Human emissions have more to do with the increase in CO2 levels we are currently seeing than any other factor. How could it be otherwise when humane emissions of CO2 are so much greater than the increase in atmospheric CO2?
Now, I'd love to see the data, but there seems to be nearly zero correlation, even though the slopes are similar. I can't look at that graph and see any obvious tight correlation. You can see the rate of increase (rather than the total c02 in the atmosphere) being used as a metric - and there's a bunch of variation in that rate of increase that doesn't look at all like human emissions.
There is some natural variation in the rate of CO2 increase as well as the steady and increasing human contribution. CO2 increases tend to be higher during El Ninos and lower during La Ninas. This may be because the warmer ocean during El Nino events tends to drive more CO2 out of the ocean and vice versa during La Ninas. Dr. Spencer's graph would have been more readable if he has put something like a 5 year average line on it rather than just a linear line. I guess you see what you want to see and I see what I want to see.
Which begs the question - maybe natural variability produces more noise than any proposed human effect:)
No, noise by definition averages out to zero over the long run. There is no trend in noise. In global temperatures it takes time (probably 20 years or more) for the warming signal to rise above the level of noise.
The Keeling Curve (KC) is not a perfectly smooth curve but has slight variations that correspond quite well with the variations in CO2 emissions. For instance there is a slight flattening in the KC in the late 1970s when CO2 emissions dropped from around 20 GT to around 18.5 GT for a year or two. Same thing in the early 1990s when CO2 emissions flattened out a bit and so did the KC.
As far as temperature goes there is natural variability and some human factors that produce noise in the temperature record that is much greater than the year to year increase in forcing. For instance the drop in temperatures following WW II correspond well with the increase in industrialization and human emissions of aerosols (primarily SO2) that went along with it. That drop went away with the pollution controls that were implemented in the 1970s that reduced those aerosol emissions. If you apply climatological criteria to the temperature curve smoothing it with a 30 year running average to eliminate the noise it fits quite well with the increase in CO2 emissions and KC especially since the 1970s after aerosol emissions were controlled.
The trick is, human contributions are dynamic - they change unpredictably all the time. It's surprising to see carbon *sinks* track that essentially in real time.
Are you kidding me? Human emissions of CO2 do not change unpredictably all the time. In fact they have been consistently rising for the past 150+ years. Check out the curve on this web page. Yes there are a few small drops in emissions. The biggest one appears to have happened during the 1970s energy crisis and another small one around 2007 during the great recession but other than that it shows continually rising emissions. And that curve matches the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as well when you consider that only about 45% of it remains in the atmosphere.
Yes, I could have phrased that better, how about a continuous dynamic exchange of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere?
On what basis do you think the various carbon sinks are acting in an inconsistent way? I've never seen any evidence of that. The documented increase of carbon in the various carbon sinks matches well with the human contribution of carbon to the cycle. It sounds like you're just hoping for something magical to happen. As I said before there is a dynamic balance of carbon between the various sinks. If you change amount of carbon in one the others will adjust to rebalance the carbon cycle.
A more realistic take on your thought experiment. Humans emit enough CO2 to raise the current atmospheric level by 7 ppm this year. 3 ppm remains in the atmosphere, 3 ppm are absorbed into the ocean and the other 1 ppm goes into the biosphere and soil. The total carbon in the short term carbon cycle is increased by over 30 gigatonnes.
Yes, there is a constant dynamic exchange of CO2 between the ocean and the atmosphere but the net exchange is increasing CO2 absorbed in the ocean. Once atmospheric levels of CO2 start falling the net exchange will be more CO2 coming out of the ocean than going in.
Let's just simplify this. Human use of fossil fuels is well documented and it's relatively simple to calculate how much CO2 is released by our use of them. Production of cement and other human activities that release CO2 are also well documented. The human emissions of CO2 are easily large enough to account for the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and the acidification of the oceans. It's up to you to provide evidence that there is some natural factor that overrides that.
CO2 is not the only thermostat but it is one of the major ones.
As far as the oceans instantly responding to CO2 they are on average over 12,000 feet deep and it takes thousands of years for them to fully respond. The surface response may be relatively quick but it takes time for those changes to propagate through the whole ocean.
