CHAIR of the Australian Environment Foundation, Jennifer Marohasy, today welcomed new research by Australian physicist, Dr Tom Quirk, suggesting natural environmental forces, more than just fossil fuel emissions, could be contributing to the elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide [CO2].
“Most CO2 from fossil fuels is emitted in the northern hemisphere and it takes at least six months to spread to the southern hemisphere, which means that concentrations in the northern hemisphere should go up before they do in the southern hemisphere. In fact, they go up simultaneously, which suggests that manmade CO2 emissions are not the only contributor to the rise in global CO2 and there must be some other source.”
The new research paper published in the journal ‘Energy and Environment’ explains that given 95 percent of CO2 from fossil fuel is emitted in the northern hemisphere then some time lag might be expected due to the sharp year-to-year variations in the estimated amounts left in the atmosphere.
“A tracer for CO2 transport from the northern to the southern hemisphere was provided by radioactive CO2 with the isotope Carbon-14. A sharp rise in radioactive carbon was created by nuclear weapons testing in the 1960’s. Analysis of Carbon-14 in atmospheric CO2 showed that 50 percent of the CO2 was transported from the northern to the southern hemisphere within a year and it took some five years for exchanges of CO2 between the hemispheres before the Carbon-14 was uniformly distributed,” said Dr Quirk.
“A simple model, with a one year mixing time, showed a delay of six months for CO2 changes in concentration in the northern hemisphere to appear in the southern hemisphere.”
“However, the measurements of CO2 show no time difference between the hemispheres. This suggests that the annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide may be coming from a global or equatorial source. This could result from the action of the world’s oceans with changing temperatures or their phytoplankton or could flow from global changes to forests and savannahs,” explained Dr Quirk.
“Dr Quirk’s findings generate almost more questions than they answer, but then again that is the nature of good science. The findings are radical because they challenge a key premise of the current consensus. But just because they are not mainstream, doesn’t mean they are wrong,” said Dr Marohasy.
“It is certainly premature for the federal government to be pressing ahead with its Emissions Trading Scheme given we understand so little about climate and climate change,” concluded Dr Marohasy.
****************************
Notes
Tom Quirk has a Master of Science from the University of Melbourne and Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford. His early career was spent in the UK and USA as an experimental research physicist, a University Lecturer and Fellow of three Oxford Colleges.
Jennifer Marohasy has a BSc and PhD from Queensland University and is Chair of the Australian Environment Foundation.
‘Sources and Sinks of Carbon Dioxide’, by Tom Quirk, Energy and Environment, Volume 20, pages 105-121
This paper was previously discussed at this blog here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/03/the-available-evidence-does-not-support-fossil-fuels-as-the-source-of-elevated-concentrations-of-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-part-1/
This is a media release from the Australian Environment Foundation; a not-for-profit, membership-based environment organisation having no political affiliation. The AEF is a different kind of environment group, caring for both Australia & Australians. Many of our members are practical environmentalists – people who actively use and also care for the environment. We accept that environmental protection and sustainable resource use are generally compatible. For more information about the AEF, visit www.aefweb.info .
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
“Dr Quirk’s findings generate almost more questions than they answer, but then again that is the nature of good science.”
Could this mean that the GCMs may not have all the facts then?
““Dr Quirk’s findings generate almost more questions than they answer, but then again that is the nature of good science.””
Dr Quirk needs to find out the state of the science before wasting his time on pointless papers.
Dear Jennifer,
While I appreciate much of what you write in your blog, the paper of Tom Quirk doesn’t add to the credibility of the skeptics…
“However, the measurements of CO2 show no time difference between the hemispheres.”
He is completely wrong that there is no lag in the CO2 levels between the NH and the SH: it is more than a year (which is not detected by the method he used). For d13C changes, it is even several years. See the trends of CO2 and d13C for different NH and SH stations:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends_1995_2004.jpg
and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/d13c_trends.jpg
The main problem with the method Tom Quirk used, is that any multiple of 12 months extra lag is not detected…
Fact 1: the total CO2 released by all of humankind’s fossil fuel burning ever amounts to approximately 3000Gt (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2005.ems).
Fact 2: the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has risen from ~280 to ~390 ppm. That corresponds to a mass of about 1000Gt.
Conclusion – human activities are entirely responsible for the rise in CO2. This is the simple argument; isotopic studies prove it beyond doubt. If you want to believe that something other than human activity is responsible for rising CO2, then you must first explain where all the human-generated CO2 is going, and then identify the source.
I think most 12 year olds could grasp the simple accounting that I’ve outlined. I’m truly baffled that educated people are apparently not able to.
RW,
There is an error in your total: it is about 320 GtC which is emitted by humans in the period 1751-2005. Add to that the extra CO2 emitted by land clearing for agriculture and general forest destruction. That is good for an increase of near 200 ppmv. The real increase is about 110 ppmv (240 GtC), which results in a total of 800 GtC in the atmosphere.
Thus, indeed it is quite clear where the origin of the increase is situated…
“Jennifer is today welcoming new research” ???
There’s nothing new since the last thread we had, on just the same paper. And no progress on the elementary issue that RW puts so forcefully. We’ve dug up and burnt a whole lot of carbon. There’s now a whole lot in the atmosphere. If what we burnt went somewhere, and a whole lot of new carbon came from somewhere else, then where?
It’s a bit like the people who theorise that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by someone else with the same name.
Jennifer, don’t you think it would have been better to check the facts before making the AEF and IPA look stupid in public, by releasing a paper that demonstrates very poor understanding of science?
SJT,
Tom Quirk’s analysis, recently published in a peer reviewed journal, is more convincing than your inane comments.
Ferdinand,
d13c does not indicate biotic carbon in oil or coal – we have empirical evidence for a 8.5 carat diamond, age dated 3.1 Ga with a d13c value -18 -35%.
So this is a fossil fueled diamond? No, of course not. I think I pointed this out in CS?
In any case the standard response to a paper you disagree with is to write a rebuttal and submit it to E&E for review.
E&E – hahahahahahaha – the denialists rag of choice. The only place you guys can get published. Desperate …
Louis – seriously – who reads E&E?
Luke, Do you read the journal ‘Energy and Environment’?
Then you should have no difficulty getting your rebuttal published at all, so go for it Luke.
“Luke, Do you read the journal ‘Energy and Environment’?”
That’s like asking if people should read all the Creationist literature out there. As it is, a large part of the garbage published in it winds up here anyway.
Luke, SJT:
If your posts are indicative of the intellectual and scientific debate by supporters of the runaway global warming contingent, then it’s no surprise that your repeatedly falsified AGW/CO2 conjecture is going down in flames.
Jennifer,
As a point of curiousity, how do you read Energy and Environment? Online, articles cost $US 18; is there any library here that has print copies?
I’m puzzled that people publish there. Papers like Tom’s could get good circulation on blogs etc. E&E doesn’t exactly add prestige or print circulation – all it does is hide stuff behind a paywall.
“If your posts are indicative of the intellectual and scientific debate by supporters of the runaway global warming contingent, then it’s no surprise that your repeatedly falsified AGW/CO2 conjecture is going down in flames.”
It would be good if people could come up with some serious arguments here, instead of the drivel that is continually served up. It has already been pointed out, this topic has been posted before and it was wrong then. It’s still wrong now. Even Ferdinand said the paper is wrong, and he’s a sceptic.
Ferdinand,
it was rumored (I haven’t seen definitive work) that the recent increase in Methane appeared relatively concurrent in NH and SH. Is this also false??
ferdinand,
got any error bars for the co2 levels? They seem pretty close to me. And the rate of change seems the same.
Luke,
I know you don’t because it is on your index of banned publications.
Peer review – let’s see, you have written a controversial paper on religion in you show that God does not exist and submitted to a mainstream journal. The peer review members are a priests from the Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox churches, a mullah from the Islamic faith and a Bhuddist monk. What chance do you think your paper would be published?
Which is why we publish in the journals we do.
The AGW catastrophists on this blog are a strident lot….. But always the same old thing. Attack the man. Attack the publication. Attack their previous associations…..
Never do they bend their heads to the task of presenting a valid argument to the topic under discussion…. Sometimes they try… but inevitably they regress/digress.
As to others, Ferdinand seems to have mentioned a problem that that would give cause for examination of Dr Quirk’s methodology… I don’t know if Ferdinand has a valid point that warrants examination or is a valid point that has an explanation already.
Then of course there is Mr Hissink and his Diamond. I assume it would be correct…. What are the implications of a Diamond containing that isotopic configuration?
…. Would SJT and Luke care to comment on Mr Hissink’s Diamond… It would seem, if I may indulge, to be a bit of a Gem, of information!
Help me out here. Ferdinand implies there is a difference when carbon is burned in a fire place. That it has a special chemical signature. As opposed to say animal exhalation – I can buy that.
But what about carbon released from wildfires, and coal cave fires that has burned for centuries, or the carbon that is billowing out of fumaroles? How are they different then coal and natural gas fired from an electric plant?
Comment from: RW April 14th, 2009 at 5:35 am
“I think most 12 year olds …….. I’m truly baffled that educated people are apparently not able to.”
Pity you are no longer 12 years old!
To answer Jen’s question – no regularly but I have read many of the denialists papers tendered by sceptics published in that journal. I find the journal very lightly reviewed and far from convincing. Rhetoric and emotion with a sprinkling of science. But that’s just my opinion.
But if you were a sceptic and after a big impact – publishing in E&E IMO does dilute your impact on science.
