I cannot promise to “audit” Segalstad’s arguments properly any time soon – though thank you for pointing him out – but I did run across Engelbeen responding to Segalstad in the final comment here

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=820

and there’s also a link to a lengthier discussion which is largely Engelbeen versus everyone. His main point seems to be that Segalstad is confusing the atmospheric residence time for a single CO2 molecule (which Engelbeen says is indeed about 5 years) with the time for restoration of equilibrium levels of CO2. Possibly he’s referring to the atmosphere-ocean cycling I mentioned but I can’t confirm that without a closer look.

Gordon, I was indeed reasoning on the assumption that the IPCC diagram is roughly correct. As always, how these discussions proceed depends on the extent of initial disagreements. The IPCC would say that that diagram and its numbers are deduced from observation; Segalstad would say they are garbage in garbage out, the result of circular reasoning. To examine the basis for the diagram would involve the sort of literature review I’ve just put off when faced with Segalstad. So, not today, not this week, but perhaps in some future iteration of the discussion.

One thing is for sure, the GFC is a great opportunity for the NEW industry, commer, and generators that emerge from the GFC to be as efficient and sustainable as possible.. but of course this would require a cap and trade (or tax) on carbon to tweak things along.

So anthropogenic CO2 from the ocean has this little tag on it stating its source and it’s date of in-gassing?? Yes…I have skimmed the theory about the different isotopes, which I presume survive their dunking in the briny.

What I think is that the IPCC has demonstrated their competence really well with the hockey stick affair. They allowed a guy with one year’s experience as a Ph. D to act as a lead author and produce a graph that contradicted an earlier graph put out by the IPCC showing the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age. When the guy was revealed as incompetent, the IPCC snuck a revised edition of the hockey stick into the AR4 review 6 years later, even though Susan Solomon, one of the IPCC leaders, asked the working group to take a closer look at bristle cone data. They ignored her. With the bristle cone data removed, the hockey stick become nothing and that’s why they were advised to remove it by NAS.

The entire working group were exposed as knowing one another personally. This is the peer review system everyone brays about, yet we go on quoting the IPCC as if it is an impartial body. Chris Landsea, a hurricane expert, was forced to resign over what he saw as impartiality by another IPCC bigwig, Kevin Trenberth.

So, we are supposed to accept the IPCC graph which ‘theorizes’ that anthropogenic CO2 is recycled, and actually accounts for a higher level of the natural CO2? Maybe you, not me.

(For the foregoing, I was assisted by the following paper: http://jgs.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/164/4/691 )

Now the question is, how much of a given year’s increment of atmospheric CO2 is actually anthropogenic CO2? For this I’ll just rely on the AR4 figure. Out of all the annual flows of anthropogenically released carbon (red arrows), the biggest is the cycling between atmosphere and ocean surface. It says that about 20 GtAC, out of an atmospheric reservoir of 165 GtAC, participates – an eighth of it, in other words. So you might suppose that of the annual extra 8+ GtAC, an eighth of it goes into the ocean within a year, but that it has meanwhile been replaced by an equivalent amount of older ACO2 released *from* the ocean. I infer, therefore, that it really is legitimate to say that the “extra atmospheric CO2″ is anthropogenic, but that a significant fraction of it has been shuttling between atmosphere and ocean, rather than just sitting in the air.

http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html#Extra_how_much_human_CO2_is_in_the_atmosphere

Ferdinand, who is a sceptic in respect of ACO2 having far less effect than AGW posits, argues that all of the increase in CO2 is due to ACO2; alternatively, Segalstad argues for the contrary;

http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/ESEF3VO2.htm

The isotopic part of the debate seems to have been overlooked recently by AGW proponents; perhaps they’ve read section 10 of Segalstad who calculates that ACO2 is 16% of the 40% increase in CO2 using 1750 as a baseline. This definitely is an issue which needs some more attention.

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch07.pdf

Fig 7.3 is on p 515; it shows the CO2 fluxes on an annual basis; ACO2 is made up of 6.4 for fossil fuels and 1.6 for land use change; these constitute 3.67% of the total emissions; table 3, p26 of the DOE report gives the total of ACO2 as 2.91%;

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf

With 98.5% of CO2 emissions reabsorbed ACO2 remaining in the atmosphere is ~0.05%. The AGW crowd talk about CO2 displacement and isotopic distinction to prove that all of the 1.5% non-absorbed and accumulated CO2 is ACO2 but this does not make sense.