The oceans warming makes them less soluble to CO2 but they are still absorbing it because the partial pressure in the atmosphere is high enough to continue to drive CO2 in the oceans. Once the level of CO2 in the atmosphere stops rising the oceans will start to release it.
Regarding your thought experiment it mostly just confused me. But CO2 is not the only factor in plant growth and probably not the major factor until others like water, soil nutrients and climate are satisfied.
Neither is the CO2 emitted by volcanoes, or any natural oxidation of of solid carbon sources:)
Both of those sources are dwarfed by human emissions. Volcanic emissions are about 1% of human emissions. I'm not clear on what you mean by natural oxidation of solid carbon sources but if you're talking about things like wildfires and burning coal seams there is some of that but it's still small compared to human sources.
Imagine for a second, that humans all disappear tomorrow and all anthropogenic CO2 emissions stop. Would you expect that the increasing sinks we've observed during the past 40 years would *stop* sinking CO2, or would we suddenly see a massive drop in CO2 as these recently found sinks eat up all the CO2 in the atmosphere that they've been expecting us to pump in there?
Initially there would be a bit of drop in atmospheric CO2 because the oceans haven't reached full equilibrium yet. But it would take thousands of years for CO2 levels to drop back to preindustrial levels of 280 ppm. Once the levels in the atmosphere start to drop the oceans would start releasing CO2 keeping the level from dropping as fast as they might otherwise. The vapor pressure equilibrium of a gas in a liquid is governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation.
You can call it neutralization if you want. It's just arguing semantics. You know what I mean and I know what you mean.
So are you asserting that the only way we can see rising CO2 but falling temperatures is because of natural milankovitch cycles?
No but to ignore them when they are relevant is disingenuous. You can also get falling temperatures by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere.
The oceans don't instantly cool (or warm). They don't instantly adjust to changes in CO2. I think you're reading more into the graphs than is warranted. You're kind of arguing like a lawyer rather than a scientist.
The supposed 800 year lag between CO2 and temperature has been reduced recently to 100 or 200 years by further research.
That's not true - the carbon cycle includes carbon from all sources, including natural petroleum products.
Yes, technically the fossil fuels we dig up and burn are part of the total carbon cycle but they haven't been actively in the carbon cycle for (mostly) hundreds of millions of years.
That's not true either - there's a dynamic system that is constantly changing and adapting. The natural response to human emissions is a clear example of that.
I don't see how you can say it's not a rough balance when the proportion of carbon in each of the various carbon sinks remains about the same. The natural response to human emissions is global warming and ocean acidification (yes, I understand the pH of the oceans is basic but acidification just means the pH is dropping).
A single black swan disproves the "all swans are white" theory:) I don't need to find your falsification criteria everywhere, I just need to find it once:)
And you totally ignored the part about Milankovitch cycles. I don't deny that there are cases where CO2 rose a bit while temperatures fell but the reasons mostly don't apply to the situation today.
You have a lot of glib hand wavey answers don't you? Maybe you'll figure it out eventually.
Yea, you might want to read up on the carbon cycle. As we burn fossil fuels and produce carbon dioxide we increase the total carbon in the carbon cycle. Some of it remains in the atmosphere, some of it is absorbed in the oceans, some of it is absorbed by the biosphere. There is a rough balance between those things. That doesn't mean adding more carbon to the cycle is a good idea. The CO2 in the atmosphere causes global warming and in the ocean it leads to acidification (which could end up being a bigger problem than GW), both at rates much higher than ever seen in natural change. The natural systems that we humans are utterly dependent on will be strained by these changes maybe to the point of causing our global civilization to collapse. At best it will be expensive to adapt to the changes.
There may be a few places like that in those graphs but more often increase CO2 accompanies increased temperatures. On the scale of the graphs the instances of CO2 increasing and temperatures dropping were long enough that the effect of changes in Milankovitch cycles were significant which is not the case when you're talking about a few centuries as is happening now. I'll stand by my statement.
I don't have to explain any increase - the burden of proof is on the affirmative:)
As for 30+ years of negative temperature trend in the face of increasing CO2, we've already seen this in the historical ice core record.
