If your best source is Wikipedia, you should re-evaluate where your get your information. Try Google Scholar for a start. Libertarians may have a good take on liberty, but, sadly, many libertarian-leaning organisations have shown a disdain for science that does not jibe with their politics. I would like to be free of gravity, sometimes, or of the relationship between calories in and body weight. But no matter how much I like freedom, we ignore physical reality at our (or, in some cases, our children's) peril.
EFF might help. But this is more in line with the Software Freedom Law Center. Defending FOSS developers against unjustified patent claims is part of their mission.
Why the natural logarithm? Do we have a hypothesis to explain why the overall forcing effect of CO2 follows the natural logarithm of atmospheric concentration? Why a linear combination with volcanic sulfate? [...]
In the absence of sound theoretical answers to these questions, these are interesting but not compelling plots. The IPCC4 report (for example) goes into far more detail about our theoretical understanding of climate forcing from different components, and how projections are built up from this understanding that apply correctly in retrospect, leading to a more compelling argument for climate change.
The fact that CO2 has a logarithmic relation to radiative forcing has been well understood since Svante Arrhenius in the late 19th century, and is also reported in the IPCC WG1 report. The base of the logarithm is irrelevant (as long as its >1), as that only translates into a constant scaling factor.
OK, so just stick with the "it's too expensive" rebuttal.
What do you do about global warming if it's too expensive to 'fix'? Honest question. No, I'm not saying "just ignore it", I'm saying: come up with a real goddamn solution, or at least a path which is tenable without punishing first adopters or shoving government totalitarian enforcement down peoples' throats. (No, it isn't worth living or saving the planet if we all live as eco-slaves.)
I don't think that it's too expensive to do anything. Significant expense is coming down anyways - in the form of direct effects of climate change, of increasing fossil fuel prices, and of social unrest. We can opt to handle the expense in a controlled, gradual manner, or we can wait until the midwestern corn belt turns into a dust bowl again, New Orleans vanishes behind a massive sea wall, and refugees from Bangladesh destabilise India. A simple way of changing to a less carbon-intensive economy is to introduce a gradually and reliably increasing tax on carbon emission - e.g. collected internally for fossil fuel at the point of production or importation, and at the border for products coming from states that do not have a similar policy. This can be done in a revenue-neutral way, by lowering existing taxes, or by distributing the income to the population similar to e.g. Alberta's so-called Prosperity Bonus. Even if you follow the Stern Review, the suggested tax rate of US$ 30 per ton of carbon amounts to less than 10 cent per gallon - noticeable, but hardly debilitating.
What do you mean "deny climate change"? People don't general deny it; people deny the attribution.
Actually, the progression is "there is no warming", "there is some warming, but it's natural", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, but it's good", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, it's bad, but there is nothing we can do", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, it's bad, but it's to expensive to do something", and then back to "there was some warming, but it has stopped". Different deniers are not always in sync - some cling to "there is no warming" when others have already reached the "its to expensive" stage.
Bombs are still exploding in Germany, kills about ten people every year.
While old bombs are still found daily in Germany, very few of them explode, even fewer explode under uncontrolled conditions, and there is about one incident per decade where humans are hurt - mostly members of the bomb disposal squad.
Why even have a central core at all? A distributed power system (hundreds of smaller reactors throughout the structure instead of one big reactor at the core) would completely eliminate that vulnerability and improve power uptime through sheer redundancy. An attacking force would have to destroy the Death Star piece by piece instead of blowing up the main core all at once.
Obviously, with the power requirement to blow up Alderaan, you need a power density where any one catastrophic reactor failure will blow up the whole thing - or at least reach far enough to cause a chain reaction. So you'd rather put all your risk into a single, well-defended place. Well, in theory. Then the contractors come in.
http://xkcd.com/605/
This morning at 8AM, the temperature was 54 degrees F. The temperature at 3PM is 75 degrees F. Scientists predict that by next week, the Earth's surface will turn to magma.
In Germany, when you are driving a car, you are supposed to be . . . well, driving. And not texting, adjusting your make-up, fixing paper jams or spilling your hot coffee on yourself so that you can sue McDonald's.
