable over time) sources.
Of course, if you don’t like the data, then the data must be wrong or fraudulent…
Quite a number of comments have denied the existence of a signal in the CO2 record due to industrial CO2 emissions, temperature, cosmic rays etc being mentioned. Temperature is well known to be significantly corellated with atmospheric CO2 dating back to Nigel Calders’s “the CO2 thermometer”. Cosmic Rays – anything would be good that accounted for CO2 fixation rates and it has a degree of plausibility currently. Neither of these effects have been allowed for or excluded in this presentation, The signal emerges from the grass as it should according to its defintion – “of sufficient magnitude”.
But let’s assume that my observations can all be suitably explained in quite other terms; Is it better to find an atmospheric signal or not to find such a signal given the events described?
John … your figure 5 shows a good correlation between CO2 and agriculture represented by NPK consumption.
You seem to be mixing up industrialization and agricultural fertilizer.
What I would take away from your graph is CO2 is correlated with attempts to grow enough crops to feed 7 billion people.
Shall we starve them to death by not fertilizing?
Jon, Very fine post.
I do agree with you that it is important to find as many correlations as possible; if they are anticipated to occur then you should be able to detect it.
My two cents is that both noise and the effects of an impulse response lag filter can obscure the real signal.
What about Pinatubo?
Pinatubo was mid 1991. CO2 ppm change dropped from 1987/1988 to 1991/1992.
1987 2.33
1988 2.12
1989 1.31
1990 1.28
1991 0.98
1992 0.46
1993 1.36
Pinatubo had no effect it appears.
Im pretty sure a large part of the 1991 and 1992 lows are Pinatubo
87 and 88 were a peak so it’s not obvious that 1989 and 1990 are anything but a return to normal
Only if the 1987 earth knew Pinatubo was going to erupt in 1991.
lolwot is correct. The 1991-1992 drop is very likely due to Pinatubo effects. Of course, Pinatubo isn’t the only thing driving CO2 concentrations – there are yearly fluctuations due to ocean temperatures and ecosystem variability (due to droughts/floods/fires/temperatures/etc.). So 89 and 90 were just regular low years: And 87 and 88 were actually high years – see http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_growth.
I think not.
It seems a temperature effect – as large amounts of hydrogen sulphide entered the atmosphere from Mt Pinatubo with a large spike in reflected SW – cooling the planet for a little bit.
Just to repeat it before more people confuse themselves.
CO2 rise has accelerated (ie the rate of increase has itself increased):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1950/mean:12/every:12/derivative
Which is inline with the increase in human CO2 emissions:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
I have no idea why people upstream were doing a whole dumb dance of “but but china has increased emissions but where is the CO2??” foolery.
Anyone would think skeptics were incompetent.
better graph of the annual CO2 rise – http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.png
There’s one in the post above but this one contains the averages for each decade
I agree that it’s a good graph. I don’t know about the data. I am somewhat sceptical, but I assume the data is accurate to some degree.
It’s a slam dunk for a scientific interpretation. We have excellent data and a comprehensive model for the carbon cycle.
How do you account for the large year-to-year changes in rate of increase?
It has never matched the rise in 1998 of 2.98ppm. And it only rose .9ppm the next year.
It rose more in 1983 than 6 of the 10 years this century.
Of course the daily and weekly data goes up and down by over 2ppm as well.
the 1983 el nino almost rivaled 1998
1991-1992 was also a big El Nino ….
1991 0.98
1992 0.46
Because this article’s analysis doesn’t show it. Do you know what we are even discussing?
I really don’t think that CO2 emissions rising and falling with economic activity is the least bit surprising. I also don’t think we need any experiment at all to tell us that if the consensus gets its way and the economy is decarbonized, there will be much less in the way of CO2 emissions. But is there any reason to believe that short term measurements of CO2 now will teach us anything about the long term climate impacts of economic mitigation strategies that are almost certainly not going to be enacted?
I think the real point of this post can be found here:
“On a final note it is likely that a deep economic recession will place science budgets under pressure. It would seem to be the height of folly to allow such pressures to affect the continued development and improvement of environmental monitoring programmes such as those discussed here.”
Translation – Maybe our success in centrally planning the energy economy in Europe, and the EPA’s machinations in the U.S., are helping to bring the world economy to a grinding halt, but please, please don’t stop the funding….
It’s absolutely not inline with human CO2 emissions. It’s inline (with some lag) with global temperature:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1950/mean:12/every:12/derivative/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1950/offset:1.5
This was reply to:
lolwot | September 6, 2011 at 5:15 pm
How is it not inline with human emissions? CO2 emissions have gone up and so has the rate of CO2 rise.
Show me the evidence! According to your link:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
carbon emissions estimate rised from ~3 GtC in 1960 to ~9 GtC in 2010. That’s 3x.