Making the ad hoc special pleading about confounding natural factors (like volcanic eruptions), only makes it more evident that our belief that modern human activity has had a significant effect on CO2 levels is likely misguided:)
Huh? If the yearly human emissions of CO2 are more than twice the year to year increase in atmospheric CO2 levels how can that not be significant in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Kindly give me a reference for having seen negative temperature trends in the face of increasing CO2 from the ice cores. I've never seen anything like that.
And I'm not saying that volcanic eruptions have any significant effect on CO2 levels because they don't. What a series of large volcanic eruptions would do is cause some cooling because of the sulfate aerosols they inject into the stratosphere.
I didn't watch the video, but NASA's own published data on sea level seems to agree with the previous assertion. Take a look yourself. That line looks more or less linear to me since the mid 1800's.
I looked at that page and it appears that there was a substantial increase in the rate of sea level rise starting around 1930.
The best estimate is that the increase in temperature since the 1950s is more than 100% caused by human emissions. All known natural climate influences point toward a slight cooling trend.
As far as what to expect in the future it's difficult to pin down since the climate is changing so fast there is no known analog to it in the past to help guide us in what to expect.
I'd like to see you try and explain the increase in observed CO2 levels in the atmosphere without including human emissions which are more than twice the year to year increase in CO2 levels.
And regarding falsifiability a long term (30 years or more) negative temperature trend in the face of increasing CO2 would probably be enough as long as there weren't confounding factors like a bunch of major volcanic eruptions.
Mount Pinatubo emitted about 40 megatonnes of CO2 during its major eruption in 1991. That same year human emissions were about 20 gigatonnes so about 500 times as much as Pinatubo. Pinatubo also pumped a lot of SO2 and other aerosols into the stratosphere which caused a noticeable drop in temperatures for a couple of years. Climate models showed the same response as the real world in that respect. So Pinatubo was just a tiny burp compared to humane pollution.
The only reason there is as much water vapor in the atmosphere as there is is that there is CO2 to support it. Water vapor is dependent on temperature and without the warming of CO2 water vapor levels would also be reduced. It's simple physics.
If you've done that environmental science work then you should be skilled enough to dig into the literature and discover the answers to your questions. Are you just too lazy to do that? I would suggest you take a look at the GISTEMP. It includes links to papers that talk about the error, spatial coverage, etc.
As far as being accurate to 0.005 degrees F it's not necessary for the individual measurements to be that precise. When you combine a lot of measurements into and average it's reasonable to express it to a higher degree of precision than the individual measurements. The clearest example of that I know of is baseball batting averages. The individual measurements are integers, either a hit (1) or an out (0), yet you commonly see batting averages expressed to 3 decimal places. So well into the season if you get a hit your batting average may rise by 0.002. By the same token in temperature averages subtle changes will appear in the average temperature when they're expressed to more decimal places.
The largest factor in our solar system is almost never considered in their models -- the sun -- and therefore they are utterly pointless.
Nope, the sun is included in every single climate model. They wouldn't work without it. It's just that observations of the sun which have been quite good for over a century and continuous from satellites since 1979 don't show enough variation to account for the warming. In fact the sun's emissions have been on the low end of it's variation range since the middle 2000s yet there has been no cooling because of it.
What appears to be happening is the extreme warming in the Arctic is reducing the temperature difference with the more temperate latitudes which results in a weaker jet stream that becomes wavier rather than being a tight circle around the high Arctic. So the jet stream is looping up the Pacific off the west coast then turning back south over Alaska and shooting down the east side of the Rockies. That draws Arctic air down into the deep south accounting for the cold temperatures there. That is becoming more common than it used to be due to a weaker, wavier jet stream due to the warming in the Arctic. Meanwhile it's been quite warm and dry here on the west coast of North America.
It might cost something to get it set up but once they get it going how much would it cost? I think maybe 5% of what they collect. They could take that out of what they collect as overhead and they still come out ahead.
I tell you, if I were an illegal alien the last thing I'd want to do is potentially call attention to myself by voting when I wasn't eligible to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
And for a more complete explanation of what we've been discussing I came across this:
The Global CO2 Rise
Human emissions have more to do with the increase in CO2 levels we are currently seeing than any other factor. How could it be otherwise when humane emissions of CO2 are so much greater than the increase in atmospheric CO2?