Having driven both in Germany and in the US for quite extended distances, there often is a significant difference. Germany has a much higher population density, and that translates to a much higher traffic density. Moreover, the fact that there are different speed limits for different classes of vehicles (80km/h for trucks and most trailers, 100km/h for many buses and some trailers, unlimited or 120km/h for normal cars) leads to frequent lane changes and other manoeuvring. On the US50, I can just put a brick on the accelerometer, tie the wheel, and go to sleep (or email) for half an hour. Driving on the German Autobahn is often (though not always) more like driving in, say, inner-city Boston. If you are not reasonably alert, there is a high chance of an accident.
/Me wonders where this guy parks his car - seems like a setup like that is just screaming: "Hey car thief! Please break my window & grab laptop + other office gear!".:-)
We don't have crime in Germany. It went out of style 35 years ago as old-fashioned.
While I would phrase this a bit more conservatively, I agree with the core reasoning. I bought my MacBook Pro because it has among the best hardware combo one can get in a notebook (and that includes keyboard, screen, touchpad, and form factor), and because, under all the glitter, it's a UNIX box. If they ever stop being a good UNIX box, I'll be back to Linux in a heartbeat. I run it on desktop and serves, anyways.
And I'm fairly sure I'm not alone with this sentiment. At the conferences I go to, people started buying Macs when MacOS-X came out. Now there are about 80% Macs, 18% Linux (on everything from ThinkPads to cheap netbooks), and 2% Windows (and those only buy the people who work for Microsoft Research). Admittedly, this is not a large field, but academics are an influential group in general.
CERN willfully discards 90% of it's data. But if you have High Speed Internet (and most Americans do, unless CERN has insane bandwidth requirement that I don't know about) , you can get access to the other 10 percent.
Actually, CERN has insane bandwidth requirements that required significant new research into distributed computer systems to realise. For the LHC, they created the LHC Grid, with the 11 tier 1 institutions being connected to CERN via dedicated 10 GBit/s links (and they receive only part of the data each).
The EuroStar takes 2:16 from (central) London to (central) Paris. It's unlikely that you can beat that on any aircraft, if you take times to and from the airport, check-in and check-out times, and waiting time into account. The Eurostar is not only international, but also leaves the Schengen area, which complicates travel a bit. But for national trains, I just go to the station with 5 minutes to spare and walk onto a train with an open ticket (although some discount options require the use of fixed connections).
A polarized window will necessarily reflect at least half of incident light (unless that light happens to be polarized at right angles to the laser light, which is extremely implausible). You really don't want to loose half of the light in the cockpit. And there is no particular reason to believe the laser light would be polarized in any particular plane, since the user can simply turn the laser around its axis. Also, of course, this would be a major change to existing airframes, and hence very expensive to implement. Of course, expensive + does not work looks like a perfect match for the TSA....
Presumably it will last a long time, if they make sure to tightly regulate any tapping of industrial scale quantities,
ensure that the amount of water drawn out is less than the local replenishment rate, and
ensure that players are treated fairly, no one entity is allowed to hog the resource, and any entity that does
tap the resource pays a quantity-dependant price for doing so, to discourage waste.
There's no inherent reason that industrial-scale drilling has to be allowed to exhaust the supply
Because this works so well for aquifers in modern, developed, industrial countries where the aquifer is fully within the borders of the only country using it? See e.g. the Ogallala Aquifer.
Do you suppose wealthy (elderly) Canadians in need of an organ transplant resign themselves to age-based rationing and just die quietly... Or pull a Steve Jobs and fly to Tennessee for a no-fuss, no-muss, no-waiting-list liver?
[...]
You really aughtn't act so defensive about this - As I said, I do think you have the better public health care system, overall. At the upper end, though, of-the-wealthy, by-the-wealthy, and for-the-wealthy, sorry, the US has that market cornered. And I don't say that as a positive!
This deserves some elaboration. Jobs is a good example of a failure of the system. That new liver has given him maybe another two years (and maybe he'd have lived much of that on his own liver, too). That's good for Jobs. But transplant organs are a limited resource. That same liver might have given someone with a better overal prognosis 20 years, or 40.
When the government is the sole insurer, however, there is no check on what is deemed a threat to health. Additionally, since there is generally no "opt-out" option provided (ie, subscription to the national insurance is mandatory), these conditions aren't simply limits to insurability, but carry the coercive force of law. The number one argument against public insurance is that it enables "personal health" to become the new "terrorism" in invading people's lives.