How is it inline with this:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.png
This part is interesting:
1987 ~2.4 ppm
1988 ~2.2 ppm
1989 ~1.4 ppm
1990 ~1.3 ppm
1991 ~1.0 ppm
1992 ~0.5 ppm
What caused the decrease?
3x which becomes 1.5x once you factor in the natural sink being proportional to the human emission.
That particular range of years is discussed earlier. Variation over a few years is just ENSO, or in that case also Pinatubo. The increase over time happens on the scale of decades. Eg the 90s increase is greater than the 80s increase and I bet the 2010s increase will be larger than the 00s.
The natural sink is NOT proportional to human emissions! Again show some evidence!
It seems to be proportional to global temperature. The evidence is in your links.
Actually, the sink is proportional to the disequilbrium between the atmosphere and the ocean. This disequilibrium is growing over time, because human emissions are outpacing sinks, so the sink is growing over time. But if we dropped emissions to zero, there would still be a sink (slowly decreasing over decades and centuries, as system returns to a new equilibrium).
M,
Yes, I agree that the sink is proportional to the disequilbrium between the atmosphere and the ocean. I disagree that the disequilbrium is significantly growing over time – the human emissions are clearly not outpacing sinks.
The link shows emissions only from burning of fossil fuels. Land use change is another major source of anthropogenic co2 emissions so you need to take that into account as well. Here is a dataset for land-use emissions from the same website.
If you add the two sources at around 1960 you get ~4GtC and in 2005 you get ~9.5GtC. That is a 2.375x increase. Annual co2 concentration growth around 1960 was ~0.8ppm, meaning growth at around 2005 should be ~1.9ppm.
You managed to match the endpoints. How about the variations in between? Why was the decadal mean growth rate smaller in 1990s than in 1980s? Why does the annual mean CO2 growth correlates so well with the global temperature? Temperature clearly leads.
Why does the annual mean CO2 growth correlates so well with the global temperature?
Do you mean in short term swings or long term trend? It’s well known that inter-annual co2 concentration flux is strongly dependent on temperature swings. If you’re talking about the trend… well…there is an established causal relationship between co2 and global temperature trends already, but you might not want to hear about that.
Both have been increasing together in recent decades, so establishling what is or isn’t causing what requires finding a period when one or the other exhibit no trend: Take a look at a surface temperature dataset for the period 1958-1975. There is no appreciable trend and yet in that period co2 concentration increased by 15ppm. Clearly temperature is not leading co2 in this instance.
Paul S,
I mean this, for example:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1950/mean:12/every:12/derivative/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1950/offset:1.5
Yes, it is a bit ironic that the other commenter is trying to now say the long term CO2 increase is caused by a long term temperature increase. If that is the case, isn’t this even more substantiation of the hockey stick data ?
Edim,
I think it is well established that, over the past few decades, co2 and global average temperature have risen in tandem. But we’ve seen that co2 emissions from human activity have also risen at a rate which would explain the rise in co2 concentration.
To determine which is the main causal factor you need to look at periods where all three aren’t increasing together and see what you’re left with. I’ve taken the graph you set up and applied a 5-year smooth to both temperature and annual co2 growth so it’s easier to see what’s going on. As you can see the temperature trend from 1960 to 1975 is flat yet the co2 growth acceleration is faster than at any other time in the record. Clearly temperature change is not the primary cause of co2 increase in this period but carbon emissions explain the acceleration well.
As for why the mean growth rate from 1990-1999 is lower than 1980-1989, the large volcano-shaped hole in the linked graph should provide a satisfactory answer.
Paul S,
I disagree with that well established explanation. CO2 responds much faster to warming than to cooling. CO2 inertia is greater in cooling directon. That could explain some discrepancies.
And I don’t think it’s easier to see what’s going on by applying a 5-year smooth. You changed the trend for change in CO2. Do you see that?
Edim,
You don’t get acceleration with inertia. The growth rate actually accelerates from the 60s to the 70s. How can this happen if temperature changes are driving the co2 increase?
The trend didn’t change, just the range of the y-axis. Since the outliers are smoothed it doesn’t need as much space to work in. Instead of a scale from 0 – 3.5 it only needs a range of 0.6 – 2.2. If you’re still unsure try applying a Linear trend (OLS) modifier to each: the result is almost identical.
