It’s an Unsettling Climate for skeptical scientists like Murry Salby

UPDATED: The full text is now available at City Journal.
Rupert Darwall is the author of Age of Global Warming (and earning excellent reviews). Darwall has a gift for converting tricky scientific concepts into a story. This month in the City Journal, he beautifully summarizes and updates the story of Murry Salby. He’s interviewed Richard Lindzen and others, and discusses Salby’s work in the context of the way heretics are marginalized.

I helped Rupert with some of the background. It’s controversial science, a complex situation, with irrelevant baggage to boot. But that’s exactly the place where science communicators — or in the case of Rupert, excellent historians — are most keenly needed. The scientists, who are more the numbers-men are the ones who need their stories told, because they are the ones not so inclined to play the PR and networking games. Bureaucratized science attracts and rewards the network players instead, and so it has become that even academia favors the social-climber scientists and grant-players over the people who are more interested in data. (Like modern bureaucratized art, where the grants go to those who are good at getting grants, and the art looks more and more like fingerpainting.)

The real science comes with numbers not press releases — and the data-crunchers have so much more to offer. Where do they belong, and who looks after them? They, who really need a whole PR department, increasingly seem to end up without one, wandering in the  independent online science movement, where at least their ideas get a hearing.

I’ve copied some extracts of Darwall’s article below. I recommend reading it all if you can. At the moment that is only available through the print copy of the City Journal.

An Unsettling Climate

Setting the scene:

In April 2013, concluding a European tour to present his research, Salby arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for a flight back to Australia, where he was a professor of climate science at Macquarie University. He discovered, to his dismay, that the university had canceled the return leg of his nonrefundable ticket. With Salby stranded, Macquarie then undertook misconduct proceedings against him that swiftly culminated in his dismissal.

I wrote about this extraordinary incident in July last year and asked Did Macquarie University sabotage, exile, blackban, strand and abandon Murry Salby?

Rupert Darwall describes Salby’s distinguished history involving work at Georgia Tech, Princeton, Hebrew, and Stockholm Universities before coming to the University of Colorado. He talks of how Salby’s work on ozone validated the science behind the 1987 Montreal Protocol. When Salby wrote a graduate textbook, it was described as “unequalled in breadth, depth and lucidity,” by one reviewer. Later Salby started to examine man-made global warming but ‘what he found left him “absolutely surprised.” ‘

Salby’s recent work is so controversial because it questions the key IPCC assumption, that man-made CO2 emissions cause global levels of CO2 to rise. As I described it way back in 2011:

Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

Salby’s trip to Europe was to present and discuss exactly this point — is humankind to blame for the CO2 levels rising, or was it a warming ocean and soil moisture changes?

In Salby’s view, the evidence actually suggests that the causality underlying AGW should  be reversed. Rather than increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere triggering global  temperatures to rise, rising global temperatures come first—and account for the great majority of changes in net emissions of CO2, with changes in soil-moisture  conditions explaining most of the rest.

 His work is so fundamental, it could really pull the rug out from under the entire IPCC thesis:

Why is the IPCC so certain that the 5 percent human contribution is responsible for  annual increases in carbon dioxide levels? Without examining other possible hypotheses, the IPCC argues that the proportion of heavy to light carbon atoms in the atmosphere has “changed in a way that can be attributed to addition of fossil fuel  carbon”— with light carbon on the rise. Fossil fuels, of course, were formed from plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago; the IPCC reasons that, since plants tend to absorb more light carbon than heavy carbon, CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels reduce the share of heavy carbon in the atmosphere. But Salby points to much larger natural processes, such as emissions from decaying vegetation, that also reduce the proportion of heavy carbon. Temperature heavily influences the rate of microbial activity inherent in these natural processes, and Salby notes that the share of heavy carbon emissions falls whenever temperatures are warm. Once again, temperature appears more likely to be the cause, rather than the effect, of observed atmospheric changes.

Further, Salby presents satellite observations showing that the highest levels of CO2 are present not over industrialized regions but over relatively uninhabited and  nonindustrialized areas, such as the Amazon. And if human emissions were behind rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, he argues, then the change in CO2 each year should track the carbon dioxide released that year from burning fossil fuels— with natural emissions of CO2 being canceled out by reabsorption from land sinks and oceans.

But the change of CO2 each year doesn’t track the annual emission of CO2 from burning fossil fuels, as shown in Figure 1, which charts annual emissions of CO2, where an annual increase of one part per million is approximately equivalent to an annual growth rate of 0.25 percent.  While there was a 30 percent increase in CO2 fossil-fuel emissions from 1972 to 1993, there was no systematic increase in net annual CO2 emission— that is, natural plus human emissions, less reabsorption in carbon sinks.

In normal times, Salby’s work solves a lot of puzzles:

Were it not for its implications for AGW, Salby’s research on the carbon cycle might be a boon to the IPCC’s troubled effort to explain interannual variability of CO2 emissions. His work offers a coherent picture of changes in net emissions, where the changes closely track a combination of temperature and soil moisture— explaining both the low net  emissions of the early 1990s and their peak in 1998. Salby also contends that   temperature alone can largely account for the rise in atmospheric CO2 through the earlier part of the twentieth century, when soil-moisture data are inadequate. Net methane emissions track natural surface conditions even more closely.

Inconvenient papers are slowed and delayed:

One way they block off inquiry is to ensure that papers by dissenting climate scientists are not included in the peer-review literature—a problem that Lindzen and Bengtsson have encountered. Indeed, that is what happened to Salby. He submitted a paper on his initial findings to the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Finding no errors— one reviewer called it “absolutely amazing”—the journal required minor revision. Before Salby could return the revised paper for publication, the editor of a different journal, Remote Sensing, resigned for publishing a paper that departed from the IPCC view, penning an abject confession: “From a purely formal point of view, there were no errors with the review process. But, as the case presents itself now, the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate skeptic notions of the authors.” Shortly afterward, Salby received a letter rejecting his revised paper on the basis of a second reviewer’s claim—contradicted by the first reviewer—that his paper offered nothing new and that all of it had already been covered in the IPCC’s reports.

 The whole article in the City Journal is much longer — it’s truly an  in depth feature review that has taken months to put together. It’s an important article because it will reach a new audience far beyond the online blogosphere and it’s a story that needs to be told.

All my posts on Murry Salby

Age of Global Warming

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657 comments to It’s an Unsettling Climate for skeptical scientists like Murry Salby

  • #
    Colin Henderson

    Jo, the post says:

    Rupert Darwall “talks of how Salby’s work on ozone validated the science behind the 1987 Montreal Protocol.”

    Did you mean invalidated?

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    • #
      Vince Whirlwind

      Nope.
      It was validated, contrary to much of the crud you’ve absorbed from hanging around looney-tune websites run by uni-dropout ex-weathergirls and suchlike.

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  • #
    Andrew

    Shame the article appears to be Paywalled.

    Can anyone provide information on what Salby is doing now. For instance is his research likely to be published any time soon.

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    • #
      Craig Thomas

      It is interesting that despite giving his talk all those years ago, he *still* hasn’t found the time to publish anything.

      It’s almost as though all he has is talk…

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      • #
        James Bradley

        Well, I beg to differ Craig, obviously he has more than that, enough for the powers that be at Queensland Uni to want to hush it up.

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          Please join the dots for me – how exactly is the University of Queensland hushing up Salby’s “work” which as far as I know has never been presented anywhere for publication?

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          • #
            Scott

            Craig I know you have trouble reading because it has been presented for reading not least on this site which means if you serious about reading it or listening to it, you would have.

            So that just makes you lazy and or a troll.

            My evidence that you have trouble reading, well you provided that in your comment because it is in all its glory in the second last paragraph on this post.

            Indeed, that is what happened to Salby. He submitted a paper on his initial findings to the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Finding no errors— one reviewer called it “absolutely amazing”—the journal required minor revision. Before Salby could return the revised paper for publication, the editor of a different journal, Remote Sensing, resigned for publishing a paper that departed from the IPCC view, penning an abject confession: “From a purely formal point of view, there were no errors with the review process. But, as the case presents itself now, the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate skeptic notions of the authors.” Shortly afterward, Salby received a letter rejecting his revised paper on the basis of a second reviewer’s claim—contradicted by the first reviewer—that his paper offered nothing new and that all of it had already been covered in the IPCC’s reports.

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            • #
              Craig Thomas

              What has the University of Queensland got to do with the journal you mention?

              Where is this “a paper” you mention?

              What has your tangent about an unrelated Journal got to do with this “a paper” you mention?

              Why do you not reference this chunk of text for us?: Where is it from?

              You see: I am sceptical.

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              • #
                Scott

                As I mentioned Lazy

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              • #
                Craig Thomas

                No, not lazy. I have been presented with a series of assertions, including some kind of story about the University of Queensland doing something nefarious, and I simply don’t believe this is of any greater value than mere fishwives’ tales.

                What is the Uni of Queensland connection? Where is this “paper”?

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              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                Where is this “paper”?

                Dr. Salby writes textbooks on atmospheric physics, Craig.

                Here’s a blog post that has excerpts from his latest published work.

                http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-textbook-explains-why-man-made_21.html

                Salby, M., 1992: The Atmosphere. In Climate Systems Modeling, K. Trenberth Ed. Sponsored Jointly by UCAR and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Cambridge University Press, 53-115.

                Salby, M., 1996: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. International Geophysics Series, Academic Press, pp. 628. 2nd Printing (2005)

                Salby, M., 2002: Planetary Waves. in Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology, P. Crutzen Ed. Academic Press, 12, 357-371.

                Salby, M., 2003: Fundamental Forces and Governing Equations, Chapter 2, in Handbook of Weather, Water, and Climate: Dynamics, Cliimate, Physical Meteorology, Weather Systems, and Measurements, T. Potter and B. Colman, eds. (Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken NJ, 2003), 7-20.

                Salby, M., 2009: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. International Geophysics Series, Academic Press, 2nd Edition

                http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Atmosphere-Climate-Murry-Salby/dp/0521767180

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              • #
                Duster

                “Where is this paper?” And there you have the elegance of censorship through suppression of publication. You know the paper was not published so it becomes an “alleged” paper. You don’t have access to it, and you ask here? Obviously Salby has it. No competent author would let his personal copy be lost. You could simply ask him for a copy, but … you ask here instead. You probably also considered it unethical to read the first tranche of ClimateGate emails, especially since they discuss suppression of opposing views and contradictory papers directly with no innuendo. They discuss the actual tactics to be used to suppress papers, coerce editors and bias journals to their view.

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              • #
                Craig Thomas

                So, Salby waves some power-point slides at some people, (presentations that Judith Curry notes contain no data), fails to publish these ideas anywhere or otherwise communicate his data or methods, and *some* people – lacking in scepticism, clearly – just lap up the unsupported conclusions.

                Where is the data?
                Where are the methods?

                Answer: nowhere.

                Conclusion: Salby’s ideas are not even close to being checkable, let alone proven.

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              • #
                the Griss

                “some power-point slides ”

                The information on which, went WAY over your head. !

                You are proving yourself to have zero knowledge on anything but very basic propaganda.

                A low level TROLL, with nothing to offer anyone, anywhere.

                A grub, a mental amoeba.

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              • #

                > censorship through suppression of publication.

                There seems to be some divergence of opinion here. You’re insisting that Salby wrote a novel paper suitable for publication but it was suppressed. Meanwhile, Kenneth Richard insists that its all in a textbook from 2012, and therefore couldn’t possibly be suitable for publication as a paper. You really ought to try to agree a common story – perhaps you two should talk to each other and try to work it out.

                But your own story doesn’t work. If Salby had written a paper, but it was suppressed by the Evil Intergalactic Hegemon, then he might as well dump a preprint onto the wub where everyone could swoon over his brilliance, you lot could point to his irrefutable maths and refute the IPCC! It would be ace. But instead, Salby refuses to reveal this gem amongst texts. Why could that possibly be?

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              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                Connolley is unreasonably demanding that these “sceptics” present coherent thoughts.

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            • #
              the Griss

              Oh dear,

              When they have to call Vince in, you KNOW there barrel has a major leak in it. !!!

              They are having to reach way down below the bottom of the barrel to even find a worm.

              21

      • #
        Kenneth Richard

        “It is interesting that despite giving his talk all those years ago, he *still* hasn’t found the time to publish anything.”

        Below is the paper being referenced here. This is in addition to the textbooks he’s published on atmospheric physics. Would it have been too much to ask for you to actually take the time to look this up yourself? Why do you assume that Salby has never actually published anything?

        Salby, M., E. Titova, and L. Deschamps (2011),Rebound of Antarctic ozone, Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 38, Issue 9, 16 May 2011, L09702, doi:10.1029/2011GL047266.

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          Weirdly, this paper about the Ozone does not support his claim about human-emitted CO2 somwehow magically not contributing to increased CO2 levels.

          It’s almost as if….you’re grasping at straws….

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      • #
        cohenite

        The extremely rude Mr Thomas takes time out from his endeavours at Deltoid to peddle more tripe. After all poor Dr Salby can hardly be publishing when the AGW establishment is censoring him and trying to ruin his life.

        No doubt Mr Thomas can scurry back to his hole at Deltoid to spread the good news to his fellow Dictyoptera.

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          Weirdly, tripe by McKitrick & Mclean can get published, nutty kookery by Miskolkni can get published, insane gibberish about the Sun having an iron core gets published, but Murry Salby somehow can’t get his mathematically-mixed-up CO2 “paper” published – not even in low-grade journals such as “Energy & Environment” that delight in publishing nonsense?

          Another conspiracy.

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          • #
            the Griss

            Weirdly, all your posts are a mass of incontinence.

            How do you manage so much irrelevant, junk-loaded, [snip]

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            • #
              Craig Thomas

              Hmmmm.
              – doesn’t address the topic at hand
              – exclusively ad hominem attacks

              I’ll take that as an admission you concede my point, shall I?

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              • #
                the Griss

                EVERY one of your posts has been loaded with ad hom attacks, with ZERO SUBSTANCE.

                There is NOTHING to answer except your smutty opinion.

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          • #
            Kenneth Richard

            tripe by McKitrick & Mclean can get published

            Along with McKitrick, a scientist named McIntyre, not “Mclean,” co-authored several peer-reviewed papers (some of them below) in dismantling Mann’s hockey stick. You are apparently so misinformed with regard to this topic that you don’t even know the names of the participants.

            Their work was considered so robust, withstanding review by the National Academy of Sciences and Royal Statistical Society, that the IPCC made them expert reviewers for the 2007 and 2013 reports (McKitrick only for AR5). And the current shape of the IPCC’s 2,000-year reconstruction looks nothing like Mann’s (MWP and LIA have returned), indicating that the IPCC has rejected Mann’s “disappeared” Medieval Warm Period…

            (photo of the 2K reconstruction from chapter 5)

            http://i1264.photobucket.com/albums/jj484/rlcina71/MWPinAR5_zpsa8972fb5.jpg

            So who are you to declare that the following papers are all “tripe”?

            http://www.multi-science.co.uk/mcintyre-mckitrick.pdf

            The data set of proxies of past climate used in Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998, “MBH98” hereafter) for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects. We detail these errors and defects. We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a Northern Hemisphere average temperature index for the 1400-1980 period, using corrected and updated source data. The particular “hockey stick” shape derived in the MBH98 proxy construction – a temperature index that decreases slightly between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then increases dramatically up to 1980 — is primarily an artifact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.

            http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl-2005.pdf
            The “hockey stick” shaped temperature reconstruction of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) has been widely applied. However it has not been previously noted in print that, prior to their principal components (PCs) analysis on tree ring networks, they carried out an unusual data transformation which strongly affects the resulting PCs. Their method, when tested on persistent red noise, nearly always produces a hockey stick shaped first principal component (PC1) and overstates the first eigenvalue. In the controversial 15th century period, the MBH98 method effectively selects only one species (bristlecone pine) into the critical North American PC1, making it implausible to describe it as the “dominant pattern of variance”. Through Monte Carlo analysis, we show that MBH98 benchmarks for significance of the Reduction of Error (RE) statistic are substantially under-stated and, using a range of cross-validation statistics, we show that the MBH98 15th century reconstruction lacks statistical significance.

            http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-ee-2005.pdf

            http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-huybersreply.pdf

            http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2005/09/mcintyre.vz.reply.pdf

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          • #
            the Griss

            “tripe by McKitrick & Mclean can get published”

            AGAIN with the IGNORANCE.. roflmao !!!

            You are doing well at displaying your ineptitude, bozo.

            Clown circus is your obvious aim in life.

            So far you have been funny for about 1 second. !

            But I’m sure you will keep practicing.

            41

          • #
            cohenite

            Speaking of publishing, where have you been published Mr Thomas?

            23

    • #
      The Backslider

      Oh lookee…. it’s Michael the Surrealist’s long lost brother……

      91

      • #
        Craig Thomas

        Wow, the pure nuggets of understanding and the incisive intellect Backslider brings to the party are truly outstanding.

        939

        • #
          The Backslider

          You don’t know yet what you are in for sonny.

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          • #
            Craig Thomas

            What am I in for? More nuggets?

            527

            • #
              The Backslider

              You betcha… just you wait sonny.

              52

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                I can’t wait. Give us more of your nuggets now!

                626

              • #
                Bulldust

                Obvious troll is obvious… why are people feeding him?

                101

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Well, if you posted anything of substance here, people would stop thinking of you as the local clown-troll.

                67

              • #
                the Griss

                “Well, if you posted anything of substance here, people would stop thinking of you as the local clown-troll.”

                Stop talking to yourself Craig…

                Its one of your many signs of madness.

                YOU are the CLOWN,

                and YOU are the TROLL. !!!

                41

            • #
              Ian

              Why don’t you address the posts by Kenneth [email protected] and 2.1.2? Presumably because he has pointed out with references the papers that Salby has published and that Craig Thomas, destroys your entire argument.

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              • #
                Craig Thomas

                What papers? You’re clearly fantasising.

                Meanwhile, Salby’s silly ideas about human-emitted CO2 somehow not being added to the atmosphere are unsupported by any publishsed science.

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              • #
                the Griss

                “What papers? ”

                Denier.. !!!

                31

            • #
              Senex Bibax

              Salby’s thesis sounds like basic physics to me. The solubility of a gas in a liquid, such as carbon dioxide in water, increases as the temperature of the liquid decreases. As the liquid warms, some of the dissolved gas will be forced to leave the solution. As seawater warms, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For a simple demonstration, take two bottles of beer, one from the fridge and one at room temperature. Open and pour, and see which one fizzes more.

              Happy, Craig? If not, you can have the nuggets from my cat’s litter box.

              81

        • #
          cohenite

          You’ll keep us busy allocating you to various categories of Hexapoda Mr Thomas.

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  • #

    Skeptics always seem to give in on the point that global warming is happening and mankind is contributing, then they argue about “to what degree is man responsible” and is it even bad?

    I, like Salby think the whole thing is rubbish, that it’s the other way around.

    “Rather than increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere triggering global temperatures to rise, rising global temperatures come first—and account for the great majority of changes in net emissions of CO2,”

    This point is also made in this clip in the great global warming swindle.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&list=UUiZxUWAfOHK6vBcKrIm0pZg

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    • #

      Elmer, it’s still possible that natural forces could lift CO2 levels, and then the extra CO2 could amplify the warming. (No one seems to be able to find evidence of that happening, but it is possible.) Technically, CO2 could act as a minor positive feedback.

      Of course, that means wind farms and all — which were useless even under IPCC assumptions — are “double useless” if the ocean is causing the rise in CO2.

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      • #
        KinkyKeith

        Hi Jo

        “Technically” speaking, Man Made CO2 can have an input to the Earths atmospheric “heat” budget.

        The problem is that in reality this “input” is so small after the other items in the system like water vapor, Natural Origin CO2 and the like have their say that the human component is effectively zero.

        This is a very easily demonstrated quantitative effect and when coupled with the Asymptote Effect absolutely puts Human Origin CO2 in the shade as far as being a contributor to world temperatures is concerned.

        Any Human effect on world temperatures is irrelevant and this point should be made clearer so that it ceases to become a focus of debate.

        🙂

        KK

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    • #
      Unmentionable

      Well we do know rising CO2 is a powerful plant growth stimulant, and that luxuriant forests in particular transpire much moisture and strongly increase and maintain local humidity levels whilst enhancing cooling via fostering conditions suitable for much higher cloud formation, than if transpiration were being suppressed. All impossible to confidently quantify, of course, but clearly rising CO2 could lead to regional cooling, in such forested areas and also downwind of them, not to mention reduced biota stresses and enhanced soil repair and replenishment. Which will further accentuate a positive feedback of enhanced biota productivity over time. At the least it’s thus viable to posit that rising CO2 can amp cooling, in very desirable ways. (well, unless you’re the one who mows the lawn ‘n stuff)

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      • #
        Craig Thomas

        That’s great, and we know that increased CO2 caused by human activities are forcing CO2 uptake, therefore there is undeniably extra “greening” happening.

        The Earth’s radiative imbalance, however, remains, unaffected by any such local coolings, and the discussion about sensitivity has yet to be resolved.

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        • #
          The Backslider

          The Earth’s radiative imbalance, however, remains, unaffected by any such local coolings

          What “radiative imbalance” might that be. Please explain, in your own words.

          and the discussion about sensitivity has yet to be resolved.

          I beg to differ. The CAGW theory that CO2 “back radiation” creates a “forcing” of increased water vapor, thus accelerating warming, has been falsified by observation, ie. a fall rather than a rise in atmospheric water vapor.

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          • #
            Craig Thomas

            The radiative imbalance is the measured difference between incoming radiation and outgoing radiation from our planet. It might pay to cover these basic topics in your own time before joining the conversation, you might exude slightly more competence.

            Atmospheric water vapor has increased, not decreased. Not sure where you got that nutty idea from.

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            • #
              The Backslider

              The radiative imbalance is the measured difference between incoming radiation and outgoing radiation from our planet.

              Oh, and what is “the measured difference” and how does the word “imbalance” fit into the equation?

              Atmospheric water vapor has increased, not decreased. Not sure where you got that nutty idea from.

              Please learn to read: The NOAA.

              I’m pretty sure that you get your false information from SkS.

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              • #
                Craig Thomas

                When you say “the NOAA”, what you really mean is, “my imagination”.

                This is clearly the case, or you would provide a link to the relevant published science.

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              • #
                sophocles

                No, not your imagination, Craig, he means The NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, an office the US Federal Government’s Department of Commerce. They manage and maintain several significant and publically accessible climate databases. You could then do what some of us do: download the data and do your own statistical analyses. If you can. I recommend the exercise. Then you might just realise things really ain’t what they are claimed to be by some loud mouths.

                Don’t know how to do your own analyses? This little book introduces you, gently, to statistical numerical analysis methods. It won’t break your bank, it’s quite cheap, and you can download the world’s best analytical software which has the capacity to handle such large datasets. The book also teaches you how to drive it.

                With the book and the software, some reading, then you will be ready for some serious self-education.

                Then you might, just might, have something worthy to add to the discussions.

                If you can’t be bothered, then go away, you’re just noise.

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              • #
                The Backslider

                When you say “the NOAA”, what you really mean is, “my imagination”.

                This is clearly the case, or you would provide a link to the relevant published science.

                Read it and weep.

                Clearly atmospheric water vapor is not driven by CO2, otherwise it would have continued to rise. Without that, your CAGW theories fall flat on their face.

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              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Backslider, water vapour in the atmosphere has *increased*.

                Ask yourself this: “What is it about the link I have just posted that I have failed to understand?”.

                Additionally, ask yourself, “What did I read that I was insufficiently sceptical of, that gave me an impression that is the direct opposite of the truth?”

                58

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Sophocles, I know precisely who NOAA is, but they don’t say what Backslider is saying, which is why I know he didn’t get his misinformation from NOAA.

                57

              • #
                The Backslider

                Backslider, water vapour in the atmosphere has *increased*.

                Wow! Talk about denial:

                A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth’s surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. – NOAA

                Sorry sonny, but your “forcing” has done a runner….. So much for CAGW theory…..

                41

              • #
                the Griss

                Seems he can’t read, Backslider, and is totally unable to even get past the title.,

                It clearly states that “Since 2000, water vapor in the stratosphere decreased by about 10 percent.”

                21

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Lol.
                You guys are wrong.

                So, OK guys – take a step back.
                Think.
                What have you missed?

                Clue: NOAA are not saying that water vapour in the atmosphere has decreased. (As everybody knows, Satellites show it has increased).

                Now, once you come to the realisation of your error, ask yourselves – “I’m clearly not exactly a genius. What else do I believe that is completely wrong?”.

                You guys many well be well on the road to rationality. This is a very exciting moment.

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              • #
                the Griss

                ““I’m clearly not exactly a genius. What else do I believe that is completely wrong?”.”

                Talking to yourself again.

                PUT DOWN THE MIRROR, you vain, egotistical fool !!

                01

              • #
                The Backslider

                Craig Thomas:

                NOAA are not saying that water vapour in the atmosphere has decreased.


                NOAA:

                Since 2000, water vapor in the stratosphere decreased by about 10 percent.

                Ok, let’s see…. I think I missed the fact that you are in fact so deeply in denial that you are unable to comprehend a simple sentence.

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              • #
                Richard C (NZ)

                Craig #3.2.1.1.8

                >”Think. What have you missed? Clue: NOAA are not saying that water vapour in the atmosphere has decreased. (As everybody knows, Satellites show it has increased).”

                We haven’t “missed” anything Craig, and the “everybody” you refer to appears not to know much about column water vapour.

                As for #6.5.1.1.5 (where you make the same erroneous statement), Figure below: Variations in the total column water vapour in the atmosphere since July 1983 according to The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP).

                http://climate4you.com/images/TotalColumnWaterVapourDifferentAltitudesObservationsSince1983.gif

                No increase in either lower or upper troposphere column water vapour i.e. you…are…wrong…Craig.

                21

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Backslider – concentrate.
                You have just quoted two sentences.
                Both of them are true.
                The conclusion you have drawn from one of them is wrong.

                Think. Think. Think.

                76

              • #
                The Backslider

                The conclusion you have drawn from one of them is wrong.

                I do believe that Richard just showed you the insignificance of your ignorance.

                I don’t believe that I have seen you post even one link to research which purportedly supports your misguided beliefs….. you are the laziest troll I have ever seen.

                11

              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                Backpedalling, much? Water vapour in the atmosphere hasn’t decreased. You got that impression from reading a tricksy bit of writing over at WUWT. If you go back to that page and read it again, you will see that it shows that water vapour has actually increased, although it uses a lot of tricksy words to fool the gullible into believing the opposite.
                Go back and check.

                45

              • #
                The Backslider

                Oh lookee…. Vince baby comes in as the rearguard Troll.

                You go and look at the NOAA link I posted, then come back and tell me how to your deluded mind (as with Craig Thomas) it does not say that water vapor has decreased by 10%.

                Now sonny, 10% is a MASSIVE amount!

                11

            • #

              Craig

              .. the measured difference between incoming radiation and outgoing radiation from our planet

              No such thing. What is it with you people, just making things up, imagining them. Because you would like them to be so?

              True is that such an ‘imbalance’ is much very much needed to fit your beliefs and CAGW-faithers. It is necessary since it would be the source of all that ‘missing heat’ that is nowhere to be found either.

              Thus, many among you just invent that it is real, allegedly ‘measured’ by satellites …

              A sorry bunch you are …

              142

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Umm, I guess nobody told you about ERBE, AIRS, or CERES satellite projects, which have measured a decrease in OLR.

                Do carry on. It’s great that somebody not apprised of the facts feels so comfortable sharing his humorous alternative opinion.

                59

              • #
                The Backslider

                I guess nobody told you about ERBE, AIRS, or CERES satellite projects, which have measured a decrease in OLR

                I guess that nobody has told you that in fact they have measured OLR increasing by 2.5 watts/sqM in the 30
                years between 1980 and 2010.

                Where do you get your foolery from?

                21

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Duh. The Earth’s radiative imbalance means heat is accumulating which causes the the obvious response.

                46

              • #
                Richard C (NZ)

                >”ERBE, AIRS, or CERES satellite projects, which have measured a decrease in OLR.” (#3.2.1.1.1)

                Perhaps you should inform the NOAA Craig:

                Figure below: Outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) at the top of the atmosphere between 180oW and 179oE (0oE and 359.5oE) and 90oN and 90oS since June 1974 according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

                http://climate4you.com/images/OLR%20Global%20NOAA.gif

                3 decreases, 3 increases, and a flatline.

                11

              • #
                The Backslider

                The Earth’s radiative imbalance means heat is accumulating which causes the the obvious response.

                Where is heat accumulating and what is the obvious response?

                01

              • #

                As I said, Craig

                You guys just make things up. Because you want them to be ‘so’ …

                Your claim was about an allegedly measured ‘energy imbalance’. Perhaps you think if you measure something else, it just becomes ‘energy imbalance’ because you you utter the words?

                Sorry ol’ chap, it just doesn’t work that way. Even if you repeat your memes over and over again …

                11

            • #
              markx

              Craig Thomas August 13, 2014 at 4:25 pm says:

              The radiative imbalance is the measured difference between incoming radiation and outgoing radiation from our planet.