Exactly that has happend in all the developed European countries with national health care systems. Smoking is outlawed, as are strong spirits. Wine is available in small doses from iris scanning dispensers to avoid misuse. Everybody is assigned to a summer fitness camp, where they march in unison at the optimal 130 bpm heart rate, eating nothing but brocoli and olive oil until their BMI is 21.2. TVs are only allowed in exercise rooms and show mandatory aerobic programs 4 times a day. Everybody wears healthy and stylish uniforms, and central heating is controlled from the European central heating authority to ensure that the average temperature is 21 degrees centigrade in daytime and 17 degrees at night. And if your estimated treatment cost is higher than your remaining life income expectation, you are painlessly terminated as a drain on the community. Right.
Outliers in both directions, but in the present case, not to the same extent.
...
One half of one percent of women go thru a period of anorexia. Of these only 5 – 10% die of their disorder within 10 years. Yet 35.7% of Americans suffer from obesity. Medical costs for obesity on average were $1,429 higher per person per year.
So the outliers aren't significant on the skinny side, but they are devastating on the fat side.
There are several fallacies in your argument. First, your source does not say "go through a period", it says "one in 200 American women suffers from anorexia", i.e 0.5% is the current risk, not the lifetime riks of ever having an episode of anorexia. Of those, 20% will eventually die of complications of their eating disorder. That's 1.4 million people. How is that "not sognificant"?
Going with a statistical life expectancy of ~70 years, we are talking about 20000 death per year. Compare this to 32000 traffic victims and 14000 murder victims a year. Consider how much the US spends on road safety and the criminal justice system, and tell me that it's not worth to try to tackle this problem.
The fact that there are worse problems in not a reason to ignore this one. As a society with limited resources, cost/benefit expectation should be a guide to our actions.
Loss of liberty, of freedom, the history of suffering at the hands of dictators throughout history is nothing to them.
Where does your liberty to put CO2 into my atmosphere come from? The naive libertarian solutions are not working for shared resources that are extremely hard to make into private property - like the oceans or the atmosphere. In fact, they already break generational fairness for simple things like real estate - shouldn't newborns all inherit an equal part of the planet? If not, why not?
The rational way to handle the use (and overuse) of shared resources is to internalize the externalities, i.e. to make users pay for all costs associated with their use, including costs that are extremely distributed. Cap-and-trade is one attempt at that - not a very good one, though. A simple carbon emission tax would be much better. It could even be made revenue-neutral by lowering other taxes or by distributing it to the people.
It does so now. Indeed, Gotland now has a vineyard. That said, wine is a lousy climate proxy either way Cultural and economic influences are a lot more important. In the middle ages it was mostly produced as a necessity for liturgical use during the last supper, and today its produced as a tourist attraction.
I read the rebuttal letter, it was printed in Science magazine.[...] I am a little confused as to why the letter was such a poor rebuttal (I believe in climate change, personally).
It wasn't a rebuttal, it was an independent letter published ~18 months ago. The probably reason why there is little science in the letter is because actual science, as opposed to pseudo-science, is complicated. It's a favorite tactic of anti-science debaters to throw out large numbers of wrong claims that take some time to properly refute. So when time or patience run out, the audience is left with the impression of doubt and open questions. And since you are always playing to different crowds, there is no need to take out refuted arguments - just re-run the whole show. Even a very much compacted version of the science, on the other hand, requires not a short editorial, but a 104 page report.
If you look at current global CO2 levels, the variation is between 380 and, oh, about 390 right now.
The US seems to stay way below this most of the time.
Soo, I dunno. Looks to me lik "net absorber" but obviously interpreting a graph is a pain, esp when things are going steadily up due to overall worldwide production.
Some sort of numbers would be nice, compared against the smoothed average.
Got a data table somewhere?
It looks like the data has been released here, but doing the reduction will be a pain in the ass.
If you look at your graph carefully, then most of the world seems to be low in CO2. But there is this small note saying "XCO2 in the figure has a 2-3% negative bias". 2-3% of 390 ppm is around 10 ppm. Add this to the values you see in the colour-coding, and things change.
Well, supposedly the data comes from Japan's IBUKU satellite. The article lists the launch date, not the range of data analysis.
The person doing the lying is apparently:
Yasuhiro Sasano, Director of Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies
Read again what I wrote. The JAXA report is fine. It shows the CO2 flux for 4 different seasons, with 3 of them showing the US as a net emitter and one showing it as a net absorber. The O'Sullivan blog takes this one graph out of context, either intentionally or through ineptness, and claims it represents the overal flux. It does not.