Paul S,
Of course you get acceleration with inertia. The acceleration is proportional to forcing (temperature) and inversely proportional to inertia (sensitivity of CO2 change to temperatures). The CO2 inertia seems to be lower in the warming direction and higher in the cooling direction (there’s a physical explanation for it). Furthermore, constant temperature (at this level) means constant CO2 growth rate , if temperature causes CO2 growth. At lower temperature levels, the constant growth rate would be lower, and at even lower levels, it would be zero. At even lower levels, it woud be negative. My hypothesis is very falsifiable. If the global temperatures in 2010s are at the same level like in 2000s, we will have approximately the same CO2 growth like in 2000s (~2 ppm/year). If the cooling really gets going, the gowth rate will decrease. The natural efflux from the atmosphere will increase and more of the annual human CO2 emissions will be removed. If the cooling is sufficient, at some point more will be removed by nature than emitted by humans. This is an extreme scenario, but possible. Even a decrease to annual growth rates lower than ~1.8 ppm/year in 2010s (from ~2 ppm/year in 2000s), should almost falsify the well established explanation, especially if human emissions continue rising. I expect the average annual growth to be lower than ~1.5 ppm in 2010s. That’s lower than in 1980s/1990s.
Regarding the trend, I meant the ends of the time series.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1950/mean:12/every:12/derivative/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1950/offset:1.5
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1950/mean:60/every:12/derivative/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1950/offset:1.5/mean:60
Look at the trends from ~1960 to ~1975 and from ~1998 to ~2010 in those 2 graphs.
My hypothesis is very falsifiable. If the global temperatures in 2010s are at the same level like in 2000s, we will have approximately the same CO2 growth like in 2000s (~2 ppm/year).
Edim,
This is my point. This test has already happened and your hypothesis has been falsified. Global temperatures didn’t increase between 1945-1975 but co2 growth rates did increase.
On the graphs I think you’re making an inadvertant cherry-picking error. Your eyes are being drawn to the outlier (1998) and that’s defining the trend for you. If you think about it though, why are you starting with 1998? Why not 1996, 1999, 2000? When dealing with noisy records, like annual co2 growth rates, over short time series choice of start and end points can make huge differences to neighbouring trends e.g. 1998-2010 shows acceleration by 0.009ppm/pa; 1999-2010 by 0.055ppm/pa. One of the benefits of smoothing when looking at a graph is that it provides some protection against inadvertant cherry picking. Over longer periods the trends of the smoothed and unsmoothed versions are near-identical regardless of chosen end points.
An even closer match: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1978/mean:12/every:12/derivative/plot/rss/from:1978/offset:1/scale:1.5
FAIL. Plants absorb CO2 (during sunlit hours) and build it into their tissues. They exhale during dark hours. This is the cause of the diurnal variance which so befuddles you.
Note that Mona Loa sees the pattern for its local slice of the NH. CO2 mixing is not instantaneous and world-wide.
1) Crop residue is often burned leading to large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
2) Tilling soil also releases Co2 from buried crop residue.
3) 21-25% of manmade Co2 from agriculture.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=115
It stands to reason … more fertilzer means more crops means more residue burning which means more CO2.
And as tiem passes more and more acreage.
You should take a look at crop acreage. Here is US corn.
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornac.asp
Corn has an aggressive subside of late due to a biofuel fantasy, total acreage is in decline I believe. Not that it has much impact I’m sure.
I think total acreage is on the rise with more land being cleared for corn.
– “Crop residue is often burned leading to large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.”
– “Tilling soil also releases Co2 from buried crop residue.”
– Methane and CO2 lost from thawing permafrost. Right?
– Increasingly land use given over to agriculture or cleared outright for urban development.
The environmentalist just wants to enjoy the splendor of the unsullied natural solitude. Other [non environmentalist] humans are far too numerous and the scum of life for ruining all that nature.
Gee, it would never be allowed to enter into that tree hugger’s mind that maybe the real problem is keeping enough carbon available in the atmosphere and close to the surface of the ground. That sort of thing would totally wreak the glorious misthrope’s propaganda campaign.
Conversion to agriculture
Urban development
Loss of carbon from the soil
Decay of thawing permafrost
You do realize that these represent the loss of fast recyclable carbon? When they are gone … When their carbon has been given up … when they have been taken out of use for capturing carbon …
… the following happens
1) The carbon that is given up gets used and stored elsewhere thereby increasing the ballistic (inertial) rate biomass carbon turnover at that alternative site. Biologically speaking, the good times return.
2) The location taken over to agriculture or urbanization must rebuild it’s local store of carbon before it becomes available for substantial re-emission.
In such a way, agriculture and urbanization prevents massive forest fires and rot out by taking potential sites for such activity ‘out of use’ and purging them of available carbon. Yes, it reduces carbon adsorption. It also reduces carbon re-emission.
If the real problem with the earth’s biota is a lack of carbon … and given that CO2 levels in the past were consistently much higher … that probably IS the problem here … suppressing the possibility of near surface re-emission risks the hazard of a carbon shortage catastrophe.
3) Thawing decaying permafrost can add much carbon to the atmosphere. It also a preparatory event for creation of a future mighty carbon adsorbing forest.