Louis can say that all the other literature is defended against sceptics by AGW zealots but that’s not really so – sceptical papers are published if they’re logical and consistent. However Louis seems to think that science is spruiking anything you feel like and getting away with it. It’s not about fair go and taking sides Louis – it’s about being right or wrong.
J Hansford (and must be be so formal) – frankly I’m sceptical about anything Louis says including his diamond. But suffice to say photosynthesis doesn’t favour C13 whereas inorganic carbon seems to slightly favour C13.
And where J Hansford have SJT and I stated catastrophist views? Your assertion perhaps yet another bit of denialist propaganda.
maybe it’s because the educated baffle thesleves with scientific issues like the biological pump, and solubility pump just to name a couple, and that CO2 accumulation correlates just as well with noise as with fossil fuel usage. The might also wonder why places like Barrow and Alert should appear to lead the world in d13C depletion.
RW and Ferdinand,
Educated people are confused by the claims made by the AGW proponents and need much more evidence to be convinced. That is why we try to look at alternative explanations.
The reasoning behind man causing the apparent increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is not very solid. I have seen all kind of figures, but none that attributes more than 10% of the total C02 emmissions attributable to man.
Let’s assume that the correct figure is 5%. If that is so, using Ferdinand figures, I get the following situation:
“Total emmissions of CO2 are of the order of 6,400 GtC from 1750, of which around 320 GtC were due to humans (plus the effects of land use and loss of forests whose amount is not clear from Ferdinand post). Yet there are only about 800 GtC in the atmosphere, and the increase from the level of 1750 is just 110 GtC.”
A 12 year old would say that the reason for the increase should surely be the 6,000+ GtC from non-human causes, an educated person says, “I need more information”.
“maybe it’s because the educated baffle thesleves with scientific issues like the biological pump, and solubility pump just to name a couple, and that CO2 accumulation correlates just as well with noise as with fossil fuel usage. The might also wonder why places like Barrow and Alert should appear to lead the world in d13C depletion.”
Of course, I’ll send them an email now, and tell them they forgot all about the bleeding obvious.
Luke,
Obviously you have never submitted a scientific paper to a peer reviewed journal judging from your opinion about editorial policies of scientific journals.
Why last year I had a submission from an academic to publish something because said academic could not get his defense published in the mainstream journal. Due diligence showed the academic’s defense was sound, but as the original article, to which the defense was directed at, was not published in AIG News.
So don’t lecture me or any other scientist here about the “editorial balance” of mainstream scientific journal because, quite frankly, your don’t have a clue. You simply blather nonsense.
As for the dC13 reply, better do some homework on what this term actually means – your weasel reply suggests I bowled you a googly.
Whoops, forgot to finish the sentence,
…,was not published in AIG News, editorial policy was to refuse publication.
That said, AIG News prefers to publish controversial material as a matter of principle. The editor is very approachable and unless a submission contains ad hominems or patently unscientific statements, articles get published.
It’s been some years now I have received any submission arguing for AGW, probably because as it’s not science based, prospective submittors realise that AIG News does not publish science fiction.
Perhaps the mainstream journals might have difficulty distinguishing all important criterion.
Re the Comment from: RW April 14th, 2009 at 5:35 am
He said “Fact 2: the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has risen from ~280 to ~390 ppm. That corresponds to a mass of about 1000Gt.” The usual factor is about 2.127 GtC per 1 ppm of CO2, so 110 ppm equates to about 234 GtC. 12-year olds are clearly better at both arithmetic and checking their facts.
Here are some more facts: from when accurate measurements of atmospheric concentration of CO2 (aka [CO2]) began in mid-1958 at Mauna Loa, the increase in ppm to mid-2008 was 70 ppm, or 149 GtC, while the cumulative Total of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 over that period was 341 GtC, nearly 200 GtC more than remained airborne.
So when RW also says “… If you want to believe that something other than human activity is responsible for rising CO2, then you must first explain where all the human-generated CO2 is going, and then identify the source”. Perhaps he meant destination not source? If so, the 192 GtC of “missing” anthropogenic went partly into the oceans (as dissolved Inorganic Carbon as well as biomass in plankton and seaweed etc) and partly into the terrestrial biosphere (mainly but not entirely plant life).
But the 192 GtC takeup from 1958 to 2008 by such processes is itself an underestimate, because the official data on emissions is far from complete – it leaves out us and all other CO2-exhaling creatures. But to the IPCC and RW, we are apparently not anthropogenic as our personal emissions are not taken into account, even though we are 7 billion or so, not to mention our cats and dogs and cows, but then they are not anthropogenic, news to my dog who certainly he thinks he is a human who happens to have 4 legs! If those emissions amounted to say 100 GtC from 1958 to 2008, then by the carbon budget, the take ups were not 192 GtC but 292 GtC (budgets have to balance, and the Mauna level is a given). Now RW, apply your isotopic skills to the above data (and to your own exhalations of CO2 in particular) and then get back to us.
I think most 12 year olds could grasp the simple accounting that I’ve outlined. I’m truly baffled that educated people like RW are apparently not able to.
Second whoops
c13C is what my mind thought, dC13 is what my fingers typed.
Tim Curtin,
No, RW is correct, and the carelessness with facts is yours. He is clearly referring to a mass of CO2; you have calculated a mass of carbon. 234Gt C is 858 Gt CO2.
I’m sure he meant source, not destination. The craziness of this argument is that it requires that the 300+ GtC that we produce from follil fuel goes somewhere, and the 234 Gt (or so) of extra C in the air came from somewhere else. Then, what’s the source?
It’s not people breathing. They don’t eat fossil fuel, but the products of photosynthesis, returning CO2 to the air whence it came.
Tim Curtin,
Tom Segalstat’s work suggests that the “missing carbon sink” is inside the IPCC assumptions of the global carbon cycle.
I suddenly realise I need to look at his Heartland Presentation to catch up on this, but, to use a misplaced metaphor, it’s another carbon stake into the heart of the CO2 Vampire.
Nick Stokes,
“mass of CO2”
Mass is a measurement of force, not quantity of matter.
Louis Sorry but you have it wrong weight is the measure of gravitational force of a mass, mass is the measure of it’s quantity.
Louis,
I maybe wrong but force is a product of mass by acceleration i.e F=m.a. Therefore mass is a component of force when accleration is present. Mass is the amount of electons protons and energy etc within that object.
Jan.
So mass is a measure of what? A quantity of weight?
Peter,
Look again at your post, you have defined force in terms of its own force.
Louis – mass is force eh? Time to retire and dream of the WMC days .. ah yes … (give it away mate)
Although masses of irresponsible right wingers often use lots of force – hahahahahaha – I crack myself up …. oooo it hurts.
A comical break intervenes, and the rest continue,,,,,,
Jan,
How do your determine an object’s mass?
The rest of my argument shoud then be simple.
“There is an error in your total: it is about 320 GtC which is emitted by humans in the period 1751-2005. ”
I think will rely on the CDIAC for an authoritive source.
“Jan,
How do your determine an object’s mass?
The rest of my argument shoud then be simple.”
All your arguments are simple, and wrong.
The idea that ACO2 is selectively ignored by reabsorption is rather preposterous since there is no difference between a natural C12 and a human C12; and if temperatures slightly increased during the 20thC, since indisputably CO2 levels follow temperature, why shouldn’t the source of the extra CO2 be natural; apart from a slight surge during the PETM CO2 levels have been declining since about 120mya;
http://www.junkscience.com/images/paleocarbon.gif
Speaking of mass and following on from poor old maligned Lindzen and the 77C radiative effect [incidentally RL says gh is responsible for 15C, 1/2 not all of the 33C], why doesn’t atmosphereic pressure contribute to the 33C? Maybe it’s the mass/weight of the extra ACO2 which is causing the increase [sic] in temperature not it’s photoluminescent properties.
“indisputably CO2 levels follow temperature” – only when something else initiated the temperature change. Please explain how you can increase the concentration of a strong infrared absorber by 40% and not see a subsequent temperature rise.
“why shouldn’t the source of the extra CO2 be natural” – it seems you’re appealing to ocean outgassing as the source of the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2. If this were the case, there would clearly be a decreasing concentration of CO2 in the oceans. Can you point us to any observation showing a decrease in oceanic CO2?
Louis,
Jack Barrett and I have written a reaction on the E&E article of Tom Quirk, that is accepted for publication and submitted to Tom for a response…
Diamond 13C seems to be an exception… For coal it is quite obvious that it is made from fossilized plants, as imprints of leaves still are visible in the coal layers. For oil that is more difficult to prove beyond doubt, but there are a lot of indications for a biogenic origin…
kuhnkat April 14th, 2009 at 2:03 pm :
“it was rumored (I haven’t seen definitive work) that the recent increase in Methane appeared relatively concurrent in NH and SH. Is this also false??”
The increase seems to be a little faster (about 6 months) in the NH, and the absolute height and the amplitude of the increase is higher in the NH. See: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/iadv/ and use different locations and see the CH4 trends.
davidc April 14th, 2009 at 2:17 pm :
got any error bars for the co2 levels? They seem pretty close to me. And the rate of change seems the same.
The mean error of the measurements themselves is less than 0.1 ppmv. Comparing flask sample series of the same location as the continuous measurements (Mauna Loa, south pole,…) shows yearly values within 0.12 ppmv. Over the full 50 years period MLO and SPO differ more and more and the lag increased over time.