Slashdot Mirror
[wikipedia.org][redstate.com][reason.com][mises.org]
If your best source is Wikipedia, you should re-evaluate where your get your information. Try Google Scholar for a start. Libertarians may have a good take on liberty, but, sadly, many libertarian-leaning organisations have shown a disdain for science that does not jibe with their politics. I would like to be free of gravity, sometimes, or of the relationship between calories in and body weight. But no matter how much I like freedom, we ignore physical reality at our (or, in some cases, our children's) peril.
EFF might help. But this is more in line with the Software Freedom Law Center. Defending FOSS developers against unjustified patent claims is part of their mission.
Why the natural logarithm? Do we have a hypothesis to explain why the overall forcing effect of CO2 follows the natural logarithm of atmospheric concentration? Why a linear combination with volcanic sulfate? [...]
In the absence of sound theoretical answers to these questions, these are interesting but not compelling plots. The IPCC4 report (for example) goes into far more detail about our theoretical understanding of climate forcing from different components, and how projections are built up from this understanding that apply correctly in retrospect, leading to a more compelling argument for climate change.
The fact that CO2 has a logarithmic relation to radiative forcing has been well understood since Svante Arrhenius in the late 19th century, and is also reported in the IPCC WG1 report. The base of the logarithm is irrelevant (as long as its >1), as that only translates into a constant scaling factor.
OK, so just stick with the "it's too expensive" rebuttal.
What do you do about global warming if it's too expensive to 'fix'? Honest question. No, I'm not saying "just ignore it", I'm saying: come up with a real goddamn solution, or at least a path which is tenable without punishing first adopters or shoving government totalitarian enforcement down peoples' throats. (No, it isn't worth living or saving the planet if we all live as eco-slaves.)
I don't think that it's too expensive to do anything. Significant expense is coming down anyways - in the form of direct effects of climate change, of increasing fossil fuel prices, and of social unrest. We can opt to handle the expense in a controlled, gradual manner, or we can wait until the midwestern corn belt turns into a dust bowl again, New Orleans vanishes behind a massive sea wall, and refugees from Bangladesh destabilise India. A simple way of changing to a less carbon-intensive economy is to introduce a gradually and reliably increasing tax on carbon emission - e.g. collected internally for fossil fuel at the point of production or importation, and at the border for products coming from states that do not have a similar policy. This can be done in a revenue-neutral way, by lowering existing taxes, or by distributing the income to the population similar to e.g. Alberta's so-called Prosperity Bonus. Even if you follow the Stern Review, the suggested tax rate of US$ 30 per ton of carbon amounts to less than 10 cent per gallon - noticeable, but hardly debilitating.
What do you mean "deny climate change"? People don't general deny it; people deny the attribution.
Actually, the progression is "there is no warming", "there is some warming, but it's natural", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, but it's good", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, it's bad, but there is nothing we can do", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, it's bad, but it's to expensive to do something", and then back to "there was some warming, but it has stopped". Different deniers are not always in sync - some cling to "there is no warming" when others have already reached the "its to expensive" stage.
Bombs are still exploding in Germany, kills about ten people every year.
While old bombs are still found daily in Germany, very few of them explode, even fewer explode under uncontrolled conditions, and there is about one incident per decade where humans are hurt - mostly members of the bomb disposal squad.
Why even have a central core at all? A distributed power system (hundreds of smaller reactors throughout the structure instead of one big reactor at the core) would completely eliminate that vulnerability and improve power uptime through sheer redundancy. An attacking force would have to destroy the Death Star piece by piece instead of blowing up the main core all at once.
Obviously, with the power requirement to blow up Alderaan, you need a power density where any one catastrophic reactor failure will blow up the whole thing - or at least reach far enough to cause a chain reaction. So you'd rather put all your risk into a single, well-defended place. Well, in theory. Then the contractors come in.
http://xkcd.com/605/ This morning at 8AM, the temperature was 54 degrees F. The temperature at 3PM is 75 degrees F. Scientists predict that by next week, the Earth's surface will turn to magma.
Actually, http://xkcd.com/164/.
In Germany, when you are driving a car, you are supposed to be . . . well, driving. And not texting, adjusting your make-up, fixing paper jams or spilling your hot coffee on yourself so that you can sue McDonald's.
