Fossil Fuels Fail to Explain Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels: AEF Media Release
Posted by Tom Quirk, April 13th, 2009 - under News, Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
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.
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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 .
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