              Hi Craig,

              It is theorized and modeled, but it is important to know that so far we don’t and can’t accurately measure this difference.

              The CERES satellite (for one) is meant to do so, but is out be a factor of about 7.5x.

              CERES satellite data measuring incoming and outgoing energy at the top of the atmosphere tell us there is an imbalance of 6.4 W m2.

              From the ‘known’ amount of recent global warming the amount of energy imbalance ‘required’ is estimated to be only 0.85 ± 0.15 W m2 (Hansen et al. (2005)).

              Calculations from knowing the absorption spectrum of CO2 is that a doubling CO2 would account for an imbalance of 3.4 W m2.

              So, CERES data needs some adjustment: (See below).

              “… uses an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust SW and LW TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty to remove the inconsistency between average global net TOA flux and heat storage in the earth–atmosphere system.”
              Loeb etal 2009 ‘Toward Optimal Closure of the Earth’s Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Budget’ J. Climate, 22, 748–766

              141

              • #
                The Backslider

                CERES satellite data measuring incoming and outgoing energy at the top of the atmosphere

                Not to mention that this satellite is simply too close to the Earth to be able to give accurate measurements either way.

                01

          • #
            Unmentionable

            ie. a fall rather than a rise in atmospheric water vapor.”

            Frankly that’s a global NET unquantifiable. In the end (and because the models are thoroughly inimical to an understanding of material reality) I prefer the simple reality-check measures posited in 1992 by the IPCC, namely, global temperature trend, and enhanced sea level rise rate.

            The first is already falsified regarding a general Venusian runaway heating surge hypothesis (and yes that’s what the water carriers for the IPCC were positing at the time, so this must be placed into its hype context and not permitted to be just quietly swept under the carpet and walked away from; and the second may be in the bag as well, if the situation of the past three years in the antarctic persists from here.

            Place your bets on the number on southern Summer 2014-2015 blizzards as there should be a few given the instrumental observation period ‘record’ southern icepack growth in 2014.

            I don’t like the cold but I’d wear a decade of painful global cold snap to finally put an end to this AGW nonsense and so that some unmolested objective geo-climatic research could finally resume its proper place founded in observation and discovery, rather than dysfunctional model conjectures and circular arguments about forcing factors.

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            • #
              Craig Thomas

              And yet the Arctic continues to ignore your opinion and is melting away as fast as ever before:
              http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

              I also searched for “IPCC Venusian runaway heating surge” and came up blank. Perhaps you can indicate to us a reference to the exact document from the IPCC wherein you claim such a thing exists?

              737

              • #
              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Steven Goddard has a history of being forced to apologise for making false assertions about Arctic sea ice. I utterly discount him as a reliable source.
                [This is a lazy ad hom attack — the mark of a person who finds it hard to reason – Jo]

                Comparing this year to a single previous year two years ago and pretending to draw a trend-based conclusion from the comparison represents utter incompetence of the lowest order.

                As you can see from the link I provided, current ice is the 5th-lowest for this date ever recorded, continuing a trend of a massive decrease in Arctic ice.
                This time last month is was 3rd-lowest.

                937

              • #
                manalive

                Arctic sea ice is simply an imprecise and tentative proxy for temperature.
                There is nothing happening in the Arctic that hasn’t happened before — and before human fossil fuel burning could have been a significant factor.

                212

              • #
                Unmentionable

                This is what I wrote:

                “Venusian runaway heating surge hypothesis (and yes that’s what the water carriers for the IPCC were positing at the time,”

                Not sure why you were off on a private tangent searching IPCC document databases, as it was the fellow travellers of the hyped IPCC view within the alleged ‘scientific debate’ who repeatedly put the issue across to the public in precisely those sorts of exaggerated and perverse terms. Such persons made much of citing the, at that time, very topical publication of Magellan’s Venusian radar imagery and associated discussion of the structural geology depicted, as some sort of facetious prop for where they ardently believed the Earth ‘could be heading’, etc., if dramatic international action were not taken within one decade, or else it would probably be too late to arrest a nascent runaway feedback … etc., etc. That sort of bullcrap went on for years.

                Were you even reading the professional ‘science’ debate during the period? Because if you were, you know perfectly well that that’s what was going on, and if you weren’t then you need to catch up and not display your lack of experience.

                That was one of the most scurrilous fear-campaigns I remember in my lifetime, and it was a shameless abuse and attack on science, and I don’t remember anyone from the IPCC camp or its ‘consensus’ group of authors, ever taking them to task to rein in the disreputable nonsense they kept sprouting. Too many people here have lived through that “runaway green-house” codswallop phase, and I’m very confident global TV archives are replete with copious video footage of warped extremist fellow-travellers and water-carriers for the IPCC consensus (a beast that then was still non-existent) putting that false-dilemma to the fear fanned public in exactly those Venusian greenhouse type runaway terms – on innumerable occasions.

                psst … no one likes a denier 😉

                170

              • #
                William Astley

                Do you have any explanation for the sudden record sea ice in the Antarctic? P.S. An observed change requires a physical explanation. The physical explanation requires something that has changed to cause what is observed. What has changed? Hint the solar magnetic cycle. There are cycles of warming and cooling that correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes.

                http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png

                The Arctic sea is recovering if your paradigm is that a cooling earth is the best of all world.

                http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

                121

              • #
                the Griss

                Gees, Steven Goddard apologises.

                Well is WAY PAST TIME that most of the alarmista apologised for their false assertions.

                But that is the difference you see.

                The alarmista will never apologise for the harm and devastation they have caused to the world and the environment.

                152

              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                And yet the Arctic continues to ignore your opinion and is melting away as fast as ever before:

                And yet according to this peer-reviewed paper, the Arctic had shorter sea ice seasons and warmer temperatures (by +3.0 C!) during the 1885 to 1935 period than it has in the last few decades. And this was when CO2 levels were still hovering around 300 ppm. Hmmm.

                http://www.biogeosciences.net/9/5391/2012/bg-9-5391-2012.pdf
                Sea surface temperature (Arctic Ocean) between ∼ AD 1885–1935 are warmer by up to 3◦C with respect to the average modern temperature at the coring site. For the period ∼ AD 1887–1945, reconstructed sea ice cover values are on average 8.3 months per year which is 1.1 months per year lower than the modern [2012] values [9.4 months of sea ice cover per year]. Moreover, reconstructions of sea-surface parameters for the time-period covered by the core show SSTs and SSSs above modern values during positive phases of the PDO: AD 1886–1912; AD 1925–1946 and AD 1979–1996.

                Also, this graph from NASA shows that the 1930s and 1940s were warmer in the Arctic than the 2000s.

                http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/arctic_ice3.php

                100

              • #
                Truthseeker

                Steven Goddard has a history of being forced to apologise for making false assertions about Arctic sea ice.

                Typical alarmist ad-homien attack that has no substance or relevance to the matter at hand. Do you have proof of this “history” of being “forced to apologise“? A “history” means having multiple occurrences, at least three would be required. Given that he controls his own blog, I do not see how he can be “forced” to apologise for anything he does not choose to do. I have been reading his excellent blog for a while now and any minor corrections are dealt with openly and swiftly, unlike the alarmist commentators who never apologise for anything regardless of the lies and errors they commit.

                The post that was linked to goes to the source data so you do not even have to believe Steve Goddard if you do not want to. The observational data is available for scrutiny, something that the alarmist brigade never bring to the table.

                200

              • #
                Greg Cavanagh

                Re: Craig Thomas

                You keep shifting the goal posts, which indicates you’re a troll.
                When presented with a refutation you can’t argue with, you stop responding. Which indicates you’re a troll.

                But your post #3.2.1.1.2 is so annoying; even I have to comment on it.

                The ice data you present starts in 1979, to current 2014. 36 years of data.
                You state that 2014 is the 5th lowest. So…. out of 36 data point, today’s measurement is one of 5 of the lowest. 36/5 = 7.2.

                To state: The artic extent is equal to a 7 year average low.

                36 years’ worth of data is a fraction of a fart of history, and not sufficient knowledge to state anything about it.

                110

              • #
                Truthseeker

                Craig,

                You bring nothing of substance to the debate.

                You bring nothing but insults and lies.

                Artic sea ice – heading upwards …

                32

              • #
                Duster

                “And yet the Arctic continues to ignore your opinion and is melting away as fast as ever…”

                Indeed, and yet the Arctic is not and has not been ice free in our lifetimes, regardless of our age! Think of how much must have melted. More intriguingly according to the NSIDC the current ice cover is within 2 sd of the mean, while two years ago, the ice cover at this time of year was well OUTSIDE the 2 sd zone. And yet here you say that very same agency tells you it is melting as fast as ever. Of course it did. Are you a journalist or a politician?

                21

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                The intellectual corruption necessary to firmly believe that Arctic ice isn’t continuing the trend of rapid disappearance is flabbergasting.

                No, it isn’t “recovering”.

                http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/08/Figure3-350×261.png

                There is a graph with *all* the data.

                Notice Goddard’s chacteristically incompetent analysis is based on just two data points, from which he ludicrously draws a trend.

                Some other idiots are using a total of 5 data points to draw their incompetent trend.

                Use *all* the data. Ask a statistician to help you.

                66

              • #
                The Backslider

                I think Polly that these guys have a better handle on what is happening.

                10

        • #
          QuixoteNexus

          Hey you win today’s star prize , a greenish /blackish badge of shame !

          “The radiative imbalance is the measured difference between incoming radiation and outgoing radiation from our planet. It might pay to cover these basic topics in your own time before joining the conversation, you might exude slightly more competence.”

          You might Exude? exude? wtfdum?
          intransitive verb
          1
          : to ooze out
          2
          : to undergo diffusion
          transitive verb
          1
          : to cause to ooze or spread out in all directions
          2
          : to display conspicuously or abundantly
          See exude defined for English-language learners »
          See exude defined for kids »

          Trying to measure any radiative imbalance is a wonderful goal , especially when the alarmists tell us that that heat goes hiding here there and everywhere ,it goes hiding in the sea, its under Antarctica. Perhaps when they have an exact way of measuring things they might come to the right conclusion, I note very recently that a team of distinguished alarmists discovered that an algorithm had been wonky (Since debunked of course) which may have led to incorrect data (wrong , but peer reviewed and printed)Perhaps you could advise me the source of your radiation imbalance ?
          If your answer mentions Skeptical Seance , please feel free to go and excrete your comments elsewhere.

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        • #
          cohenite

          You don’t know what you’re talking about Mr Thomas. Salby’s work shows humans are not the source of CO2 increase. That doesn’t include you of course.

          101

          • #
            the Griss

            Craig is obviously a big source of HOT AIR !!!

            And not much else.

            81

          • #
            Craig Thomas

            Salby has published no such work, therefore, no, he hasn’t shown any such thing.

            The powerpoint presentation where he alludes to this surprising conclusion provides no data, no methods, nor any convincing argument for why it should be true.

            77

        • #
          Ian

          Ever going to acknowledge Kenneth Richard’s posts listing Salby’s publications?

          40

        • #
          tom0mason

          “…and we know that increased CO2 caused by human activities are forcing CO2 uptake, therefore there is undeniably extra “greening” happening.”

          You obviously don’t know so I’ll try and educate you. Depending on who you read the human input of CO2 to the atmospher is 1% to 5%. All of the other 95-99% is natural the majority from the oceans, then the tropical forests, the swamps, the mid-latitude forest.
          Guess who – Murry Selby.
          but just to give you some more
          From a side note in ‘Recent Changes of Arctic Multiyear Sea Ice Coverage and the Likely Causes’ by Polyakov

          These rivers breathe a lot of carbon.” —David Butman , a doctoral student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, who coauthored a recent article published in Nature Geoscience showing that rivers and streams in the United States are “supersaturated” with carbon dioxide (CO2) compared to the atmosphere, releasing an amount of CO2 equivalent to a car burning 40 million gallons of gasoline (enough to fuel 3.4 million car trips to the moon).
          Butman and coauthor Pete Raymond, a Yale professor, measured temperature, alkalinity, and pH from samples of more than 4,000 U.S. rivers and streams, and also studied the morphology and surface area of the waterways. They fed this data into a model to determine the flux of CO2 from the water and found that the amount of CO2 given off by rivers and streams “is significant enough for terrestrial modelers to note of it,” according to Butman.
          The study revealed that the CO2, after being released by decomposing plants, is making its way from the ground into the rivers and streams.
          The researchers also determined that an increase in precipitation caused by climate change will create a cycle that to increasing amounts of CO2 in the waterways and subsequently in the atmosphere. (Source : Yale University)

          Nature in all it’s various ways is putting the CO2 into the atmosphere just as it always has done. Humans are, by all records, just bit part players.

          40

    • #
      jimbrock

      Also, and never mentioned. We are in an interglacial period, during which the earth warms … until it doesn’t , then back into an ice age.

      20

  • #
    Kenneth Richard

    Salby’s contention—that human emissions of CO2 are not the main driver of atmospheric CO2 levels—is supported by another peer-reviewed paper showing that CO2 levels were in the 480 ppm range during the 1820s.

    http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-paper-finds-co2-levels-were-higher.html

    272

    • #
      farmerbraun

      Those CO2 measurements from 1800-2000 seem to have some correlation with warm phases of the PDO. Anyone had a look?

      42

    • #
      Craig Thomas

      Seeing as the extreme mentioned in that paper is nowhere near 480ppm, I think I will pass on accepting your interpretation of…er…well, anything, really.
      Clearly unreliable.

      730

      • #
        Kenneth Richard

        The 480 ppm value comes from this graph taken from the Beck paper:

        http://i.imgur.com/rqIfm.jpg

        Even James Hansen, in a 2013 paper, has questioned why it is that the airborne fraction of CO2 (Mauna Loa) concentration isn’t matching the much more rapid increase in human emissions of CO2…

        http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/011006
        “However, it is the dependence of the airborne fraction on fossil fuel emission rate that makes the post-2000 downturn of the airborne fraction particularly striking. The change of emission rate in 2000 from 1.5% yr-1 to 3.1% yr-1 (figure 1), other things being equal, would have caused a sharp increase of the airborne fraction.”

        Hansen’s graph showing the non-correlation between human emissions and the airborne fraction CO2:

        http://ej.iop.org/images/1748-9326/8/1/011006/erl459410f3_online.jpg

        So Craig, in the ice core record of the last million or so years, there is scientific consensus that CO2 levels rose from about 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during interglacials an average of about 800 years *after* the temperatures began rising. What natural factors do you think caused CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm to 300 ppm every 100,000-120,000 years?

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          Beck’s measurements are rubbish. Nobody in their right mind considers them representative of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

          We know how much CO2 humans are emitting. We can see the effects of that activity: increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 causes warming.
          What part of this are you having so much trouble with that you have to posit some unknown and unobserved mechanism that would both
          – remove anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere
          AND
          – add CO2 in the atmosphere to bring it up to current high levels
          ?

          Your whole train of thought is completely bonkers.

          835

          • #
            the Griss

            “We know that CO2 causes warming”

            BS !!!

            and the atmospheric CO2 levels are currently VERY LOW STILL, like they have been, at plant subsistence level for many thousands of years.

            A delicate balance between just enough, and biosphere collapse.

            IF we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, this is ONLY GOOD, because CO2 is TOTALLY BENEFICIAL to ALL PLANT LIFE ON EARTH

            CO2 is THE BUILDING BLOCK OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH,

            and anyone who wants to restrict it to the paltry level that we current have is a total moron. !!!

            214

          • #
            sophocles

            The anthropogenic CO2 contributions to the atmosphere is at about 3-4% of annual global emissions of CO2. Over 98% of all CO2 on this planet is dissolved in the oceans. Warm the water and CO2 is emitted. This is a simple experiment you can conduct at home with a bottle of carbonated soft drink and your refrigerator.
            The tail does not wag the dog. That level of contribution to overall emissions is not even the tail of the dog.

            At present, oceanic cloud cover is relatively low compared with what it has been and more Solar Irradiance is reaching the water. SI + water = increase in T(H2O) which in turn emits CO2 to the atmosphere.

            Since about 2003, oceanic cloud cover has been steadily increasing (small but measurable increments) and, according to Phil Jones (CRU East Anglia in an interview on http://www.bbc.org 2008), global average temperature has been decreasing slightly. The trend has not changed and the next two years are going to be interesting.

            (The NOAA maintains an oceanic cloud cover database. Check there. I leave this as an exercise for the student—you.)

            The current atmospheric levels of CO2 are low. For over a billion years CO2 levels have been between 2000 and 4000ppmv. That can be considered the norm. Don’t believe me? Then you have the burden of proof; I only need to point to the titanosaurs.

            102

          • #
            Kenneth Richard

            Beck’s measurements are rubbish. Nobody in their right mind considers them representative of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

            On what do you base your presuppositions about accurate CO2 concentration levels?

            During the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous ages, CO2 levels were in the 1,800 to 2,000 ppm range according to textbooks. Do you disagree with these documented concentration levels as well? If so, on what basis?

            What caused CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacial periods to 300 ppm during interglacials (800 years after the temperatures rose)? It wasn’t human emissions. So what was it, Craig?

            91

          • #
            Richard C (NZ)

            Craig #14.2.1.1

            >”We know how much CO2 humans are emitting. We can see the effects of that activity: increased CO2 in the atmosphere.”

            That’s the superficial assessment but determination of the airborne fraction is rather more fraught. See #4.2.1 above and #17.1.1.4 here:

            http://joannenova.com.au/2014/08/its-an-unsettling-climate-for-skeptical-scientists-like-murry-salby/#comment-1536516

            >”What part of this are you having so much trouble with that you have to posit some unknown and unobserved mechanism that would both – remove anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere AND – add CO2 in the atmosphere to bring it up to current high levels ?”

            “Unknown”? No.Henry’s law. Again, see #17.1.1.4

            “bring it up to current high levels”? No. aCO2 is not the only contributor and the Henry coefficient changes with change in temperature. Again, see #17.1.1.4

            You have to consider short-term constant temperature (Henry “constant”) AND long-term temperature change (“Temperature dependence of the Henry constant”), as explained in #17.1.1.4

            50

            • #
              Richard C (NZ)

              >”determination of the airborne fraction is rather more fraught. See #4.2.1 above and #17.1.1.4 here:…”

              Also #19 here:

              http://joannenova.com.au/2014/08/its-an-unsettling-climate-for-skeptical-scientists-like-murry-salby/#comment-1536192

              20

              • #
                Richard C (NZ)

                >”determination of the airborne fraction is rather more fraught. See #4.2.1 above and #17.1.1.4 here:… Also #19 here:”

                And now add the link at #17.1.1.1.2 which is:

                http://chipstero7.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/it-is-often-asserted-by-cagw-advocates.html

                “The 1:50 partitioning ratio for CO2 between the atmosphere and oceans at the Earth’s average surface temperature as ordained by Henry’s law means that 98% of anthropogenic CO2 should be absorbed by the oceans and only 2% should remain as a permanent addition to the atmospheric CO2 greenhouse upon equilibrium. Since human CO2-emissions are currently 30 gigatonnes/year this implies that only about 0.6 gigatonnes/year will become ‘permanently’ added to the resident CO2 greenhouse. 0.6 gigatonnes of CO2 corresponds to 0.078ppmv. The Keeling Curve tells us that atmospheric CO2 is increasing at the rate of 2ppmv/year. Therefore the human component only accounts for about 3.9% of the overall increase in CO2 each year (i.e. 0.078/2).

                50

          • #
            cohenite

            We know how much CO2 humans are emitting. We can see the effects of that activity: increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 causes warming.

            None of this is true; and since Mr Thomas is a smart guy it must mean he is lying.

            71

            • #
              the Griss

              “and since Mr Thomas is a smart guy’

              Doh.. you forgot the /sarc tag !!!

              71

            • #
              tom0mason

              Of course it’s not true.
              As Salby pointed out depending on which study you get figures in the range ~1 – 5% of all the CO2 is human origin. 95-99% is natural, mostly from the oceans, then the tropical forest, temperate forest and all the rest.

              Nature controls the CO2 levels and has always done.
              Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or a conman.

              11

            • #
              Craig Thomas

              In that case, Cohenite, you are disagreeing with Murry Salby, who says,
              “In truth only one component of the CO2 budget is known with any certainty, human emissions, implicitly through records of extraction – how much coal and oil are dug up”.

              In this case, I agree with Murry Salby that Cohenite is utterly clueless.
              (I don’t expect anybody to accept this completely unoriginal conclusion for publication.)

              77

              • #
                the Griss

                Poor CT, Your basic lack of comprehension of what is actually written is quite hilarious.

                Borders on the ridiculous that someone can be so [snip]

                11

              • #
                the Griss

                But do keep going just to give us the slap-stick humour.

                Each post you make reinforces your blatant ignorance.

                01

              • #
                The Backslider

                In that case, Cohenite, you are disagreeing with Murry Salby

                No he is not you dill, he is disagreeing with YOU. Murray Salby has never said “We can see the effects of that activity: increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 causes warming.”

                11

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                I said “We know how much CO2 humans are emitting”.

                Cohenite denied this is true.

                Of course, it is true, as Murry Salby points out, for the edification of ignorami the likes of Cohenite.

                62

              • #
                The Backslider

                I said “We know how much CO2 humans are emitting”.

                Cohenite denied this is true.

                Again, putting words into people’s moouths.

                You said:

                We know how much CO2 humans are emitting. We can see the effects of that activity: increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 causes warming.

                Clearly Cohenite disagrees with your conclusion. Why don’t you ask him to clarify? To me it’s obvious, but then, you have shown yourself to have awful comprehension problems.

                01

              • #
                the Griss

                We know how much CO2 humans are emitting. We can see the effects of that activity: increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 causes warming.

                What Salby was saying is that we can have a bit of a rough stab at figuring out how much CO2 humans are emitting.. with a massive uncertainty,

                we certainly do not know to any degree of accuracy..

                If you think we know, then give a value with error margins… We are waiting. !

                The rest of your statement was, as usual, a load of complete bollocks.

                01

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Cohenite said, “None of this is true”.

                Addressing his assertion, seriatim, against each of mine, we start with,
                “We know how much CO2 humans are emitting”.
                This is a well-known true statement, as confirmed by Murry Salby.

                We need not proceed to test Cohenite’s assertion against the rest of the list as it is already proven wrong.

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              • #
                the Griss

                Oops.. Seems I’m still waiting for that number.. How much CO2 do humans emit.

                with error margins.

                If you can’t answer that, then YOU DON’T KNOW !!!!

                And please, NOT some ultrawide 99% con !!!!

                01

              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                You could ask Murry Salby – he says he knows what it is.

                53

              • #
                the Griss

                As I suspected.. you have NO answer.. You do not know.

                Again, you choose to mis-interpret what Murry said, because you don’t understand what he said.

                He was implying that it was the only type of CO2 that we even had the remotest possibility of calculating.

                I guess that that is just way too much for you to comprehend, though.

                01

              • #
                The Backslider

                *Vince Whirlwind*

                Oh lookeee…. another troll has joined the fray.

                They really are desperately afraid of Murray Salby.

                01

            • #
              cohenite

              Mr Thomas, the latin quoting pedant; your role at Deltoid was the nasty little picker of wings off flies wasn’t it Mr Thomas?

              So I was wrong when I said all of this was wrong:

              We know how much CO2 humans are emitting. We can see the effects of that activity: increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 causes warming.

              The paragraph is actually a syllogism with the first fact allegedly proving the last; that is human CO2 is causing the warming is obviously what the paragraph meant; any reasonable person could understand that.

              And when I said it was all wrong I meant that meaning, that human CO2 is causing the warming, was wrong.

              But you’re not a reasonable person are you Mr Thomas; you’re an alarmist; and not just any alarmist, as bad and unreasonable as those are; you’re an alarmist from Deltoid; and just as there are hierarchies in the insect world so too are there hierarchies in the alarmist world, and the Deltoid denizens like you Mr Thomas, are the pick of the crop of alarmists.

              You’ve infested this thread like a snail crawling over a nice green leaf Mr Thomas, leaving a trail of slime behind.

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          • #
            Newminster

            What you seem to be having trouble with, Craig, is stringing together any sort of coherent logic. All you are doing is spouting half-baked ideas gleaned from Skeptical Science or somewhere without bothering to pass them through your brain.
            You demand peer review but when you get it you dismiss it if it doesn’t match your preconceptions. You dismiss Beck as “rubbish”, on what basis? Because of your own research? Or because Cook and Nuccitelli say so?
            You’re a classic example, all too visible on genuinely skeptical websites, of those who for some reason or other are desperate for global warming to be real and catastrophic and feel the need to say so at every opportunity, presumably because if it turns out not to be the case your entire belief system will be shattered.
            Which makes you quite a bizarre person when you think about it. A man who wants there to be disaster round the next corner.
            The science of global warming as trotted out by that highly political organisation the IPCC is nowhere near as clear cut or as settled as they would like us all to think. Open your mind and let some daylight in for a change.

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            • #
              Craig Thomas

              Beck’s measurements are complete rubbish.

              If you can’t see that by the simple process of examining his data and noting the scatter of values and the metadata attached to them, then you really must be mentally incompetent.

              Basically, when you get scientific meansurements that disagree with earlier scientific measurements, you have to look at the quality of the data and decide which one is wrong:
              http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome.html

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              • #
                karl

                I’m new to this thread and not a scientist. Craig, how much public money do receive in grants to very the AGW THEORY. Because at the moment it is still a theory yes-with an unjustifiably high degree of certainty without any actual evidence. I mean to say-there is no observed empirical data showing a direct correlation between human co2 and average global temperatures is there. I seem to read a lot about the missing heat-do you need to find this heat to actually turn AGW from a theory to a fact? And why do continually ignore Keith Richards posts? As a layman sceptical of anything unless proven it appears you ignore him because he is smarter than you-is that the case?

                01

            • #
              the Griss

              “are complete rubbish.”

              That mirror again.. Put it down, your vanity and ego will warp your mind…

              oh look.. way too late !!!

              01

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            tom0mason

            “Beck’s measurements are rubbish. Nobody in their right mind considers them representative of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.”
            I’ll use your quote
            “I think I will pass on accepting your interpretation of…er…well, anything, really.”
            You’re clearly unreliable.

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      • #
        sophocles

        CO2 concentrations varied dynamically between ~220-425 ppm from 14,000-11,500 years ago.

        … to quote the paper.

        20

  • #
    turnedoutnice

    There is near zero CO2-AGW anyway, because the water cycle gives highly negative feedback.

    Arctic Ice is growing fast, easily explicable.

    Salby saying CO2 rise in mostly natural is icing on the cake.

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  • #

    Salby’s CO2 stuff is drivel. Its been taken to pieces by many people. You betray yourself by believing or giving time to this nonsense. There are lots of interesting things to argue about – the value of climate sensitivity, say. But that the rise in CO2 is human-caused isn’t worth discussing.

    8120

    • #
      the Griss

      “Salby’s CO2 stuff is drivel.”

      Who are you to say that! You are a total non-entity in any science debate.

      The only people who think they have taken his work apart are those of your ilk……

      ….. ignorant propagandists with basically zero understanding of climate and atmospheric systems.

      843

      • #
        Rereke Whakaaro

        That is a very coherent statement, especially coming from you, Griss. I am impressed.

        450

      • #
        Craig Thomas

        Griss, the fact is that even basic work like Michael Mann’s work on “the Hockey Stick” clearly proves that Salby’s opinions are wrong.

        453

        • #
          James Bradley

          Wait, Craig, that would be the graphic representatuion based on altered data.

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          • #
            Craig Thomas

            Whatever do you mean by “altered data”?

            535

            • #
              James Bradley

              Altered dat: corrupted, contaminated, changed, amended, smoothed, polished, other than as observed, different from originally recorded, not empirical, incorrect, manipulated, selectively enhanced…

              301

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                I just searched the internet for any information that would point to Mann having been found to have committed any such crimes. Zip. Nada.

                Weirdly, searching for Salby and similar concepts gave me some hits,
                “The National Science Foundation investigation report issued on 20 February 2009 found that Salby had overcharged his grants and violated financial conflict of interest policies, displaying “a pattern of deception, a lack of integrity, and a persistent and intentional disregard of NSF and University rules and policies” and a “consistent willingness to violate rules and regulations, whether federal or local, for his personal benefit.” It debarred Salby from receiving federal assistance and benefits until 13 August 2012″

                641

              • #
                cohenite

                I just searched the internet for any information that would point to Mann having been found to have committed any such crimes. Zip. Nada.

                Looking at your reflection in the mirror is not the same as doing a search; although of course there is the issue of whether you are capable of understanding anything if you did search.

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              • #
                the Griss

                “on page 30 of the NSF document, even the Acting Deputy Director of the NSF admitted there was “insufficient evidence to support this allegation”.”

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              • #
                the Griss

                “It looks very much like Macquarie University broke their commitments to Murray and then went out of their way to discredit their own professor when he did science they didn’t approve of. “

                “What is even more obvious in regards to motivations is that the ticket was non-refundable and therefore Macquarie got nothing back, financially, for cancelling the ticket.”

                So the ticket cancelling was done out of SPITE, so that Mr Salby could not attend his hearing.

                Tried in-absentia on purpose. A low act, to be sure.