Having driven both in Germany and in the US for quite extended distances, there often is a significant difference. Germany has a much higher population density, and that translates to a much higher traffic density. Moreover, the fact that there are different speed limits for different classes of vehicles (80km/h for trucks and most trailers, 100km/h for many buses and some trailers, unlimited or 120km/h for normal cars) leads to frequent lane changes and other manoeuvring. On the US50, I can just put a brick on the accelerometer, tie the wheel, and go to sleep (or email) for half an hour. Driving on the German Autobahn is often (though not always) more like driving in, say, inner-city Boston. If you are not reasonably alert, there is a high chance of an accident.
We don't have crime in Germany. It went out of style 35 years ago as old-fashioned.
And I'm fairly sure I'm not alone with this sentiment. At the conferences I go to, people started buying Macs when MacOS-X came out. Now there are about 80% Macs, 18% Linux (on everything from ThinkPads to cheap netbooks), and 2% Windows (and those only buy the people who work for Microsoft Research). Admittedly, this is not a large field, but academics are an influential group in general.
CERN willfully discards 90% of it's data. But if you have High Speed Internet (and most Americans do, unless CERN has insane bandwidth requirement that I don't know about) , you can get access to the other 10 percent.
Actually, CERN has insane bandwidth requirements that required significant new research into distributed computer systems to realise. For the LHC, they created the LHC Grid, with the 11 tier 1 institutions being connected to CERN via dedicated 10 GBit/s links (and they receive only part of the data each).
The EuroStar takes 2:16 from (central) London to (central) Paris. It's unlikely that you can beat that on any aircraft, if you take times to and from the airport, check-in and check-out times, and waiting time into account. The Eurostar is not only international, but also leaves the Schengen area, which complicates travel a bit. But for national trains, I just go to the station with 5 minutes to spare and walk onto a train with an open ticket (although some discount options require the use of fixed connections).
A polarized window will necessarily reflect at least half of incident light (unless that light happens to be polarized at right angles to the laser light, which is extremely implausible). You really don't want to loose half of the light in the cockpit. And there is no particular reason to believe the laser light would be polarized in any particular plane, since the user can simply turn the laser around its axis. Also, of course, this would be a major change to existing airframes, and hence very expensive to implement. Of course, expensive + does not work looks like a perfect match for the TSA....
What's next? They're gonna steal fox news stories?
Come on! Even a senile pygmy macaque can tell that Fox is all satire.
I'm posting this on an iPad for god's sake.
And of course the iPad is running iOS and apps build with XCode wich uses gcc as the compiler backend. No GNU, no iPad.
Presumably it will last a long time, if they make sure to tightly regulate any tapping of industrial scale quantities, ensure that the amount of water drawn out is less than the local replenishment rate, and ensure that players are treated fairly, no one entity is allowed to hog the resource, and any entity that does tap the resource pays a quantity-dependant price for doing so, to discourage waste.
There's no inherent reason that industrial-scale drilling has to be allowed to exhaust the supply
Because this works so well for aquifers in modern, developed, industrial countries where the aquifer is fully within the borders of the only country using it? See e.g. the Ogallala Aquifer.
Do you suppose wealthy (elderly) Canadians in need of an organ transplant resign themselves to age-based rationing and just die quietly... Or pull a Steve Jobs and fly to Tennessee for a no-fuss, no-muss, no-waiting-list liver?
[...]
You really aughtn't act so defensive about this - As I said, I do think you have the better public health care system, overall. At the upper end, though, of-the-wealthy, by-the-wealthy, and for-the-wealthy, sorry, the US has that market cornered. And I don't say that as a positive!
This deserves some elaboration. Jobs is a good example of a failure of the system. That new liver has given him maybe another two years (and maybe he'd have lived much of that on his own liver, too). That's good for Jobs. But transplant organs are a limited resource. That same liver might have given someone with a better overal prognosis 20 years, or 40.
When the government is the sole insurer, however, there is no check on what is deemed a threat to health. Additionally, since there is generally no "opt-out" option provided (ie, subscription to the national insurance is mandatory), these conditions aren't simply limits to insurability, but carry the coercive force of law. The number one argument against public insurance is that it enables "personal health" to become the new "terrorism" in invading people's lives.
Exactly that has happend in all the developed European countries with national health care systems. Smoking is outlawed, as are strong spirits. Wine is available in small doses from iris scanning dispensers to avoid misuse. Everybody is assigned to a summer fitness camp, where they march in unison at the optimal 130 bpm heart rate, eating nothing but brocoli and olive oil until their BMI is 21.2. TVs are only allowed in exercise rooms and show mandatory aerobic programs 4 times a day. Everybody wears healthy and stylish uniforms, and central heating is controlled from the European central heating authority to ensure that the average temperature is 21 degrees centigrade in daytime and 17 degrees at night. And if your estimated treatment cost is higher than your remaining life income expectation, you are painlessly terminated as a drain on the community. Right.