See: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_trends.jpg
There is also a slight difference in slope between the emissions and the MLO/SPO increase of atmospheric increase. That is another strong indication that the increase in the atmosphere is the result of the emissions, as no natural process is able to follow the emissions in such a regular way:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1960_2006.jpg
James Mayeau April 14th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
“Help me out here. Ferdinand implies there is a difference when carbon is burned in a fire place. That it has a special chemical signature. As opposed to say animal exhalation – I can buy that.
But what about carbon released from wildfires, and coal cave fires that has burned for centuries, or the carbon that is billowing out of fumaroles? How are they different then coal and natural gas fired from an electric plant?”
There are quite different levels of isotopes if one looks at different reservoirs of carbon: inorganic carbon is mostly around zero per mil d13C level, including volcanic outgassing, oceanic dissolved (bi)carbonates and deposits (the white cliffs of Dover…), organic carbon is (much) lower: from average -24 per mil for recent plants and fossil plants (coal) to -40 per mil for natural gas. See for a nice introduction: http://homepage.mac.com/uriarte/carbon13.html
A further differentiation between recent organics and fossil organics is the 14C level, which decreases over time and is used to determine the radiocarbon age of recent fossils (up to 60,000 years). Fossil fuels are completely depleted of 14C. That caused necessary corrections for carbon dating from about 1870 on, until 1950, when a lot of nuclear tests were done, increasing the 14C levels in the atmosphere.
Thus it is quite impossible to see a difference between current fossil fuel burning and vegetation decay / burning, as these have near the same d13C signature, once they are in the atmosphere. But there is a way out: the oxygen use of fossil fuel burning can be calculated with reasonable accuracy, the oxygen use by changes in land use with some more guesswork (but that amounts to about 1-2 GtC/yr or 0.5-1 ppmv/yr of the emissions), thus any difference in oxygen use between what is calculated and what is measured should be more or less organics buildup or decay/burning.
Battle e.a. ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/5462/2467 ) showed a small net uptake of CO2 by natural vegetation (+ natural wildfires, natural coal burning,…) based on the oxygen (and d13C) balance. Extended to 2002 by Bender e.a.:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
Jan Pompe April 14th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
“maybe it’s because the educated baffle thesleves with scientific issues like the biological pump, and solubility pump just to name a couple, and that CO2 accumulation correlates just as well with noise as with fossil fuel usage. The might also wonder why places like Barrow and Alert should appear to lead the world in d13C depletion.”
Jan, there is little doubt that humans are responsible for the increase in the atmosphere.
See my take on this at: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html
Too many sceptics (including Tom Quirk) compare the increase per year with the emissions, and show that there is a good correlation with (sea surface) temperature. Which is completely right. NOAA’s (Dutch) Pieter Tans, responsible for the CO2 data came to the same conclusion: the variability in CO2 sink (!) capacity of oceans and vegetation is mainly temperature and precipitation dependent. See: http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf
But that is all about the variability around the trend (the noise!). That says nothing about the origin of the trend itself. The near fit between cumulative emissions and accumulation in the atmosphere is a very good indication that the emissions are at the base of the increase…
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1960_2006.jpg
Jan, I forgot to add about Barrow and Alert: most other “baseline” stations are in the Pacific Ocean, where less human sources are mixed in. Barrow and Alert receive air from the industrial sites in NA and Eurasia via the Ferrell cells. If you look at the CO2 levels of Schauinsland (South Germany) above the 1,000 m inversion, the CO2 levels are slightly higher and with more seasonal variability (Black Forest) than Barrow…
Manuel April 14th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
“Educated people are confused by the claims made by the AGW proponents and need much more evidence to be convinced. That is why we try to look at alternative explanations.
The reasoning behind man causing the apparent increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is not very solid. I have seen all kind of figures, but none that attributes more than 10% of the total C02 emmissions attributable to man.
Let’s assume that the correct figure is 5%. If that is so, using Ferdinand figures, I get the following situation:
Total emmissions of CO2 are of the order of 6,400 GtC from 1750, of which around 320 GtC were due to humans (plus the effects of land use and loss of forests whose amount is not clear from Ferdinand post). Yet there are only about 800 GtC in the atmosphere, and the increase from the level of 1750 is just 110 GtC.”
See first my comprehensive argumentation why the increase in the atmosphere is quite surely from the human emissions at the link within the response to Jan Pompe…
“Total emmissions of CO2 are of the order of 6,400 GtC from 1750”: right, most of it are “natural” emissions in the order of 6080 GtC, but total “natural” sinks are of the order of 6,290 GtC in the same period… Thus the balance of natural sources and sinks is negative (210 GtC since 1750), at least since 1959, since SPO started its CO2 measurements…
It doesn’t matter how much CO2 circulates through the atmosphere within a year, only the difference between natural inputs and outputs over a(the) year(s) matter. And that was negative over every year of the past 50 years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg
Thus while a lot of CO2 molecules (150 GtC of the 800 GtC in the atmosphere) are exchanged continuously and over the seasons every year, that does add nothing, nada, zero in total CO2 mass to the atmosphere, to the contrary, in average 45% of the emissions (in mass) is removed (~4 GtC of the 800 GtC in the atmosphere, including ~8 GtC emissions per year)…
SJT April 14th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
I think will rely on the CDIAC for an authoritive source.
The URL is here: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2005.ems
“All emission estimates are expressed in million metric tons of carbon”
I suppose that RW made a order of magnitude error in summing the figures from MtC to GtC, but it doesn’t matter, what matters is that far more is emitted than is found as increase in the atmosphere. As long as that is the case, there is no net CO2 addition from nature as a whole to the atmosphere…
RW April 15th, 2009 at 12:26 am :
““indisputably CO2 levels follow temperature” – only when something else initiated the temperature change. Please explain how you can increase the concentration of a strong infrared absorber by 40% and not see a subsequent temperature rise.”
The effect of 2xCO2 – without feedbacks – is rather weak: about 0.9°C. With water vapor feedback, about 1.3°C. That is all. All the other feedbacks are quite uncertain, to say the least.
Clouds and aerosols are involved in GCM’s as positive and negative feedbacks to increase the sensitivity of 2xCO2 to 2-4.5°C. But aerosols are very uncertain and even may have the wrong sign. They were used to “explain” the 1945-1975 cooler period with increasing CO2 levels. But as we see a similar period now, it looks like that the negative PDO was responsible for the relative flat temperature trend then and now, not aerosols.
The same problem for clouds: all climate models see cloud cover as a positive feedback, while it probably is a negative feedback. And no model in the world is capable of representing cloud cover in the tropics and at the poles as observed… As 1% change in cloud cover has about the same effect as all CO2 increase since the start of the industrial revolution, there is still a lot of work to do for the modellers…
Dear Jennifer,
Sorry for the intrusion and the amount of messages from my side… What I write is the result of over a year of discussion with other sceptics about this item. I was discussing the work of Tom Quirk with others, when we heard that it was published. What a pity that it wasn’t discussed before publication, neither that the reviewers didn’t see the obvious problems of his approach…
Sceptics need to be sceptic for everything that is said, as good from “warmers” as from fellow sceptics… if they are real sceptics anyway…
In my mind this issue separates the true sceptics from the knee jerk deniers.
Ferdinand is a true sceptic.
In my school system kindergarten kids are capable of understanding where the CO2 increase has come from. One doesn’t have to be as old as 12.
Why is it that this kind of cutting edge science only gets published in Energy and Environment?
I don’t bother looking at any other Journals anymore because their papers are quite boring, nothing new or exciting being published. It all just follows the mainstream “science”.
This paper only reinforces the position of Energy and Environment as rapidly becoming the best climate journal around at the moment (btw I am not affiliated in any way with Energy and Environment)
Remember that Energy and Environment was the journal that published that Ernst Beck paper exposing co2 in the early 20th century was higher than today, and another paper proving the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist and a paper proving global temperature can’t exist in a real world. This is 4 in a row.
I might have to reconsider my hostility to “journals” at this rate! only joking, most of them are still full of rubbish. For real science you have to read the blogosphere, not journals. BTW check out my blog
Ferdinand, rather than just swallowing everything the IPCC tell you, you might want to check out this post from last year by Roy Spencer on the Watts up With That blog. This is not exactly news, it has been known that humans aren’t the cause of the co2 rise for a while now:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/25/double-whammy-friday-roy-spencer-on-how-oceans-are-driving-co2/
Ferdinand,
“It is quite obvious coal…” is – you have made a logical error here – apart from using D13C when it suits you. It is the error of affirming the consequent.
The carbon isotope ratios in hydrocarbon systems are strongly influenced by the temperature of reaction. For hydrocarbons produced by the Fischer-Tropsch process, the D13C varies from -65% at 127 C to –20% at 177C. These hydrocarbons could hardly be described as “fossil fuel” but clearly there are many fules who believe otherwise.
The diamond and Fischer Tropsche D13C result simply means that this ratio cannot be used to discriminate biotic from non biotic carbon.
Luke, SJT,
Mass is a measurement of the force that an object experiences in the presence of another object. Apple falling out of tree to ground happens because the earth, large lump of matter, attracts apple, small amount of matter, and the weight of the apple is a measurement of the attrative force exerted on it by the earth. Obviously both of you have trouble understand the operation of weighing scales, and hence basic physics.
Indiana,
Slight correction to precedence – The Institute of Australian Geoscientists News (AIG News) published Beck’s work before E&E.
Thanks, Louis, I’ll frame that. 😉
SJT,
Deeper and deeper into the poodoo you go.
You have an object which you weight on a beam balance, initially with no compensating weight/mass on the other tray. The balance is unbalanced by the attraction of the object gravitationally to the earth. So one starts adding calibrated weights/masses on the empty scale until perfect balance is achived. You do this by balancing the force being exerted by the object by its graviational attraction to the earth by adding calibrated weights to finally determined the objects mass.