                You seem to know.. Did his contract have any teaching commitments, I heard that it DIDN’T !

                I also heard that the Uni did not provide the computing services as written in the contract.

                Seems like to whole thing was probably devised from the start with the aim of curtailing Mr Salby’s work, because it was so dangerous to the CAGW meme.

                AND IT STILL IS DANGEROUS… which of course is why there is a flood of third rate alarmista propagandists now visiting.

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              Rolf

              Like upside down tom make it fit the purpose, and omitting the part that opposed the finish. That’s altered data.

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                Craig Thomas

                And yet over two dozen independent studies have replicated Mann’s work, finding it to have been correct.

                I guess whoever told you Mann indulged in “altered data” told you porkies. You should have more sceptical.

                547

              • #
                Winston

                yet over two dozen independent studies have replicated Mann’s work, finding it to have been correct.

                Craig,

                Thank you so much for reinforcing my long held belief that climate science is hopelessly compromised, and that even the most inept and questionable methodology gets a big tick of approval by the climate faithful through completely partisan assessment of work which in any other discipline would have been roundly chastised and rejected.

                Michael Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’– is an example of politically motivated ideology attempting to bypass the basic tenets of objective science. The Climategate emails tell the story better than any opinion piece could hope to, showing quite succinctly that Dr Mann used his pre-eminent position in the field to manipulate the data in paleoclimate studies to conform to his predetermined result, in an attempt to remove (or at least mollify) the somewhat inconvenient “Medieval Warming Period”. This was in order to add legitimacy to his contention that modern late 20th century warming was anomalous and outside the natural climate variations that have been seen throughout the Holocene interglacial period. His peers were aware of the shortcomings of his methodology but fell meekly into line behind the study rather than insist via peer review on corrections to the paper, or modification of the data and/or conclusions. Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre showed that the “Hockey stick” graph depended heavily on unreliable data, especially samples of tree rings from bristlecone pine trees, the growth patterns of which were often not responding to temperature at all. It was also shown to have depended on a statistical filter that over-weighted any samples showing sharp rises in the 20th century.

                Those defending the various Hockey-stick graphs brought in a lake-sediment sample from Finland (Tiljander), which had to be turned upside down to show a temperature spike in the 20th century; they then added a sample of larch trees from Siberia that turned out to be affected by one tree that had grown faster in recent decades, perhaps because its neighbor had died or been removed. Recently, this Siberian larch data was finally corrected by the University of East Anglia’s Keith Briffa to remove all signs of hockey-stick upticks, showing that McIntyre’s criticisms were completely valid, even if they were not prepared to concede it publicly.

                To quote from Climate Audit’s take on proceedings:

                “As CA readers are aware, the “big news” of Mann et al 2008 was its claim to have got a Hockey Stick without Graybill’s bristlecone chronologies (camouflaged as a “no-dendro” reconstruction). CA readers are aware that this claim depended on their use of contaminated modern portion of the Tiljander sediments and that the original claims for a “validated” no-dendro reconstruction prior to 1500 fell apart, even though no retraction or corrigendum to the original Mann et al (PNAS 2008) has been issued. As we learned (from an inline comment by Gavin Schmidt in July 2010), Mann et al have conceded that these claims fell apart, but did so using a “trick” (TM- climate science.) Instead of acknowledging the false assertions at the journal in which the assertions were made (PNAS), they acknowledged the failure of the no-Tiljander no-bristlecone reconstructions deep in the Supplementary Information of a different paper (Mann et al, Science 2009) – a trick for which the term “Mike’s PNAS trick” is surely appropriate (though the term “Mike’s Science trick” also merits consideration.)”

                Further information re: the debunking of this study can be found here:

                http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/

                Including evidence that much of the statistical significance of proxies used in Mann’s study were drawn from cherrypicking 12 larch trees in Yamal, Siberia, with one of those trees being an outlier (YAD061) that should have been discarded from the sample, since it skewed results disproportionately:

                http://climateaudit.org/2009/09/27/yamal-a-divergence-problem/

                Also, witness the over 800 studies gathered here showing that the Medieval Warming Period was not only real, but it was global and of a similar, if not greater, magnitude than the modern Warming Period which can be found here:

                http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/description.php

                Some examples of well-known climate researchers own words validating skeptical assertions regarding the motivation and methodological manipulation evident in this “landmark” study are found below:-

                Michael Mann
                “It would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “Medieval Warm Period”.”

                #300 Bo Christiansen – on Hockey stick reconstructions
                “All methods strongly underestimate the amplitude of low-frequency variability and trends. This means that it is almost impossible to conclude from reconstruction studies that the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period.”

                #0886 Jan Esper on his own reconstruction – also hidden decline
                And the curve will also show that the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together.

                #4007 Tim Osborne
                “Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were”

                Tim Osborne #2347
                “Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures – another way of “correcting” for the decline, though may be not defensible!”

                #3234 Richard Alley
                “Unless the “divergence problem” can be confidently ascribed to some cause that was not active a millennium ago, then the comparison between tree rings from a millennium ago and instrumental records from the last decades does not seem to be justified, and the confidence level in the anomalous nature of the recent warmth is lowered.”

                Finally, the Wegman Report into the validity of the now infamous ‘Hockey Stick’ paper included some of the following interesting and insightful observations:

                In addition to debunking the methodology used in the ‘Hockey Stick’ global climate reconstruction paper, Wegman goes a step further in his report, attempting to answer why Mr. Mann’s mistakes were not exposed by his fellow climatologists. Instead, it fell to two outsiders, Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick, to uncover the paper’s errors.

                Wegman uses a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of the most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely or possible.

                “As analyzed in our social network,” Mr. Wegman writes, “there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.” He continues: “However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”

                He added: 
“However, it is immediately clear that the Mann, Rutherford, Jones, Osborn, Briffa, Bradley and Hughes form a clique, each interacting with all of the others. A clique is a fully connected subgraph, meaning everyone in the clique interacts with every one else in the clique”.

                The report further added:

                “One of the interesting questions associated with the ‘Hockey Stick Controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published. Indeed, a common practice among associate editors for scholarly journals is to look in the list of references for a submitted paper to see who else is writing in a given area and thus who might legitimately be called on to provide knowledgeable peer review. Of course, if a given discipline area is small and the authors in the area are tightly coupled, then this process is likely to turn up very sympathetic referees. These referees may have coauthored other papers with a given author. They may believe they know that author’s other writings well enough that errors can continue to propagate and indeed be reinforced.”

                In the case of the Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” paper, Wegman and his team found the “clique” of gatekeepers to be no more than just 43 scientists, the majority of whom were wholly inter-dependent and inter-related.

                Marcott et al (2013) attempted to resuscitate the zombie-like Hockey stick with one of it’s own, only to be shot down within weeks of publication by various skeptic blog sites who demonstrated fatal methodological errors that even the authors tacitly accepted in their concluding statements within the paper, when they stated: “[The] 20th-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.” One wonders therefore why they bothered to publish if their statistical methodology was not robust enough to legitimise their conclusions. Yet another example of post-modern science in action.

                That enough for you, old boy.

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                cohenite

                And yet over two dozen independent studies have replicated Mann’s work, finding it to have been correct.

                Nothing is independent in AGW; it’s all plugged into the same lie.

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                Duster

                Winston,

                “. . . The Climategate emails tell the story better than any opinion piece could hope to, showing quite succinctly that Dr Mann used his pre-eminent position in the field to manipulate the data in paleoclimate studies to conform to his predetermined result, in an attempt to remove (or at least mollify) the somewhat inconvenient “Medieval Warming Period”. This was in order to add legitimacy to his contention that modern late 20th century warming was anomalous and outside the natural climate variations that have been seen throughout the Holocene interglacial period. …”

                While the CG emails document just how shoddy Mann’s work is, and how little esteem his colleagues hold him in, the “hockey stick” problem was that he added a temperature record to the end of a graph of tree ring data in order to create the “hockey stick.” The tree ring data headed down and was masked by appended temperature data that was a completely different form of data. The addition was not documented and thus lead to cries of “fraudulent.” However climate modelers live in a world of wishful thinking in which they understand reality in such detail they can forecast its behaviour in detail.

                Mann explicitly says that they need to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period because the peak heat belies the “warmest ever” language. Since that communication there has been active investigation of the MWP and to the great embarrassment of Mann not only has it not gone away, it is now known to be a global phenomenon. Craig is plainly ignorant of historical geology and needs to look at the really big picture preferably the Phanerozoic in order to actually understand the implications of the minute changes in atmospheric CO2 we are seeing. However, he is plainly wedded to an idea and lets others do his thinking.

                20

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Winston and others – you are just repeating nonsense here. No fraud was detected anywhere in Michael Mann’s work, nothing was “masked” and the methods used to compare different temperature data were clearly elucidated in the relevant published papers (which you guys clearly haven’t read).

                Even more importantly, over two dozen subsequent studies have replicated the “hockey stick” confirming Mann’s work was correct in any case. (None of which you guys have bothered to read, either).

                It wasn’t just non-fraudulent, it was even correct.

                In conclusion – stop reading nonsensical lies on the internet and read some actual published science.

                77

              • #
                Richard C (NZ)

                >….in Michael Mann’s work, nothing was “masked”

                Heh, funny.

                And now, he’s off to court (well, he’s already been, then he left to amend false claims, now he’s going back again):

                ‘Real Nobel Laureate Takes Pity on Fake Nobel Laureate’

                by Mark Steyn, SteynOnline on 13 August 2014.

                http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/real-nobel-laureate-takes-pity-on-fake-nobel-laureate.html

                Excerpts:

                “In his later court filings, Mann has made equally preposterous and objectively false claims. For example, Mann has claimed that he has been “exonerated” by such bodies as the University of East Anglia, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and even by the government of the United Kingdom, none of which have investigated Dr Mann at all, never mind “exonerated” him.

                The audacity of the falsehoods in Mann’s court pleadings is breathtaking. For example, on page 19 of his brief below dated January 18, 2013, he cites the international panel chaired by the eminent scientist Lord Oxburgh, FRS as one of the bodies that “exonerated” him, whereas on page 235 of Mann’s own book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars , he states explicitly that “our own work did not fall within the remit of the committee, and the hockey stick was not mentioned in the report.” It is deeply disturbing that a plaintiff should make such fraudulent claims in his legal pleadings.”

                And,

                Mann has falsely misrepresented his academic credentials and passed himself off as a Nobel Laureate on an industrial scale – and, to a degree, by Google standards, it’s worked, at least with gullible rubes like Robert Hunziker.

                But in a court of law Google hits don’t count. When it comes to Mann’s fraudulent claim to be a Nobel Prize winner, only Geir Lundestad and a handful of his colleagues count.

                That’s the problem for Mann. His lies glide smoothly down the slipway and into the great sea of Google, but in court it’s a stricter standard.

                + + +

                I don’t think Michael is used to “a stricter standard”, he’s used to pal-review from his climate-clique. Hopefully his character will benefit from his court excursion.

                50

              • #
                Winston

                You’ll notice that “Craig Thomas” has launched a rebuttal (of sorts) to my deliberately comprehensive (and possibly over-elaborative as a result) challenge to his contention that Mann’s Hockey Stick was legitimate and scientifically robust.

                When faced with points he could not refute, Craig sought to merely sweep away such comments by placing them under an arbitrary (and I would suggest desperate) umbrella of “nonsensical”, and then even added “lies” as a further derisory comment, without any specific detail whatsoever in refutation to back up his otherwise fact free assertions. And Craig wonders why intelligent people remain unconvinced by his obvious activism, where his answers demonstrate completely that there exists no factual evidence whatsoever that could possibly persuade him to alter his views. These views are completely fixed and intransigent, and his mind is completely closed. Where someone like myself awaits some kind of persuasive evidence that might potentially change my skepticism and viewpoint, Craig is so married to the philosophy of his belief system, that he will wriggle and slither and evade and obfuscate (and yet simultaneously telling himself that he is honestly engaging the points raised, when clearly he is doing no such thing) so as to avoid ever having to allow himself the luxury of dropping his defensiveness, acknowledge for example the glaring inadequacies of Mann’s work (which even his colleagues are quoted above as privately acknowledging), or the appalling waste of say wind and solar renewable power generation (which I note further down the thread he remains convinced is on a cost parity with “heavily subsidised” fossil fuels ( Wow!)) -talk about fantasy land thinking- truly pitiful. Yet he remains undeterred, continues to bluster and deride without really having investigated thoughtfully, and more importantly impartially, the science he is defending.

                Btw, I wholeheartedly agree with Duster that grafting low resolution proxy data onto high resolution modern temperature record is completely indefensible and cannot possibly be valid, and any scientist who believes otherwise is a charlatan. That in itself should have consigned the Hockey Stick to the dustbin of history at the preliminary stages, but such is the state of climate science that such poor methodology is considered “de rigeur” among the climate glitterati. While ever the alarmists underestimate the intellect of those opposing them, and seek to bluster and howl down those who raise inconvenient points of inconsistency and distortion in their hypothesis, then they simply cannot succeed in their aims. Thankfully so, given that their aims are I believe a reflection of greed, a desire for power and a callous disregard for others, precisely the sorts of character flaws that make them the very last people on earth to be trusted with decisions of policy and governance.

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              • #

                > grafting low resolution proxy data onto high resolution modern temperature record is completely indefensible and cannot possibly be valid

                But you have to admire Mann and the IPCC’s cunning. Just look at http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/ from the TAR Summary for Policymakers. See the way they’ve cunning coded the data – the proxy stuff in blue, the instrumental data in red, so that its… errm… really hard to notice… that there are two different data sources… in there? And just to make it really really confusing, they’ve added a label to the graph saying the same. How much more duplicitous can you get?

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                The Backslider

                Your link shows nothing Billy.

                01

              • #

                Oops, that’s the full TAR, which is unlikely to fit. It shows everything, not nothing. You want: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-1.htm

                42

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                The Backslider

                140 years and 1000 years Billy. Now, we both know that is simply not enough data to give a clear picture, don’t we?

                01

        • #
          The Backslider

          Griss, the fact is that even basic work like Michael Mann’s work on “the Hockey Stick” clearly proves that Salby’s opinions are wrong.

          Please explain to us all how Michael Mann’s work “proves” that Salby’s “opinions” are “wrong”. Or are you just parroting Michael Craig?

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          • #
            Craig Thomas

            Mann’s modelling reflects actual CO2 concentrations in the past.
            Salby’s model diverges from reality into values which are not valid.

            535

            • #
              The Backslider

              That is not an explanation, it is an assertion. Are you able to add any value to the discussion?

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              • #
                Craig Thomas

                No, it was an explanation that answered your question.

                Perhaps you need to take time out to study Salby’s work and see exactly what it means?

                529

              • #
                The Backslider

                Perhaps you need to take time out to study Salby’s work and see exactly what it means?

                How could I possibly do that when you say it does not exist? How also can you say that it is “wrong” while at the same time saying it does not exist?

                51

            • #

              Craig… you should pay attention to Backslider, he knows an assertion when he sees one.

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                KinkyKeith

                Better that than an Insertion.

                KK

                btw Craig has just cracked the ton with 101 comments.

                I assume he is being paid by the number of comments rather than length since most of the comments are rather short as well as being short on substance.

                @ 20 cents a go he has earned over twenty dollars in his Skeptical Science account.

                Well done Craig.

                KK

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            • #
              Kenneth Richard

              “Salby’s model diverges from reality into values which are not valid.”

              What is “reality,” Craig?

              Do you think it’s possible that Salby knows more about atmospheric physics than you do? After all, he’s published a textbook on the subject.

              http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Atmosphere-Climate-Murry-Salby/dp/0521767180

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              • #
                the Griss

                A text book that Craig obviously has not read, or any even near same subject.

                111

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                Craig Thomas

                Reality means there is no such thing as negative CO2 concentration.

                Yes, Salby knows all about atmospheric physics, and I assume that is why he has been unable to write a science paper that actually explains his recent novel CO2 beliefs.

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              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                Yes, Salby knows all about atmospheric physics, and I assume that is why he has been unable to write a science paper that actually explains his recent novel CO2 beliefs.

                It should not be news to you (though I’m not surprised that it is, given your track record) that Salby’s contentions about CO2 being modulated, or functioning as an effect of, temperature changes, is not “novel.” It is heavily supported by peer reviewed science. How else do you explain why 110+ ppm increases in CO2 levels followed, rather than led, temperature increases (by about 800 years) in the ice core record (again, as documented in the peer-reviewed scientific literature)?

                http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/IceCores1.gif

                Salby doesn’t need to write another paper confirming the CO2-is-modulated-by-temperature science. It’s well established. That’s why it’s written about as “common knowledge” in his textbooks on atmospheric physics.
                ———————————————————
                Furthermore, Salby’s observations about CO2 emissions (anthropogenic) not seeming to correlate with the atmospheric concentration levels are also not “novel.” James Hansen himself has written about the lack of correlation between the Mauna Loa numbers and human CO2 emissions in a 2013 paper, and he produced this graph for the paper showing this non-correlation:

                http://ej.iop.org/images/1748-9326/8/1/011006/erl459410f3_online.jpg

                Another paper, McFarling and Muere et al, 2006, also shows that, from 1750 to 1875, there was a lack of obvious correlation between CO2 emissions from humans and the atmospheric levels of CO2, as indicated by this graph:

                http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Law17501875.png

                What’s rather surprising is that you are so unfamiliar with the science that you aren’t even aware that Salby’s points are anything but new and unheralded.

                11

            • #
              FIN

              There’s a definite “tell” going on here. That is, Nova hasn’t jumped on you like a rabid hyaena cos even she’s back peddling from the drivel posted on this thread. Bit like the Junior rocket scientist’s curve fitting crap. Oops, that one has been quietly shredded. Nothing to see here folks move along, oh look Murry, he’s good for a distraction. That’ll keep the punters busy.

              121

            • #
              the Griss

              Mann’s work is a FABRICATION, a FAIRY TALE. !!

              Only a monumental fool would continue to worship him. !

              112

        • #
          the Griss

          “even basic work like Michael Mann’s ”

          roflmao.. now you TRULY are being idiotic.!

          Basic is very much the correct term. Kindergarten type basic. !

          162

        • #
          Kenneth Richard

          “And yet over two dozen independent studies have replicated Mann’s work, finding it to have been correct.”

          The MBH98 graph has the Medieval Warm Period -0.8 C colder than the late 20th century:

          http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/hockey_stick/mann_hockeystick.jpg

          The IPCC’s latest report, using multiple papers as reference points, has the Medieval Warm Period as, perhaps -0.1 C cooler than current temperatures, if not just as warm (global graph on lower right).

          http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-s0i7iaUO_KQ/Ut9qWdMtPUI/AAAAAAAAE4Q/gc3tG-z7mLU/s1600/Fig5-7anim.gif

          Which reconstruction do you deny – the IPCC’s, or Mann’s? You can’t accept both. So which is it?

          181

          • #
            Craig Thomas

            Well, if you could link to whatever it is the IPCC says – instead of linking to doctored graphs on a kook-blog – I could offer comment.

            43

            • #
              Kenneth Richard

              Well, if you could link to whatever it is the IPCC says – instead of linking to doctored graphs on a kook-blog – I could offer comment.

              Wow, again with the lack of familiarity with the material. Craig, this graph, which you call “doctored,” comes from the latest IPCC report. It’s in Chapter 5 (WG1). The only “addition” to it was the identification of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age and their corresponding year ranges. Here is a direct photo of the graph (which shows NH (top), SH (below left), and global mean temperatures (lower right) for the last 2,000 years. Notice that the Medieval Warm Period, which Mann made disappear (to -0.8 C colder than present) via data manipulation has returned and is just as warm (or with 0.1 C) as modern temperatures.

              http://i1264.photobucket.com/albums/jj484/rlcina71/MWPinAR5_zpsa8972fb5.jpg

              So now that we’ve got this attempt at obfuscation out of the way, I will ask my question again. See if you can avoid dodging it this time.

              ——————————————–

              The MBH98 graph has the Medieval Warm Period -0.8 C colder than the late 20th century:

              http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/hockey_stick/mann_hockeystick.jpg

              The IPCC’s latest report, using multiple papers as reference points, has the Medieval Warm Period as, perhaps -0.1 C cooler than current temperatures, if not just as warm (global graph on lower right).

              http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-s0i7iaUO_KQ/Ut9qWdMtPUI/AAAAAAAAE4Q/gc3tG-z7mLU/s1600/Fig5-7anim.gif

              Which reconstruction do you deny – the IPCC’s, or Mann’s? You can’t accept both. So which is it?

              01

        • #
          QuixoteNexus

          HAHAHAHA Nice one Craig ! Best piece of trolling in a long time. Nobody ever told you that the hockey stick has been beaten up so often it now thinks its a shillelagh?
          I get it , this is Pointman in one of his many guises being a semi educated alarmist , I can hardly wait to watch this develop ~(>) .

          131

        • #
          meltemian

          Please tell me you’re a ‘wind-up’?
          Haven’t laughed so much in ages.

          10

    • #
      farmerbraun

      “the rise in CO2 is human-caused ”

      Want to try for an accurate statement that is worth discussing?

      241

    • #
      turnedoutnice

      CO2 climate sensitivity is on verge, zero, as is the case for any other well mixed GHG reducing OLR.

      The water cycle is immensely subtle and Climate Alchemy has missed out the really important bit!

      281

    • #
      Lionell Griffith

      A Dancing Marionette

      He cannot resist the motion.
      His masters pull the strings.
      Without will or devotion.
      The dancing is all he brings.

      He dances into the night.
      No will to do but prancing.
      Having no thought or delight.
      A dancing marionette is dancing.

      240

      • #
        the Griss

        How true. Lionell.

        This is one aspect that HAVE to try to divert attention from.

        Hence the clown’s diversionary tactics, yet again.

        What proportion of rise in CO2 is human-caused is very much an important topic of debate, and one the alarmista MUST try to avoid.

        I thought the CONSENSUS was about 97% natural, 3% human. 😉

        301

        • #
          Tim

          We 97% are so learned and superior that we don’t even need to discuss this subject with you uneducated peasants.

          So why are you here?

          100

    • #
      Sam Pyeatte

      That Dr. Salby has been rejected by the AGW totalitarians is proof the opposition to him is purely political, and laced with fear. Fear the truth will get out and gain traction. Well, too late.

      171

      • #
        Craig Thomas

        Welll…..that, and the fact his beliefs about CO2 appear to have no scientific basis.

        630

        • #
          James Bradley

          So, Craig, we are better to believe you that the human contribution of 12ppm CO2 to the concentration of CO2 that already makes up the planet’s atmosphere is bringing us to some imaginery tipping point?

          121

          • #
            Craig Thomas

            When I went to school, the difference between 280ppm and 400ppm would have been calculated as 120ppm, but perhaps we went to different schools?

            What’s this “imaginary tipping point” you talk about? I can’t see it being among the topics under discussion here? Is this a diversion, tangent, excursion, redirection, deflection, digression, deviation, or divergence on your part?

            And no. Don’t believe me. Rely instead on what the relevant experts, including every single national science academy in the world is telling you.

            627

            • #
              The Backslider

              Don’t believe me. Rely instead on what the relevant experts, including every single national science academy in the world is telling you.

              All of those science academies have told us about CO2 having itself a slight warming effect, with the big thing being the “forcings”, in particular increased atmospheric water vapor, which supposedly amplifies the warming caused by CO2.

              Pity however that the NOAA in fact tells us that atmospheric water vapor has fallen.

              You were saying…?

              120

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                Maybe the scientists should look into that?

                I’m guessing they would find that the truth is the precise opposite of what you assert. The reason I’m guessing this is that it is common knowledge that measurements show the upper troposphere has been moistening for the last 30 years.

                423

              • #
                The Backslider

                The reason I’m guessing this is that it is common knowledge that measurements show the upper troposphere has been moistening for the last 30 years.

                So wha?… we should all rely on your guesses?

                I prefer to accept what the NOAA has had to say about it. Please take the time to look it up.

                You should also take the time to question whether simply accepting at face value what you read on the SkS website is a wise thing……. “common knowledge” from there has little value.

                111

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                As far as I am aware, NOAA has nothing to say which even remotely resembles what you are saying it says.

                Of course, if they did say it, it would be a simple matter for you to back up your assertion with a simple link to where it was at NOAA that you read this supposed nugget of information…

                419

              • #
                The Backslider

                As far as I am aware, NOAA has nothing to say which even remotely resembles what you are saying it says.

                Wrong!

                11

              • #
                Richard C (NZ)

                Craig #6.5.1.1.1

                >”..it is common knowledge that measurements show the upper troposphere has been moistening for the last 30 years.”

                Moistening? It’s common knowledge? Really? I don’t think so.

                Figure below: Variations in the total column water vapour in the atmosphere since July 1983 according to The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP).

                http://climate4you.com/images/TotalColumnWaterVapourDifferentAltitudesObservationsSince1983.gif

                Refer the 680 – 310mb curve for upper troposphere. That’s not moistening Craig. Unless column water vapour has been redefined of course but I’m sure it hasn’t.

                20

            • #
              James Bradley

              Craig, the human contribution of 3% of 400ppm is 12ppm – of that Australia is apparently over-represented by contributing about .18 ppm – which if acted upon now by closing down all human CO2 producing activity will have some spurious affect in about 1,000 years per Tim Flannery and the IPCC.

              162

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                James, that is a bizarre assertion which reflects poorly on your mathematical and logical abilities.

                Let me analogise thusly:

                You have a bucket with a hole in it under your leaking water tank. The bucket has 280ml of water in it. Initially, the drips coming from the water tank exactly equal the drips leaving via the hole in the bucket, so the bucket stays at a constant 280ml.
                Then, you grab a teaspoon of water, every day, and tip it into the bucket. After a month, you notice that the bucket now has 400ml of water in it.

                According to your (faulty) logic, only 5ml of that 120ml is due to the teaspoon. Of course, this logic is wrong: the 5ml added every day is in excess of the outgoing flow from the hole in the bucket, and therefore water now accumulates.

                I trust you now understand why you (and Salby) are wrong?

                520

              • #
                James Bradley

                Oh I see, so human activity has suddenly increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by some 43% and now that becomes somehow crucial because?

                82

              • #
                James Bradley

                Sorr, I was being sarcastic.

                Human contribution to atmospheric CO2 is still 3% of 400ppm.

                That still equals 12ppm.

                Math is specific.

                Semantics is not.

                Gravity works.

                111

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                …because?

                Let’s ask the scientists shall we?

                Maybe ecologists can tell us something interesting? Maybe economists can expand on the implications?

                Just as long as we don’t just bury our heads in the sand throwing up all sorts of excuses for not believing the reality of what’s going on.

                522

              • #
                the Griss

                “Let’s ask the scientists shall we?”

                I’m here Craig… Ask away. 🙂

                103

              • #
                cohenite

                You have a bucket with a hole in it

                And there you have it folks; AGW science succinctly summed up by Mr Thomas.

                122

        • #
          The Backslider

          his beliefs about CO2 appear to have no scientific basis.

          Please explain to us your own reasoning showing that Salby’s “beliefs about CO2” have no scientific basis. If you can.

          120

          • #
            The Backslider

            *crickets*

            61

          • #
            Craig Thomas

            Where is the science? A bunch of powerpoint slides from a talk he once gave? Is that it?

            517

            • #
              the Griss

              Try watching it with an open mind, (if you can find the key)

              you may just LEARN something….. after you have watched it a dozen or so times.

              But do go back and do some basic junior high school science first, just to get you started.

              112

              • #
                Craig Thomas

                You can’t learn much from somebody who is wrong.

                519

              • #
                the Griss

                “You can’t learn much from somebody who is wrong.”

                I take it you frequent SkS or similar then, because you don’t seem to have learnt anything.

                122

            • #
              Kenneth Richard

              Where is the science? A bunch of powerpoint slides from a talk he once gave? Is that it?

              Where is the science? Are you completely unaware that Salby has published a textbooks on atmospheric physics?

              Salby, M., 1992: The Atmosphere. In Climate Systems Modeling, K. Trenberth Ed. Sponsored Jointly by UCAR and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Cambridge University Press, 53-115.

              Salby, M., 1996: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. International Geophysics Series, Academic Press, pp. 628. 2nd Printing (2005)

              Salby, M., 2002: Planetary Waves. in Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology, P. Crutzen Ed. Academic Press, 12, 357-371.

              Salby, M., 2003: Fundamental Forces and Governing Equations, Chapter 2, in Handbook of Weather, Water, and Climate: Dynamics, Cliimate, Physical Meteorology, Weather Systems, and Measurements, T. Potter and B. Colman, eds. (Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken NJ, 2003), 7-20.

              Salby, M., 2009: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. International Geophysics Series, Academic Press, 2nd Edition

              http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Atmosphere-Climate-Murry-Salby/dp/0521767180

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              • #
                the Griss

                “Are you completely unaware….”

                Yes, he does appear to be. !

                Brain-washed at high pressure.. wiped clean of actual knowledge and thinking ability..

                112

              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                None of these links represents research that supports Murry Salby’s talk where he started raving on about a mathematically implausible interpretation of the carbon cycle.

                Do you genuinely not know that?

                62

              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                None of these links represents research that supports Murry Salby’s talk where he started raving on about a mathematically implausible interpretation of the carbon cycle.