If all the near surface carbon sources are expended in the early stages of a CO2 build up … with the consequence of stimulating alternate pre-existing carbon sinks .. there is going to be a fearsome demand for CO2 and no means of re-supply.
Hello ice age.
At least, when the economy recovers, the well-to-do can dine well.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14803840
Yum.
“The researchers calculate that they have probably been there only for 30-40 years; “
“On a final note it is likely that a deep economic recession will place science budgets under pressure. It would seem to be the height of folly to allow such pressures to affect the continued development and improvement of environmental monitoring programmes such as those discussed here.”
Must be a joke huh?
It’s the equivalent to saying “Global warming is important and real because I depend on it to earn my livelihood.”
Enjoy your fantasy.
George W Nixon.
Relative to the ongoing question regarding the effect of CO2 on our atmosphere, I would state the following. Over the last decade or more, the great planets have been approaching rough alignment relative to a line passing between them towards the sun, and now are moving away from that rough alignment. Under such gravitational circumstances, the orbits of both the moon and earth would be undergoing constant change. The sun would be affected by such changing of the great planets positions.
With regards to the fundamental dynamic nature of gravity and resulting gravitation, the two pioneer spacecraft anomalies indicate a vital lack of knowledge. Whilst the scientific community are completely unable to account for such anomalies, my 65 years spent on matter and associated mysteries automatically provide an answer to the pioneer anomalies. In fact, if the referred to and other anomalies did not occur, my attempt to shed some light into such physical mysteries would have to be considered false.
With regards to gravity, the referred to work demands that there is a Gravitational Thermal Effect (both warming and cooling) of the matter of bulk bodies in proportion to changing gravitational circumstances. The referred to effect is explained in detail in book form at Lulu.com and provides another reason for the eternal heating of the earth’s interior that sustains and provides ongoing heat energy for volcanic activity.
One or two people posted this link
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/globalview/co2/co2_intro.html
I had not seen it before it’s rather good. The diference in NH SH amplitudes is supposed due to effects of differences in relative land mass on the seasonal cycle.
“Webhubtelescope” made some interesting comments but unfortunately I could not find the analysis he referred to by following the link through his handle.
It’s in my book The Oil Conundrum, which is online but you have to click through the table of contents to find the relevant section.
A preliminary analysis is on the blog post:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-shock-model-analysis-relates-to-co2.html
Jon,
This is another good animation:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
The preindustrial (orange) and ice ages (blue) “data” is very questionable.
The Mauna Loa and global emissions records show that the ratio between the amount of increase in atmospheric CO2 and the human CO2 emissions is roughly 50% on average over several years.
On a year-to-year basis this bounces all over the map
The correlation between changes in CO2 emissions and blips in the global economy is interesting.
However, I think a far better (and more plausible) correlation with atmospheric CO2 has to do with whether or not the planet is warming or cooling.
This would be the correlation between the annual ratio of CO2 increase in the atmosphere:the annual total CO2 emissions with the annual change in global temperature. Plotting the two shows a good correlation, with the CO2 ratio higher in years with warming than with years with cooling. In other words, more of the emitted CO2 “remains” in the atmosphere when the planet has warmed than when it has cooled. (This makes sense considering the temperature dependency of CO2 solubility in sea water.)
Links to the calculation and graph with sources of data cited are attached:
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6088/6125488794_8ef0233067_b.jpg
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6080/6125478512_1eb60e073e_b.jpg
Maybe someone who understands statistics better than I do could see how robust this correlation really is, but on the face of it, it looks better than the economy “blip” correlation.
Max
Wow, that is an intriguing set of data.
And there are no corrections for any natural events?
WebHubTelescope
No. I haven’t made any adjustments for any events, in the assumption that these events would show up in the annual change in global temperature.
It’s a rough correlation using only the published data without any built-in time lags, etc.
Max
Great job, Max.
Amazing what kind of information you can pull out of seeming noise. I have a feeling that no one ever actually thought to try this before you gave it a shot. I guess all it takes is some intellectual curiosity.
WebHubTelescope
See my post on CO2 variation vs latitude drawing from Fred H. Haynie’s Future of Global Climate Change.
http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf
I found his analyses even more fascinating.
Max,
I haven’t looked at the issue myself, but what I have read tells that the correlation between the variations in the increase of atmospheric CO2 and temperature are almost totally related to the behavior of the land based biosphere, not CO2 in oceans. The weather patterns of warming years favor release of CO2 from vegetation and soil while the net change of these components is opposite in the cooling years.
The results of the HIPPO project discussed in the most recent thread should provide additional data on this issue.
Pekka
Re: “Co2 relate to . . . land based biosphere, not CO2 in oceans.”
