arctic ice increases 60%

The equilibrium concentration concept also disproves the AGW assertion that "all or nearly all" recent CO2 rise is due to fossil fuel emissions, and makes it obvious why the signature studies never seem to come up with the 'right' numbers to support the AGW alarmist's position. We don't even have to resort to signature studies to see the light, just the tabulated release numbers from CDIAC will do.

A given unit of CO2 released to the atmosphere does not raise the atmosphere's CO2 concentration by that unit because 49/50ths of that unit are quickly absorbed by the ocean as a result of the pressure gradient created by the perturbation to the equilibrium concentration. In other words, in order to get a unit of increase in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration, we have to release ~50 units to overcome the solubility equilibrium concentration.

So if we do the math the atmosphere contains 750Gt carbon (its carbon right? Not CO2; we want to make sure we are working in the same units) and the alarmist's position is that we are responsible for 20% of that or 150Gt. But in order to get there we would have had to contribute 7500Gt to overcome the equilibrium concentration with the ocean. In our peak emissions year we added 8.3Gt. More than half of all anthropogenic carbon was emitted after 1978. There is NO WAY we have or could possibly have emitted the amount required to increase atmospheric CO2 concentration by this amount. It's an amount greater than all the fossil fuels yet burned or even discovered.

This simple forensic reconstruction also comes from Tom Segalstad.

The thing has to add up or it's just no good.

Jimbo

 

I couldn't see an actual paper on the page IM linked to, but went on from there. Found this: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87

Now as I've already admitted, I haven't looked into this issue much yet. I was curious about the methodology that would be used, because offhand I couldn't see a way in which anthro and non-anthro emissions could be distingished once free in the atmosphere.

I italicised that last bit because it's important. I can easily understand how any given sample of CO2, from any given source, could be analysed to determine its origin. That's a no-brainer to anyone who gets the basics of how isotope analysis is used. However, that's a very different matter from taking a random sample of the atmosphere, and then trying to tease out what percentage of its CO2 content is anthro. It seemed to me that the latter could never be done directly, and it seems that I was right. It has to be done by deduction.

I'm just mentioning this for clarity.

When you say things like this:

You're correct in a way, but it's confusing when talking about atmospheric CO2 analysis. I mean if you give any mug in a lab a sample of fossil carbon, they can easily tell it's fossil carbon just by checking for C14 (apart from some rare exceptions, where the fossil carbon may have been influenced by uranium deposits or whatever). They could also check for a C12/C13 ratio indicative of a biological origin. However, they can't check directly in the case of atmospheric CO2, and it would be best (IMO) to be clear about this when discussing the subject.

Anyway, what I was getting around to was this:

How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?

Now this caught my eye because I was already familiar with this sort of thing from other discussions of other subjects. It does seem, if this page is correct, that regardless of the actual values of the ratios in question, their qualitative trends do match current climate science.

Given that the expected actual values would be dependent on accurately modelling the whole system, and given that modelling is not going to be perfect, shouldn't the observed trends in these measurements be regarded as significant?

 

Let's say for the sake of argument it REALLY IS a problem. The signature studies don't find that the atmosphere contains that amount of fossil carbon which would prove that the atmosphere's CO2 rise is due to fossil fuel burning. The studies all show the vast majority of the 'new' CO2 in the atmosphere is completely natural.

So now what?

Jimbo

 

180 YEARS OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2
GAS ANALYSIS
BY CHEMICAL METHODS
Ernst-Georg Beck
Dipl. Biol. Ernst-Georg Beck, 31 Rue du Giessen, F-68600 Biesheim, France
E-mail: egbeck@biokurs.de
2/2007
ABSTRACT

"More than 90,000 accurate chemical analyses of CO2 in air since 1812 are summarised. The historic chemical data reveal that changes in CO2 track changes in temperature, and therefore climate in contrast to the simple, monotonically increasing CO2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change. Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm.
Between 1857 and 1958, the Pettenkofer process was the standard analytical method for determining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and usually achieved an accuracy better than 3%. These determinations were made by several scientists of Nobel Prize level distinction. Following Callendar (1938), modern climatologists have generally ignored the historic determinations of CO2, despite the techniques
being standard text book procedures in several different disciplines. Chemical methods were discredited as unreliable choosing only few which fit the assumption of a climate CO2 connection"

You guys really should take the time to read this paper. Don't bother emailing him as he has since passed away from cancer a couple of years ago.