                What was the physical mechanism that caused atmospheric CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during interglacials about 800 years after the temperatures began to rise during the last 800,000 years? Was it not primarily the warmed ocean waters outgassing their stores of CO2? In other words, was it not warmed temperatures causing the amplified CO2 effect? That’s what the science says. If you don’t agree, then what was it?

                01

            • #
              Raven

              Where is the science? A bunch of powerpoint slides from a talk he once gave? Is that it?

              Don’t let Al Gore hear you say that . . .

              101

              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                Does Al Gore pretend to tell all the scientists in the world that they are wrong and he has better knowledge than them?

                52

              • #
                the Griss

                No Vince.. just the one he isn’t funding. !

                The rest are bought and paid for.

                They have their instructions.

                11

              • #
                Raven

                Does Al Gore pretend to tell all the scientists in the world that they are wrong and he has better knowledge than them?

                Sure, I think Al Gore absolutely has better knowledge than all the scientists.
                One only needs to see the rise in his bank balance is inextricably linked to his AGW activism, whereas all those scientist/activists have merely hopelessly compromised their integrity.

                00

              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                Does Al Gore pretend to tell all the scientists in the world that they are wrong and he has better knowledge than them?

                Has Al Gore ever called that the thousands of scientists who do not agree that “carbon pollution” emitted by humans will melt the polar ice caps, cause more frequent and more intense floods, droughts, hurricanes, storms, raise sea levels by “20 feet”….are “climate deniers”?

                10

            • #
              The Backslider

              As I said, *crickets*

              I’m gonna start calling you “Polly” pretty soon….

              20

              • #
                the Griss

                Gees, I though Polly was a parrot.

                This guy is more like a Galah. !!

                Golly Galah.. rather than Polly Parrot.

                10

        • #
          the Griss

          Poor Craig, your lack of comprehension of Salby’s work must truly be hurting your feeble little mind.

          Go peddle you worthless propaganda elsewhere.

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    • #
      Peter Miller

      “Salby’s CO2 stuff is drivel. Its been taken to pieces by many people.”

      Obviously, you meant to say:

      “The official viewpoint of the official Pan-Global Climate Bureaucracy is that Salby’s CO2 stuff is drivel. It has been taken to pieces by the data manipulation department of the Climate Inquisition for daring to use actual observations, as opposed to theoretical computer models.”

      No need for any thanks, I am only too happy to help, when such an obvious mistake is made.

      501

      • #
        Vince Whirlwind

        You’re not thinking.

        If you subtract the annual atmospheric CO2 increase from the annual CO2 emitted by humans, you get a positive value which represents CO2 being emitted by humans but not being accumulated in the atmosphere.
        That is to say, the natural carbon cycle is fixing more CO2 than it is releasing.
        (Remember: released CO2 is still increasing).

        It’s actually as simple as that – Salby’s methematical contortions aren’t just wrong, they are completely senseless.

        63

        • #
          the Griss

          “You’re not thinking.”

          Coming from you..

          that is truly hilarious. 🙂

          IRONY !!!!!

          Pothead calling the silverware black.

          11

    • #

      I would like some credible sources for your claim – and not Wikipedia or the usual out-of-focus generalizations that are typical of climatologists.
      Salby also makes claims about being able to explain methane levels, which have recently stabilized.

      301

      • #
        Vince Whirlwind

        And are those claims by Salby “out-of-focus generalizations”, or are they written down in the form of a published research paper including full details of all his data and all his methods?

        52

    • #
      Kenneth Richard

      William Connelley:

      Why is it that, from 1750 to 1875, human emissions of CO2 didn’t rise to any detectable degree, and yet CO2 levels rose by 15 ppm, as determined by MacFarling Muere et al, 2006 (see below graph)?

      http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Law17501875.png

      222

      • #
        tom0mason

        And if the UK was part of the world back then, the UK’s CET record shows massive temperature rise over that period.
        http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/08/12/cet-seasonal-trends/

        70

      • #
        Craig Thomas

        Kenneth has a basic misunderstanding: cumulative emissions affects CO2 levels. Annual variance in emissions is irrelevant unless it represents a trend in some direction.

        423

        • #
          Kenneth Richard

          Kenneth has a basic misunderstanding: cumulative emissions affects CO2 levels.

          Actually, temperature changes affect CO2 levels much more than human emissions do. That’s why CO2 levels rose from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during interglacials (800 years later) for the last 800,000 years of the ice core record…when no human CO2 emissions were involved. The CO2 rise followed the temperature rise in the past, not the other way around.

          The same holds true today.

          151

          • #
            Vince Whirlwind

            If that were true you would see inter-annual CO2 variance strongly correlated with global average temperature variance.
            But you don’t.
            There goes another one of your nutty ideas – right down in flames.

            53

            • #
              Kenneth Richard

              If that were true you would see inter-annual CO2 variance strongly correlated with global average temperature variance.
              But you don’t.

              According to these papers, we do.

              http://www.tech-know-group.com/papers/Carbon_dioxide_Humlum_et_al.pdf

              Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature.

              Highlights

              ► The overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere.

              ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.

              ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.

              ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.

              ► Changes in ocean temperatures appear to explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.

              ► CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2, and changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.
              ———————————
              http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v343/n6260/abs/343709a0.html
              The hypothesis that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is related to observable changes in the climate is tested using modern methods of time-series analysis. The results confirm that average global temperature is increasing, and that temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide are significantly correlated over the past thirty years. Changes in carbon dioxide content lag those in temperature by five months.
              ———————————
              http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-paper-demonstrates-temperature.html
              A recent paper published in Nature Climate Change

              http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n5/full/nclimate1817.html

              ….finds a disconnect between man-made CO2 and atmospheric levels of CO2, demonstrating that despite a sharp 25% increase in man-made CO2 emissions since 2003, the growth rate in atmospheric CO2 has slowed sharply since 2002/2003. The data shows that while the growth rate of man-made emissions was relatively stable from 1990-2003, the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 surged up to the record El Nino of 1997-1998. Conversely, growth in man-made emissions surged ~25% from 2003-2011, but the change in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 has flatlined since 1999 along with global temperatures. The data demonstrate temperature drives CO2 levels due to ocean outgassing, man-made CO2 does not drive temperature, and that man is not the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels.
              —————————————-
              http://www.john-daly.com/co2-conc/updated.htm
              There was no significant correlation neither between the surface record and the variations in the increase rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, nor between the emission rate and the increase rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But the MSU record explained the variations in the increase rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to a great extent. A possible explanation to the sensitivity of CO2 concentration to global temperature is the temperature-dependent CO2(atm) – CO2(water) equilibrium. This explanation is supported by the statistical analysis.
              —————————————-
              http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gbc.20028/abstract
              In contrast to recent claims, trends in the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon cannot be detected when accounting for the decadal-scale influence of explosive volcanism and related uncertainties. Our results highlight the importance of considering the role of natural variability in the carbon cycle for interpretation of observations and for data-model intercomparison.
              —————————————

              From Salby’s atmospheric physics textbook:

              “The resemblance between observed changes of CO2 and those anticipated from increased surface temperature also points to a major inconsistency between proxy records of previous climate. Proxy CO2 from the ice core record (Fig 1.13) indicates a sharp increase after the nineteenth century. At earlier times, proxy CO2 becomes amorphous: Nearly homogeneous on time scales shorter than millennial, the ice core record implies virtually no change of atmospheric CO2. According to the above sensitivity, it therefore implies a global-mean climate that is “static,” largely devoid of changes in GMT and CO2. Proxy temperature (Fig. 1.45), on the other hand, exhibits centennial changes of GMT during the last millennium, as large as 0.5–1.0◦ K. In counterpart reconstructions, those changes are even greater (Section 1.6.2). It is noteworthy that, unlike proxy CO2 from the ice core record, proxy temperature in Fig. 1.45 rests on a variety of independent properties. In light of the observed sensitivity, those centennial changes of GMT must be attended by significant changes of CO2 during the last millennium. They reflect a global-mean climate that is “dynamic,” wherein GMT and CO2 change on a wide range of time scales. The two proxies of previous climate are incompatible. They cannot both be correct.” pg. 254
              ————————————-
              “Revealed by natural perturbations to the Earth-atmosphere system, the sensitivity accounts for much of the observed variation of CO2 emission on interannual time scales (Fig. 1.43). It establishes that GMT cannot increase without simultaneously increasing CO2 emission – from natural sources.” pg. 253
              —————————–
              “The results for the two periods are in broad agreement. Together with the strong dependence of CO2 emission on temperature (Fig. 1.43), they imply that a significant portion of the observed increase in r˙CO2 derives from a gradual increase in surface temperature.” pg. 253
              —————————–
              “Warming of SST (by any mechanism) will increase the outgassing of CO2 while reducing its absorption. Owing to the magnitude of transfers with the ocean, even a minor increase of SST can lead to increased emission of CO2 that rivals other sources.” pg. 546

              40

        • #
          James Bradley

          Look out, Richard, Craig may be holding an analogy, the last one he tried on me had holes all through it.

          71

        • #
          cohenite

          cumulative emissions affects CO2 levels.

          Not necessarily Mr Thomas; you in a room with one plant as the base and then another one of your O2 thief mates from Deltoid in the same room would not necessarily increase CO2 if more plants were also put into the room.

          61

          • #
            Craig Thomas

            Maybe some scientists should do some research into the various feedback mechanisms in order to ascertain what the net effect is going to be, huh?

            Oh, turns out many, many scientists have been doing exactly that, and they agree on a climate sensitivity value of between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees.

            Didn’t you know this?

            63

            • #
              Raven

              Oh, turns out many, many scientists have been doing exactly that, and they vary on a climate sensitivity value of between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees.

              There . . . fixed it for you Craig.

              21

              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                Obviously you don’t understand this topic. They agree on the range of values provided by Craig. Do some reading and get up to speed so you don’t waste anymore of our time with your ignorance.

                43

              • #
                the Griss

                “don’t waste anymore of our time with your ignorance”

                Coming from you, that is the eight of irony.

                Your every post is basic ignorance. !!

                And a total waste of your time, unless you are auditioning for clown school.

                01

              • #
                the Griss

                eight… => height

                01

              • #
                Raven

                Obviously you don’t understand this topic. They agree on the range of values . . .

                Don’t understand the topic?

                Hmmm . . . obviously you don’t understand plain English.
                To agree on a range, but not on any single point within that range, is to vary in opinion.
                It’s really that simple.

                F’rinstance . . . you and I might agree I have some rabbits in this bag.
                Neither one of us knows how many rabbits there are, but hey . . . we agree there’s a bag of rabbits.

                So if all these scientists don’t know how many rabbits are involved, they obviously tend to look like they are pulling them out of their collective a#se.

                In other words, it’s logical to conclude they have NFI.

                00

        • #
          tom0mason

          And you are here not to listen but to preach, as made edivent by your comment –

          “You can’t learn much from somebody who is wrong.”

          You are a troll.

          30

    • #
      Bulldust

      It would be refreshing to see WC attack the rubbish that gets trotted out on the warmest side with the same vigour. You know that will never happen due to his deep Green leanings. Shameless advocate is shameless.

      241

      • #
        Bulldust

        I notice WC won’t touch my question despite being happy to spam drivel all over other threads in response to virtually every post directed at him. He immediately changes tack whenever the truth is pointed out.

        20

        • #

          Your question was too vague.

          http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2012/03/17/arctic-methane-emergency-group/

          What, in particular, do you want attacked? Provide links.

          31

          • #
            the Griss

            Stott blog again..

            You poor lonesome little child !!

            00

            • #
              Bulldust

              He gets very few fellow traveller’s at his vindictive blog, which is why he comes to popular blogs such as Jo’s to drum up extra hits.

              Where to start WC? There has been so much taxpayer funded drivel trotted out on the warmist side it’s hard to know where to start. Anything climate-related by Lewandowsky, Briffa’s infamous one tree, or Mann’s hockey stick… like I said, such rich pickings.

              Heck, anything vaguely truthful about the humongous limitations of modeling would also be refreshing. As someone who deals with models daily I agree wholeheartedly with Dr Box:

              Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.

              The IPCC models certainly satisfied the first part of that statement…

              00

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        Bulldust

        Then again Craig Thomas might be a sock puppet alter ego…

        20

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      Scott

      William Connolley’s CO2 stuff is drivel.

      There fixed if for you.

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      KuhnKat

      Conoily,

      Is “drivel” one of those scientific terms you showed you mastery of over at Wikipropaganda.

      Please, give us all a laugh and give us a TECHNICAL explanation of why Salby is wrong, if you still have a brain cell to do it with that is…

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      • #
        Vince Whirlwind

        Just as soon as Salby professionally publishes his research including all his data and his methods, people will be able to offer the usual professional criticism.

        In the meantime, all we have to go on is his drivel.

        62

    • #
      michael hammer

      William Connolly;

      NOAA publish historical data showing OLR has been generally rising from 1970 to 2010 – the principal claimed global warming period. Since the theory of AGW is that rising CO2 reduces OLR (less outgoing energy with same incoming energy leads to warming) could you please explain to me how the NOAA data is reconcilable with the theory of AGW. I am genuinely very interested in your explanation.

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      James (Aus.)

      So who are “the many people”, Connolly? Names, dates, name of papers, journals. Off you go.

      101

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      TedM

      I am unaware of any sound scientific demolition of Murray Salby’s paper. Just negative rhetoric. You have obviously not worked methodically through his paper. I like James await your references and links. If they exist then I can probably already guess who they are.

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      • #
        Craig Thomas

        What paper? There isn’t one.

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        • #
          The Backslider

          Perhaps you should take the time to listen to somebody far more qualified than you to talk on the subject:

          The fact that Murry Salby is a former colleague of mine and definitely a scientific straight shooter initially caught my attention on this. If correct, his hypothesis has far reaching implications on both AGW science and policy. His presentation was extremely lucid and well done (even without availability of the plots.) The topic he addresses was one that I thought was squarely in the “what we know with confidence” category; this presentation synthesizes and opens up issues at the knowledge frontier on this topic. Fascinating stuff. So if you are irritated that “deniers” will use this talk (and the fact that I featured it on my blog) as ammo in their war against CO2 stabilization policy, well that is too bad. I for one am not going to let your irritation get in the way of having a good discussion here where we all stand to learn something. – Judith Curry

          You have made a number of posts here implying that Salby is wrong. It is now your duty to show us all why.

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            Craig Thomas

            How can you show something is wrong when it doesn’t exist.

            Even Judith Curry admits his powerpoint presentation lacked the data.

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              Kenneth Richard

              Even Judith Curry admits his powerpoint presentation lacked the data.

              What is this about “power point presentation”? Do you actually believe that Salby has nothing more than a power point and some graphs to back up his research? Really?

              http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/04/carbon-cycle-questions/
              Apparently you’re getting your “lacked the data” ideas from this blog post from 2011. Curry was merely saying she wished she had more she could have seen from the presentation, as there was only a podcast available at that point (summer, 2011)…no video, no graphs to view, etc.

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              • #
                Craig Thomas

                I don’t want “video, graphs”.

                I want him to provide his data and his methods.

                What’s he hiding? Why’s he hiding it?

                53

              • #
                The Backslider

                What’s he hiding? Why’s he hiding it?

                Have you asked him?

                01

              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                How could anybody ask him – isn’t he on the run from the law?

                50

              • #
                The Backslider

                isn’t he on the run from the law?

                You do know Vince that Joanne has your IP address and you can easily be found?

                I would suggest that you desist from Libel.

                01

              • #
                Vince Whirlwind

                I think honest scientists like Michael Mann will suing [snipped]

                [Vince we will not publish ad homs and libel. – Mod]

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                the Griss

                “I think honest scientists like Michael Mann ”

                roflmao..

                Ok, you got me with that one, well done 🙂

                Now you are truly getting onto the stand-up-comedy stuff.. clown school beckons !!!

                01

            • #
              The Backslider

              How can I say something is wrong when I insist it doesn’t exist?

              There, fixed it for you.

              20

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          TedM

          What because it was rejected by a second set of reviewers.

          10

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      The Backslider

      Salby’s CO2 stuff is drivel. Its been taken to pieces by many people.

      Ok Billy, show us all how you understand it all and can take it to pieces…. or do you just believe when somebody else tells you they have taken it to pieces?

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        Craig Thomas

        Is this “Billy” thing some sort of feeble attempt at feeling superior?

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        • #

          The key phrase, I believe, is this:

          show us .. you .. can take it to pieces

          and it squarely relates to claims you’ve made repeatedly:

          Salby’s CO2 stuff is drivel. Its been taken to pieces by many people

          Another curiosity wrt that assertion

          How can you show something is wrong when it doesn’t exist

          It sound like you’ll have to make up your mind about whether it doesn’t even exist, or if it indeed has been picked apart. But then again, maybe that’s just the usual confusion among believers on display

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            Once again: Salby hasn’t published his CO2 work; pointing at his textbooks where he regurgitates std stuff doesn’t help. AFAIK – and no-one has pointed to it written down properly anywhere, so AFAAK – Salby’s stuff is only available on youtube. That doesn’t help his scientific credibility.

            > has been picked apart

            http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/11/09/thrust/

            Or maybe you’d trust those well-known pinko-leftists at WUWT:

            http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/05/why-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-1/

            Or you can have an actual real scientist ripping Salby’s stuff up:

            http://www.climatescience.cam.ac.uk/community/file/download/843

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              Kenneth Richard

              Once again: Salby hasn’t published his CO2 work…Salby’s stuff is only available on youtube.

              His CO2 work is in his published graduate level textbook on atmospheric physics.

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              • #

                Firstly, calling it “graduate level” doesn’t make it any better to anyone who has a clue; you should drop the puffery.

                Secondly, as I’ve already said, he *hasn’t* published the interesting stuff there. See 25.1.1.1: “what’s in there is the perfectly uncontroversial CO2-and-T vary together over iceage type timescales (with Salby getting the bit about lags subtly wrong), and the also-uncontroversial CO2-and-T covary over short timescales. What Salby is careful to avoid is the CO2 over decadal and century timescales; because he can’t find any support from reputable papers for what he wants, there.” In particular, the youtube claims that the recent CO2 rise isn’t human-caused aren’t in there.

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                Kenneth Richard

                What Salby is careful to avoid is the CO2 over decadal and century timescales; because he can’t find any support from reputable papers for what he wants, there.

                Here is the textbook itself. Read it and then explain how Salby does not say that CO2 is modulated primarily by temperature, not human emissions.

                http://www.atmosfera.unam.mx/jzavala/OceanoAtmosfera/Physics%20of%20the%20Atmosphere%20and%20Climate%20-%20Murry%20Salby.pdf

                After that, William, please explain what mechanism caused CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during glacials for the last 800,000 years. It wasn’t humans burning fossil fuels. So what was it? And then explain what you mean when you say that Salby can’t find any support in the peer reviewed literature for the conclusion that temperature drives CO2. (See the below papers as reference.)

                “The out-of-phase relationship between rCO2 and δ13C in the instrumental record (Fig. 1.43) is the same one evidenced on longer time scales by ice cores (Fig. 1.14). The out-of-phase relationship in ice cores is regarded as a signature of anthropogenic emission, subject to uncertainties (Sec. 1.2.4). The out-of-phase relationship in the instrumental record, however, is clearly not anthropogenic. —Dr. Salby

                ———————————
                http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-6-1.html
                “Atmospheric CO2 follows temperature changes in Antarctica with a lag of some hundreds of years.”
                ———————————
                Atmospheric CO2 Concentration from 60 to 20 kyr BP from the Taylor Dome ice core, Antarctica (Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 27, Number 5, March 2000) – Andreas Indermuhle et al.

                “The lag was calculated for which the correlation coefficient of the CO2 record and the corresponding temperatures values reached a maximum. The simulation yields a lag of (1200 ± 700) yr.
                ———————————
                Southern Hemisphere and Deep-Sea Warming Led Deglacial Atmospheric CO2 Rise and Tropical Warming (Science, Volume 318, Issue 5849, September 2007) – Lowell Stott et al.

                “Deep sea temperatures warmed by ~2C between 19 and 17 ka B.P. (thousand years before present), leading the rise in atmospheric CO2 and tropical surface ocean warming by ~1000 years.
                ———————————
                Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III (Science, Volume 299, Number 5613, March 2003) – Nicolas Caillon et al.

                “The sequence of events during Termination III suggests that the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years and preceded the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation.”
                ———————————
                Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations (Science, Volume 283, Number 5408, pp. 1712-1714, March 1999) – Hubertus Fischer et al.

                “High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations.
                ———————————
                Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the Last Glacial Termination (Science, Volume 291. Number 5501, January 2001) – Eric Monnin et al.

                “The start of the CO2 increase thus lagged the start of the [temperature] increase by 800 ± 600 years.”
                —————————————————
                http://lgge.osug.fr/IMG/fparrenin/articles/landais-NGeo2013.pdf
                “Two-phase change in CO2, Antarctic temperature and global climate during Termination II” Nature Geoscience 6,1062–1065 (Oct. 2013) – Landais et al.

                “Antarctic temperature started increasing in phase around 136,000 years ago, but in a second phase of Termination II, from 130.5 to 129,000 years ago, the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations lagged that of Antarctic temperature unequivocally….At mid-slope, there is an unequivocal lead of δ15N [temperature] over CO2 of 900 ± 325 yr
                —————————————————-

                http://www.clim-past.net/9/2507/2013/cp-9-2507-2013.html
                “Our isotopic data suggest that the carbon cycle evolution along Termination II and the subsequent interglacial was controlled by essentially the same processes as during the last 24 000 yr, but with different phasing and magnitudes. Furthermore, a 5,000 yr lag in the CO2 decline relative to EDC [East Antarctica] temperatures is confirmed during the glacial inception at the end of MIS5.5 (120,000 yrs before present).”
                —————————————————-
                The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature (Global and Planetary Change, Volume 100, pp. 51–69, January 2013) – Ole Humlum et al.

                “There exist a clear phase relationship between changes of atmospheric CO2 and the different global temperature records, whether representing sea surface temperature, surface air temperature, or lower troposphere temperature, with changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2 always lagging behind corresponding changes in temperature.”

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                > Here is the textbook itself…

                It doesn’t contain his “new” CO2 stuff. If you think it does, please give the chapter and verse and diagram numbers. Its your claim that its in there; if your claim is based on knowledge, then you know exactly where in the book it is. If you’re just puffing, you don’t know where in there it is.

                > The out-of-phase relationship between rCO2 and δ13C in the instrumental record (Fig. 1.43) is the same one evidenced on longer time scales by ice cores

                Fairly odd; he wouldn’t get away with that in a reviewed publication.

                > The out-of-phase relationship in ice cores is regarded as a signature of anthropogenic emission

                That sounds mad. No-one is claiming that the 800 kyr record of the ice cores is showing anthro effects, except right at the end.

                > “The out-of-phase relationship in the instrumental record, however, is clearly not anthropogenic”

                AFAIK, no-one is claiming that it is.

                In youtube, Salby claims that the recent CO2 rise, from 280 to 400 ppm, isn’t human caused. the book doesn’t say that. In youtube, Salby invents some weird physics that makes CO2 disappear in the old ice cores, and wraps this up in shonky maths(http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/11/09/thrust/). That’s not in the book.

                If you believe all this stuff is in the book, then you have another problem: what’s he doing submitting a paper on it? Paper have to be innovative. You can write a book using material in your and other people’s papers. You can’t submit a paper if the material is already in your book.

                > what mechanism caused CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during glacials for the last 800,000 years.

                http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/03/12/yet-more-tco2-lags/

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              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                It doesn’t contain his “new” CO2 stuff. If you think it does, please give the chapter and verse and diagram numbers.

                William, would it have been too much to ask for you to look at the Table of Contents of the textbook? Could you not have figured out that the discussion of CO2 and the greenhouse effect might take place in Chapter 8, section 7, from pages 247 to 260, entitled “The greenhouse effect”? Or how about the ocean’s “Role in the carbon cycle” (chapter 17.3)? Why couldn’t you have looked into this yourself?

                By the way, you still haven’t answered my question. Linking me to a blog post isn’t an answer. Provide me with a direct, succinct answer to the following question (which I have asked 3 times now):

                What physical mechanism caused CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during interglacials after an 800-year lag in the ice core record? It wasn’t humans burning fossil fuels or land use changes. So what was it? Be specific and do not obfuscate.

                Here are some quotes regarding the “CO2 stuff” from Salby’s textbook (that you apparently were too bothered to look up yourself).
                ————————–
                Together, emission from ocean and land sources (∼150 GtC/yr) is two orders of magnitude greater than CO2 emission from combustion of fossil fuel. These natural sources are offset by natural sinks, of comparable strength. However, because they are so much stronger, even a minor imbalance between natural sources and sinks can overshadow the anthropogenic component of CO2 emission.” pg. 546
                ————————–
                “The vast majority of that [greenhouse] warming is contributed by water vapor. Together with cloud, it accounts for 98% of the greenhouse effect.” pg. 249
                ————————–
                “Surface temperature depends on the atmosphere’s optical depth. The latter, in turn, depends on atmospheric composition through radiatively active species. Water vapor is produced at ocean surfaces through evaporation. Carbon dioxide is produced by decomposition of of organic matter. These and other processes that control radiatively active species are temperature dependent.” pg 249,250
                —————————
                The resemblance between observed changes of CO2 and those anticipated from increased surface temperature also points to a major inconsistency between proxy records of previous climate. Proxy CO2 from the ice core record (Fig 1.13) indicates a sharp increase after the nineteenth century. At earlier times, proxy CO2 becomes amorphous: Nearly homogeneous on time scales shorter than millennial, the ice core record implies virtually no change of atmospheric CO2. According to the above sensitivity, it therefore implies a global-mean climate that is “static,” largely devoid of changes in GMT and CO2. Proxy temperature (Fig. 1.45), on the other hand, exhibits centennial changes of GMT during the last millennium, as large as 0.5–1.0◦ K. In counterpart reconstructions, those changes are even greater (Section 1.6.2). It is noteworthy that, unlike proxy CO2 from the ice core record, proxy temperature in Fig. 1.45 rests on a variety of independent properties. In light of the observed sensitivity, those centennial changes of GMT must be attended by significant changes of CO2 during the last millennium. They reflect a global-mean climate that is “dynamic,” wherein GMT and CO2 change on a wide range of time scales. The two proxies of previous climate are incompatible. They cannot both be correct.” pg. 254
                ————————
                “Revealed by natural perturbations to the Earth-atmosphere system, the sensitivity accounts for much of the observed variation of CO2 emission on interannual time scales (Fig. 1.43). It establishes that GMT cannot increase without simultaneously increasing CO2 emissionfrom natural sources.” pg. 253
                ————————
                “The results for the two periods are in broad agreement. Together with the strong dependence of CO2 emission on temperature (Fig. 1.43), they imply that a significant portion of the observed increase in r˙CO2 derives from a gradual increase in surface temperature.” pg. 253
                ————————
                Warming of SST (by any mechanism) will increase the outgassing of CO2 while reducing its absorption. Owing to the magnitude of transfers with the ocean, even a minor increase of SST can lead to increased emission of CO2 that rivals other sources.” pg. 546
                ————————
                “The CO2 absorption band is already saturated (Fig. 8.1). How then can increased levels of CO2 produce global warming?” pg. 264

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              • #
                the Griss

                I fail to see why anyone [snip] would keep citing that “stoat” blog.

                It is totally unreliable and full of meaningless gibberish and misinformation.

                But I guess that it is all you have.

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              • #

                I admit, I’m impressed – there’s far more wacko stuff that I thought he’d dare stuff into a text book. Compare his “The vast majority of that [greenhouse] warming is contributed by water vapor. Together with cloud, it accounts for 98% of the greenhouse effect.” (note no reference) compared to wiki’s well-referenced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_vapor

                And “The CO2 absorption band is already saturated (Fig. 8.1). How then can increased levels of CO2 produce global warming?” is truely naivist drivel.

                This is an excellent example of how its easier to write junk into a textbook than a paper. But, still, the reason you’re forced to quote so much is that its all insinuation – he doesn’t say the rise from 280 to 400 isn’t human caused, as he does on youtube. Presumably because he doesn’t dare to.

                me> you have another problem: what’s he doing submitting a paper on it?
                you> -silence-

                > CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during interglacials

                You’ll find that

                http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/03/12/yet-more-tco2-lags/

                is specific, succinct, clearly written and not at all obscure. Its even by a real scientist, which is why you’ve never heard of him. You may also find http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/01/19/theres-no-light-the-foolish-ca/ helpful.

                44

              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                (note no reference) compared to wiki’s well-referenced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_vapor

                Oh yes, and Wikipedia is so much more reliable as a resource than highly referenced textbooks on atmospheric physics used by graduate students. After all, if you wrote it, it must be true. Right? (see below)

                And regarding references, there are 14 pages of references in the back of the textbook (and textbooks are source-referenced differently than papers—apparently this is news to you).

                This is an excellent example of how its easier to write junk into a textbook than a paper.

                How hard was it for you, William, to write your own blog junk (5,000+ articles) on an online encyclopedia page? Did you have any real scientists reviewing and critiquing your “work” as you deleted papers and references written by scientists who you didn’t agree with?