I would be interested in your evaluation of Fred Haynie’s analyses. which comes to the opposite conclusion.
Appreciate any links you can provide on the biosphere>oceans..
David,
That Haynie’s analysis is good. I agree with almost all of it. It’s a bit hard to read (colors…). I would like (luke)warmists to respond to the hypothesis. Anybody?
He started by fitting sine waves which is a bit of a crutch.
Couldn’t we test this by separating the temperature record into land and ocean?
Hi Pekka,
‘The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) provides global monthly measurements of both oceanic phytoplankton chlorophyll biomass and light harvesting by land plants. These measurements allowed the comparison of simultaneous ocean and land net primary production (NPP) responses to a major El Nino to La Nina transition. Between September 1997 and August 2000, biospheric NPP varied by 6 petagrams of carbon per year (from 111 to 117petagrams of carbon per year). Increases in ocean NPP were pronounced in tropical regions where El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impacts on up-welling and nutrient availability were greatest. Globally, land NPP did not exhibit a clear ENSO response, although regional changes were substantial.’ http://www.ess.uci.edu/~jranders/Paperpdfs/2001ScienceBehrenfeld.pdf
There is an extra wrinkle in nutrients rising to the surface in a La Nina. An extra 6 petagrams (as carbon) of NPP turning over every few days will make a difference.
Although I think you are right as well – the terrestrial changes reflect a balance between dead autotrophs and heterotrophs – even if NPP doesn’t change much.
Cheers
Well done, Max.
Your correlation looks even better than the one I posted earlier: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1978/mean:12/every:12/derivative/plot/rss/from:1978/offset:1/scale:1.5
Here I just plotted annual ML CO2 changes against RSS global temp anomaly from 1978 onwards.
It would be interesting to see how close the SST annual change correlates, especially the Pacific SST
That also shows very little lag between dCO2 and dTemperature.
So we have good time-series correlations between dCarbon emitted and dTemperature, and also between dCO2 and dTemperature.
The third leg in this triangle is that a good correlation should exist between dCarbon and dCO2. That is basic transitivity and it would be surprising if it didn’t occur.
The merged image of the two analyses :
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/7963/2groupsco2.gif
All the peaks do seem to align well.
No.
No correlation between dCO2 and dT. Only dCO2 and T.
No correlation between dE(CO2) and dT. Only dCO2/E(CO2) and dT.
No correlation between dE(CO2) and dCO2.
Manacker’s data is this
dRemaining = dCO2/E
where E is the yearly carbon emissions. If it wasn’t for the 1/E scaling factor, the envelope over time would not match the dTemperature time-series profile. It would tail off in the early years as is shown in Peter317’s graph, which you can see when they are superimposed.
Emissions were definitely less in the 1960’s, so what the dRemaining ratio is doing is scaling the dCO2 to show a greater sensitivity of temperature changes to fractional excess.
Since the logarithm function is a measure of fractional excess, i.e.
this essentially demonstrates the predicted logarithmic sensitivity of temperature to excess CO2. Is this the real justification for the good correlation?
If it wasn’t for the 1/E factor, then we would need to introduce the equivalent of a logarithmic factor. Straightforward to do by just switching to dRemaining = dCO2 / CO2 instead. The carbon emissions is a just a stand-in for a logarithm.
I guess this is what happens when you do exploratory data analysis, in that the correlations eventually will shake out.
I’ve now managed to get a more detailed dCO2 graph, and plotted it against the SST anomaly, both normalized to get them on the same scale:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1978/normalise/mean:2/plot/esrl-co2/from:1978/mean:12/derivative/normalise/mean:2
This shows a very good alignment between dCO2 and SST anomaly, with a distinct lag between temp and dCO2.
Changing SST to any of the temperature series also shows a good alignment, although the lag is less. This is to be expected, as there will also be a lag between SST and atmospheric temp.
That is pretty impressive. Even more so if you extend the graph back to 1960.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1960/normalise/mean:2/plot/esrl-co2/from:1960/mean:12/derivative/normalise/mean:2
I can do the cross-correlation for this data and figure out what lag gives the highest factor. Eyeballing it, any lag looks pretty dang small.
If the thinking is that temperature is related to the logarithm of atmospheric CO2 concentration, then
![T=K\ln{[CO_2]}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=T%3DK%5Cln%7B%5BCO_2%5D%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=333333&s=0&c=20201002)
![dT=K\frac{d[CO_2]}{[CO_2]}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=dT%3DK%5Cfrac%7Bd%5BCO_2%5D%7D%7B%5BCO_2%5D%7D&bg=ffffff&fg=333333&s=0&c=20201002)
taking the differentials
which is what this graph is essentially showing
Not quite. The graph is not of CO2 concentration but of dCO2.