Now, I'd love to see the data, but there seems to be nearly zero correlation, even though the slopes are similar. I can't look at that graph and see any obvious tight correlation. You can see the rate of increase (rather than the total c02 in the atmosphere) being used as a metric - and there's a bunch of variation in that rate of increase that doesn't look at all like human emissions.
There is some natural variation in the rate of CO2 increase as well as the steady and increasing human contribution. CO2 increases tend to be higher during El Ninos and lower during La Ninas. This may be because the warmer ocean during El Nino events tends to drive more CO2 out of the ocean and vice versa during La Ninas. Dr. Spencer's graph would have been more readable if he has put something like a 5 year average line on it rather than just a linear line. I guess you see what you want to see and I see what I want to see.
Which begs the question - maybe natural variability produces more noise than any proposed human effect :)
No, noise by definition averages out to zero over the long run. There is no trend in noise. In global temperatures it takes time (probably 20 years or more) for the warming signal to rise above the level of noise.
The Keeling Curve (KC) is not a perfectly smooth curve but has slight variations that correspond quite well with the variations in CO2 emissions. For instance there is a slight flattening in the KC in the late 1970s when CO2 emissions dropped from around 20 GT to around 18.5 GT for a year or two. Same thing in the early 1990s when CO2 emissions flattened out a bit and so did the KC.
As far as temperature goes there is natural variability and some human factors that produce noise in the temperature record that is much greater than the year to year increase in forcing. For instance the drop in temperatures following WW II correspond well with the increase in industrialization and human emissions of aerosols (primarily SO2) that went along with it. That drop went away with the pollution controls that were implemented in the 1970s that reduced those aerosol emissions. If you apply climatological criteria to the temperature curve smoothing it with a 30 year running average to eliminate the noise it fits quite well with the increase in CO2 emissions and KC especially since the 1970s after aerosol emissions were controlled.
The trick is, human contributions are dynamic - they change unpredictably all the time. It's surprising to see carbon *sinks* track that essentially in real time.
Are you kidding me? Human emissions of CO2 do not change unpredictably all the time. In fact they have been consistently rising for the past 150+ years. Check out the curve on this web page. Yes there are a few small drops in emissions. The biggest one appears to have happened during the 1970s energy crisis and another small one around 2007 during the great recession but other than that it shows continually rising emissions. And that curve matches the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as well when you consider that only about 45% of it remains in the atmosphere.
Carbon Dioxide vs Volcanoes.
Yes, I could have phrased that better, how about a continuous dynamic exchange of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere?
On what basis do you think the various carbon sinks are acting in an inconsistent way? I've never seen any evidence of that. The documented increase of carbon in the various carbon sinks matches well with the human contribution of carbon to the cycle. It sounds like you're just hoping for something magical to happen. As I said before there is a dynamic balance of carbon between the various sinks. If you change amount of carbon in one the others will adjust to rebalance the carbon cycle.
A more realistic take on your thought experiment. Humans emit enough CO2 to raise the current atmospheric level by 7 ppm this year. 3 ppm remains in the atmosphere, 3 ppm are absorbed into the ocean and the other 1 ppm goes into the biosphere and soil. The total carbon in the short term carbon cycle is increased by over 30 gigatonnes.
Yes, there is a constant dynamic exchange of CO2 between the ocean and the atmosphere but the net exchange is increasing CO2 absorbed in the ocean. Once atmospheric levels of CO2 start falling the net exchange will be more CO2 coming out of the ocean than going in.
Let's just simplify this. Human use of fossil fuels is well documented and it's relatively simple to calculate how much CO2 is released by our use of them. Production of cement and other human activities that release CO2 are also well documented. The human emissions of CO2 are easily large enough to account for the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and the acidification of the oceans. It's up to you to provide evidence that there is some natural factor that overrides that.
CO2 is not the only thermostat but it is one of the major ones.
As far as the oceans instantly responding to CO2 they are on average over 12,000 feet deep and it takes thousands of years for them to fully respond. The surface response may be relatively quick but it takes time for those changes to propagate through the whole ocean.