                And no, your blog post most definitely does not answer my question, which you continue to dodge by hiding behind your little “But I’m a blogger!” curtain. Answer the question directly right here:

                What was the physical mechanism that caused CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during interglacials about 800 years after temperatures rose? Was it something other than the warmer ocean temperatures during the interglacials, which led to the outgassing of the vast ocean stores of CO2?

                ——————————————
                http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020515/climategate-the-corruption-of-wikipedia/

                Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

                All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
                ————————————–

                http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikipropaganda-on-global-warming/

                Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.

                Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party.

                And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore. Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry.

                Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelley used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding.

                http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_law_ban_wikipedia.htm
                “Wikipedia has long been banned as a credible source for schools and universities…”

                School officials unite in banning Wikipedia (The Seattle Times)
                Wikipedia banned from UCSC class (Vallejo Times Hearald)
                A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source (The New York Times)
                Fake Wikipedia prof altered 20,000 entries (The Daily Telegraph, UK)
                Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar (Canada Free Press)
                Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems (The Register)
                Dutch Justice Ministry to Block 30,000 Workers From Using Wikipedia (FOX News)
                Falling exam passes blamed on Wikipedia ‘littered with inaccuracies’ (The Scotsman, UK)
                Insider Editing at Wikipedia (The New York Times)
                Judges told repeatedly to stop using Wikipedia (ArsTechnica)
                Congress caught making false entries in Wikipedia (CNET News)
                Australian politicians ‘doctor Wikipedia entries’ (The Daily Telegraph, UK)

                10

              • #
                the Griss

                The WC is now totally irrelevant to any meaningful discussion on climate.

                He knows it too…….. don’t you, WC. 🙂
                [snip]

                10

            • #
              The Backslider

              That doesn’t help his scientific credibility.

              Perhaps you should replace your own pathetic name on your Wikipedia page of famous and notable scientists with that of a real and notable scientist, such as Salby?

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      QuixoteNexus

      We actually have a remarkable admission from billy goat gruff troll :-

      “There are lots of interesting things to argue about – the value of climate sensitivity, say. But that the rise in CO2 is human-caused isn’t worth discussing.”

      I,m happy to go along with that so STFU!

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    • #
      Newminster

      Ah! Enter the Stoat, eco-activist, computer programmer and wiki-fiddler par excellence!
      Why we should pay the slightest attention to your views on anything to do with climate, coloured as they are by your association with the eco-luddite tendency, is beyond me.
      But since you’re here, let us have the definitive evidence that Salby’s views on CO2 are drivel.
      (Preferably without referring us to (un)realclimate!
      I have to say given the choice between Curry and Connolley I know which side I would come down on.

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      jimbrock

      Is this the same William Connelly who was deprived of editing privileges at Wikipedia? I should be convinced by anything he posts? Chuckle.

      50

  • #
    Bruce

    I still await the truth of this story.

    40

    • #
      the Griss

      I suspect the real truth is floating around in emails asking, “how can we shut this Salby guy up!”

      They KNEW he was onto the truth, and they couldn’t let that happen.

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      • #
        James Bradley

        If they had nothing to fear they wouldn’t censor his work.

        Just acting like a totalitarian regime bent on quashing dissent to protect a contaminated manifesto really.

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          What work? Where did he publish it?

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          • #
            The Backslider

            What work? Where did he publish it?

            The rest of the World seems to know. Why don’t you take the time to find out, Google is your friend.

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            • #
              Craig Thomas

              The rest of the world knows what I know: it doesn’t exist.

              And there you are, defending something that exists only in your imagination.

              You’re like my mad uncle who sometimes starts jumping around because he’s being attacked by wasps. Wasps nobody else can see.

              716

              • #

                I would suggest that the rest of the world knows an awful lot more than you do. Especially those there who actually want to know, find out and learn things ..

                BTW I don’t think your anecdote about what runs (or jumps) in your family will be helpful to your ‘argument’ … Just a thought 😉

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                cohenite

                You’re like my mad uncle who sometimes starts jumping around because he’s being attacked by wasps. Wasps nobody else can see.

                I see madness runs in your family; you also jump about because of something which doesn’t exist: AGW.

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              • #
                James Bradley

                Craig,

                So why did you join the posts on this site if it doesn’t exist?

                I just step back from mad uncles, smile and walk away.

                That would be why alarmists site are under represented.

                That would be why you are posting here.

                You have no other audience.

                Craving attention.

                Were you abused?

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              • #
                The Backslider

                it doesn’t exist

                Again then I ask you to explain – if it does not exist, how then can you say that Murray Salby is “wrong”?

                What exactly is he wrong about (again)?

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  • #
    David L. Hagen

    Readers: Listen and judge for yourself the integrity of Murry Salby’s technical presentations.
    Check out the summary of his slides

    Salby’s analysis is supported by Beenstock et al. 2012.

    We use statistical methods for nonstationary time series to test the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming (AGW), according to which an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations raised global temperature in the 20th century. Specifically, the methodology of polynomial cointegration is used to test AGW since during the observation period (1880–2007) global temperature and solar irradiance are stationary in 1st differences whereas greenhouse gases and aerosol forcings are stationary in 2nd differences. We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we find that greenhouse gas forcing might have had a temporary effect on global temperature.

    Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming M. Beenstock, Y. Reingewertz, and N. Paldor, Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss., 3, 561-596, 2012 http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/3/561/2012/
    doi:10.5194/esdd-3-561-2012

    William Connelly demeans himself by ad hominem attacks rather than using the scientific method to address the substance of Murry Salby’s evidence and the accuracy of his models and their predictions.
    Perhaps he can study the foundations of climate science sufficiently to recognize that both the cause of the rise in CO2 and the sensitivity of climate to CO2 are foundational to the global warming projections. Especially considering that current global climate models “only” show about 200% of the actual global warming trend since 1979.

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      Craig Thomas

      William Connelly *could* do that, if only Salby were to publish any such substance.

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        The Backslider

        William Connelly *could* do that, if only Salby were to publish any such substance.

        Hang on…. if you have not read/seen any of his work, how can you say that he is wrong?

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          Craig Thomas

          If there is no work, then how can you say he is right?

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            The Backslider

            If there is no work

            But there is. Now, answer my question.

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            James Bradley

            Craig, when presented with that which you asked for you ignore its existence – that would make you a denier.

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            Kenneth Richard

            If there is no work, then how can you say he is right?

            Salby writes textbooks on atmospheric physics, Craig. That’s his “work.” Are you so devoid of motivation that you couldn’t have figured this out for yourself?

            Here’s a blog post that has excerpts from his latest published work.

            http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-textbook-explains-why-man-made_21.html

            Salby, M., 1992: The Atmosphere. In Climate Systems Modeling, K. Trenberth Ed. Sponsored Jointly by UCAR and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Cambridge University Press, 53-115.

            Salby, M., 1996: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. International Geophysics Series, Academic Press, pp. 628. 2nd Printing (2005)

            Salby, M., 2002: Planetary Waves. in Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology, P. Crutzen Ed. Academic Press, 12, 357-371.

            Salby, M., 2003: Fundamental Forces and Governing Equations, Chapter 2, in Handbook of Weather, Water, and Climate: Dynamics, Cliimate, Physical Meteorology, Weather Systems, and Measurements, T. Potter and B. Colman, eds. (Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken NJ, 2003), 7-20.

            Salby, M., 2009: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. International Geophysics Series, Academic Press, 2nd Edition

            http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Atmosphere-Climate-Murry-Salby/dp/0521767180

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              Craig Thomas

              So…nothing about how all the CO2 put in the atmosphere by human activity somehow doesn’t exist, then?

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                The Backslider

                So…nothing about how all the CO2 put in the atmosphere by human activity somehow doesn’t exist, then?

                Oh, so you read the book (that doesn’t exist) did you?

                Please give us all a point by point refutation of Murray Salby’s work.

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                The Backslider

                *crickets* again….

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                Kenneth Richard

                So…nothing about how all the CO2 put in the atmosphere by human activity somehow doesn’t exist, then?

                Please identify where Salby has said that human emissions of CO2 “don’t exist.”

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        The Backslider

        William Connelly *could* do that

        Of course he could, he is a World famous climate scientist after all, isn’t he?

        BTW, he will hate you for spelling his name wrong……

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        the Griss

        Salby scares the crap out of you guys, doesn’t he. 🙂

        So funny to watch the desperation at the mere mention of his name. !

        The grubs come out of the dung heap, one after another.

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          Crakar24

          Its a bit like playing “whackamole” aint it.

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          Craig Thomas

          I’m no grub.
          I’ve never been found to have, “overcharged his grants and violated financial conflict of interest policies, displaying “a pattern of deception, a lack of integrity, and a persistent and intentional disregard of NSF and University rules and policies” and a “consistent willingness to violate rules and regulations, whether federal or local, for his personal benefit.”
          *That’s* what a grub would do.

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            Seems like you very much rather would be talking about something else.

            Now, while you’re at it with mud slinging, can you explain the source of such claims? AFAIK what you quote is from a ‘confidential’ report.

            Do you know what that report actually claims if you read its entirety? I know. But do you?

            Or are you really just the snippet-collector you come across as?

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            mark

            Just a sec….at the start of this thread CT claims not to know anything about or the relationship of Queensland Uni to Salby.

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            the Griss

            “I’m no grub.”

            Opinions differ. !

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            cohenite

            I’m no grub.

            Au contraire: you’re definitely a larval form.

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            Newminster

            You need a hand with those goalposts, Craig?
            They must be awfully heavy to shift all by yourself.

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            jimbrock

            Reminds me of another statement: “I am not a crook.”

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        the Griss

        William Connelly *could* do that

        Gees, you seriously overestimate the WC’s ability!

        The ONLY think the WC can do is propaganda BS. !!

        Were you one of his students? You seem to have the same arrogant ignorance.

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      Craig Thomas

      Sadly for Salby (if what you say is true), the paper by Beenstock (not a climate scientist) merely proves that linear regression doesn’t apply to climate science. Oops. What was Salby trying to do?

      Some of Beenstock’s conclusions and methods were debunked here:
      http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/219/2013/esdd-4-219-2013.pdf

      All in all, if you are trying to tie Salby to Beenstock, then you have assisted William Connelly by backing up his assertion that Salby’s data-free powerpoint presentation was drivel.

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        cohenite

        Very amusing; Mr Thomas links to Hendry and Pretis rebutted here.

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          Vince Whirlwind

          I see a rebuttal by non-scientists who give the game away by making all sorts of wild scietnific assertions that are WAY outside their sphere of competence.

          This points to them being emotionally involved with a belief in ideas they aren’t competent to properly analyse.

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    Rereke Whakaaro

    … the proportion of heavy to light carbon atoms in the atmosphere has “changed in a way that can be attributed to addition of fossil fuel carbon”— with light carbon on the rise.

    I have criticised the “can be attributed” phrase before. The word “can” means that it is possible, and theoretically feasible. More accurately, the phrase “is attributed” would be more appropriate, because it is more certain, and closer to what has actually happened, but that phrase leaves no wriggle-room, and no means of escape.

    But the real issue is with the word, “attributed”, which literally means, assigned, or given. There is no causal factor implied in the word “attributed”. Something is assigned, or given, by human action, human whim, or political expediency.

    Its presence of that phrase in the IPCC political Reports invalidates the whole political hypothesis, and also brings the scientific hypothesis into doubt, because if scientific proof were present, attribution would not be required.

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    michael hammer

    I seriously wonder how this phase of science will be viewed by historians. Salby has carrid out a piece of research in a professional manner and should be entitled to have that published. Climate gate made it crystal clear that one side of the debate is actively supressing critical points of view and this is simply further proof of that state of affairs. For an employer to strand an employee overseas when they had effectively guaranteed his return via a confirmed return ticket is so extreme as to border on the criminal in my view.

    When this sort of behaviour has occured in the past it was a red flag indicator that not only was the underlying science shonky but that its proponents knew it was shonky. Serious science does not shy away from criticism because that is how the science is proven.

    This issue of mans emissions causing rising CO2 is very much up for debate. Firstly dismissing all those wet CO2 measurements that do not conform to the theory while accepting those that do is classic confirmation bias. Then the point about CO2 being greatest over wilderness areas is very significant. Also the question of why the correlation between human emissions and atmospheric CO2 any works if one assumes no net negative feedback yet we know strong negative feedback does occur (loook at the greening of the mid latitudes). The postulate of man causing rising CO2 is nowhere near as certain as AGW porponents make out and they are trying to avoid having this issue explored by the claim of obviousness. There was an earlier analogy “isn’t it patently obvious a heavier object will fall faster than a light object – so obvious its not worth discussing”.

    However to me the utter refutation of the AGW hypothesis is the OLR data. The central claim is that rising CO2 reduces energy loss to space ie: it reduces outgoing long wave radiation. This is the absolutely fundamental central tenant of the whole theory yet the NOAA data shows OLR has been rising not falling. That entirely by itself is enough to utterly demolish the theory that AGW is the dominant effect on our climate today.

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      Peter C

      The central claim is that rising CO2 reduces energy loss to space ie: it reduces outgoing long wave radiation. This is the absolutely fundamental central tenant of the whole theory yet the NOAA data shows OLR has been rising not falling

      If CO2 is rising and OLR is rising, that is a correlation. Since global temperature is not rising the increasing OLR cannot be due to global temperature. Could it be that CO2 is causing increased OLR. That would mean that Greenhouse gases help COOL the Earth! A radical thought.

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        michael hammer

        Peter you forget the thoery is that rising CO2 should cause FALLING OLR so the correlation is negative not positive – the effect being the exact opposite of what a theory requires hardly supports the thoery. Apart from which, the rate of rise of the two is completely different so there is no real correlation other than both are +ve.

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          Peter C

          Please explain Michael..

          1. I am not concerned with any theory. I am looking at the empirical evidence which you reported. CO2 is going up. OLR is going up. That is positive correlation.

          2. The rate of rise is completely different? OLR = AxCO2. A can be any number

          3.

          !Peter you forget the thoery is that rising CO2 should cause FALLING OLR so the correlation is negative not positive –

          That seems to be an answer to the question that I asked on the Weekend Unthreaded. Thank you.

          Question was: Does the Greenhouse theory make any prediction which can be tested empirically?

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            NielsZoo

            “Question was: Does the Greenhouse theory make any prediction which can be tested empirically?”

            Ummm… based on my understanding of current greenhouse “theory” is that the the main “investigators” in the field are careful to create “proof” that may not be reproduced by any means acceptable to any other branches of the physical or mathematical sciences or which align with any acceptable definition of the term “proof.” In those cases that it may be possible to independently invalidate the current theories settled science, archived samples, raw data, methods, algorithms, software etc. shall be properly mislabeled, mishandled, misfiled, re-calibrated, edited, redacted or deleted before any release is approved.

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            michael hammer

            Hi Peter;

            To answer your questions. Yes CO2 and OLR are both going up but then CO2 and the price of more or less any commodity you care to consider are both going up. Does that mean correlation between them as well? Sure if both CO2 and OLR are rising linearly then there can be any constant of proportionality but infact CO2 is supposedly rising more or less linearly but OLR is not. In fact the pattern of OLR rise is far more closely correlated to the satellite temperature record. Which would simply mean OLR changes with temperature exactly as one would expect from very well known laws such as the Stefan Boltzman law. Indeed, it would give us a way to measure climate sensitivity – change in emission for a given change in temperature. I did do the calcs and the increase in OLR was greater than predicted even for a black body which is not possible if its due to temperature alone. Thats suggests emissivity is changing as well and the obvious contender is cloud cover – change in albedo. But I digress, both the fact that direction of change is opposite to that predicted and that the shape of the rise of CO2 and OLR do not match speaks against the theory. The direction being opposite is by far the more significant.
            Your second question as to whether CAGW makes any testable predictions, yes it does make a few . Firstly the one which was the point of my original past. The absolute fundamental prediction of CAGW is that OLR should be falling – it isn’t and that in my view is enough just by itself to destroy the theory. Secondly, it predicts there should be a hotspot in the upper tropical troposphere. There isn’t (tested by 1000’s of searate measurements) so again the prediction is wrong and the theory at least weakened. Thirdly the theory predicts an accelerating rise in global temperature – yet the temperature has stopped rising now for over 15 years and is below even the most conservative model prediction a third failed prediction. Fourth, the theory predicts a rise in extreme weather such as cyclones yet they have not eventuated a fourth failed prediction. The theory predicts a reduction is ice on earth leading to rising sea levels. The actic is used as the poster proof of that but in fact the prediction is not regional loss of ice but global loss of ice and in this context lets not forget ice in the Arctic represents far far less than 1% of ice on earth. Over 70% of ice on earth is in the Antarctic with most of the rest in Greenland. In fact there is not global loss of ice on earth, summer ice in the Arctic has been shrinking but ice in the Anarctic has been growing. Total ice on earth is pretty much stable according to the data I have seen so thats a fifth failed prediction.

            A failed prediction is far more serious than a fulfilled prediction simply because the burden of proof is not symmetrical. 10 supporting findings do not prove a theory yet one clear failed prediction is enough to destroy it (it does not matter how much circumstantial evidence there is a a persons guilt of a crime, if there is one clear unshakable contraindication its proof the person is not guilty). In any rational non emotive and non political environment I very seriously doubt if CAGW would have any credibility)

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              Peter C

              Thanks Michael,

              Just to make absolutely certain.
              You talk about GAGW. I asked about The Greenhouse Theory. Are we talking about the same thing?

              I am trying to devise a test of the Greenhouse Theory. I hope to explain this more fully in the forthcoming weekend unthreaded.

              I agree with your comments about clouds.

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                michael hammer

                Hi Peter;
                Yes we are more or less talking about the same thing. In fact CO2 is a greenhouse gas and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere do act to reduce energy loss to space (this is absolutely beyond doubt based on very basic and exceptionally well proven spectroscopic theory) HOWEVER the big question is how large is the effect. I liken it to coming home to a cold house and lighting a candle to warm the house up. Technically its beyond doubt that a burning candle releases heat and its also beyond doubt that releasing heat inside a house will warm the house but the question is how much. Is it significant, in fact is the effect even measurable.

                To avoid that quagmire I use the term CAGW which in essence means the greenhouse theory at a potentially dangerous or at least significant level. To me the most fundamental test is the OLR. If that is increasing rather than reducing as CO2 rises then the CAGW theory is wrong – end of issue. Its a fundamental fatal inconsistency. Indeed I find it hard to imagine any test more specific or more terminal to the theory.

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        The Backslider

        Since global temperature is not rising the increasing OLR cannot be due to global temperature. Could it be that CO2 is causing increased OLR.

        The increased OLR is due to declining atmospheric water vapor, also confirmed by the NOAA. Yet another key thing which falsifies AGW/CO2 theory.

        Yes, it means that the planet is already cooling, even though we may not be able to sense it yet.

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      Unmentionable

      “I seriously wonder how this phase of science will be viewed by historians.”

      I was seriously asking myself that in 1992, when I finally realized there were people in ‘science’ who were apparently more than silly enough to take the greenhouse calamity seriously, and to completely ignore and discount everything that geology already knew, in favor of a mere theory of a few mm of sea level rise in 30 and 100 yrs from then. I foresaw it working almost exactly like it has, a massive ignorant media and UN/politics driven anti-science farce pretending to be a matter of the science.

      I did my ‘nanna at them then, and so did some with me, but it made no difference at all, the fix was already in, the propaganda had already deposited its poison to any form of ‘debate’. What I found the most curious though was the whole sale and total discounting of EVERYTHING the geology had to say, as the entire GW debate studiously and courageously did all it could to perpetually ignore geology, and its was pre-considered, so that when people like Plimer and Carter sought to go around the gate-keepers to publicly set the science record and ‘data’ straight, the warmerists reaction against them was all the more intense than for all prior greenhouse theory skeptics. It was because they had actual observational recourse and verifiable evidence in outcrop and core that demolished the whole Venusian-type greenhouse vision of eco-horrors.

      But the truth is we all knew the same stuff in 1992, it just hadn’t been put to the public in a form an average person, let alone an ill-edjamuckated warmerist warp-‘o-naught could grasp.

      I’m glad they had the tenacity, knowledge and personal qualities to express the actual Earth science to the public, because appealing to the warmisseds (as we tried to in 1992) to just examine the observational and examinable material evidences from geology, was a dead loss and never going to happen.

      The warmisseds had to be dragged along screaming and literally shamed into examining the clearly presented science and try to explain themselves to the public, RE: David Suzuki recently and even then he still wants to completely DENY it and pretend that’s not really his area of expertise and he is just following the consensus of the real experts! ha! … “I was just following orders” … etc., shameless.

      Appealing to the public and informing them is the key as talking to warmisseds about science is a very dry hole, it’s not what they care about. They only care about it if the truth interferes with their funding and it getting cut back, as then they have to shout all the more and denigrate all the more to scare up a pot ‘o cash from the mass-captured Homo Taxalotus Stupidificus.

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    A key point for me is

    Net methane emissions track natural surface conditions even more closely.

    The problem with atmospheric methane levels for AGW theory is that the rate of growth abruptly slowed around 2000 after doubling in the previous 200 years. As NOAA said in late 2003

    Pattern of increase stops, but scientists don’t know why

    The rise in CO2 levels seems more closely correlated to CO2 emissions, though there some anomalies.

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    • #
      Newminster

      Kevin, scientists could probably find out why but the ones involved in that particular discipline are scared shitless at what the answer might turn out to be.
      As somebody said upthread the science of climate as practised is “shonky” and always was. As long as the temperatures kept creeping up and the eco-warriors kept yelling their lying little heads off about how we’re all doomed they could pretend the science was rock solid and settled.
      Unfortunately Mother Nature took a hand before they had it all locked down and even the IPCC is being forced into a bit of backtracking, though you wouldn’t think so to read the Summary for Policymakers.

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    TdeF

    What happened to Selby was awful, almost unbelievable punishment for telling the truth as a qualified scientist, far more qualified in the field than our Australian Climate Commissioners. It looks like Flannery had a hand in his dismissal too.

    Salby’s lecture in Germany was riveting (on YouTube). While there is a lot to say about his presentation and conclusions, the outstanding discovery he made is overlooked. While he saw is no correlation between CO2 and temperature at all despite a perfect match in the computer models, there is in fact a perfect correlation between CO2 and the integral of temperature. No one seems to understand this is proof that CO2 rise is a consequence, not cause of temperature rise. As immediate temperature changes in the thin atmosphere are proportional in the first order to sunlight intensity, the integral of temperature is total incident radiation and as most falls on the ocean, corresponds to warming, specifically of the oceans. Add the fact that 98% of the CO2 is in the oceans and you have your CO2 rise, using schoolboy equilibrium and Henry’s law as the exchange mechanism.

    Time will show this to have been the seminal lecture in the debunking of wrong models and the insistence on causality, that if two things go up at once, one must cause the other. That was true, but he showed temperature caused CO2 increases, not the other way around.

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      “Free” speech has become very costly, especially to people such as Selby.

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      Tim

      “It looks like Flannery had a hand in his dismissal too.”

      It’s hard to believe even Flannery has the power to excommunicate a scientist that was doing legitimate science: challenging an unproven hypothesis.

      I think the puppet-strings were being pulled from higher up the fraud chain.

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      “The decision to terminate Professor Murry Salby’s employment with Macquarie University had nothing to do with his views on climate change nor any other views….”

      “Professor Salby’s employment was terminated firstly, because he did not fulfil his academic obligations, including the obligation to teach. After repeated directions to teach, this matter culminated in his refusal to undertake his teaching duties and he failed to arrive at a class he had been scheduled to take.

      “…The second reason for his termination involved breaches of University policies in relation to travel and use of University resources.”

      http://mq.edu.au/newsroom/2013/07/10/statement-regarding-the-termination-of-professor-murry-salby/#ixzz3AFPQmVcK

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        The Backslider

        We are all well aware of the excuses…. and?

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        The Backslider

        Actually, I am sitting here laughing that you could be so stupid David.

        Any professional body would NEVER publicly reveal the reasons for a termination….. unless they were maliciously trying to defame somebody.

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          Craig Thomas

          So where’s the claim for unfair dismissal?

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            The Backslider

            Unlike you, I do not speak for other people. Perhaps you should direct that question to Murray Salby?

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              Craig Thomas

              Backslider says, “Any professional body would NEVER publicly reveal the reasons for a termination”
              and then he says, “Unlike you, I do not speak for other people.”.

              ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!

              Thank you for the comedy show!

              Tell me it’s just an act…

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      Unmentionable

      ” … corresponds to warming, specifically of the oceans. Add the fact that 98% of the CO2 is in the oceans and you have your CO2 rise, …”

      Is a less-caustic ocean consistent with oceanic sourcing?

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        Unmentionable

        A thought experiment.

        Peter walks into the lab’s office and his manager says there’s a 44 gallon drum of concentrated acid waste out the back that needs to be neutralized, so he gives Peter a bag of cement dust and a spade and says go too it.

        It takes a while to fully neutralize the acidity via adding the cement dust slowly to prevent it boiling over as the reaction proceeds and exsolves the CO2 as roiling small gas bubbles, but in time it steadily makes the liquid less acidic.

        When done Peter goes back to his Boss and reports that not only is the acid fully neutralized but he’s slightly over done it and the pH meter in reading slightly caustic.

        His Boss is not too happy with this as the waste-disposal company requires a pH of exactly 7 or else they will charge the Lab a further standard charge of $180 for a “neutralization treatment”.

        So he asks Peter to go back and make sure the pH is fully neutralized. So peter says that he can either add some acid, or else he can remove some of the caustic to make it less caustic, so which do you wish?

        His Boss replies, “well, we have no remaining acid to add, so you’ll have to see if you can remove some of the caustic to make it progressively less-caustic until it neutralizes.”

        Peter quickly realizes that the only means for him to make the liquid less-caustic until it finally neutralizes, is to gradually bind the exsolved gaseous CO2 bubbles back into the liquid once more.

        The CO2 could not have NET come from the ocean, if the ocean has become less-caustic, even as gaseous atmospheric CO2 has risen.

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          Unmentionable

          Alternatively, excess submarine volcanic or sedimentary exhalations of CO2 could both make the oceans less caustic and cause atmospheric CO2 to rise.

          Which if confirmed would suggest that the global rate of volcanic activity is not evenly distributed with time but is globally pulsed suggesting a common mechanism which is not merely local upper mantle melt hydration and transportation and structure related. I’d love it if this were so, simply due to how fricken fresh and interesting that would be.

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            Unmentionable

            There is some suggestions of volcanic cyclicity, but keep in mind that this graph is almost entirely terrestrial continental volcanism, and does not include the submarine volcanism, for which data is almost non-existent, other historic spot reports of major open ocean eruptions seen from ships in transit.

            http://volcano.si.edu/images/faq_increase.png

            So why would one suspect that a mild continental volcanic cyclicity might differ (be less pronounced or responsive) and express it self differently from a global submarine volcanism multi-decadal cyclicity?

            (1) the oceanic geotherm isochrons are much higher … because …

            (2) the oceanic crust is ~20% as thick as continental crust and more discontinuous due to numerous major fracture zones and their associated deep through-crust basement rock chasms.

            (3) the mid-ocean ridges are already well known to be by far the longest broadest hot volcanic belt on earth (why it isostaticly sits so high and closer to the surface than the deep ocean basin floor), and these span 65,000 km in length, placed end to end. In other words it dwarfs all other planetary volcanic chains and volcanic provinces, combined.

            4) where the mid ocean ridge and oceanic magma reaches the air, such as in Iceland, we see numerous major fissures and voluminous rift-type volcanic eruptive degassing occurring.

            So it’s a fair supposition that there are many more prosaic smaller eruptions occurring constantly, entirely unseen within the deep oceans, than in the atmosphere – and capable of far more degassing than we currently appreciate
            __

            And if these were indeed erupting with a global pulse or cyclicity, as is mildly present at a multi-decadal level for continental volcanism, then we shouldn’t be too surprised to see a global alteration in ocean acid:base ratio trends, and oscillations in atmospheric CO2 level, and global SSTs, and or course major and occasionally very rapid mode switching in both weather and climate.

            But what the heck would observational geological marine exploration have to offer to the fraught question of AGW, or no AGW?

            “You thar! … yes, you! … shudup and sidown!”

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    sophocles

    Salby’s Hamburg presentation—the one which Macquarie Uni didn’t like—is well worth watching, and taking notes from.

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      TdeF

      Thanks. From memory I loved the dry humour, as much as you get in so many lectures from scientists. Murry said that the computer projections of temperature and CO2 were not just correlated, they were synonymous and by implication that was not only amazing, it was impossible. He is the sort of person to have been laughing inside at how ridiculous this was, to have a computer model exactly replicate something as if the CO2 levels and only the CO2 levels had any impact on the temperature of a planet? To him this was ridiculous as in the Latin meaning of laughable, risible. It needed a touch of I’m Brian and so is my wife.

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        Craig Thomas

        Bizarrely – when *I* look at the projections for CO2 increases, I see a very steady increase with a regular annual variation around it.

        When I look at temperature projections, I see wiggly lines going all over the place with a very irregular long-term trend on it and no regular annual variation.
        http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/oct/01/ipcc-global-warming-projections-accurate

        My conclusion? Salby was talking rubbish. And drivel. And you should be more sceptical of powerpoint presentations in the future.