You have determined that your object weighs 1 Kg. And it also has a mass of 1 Kg.
Unfortunately it seems you have never seen a beam balance let alone used one, only the modern electronic scales which magically display a number indicating the mass/weight of an object. Hence you do don’t understand the relationship between mass and weight of an object.
Sinkers – don’t bother blathering. You said what you said. If you made a simple error you could have just noted such and moved on. You’re biting coz you know you’re a physics goofball.
SJT – he’s giving you a grade 9 science lesson – unreal !!
Indiana – mate you must have come down in the last shower if you believe the codswallop that Wattsup Doc and Spencer serve up. Denialist crap is frying your brain – ever wondered why these turkeys can’t get their bilge published.
Of course Sinkers would publish them (in AIG hahahahahah) – he’ll publish anything – remember the “grenades in the blogosphere” blog. For Sinkers this isn’t about science – it’s about politics – pure and simple. Any semblance of scientific ethic long gone.
Ferdinand: I am a great fan of your work and your contributions here, but I am not sure about when you say “what matters is that far more is emitted than is found as increase in the atmosphere” True..But not …” As long as that is the case, there is no net CO2 addition from nature as a whole to the atmosphere…”
Recall that dCt = Et – NAt where Et includes all emissions from fossil fuels, land clearing, and respiration etc, and NAt are Natural Absorptions of CO2 by the oceans and biospheres. Moreover total Et = AEt + NEt, where AEt are anthropogenic emissions via fossil fuel burning etc and NEt are natural emissions from respiration & exhalation by soils, sea, vegetation, and animals etc. If dCt = 4.33 GtC as in mid 2007-mid 2008, and AEt = 10.22 as recorded in 2007-2008, while NEt = say 5 GtC, then total Et = 15.22, and NAt MUST be (15.22-4.33) = 10.89. Clearly both AEt and NEt are implicated in the dCt, pro rata, and that is where Tom Quirk’s C isotopes come in, if there is a difference between the isotopic composition of AEt and NEt.
Ferdinand
I have mentioned it before but you ignored it then and you will probably ignore it now that near fit that you talk about is no better than a near fit between cumulative noise and accumulation in the atmosphere. that is however what we expect when you remove all degrees of freedom when you do the integrals. I don’t think as a consequence that it is much of a proof. I would rather check covariance and look for lags in variations if any.
I have spent too many years looking from problems in signal processing where (not just electronic) to be convinced that that looking only at the cumulative totals of input and output that we can tell if there is any correlation and how well the signal is being processed especially in processes where shape is important Like NC lathes blow moulding machines and brick kilns. When you correlate accumulations you fill in the ridges and the valleys effectively wiping the data clean of it’s “fingerprints”.
With the dC13 depletion i was looking at la Jolla which I think is not so far removed from the sources.
Sure Louis, how much does a gigaton of CO2 weigh on your balance beam?
Ferdinand,
thank you for the information.
If I may ask another question, what is your opinion of the recent study that reported the North Atlantic absorbing decreasing amounts of CO2 since the mid ’90’s??
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1023-carbon.html
Also how does this affect the Carbon allocations that have been assumed??
SJT,
” how much does a gigaton of CO2 weigh on your balance beam?”
depends on where they are located. Please specify.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Ferdinand,
Thank you very much for your answer to my previous post. I am sorry but I am not convinced by your arguments. It still seems to me that the only possible way of sustaining the claim that man emitted CO2 is causing global warming involves assuming that nature is perfect while man is evil, and I am not prepared to buy that.
As you recognize, natural processes cause a tremendous amount of emissions and absortions of CO2 each year, yet they are completely balanced and they have been so for thousands of years. Only when man adds a tiny portion to the system, everything starts to go wrong. This is rather strange and deserves a close examination without jumping to conclussions.
Please note that I am not saying that the increase in the concentration of CO2 is not due mainly to man contribution. Only that you should be very careful not to just dismiss any analysis that might indicate that there are other reasons that could, at least partially, explain the recent evolution of the measured CO2 concentration as compared with historical data that has yet to be proved right.
RW,
“it seems you’re appealing to ocean outgassing as the source of the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2. If this were the case, there would clearly be a decreasing concentration of CO2 in the oceans. Can you point us to any observation showing a decrease in oceanic CO2?”
Please check your argument. Everybody agrees that man has added more CO2 to the system than the measured increase in the atmosphere. The rest has to be distributed between the oceans, soil and biomass.
What we still need to understand is what is the relation between man emissions and the increase in the atmosphere concentration, what would have happened if the emissions had ocurred at a time when Earth was naturally cooling or what would have happened if no emissions had taken place, but Earth had gotten naturally warmer.
Just come back from a MEGWA night (Mineral Exploration Group of WA) so I post this without reading any responses to my previous posts here.
Given a beam-balance on one hand and a modern electronic balance, or say a spring balance on the other, then the beam balance would measure mass but the other two the gravitational force exterted on the test object. Take all three weighing systems to the Moon and repeat the experiment. The beam balance will produce the same result, and thus an accurate measure of the object’s mass but the other two will show lower numbers than the beam balance since the force exerted on the test object by the Moon will be lower than the Earth.
Your homework is to explain why, but since that is unlikely, we can show that the beam balance measures mass because it uses calibrated masses to determine an unknown mass, while the electronic or spring balances use force to measure mass by virtue of applying a force to either a piezoelectric crystal, or a coiled spring that is essentially a torsion bar.
Anyone who doesn’t understand this needs to rethink their understanding of basic physics.
How much will a gigaton of gaseous CO2 weigh on a beam balance?
Indiana April 15th, 2009 at 7:39 am
“Ferdinand, rather than just swallowing everything the IPCC tell you, you might want to check out this post from last year by Roy Spencer on the Watts up With That blog. This is not exactly news, it has been known that humans aren’t the cause of the co2 rise for a while now:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/25/double-whammy-friday-roy-spencer-on-how-oceans-are-driving-co2/”
Indiana, If there is anything I don’t is just swallowing anything because it is said by some authority (or none-authority)… I always try to look behind what is said and see if it is plausible and if it is repeatable. And please if you refer to what Roy Spencer wrote, also read the comments, including mine… Dr. Spencer made the same error as many others by looking at the variability around the trend (the “noise”) and assuming that the cause of the noise is also the cause of the trend…
Further, take the article of Ernst Beck with some salt: the peak in his historical measurements around 1942 is not seen in ice cores, stomata index data and coralline sponges. His peak values are based on extreme CO2 values over land near huge sources. Similar to measuring “global” temperatures near barbeques and AC fans…
See: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
Louis Hissink April 15th, 2009 at 11:26 am
“Ferdinand,
“It is quite obvious coal…” is – you have made a logical error here – apart from using D13C when it suits you. It is the error of affirming the consequent.”
Louis, I suppose we can fill a few blogs with a discussion about the origin of fossil fuels (biogenic or not), but that is not the item under discussion here. Even if “fossil” fuel is of non-biogenic origin, the facts still show that the burning of such fuels are the cause of the decline in d13C of the atmosphere. Not the oceans (too high in d13C) and not the biosphere (more CO2 uptake than release based on the oxygen balance, thus a sink for 12C)…
Tim Curtin April 15th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
“Ferdinand: I am a great fan of your work and your contributions here, but I am not sure about when you say “what matters is that far more is emitted than is found as increase in the atmosphere” True..But not …” As long as that is the case, there is no net CO2 addition from nature as a whole to the atmosphere…”
Recall that dCt = Et – NAt where Et includes all emissions from fossil fuels, land clearing, and respiration etc, and NAt are Natural Absorptions of CO2 by the oceans and biospheres. Moreover total Et = AEt + NEt, where AEt are anthropogenic emissions via fossil fuel burning etc and NEt are natural emissions from respiration & exhalation by soils, sea, vegetation, and animals etc. If dCt = 4.33 GtC as in mid 2007-mid 2008, and AEt = 10.22 as recorded in 2007-2008, while NEt = say 5 GtC, then total Et = 15.22, and NAt MUST be (15.22-4.33) = 10.89. Clearly both AEt and NEt are implicated in the dCt, pro rata, and that is where Tom Quirk’s C isotopes come in, if there is a difference between the isotopic composition of AEt and NEt.”
Tim, you need to take natural emissions and natural sinks together: that is the net addition or net sink by nature over a year. The natural cycle is estimated at about 150 GtC/yr (90 GtC between oceans and atmosphere and 60 GtC between biosphere and atmosphere), see:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/CarbonCycle/Images/carbon_cycle_diagram.jpg
But the total amounts exchanged back and forth over a year don’t matter, only the difference between the natural flows in and out over a year is what matters, and that was negative over every year of the past 50 years (as your example also shows)…
In simple terms, using your symbols and figures:
AEt + NEt – NAt – dCO2 or using the “knowns” at one side:
NEt – NAt = dCO2 – AEt or in figures:
NEt – NAt = 4.33 – 10.22 = -5.89
That is the same as in your calculation, even if the real height of NEt and NAt is unknown within large limits of error. NEt may be 5 or 100 or 1,000 GtC, within a year the same amount + 5.89 GtC is removed in the sinks. Thus the net increase (in mass! Not in individual molecules) caused by nature is zero. Without human emissions, one would see a decrease in CO2 content of the atmosphere…
A complete different picture is when you look at the influence of the exchange on the isotope ratio. At one side humans add 10 GtC with a d13C level of -24 per mil average. At the other side 150 GtC of the 800 GtC in the atmosphere is exchanged with ocean and vegetation 13C levels which are more conservative. without human emissions, the pre-industrial value of the atmosphere (from ice cores) was at -6.4 per mil, rapidely decreasing in ratio with the emissions to -8 per mil currently (also from ice cores, firn and direct measurements, see: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sponges.gif ). There was only a small (+/- 0.2 per mil) temperature dependent variability in d13C levels throughout the Holocene in ice cores, sediments and coralline sponges (the latter for the period 1400-1850)…
The ocean d13C levels are between zero (deep oceans) and +1 to +5 per mil (ocean surface), even after fractionation at the ocean surface-atmosphere border, that would INcrease the d13C level (back towards the old equilibrium). Thus the 150/800 CO2 exchange dilutes the fossil fuel “fingerprint”, but doesn’t add anything at the total CO2 quantity of the atmosphere, to the contrary, it takes some 4 GtC/yr away…
Comment from: Indiana April 15th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Why is it that this kind of cutting edge science only gets published in Energy and Environment?