The oceans warming makes them less soluble to CO2 but they are still absorbing it because the partial pressure in the atmosphere is high enough to continue to drive CO2 in the oceans. Once the level of CO2 in the atmosphere stops rising the oceans will start to release it.
Regarding your thought experiment it mostly just confused me. But CO2 is not the only factor in plant growth and probably not the major factor until others like water, soil nutrients and climate are satisfied.
Neither is the CO2 emitted by volcanoes, or any natural oxidation of of solid carbon sources :)
Both of those sources are dwarfed by human emissions. Volcanic emissions are about 1% of human emissions. I'm not clear on what you mean by natural oxidation of solid carbon sources but if you're talking about things like wildfires and burning coal seams there is some of that but it's still small compared to human sources.
Imagine for a second, that humans all disappear tomorrow and all anthropogenic CO2 emissions stop. Would you expect that the increasing sinks we've observed during the past 40 years would *stop* sinking CO2, or would we suddenly see a massive drop in CO2 as these recently found sinks eat up all the CO2 in the atmosphere that they've been expecting us to pump in there?
Initially there would be a bit of drop in atmospheric CO2 because the oceans haven't reached full equilibrium yet. But it would take thousands of years for CO2 levels to drop back to preindustrial levels of 280 ppm. Once the levels in the atmosphere start to drop the oceans would start releasing CO2 keeping the level from dropping as fast as they might otherwise. The vapor pressure equilibrium of a gas in a liquid is governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation.
You can call it neutralization if you want. It's just arguing semantics. You know what I mean and I know what you mean.
So are you asserting that the only way we can see rising CO2 but falling temperatures is because of natural milankovitch cycles?
No but to ignore them when they are relevant is disingenuous. You can also get falling temperatures by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere.
The oceans don't instantly cool (or warm). They don't instantly adjust to changes in CO2. I think you're reading more into the graphs than is warranted. You're kind of arguing like a lawyer rather than a scientist.
The supposed 800 year lag between CO2 and temperature has been reduced recently to 100 or 200 years by further research.
That's not true - the carbon cycle includes carbon from all sources, including natural petroleum products.
Yes, technically the fossil fuels we dig up and burn are part of the total carbon cycle but they haven't been actively in the carbon cycle for (mostly) hundreds of millions of years.
That's not true either - there's a dynamic system that is constantly changing and adapting. The natural response to human emissions is a clear example of that.
I don't see how you can say it's not a rough balance when the proportion of carbon in each of the various carbon sinks remains about the same. The natural response to human emissions is global warming and ocean acidification (yes, I understand the pH of the oceans is basic but acidification just means the pH is dropping).
A single black swan disproves the "all swans are white" theory :) I don't need to find your falsification criteria everywhere, I just need to find it once :)
And you totally ignored the part about Milankovitch cycles. I don't deny that there are cases where CO2 rose a bit while temperatures fell but the reasons mostly don't apply to the situation today.
You have a lot of glib hand wavey answers don't you? Maybe you'll figure it out eventually.
Yea, you might want to read up on the carbon cycle. As we burn fossil fuels and produce carbon dioxide we increase the total carbon in the carbon cycle. Some of it remains in the atmosphere, some of it is absorbed in the oceans, some of it is absorbed by the biosphere. There is a rough balance between those things. That doesn't mean adding more carbon to the cycle is a good idea. The CO2 in the atmosphere causes global warming and in the ocean it leads to acidification (which could end up being a bigger problem than GW), both at rates much higher than ever seen in natural change. The natural systems that we humans are utterly dependent on will be strained by these changes maybe to the point of causing our global civilization to collapse. At best it will be expensive to adapt to the changes.
There may be a few places like that in those graphs but more often increase CO2 accompanies increased temperatures. On the scale of the graphs the instances of CO2 increasing and temperatures dropping were long enough that the effect of changes in Milankovitch cycles were significant which is not the case when you're talking about a few centuries as is happening now. I'll stand by my statement.
I don't have to explain any increase - the burden of proof is on the affirmative :)
As for 30+ years of negative temperature trend in the face of increasing CO2, we've already seen this in the historical ice core record.