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          the Griss

          LOL, quoting the Guardian for anything… seriously…. !!!

          No wonder your basic understanding nearly everything is so horrendously stupid.

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            Andrew

            Not only that, but he picks the Guardian’s most humiliating self-beclownment to repost!

            The models were accurate – yeah, the one showing the absolute rock bottom of the IPCC’s range of 1.5-4+ per century. The “accurate” model was the one that matched the 0.15C/da – during the late 20th C warm period, with the 60yr cycle in upswing! And they think this HELPS their cause!

            Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

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              Vince Whirlwind

              Um, did you just miss the point?
              TdeF says Salby was saying, “the computer projections of temperature and CO2 were not just correlated, they were synonymous “.

              This statement by Salby is complete buffoonery.

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          sophocles

          Mann has not been arrested, charged, nor convicted of any criminal offence. Neither has he been investigated or “exonerated” by academic and other enquiries, despite his strenuous protestations (see Steve McIntyre’s analyses at Climateaudit.org) to the contrary.

          However, Steven McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick found on close investigation of Mann’s `hockeystick’ temperature reconstruction (Mann et al 1998) that the method used selected and created hockeystick graphs from even red noise. You can find the dismemberment on McIntyre’s blog. McIntyre found omission of data which showed a recent decline and splicing of thermometer data to the tree ring data, which renders the analysis void. Mixing such data is a statistical ‘crime’ by introducing oranges into a survey of apples. It is notable Mann has neither corrected nor withdrawn such a failed paper.

          If you can’t be bothered searching for it, Andrew Montford put it all together into a very readable book “The Hockey-stick Illusion; Climategate and The Corruption of Science.” (Inquiring Minds 2010). That will bring you up to where you should be able to make meaningful contributions to the discussion. If you read it.

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  • #
    Yonniestone

    Murry Salby would be an interesting addition to Dr Patrick Moore’s Australian tour later this year, why not Lord Monckton also?

    I have thought a group tour of proven CAGW skeptics would have a great impact on the publics perception of the CAGW scam, having an education verses an indoctrination would get a good response.

    Regardless of anyone’s background or education most people will be naturally skeptical of anything, to make that decision of believing one side or the other often hangs on how the argument is presented, scare tactics only work for so long, it’s being treated like an adult in a non condescending manner that wins in the end.

    I hope warmists continue with the shrill threats of doom and nanny talk, it lends greatly to the cause of final truth.

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      farmerbraun

      I’d rather see the NZ and OZ Governments convene an Australasian (Atmospheric?) Science Symposium . . . and invite some friggin’ scientists.

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    • #
      Tim

      Thanks for highlighting this, Yonniestone. His tour needs funding support as well as co-speakers.

      https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lecture-tour-patrick-moore-greenpeace-co-founder

      Come on people! $$$ needed.

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    • #
      Vince Whirlwind

      Great idea – “sceptics” all over Australia could pack their zimmer frames and adult diapers into their cars and all converge on Canberra in what could be known as “THE CONVOY OF NO COHERENCE”.

      When all 53 of them turn up, they could gather on the lawns of Parliament house (with the assistance of their carers) and Alan Jones could go red in the face telling them stories about all the geriatrics who were detained at the border by a police force in the pay of the Illuminati and trying to keep a lid on the great big conspiracy.

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  • #
    old44

    “rising global temperatures come first”

    Wasn’t this first pointed out when AlGore made his first presentation.

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    • #

      It doesn’t come first when independent agents (man) are digging up carbon and, regardless of the global average surface temperature, burning it.

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      • #
        The Backslider

        So David, what do YOU do for electricity? Do you drive a car?

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        • #
          Crakar24

          TBS,

          David is a regular posted over on Spencers blog and i as yet have not seen him engage in any meaningful debate, perhaps the environment at Jo’s will allow him to start but i dout it, good luck.

          Cheers

          Crakar24

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        • #
          Craig Thomas

          I’d say David supports the idea of our government ceasing its subsidies for the coal industry and investing instead in renewable technologies.

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          • #
            The Backslider

            I’d say David

            And just who do you think that YOU are speaking for somebody else?

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          • #
            Crakar24

            I’d say David has no idea what he is talking about as man does not dig up *carbon*.

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          • #
            James Bradley

            Craig, I’s say that if renewable technolgies did not require very large tax payer funded grants to start-up and then extremely large tax payer funded subsidies to continue either we would all invest in them or Big Bad Coal, Oil and Gas would have bought all the patents and sat on the technology.

            I have a question for you.

            How much have you invested out of your own pockets in renewable energy other than the purchase of a heavily subsidised PV Solar rack for personal use at the expense of other consumers?

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            • #
              Craig Thomas

              Coal power is currently reliant on massive government subsidies. I’d like that to stop.

              Wind power is now cheaper than coal. Coal power plants are being shut down, even in Australia.
              Souith Australia’s electricity prices are shooting down as a result of all their investment in wind.

              I want cheaper electricity. I want more wind power.

              629

              • #
                Crakar24

                What the?????

                Yes you are correct when you say South Australia has shut down an aging plant in Pt Augusta but they are now planning to restart it because we have to import sh*t tins from Victoria which of course has driven power prices through the roof with no sign of dropping.

                In short Craig you are nothing more than a loud mouth bull sh*^^er clogging up my inbox with junk. I pity people like you, you onviously have no life, bitter and twisted at the world because you have no friends and you still live at home with your parents.

                Sitting there with your nose pressed against the monitor waiting for people to buy into your self loathing wretched life.

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              • #
                the Griss

                “I want more wind power.”

                …then eat more beans.

                the stink won’t change much.

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              • #
                Crakar24

                I had a terrible case of wind the other day when i accidentally swallowed one of those stupid little green buttons.

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              • #
                MarcusViaManchuria

                Oh for goodness sake you mindless nong, the stench in your nostrils is from your cranio-rectal insertion procedure and not demon carbon.
                I live half my time in China, where a NEW coal fired generator comes online every couple of weeks. I travel extensively and see the futility of your flatulence powered failures that require a gas or diesel powered backup just to look good. I see the only viable power generation to lift the third world out of poverty and it is NOT “renewables of any sort or description. Coal is the only solution right now, hence the massive stockpiling of China , india and other countries free of PC restrictions.

                I sat here and read all that you have written here and my heart cries for you. The delusions you have been dealt are tragic, of course, but you need to be
                open to the truth at some stage, lest you become another useful idiot for the collective. It is never too late to show your back to the darkness.Our cooling planet will soon drive home the truth as more and more die from the cold and crops, that are currently at record high levels, begin to fail.

                We indeed face a calamity and your are , it seems, happily a part of it.

                I wish you the most sincere good fortune in your rudderless meanderings and I offer you the opportunity to come dip your toes in our reality pools at your leisure. There is no charge and many here to guide you.

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                the Griss

                “I want more wind power.”
                [snip]

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              • #

                Craig,

                Souith Australia’s electricity prices are shooting down as a result of all their investment in wind.

                Pick a day, any day.

                AEMO Average Daily prices

                Tony.

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              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                “Wind power is now cheaper than coal.”

                http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21608646-wind-and-solar-power-are-even-more-expensive-commonly-thought-sun-wind-and

                If all the costs and benefits are totted up, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.

                ————————————————–
                http://online.wsj.com/articles/robert-bryce-dreaming-the-impossible-green-dream-1402527502
                Merely to keep pace with the global growth in electricity demand would require the installation of about 280,000 megawatts of new wind-energy capacity every year. According to several academic studies, the areal power density of wind energy—that is, the amount of power that can be derived from a given amount of land—is about one watt per square meter. This means that installing the requisite additional wind capacity would require covering about 280,000 square kilometers (108,000 square miles of land)—an area nearly the size of Italy—with wind turbines, every year.

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              • #
                sophocles

                I want cheaper electricity. I want more wind power.

                Choose one. You can’t have both. No country’s national grid can cope with the vagaries of wind power. It’s an engineering problem which is currently insoluble. India has tried, and is trying but its grid has been rendered highly unstable causing widespread outages, by adding wind-power. They now require their wind generators to state the next day’s generation so they can try and stabilise the grid.

                So you think wind power is cheaper? Coal is unsubsidised. To work, Wind has had to be heavily subsidised. It’s cost is very much higher than conventional methods.

                Here’s an exercise for you: create a database and track wind strength at your home every day for three to five years. When wind speed falls below 20knots, there isn’t much power to be had. You are to determine the number of hours per year the velocity is over this and for how many hours per day. A day is 24 hrs, midnight to midnight.

                You will find it is totally unsustainable when use patterns are taken into account and the surprisingly long periods of effectively no wind (less than 20knots).

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                Wayne Job

                Craig, If you believe that wind power is cheap electricity or even reliable, it is no wonder you believe in the magic CO2 fairy. Please go away and contemplate your navel in a Zen type manner for a decade or two, perhaps read Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and reconsider your real knowledge. You sir have drunk to much cool aide.

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              • #
                Rod Stuart

                Achtung!
                The folly of wind is costing the Germans $412 billion.

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                Craig Thomas

                Lol, these people really aren’t keeping up.

                China is progressively banning coal power and plans on shutting down all Beijing power stations by 2020.
                Coal prices are now in freefall.

                China aims to build 70GW of solar power by 2017.
                http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-16/china-targets-70-gigawatts-of-solar-power-to-cut-coal-reliance.html
                China aims to have 150GW of wind power by 2017. They already have the biggest capacity of wind power installed in the world

                India aims to add 10GW per year of wind power.
                http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/power/government-aims-to-add-10000-mw-per-year-to-lift-wind-energy-sector/articleshow/40079023.cms

                Meanwhile, some backward yokels in a small pacific nation are trying to further retard their nation’s adoption of modern power-generating technologies.

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                MarcusViaManchuria

                You continue to flounder in your swirling cup of kool aid Craig. Even entertaining the idea that China is “closing down” coal invites certification and I am quite happy to sign the papers forthwith.

                My wife’s family is heavily involved in power generation in Jilin province and they would laugh hysterically at such a ridiculous notion.
                You really do need to to come with me when I tour some of the new facilities recently brought online. Including the new Wind farm near their home town that draws it’s all to frequently required back up power from a state of the art gas fired plant a kilometre away.

                China has a cast iron commitment to dragging their people out of the poverty that you would enforce on us all with your maniacal musings and delusions.
                China has one of the highest percentages of “renewables” in the world due almost entirely from Hydro, which of course is spurned so vociferously here in Australia by the regressives collective where you hang your Fedora.

                The Chinese are amassing a vast stockpile of coal from around the world including their own vast but dwindling reserves.
                It’s not for a Hungi bro eh, it’s to generate “Cheap” power to lift the living standards of over a billion people. How you can believe what you regurgitated here rates with ‘where do the flies go in winter?’ mysteries that cannot be answered. (Actually, they go to China).

                A moments serious research will unveil a truth of company after company associated with renewables collapsing in China. Company directors are being arrested and severe punishments are being imposed for the fraudulent activities undertaken by many in an industry that simply cannot work because the premise on which it was established is fatally flawed.

                Coal prices are, by and large, manipulated by the biggest players and Asia controls it all. Smart business. Smart governance. Smarter than the average type warmist, by far.

                Please, for the sake of family and friends, even if you don’t care if the ill fitting straight jacket makes you look somewhat diminished, lift yourself from the mire and drag yourself into our realm where there is light in abundance and truth for the learnin’.

                Whatever you have been subjugated by in the collective of fools and folly can be undone with a brand new PEARList approach. Come on, give it a try, we can here your cry for help. Peace.

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            cohenite

            Mr Thomas is a fan of renewables; and he dares accuse Salby of fantasy.

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            Kenneth Richard

            I’d say David supports the idea of our government ceasing its subsidies for the coal industry and investing instead in renewable technologies.

            Renewables already get 25 times the subsidies that fossil fuels do in the US.

            http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/13/renewables-get-25-times-the-subsidy-that-fossil-fuels-do/

            China is progressively banning coal power and plans on shutting down all Beijing power stations by 2020.

            http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/chinas-growing-coal-use-is-worlds-growing-problem-16999

            Coal, the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels, accounts for 70 percent of energy used in China today and is responsible for about three quarters of electricity generation.

            In just 5 years, from 2005 through 2009, China added the equivalent of the entire U.S. fleet of coal-fired power plants, or 510 new 600-megawatt coal plants.

            From 2010 through 2013, it added half the coal generation of the entire U.S. again.

            At the peak, from 2005 through 2011, China added roughly two 600-megawatt coal plants a week, for 7 straight years.

            And according to U.S. government projections, China will add yet another U.S. worth of coal plants over the next 10 years, or the equivalent of a new 600-megawatt plant every 10 days for 10 years.

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        • #
          NielsZoo

          I have to agree. I’ve run into David several times and his particular schtick is primarily obfuscation, followed by misdirection, misunderstanding and finally links to 50×100 pixel graphs on his blog that “prove” his ramblings. Textbook Warmist acolyte. I gave up on him quite a while ago when he insisted that the star in the center of our particular solar system did not emit any infrared radiation… after being confronted with a graph of solar radiation.

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        • #
          PhilJourdan

          No, he just slithers.

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  • #
    Richard C (NZ)

    Joanne, re:

    >”As I described it way back in 2011 [hotlink]”

    That was the Salby post (“temperature controls CO2 levels”) where you included Tom Quirk’s work:

    ‘SOURCES AND SINKS OF CARBON DIOXIDE’

    http://icecap.us/images/uploads/TomQuirkSourcesandSinksofCO2_FINAL.pdf

    This comment is in respect to his graph, viz,

    Figure 1 A) Estimated emissions from worldwide fossil fuel use and the annual increase in atmospheric CO2, here:

    http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/co2/co2-emissions-atmospheric-rise-quirk.gif

    You may recall that I emailed you at length in a similar vein but rather than compare “annual increase” (a decrease in many years) in atm CO2 to anthro emissions (AE), I compared incremental growth in AE vs incremental growth of atm CO2 (Mauna Loa) thus (these are rough calcs BTW):

    Using the conversion factor
    2.12 Gt C = 1ppmv CO2 (IPCC) and data sources:

    Carbon Budget report
    http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/

    Historical CO2 data:
    ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_annmean_mlo.txt

    Incremental rises and incremental growth averages:

    114.73 GtC – total carbon rise 1970 to 2005
    3.5 GtC – fossil fuel rise 1970 to 2005

    3.197 GtC per year – total carbon rise 1970 to 2005
    0.097 GtC per year – fossil fuel rise 1970 to 2005

    35.36 GtC – total carbon rise 2005 to 2013
    2.1 GtC – fossil fuel rise 2005 to 2013

    3.93 GtC per year – total carbon rise 2005 to 2013
    0.23 GtC per year – fossil fuel rise 2005 to 2013

    This corresponds to the 1970 to 2005 portion of Tom Quirk’s graph. So from 2005 to 2013, total atm carbon was rising just under 17 times faster than anthro emissions growth.

    But the IPCC paints a different picture.

    [IPCC AR4] – “The increases in global atmospheric CO2 since the industrial revolution are mainly due to CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, gas flaring and cement production.”

    http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-3.html

    There is no citation to support that statement.

    Refer AR5 Figure 6.1:

    http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig6-1.jpg

    Refer AR4 Figure 2.3:

    http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/figure2-3-l.png

    A glance at Fig 2.3 (a) and (b) leaves the impression that from 1970 to 2005, ALL of the MLO CO2 rise (Total CO2 in ppm) was due to fossil fuel emissions because the slope of (b) is the same as (a) thanks to scaling and different units (ppm vs GtC).

    But the natural and anthropogenic components are missing from both (a) and (b) to allow comparison. In terms of GtC units and (b), the respective slopes are as above: 3.197 GtC/yr total vs 0.097 GtC/yr anthro 1970 to 2005, contrary to the IPCC impression.

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    • #
      Richard C (NZ)

      Re #17, AR5 Figure 6.1

      The natural/anthro carbon emission ratio as at 2013 from IPCC AR5, Figure 6.1:

      http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig6-1.jpg

      Natural emissions total: 198.2 GtC
      Anthro emissions total: 8.9 GtC (7.8 GtC is fossil fuels)

      Ratio in terms of 100% total 207.1 = 95.7:4.297

      In other words anthropogenic emissions, which include fossil fuel emissions were still only 4.3% of total emissions in 2013 even though they had risen from 4.3 GtC per year in 1970 to 7.8 GtC per year in 2005.

      This has been topical in respect to Bozhinova et al (2014) recently (despite The Hockey Schtick error in interpretation). I took it up with Denica Bozhinova (co-author) at Climate Change Dispatch:

      #12 Richard C NZ 2014-07-26 04:44
      Denica #10

      >”The anthropogenic flux to the atmosphere is much bigger than the net contribution from both ocean and biosphere.”

      An apples-to-apples comparison is contributors to atmospheric CO2 i.e. initial anthropogenic emissions flux (AE) to atmosphere is apportioned to 3 reservoirs: atm, ocean, and land. So yes, the initial AE flux is large but there is take up by biosphere and ocean (i.e. becomes part of “net contribution from both ocean and biosphere”).

      If you convert Mauna Loa (ML) ppm growth to GtC (using the IPCC’s 2.1 GtC/ppm conversion factor) from say 2005 to 2012 as I did and compare that to reported AE increase over the same period, ML atmospheric CO2 growth is roughly 17 times faster than AE growth.

      This implies a significantly greater atm CO2 contributor other than AE as in the 1990s according to the 2004 US DOE EIA report of IPCC TAR figures (see #7 above) in Million Metric Tons of Gas:

      770,000 – Natural
      23,100 – Human-Made

      Human-Made (AE) is only 2.9% of the much greater Natural in that decade. Your statement above contradicts both 21st C ML vs AE growth and the US DOE/IPCC TAR figures for 1990s.

      http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/only-about-3-of-co2-in-atmosphere-due-to-burning-fossil-fuels.html#comment-44638

      #13 Richard C NZ 2014-07-26 04:46
      Denica #10 (following on from #12)

      >”The anthropogenic flux to the atmosphere is much bigger than the net contribution from both ocean and biosphere.”

      Your statement also appears contradictory to Lutjewad, Fig 4 in your paper (see #8 above) Bozhinova et al (2014):

      Figure 4. 6 months of hourly results for Lutjewad at 60m height. Comparison between observed and modeled (a) CO2 concentrations, (b) CO2ff concentrations

      CO2ff for Lutjewad at 60m from April – October 2008 (b) is predominately between 0 and 10ppm. CO2 concentration (a) is around 380 – 400ppm. 5/390 = 0.0128 (1.3% approx).

      In other words, it is not AE emitted from sources that determines the atm constituency, it is subsequent take up and cycling e.g. respiration in the biosphere, so that only approx 1.3% of Lutjewad, Netherlands, near-sfc atm constituency is CO2ff according to Bozhinova et al (2014) Fig 4 even though initial AE flux may be relatively large in that vicinity (maybe it isn’t of course).

      http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/only-about-3-of-co2-in-atmosphere-due-to-burning-fossil-fuels.html#comment-44639

      + + +

      No reply from Denica, unfortunately.

      ‘Simulating the integrated summertime Δ14CO2 signature from anthropogenic emissions over Western Europe’

      Bozhinova et al (2014)

      http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/14/7273/2014/acp-14-7273-2014.pdf

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      • #
        Craig Thomas

        Why not simplify things by answering this basic question, Richard:
        Given the one quantitative measure we know the best about the Carbon cycle is the anthropogenic contribution, and given we know for a fact that CO2 levels are on a long-term increasing trend, and give that the additional CO2 in the atmosphere is *less* than the anthropogenic contribution, what mechanism do you propose is behind the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere being less than the anthropogenic contribution?

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        • #
          TdeF

          Craig, the question is whether any of the increase in CO2 is man made? Can that be answered?
          Yes, the answer from C14 is, almost none.

          The very idea that you can unilaterially add a gas to one side of an equilibrium and expect it to stay there is in conflict with basic chemistry.

          98% of all the CO2 is dissolved in the oceans and the oceans are in constant gaseous equilibrium with the thin atmosphere, which is 1/400th of the weight. So add CO2 and it gets absorbed into the oceans. O2 as well. That is how fish breathe. Yes, they produce CO2 and CH4 as well. Henry’s law controls the balance between CO2 in the air and CO2 in the ocean.

          The primitive idea that man’s burning of fossil fuel adds to the atmosphere alone is absurd, but fundamentally that is what is claimed. The IPCC argue that it takes 250 years for the CO2 to be absorbed. Back in the 1950s, it was seen to be 14 years and that has been confirmed by the rapid absorption of C14 tagged CO2 from the atom bomb blasts which doubled C14O2.

          Anyway the answers are quite simple. There is a real tendency, as you have pointed out, to try to overwhelm people with ‘science’. It is not that hard and you are right to require answers to basic questions.

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            Craig Thomas

            This is nonsense.

            As professor Salby says,
            “In truth only one component of the CO2 budget is known with any certainty, human emissions, implicitly through records of extraction – how much coal and oil are dug up”

            So tell us, are all the scientists, including Salby, wrong on this?

            As for your “primitive idea that man’s burning of fossil fuel adds to the atmosphere alone is absurd, but fundamentally that is what is claimed”. This is simply incomprehensible gibberish.
            http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCarbon/
            People are well aware that increased atmospheric CO2 will affect the Ocean carbon cycle.

            And, no, “the answers are quite simple” is plain wrong. The answers are complex. The measurements required to answer questions are difficult.

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              the Griss

              “This is nonsense.”

              Nice heading. 🙂

              Totally descriptive of what followed. !

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              TdeF

              “simply incomprehensible gibberish”. What was incomprehensible? I doubt the statement could be much simpler. The definition of gibberish also needs some explanation apart from being an obvious tautology. As for simply, that is in fact gibberish.

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            • #
              Unmentionable

              As for your “primitive idea that man’s burning of fossil fuel adds to the atmosphere alone is absurd, but fundamentally that is what is claimed”. This is simply incomprehensible gibberish.

              Nope, the general point of what TdeF wrote was in fact highly relevant. You could criticize the human component source as being over-simplified for the sake of the point he was making, but for the point made that was more than understandable on that level of generalization. But his prime point is valid and it stands, and you didn’t offer anything that impaired it’s validity, mostly because you can’t, and are unlikely to.

              It’s clear you just don’t like that his point implies for your apparent pet AGW klingonology. But then again a quick scan of your flip, shallow, mistaken and generally antagonistic comments within the above blog post reveals a feeble cling-on to be your substitute for any sort of valid point construction, and an inability to master your petulance for to participate in a mature honest conversation.

              Do you actually believe that such replies as yours above ever persuades another to likewise imitate a quarrelsome dishonest intellectual limpet?

              I rather doubt its effectiveness mate. (just saying)

              But the many and compelling counters to your replies have been amusing so I don’t want to discourage you, far from it, you’re doing a fine job of demonstrating the general ineffectualness of your pet theory’s veracity to understanding climate and planetary phenomena more generally.

              Thanks for that, your input is most appreciated. 😀

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            Richard

            98% of all the CO2 is dissolved in the oceans and the oceans are in constant gaseous equilibrium with the thin atmosphere, which is 1/400th of the weight. So add CO2 and it gets absorbed into the oceans.

            This is something I have been preaching for years: http://chipstero7.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/it-is-often-asserted-by-cagw-advocates.html Nice to see someone else pointing this out.

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        • #
          James Bradley

          Craig, about the only thing we may be able to estimate is the human CO2 contribution, the rest of your post is pure hearsay and propaganda.

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          • #
            TdeF

            Not really. Radiocarbon dating can be used to date the air you breathe. Why not?

            Thanks to C14 you can tell by inference if CO2 is old or new. It is so simple, everyone misses it. What is certain is that the extra 50% in the 20th century is not fossil CO2. You will not have read this anywhere else, but the logic is trivial. No one seems to write papers on the obvious and the people who should know, the IPCC, say nothing.

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            • #
              Bris Vegas

              Stable carbon isotope ratios measure the ratios of atmospheric C12/C13. These isotopes are not radioactive. This has nothing to do with radioactive C14 dating

              02

              • #
                NielsZoo

                You missed the point. It’s not 14>12 decay dating, it’s using the natural radioisotope ratios of the C12,13,14 in atmospheric CO2. The C14 laden CO2 comes from biomass (read as non-anthropogenic) and not fossil fuel burning from which the C14 ratio is much lower due to it’s previous natural decay.

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          • #
            the Griss

            You KNOW you are on a topic that HURTS THEM LIKE CRAZY, because the alarmista LOONS turn up to try and defend the indefensible.

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        • #
          Peter C

          CO2 is going up because of out gassing by the oceans which have warmed slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age.

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        • #
          Richard C (NZ)

          Craig #17.1.1

          >”give that the additional CO2 in the atmosphere is *less* than the anthropogenic contribution,”

          I’ve just demonstrated above that the implication from growth rates is that it is *more* (much more) after reservoir exchange processes. Bozhinova et al (2014) Figure 4 corroborates that (CO2ff for Lutjewad about 1.3% approx of atm CO2 concentration) and IPCC TAR corroborates that (total aCO2/AE 2.9% of global atm CO2 concentration 1990s).

          If accumulated aCO2/CO2ff (not the same note) was indicative of AE/AFF contribution to atm CO2 concentration, the percentages would be much greater than 2.9% (global AE) by the 1990s and 1.3% (Lutjewad AFF) by 2008.

          >”what mechanism do you propose is behind the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere being less than the anthropogenic contribution?”

          As above, emissions at source does not determine atm CO2 constituency so your question is ill-posed.

          So what exactly is “the anthropogenic [atm] contribution” Craig? You cannot simply total up cumulative anthro emissions from sources (or just the fossil fuel emissions) because that overshoots wildly, it is how the planetary processes allocate those emissions to the respective reservoirs: air, land, and sea. It is THEN accounting for cycling between those reservoirs e.g. respiration, THEN, it is what can be ascertained to be aCO2 or CO2ff in the atm CO2 concentration (e.g. only 2.9% global AE 1990s and 1.3% Lutjewad AFF 2008 as above).

          These are very small contributions to the atmosphere by AE/AFF that obviously do not reconcile with calculations of the airborne fraction (AE) of about 42% e.g. here:

          ‘The atmospheric CO2 airborne fraction and carbon cycle feedbacks’
          http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/posters_pdf/jones1_poster.pdf

          And what TdeF said at #17,1,1,1, especially re the mechanism requested and Henry’s Law. An ocean accumulating heat from solar change last 400 yrs will have a long-term temperature rise obviously so the Henry constant (or coefficient) changes and the ocean both absorbs to maintain equilibrium at short-term constant temperatures and out-gasses in terms of long-term oceanic temperature change.

          ‘Temperature dependence of the Henry constant’
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_law

          Paraphrasing ‘Living with the oceans’, the ocean contains about 38,000 Gt of carbon which is about 16 times as much carbon as the terrestrial biosphere, around 60 times as much as the pre-industrial atmosphere, and around 95 times the 400 GTs of industrial era AE to end of 20th century. The ocean is there­fore the greatest of the carbon reservoirs, and essentially determines the atmospheric CO2 content (not AE emissions at source) in accordance with Henry’s law.

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            Richard C (NZ)

            >”I’ve just demonstrated above”

            I’m referring to #17 here which is still in moderation at this comment time so no-one has seen it yet (also referring to #17.1 which isn’t).

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    Bulldust

    Completely O/T but interesting/funny:

    https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/24703973/wa-actress-to-play-gina-rinehart/

    Last I heard Ketut was working at Roy Hill for $2 a day…

    00

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    TdeF

    I will restrict my comments here, but C14 is actually much more telling than C13. C14 is the basis of radio carbon dating and has been a near constant for 10,000 years, produced only by cosmic rays and with a half life of 5730 years. So if the extra 50% of CO2 was from hundred million year old fossil fuels (and they have no C14) C14 levels should be down 33%. They aren’t. This was known in the 1950s before the bomb tests as the Suess effect. Only say 2% of the fossil fuel CO2 is in the air. Practically nothing.

    I have written to Dr. Selby and Lord Monckton sees the logic. Writing papers on the obvious seems a waste. When I wrote to Dr. Will Steffen, another Australian salaried Climate Commissioner, a science PhD in industrial chemistry and asked him why this was not obvious to a chemist and he just referred me to the IPCC report with the Everyone Knows argument. They have all buried the open and shut logic of C14. A shame. If the extra CO2 is not from burning coal, gas and oil, there is no argument. Man is not having any effect even on CO2 levels, so how can we cause global warming, climate change, polar bear annihilation? Is it possible mankind is irrelevant on the scale of a planet (he asked knowingly).

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      Craig Thomas

      Interestingly, C14 *has* decreased by over 33% since 1965.

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        The Backslider

        Interestingly, C14 *has* decreased by over 33% since 1965.

        Please…. *cough*… provide a reference… *cough*….

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          TdeF

          Just look up C14 in Wikipedia. They show the well known C14 graph. After all, this is the basis of all Carbon dating, so it is incredibly well known.
          You can see a lot of things which are very interesting as the C14 returns quickly to the levels before the atom bomb blasts, the same levels as before the blasts.