I don’t bother looking at any other Journals anymore because their papers are quite boring, nothing new or exciting being published. It all just follows the mainstream “science”.
This paper only reinforces the position of Energy and Environment as rapidly becoming the best climate journal around at the moment (btw I am not affiliated in any way with Energy and Environment)
Remember that Energy and Environment was the journal that published that Ernst Beck paper exposing co2 in the early 20th century was higher than today, and another paper proving the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist and a paper proving global temperature can’t exist in a real world. This is 4 in a row.
I might have to reconsider my hostility to “journals” at this rate! only joking, most of them are still full of rubbish. For real science you have to read the blogosphere, not journals. BTW check out my blogComment from: Indiana April 15th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Why is it that this kind of cutting edge science only gets published in Energy and Environment?
I don’t bother looking at any other Journals anymore because their papers are quite boring, nothing new or exciting being published. It all just follows the mainstream “science”.
This paper only reinforces the position of Energy and Environment as rapidly becoming the best climate journal around at the moment (btw I am not affiliated in any way with Energy and Environment)
Remember that Energy and Environment was the journal that published that Ernst Beck paper exposing co2 in the early 20th century was higher than today, and another paper proving the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist and a paper proving global temperature can’t exist in a real world. This is 4 in a row.
I might have to reconsider my hostility to “journals” at this rate! only joking, most of them are still full of rubbish. For real science you have to read the blogosphere, not journals. BTW check out my blog
Indiana,
Whatever your opinion of the validity these 4 papers, it is irrelevant. People who are doing research consider them a joke, and the work of cranks. One has to be uneducated or a knee jerk AGW denier to give them any credibility whatsoever.
There are uncertainties in the intensity of the global warming that has been projected as a result of GHG’s that lend themselves to legitimate scepticism. The advocacy of the above ideas discredits the judgement of those who do so. They are justly mocked and scorned by those who understand the science.
A scientific paper is judged by whether scientists make use of the results, regardless of your opinion.
Scientists have accepted and understood the greenhouse effect discovered by Tyndall over 150 years and used the idea in their research on climate. It isn’t going away because some misguided quacks published a paper that claims it isn’t so.
The work of Beck is also a piece of quackery, claiming that data dominated by local CO2 sources and sinks should be used to calculate an index of global CO2 content.
Climate researchers accept global temperature as a valid index of the state of global climate. It cannot be willed away.
As Ferdinand has shown Quirk’s paper has a lot of errors, and neglects the fundamental fact, that the increase in CO2 observed by MLO and confirmed by Barrow, Samoa and South Pole,
and the best data on human emissions, shows that human emissions have exceeded the global increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. The means that the net influence of the natural world is negative in sign. A negative sign means that natural world which has process which emit and processes which absorb CO2, must be a net sink of CO2 rather than a source. Even a kindergarten student can understand this simple arithmetic. Rejection of this argument is non rational and reflects some kind of religious mentality involved in the denial of AGW.
Ferdinand
“”The near fit between cumulative emissions and accumulation in the atmosphere is a very good indication that the emissions are at the base of the increase…”
I have mentioned it before but you ignored it then and you will probably ignore it now that near fit that you talk about is no better than a near fit between cumulative noise and accumulation in the atmosphere. that is however what we expect when you remove all degrees of freedom when you do the integrals. I don’t think as a consequence that it is much of a proof. I would rather check covariance and look for lags in variations if any.”
Jan, there need to be a balance between what is necessary information and what can be assumed to be noise. In the case of natural variations, there are a lot of problems to find a signal in between the (much) larger noise. That is especially the case for tide gauges where one need about 25 years of measurements to find out what the local trend is…
In the case of emissions vs. increase in the atmosphere, we see the opposite: if one compares accumulation with accumulation, there is a clear signal, if we compare the derivatives, there is no clear signal, except for the good correlation with (sea surface) temperature/ENSO. The essential error of Tom Quirk, Dr. Spencer and others is to assume that this cause of the variability around the trend (thus the noise…) is also the cause of the trend…
And I beg to differ in opinion about the value of the integrals: the integral of the temperature induced noise over the past 50 years is about 6 ppmv (detrended, detrending doesn’t change the correlation…), the full increase over the same period is 60 ppmv, quite a difference. Further, integration doesn’t remove any variability (compared to smoothing), one year with a double increase will be seen in all subsequent years. It only shows that the influence of the noise (temperature) on the trend is minimal.
See also the difference in the correlations between accumulated emissions and temperature vs. increase in the atmosphere: even with decreasing temperatures, CO2 increases in all years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_2004.jpg
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_co2_1900_2004.jpg
How can one assume that temperature is the cause of the increase in the atmosphere if one sees the difference between the two correlation graphs…
kuhnkat April 15th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
“If I may ask another question, what is your opinion of the recent study that reported the North Atlantic absorbing decreasing amounts of CO2 since the mid ’90’s??
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1023-carbon.html
Also how does this affect the Carbon allocations that have been assumed??”
This study seems more alarm that real, they say:
“We are cautious about attributing this exclusively to human-caused climate change because this uptake has never been measured before”
Seems that this is a similar non-story as the reduction of the Gulf stream: after one snapshot measurements there was a big alarm that the Gulf stream lost one third of its strength. But repeated measurements showed that there is a huge seasonal variation in the Gulf stream flow, thus there was no base for the alarm.
Further, they don’t mention a long-term continuous study (over near two decades) at the Bermuda’s, showing that the North Atlantic uptake is strongly NAO dependent: more winds in winter increases the uptake and reverse (with +/- 50%!)…
See: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5602/2374
In reality, indeed there is a slight decrease in global uptake by natural sinks: in the first period (1900-1960) the increase in the atmosphere was about 53% of the emissions (with limited validity), over the next period (1960-2004) it was 55% and nowadays about 57%. At one side this may be a question of increase in year-by-year emissions, and at the other side reaching limits in plant growth (fertiliser, minerals, light, precipitation), where CO2 is not the limiting factor anymore and oceans which are saturating…
Ferdinand Thank for your reply but i beg to differ
Ferdinand; always interested in your work; this article takes a contrary view;
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/Carbon_Dioxide_The_Houdini_of_Gases.pdf
The Earth Observatory link from NASA of the Carbon cycle is similar to Fig 7.3 on p515 of AR4; Fig 7.3 provides a total annual emission of 218.2 Gt with the anthropogenic contribution being 8 Gt or 3.67%; 98.5% of that 218.2Gt is reabsorbed; see Table 3 p6 here;
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf
Actually the DOE data gives a % for the human contribution to annual CO2 emissions of 2.9% but we’ll stick with AR4’s 3.67%. NOw with 1.5% of CO2 emissions from all sources left in the atmosphere how much of that is anthropogenic;
1.5/100 x 3.67/100 = 0.000552; or at the end of the year a human sourced CO2 molecule has 1 chance in 1811.594203 of being left in the atmosphere; on an accumulative basis, after the 2nd year applying the same formula again an ACO2 molecule has a % chance of being left in the atmosphere of 8.28E-06 or 1 chance in 120772.9469; that trend will continue to decline unless you and IPCC can explain how an ACO2 molecule is preferentially ignored by natural sinks. Of course the argument is that sinks are not expanding at a sufficient rate to accommodate the increase and the distinction between ACO2 and natural C12 molecules is irrlevant because they compete for the fixed absorption spots; but this ignores 2 salient facts; firstly natural emissions have increased and I have linked to Segalstad before, and 2ndly sink capacity has varied as the D’Aleo and Siddons link above shows.
Finally, a 3rd overlooked factor is that the measurement of CO2 is on a dry air basis which assumes a site specificity and excludes the water concentration which can vary from nearly 0% to 5% concentration with consequent profound effect on the real concentration of CO2; this means the fixed gas ratio is nothing of the sort; I wouldn’t dismiss Beck so easily.
Jan,
Since human emissions cumulatively have exceeded the cumulative increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the only other source or sink is natural activity, i.e. non human industrial sources,
why do we need any graphical analysis to say that naturl activity has been a net absorber of CO2?
It is also true that the every annual cumulative increase in the annual CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere has been less than the annual emissions, so that natural activity has been a sink on an annual basis. What is wrong with this simple straight forward analysis?
Jan Pompe April 16th, 2009 at 6:44 am
“you can compare with accumulation with noise and get the same result.”
Can you show me an example of such accumulation of white noise? I would expect that the accumulation would remain randomly varying around zero (but my statistics are very rusty…).