Notwithstanding that, if CO2 was the driver of SST then you would expect a large lag between dCO2 and SST – given the large thermal capacity of water
Thanks, BTW, for extending it back to 1960 – the reason I only went back as far as 1978 was that I started off by plotting it against the satellite data.
I know, that is why I show the second equation. You are indeed plotting the correct variants. (Whether the CO2 denominator is plotted is a detail)
So here are the cross-correlations with the lag shown in months:
http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/861/co2mlthad.png
At a magnified lag scale:
http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/33/co2mlthadshort.png
Virtually no lag to speak of, maybe there is a positive asymmetry but the peak is likely only +/- 1 month.
So I am not sure what lag you are talking about. I couldn’t see it eyeballing the curves, and it doesn’t show up in the cross-correlation.
Very impressive time-series correlation though.
It seemed to me that, just eyeballing it, there was quite a significant lag. However, having taken a look at it, it seems I was concentrating on the upward bits, which mostly show a lag. Not so, however, on the downward bits, where a lot of the lag is actually negative.
The lags (or lack of) show up better to the eye if you increase the averaging from 2 to 12 months, BTW
What tools do you use for your analyses, BTW? I’m far more at home with creating tools than actually using them ;-)
I meant to add at the end: …but now I’m getting old and lazy and so would prefer just to beg, borrow or steal tools which just work without fuss.
I am using R Studio. You did a very good job of aligning and normalizing the data, so it was easy to import the tab-delimited output files and do the R CCF stat function on the two sets.
plot(ccf(t_had[2],co2_ml[2],lag.max=360))
BTW, All the extra fine structure in the cross-correlation function is the matching of the somewhat periodic disturbances of dCO2 with the temperature fluctuations. That is a sign of further correlation. For example you would see that same structure if you did a cross-correlation of a sine curve with a cosine curve, albeit that would also show an obvious lag.
The overall envelope tells us about the impulse response, which is a disordered damped function.
Thanks for that
Edim
You stated above that the atmospheric CO2 fluctuations seemed to be related to temperature fluctuations with a time lag.
Look at the data I plotted in the above post.
It is a crude analysis, to be sure, but it shows that annual change in temperature seems to correlate with annual amount of CO2 emissions “remaining” in the atmosphere.
Max
This is what the time-series cross-correlation looks like:
A strong correlation spike at zero lag, which you can tell just looking at the data.
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/6048/co2temperatureccf.png
Max,
Thanks. It’s a good analysis and interesting. I am looking forward to Salby’s paper.
Edim,
As an addendum to our earlier discussion I’ve put a carbon emissions-driven model into a spreadsheet and compared the outputs to observations from 1850-2010:
These graphs show the model-expected changes in annual growth rates against Mauna Loa and Law Dome ice core co2 data. Top shows annual figures, Bottom shows 11-year smooths of annual growth rates:
http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/6362/modelvsobsco2growth.gif
This graph shows the model-expected co2 concentration over time against Mauna Loa and Law Dome ice core co2 data:
http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/471/modelvsobsco2conc.gif
The input for the model is simply the sum of the two sources discussed earlier. There are two basic assumptions: the base growth rate in 1960 was 0.75ppm/yr and the base ratio of emissions/co2 mixing in atmosphere remains constant at the 1960 level. A further assumption in building the concentrations data is that co2 concentration in 1900 = 295ppm.
———————————————————————————–
Clearly emissions provide an excellent explanation for the multi-decadal changes in co2 concentration but not inter-annual and intra-decadal fluctuations in annual growth rates. We know from Salby’s speech that his temperature-driven model was out by about 10ppm in the middle of the twentieth century whereas this emissions-driven model is never more than 3ppm out, which suggests emissions provide a much better explanation for the trend than temperature change.
Another wow!, three great analyses in a row, Jon, Max, and now Paul S.
This one by Paul S agrees really well with what I have been saying. I do the actual convolution of the CO2 atmospheric impulse response against the historical fossil fuel emissions. The most frightening bit of agreement is the baseline CO2 concentration I used. Paul S said:
whereas I wrote this last year:
Wow, 295 vs 294, take your pick.
The convolution model is written up in my online Google docs book linked at http://TheOilConundrum.com (see page 594 in particular).
The other big revelation is the significance of considering an “adjustment time” and not a “residence time” for sequestration of atmospheric CO2 into the carbon cycle. That point does not get hammered home enough.
Interesting what a bunch of citizen scientists can come up with.
Thanks,
I’ve just added a modifier to track annual temperature fluctuations as per Manacker’s data. Results are here: http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/9926/modelvsobsco2growthtemp.gif. The modifier simply multiplies the annual temperature change by 4 (arbitrarily) to get an annual natural variability figure which is added to the base model output.