Jimbo

 

Well if that's the case, them critters are screwed. However, your signature studies don't seem to be the same as other people's signature studies, which is what I'm trying to sort out at the moment.

BTW, I was curious about the times when you said CO2 levels were 10 or 20 times higher than they are now. Turns out that hasn't been the case since before the Cambrian, which kinda makes it irrelevant to preserving our current ecosytem. Taking the graph from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png



The bit that should interest us is the last 20 million years or so, and according to this graph CO2 levels have been pretty stable during that period.

I'm taking the 30 Myr filter line as a reference, since the modelling looks to be out and the raw data points have too much scatter.

 

Found a copy. Will read it. Question: was it ever published in a peer-reviewed journal?

 

It appears that the current scientific understanding is that about 45% of the anthropically-emitted CO2 is retained in the atmosphere, not the 2% (1/50) you mention above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere#Sources_of_carbon_dioxide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere#Anthropogenic_CO2_increase

So by my crude calculations, if humans have released about 346 gigatonnes of carbon, and if 45% (156 Gt) have been retain in the atmosphere, and if there currently is 750Gt carbon in the atmosphere (your number), then the 156Gt that humans have added represent a 26% increase over pre-industral atmospheric carbon levels. This is less than the 43% mentioned above, but at least those two numbers are in the same ballpark.

 

Not unless you want to consider Energy and Environment a legitimate peer-reviewed publication.

 

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Mark Twain

CO2 has a short residence time | SKEPTICAL SCIENCE

 

Ok Jimbo. I've read it.

For a start, without doing quite a bit of swotting up, I'm not in a position to assess the accuracy of the chemical testing methods mentioned by Beck. However, I'm happy to accept the measurements as accurate (enough) for the sake of this discussion.

I have to say that the abstract did throw up a couple of warning flags for me.

The last sentence is is pure argument from authority. The results should stand or fall on their own soundness, not on who happened to perform the measurements and what awards they had previously won. Nobel laureates are human too, and there is no a priori reason to assume they are capable of measuring CO₂ better than many other people.

Again, the last sentence throws up a warning flag for me. Starting by assuming, and asserting, corruption on the part of any scientist who publishes something you disagree with is not the way to put forward a convincing argument.

Beck says that measurements from ice cores will be a bit lower than the real value due to absorption by the ocean, and that measurements from a tropical island would suffer less from absorption, thereby making the ice core data seem to have lower levels than the later data from Hawaii. This is true, but these differences are known and should be easily accounted for. So, offhand I can't see what is wrong with using ice core data, and it seems to be well accepted practice. We have ice cores from way back up to almost the present day so calibration, if required, should be perfectly feasible. It's standard practice for radiometric dating, so I assume it would be done for ice cores too.

There's not much to argue with in most of Beck's paper, since it's basically a pile of measurements. Assuming the people who did the measurements were competent (seems fair and likely) the next thing is to look at why the results mentioned weren't accepted by Callendar and Keeling. So, I went looking for peer review of Beck's work. It's hard to find. I did eventually find a page which provided what seemed like a pretty good summary.

The most relevant parts are quoted below, with a bit of snipping for brevity (but without distorting the context).

Now as far as I can tell at the moment, this seems like a reasonable explanation for Keeling's decision to rely mainly on data from Mauna Loa and ice cores. Quite honestly, it seems far more reasonable than asserting corruption and conspiracy. However, I'm happy to read counterarguments if you wish to provide them.