“One needs to be careful having a smoking gun isn’t much good if you wipe the fingerprints off it. It gets worse if you add your own by fiddling about with running averages that can cause spurious correlations.”
There is a huge difference between accumulation and running averages, which indeed cause spurious correlations (cfr. Endersbee: 21 years running temperature average…) and whipes out any variability. But accumulation doesn’t do that. I have blown up the section 1996-2004 in the previous graph. That clearly shows the (small) mainly temperature induced variability around the average trend, which is simply 55% of the emissions. If one want to calculate the derivative, the year by year increase, the information still is in the graph. There is no loss of information:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1996_2004.jpg
compare that to what temperature does:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_co2_1996_2004.jpg
There is simply no (short term) correlation between temperature and the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. But if you look at both graphs, you can see that the temperature variation is largely responsible for the small variability around the average trend.
“this one in particular I tried it when it came up on CA and got the same cumulative signal and a very similar R2 correlation coeff with white noise. It doesn’t really prove anything.”
Except that white noise doesn’t add anything physically to the atmosphere, while the emissions do… One can debate this in length, but if one adds more CO2 to the atmosphere than is found as increase, there is little doubt possible about the origin… Any alternative natural source that can follow the emissions in such an incredible fixed ratio must be steered with a very good control algorithm…
Manuel April 15th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
“Thank you very much for your answer to my previous post. I am sorry but I am not convinced by your arguments. It still seems to me that the only possible way of sustaining the claim that man emitted CO2 is causing global warming involves assuming that nature is perfect while man is evil, and I am not prepared to buy that.
As you recognize, natural processes cause a tremendous amount of emissions and absortions of CO2 each year, yet they are completely balanced and they have been so for thousands of years. Only when man adds a tiny portion to the system, everything starts to go wrong. This is rather strange and deserves a close examination without jumping to conclussions.
Please note that I am not saying that the increase in the concentration of CO2 is not due mainly to man contribution. Only that you should be very careful not to just dismiss any analysis that might indicate that there are other reasons that could, at least partially, explain the recent evolution of the measured CO2 concentration as compared with historical data that has yet to be proved right.”
Manuel, the fact that humans are responsible for most of the increase of CO2 in the last centuries and the influence of that increase are completely separated items.
Nature was quite balanced over the past few million years: temperature and CO2 were tightly coupled (with a lot of lag for CO2) in a surprisingly linear ratio of about 8 ppmv/°C:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/Vostok_trends.gif
The ratio is the same for 4 glacials/interglacials each some 100,000 years separated, recently confirmed by the 800,000 years Dome C ice core results. That the ratio doesn’t fade away with depth/pressure/age is a sign that there is no (vertical) migration of CO2/air in the ice.
If we may use the same long-term ratio for the more recent warming since the LIA (some 0.8°C), then some 6 ppmv increase is from the warming, the rest of the 100 ppmv is from the emissions…
There is little doubt that ice cores are rather reliable conservations of ancient air, if handled with a lot of care. And the current CO2 baseline stations since 1958 are very accurate (better than 0.2 ppmv). In contrast to the historical data gathered by Beck, which are snapshots from different places in different years and different apparatus (at best +/- 10 ppmv, at worst +/- 150 ppmv) and different local circumstances of CO2 sources/sinks (with variations of hundreds of ppmv over a day)…
cohenite April 16th, 2009 at 8:54 am
“Ferdinand; always interested in your work; this article takes a contrary view;
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/Carbon_Dioxide_The_Houdini_of_Gases.pdf”
Sorry, but that is not serious… The authors assume something that they further attribute to the modelers:
“Climate Modelers are aware of this “missing excess”
Well, I never heard of a missing excess, only heard about missing sinks…
And they even can’t calculate: since at least 1900, the accumulated emissions exceed the increase in the atmosphere, if you use the emission figures.
For the residence time of CO2 (Segalstad), see next items…
“The Earth Observatory link from NASA of the Carbon cycle is similar to Fig 7.3 on p515 of AR4; Fig 7.3 provides a total annual emission of 218.2 Gt with the anthropogenic contribution being 8 Gt or 3.67%; 98.5% of that 218.2Gt is reabsorbed; see Table 3 p6 here;
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf”
The natural emissions were estimated at 770 Gt CO2, human emissions 23.1 Gt CO2, natural absorption 793 Gt CO2 and increase in the atmosphere 11.7 Gt CO2.
Thus the natural absorption is larger than the natural emissions and the net contribution of nature to the increase in the atmosphere is negative…
“Actually the DOE data gives a % for the human contribution to annual CO2 emissions of 2.9% but we’ll stick with AR4’s 3.67%. NOw with 1.5% of CO2 emissions from all sources left in the atmosphere how much of that is anthropogenic;”
As about 150/800 GtC is exchanged between the atmosphere and the biosphere/oceans, about 20% of the 8 GtC anthro CO2 from the previous year will be removed from the atmosphere and all subsequent years. That means that from the 300+ GtC added to the atmosphere (+30%) only a fraction remains in the atmosphere: about 6% actually. No problem with that. Nobody in the IPCC, nor I, expect that anthro CO2 behaves differently than natural CO2.
The problem with the residence time of a molecule is that it has nothing to do with the lifetime of excess CO2 as mass in the atmosphere: what happens if we stop all emissions today? Using the above figures, without human emissions, in the next year there would be a decrease of 793 – 770 Gt CO2 = 23 Gt CO2 or only 0.5% of the amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere, quite a difference with the 20% per year of the residence time decay.
Even worse: the next year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a little smaller and in the upper oceans a little higher, thus less CO2 is pushed into the oceans, as the partial pressure difference is smaller then. Thus the 0.5% of the first year is only 0.4% in the second year and so on…
In short, all studies summed by Segalstad about a residence time of around 5 years are right for how long anthro CO2 molecules reside in the atmosphere, but don’t tell you anything about how long the increase in total CO2 (caused by the same anthro emissions) stays in the atmosphere…
The real excess decay half life time is around 40 years, much longer than the residence half life time, but much shorter than the IPCC estimates: these may be real for 10% of the emissions, only if we burn all oil and most of all coal, which is not very realistic…
ALL historical measurements were done on dryed air samples (which caused errors btw), as good as all modern measurements are done on dry air (by freezing out water vapor at -70°C) or calculated on dry air, simply because water vapor is highly variable and everybody likes to compare CO2 in air ratio’s regardless of altitude or latitude…
Ferdinand; the absorption is 781,400 not 793,100 which is the total of all emissions; the increase of 11700 is therefore correct.
Cohenite:
Finally, a 3rd overlooked factor is that the measurement of CO2 is on a dry air basis which assumes a site specificity and excludes the water concentration which can vary from nearly 0% to 5% concentration with consequent profound effect on the real concentration of CO2; this means the fixed gas ratio is nothing of the sort; I wouldn’t dismiss Beck so easily.
There is a reason it is overlooked. It is insignificant.
The water can only take up a tiny fraction of the CO2 in the air. According to the theory of how it is taken up, it can only absorb the CO2 that is contained in the air of a volume equal to the condensed vapor, which is ice, not liquid. This is a tiny fraction of the volume of the air, equivalent to less than .01ppM out of 380ppM in the atmosphere.
Even if the air and liquid water were allowed to come to equilibrium the conclusion would not change.
” I wouldn’t dismiss Beck so easily.”
List of papers you can dismiss easily :-
* Beck
* G&T
* Miskolczi
* Jaroworski
* Quirk
There are many more, but it’s a start.
Ferdinand
Why would it be randomly varying about zero when there is no such thing as negative emission?
I posted one up on photobucket the noise signal can be seen along the bottom
http://s229.photobucket.com/albums/ee272/JanPompe/?action=view¤t=accumNOise.png
I don’t know what would be surprising about it when we expect that if we plot the cumulative sum of random positive numbers that we will get a monotonically rising function and a high correlation coefficient is to be expected with any similarly generated function even annual stork birth rates (which can’t be negative either).
Now I think you are being facetious you know as well as I that it means that you will get a similar correlation if you replace the the emission figures with randomly generated numbers. Did you not check your method a Null Hypothesis?
I don’t think we need to debate it at length your method does NOT tell us anything at all about the provenance of the CO2 in the atmosphere you say you have a smoking gun but the reality is that you have wiped the finger prints from the weapon and the DNA from the scene of the crime. Just about any source of CO2 that we care to name produces more CO2 than is found as increase. Just looking at d18C tells us about the the mix or ration left behind not whether it is cause of the rise. If we are to do better than the folks over at RC we need to better than Michael Mann who also failed to check his method with null hypothesis. I do trust in your case it’s not deliberate.
cohenite April 16th, 2009 at 11:15 am
“Ferdinand; the absorption is 781,400 not 793,100 which is the total of all emissions; the increase of 11700 is therefore correct.”
Of course, you are right… The real removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by nature thus is 781.4 Gt CO2 – 770 Gt CO2 = 11.4 Gt CO2.
Doesn’t make a difference for the excess decay half life time: I calculated that from the carbon levels in the atmosphere (4 GtC from 800 GtC is removed per year nowadays), not the CO2 levels (too lazy to calculate CO2 levels in the atmosphere…).
Anyway, as long as the emissions are larger than what is found in the atmosphere, there is no net addition of CO2 in the atmosphere by nature, even if a lot of CO2 is exchanged each year…
Ferdinand: Would you say that Australia(where I know you have visited) as a country would absorb more co2 than it emits, considering it’s low population and considerable vegetation
Bedankt
Jan Pompe April 16th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
“Why would it be randomly varying about zero when there is no such thing as negative emission?”