One interesting part is the drop in amplitude correlation in the 00s. I used HadCRUT for the temperature series because it goes back to 1850 so was curious what an alternative record would look like. I inserted Gistemp data from 2001-2010 and got this: http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/9926/modelvsobsco2growthtemp.gif. Correlation is back.
On a tangent this does suggest that HadCRUT hasn’t properly captured the extent of global temperature change through the 00s.
I never did this because I wanted to get the general trend first, but a fat-tailed convolution of a natural oscillatory signal will suppress the signal but retain its frequency. This can conceivably tell the amplitude of the raw signal by essentially doing this inverse convolution (where the solution is iterated to get the original impulse signal).,
Yes, manacker’s data is much more interesting than what Salby has to say.
Salby’s finding is a classic example of a moot point. He forgets that it is the “adjustment time” and not the “residence time” that governs the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. The short effective residence time due to rollover in CO2 in the carbon cycle will likely mix-up the isotope ratios enough to make it impossible to prove his thesis either way.
So ignore Salby and look at what manacker and Huddleston have to say. I think it is kind of amazing that no one else is really piping up on this data. Did Max (manacker) generate this analysis himself? Is he just a curious citizen scientist, like Huddleston and a lot of us?
WebHubTelescope
1. Yes (using HadCRUT3 record and cited CO2 data)
2. Curious: yes, but chemical engineer instead of scientist.
Cheers,
Max
There have been numerous interesting comments and further pieces of analyisis posted by various people in response to my observations for which I am very grateful. It will all take me some time to go through and think about the implications. One aspect of my observations that does not seem to have been explicitly commented upon – though it might be implicit in these other approaches on more measured appraisal – is this;
The observations – a signal in the atmospheric CO2 record of Industrial CO2 emissions – emerge not from an absolute decrease in annual emissions (which very rarely occurs) but from changes in the rate of increase in those emissions.
That is hugely significant. If you think about it, this can lead to a better measure of differential global temperature sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 concentration change.
The gross form of sensitivity is on the left, where they take long term changes in temperature over long term changes in concentration. Yet the shorter scale form, shown on the right should also be operational. That is the differential form and it should be completely consistent with the long term sensitivity.
Maybe this is obvious to everyone but I don’t read all the climate science documents so may have missed something..
I’m interested in this. i think you can past a formatted equation into word press? or maybe code the equation like a computer program or something?
I noticed on my site that I can include latex formulas in the post, but not in the comments.
I have the plugin “Optimized Latex”. Some other plugins might give different results.
As far as I remember the one cannot add plugins, when using the wordpress.com service. I have WordPress software on my own server.
I have seen it work here, but you have to do something simple, like
I checked another plugin “Youngwhan’s Simple Latex”. This allows latex also in comments. The formulas must be bracketed by [math] .. [/math]
(if this doesn’t work I will give up on latex)
delta N / delta T = dT(N) / dN
Again, the figure 1 is very misleading. Why secondary y-axis? Both time series can be converted to the same unit (ppm, GtC or GtCO2). Then it will be clear that such small fluctuations of annual change in human CO2 emissions (range: -1 to 1.5 GtCO2/year) can not cause the much larger fluctuations of atmospheric CO2 annual change (range: 2 to 23 GtCO2/year)!
Regarding manacker’s analysis, I played a bit with his data. It’s interesting that the annual human emissions ratio remaining in the atmosphere (dCO2/E) correlates with the annual temperature change (dT), while the annual CO2 change (dCO2) correlates with the temperature anomaly (T). I plotted these vs eachother and here are the results (linear trend):
dCO2/E in % vs. dT in °C/year
dCO/E = 93.79*dT + 48.4
R^2 = 0.5042
dCO2/E in % vs. T in °C
dCO2/E = 16.43*T + 47.62
R^2 = 0.0467
dCO2 in GtCO2/year vs. dT in °C/year
dCO2 = 20.49*dT + 10.95
R^2 = 0.2907
dCO2 in GtCO2/year vs. T in °C
dCO2 = 16.41*T + 9.54
R^2 = 0.5617
Using the data from manacker’s analysis again:
dCO2 in GtCO2/year vs. dE in GtCO2/year (~figure 1)
dCO2 = -0.217*dE + 11.24
R^2 = 0.0016
So, no correlation between the annual atmospheric CO2 change and annual change in emissions.
The strongest correlation is between the annual atmospheric CO2 change (dCO2) and temperature. SST would likely give a better correlation.
I did the cross-correlation function below:
http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/3109/co2co2ccf.png
The CO2 clearly lags the carbon emissions, but there is quite a bit of noise.
This next one is kind of cheating but this is what happens when I fit the cross-correlation to a cubic spline algorithm. This interpolates all the points, detecting the positive lag but with a reduced absolute correlation, and again quite weak ~0.05.
http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/9417/co2co2ccfspline.png
The last one is suspect because what you are doing is forcing a monotonic linearization in T by integration. Since dCO2 is mainly positive, then the correlation goes up. If you do CO2 against T the correlation will be even closer to 1.