          41

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            TdeF

            Sorry, perhaps better Radiocarbon dating. Look for the graph of C14 in the 20th century. The fact that it has been close to constant for 50,000 years is the key to dating.

            30

          • #
            Craig Thomas

            “…it is incredibly well known.”

            Sadly it happened to be on the quasi-infinite list of everything Backslider doesn’t know.

            It beggars belief that he chooses to use such a stunning paucity of knowledge as a springboard into participating in a public forum such as this one. You’d think he’d just lurk and learn, but no, he is intent on advertising the entire breadth of his glorious ignorance.

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          The Backslider

          Clearly both of you guys missed the *cough, cough*.

          Tdef, you gave the game away. I was hoping for Polly to link to some guff claiming that the reduction in C14 after atmospheric nuclear testing ceased somehow has something to do with Anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

          I think he missed the bit about “in the 1950s before the bomb tests”.

          01

  • #

    Salby is wrong, in the opinion of a lot of scientists, most just as smart as he is. What more is there to say?

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    • #
      The Backslider

      Salby is wrong, in the opinion of a lot of scientists

      Salby is wrong about what exactly?

      Please show to us all the “lot of scientists” who say that he is “wrong”.

      You are of course aware that once upon a time a “lot of scientists” insisted that the Earth is flat? Let me guess: 97% of scientists say that Murray Salby is “wrong”….? Yes, a consensus, it must be right.

      Ever heard of “science”?

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        Craig Thomas

        I’m not aware of any scientists insisting the Earth is flat.

        Provide evidence.

        Ever heard of “Evidence”?

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          The Backslider

          I’m not aware of any scientists insisting the Earth is flat.

          Then you were born yesterday.

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            Craig Thomas

            So….no evidence to back up your assertion that, “a “lot of scientists” insisted that the Earth is flat”.

            I somehow didn’t think you’d actually come through with anything to back that one up. It is a pretty egregious bit of nonsense, after all.

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              The Backslider

              These days, only warmist scientists (like Trenberth) believe that the earth is flat, however in ancient times it was the “consensus”.

              12

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          James Bradley

          Craig, sorry I must apologise for my responses to you, I realise now by your overtly agressive indoctrinated propaganda responses that you must be on the wrong science site – you’re probably looking for the one founded by L. Ron Hubbard.

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          The scientists all said the earth was flat until a few errant explorers decided to push the envelope.

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            Craig Thomas

            Names. I want names. Which scientists “said the earth was flat”?

            Who told you this nonsense? Why did you believe them? Haven’t you ever heard of being sceptical when people tell you lies?

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              the Griss

              Trenberth uses a flat Earth, non-rotating, 1/4 sun-power, energy balance model.

              That’s pretty darn flat Earth !!!

              Did you ever see that [snip] diagram of his, where all the values were stated in integers and had +/- numbers like 9, 12,21.. whatever.

              Then one number was stated with a .6 on it, still +/- 8 or something.

              And that 0.6 was the difference between up-welling and down-welling.

              [SNIP]

              Typical of most climate so-called science.

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                Craig Thomas

                So….you have no names of any scientists who believe the Earth is flat?

                Why do you make an assertion, when it is so patently false?

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                The Backslider

                you have no names of any scientists who believe the Earth is flat

                He just gave you one: Trenberth.

                11

              • #
                James Bradley

                Okay, Craig, names is it?

                Can you provide all the names of the worls’s scientists that support the belief in AGW? Shouldn’t be hard just obtain all the names of the world’s scientists then remove the 3% that don’t support AGW.

                If not can you provide more names than say… oh the number of scientists that actually supported AGW in Cook’s consensus?

                10

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                James Bradley

                Craig, really, it’s alright if you can’t provide the names – it’s just that if you don’t then that means your own assertions about the scientific evidence in support of AGW are patently false.

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            • #

              You ask for names yet give none. You assert there is no science yet give none of your own. Where is anything YOU have done in all of your postings? What is it YOU have done besides dance the dance of The Dancing Marionettes?

              Isn’t it interesting, we have two wannabe big name Dancing Marionettes chiming in to fight for “the cause” along with one new marionette. Could it be there is only one marionette pretending to be three? They give the same message, using the same ideas, fighting the same cause. Hmmm. Could be. More likely though, they have the same puppet master pulling their strings. So dance the same they must. The dance they dance is not their own. They dance to their master’s tune.

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                Craig Thomas

                Duh. There are no names. That is my contention. So *of course* I don’t provide any. Because there aren’t any.

                On the other hand, somebody above made an assertion that there *are* such names. But he can’t provide them.

                Ergo, I am proven to have been correct.

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                The Backslider

                I am proven to have been correct.

                Nonsense, as with all of your other nonsense.

                It is clear to all that you have just been running a diversion while David Appell fails to anwswer why he thinks Murray Salby is wrong and who the “lots of scientists” are who have that opinion.

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    James Bradley

    And see, Craig, this is precisely what happens when desperate times call for desperate measures – you get all sorts of desperates attempting to obscure the evidence with rhetoric and zealotry.

    You’re just another bait-layer obfuscating to mask your ignorance.

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      the Griss

      “to mask your ignorance”

      He’s not doing a very good job at it then, is he. !! Total failure, actually.

      His ignorance shines through. 🙂

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    John

    What joy! Craig Thomas is a member of a dying breed. He should be cosseted and loved. He is a true heir of William Connelly. I thought his type had finally got the message and died out.

    He even believes that there was a perfect equilibrium of CO2 before humans arrived.
    No natural contribution from the ocean or increasing bacterial emissions of CO2 as the planet warms and cools.

    I love his type, true believers.
    So quaint.

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    QuixoteNexus

    Seriously this has to be Pointman on a wind up!

    http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/carbondioxide.html

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  • #

    > Salby, M., 1992: The Atmosphere. In Climate Systems Modeling, K. Trenberth Ed. Sponsored Jointly by UCAR and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Cambridge University Press, 53-115.

    Spiffy. But that’s just std.atmos physics – uncontroversial, not original. None of his CO2 wackiness has been published.

    Salby, M., 1992… 1996… 2002… 2003… Salby, M., 2009: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. International Geophysics Series, Academic Press, 2nd Edition

    And look at the dates on those. The only one within the last decade is the 2nd edition of a prior publication. He’s not exactly an active publishing scientist.

    > If they had nothing to fear they wouldn’t censor his work.

    No-one is censoring Salby’s work. It remains up on youtube where he put it.

    Plenty of people have pointed out what’s wrong with Salby’s stuff (e.g. https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/salby-comment-1/, or my http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/11/09/thrust/). TL;DR: He does a lot of “theoretical calculations” but at no point does he point out that those calculations can’t be done without assuming values for some basic parameters (CO2 diffusion in ice, for example; or the non-conservation of CO2 in ice) and that his values for those parameters are wildly at variance with the ones anyone else would use. He doesn’t engage at all with existing literature, or indeed the bleedin’ obvious: we’ve emitted all that CO2: where does he think its gone?

    But trying to read Salbys stuff (well, OK, you can’t read it because he doesn’t write it down) and then the rebuttal isn’t a very good idea. You’re better off reading, e.g. http://moyhu.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/co2-accumulation-accounted-for-by.html

    OLR: http://scienceofdoom.com/2014/08/12/the-atmosphere-cools-to-space-by-co2-and-water-vapor-so-more-ghgs-more-cooling/ is interesting.

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      Kenneth Richard

      “And look at the dates on those. The only one within the last decade is the 2nd edition of a prior publication. He’s not exactly an active publishing scientist.”

      Apparently you weren’t reading closely enough. Salby published another textbook on atmospheric physics (graduate level) in 2012. It’s available for $86.

      http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Atmosphere-Climate-Murry-Salby/dp/0521767180

      He also published this paper in Geophysical Research Letters in 2011.

      Salby, M., E. Titova, and L. Deschamps (2011),Rebound of Antarctic ozone, Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 38, Issue 9, 16 May 2011, L09702, doi:10.1029/2011GL047266.

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      • #

        I read all the dates you provided. And the 2012 is just another update. But seriously? One paper, and one book, since 2010 and you think this is a valuable productive scientist? Its a very poor publication record. The 2011 GRL is minor; and again, non-wacky. I think you want to switch over to the “don’t judge people by their publication record, judge them by their value!” type argument; its what “skeptics” always need to do when pushing their people in comparison to anyone mainstream.

        More interestingly, has anyone read his “Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate”? Does he put any of his wacky stuff in there, or is it just the std stuff?

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          Kenneth Richard

          One paper, and one book, since 2010 and you think this is a valuable productive scientist?

          What percentage of climate scientists publish graduate level 780-page textbooks on atmospheric physics?

          I think you want to switch over to the “don’t judge people by their publication record, judge them by their value!” type argument; its what “skeptics” always need to do when pushing their people in comparison to anyone mainstream.

          I’m not “switching over” to anything of the kind. I’m just correcting you.

          And Salby is not “my people” any more than Roy Spencer, who does not agree with Salby’s analysis, is “my people.” Unlike you, who simply calls information he disagrees with “drivel” without even understanding what it is, I happen to carefully consider new research that seems to conflict with the “conventional wisdom.” I’ve found Salby’s work interesting ever since being introduced to it a few years ago, but not entirely convincing. I’ll need more than 4 or 5 supporting papers (so far) to persuade me.

          More interestingly, has anyone read his “Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate”?

          Graduate level students have. And yes, the data regarding CO2 levels being driven by natural factors is in there.

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            Kenneth Richard> What percentage

            Very few I’d guess. But don’t mistake it for original research, or support for his CO2 stuff.

            > calls information he disagrees with “drivel” without even understanding what it is

            I understand what Salby is saying. I’ve analysed it and pointed out where he’s wrong. I’ve linked to that already, but here’s the link again: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/11/09/thrust/

            > students have

            Perhaps. But I meant, anyone here find it of value? No-one is quoting it in support of Salby.

            > the data regarding CO2 levels being driven by natural factors is in there

            The data isn’t. You mean, refs to other papers. That’s where is gets complex: what’s in there is the perfectly uncontroversial CO2-and-T vary together over iceage type timescales (with Salby getting the bit about lags subtly wrong), and the also-uncontroversial CO2-and-T covary over short timescales. What Salby is careful to avoid is the CO2 over decadal and century timescales; because he can’t find any support from reputable papers for what he wants, there. See-also 27.1.1.3.

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          the Griss

          “Does he put any of his wacky stuff in there”

          You mean stuff you don’t comprehend, I assume. !

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        • #

          What have YOU actually done but dance the dance of a Dancing Marionette?

          You only attack others but do nothing yourself. Is there any self in you that actually exists? Or are you only a reflection of your sacred *other* dancing only to the tune he plays?

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          Craig Thomas

          “has anyone read his “Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate”? Does he put any of his wacky stuff in there, or is it just the std stuff?”

          It was a rehash of his previous textbook, but *with* a bunch of wacky stuff added in. I believe sales are poor….

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          • #
            Craig Thomas

            As one reviewer puts it:

            “Salby’s strange ideas on topics outside his expertise have been refuted by experts who have talked to him: Colin Prentice (Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC TAR Section 2:`Carbon Cycle and Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’ ), Eric Wolff on ice-cores, John Nielson-Gammon in general for cherry-picking paleoclimate data and proposing a model that would require negative atmospheric CO2 during ice ages.”

            “Long-debunked wrong ideas from climate anti-science sources do not belong in textbooks.
            As of this writing, Dr Salby has yet to publish any papers on these ideas, just 3 videos of talks to non-climate audiences, sponsored by The Sydney Institute and European EIKE. Dr. Salby started this odd campaign July 5, 2011. He had submitted a paper “Rebound of Antarctic Ozone” for a stratospheric session, got an oral timeslot at a conference, and with no notice talked about his ideas that CO2 rise was a side-effect of temperature rise, i.e., totally unconnected with the session topic.”

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          Unmentionable

          I read all the dates you provided. And the 2012 is just another update. But seriously? One paper, and one book, since 2010 and you think this is a valuable productive scientist?

          Actually, I much prefer less fodder to wade through and more quality of reflection. What I constantly find with the prolific authors (and bloggers) is a distinct lack of sufficient time digesting observation and thinking carefully before spraying the sci-verse with their mucilage of quantitative dirge and calling it science communication.

          Not making any reflection on you, you’ve put your view, and put it well. I’m just saying that less is actually more for me, and more for the sake of more as some sort a status symbol or shop facade for a professional guide to respectability and accomplishment is what I’d like a lot less of, because I value the quantity measure of publications almost not at all, for the most original thinking almost always comes from those who haven’t published almost anything yet.

          00

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            Unmentionable

            Like this for instance:

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species

            “In December 1831, Darwin joined the Beagle expedition as a geologist and naturalist. … “the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859 … The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. …”

            That’s the sort of science author I’d prefer to read.

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      NielsZoo

      WC – “And look at the dates on those. The only one within the last decade…”

      I know it’s shameful… and really, that Newton guy, you know, that did the work on the solar spectrum hasn’t published anything on it since 1672. I guess it’s no longer valid science so we’ll just ignore it.</sarc>

      30

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    TdeF

    Nuggets from Craig Thomas. That’s not what I would call them

    I made the mistake of thinking he wanted to discuss and learn. No.

    Quotes
    It’s almost as though all he has is talk…
    I simply don’t believe this is of any greater value than mere fishwives’ tales.
    Wow, the pure nuggets of understanding and the incisive intellect
    not sure where you got that nutty idea from
    A sorry bunch you are …
    Clearly unreliable.
    Your whole train of thought is completely bonkers.
    Salby’s opinions are wrong.
    Salby’s model diverges from reality into values which are not valid
    You would do much better to lurk and learn rather than advertising your nonunderstanding by posting rubbish.
    and the fact his beliefs about CO2 appear to have no scientific basis.
    And no. Don’t believe me. Rely instead on what the relevant experts, including every single national science academy in the world is telling you.
    that is a bizarre assertion which reflects poorly on your mathematical and logical abilities.
    Just as long as we don’t just bury our heads in the sand throwing up all sorts of excuses for not believing the reality of what’s going on.
    Where is the science? A bunch of powerpoint slides from a talk he once gave? Is that it?
    You can’t learn much from somebody who is wrong.
    How can you show something is wrong when it doesn’t exist.
    some sort of feeble attempt at feeling superior?
    You’re like my mad uncle who sometimes starts jumping around because he’s being attacked by wasps. Wasps nobody else can see.
    if only Salby were to publish any such substance
    if there is no work, then how can you say he is right?
    I’m no grub.
    I’ve never been found to have, “overcharged his grants and violated financial conflict of interest policies, displaying “a pattern of deception, a lack of integrity, and a persistent and intentional disregard of NSF and University rules and policies” and a “consistent willingness to violate rules and regulations, whether federal or local, for his personal benefit.”
    *That’s* what a grub would do.
    So where’s the claim for unfair dismissal?
    ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!
    Thank you for the comedy show!
    Tell me it’s just an act…
    My conclusion? Salby was talking rubbish. And drivel. And you should be more sceptical of powerpoint presentations in the future.
    I want cheaper electricity. I want more wind power.

    In all the 85 comments there has not been a single contribution to the discussion. This is just content free ridicule and the comments on Salby are substantially defamatory. Could I suggest that he is just ignored please. Maybe he is just lonely and ignored at home? Who would be surprised?

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    TdeF

    Nuggets from Craig Thomas. That’s not what I would call them

    I made the mistake of thinking he wanted to discuss and learn. No.

    Quotes
    It’s almost as though all he has is talk…
    I simply don’t believe this is of any greater value than mere fishwives’ tales.
    Wow, the pure nuggets of understanding and the incisive intellect
    not sure where you got that nutty idea from
    A sorry bunch you are …
    Clearly unreliable.
    Your whole train of thought is completely bonkers.
    Salby’s opinions are wrong.
    Salby’s model diverges from reality into values which are not valid
    You would do much better to lurk and learn rather than advertising your nonunderstanding by posting rubbish.
    and the fact his beliefs about CO2 appear to have no scientific basis.
    And no. Don’t believe me. Rely instead on what the relevant experts, including every single national science academy in the world is telling you.
    that is a bizarre assertion which reflects poorly on your mathematical and logical abilities.
    Just as long as we don’t just bury our heads in the sand throwing up all sorts of excuses for not believing the reality of what’s going on.
    Where is the science? A bunch of powerpoint slides from a talk he once gave? Is that it?
    You can’t learn much from somebody who is wrong.
    How can you show something is wrong when it doesn’t exist.
    some sort of feeble attempt at feeling superior?
    You’re like my mad uncle who sometimes starts jumping around because he’s being attacked by wasps. Wasps nobody else can see.
    if only Salby were to publish any such substance
    if there is no work, then how can you say he is right?
    I’m no grub.
    I’ve never been found to have, “overcharged his grants and violated financial conflict of interest policies, displaying “a pattern of deception, a lack of integrity, and a persistent and intentional disregard of NSF and University rules and policies” and a “consistent willingness to violate rules and regulations, whether federal or local, for his personal benefit.”
    *That’s* what a grub would do.
    So where’s the claim for unfair dismissal?
    ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!
    Thank you for the comedy show!
    Tell me it’s just an act…
    My conclusion? Salby was talking rubbish. And drivel. And you should be more sceptical of powerpoint presentations in the future.
    I want cheaper electricity. I want more wind power.

    In all the 85 comments there has not been a single contribution to the discussion. This is just content free ridicule and the comments on Salby are substantially defamatory. Could I suggest that he is just ignored please. Maybe he is just lonely and ignored at home? Who would be surprised?

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      > Could I suggest that he is just ignored please

      If you want to ignore him, then set an example and do so. But replicating a pile of his comments, twice, isn’t a very good start.

      But you’re wrong about his contributions; they are valuable. For example: “Where is the science? A bunch of powerpoint slides from a talk he once gave? Is that it?”. Salby’s CO2 work hasn’t been published as far as I’m aware, and no-one has provided a link to it so I guess no-one else knows either. Only to some rather old and bog-std stuff.

      We do have the unsubstantiated assertion “He submitted a paper on his initial findings to the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.” But if so, why hasn’t he made the paper available?

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        Kenneth Richard

        Salby’s CO2 work hasn’t been published as far as I’m aware

        Salby’s CO2 work is in his latest textbook, William.

        http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-textbook-explains-why-man-made_21.html

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          the Griss

          I doubt that the WC has read a real text book for a very long time. !

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          the Griss

          Unless he considers Woman’s Weekly or Cleo a text book . !

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        • #

          Thanks for the ref, but you need to read it, not just ref it. What you’ve linked there is poor quality and wouldn’t survive peer review, but its not the stuff we’re talking about. Nothing there says that the CO2 rise isn’t human-caused, as his youtube stuff does. There’s nothing there about his weirdo maths to make CO2 in icecore disappear. What he’s got there is just about survivable, though he’s emphasising and re-interpreting respectable things to the limit of the side he’s trying to push.

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            Kenneth Richard

            “Nothing there says that the CO2 rise isn’t human-caused, as his youtube stuff does.”

            Here is the textbook itself. Read it and then explain how Salby does not say that CO2 is modulated primarily by temperature, not human emissions.

            http://www.atmosfera.unam.mx/jzavala/OceanoAtmosfera/Physics%20of%20the%20Atmosphere%20and%20Climate%20-%20Murry%20Salby.pdf

            After that, William, please explain what mechanism caused CO2 levels to rise from 190 ppm during glacials to 300 ppm during glacials for the last 800,000 years. It wasn’t humans burning fossil fuels. So what was it?

            “The out-of-phase relationship between rCO2 and δ13C in the instrumental record (Fig. 1.43) is the same one evidenced on longer time scales by ice cores (Fig. 1.14). The out-of-phase relationship in ice cores is regarded as a signature of anthropogenic emission, subject to uncertainties (Sec. 1.2.4). The out-of-phase relationship in the instrumental record, however, is clearly not anthropogenic. —Dr. Salby

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            • #
              Kenneth Richard

              The WC linking to Wikipedia..

              WHAT A JOKE !!!!! roflmao !!!

              Indeed.

              —————————————
              http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020515/climategate-the-corruption-of-wikipedia/

              Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

              All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
              ————————————-
              http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikipropaganda-on-global-warming/

              Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.

              Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party.

              And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore. Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry.

              Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelley used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding.
              ——————————————-
              http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_law_ban_wikipedia.htm
              “Wikipedia has long been banned as a credible source for schools and universities…”

              School officials unite in banning Wikipedia (The Seattle Times)
              Wikipedia banned from UCSC class (Vallejo Times Hearald)
              A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source (The New York Times)
              Fake Wikipedia prof altered 20,000 entries (The Daily Telegraph, UK)
              Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar (Canada Free Press)
              Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems (The Register)
              Dutch Justice Ministry to Block 30,000 Workers From Using Wikipedia (FOX News)
              Falling exam passes blamed on Wikipedia ‘littered with inaccuracies’ (The Scotsman, UK)
              Insider Editing at Wikipedia (The New York Times)
              Judges told repeatedly to stop using Wikipedia (ArsTechnica)
              Congress caught making false entries in Wikipedia (CNET News)
              Australian politicians ‘doctor Wikipedia entries’ (The Daily Telegraph, UK)

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        I wonder if it’s getting loneley among the CAGW-backbenchers?

        you’re wrong about [Craig Thomas’] contributions; they are valuable

        Pretty much says it all

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        the Griss

        The WC thinks CT’s contributions are valuable.. lol !!!!

        Poor CT, that puts a major stain on his small remaining credibility.

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      Tim

      Maybe he’s referring to Leck’s propaganda-o-tron bot. His answers sure appear with miraculous speed.

      http://gizmodo.com/5681617/programmer-develops-twitter-bot-to-troll-climate-change-deniers

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      john robertson

      Come now, we need to coddle and treasure this rare breed of critter.
      Either a true believer, exceedingly rare.
      Or a semi-coherent Troll, also a vanishing breed.
      Whichever it is, the empty blathering serves as an insight into the group psychosis of this death cult and should be valued.
      After all it does attempt to engage, therefore some cognitive function remains.
      As better writers than myself have pointed out, the people who need to be reached are not us openly doubtful curmudgeons , nor the members of the C.C.C (Cult of Calamitous Carbon/Climate) Fully paid up suckers will not be convinced until their moneys gone.
      The majority of citizens have not engaged in this discussion yet, they are only now being stung into action.
      The bills are coming into households world wide, “Electricity prices will necessarily sky rock”.
      As the cycle turns cooler, almost in synch with ever increasing costs for energy, this is when the discussion truly begins.
      And it will not be pretty.
      This internet will make the next phase very interesting.

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    Richard

    The measurements required to answer questions are difficult.

    I had no idea that the IPCC were concerned with measurements, I thought they based their carbon cycle conclusions on models.

    I think the graph below is potentially relevant to Salby’s idea that temperature controls atmospheric CO2. Look how there is a time-lag between temperature changes and CO2 changes. CO2 is clearly lagging temperature. Can CO2 really cause corresponding temperature increases that occurred before the CO2 increase? Unlikely. The graph below is probably sufficient by itself to refute the entire CAGW-ideology.

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      Richard

      Hopefully this time the image appears, it didn’t appear in my post above.

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      Vince Whirlwind

      I had no idea that the IPCC were concerned with measurements, I thought they based their carbon cycle conclusions on models.

      http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

      You obviously haven’t even read the work the IPCC publishes.
      Read it now and come back to us with and apologise for wasting our time with beliefs that are unsourced and untrue.

      It’s a bit of a trend on this blog – people who know nothing about something have a miraculous revelation that allows them to pass comment about that something despite their complete lack of knowledge.

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        the Griss

        “It’s a bit of a trend on this blog – people who know nothing”

        I noticed that to..

        The last few weeks we have had the WC, then Apple, then CT and now you.

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        • #
          Vince Whirlwind

          Still no substance form you then.

          I don’t suppose *you*’ve read AR5, either? I bet you’re an expert on it, though…

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        the Griss

        Its almost as if there was a massive panic among the alarmistas, and the Green Blob is trying to smear the forum with their stinking green-brown slime.

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  • #
    Bris Vegas

    Murry Salby was ‘stranded’ in Paris because he went there without the university’s permission. At the time he was facing disicplinary actions. An independent enquiry supported the university’s actions in dismissing Dr Salby.

    Dr Salby was also found to have misused funding when he was a researcher at the University of Colorado. https://www.nsf.gov/oig/search/I06090025.pdf

    Maybe he just wasn’t doing a good job.

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    • #
      Tim

      Tim Flannery also gets about a bit. Has any enquiry into his expenses been undertaken?

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        Vince Whirlwind

        Flannery is a good teacher and does a good job without ripping off his employer. Maybe Salby should sign up to study under him to learn some good habits?

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  • #
    • #
      TdeF

      Thanks. This fits with Henry’s law. Like lemonade, warmer means gas loss and cooler gas absorption.

      However my calculations using Henry’s law show that it is knife edge. Cool and the CO2 goes straight back in. So outgassing at the equator and rapid absorption at the poles.

      What is puzzling is the sheer amount of CO2 in the oceans,50x as much as in the air, something not expected from Henry’s law.

      The second puzzle is the rate at which shallow water mixes with deep oceans is measured in hundreds of years, so the IPCC and others think this means surface CO2 and deep CO2 take hundreds of years to mix, putting the deep CO2 out of the picture.

      For the first you have to look at the incredibly solubility of CO2 at high pressure. This is possibly because CO2 is so polar it freezes at -56C. The second is that gas may moves smoothly between the depths, unlike water itself. This happens with gas in bottles. The bubbles come from the bottom.

      It is possible there is a CO2 elevator at work here, a unique mechanism. The solubility of CO2 at depth is so great that it provides an enormous reservoir not subject directly to Henry’s law but supplies infinite reserves to the surface. However a loss of CO2 in the surface layer may produce rapid movement up of compressed gas regardless of ocean currents.

      Conversely at the poles, CO2 absorbed may sink very quickly to great depth, changing the whole idea behind Henry’s law. Maybe at lot of it has to do with the sheer volume of the oceans and distance from the surface and changing conditions. Normal Henry’s law is about almost constant pressure in the liquid below, not pressures 400x higher at the bottom than the top. This pressure gradient would be impossible to simulate in a laboratory, so we have to learn from nature. What we do know is that equilibrium exists, most of the world’s CO2 is in the oceans and the exchange time, the half life is around 14 years.

      What this all means is that man cannot increase the 2% of CO2 in the atmosphere. The 50% increase must be due to overall ocean warming and given the 50x amplification, it would require an increase in average temperature of only about 1C. Now that makes sense.

      An interesting test would be to check the age of CO2 in the deep oceans. C14 has a half life of 5730 years and if C14O2 took a long time to sink, the CO2 at the bottom would be substantially older. That is much less C14. If however the average age of CO2 at the top of the ocean was comparable to that at the bottom, we know the mechanism of exchange is fast, confirming the idea.

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    Andrew McRae

    Jo, why are you doing this to yourself again? We’ve talked about this in email. You’ve been shown the logic, the measurements, the arithmetic, and the inescapable conclusion.
    Why do you persist with ignoring Salby’s violation of conservation of mass?
    Or do you still believe his conclusion is compatible with conservation of mass?

    Irrelevancy of Salbyisms
    The argument presented in the article is logically fallacious:

    But Salby points to much larger natural processes, such as emissions from decaying vegetation, that also reduce the proportion of heavy carbon. Temperature heavily influences the rate of microbial activity inherent in these natural processes, and Salby notes that the share of heavy carbon emissions falls whenever temperatures are warm.

    He has only shown here that the isotope argument for human causation does not follow. But this does not prove natural causation, that would be fallacious reasoning.
    If any other different argument which is valid were to show that industry was the main cause of the CO2 rise then the conclusion of human causation would still be valid. We do have another argument which has nothing to do with isotopes or temperatures or soil moisture or unmeasurable rates of change of Amazonian carbon sinks or any other tricky complications.
    It’s simply the mass balance principle.

    What it is.
    In nearly every calendar year for which both atmospheric CO2 and industrial carbon emissions data are available, the annual increase in total atmospheric carbon content was only around half the industrial emissions contribution. An inquiring mind would ask where the other half of the emitted mass went. The belief that human activity is the main driver of recent CO2 increase based on the mass balance principal is an empirically falsifiable belief. That belief could only be false if the annual rise in CO2 was greater or equal to the industrial emissions. The measurements show it’s not, it’s the other way around.

    By including all fossil fuel reserves as part of the Industrial carbon repository, and defining Nature as everything that isn’t Industry or the Atmosphere, we obtain a partitioning of Earth’s carbon atoms into 3 repositories which does not leave any atoms unaccounted. It’s then an argument about the observed change in Atmospheric carbon between two points in time relative to what quantity we know was removed from the Industrial repository during that period.

    What it’s not.
    This is not a rate-based argument, so it does not need partial differential equations and calculus to solve it. The quantities are in gigatonnes, not in gigatonnes per year. Solving it really is as simple as algebra and arithmetic.
    This is not an argument that violates Henry’s law or makes any restrictions on what soil microbes can or can’t do in their spare time, since it is based on measurements which are the net result of all forces and processes up to the time of the measurement no matter what those forces and processes were.
    This is not a supposition about natural sinks and sources being in perfect pre-industrial harmonious balance and neither is it an argument that natural sinks and sources remain absolutely fixed in their capacity.
    This is not an argument that natural variability doesn’t occur, indeed the changing temperature of the ocean and the changing activity of the biosphere are the main contributors to the year-by-year variance in atmospheric CO2 rise and are the reason the fraction of industrial emission that is absorbed per year is not constant and varies above and below 50%. However the net flow of carbon per year is all in one direction as you will soon see.