 

By the way, I dealt with this in the post just before yours. Since mine was posted when you were composing the post below, perhaps you missed it.

My post was this one.

 

You've mentioned reefs built in the past several times, and wanted to know how they were built if high CO₂ was a problem. It's a good question. I find palaeo stuff fascinating anyway, so have started checking up.

It turns out that the reefs built in those eras aren't relevant to modern reefs. The reason they could be built under different conditions (high atmospheric CO₂ and lower oceanic pH) is because the critters that built them were unrelated to modern corals and used a different chemistry.

Calcium carbonate isn't just calcium carbonate. There are two forms used by shelly critters (ancient and/or modern). These forms are calcite and aragonite, and the two behave somewhat differently. It's known that the ocean has changed between being a calcite sea and an aragonite sea at various times in the past.

There's a handy diagram of the changes here:



If you compare that to the earlier graph of palaeo CO₂ levels you should be able to see a correlation.



It's a bit inconvenient to compare the two, since the calcite/aragonite diagram's time axis is reversed to the time axis of the CO₂ levels graph, but by mentally flipping one or the other it's clear enough. Taking the 30 Myr filter line as the reference, it's clear that the calcite sea corresponds to high atmospheric CO₂ levels, and the aragonite sea (which is what we currently have) corresponds to CO₂ levels around the levels we are used to.

In fact, the switch appears to occur at CO₂ levels not that far above the current level. When the oceanic chemistry switches from aragonite sea to calcite sea, you get results like this:

In other words, lethal to modern corals, and to any other organism that relies on aragonite, and exactly the sort of effects that marine biologists are warning us about.

For comparison, reefs in the Cambrian, when the CO₂ levels were really high (the 10x or 20x you have mentioned) were built by archeocyathids, which used a calcite shell.

Reefs from the Ordovician up to the Permian were largely built by rugose corals, which also used calcite, and went extinct in the Permian-Triassic extinction event, when the ocean was solidly into an aragonite phase.

Modern corals (Scleractinia) evolved after that event.

During the Jurassic and Cretaceous (calcite sea again) reef building was taken over by rudists.

Now we're back in an aragonite sea (for the moment, anyway) and the reefs we have to worry about are the current Scleractinia ones. Cambrian reefs aren't relevant.

 

On of the reasons seagrasses are being studied and protected is that they provide a natural PH buffer to thier environment. The disappearence of seagrass in certain areas of the world is a concern.

http://www.biogeosciences-discuss.net/10/12313/2013/bgd-10-12313-2013-print.pdf

Posidonia grass is particularly important

 

Ok, I've decided I'm not going to waste any more time trying to sort through the old 750 page thread.

There may be some good stuff in there somewhere, but having gone through the middle 100 pages of it it looks like one of those things that might have been fun at the time, but is basically just a huge trollfest. To cut through the fluff I have to put stacks of people on ignore whenever I look at it, and those are people whose posts I am usually happy to read in any other context. So, then I have to take them off ignore again whenever I want to look at the rest of the forum.

I might make the effort, but I'd need a very good reason to, and there doesn't seem to be one.

Jimbo, this is basically why I'm not going to waste my time on the old thread. Despite the vehemence of your claim to have debunked this to zombie stage, it turned out to be a false claim. Not only had you misread the relevant units so that you were (when comparing like with like) out by a factor of almost 4, but when I checked the NDAIC site I saw that your other claim (that the highest emissions ever were in 2007) was also false, and that in fact the NDAIC had nicely tabulated and constantly rising emissions for every year since then.

In other words, I simply cannot trust your assertion that everything had already been dealt with and debunked by you in the old thread. I'll put it down to imperfect memory.

Since that thread is such a mess, I'm writing it off. This one is (at the moment) relatively clean and focused, so is a much better use of my time.

Cheers.

 

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