Sorry, I thought that the definition of white noise was that the average was zero over time. But no problem, any positive random origin of extra CO2 would give a rather straight increase over time. Does that fit the increase in the atmosphere?
Not really: the increase in the atmosphere is not linear, but more equiprocentual increasing (thus with a linear increase per year). Just like the emissions, see:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_emiss_increase.jpg
Any positive random noise is not enough to explain the increasing increase, one need a second component which increases the average of the random noise… See the following graph with the accumulations of a random function, a mix of 70% linear increasing + 30% random and the real emissions:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_rand.jpg
The simple accumulated noise doesn’t fit, the mix is better but still too noisy and the real emissions are a near fit with little noise… Thus the null hypothesis is rejected, except if something in nature perfectly mimics the emissions.
About the rest of the discussion: there is no smoking gun for natural emissions, as nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2. Any addition is compensated with an excess sink. That is even the case for the biosphere on its own (via the oxygen balance) and the oceans on their own (as residual of the biosphere uptake). The d13C levels on their own don’t prove that fossil fuels are the cause, but the mass balance does prove it. The d13C levels is only an additional indication that the oceans can’t be the source of the d13C decline…
chrisl April 16th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
“Ferdinand: Would you say that Australia(where I know you have visited) as a country would absorb more co2 than it emits, considering it’s low population and considerable vegetation
Bedankt”
Depends how much the vegetation is absorbing more than decaying… In general, mature vegetation does store some carbon in a more or less fixed way: from peat to browncoal to coal. The rest of the wood and root system is more or less in balance with the general decay after years of growth. New plantations do a much better job by fixing far more CO2 in their wood and root system, without decay (except of the leaves) until mature, but when used (and burned), that returns sooner or later to the atmosphere, except when replanted directly after cutting.
At the other side, Australia uses a lot of coal (and gas?) as energy source for power generation + oil for traffic… Thus I think that there still is an unbalance. If that will have much effect, that is highly debatable, but looking at alternative energy sources (without taxes and other Kyoto’s which cost a lot without any benefit) is prudent, even if it was only to get more independent from not so stable countries…
chrisl April 16th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
BTW, beautiful country! Hope to get back there some day to visit the Northern part (Darwin and around)…
“Ferdinand: Would you say that Australia(where I know you have visited) as a country would absorb more co2 than it emits, considering it’s low population and considerable vegetation
Bedankt”
If the vegetation is constant, it’s not absorbing anything.
Interesting question:
Hotter late season fires in northern Australia – Kimberley, Top End, Gulf and Cape York – perhaps more emissions.
CO2 fertilisation would be doing something perhaps.
Droughts might increase emissions. Wets grow more vegetation.
Overgrazing and lack of a proper fire regime from Central Queensland to north-west NSW – causing woodland thickening. Maybe 100 Mt per annum.
What’s the nett ? hmmmm ….
Ferdinand; this is your defining position;
“Anyway, as long as the emissions are larger than what is found in the atmosphere, there is no net addition of CO2 in the atmosphere by nature, even if a lot of CO2 is exchanged each year…”
Thus, even though both sinks and natural emissions are increasing, since the ACO2 is greater than the residual, ACO2 must be responsible for the residual. The sink increase is the difference between the emissions and the atmospheric increase; do you have an accurate figure for the increase in ocean uptake; there is quite a bit of variation in the [peer-reviewed] official literature;
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/oceans/ndp_088/intro088.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5682/367
Ferdinand thank you again for your response I had a busy night adn it’s about 10 hours after my bed time so I’ll be brief.
Really depends on signal type there is no requirement for it to be an alternating one.
I have two questions first is why did you not normalise the data?
The second is can you give a numeric of the confidence level with which you reject the null hyporthesis?
Finally it is is this chart that i was looking at where you are looking at accumulation rather than signature in the variations where I find you can replace the the accumulated emission with accumulated noise(or if you prefer to call it random data).
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1960_2006.jpg
Jan,
I didn’t normalise the data as that would obscure the differences (I used slightly different endpoints to have different slopes), but indeed I could have given an offset in the presentation. It was just a fast trial to see what the effect of random data on the slope and variability around the trend was (without further criteria).
The effect is quite clear: with only random data, the correlation still is high, but there is relative much variation around the trend and the trend itself is decreasing compared to the observations. A 70/30 mix of an increasing “emission” value with a random variation gives a better fit in trend, but still more variation around the trend than the emissions only trend.
Thus random only or trend + random give too much variability around the trend, thus the variability in reality is smaller than the regular increase.
My conclusion in this is that the trend itself is mostly caused by the emissions and the variability around the trend is caused by (sea surface) temperature variations. The relative small deviations from the trend in the 1960-2006 graphs for MLO and SPO are probably ENSO and Pinatubo related…
At the other side, looking at the variability only can give false conclusions: The non-detrended dCO2/yr graphs show a good correlation with (sea surface) temperature, especially ENSO events. But that is only about the variability around the trend, as the detrended dCO2/yr correlation is about the same as the non-detrended correlation. Thus one can’t conclude that the temperature variation is the cause of the trend itself, only that it is the cause of the variability around the trend… That is where Tom Quirk and others went wrong.
With a simple formula, I can obtain a rather good emulation of what happened in the atmosphere, only based on emissions and temperature:
dCO2 = 0.57*emissions + 3*dT
See the result here: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/egbn_trend.jpg
Pieter Tans has a better fit (explaining about 2/3rd of the variability), by including precipitation:
http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf
As someone who is not a statistical novice, might I be permitted to note that the debate here seems about statistial nits?
This only happens when the empirical facts are not obvious.
For the scientists among us, this means we are wasting time and energy on nonsenses.
But, for the rest here, we sit back and read. 🙂
If .iIt’s the Platonic, or if Socratic discourse is your cup of tea, your bent is,
So be it.
Louis
You might well be right about the statistics but physically if emissions are a source (and I have no doubt that they are) they should correlate with rate of change of the atmospheric concentration rather than with accumulation i.e. the difference in a year’s accumulation will be equal to emissions (all sources) minus the total sequestered (all sinks) during that year.
Jan,
That depends of the signal/noise ratio.
For e.g. the tidal gauges the signal is about 0.01 mm/day within a “noise” of 6 m amplitude twice a day + a lot more at spring tide… That needs many years before a change in ocean level (statistically) can be detected, as there is no measurable effect of sea level on the rate of change over a day and hardly detectable over a year.
For the increase in the atmosphere vs. emissions, where the “noise” is about +/- 2 GtC/year, the emissions over 8 GtC/year and the average increase in the atmosphere 4 GtC/yr, 2-3 years are sufficient to separate the signal from the noise. In this case, the variability is not in the emissions, but in the mainly temperature controlled sink capacity (mainly of the oceans)…
If there was a lot of variability in the emissions and no variability in sink capacity, one would find a high correlation between increase in the atmosphere and the emissions and less/not with temperature. Thus looking at the rate of change is quite dubious in this case, where everybody is interested in the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, as that is supposed to give a lot of trouble…
Ferdinand
I don’t think they went wrong there at all given the claim that there has been a general upward trend of sea surface temperature
This equation only tells part of the story since it leaves out the biological pump while it does allow for decreased solubility due to sea surface temperature.
dCO2 = 0.57*emissions + 3*dT
it does however make my point that the change rather than the accumulation is proportional to emissions adn the accumulation the integral of the right hand side which indicates also that temperature plays a part renedering nonsense statements like this:
[emphasis mine]
Comment from: Jan Pompe April 18th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Ferdinand
” Thus one can’t conclude that the temperature variation is the cause of the trend itself, only that it is the cause of the variability around the trend… That is where Tom Quirk and others went wrong.”
I don’t think they went wrong there at all given the claim that there has been a general upward trend of sea surface temperature
This equation only tells part of the story since it leaves out the biological pump while it does allow for decreased solubility due to sea surface temperature.
dCO2 = 0.57*emissions + 3*dT
it does however make my point that the change rather than the accumulation is proportional to emissions adn the accumulation the integral of the right hand side which indicates also that temperature plays a part renedering nonsense statements like this:
“The observed increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since pre-industrial times is entirely due to human activities. ”
[emphasis mine]
This is definitely not a nonsense statement.
The natural world has been a net sink of for the CO2 emitted by human industrial activity. The best data that we have says that human emissions have exceeded the increase in atmospheric CO2 since regular CO2 monitoring has begun. The variation of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere due to ocean temperature is a variation in the net absorption of the oceans, because the colder part of the ocean is still a more powerful sink than the warmer part is a source.
Jan Pompe April 18th, 2009 at 1:39 am
[quote]Ferdinand
Thus one can’t conclude that the temperature variation is the cause of the trend itself, only that it is the cause of the variability around the trend… That is where Tom Quirk and others went wrong.
I don’t think they went wrong there at all given the claim that there has been a general upward trend of sea surface temperature
This equation only tells part of the story since it leaves out the biological pump while it does allow for decreased solubility due to sea surface temperature. [/quote]
The ocean temperature increase is mainly since 1976, before that we had a cooler period, especially in the NH. Despite that, CO2 levels increased in ratio with the emissions. Thus the influence of temperature is quite small.
The current 3 ppmv/°C is about right for short term responses of vegetation and oceans, the (very) long term response is about 8 ppmv/°C over the past near million years. That includes (deep) ocean current changes, land changes from ice caps to forest and back,… over glacials and interglacials. Given this ratio, the maximum increase of CO2 from the warming since the LIA wouldn’t be more than 6-8 ppmv (0.8-1.0°C temperature increase) that is all. The rest of the 100+ ppmv CO2 rise is highly probably from the emissions.