Making the ad hoc special pleading about confounding natural factors (like volcanic eruptions), only makes it more evident that our belief that modern human activity has had a significant effect on CO2 levels is likely misguided :)
Huh? If the yearly human emissions of CO2 are more than twice the year to year increase in atmospheric CO2 levels how can that not be significant in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Kindly give me a reference for having seen negative temperature trends in the face of increasing CO2 from the ice cores. I've never seen anything like that.
And I'm not saying that volcanic eruptions have any significant effect on CO2 levels because they don't. What a series of large volcanic eruptions would do is cause some cooling because of the sulfate aerosols they inject into the stratosphere.
His rocket is steam powered so he probably doesn't need a license for explosives but maybe he needs a license for his boiler.
This Wikipedia article on it contains some more information and a couple of satellite photos.
2012 Kermandec Islands eruption
The raw data is available. You're just too lazy to seek it out.
I didn't watch the video, but NASA's own published data on sea level seems to agree with the previous assertion. Take a look yourself. That line looks more or less linear to me since the mid 1800's.
I looked at that page and it appears that there was a substantial increase in the rate of sea level rise starting around 1930.
The best estimate is that the increase in temperature since the 1950s is more than 100% caused by human emissions. All known natural climate influences point toward a slight cooling trend.
As far as what to expect in the future it's difficult to pin down since the climate is changing so fast there is no known analog to it in the past to help guide us in what to expect.
I'd like to see you try and explain the increase in observed CO2 levels in the atmosphere without including human emissions which are more than twice the year to year increase in CO2 levels.
And regarding falsifiability a long term (30 years or more) negative temperature trend in the face of increasing CO2 would probably be enough as long as there weren't confounding factors like a bunch of major volcanic eruptions.
Mount Pinatubo emitted about 40 megatonnes of CO2 during its major eruption in 1991. That same year human emissions were about 20 gigatonnes so about 500 times as much as Pinatubo. Pinatubo also pumped a lot of SO2 and other aerosols into the stratosphere which caused a noticeable drop in temperatures for a couple of years. Climate models showed the same response as the real world in that respect. So Pinatubo was just a tiny burp compared to humane pollution.
The only reason there is as much water vapor in the atmosphere as there is is that there is CO2 to support it. Water vapor is dependent on temperature and without the warming of CO2 water vapor levels would also be reduced. It's simple physics.
If you've done that environmental science work then you should be skilled enough to dig into the literature and discover the answers to your questions. Are you just too lazy to do that? I would suggest you take a look at the GISTEMP. It includes links to papers that talk about the error, spatial coverage, etc.
As far as being accurate to 0.005 degrees F it's not necessary for the individual measurements to be that precise. When you combine a lot of measurements into and average it's reasonable to express it to a higher degree of precision than the individual measurements. The clearest example of that I know of is baseball batting averages. The individual measurements are integers, either a hit (1) or an out (0), yet you commonly see batting averages expressed to 3 decimal places. So well into the season if you get a hit your batting average may rise by 0.002. By the same token in temperature averages subtle changes will appear in the average temperature when they're expressed to more decimal places.
The largest factor in our solar system is almost never considered in their models -- the sun -- and therefore they are utterly pointless.
Nope, the sun is included in every single climate model. They wouldn't work without it. It's just that observations of the sun which have been quite good for over a century and continuous from satellites since 1979 don't show enough variation to account for the warming. In fact the sun's emissions have been on the low end of it's variation range since the middle 2000s yet there has been no cooling because of it.
What appears to be happening is the extreme warming in the Arctic is reducing the temperature difference with the more temperate latitudes which results in a weaker jet stream that becomes wavier rather than being a tight circle around the high Arctic. So the jet stream is looping up the Pacific off the west coast then turning back south over Alaska and shooting down the east side of the Rockies. That draws Arctic air down into the deep south accounting for the cold temperatures there. That is becoming more common than it used to be due to a weaker, wavier jet stream due to the warming in the Arctic. Meanwhile it's been quite warm and dry here on the west coast of North America.
It might cost something to get it set up but once they get it going how much would it cost? I think maybe 5% of what they collect. They could take that out of what they collect as overhead and they still come out ahead.
I tell you, if I were an illegal alien the last thing I'd want to do is potentially call attention to myself by voting when I wasn't eligible to do so.