Outliers in both directions, but in the present case, not to the same extent.
One half of one percent of women go thru a period of anorexia. Of these only 5 – 10% die of their disorder within 10 years. Yet 35.7% of Americans suffer from obesity. Medical costs for obesity on average were $1,429 higher per person per year.
So the outliers aren't significant on the skinny side, but they are devastating on the fat side.
There are several fallacies in your argument. First, your source does not say "go through a period", it says "one in 200 American women suffers from anorexia", i.e 0.5% is the current risk, not the lifetime riks of ever having an episode of anorexia. Of those, 20% will eventually die of complications of their eating disorder. That's 1.4 million people. How is that "not sognificant"?
Going with a statistical life expectancy of ~70 years, we are talking about 20000 death per year. Compare this to 32000 traffic victims and 14000 murder victims a year. Consider how much the US spends on road safety and the criminal justice system, and tell me that it's not worth to try to tackle this problem.
The fact that there are worse problems in not a reason to ignore this one. As a society with limited resources, cost/benefit expectation should be a guide to our actions.
Loss of liberty, of freedom, the history of suffering at the hands of dictators throughout history is nothing to them.
Where does your liberty to put CO2 into my atmosphere come from? The naive libertarian solutions are not working for shared resources that are extremely hard to make into private property - like the oceans or the atmosphere. In fact, they already break generational fairness for simple things like real estate - shouldn't newborns all inherit an equal part of the planet? If not, why not?
The rational way to handle the use (and overuse) of shared resources is to internalize the externalities, i.e. to make users pay for all costs associated with their use, including costs that are extremely distributed. Cap-and-trade is one attempt at that - not a very good one, though. A simple carbon emission tax would be much better. It could even be made revenue-neutral by lowering other taxes or by distributing it to the people.
Britain once produced wine.
It does so now. Indeed, Gotland now has a vineyard. That said, wine is a lousy climate proxy either way Cultural and economic influences are a lot more important. In the middle ages it was mostly produced as a necessity for liturgical use during the last supper, and today its produced as a tourist attraction.
I read the rebuttal letter, it was printed in Science magazine.[...] I am a little confused as to why the letter was such a poor rebuttal (I believe in climate change, personally).
It wasn't a rebuttal, it was an independent letter published ~18 months ago. The probably reason why there is little science in the letter is because actual science, as opposed to pseudo-science, is complicated. It's a favorite tactic of anti-science debaters to throw out large numbers of wrong claims that take some time to properly refute. So when time or patience run out, the audience is left with the impression of doubt and open questions. And since you are always playing to different crowds, there is no need to take out refuted arguments - just re-run the whole show. Even a very much compacted version of the science, on the other hand, requires not a short editorial, but a 104 page report.
So. I googled for IBUKI. Data on that is really sparse on the official website, but I found this: https://data.gosat.nies.go.jp/GosatBrowseImage/browseImage/XCO2_L3.gif
If you look at current global CO2 levels, the variation is between 380 and, oh, about 390 right now. The US seems to stay way below this most of the time.
Soo, I dunno. Looks to me lik "net absorber" but obviously interpreting a graph is a pain, esp when things are going steadily up due to overall worldwide production. Some sort of numbers would be nice, compared against the smoothed average. Got a data table somewhere?
It looks like the data has been released here, but doing the reduction will be a pain in the ass.
If you look at your graph carefully, then most of the world seems to be low in CO2. But there is this small note saying "XCO2 in the figure has a 2-3% negative bias". 2-3% of 390 ppm is around 10 ppm. Add this to the values you see in the colour-coding, and things change.
Well, supposedly the data comes from Japan's IBUKU satellite. The article lists the launch date, not the range of data analysis. The person doing the lying is apparently: Yasuhiro Sasano, Director of Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies
Read again what I wrote. The JAXA report is fine. It shows the CO2 flux for 4 different seasons, with 3 of them showing the US as a net emitter and one showing it as a net absorber. The O'Sullivan blog takes this one graph out of context, either intentionally or through ineptness, and claims it represents the overal flux. It does not.