Thus all together, there is a clear influence of temperature on CO2 levels, but the effect on current CO2 levels in the past centuries is rather small…
Ferdinand: A question(a.u.b.) Whereabouts on the earth is the co2 absorbed? The co2 levels stay in remarkable equilibrium(give or take a few parts per billion) so what regions of the world absorb it. Logically one would say that Australia(for example) always has been and always will be a net absorber of co2.
chrisl April 18th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Ferdinand: A question(a.u.b.) Whereabouts on the earth is the co2 absorbed? The co2 levels stay in remarkable equilibrium(give or take a few parts per billion) so what regions of the world absorb it. Logically one would say that Australia(for example) always has been and always will be a net absorber of co2.
Chrisl, a large part of the emitted CO2 is absorbed in the colder parts of the oceans, especially at the sink places of the THC (thermohaline circulation) in the North Atlantic. A nice graph of the source (near the equator) and sink places (near the poles) and the seasonal differences in the mid-latitudes can be found at:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/images/fig03.jpg
Another part is everywhere in vegetation: More CO2 in the atmosphere helps growing plants, if all other necessities are present in sufficient quantity. Before 1990 the biosphere was near neutral, after 1990 a net sink:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/287/5462/2467.pdf
While most of Australia is mature vegetation, even there is some buildup of organics in the ground as not all humus decays…
“Logically one would say that Australia(for example) always has been and always will be a net absorber of co2.”
Why? Vegetation would have to be growing beyond it’s current level to do that. The deserts aren’t getting any smaller.
SJT “List of papers you can dismiss easily :-
* Beck
* G&T
* Miskolczi
* Jaroworski
* Quirk
You forgot to add, “List of papers you can dismiss easily :-…if you’re a raving, blithering, narrow-minded, egotistical, callous, uninformed and basically stupid ass”.
Your intelligence quotient just dipped below 80.
Ferdinand “take the article of Ernst Beck with some salt: the peak in his historical measurements around 1942 is not seen in ice cores, stomata index data and coralline sponges”.
You’re not seriously suggesting that proxy data is better than first hand observation, are you? BTW…those observations were not done by Beck, only reported by him. I have read the scientist in question and he went to a lot of trouble to make sure his observations were correct. He eliminated variables in CO2 density due to things like wind, etc., and made the observations over several years at various alitudes and locations. The guy knew what he was doing.
If anything, the 1940’s observations prove the proxy data is faulty, which Jaworowski pointed out independently.
Louis Hissink “Luke, SJT,…. Mass is a measurement of the force that an object experiences in the presence of another object”.
Louis…Luke, SJT, RW, Eric Adler, etc., are textbook junkies who don’t understand there is something going on in nature beyond what the mind can understand. They read textbooks and can only understand the math and the simplified analogies.
Mass is defined in science as something that ‘occupies space’. Doh!! They don’t elaborate much on how that ‘stuff’ interacts with it’s environment. For example, take inertia. It’s the property of mass that resists the mass from being moved from rest and when the mass is in motion, it resists a change in the mass’s velocity. All we have is the lame, f = ma, with no qualitative understanding of how mass resists motion or a change in motion.
In a textbook, momentum is defined as mass x velocity, which says absolutely nothing about momentum. As Bohren pointed out in the Fundamentals of Atmospheric Radiation, a photon has momentum but no mass. How would a textbook junkie explain that? He can’t because he doesn’t understand that momentum is a phenomenon, not a mathematical identity. A photon has momentum…period. Full stop. It doesn’t care how the human mind defines it based on an illusionary parameter called time (velocity).
I have been trying to point that out to Luke, SJT, RW and Eric Adler, but they are all hung up on the quaint notion that natural phenomena must somehow obey man-made laws. They don’t understand, for example, that a blackbody does not exist except in the mind’s of humans, since it was defined as an ideal entity by a human. They don’t get what G&T are saying, that CO2 in the atmosphere cannot be described as a blackbody. That doesn’t stop certain climate scientists from applying Planck, Boltzmann and Kircheoff liberally to a body that is not a blackbody.
In their paper, G&T state the following:
“Heat is the kinetic energy of molecules and atoms and will be transferred by contact or radiation. Microscopically both interactions are mediated by photons. In the former case, which is governed by the Coulomb resp. van derWaals interaction these are the virtual or o-shell photons, in the latter case these are the real or on-shell photons. The interaction between photons and electrons (and other particles that are electrically charged or have a nonvanishing magnetic momentum) is microscopically described by the laws of quantum theory. Hence, in principle, thermal conductivity and radiative transfer may be described in a unified framework. However, the non-equilibrium many body problem is a highly non-trivial one and subject to the discipline of physical kinetics unifying quantum theory and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics”.
I’m sure the average climate scientist is well-versed in “physical kinetics, quantum theory and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics”. I doubt if most of them have heard of those disciplines, never mind Gavin Schmidt, a mathematician who thinks he excels in physics.
Just to be nice guys, G&T reduced the problem to classical mechanics to reveal the inadequacies of climate science theory. They concluded:
1) In classical radiation theory radiation is not described by a vector field assigning to every space point a corresponding vector. Rather, with each point of space many rays are associated. This is in sharp contrast to the modern description of the radiation field as an electromagnetic field with the Poynting vector field as the relevant quantity.
(my note: AGW theory not only omits the vectors, it uses blankets, and gases that store energy, much like a capacitor stores charges in electronics). They also create positive feedback without amplification.
2)The constant σ (sigma) appearing in the T4 law is not a universal constant of physics. It strongly depends on the particular geometry of the problem considered.
(my note: that would be the variable Boltzmann equation which conveniently supports AGW theory.)
3)The T4-law will no longer hold if one integrates only over a filtered spectrum, appropriate to real world situations.
The Stefan-Boltzmann T4 law does no longer hold in the latter case, where only two bands are integrated over, namely that of visible light and of infrared radiation from 3 microns to 5 microns, giving rise to a steeper curve.
(my note: I tried to explain this to RW the other day and he came back at me claiming I don’t understand blackbody radiation. I don’t, but RW is claiming G&T, both physicists, don’t understand it.)
4)Many pseudo-explanations in the context of global climatology are already falsified by these
three fundamental observations of mathematical physics.
It’s gotten to a point for me, Louis, where it’s a waste of time trying to have an intelligent conversion with such people when they don’t have the slightest clue about basic physics. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they don’t understand mass.
Louis “Mass is a measurement of force, not quantity of matter”.
I made a mistake in my previous post when I said mass ‘occupies space’. It’s matter that occupies space and has mass. Mass has different meanings in different situation but in the ordinary sense it represents the resistance to motion provided it is a constant mass (that is, not changing states from mass to energy).
You were essentially correct when you said mass was related to the forces between bodies. However, if we take a quantity of matter out into space, where the forces on it are neglible, it still has mass. Newton’s 2nd Law equates force to mass by introducing the human parameter of time into the phenomenon of acceleration. By that I mean humans observed the change of velocity in an object that is a natural phenomenon, but they introduced a measuring system to measure it and keep tract of it.
If you had a block of lead out in space, and you tried to push on it, the mass would resist you. Of course, if the block sat on the earth’s surface, and you tried to push on it, you’d not only have to overcome it’s mass, you’d have to overcome the friction due to gravity holding the block against the surface. It would slide easier on a surface like ice, or ball-bearings, or if you suspended it from a rope, it would move more easily. In space, there would be no such resistance and the block would move more easily. If you kept the force on the block, it would gradually accelerate.
I think the concept of mass can get really confusing. If you take a pea and a block of lead, and drop them from the same height, they will apparently reach the ground at the same time. The acceleration due to gravitational force is constant at 9.8 m/s.s. What does that tell you about mass? If you had a one cubic foot box filled with feathers dropped on you from 5 feet above, it might be annoying. If the box was full of lead, it would be lights out. They are accelerating at the same rate but the box with lead has more of a punch.
If the accelerations are the same from the initial conditions where velocity is zero, the velocities at your head will be the same. The momentums won’t be the same since their masses are different. It’s the momentum that ko’s you and mass is the difference.
Having said all that, I still have no idea what mass is.
Gordon Robertson April 25th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Sorry for the delay, just saw your message now…
“You’re not seriously suggesting that proxy data is better than first hand observation, are you? BTW…those observations were not done by Beck, only reported by him.”
Depends where the measurements were taken. The around 1942 peak shows an enormous variability in CO2 levels between (near) ocean data and mid-land data, where the (near) ocean data are around the ice core measurements and the range of the mid-land data is wide enough to include the ice core data. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/beck_1930_1950.jpg
No matter how accurate the measurements were (+/- 10 ppmv in general), if you measure near huge sources and sinks, the data are worthless as information of the more or less global CO2 levels of that time. What Ernst Beck has done is like trending the averages of a few months of temperature in Oslo, followed with the temperature in Rome, measured on an asphalted roof and followed by the temperature of Helsinki. From the trend one can conclude that there was a peak in global temperature… Even trying to compensate for the asphalted roof doesn’t solve the real problems of such an approach. See further:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
On the other side, ice core bubbles contain the real composition of the atmosphere (with a slight gravitational correction) of ancient times. Jaworowski’s objections of 1992 (repeated until now…) were adequately answered by the work of Etheridge e.a. of 1996 on the Law Dome ice cores, where firn CO2 was measured and compared to ice CO2 and to atmospheric CO2 (a 20 years overlap with the south pole data for the same gas age). See:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1996/95JD03410.shtml and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html