A more interesting correlation is the second derivatives and higher derivatives between excess emission CO2 and T. Those will show R^2 around 0.5 as well. That means the Taylor’s series expansion of the two waveforms are also highly correlated.
Mostly agree.
We’ve got a clueless local TV weatherman who recently posted this:. “How sad is it that we have to “hope” for sun to come out after these nasty flooding events? I said it once before in this blog, and I’ll say it again now: we are in a new climate pattern across the globe. Bouts of dry weather (and semi-droughts) will be followed by a period of torrential – and sometimes flooding – rains. It’s been apparent since the turn of the decade, and we’ll just have to continue to live with it.”
Ok, so he has what? Maybe a masters degree in meteorology? Not necessarily proof of any great intelligence. What really bothers me is the blatant laziness. Why bother to do a little digging when you can make such claims knowing they put you solidly in the mainstream. He even goes so far as to try to make himself out as some sort of brave AGW pioneer with the “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.”
I’m 60 years old and I’ve had a good life. If I got some terminal disease I’d be able to accept it I think with a fair amount of equanimity. But the two things that would most motivate me to keep fighting would be my family first of course, and then my fervent wish to be around to see the global warming hypothesis blow up. I just don’t want to miss all the excuses and rationalizations and lies the warmists will be telling as they scurry about trying to save themselves from disgrace.
Heh. I’m 65 and I share the same drive and ambition. Schadenfreude is SO addictive!
Very interesting paper indeed !
What is here demonstrated is the close correlation between wealth’ production and fossil energy consumption i.e CO2 emissions. This means that any attempt to contain / decrease these CO2 emissions (i.e fossil energy consumption) will directly affect wealth production and amplify the current crisis (another issue related to positive i.e amplifying feedback, with huge negative effect on our economy…!).
That is exactly why all these nice policies discussed and hopefully rejected during last COP15 conference are so dangerous. They would very surely rush our World into a deadly spiral of decline, and the worst crisis ever experienced in Mankind History. Fore sure the impact on human societies would be dramatically more damaging than a 1 or 2°C warmer climate.
The only way forward lays in the development of efficient carbon free energy resources.
As most renewable energies are so far disqualified w.r.t efficiency criteria, the only available & sustainable solution is nuclear energy !
Not really. Fossil fuels are just fine till a good economical suite of options is available. Nuclear will work for some electric sourcing, which is a part of the picture.
But fossil fuels are not scarce, expensive, or harmful. They’re not even big polluters any more; damaging harmful emissions have been declining for a long time. Even diesel particulates are coming under control.
In any case, NO ground should be ceded to those who assert or imply that CO2 is a pollutant, harmful, or in any way to be cut back.
I did the cross-correlation of Jonathan’s dCO2 and dE data.
The results are here:
http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/6048/co2ccemissions.gif
Again the strongest peak is at a zero-lag. This is likely not a random chance as the odds of this happening are about 1 in 50 if the effects were randomly correlated, and the peak would likely not be as strong.
It is not as conclusive as Peter’s d[CO2] and dTemperature cross-correlation, which has odds of 1 in 600 of that happening, but still compelling.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S5PeFWheTHg/Tm70q–ifhI/AAAAAAAAAgU/YOy_x1SMqFU/s1600/CO2_PD_P_Models.gif
If this the conclusive causal chain?
![d[FF] \longrightarrow d[CO_2] \longrightarrow dTemperature](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=d%5BFF%5D+%5Clongrightarrow+d%5BCO_2%5D+%5Clongrightarrow+dTemperature+&bg=ffffff&fg=333333&s=0&c=20201002)
If it was the other way, an increase in temperature would have to lead to both CO2 and carbon emission increases independently. CO2 could happen because of outgassing feedbacks, but I find it hard to believe that the world economy would increase FF emissions as a result of a warmer climate. And it is just as mysterious how that would also cause similar changes of NPK (I didn’t do the cross-correlation for this data, but it looks just as strong a zero-lag peak).
Max Manacker’s emissions data does not match Jon’s Figure 1.
This is the overlay (the vertical shift does not matter for cross-correlation).
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/2985/jonmax.gif
Someone put in a bad data point for 1988. It is enough to influence the cross-correlation, Max’s data is much less correlated than Jon’s.
If changes in CO2 lag changes in temperature by 600-1000 years, as the ice cores showed, then why isn’t the rise in atmospheric CO2 now , a manifestation of that—-ie of the natural CO2 rise , lagging the natural temperature rise that occurred back then at the end of the LIA and since—-lagging by that 600-1000 years?