    Procedure
    Just apply conservation of mass to the measurements. We wish to deduce whether Nature was a net emitter or a net absorber of carbon during any given year, and by how much. So we set the total of changes of the repositories to be zero, then calculate Nature’s change in carbon content based on the measured changes in the other two repositories (Air and Industry). Using 2004 figures in Gt of carbon : 3.4 + -8.8 + N = 0 ; therefore N = 0 – 3.4 + 8.8 = +5.4. Nature comes out as positive, its content increased over that year, therefore a net absorber, therefore not a net source.

    Conclusions
    Apply the same procedure to the data from other years and you’ll find that 1998 is the only recent year which gets anywhere close to nature being a net emitter, probably due to Henry’s law reducing the rate at which a warm El Nino ocean can absorb CO2. Yet even during 1998 more carbon went into Nature than came out of it. In every year of the last 40 years the industrial repository is the only net source of CO2 on a year-on-year basis.
    The conclusion is inescapable.

    In Salby’s view, the evidence actually suggests […]

    False. Evidence cannot suggest anything, only people make suggestions. Salby is the one suggesting the causality should be reversed.

    Salby’s recent work is so controversial because it questions the key IPCC assumption, that man-made CO2 emissions cause global levels of CO2 to rise.

    Salby’s recent work is so controversial because it reaches conclusions incompatible with conservation of mass.

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      TdeF

      The CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up 50% in a hundred years. That is the problem.

      The first hypothesis of warmists is that industrial man is responsible, whether wholly or partly seems to be your point. The second hypothesis is that this increase largely explains the recent increases in temperature. In this the AGW, man made Global Warming argument is that most of the increase in CO2 is not natural. If the increase in CO2 is entirely natural and not related to fossil fuels, you can take the A away from AGW and man is not in control.

      How you add up the Carbon sinks and sources, as laid out in the Bern diagram, is what you seem to be discussing, that CO2 is in equilibrium. Nothing much to do with conservation of mass though, a principle which seems a bit of dramatic overkill in this argument. Given that 98% of CO2 is in solution, perhaps 60% of the total CO2 biosphere, even a small increase in ocean temperature would produce a dramatic increase in aerial CO2. So we have a causality, but not the one of the AGW people.

      The likelihood is that man cannot increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere given the principles of physical chemistry with respect to gaseous equilibrium. It is a simple law. Concentrations in the gas and air remain at a fixed ratio for a given temperature. That means using simple ratios if you increase the CO2 in the air from 2% to 3% by burning coal, the total CO2 increases to 101% and the final concentrations are changed by only 1%, from 2% to 2.01% in the air and 98% to 97.98% in the water.

      The really interesting question is why there is so much more CO2 in the oceans, a far higher concentration than Henry’s law would predict. As I suggested, this is because the physical properties of CO2 in solution change dramatically with pressure and vast pressures are involved.

      Murray Selby’s presentation was really profoundly good. He made simple sense to people who were not necessarily in his field, which is a real skill. I would watch his video again. There is no doubt he had to go. He had just proven CAGW was wrong and he was employed to prove otherwise. His own explanation at the time was that he was not in his contract hired to teach classes. This was just a device to force him to leave, something which would not surprise anyone.

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        Andrew McRae

        TdeF, you didn’t understand a single thing I said. That didn’t seem to stop you from responding.

        The first hypothesis of warmists is that industrial man is responsible, whether wholly or partly seems to be your point.

        Nope. I didn’t mention global warming at all. You didn’t understand a single thing I said.

        Nothing much to do with conservation of mass

        The question of whether CO2 has gone up primarily from artificial causes or natural ones (ie Salby’s conclusion) is crucially connected with conservation of mass. You didn’t understand a single thing I said.

        The likelihood is that man cannot increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere given the principles of physical chemistry with respect to gaseous equilibrium.

        You’re just going to keep repeating that regardless of real measurements, aren’t you.
        It doesn’t matter what you think is probable. It only matters what was observed to actually occur. We don’t even need to know how it happened at the chemistry level, as simply knowing what happened in net carbon exchange is sufficient. You didn’t understand a single thing I said.

        If anything can be salvaged from your comment, it is your point about our inability to alter the equilibrium levels of CO2. As you say, the equilibrium level is temperature dependent and we don’t have much control over actual temperatures. Crucially, as the ocean now goes into cooling it will be observed that CO2 continues to go up, whereas any temperature-only model would predict CO2 goes into decline within a few years. You cannot use the current disconnect between rising CO2 and decreasing temperature to disprove CAGW without also recognising it proves temperature is currently not the main driver of CO2.

        That doesn’t prove whether we did or did not increase the CO2 levels over the last 150 years because the reality has not been an equilibrium scenario, at least because we keep adding CO2 to the air. We can speculate all day about how fast carbon goes into and out of oceans, trees, plankton, volcanoes, and everything else, and that will still just be speculation. Applying conservation of mass proves that human activity did raise CO2 levels by more than 60ppm over the last 50 years. That’s the point.

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          Vince Whirlwind

          You cannot use the current disconnect between rising CO2 and decreasing temperature to disprove CAGW without also recognising it proves temperature is currently not the main driver of CO2.

          Applying conservation of mass proves that human activity did raise CO2 levels by more than 60ppm over the last 50 years. That’s the point.

          If only the denizens of this page would stop and think about it, they would see these conclusions are inescapable.

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      Over at WUWT someone expressed the mass balance idea thus:

      “We put +8Gt up every year, but only +4Gt change is seen in the air at the end of each year. Arithmetic says +4.0 – +8.0 net effect of nature on atmosphere is negative. Nature is presently a net sink of CO2 from the atmosphere, no other conclusion is compatible with observations.”

      To which I replied as follows:

      “That is not evidence that nature is a net sink.

      The ocean surfaces have been warming since the LIA so throughout that period of time the capacity of the oceans to hold CO2 has been falling naturally.

      It is more likely that ever since the LIA nature has been a net source of CO2 when the warming oceans are taken into account.

      Nature itself could be producing the extra 4Gt with the human contribution negligible after it has been taken up by local or regional sinks such as nearby vegetation.”

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        Richard C (NZ)

        Stephen #32.2

        >”Nature itself could be producing the extra 4Gt with the human contribution negligible after it has been taken up by local or regional sinks such as nearby vegetation”

        I think “local or regional” is the key e.g. anthro contribution is all but non-existent in the South Pacific. Your statement therefore might be more applicable to say Pennsylvania in the US where there is both industry and vegetation. JAXA Ibuki indicates (I think I recall) that the State is a net sequesterer even with the industry present.

        You posted a link previously linking to AIRS. Below is Nasa AIRS Mid-Troposphere (8km) CO2 July 2003:

        http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nasa_AIRS_CO2_July03.jpg

        Clearly not “well mixed” at regional level and the high concentrations (obviously after air transport) don’t correspond with industrialized areas.

        Recently Willis Eschenback observed, in ‘The Revenge of the Climate Reparations’ that “it [Ibuki] appears to be pretty accurate. For example, if you look at the lower right part of Australia, you can see the two big cities of Sydney and Melbourne as red dots in the sea of blue.”

        http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/05/the-revenge-of-the-climate-reparations/

        I find it amusing that the country demanding climate reparations most vociferously (Leftist Bolivia) is sandwiched between industrial Germany and Japan on the Top 20 Carbon Emitting Nations chart.

        Tom Quirk covered the regional aspect in his paper (referred to by Joanne and linked previously at #17):

        ‘SOURCES AND SINKS OF CARBON DIOXIDE’

        ABSTRACT
        The conventional representation of the impact on the atmosphere of the use of fossil fuels is to state that the annual increases in concentration of CO2 come from fossil fuels and the balance of some 50% of fossil fuel CO2 is absorbed in the oceans or on land by physical and chemical processes.

        An examination of the data from:

        i) measurements of the fractionation of CO2 by way of Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 isotopes,

        ii) the seasonal variations of the concentration of CO2 in the Northern Hemisphere and

        iii) the time delay between Northern and Southern Hemisphere variations in CO2,

        raises questions about the conventional explanation of the source of increased atmospheric CO2.

        The results suggest that El Nino and the Southern Oscillation events produce major changes in the carbon isotope ratio in the atmosphere. This does not favour the continuous increase of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels as the source of isotope ratio changes. The constancy of seasonal variations in CO2 and the lack of time delays between the hemispheres suggest that fossil fuel derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted. This implies that natural variability of the climate is the prime cause of increasing CO2, not the emissions of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.

        http://icecap.us/images/uploads/TomQuirkSourcesandSinksofCO2_FINAL.pdf

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          Richard C (NZ)

          Stephen re #32.2.1 (just to focus your attention)

          Note in particular this element (emphasised) from Tom Quirk’s analysis quoted and linked above:

          “The constancy of seasonal variations in CO2 and the lack of time delays between the hemispheres suggest that fossil fuel derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted

          Easy to visualize from the AIRS graphic too.

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            Craig Thomas

            So what? What happens to the CO2 that would have been absorbed if the human-produced CO2 wasn’t around?
            Never mind, we already know what happens:
            CO2 levels continue to climb due to the additional CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.

            As to the line you are quoting – Tom Quirk is a propagandist working for a right-wing lobby-group.
            Not a scientist.
            Not a researcher.
            His opinion is based on no research, no analysis of science or data, just a misbegotten opinion that doesn’t even make sense.

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              The Backslider

              I suggest Polly that you take the time to learn about Henry’s Law.

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              Richard C (NZ)

              Craig #32.2.1.1.1

              >”Tom Quirk…….opinion is based on no research, no analysis of science or data, just a misbegotten opinion that doesn’t even make sense.”

              Opinion? BS. Read his paper ‘SOURCES AND SINKS OF CARBON DIOXIDE’:

              http://icecap.us/images/uploads/TomQuirkSourcesandSinksofCO2_FINAL.pdf

              I suggest, given your rant, that you’re just indulging in projection Craig.

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              The Backslider

              As to the line you are quoting – Tom Quirk is a propagandist working for a right-wing lobby-group.
              Not a scientist.
              Not a researcher.
              His opinion is based on no research, no analysis of science or data, just a misbegotten opinion that doesn’t even make sense.

              Well, that’s nice and defamatory.

              Just to show the insignificance of your ignorance:

              Dr Tom Quirk

              University of Oxford
              Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Elementary Particle Physics
              1963 – 1967

              Junior Research Fellow St. Johns College
              Fellow Wolfson College
              Fellow Hertford College

              University of Melbourne
              University of Melbourne
              Master of Science (M.S.), Nuclear Physics
              1957 – 1963

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                Vince Whirlwind

                He’s been running a bunch of companies while writing the occasional article for reactionary mouthpieces such as the IPA aqnd the Quadrant.

                He is not a scientist, has no expertise in this area, and moreover obviously has no clue what he’s talking about, something that is obvious when you go back over the fallacious and now disproven articles he has written over the years.

                [Vince, it would be useful if you cited these many disproven articles you mention. – Mod]

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                The Backslider

                He is not a scientist

                Gee Vince, somebody who has a doctorate from Oxford is not a scientist? And you people have the gall to call skeptics deniers?

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                Richard C (NZ)

                >”He [Quirk] is not a scientist”

                Maybe not, but if Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Elementary Particle Physics is anything to go by, he probably ranks a few echelons higher and has ample transferable knowledge and skills to apply to fledgeling climate science.

                From Cornell (my emphasis):

                ‘Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics’

                The Standard Model of strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions is the crowning achievement of twentieth century physics. However, despite its many spectacular successes, the Standard Model is inconsistent at high energies and should be superseded by a new, more fundamental theory at the teraelectron-volt (TeV) energy scale. Many theoretical ideas about the nature of the physics at the TeV scale have been proposed, examples include: supersymmetry, extra dimensions of space and new strong interactions. Members of the Cornell theory group are active in investigating these ideas. While so far this work has been purely theoretical, the experimental investigation of the TeV scale began in late 2009, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland began operations.

                Continues>>>>>>>

                http://www.physics.cornell.edu/research/theoretical-elementary-particle-physics/

                If climate science had only a rudimentary acquaintance with energy-per-photon (in electron-volts) across the electromagnetic spectrum, they wouldn’t have the notion that 1W of DLR power in the 3 – 16µm EM WL range is an equivalent heating agent to 1W of power in the solar spectrum.

                Heating effect is the critical element of the climate sensitivity paradigm. That is, the actual heating effect of ΔF=4 W/m2 for 2xCO2 (TOA, based on radiative transfer codes using detailed knowledge of GHG absorption as a function of wavelength) i.e. is the heating effect of that downwelling long-wave radiative flux (DLR) real or is DLR not the heating agent it is assumed to be e.g. is 1 W/m2 DLR heating effect equal to 1 W/m2 SW heating effect?

                It isn’t. DLR occurs in the IR-C range of the electromagnetic spectrum, SW in IR-A/B (and Visible and UV):

                Electromagnetic spectrum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
                Infrared http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared

                From Electromagnetic spectrum:
                NIR Near Infrared 300 THz 1 μm 1.24 eV ……[IR-A/B (SW)]
                MIR Mid infrared 30 THz 10 μm 124 meV…….[IR-C (DLR)]

                From Infrared:
                Near-Infrared NIR 0.78–3 µm
                IR-A: 700 nm – 1400 nm (0.7 µm – 1.4 µm, 215 THz – 430 THz) …..[SW]
                IR-B: 1400 nm – 3000 nm (1.4 µm – 3 µm, 100 THz – 215 THz) …..[SW]
                Mid-Infrared MIR 3–50 µm
                IR-C: 3000 nm – 1 mm (3 µm – 1000 µm, 300 GHz – 100 THz) …..[DLR]

                So although power is apparently equal (1 W/m2 DLR = 1 W/m2 SW) the heating effect on any material (e.g. water) is occurring at different wavelengths (less than 3µm vs greater than 3µm) and different energy-per-photon levels (1.24 eV vs 124 meV) i.e. the heating effect is not equal.

                The effective penetration depth of water by DLR is only around 10µm (microns) as established by Hale and Querry (1973) and corroborated since. See:

                ‘A Null Hypothesis For CO2’

                Roy Clark PhD
                Submission to the US EPA

                http://appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/EPA_Submission_RClark.pdf

                This is the reason solar power is harnessed by a water medium in solar water heating systems but no-one in their right mind bothers with DLR e.g. 400 W/m2 day/night DLR Darwin. And, apart from the feedback solar and ocean oscillation issues, probably the reason most climate models are wildly overshooting temperature.

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              Kenneth Richard

              Welcome back, Craig.

              For the past 800,000 years of the ice core record, CO2 levels rose from 190 ppm during the glacials to 300 ppm during the interglacials (after a lag of about 800 years).

              Question: What was the physical mechanism that caused atmospheric CO2 levels to rise by 100+ ppm for the last 800,000 years – since it wasn’t caused by humans burning fossil fuels?

              Why do you suppose that the physical mechanism that caused CO2 levels to rise by 100+ ppm in the ice core record does not exist today? What happened to it? Did it disappear?

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              Rod Stuart

              Craig
              I am new to this web site, and you certainly seem to have a handle on the subject.
              Are you a perfessor at one of them there Unis or something?
              Or you must be one of them climate science experts that they keep talking about. Where do you obtain all this information?
              You certainly seem to be a smart feller. I am from Tasmania, and we don’t think much about the weather down here unless it interferes with the haying. You must be from the mainland, or meybe one of them fur flung Europe places.

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            Kenneth Richard

            Richard (NZ):

            A few more papers supporting Dr. Quirk’s:
            —————————————–
            http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/c641328u4263j70x/
            The natural exchange of CO2 between ocean, biomass on land and the atmosphere is very large. In only four to five years all the CO2 in the atmosphere has been recycled through the oceans and the biomass system. The annual anthropogenic human production of CO2 is neutralized by nature in as little as 12 days. Recent studies of the solar forcing, changes in cosmic radiation and its role in cloud formations explain the global warming that has taken place since 1910.
            ——————————————-

            http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/b086687054075135/
            It is commonly assumed (e.g. by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; IPCC) that a part of the emitted carbon dioxide will stay in the atmosphere and, therefore, large emission rate of carbon dioxide should cause large increase rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide. High temperature should also increase the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration due to lowered solubility of carbon dioxide in the backmixed ocean surface water. However, using two-dimensional regression analysis, the increase rate could not be explained by the emissions because temperature was the dominating parameter that controlled the increase rate. The fraction of the emissions that remained in the atmosphere—or the airborne fraction—decreased significantly despite global warming.

            10

            • #
              Richard C (NZ)

              Kenneth #32.1.1.2,

              Interesting. The Goldberg paper is available here (expect instant disparagement due to hosting):

              ‘RATE OF INCREASING CONCENTRATIONS OF ATMOSPHERIC
              CARBON DIOXIDE CONTROLLED BY NATURAL TEMPERATURE VARIATIONS’

              http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/25543.pdf

              Page 3.

              2. THE CARBON CYCLE
              According to measurements by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U S DOE, the total reservoir of CO2 in the atmosphere (expressed in carbon equivalents) is 775 Gtons, figure 3.

              The diagram shows that in the oceanic reservoir there is 38 100 Gtons C of dissolved CO2, which (according to Henry’s Law) fifty times more than in the atmosphere. According to the diagram the annual flux of CO2 from the oceans to the atmosphere is 90 Gton C and 92 Gton C in the opposite direction.

              The biomass is absorbing 101 Gton C per year but is also releasing the same amount due to decay processes. This shows that all the CO2 in the atmosphere 775/(101+92)=4 is circulated through the oceans and the biomass in approx. four years.

              The human contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere is estimated to 7-8 Gton C per year, which is one percent of the existing CO2 in the atmosphere. If we add the absorption of CO2 into the oceans and biomass of 92+101 = 193 Gton C, we can calculate that the annual human contribution corresponds to only 12 days of natural turnover.

              This shows that human emissions of CO2 are a very small part of the total natural circulation of CO2.

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      • #
        Vince Whirlwind

        Stephen, you’ve provided nothing but incoherent babble.

        “It is more likely that ever since the LIA nature has been a net source of CO2 when the warming oceans are taken into account.”

        This is precisely what is not happening and we know it for sure because we are putting 8Gt into the atmosphere, but the atmosphere is only gaining 4Gt.

        It is a trivial work of logic to understand that Nature is therefore a net sink under these conditions, regardless of the precise value for any one component of the natural carbon cycle, eg the oceans.

        45

        • #
          the Griss

          Vince, you have NEVER provided anything BUT incoherent babble.

          [SNIP.]

          34

          • #
            Vince Whirlwind

            I see you failed to grasp my point. Let me try to explain it for you:
            Stephen says, “Nature has been a net source of CO2”.
            But humans have annually been supplying 8.8Gt to the atmosphere, while the atmosphere has only been increasing by 4Gt.
            This means we can be 100% certain that nature has been a net sink for CO2.
            Richard’s assertion is the complete opposite of basic, evident fact.

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            • #

              Humans produce 8.8Gt but it is all taken up locally and regionally by vegetation since the satellite data shows no surplus CO2 emanating from population centres. It is all emanating from warmer ocean surfaces as per my link.

              Meanwhile the oceans have warmed due to higher solar activity so that their ability to retain CO2 has been declining. That produces the natural increasing CO2 at 4Gt.

              You say that nature is a net sink by virtue of its rapid local absorption of the human contribution but that higher absorption rate is a by product of the initial human emissions so it is not truly natural.It would not have happened without the human emissions to drive it in the first place.

              Absorption of that 8.8Gt of human CO2 by nearby vegetation is as unnatural as the initial human emissions.

              Meanwhile, if one ignores both the human local release of CO2 and the human caused local absorption as one should because neither is natural and they cancel out, then the natural world in the background is acting as a natural source to the extent of 4Gt.

              That is why the mass balance argument is a fallacy.

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      • #
        Andrew McRae

        > “That is not evidence that nature is a net sink.”

        Unless you want to disprove conservation of mass, or prove the emissions figures are bogus, or prove all CO2 measurements are wrong, then yes it is proof nature is a net sink.

        > “The ocean surfaces have been warming since the LIA so throughout that period of time the capacity of the oceans to hold CO2 has been falling naturally.”

        The recovery of CO2 levels from the LIA would naturally be to reach the same levels it was at prior to the onset of the LIA. Assuming the recovery was as rapid as the onset, the recovery from the LIA was all over by 1900. Yet CO2 levels are now way past the levels they were in 1500. You would only have to look at the Law Dome ice core proxy to see that.
        Oh! My mistake. The last time someone pointed you to the Law Dome proxy to correct your misconceptions, you never replied to them. I guess you’ll ignore the evidence this time too.

        Your next comment on that WUWT thread was priceless:

        we do still need to resolve the discrepancy between proxy records (especially ice cores) and the sheer size of the apparent CO2 increase in proportionate terms observed during the 20th century.

        No “we” don’t. You need to resolve that discrepancy. I already have.

        Not that it matters much, because the mass balance principle makes the Henry’s Law arguments moot. We already know what actually happened in the end result of all carbon transfers in any year of the previous 50, so whatever chemistry reactions occurred were reactions that led to that observed end result.

        > “It is more likely that “…
        > “Nature itself could be producing the extra 4Gt”

        I don’t know why I bother with checking the real world measurements when your supposition and speculation is clearly a more readily available substitute.

        > …”with the human contribution negligible after it has been taken up by local or regional sinks such as nearby vegetation.”

        Sure. And any space in a carbon repository that is occupied by aCO2 is space that can’t be occupied by natural CO2. If our 8GtC was fully absorbed by Nature, but the Atmosphere was still observed to increase by only 4GtC, you have to emit 8GtC from Nature but then annihilate 4Gt of natural matter to stay consistent with the observations. You are playing Carbon Whack-a-mol™. A net absorption of carbon atoms (of mixed origin) by Nature is the only explanation consistent with measurements of pCO2 in air, increasing fossil fuel sales, increasing Dissolved Inorganic Carbon from ocean surveys, the widely reported beneficial greening of the planet, and the weak decline in ocean pH.

        I say the conclusion is inescapable. Perhaps you are trying to become famous as the Houdini of the climate debate.

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        • #

          You can only say that nature is a net sink if you wrongly label the additional absorption caused by our emissions as natural.

          As I said to Vince above:

          “Humans produce 8.8Gt but it is all taken up locally and regionally by vegetation since the satellite data shows no surplus CO2 emanating from population centres. It is all emanating from warmer ocean surfaces as per my link.

          Meanwhile the oceans have warmed due to higher solar activity so that their ability to retain CO2 has been declining. That produces the natural increasing CO2 at 4Gt.

          You say that nature is a net sink by virtue of its rapid local absorption of the human contribution but that higher absorption rate is a by product of the initial human emissions so it is not truly natural.It would not have happened without the human emissions to drive it in the first place.

          Absorption of that 8.8Gt of human CO2 by nearby vegetation is as unnatural as the initial human emissions.

          Meanwhile, if one ignores both the human local release of CO2 and the human caused local absorption as one should because neither is natural and they cancel out, then the natural world in the background is acting as a natural source to the extent of 4Gt.

          That is why the mass balance argument is a fallacy.”

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          • #
            Andrew McRae

            (Sorry for delay in replying but I hadn’t checked until now for responses.)

            >> You can only say that nature is a net sink if you wrongly label the additional absorption caused by our emissions as natural.

            No, *you* can say Nature is a net sink of carbon in any given year if Nature absorbs more carbon than it emits during that year. By definition of “net”.

            Your attempt to invent strawmen while again refusing to understand any argument that has been put to you is growing tiresome. It is not befitting of you.

            >>”You say that nature is a net sink by virtue of its rapid local absorption of the human contribution”

            No! No, Mr Wilde. YOU said that. You introduced it. You said it right here:
            >> ”with the human contribution negligible after it has been taken up by local or regional sinks such as nearby vegetation.”

            I showed your argument didn’t add up (literally) even if your statement about local absorption was accepted hypothetically. My words in reply to yours were: “If our 8GtC was fully absorbed by Nature[…]”
            Don’t try to pin the blame for your assumptions on anyone else.

            >> “but that higher absorption rate is a by product of the initial human emissions so it is not truly natural. It would not have happened without the human emissions to drive it in the first place.”

            This is where you imagine that I have ever before used the phrase “natural absorption” in this discussion (I hadn’t), then use the ambiguity of the word “natural” to imagine it means whatever suits your argumentative purpose. A “natural absorption” in this context means an absorption by Nature of carbon, same as an “oceanic absorption” would be absorption by the ocean. The source of carbon is irrelevant to describing where it actually went. If 30 cars entered Canberra this morning, you do not try to tell me only 3 cars entered Canberra this morning because 27 of them were from Sydney. Their origin is irrelevant to describing where they went. You have to describe what happened before you can engage in attribution of how or why it happened.

            >> “Absorption of that 8.8Gt of human CO2 by nearby vegetation is as unnatural…. “

            Rrrrrriiiight. Uhuh. So when plants absorb CO2 that came from the ocean, that absorption is “natural”, but according to you when they absorb CO2 from fossil fuels that absorption is not “natural”? So you’re implying some absorptions into Nature are counted as having gone into Nature and other absorptions into Nature are not counted as having gone into Nature? And why is the source of some CO2 relevant to whether it gets counted as part of a subsequent absorption by Nature…?? Oh, okay, I know why.
            We are clearly on different planets. On my planet the plants do not have laser barcode scanners to check every CO2 molecule they encounter to see if it was last touched by industry and decide whether they should absorb it or reject it. They just absorb CO2 without fussing about the source, as they do every day for at least 6 months of the year.

            On your planet things may be different. Don’t let the airlock hit you on the way out.

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      Richard C (NZ)

      Andrew #32

      >”Just apply conservation of mass to the measurements”

      >”Using 2004 figures in Gt of carbon : 3.4 + -8.8 + N = 0 ; therefore N = 0 – 3.4 + 8.8 = +5.4″

      Compelling on the face of it but neglects reservoir exchange over time (even a year i.e. 8.8 GtC didn’t arrive instantly in one dollop). For discussion refer to Tom Quirks’ graph of FF emissions 1959 – 2006:

      http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/co2/co2-emissions-atmospheric-rise-quirk.gif

      Your calculation implies that about 39% (3.4/8.8) of CO2ff goes to atm each year. So for the 48 years of the graph, of the approx 264 GtC CO2ff total, 103 GtC went to atm by that implication.

      MLO
      ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_annmean_mlo.txt

      In those 48 yrs, MLO atm carbon increased 140 GtC (139.77 at 2.12 ppm to GtC conversion), 37 GtC more than CO2ff alone by reasoning as above. If we assume that in 1958 none of the atm constituency was CO2ff then CO2ff as a percentage of total atm was increased from 0 to 17.3% 1959 – 2006 (381.9 – 315.97 = 65.93. 65.93/381.97 = 0.1726) by the rationale that all of the increase was CO2ff (which comes up 37 GtC short) and no other contributor.

      So if the simple conservation of mass calc is correct, we should be able to find studies of in-situ measurements where current CO2ff as a proportion of atm CO2 is well in excess of 17%.

      Upthread at #17.1, the natural/anthro carbon emission ratio as at 2013 from IPCC AR5, Figure 6.1 is 4.3%. IPCC TAR for 1990s was 2.9%. In-situ this translates to approx 1.3% at Lutjewad, Netherlands being near-sfc CO2ff atm constituency according to Bozhinova et al (2014) Figure 4. #17.1 here:

      http://joannenova.com.au/2014/08/its-an-unsettling-climate-for-skeptical-scientists-like-murry-salby/#comment-1536142

      The respective growth rates of atm total carbon and FF carbon emissions (see #17 above #17.1) imply another growth contributor to atmospheric constituency other than anthro FF emissions. An observation of only about 1.3% CO2ff currently in the atm by Bozhinova et al supports this and is contrary to the 17+% expected from the simple calc which neglects uptake and cycling over time.

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        Richard C (NZ)

        Should be:

        “the [anthro/natural] carbon emission ratio”

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        Richard C (NZ)

        Re #32.3

        >”Compelling on the face of it [mass balance calc] but neglects reservoir exchange over time (even a year i.e. 8.8 GtC didn’t arrive instantly in one dollop)”

        ‘SOURCES AND SINKS OF CARBON DIOXIDE’

        Tom Quirk

        6 CONCLUSION
        During the 1977 to 2001 time period analysed:

        The yearly increases of atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been nearly two orders of magnitude greater than the change to seasonal variation which implies that the fossil fuel derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year that it is emitted.

        http://icecap.us/images/uploads/TomQuirkSourcesandSinksofCO2_FINAL.pdf

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      • #
        Andrew McRae

        For discussion refer to Tom Quirks’ graph of FF emissions 1959 – 2006:

        Hilarious. You refer to the first graph of data that I used to arrive at the conclusion that temperature does not explain the CO2 rise. It clearly shows industrial emissions higher than the resulting atmospheric increase, but you don’t seem to understand what that fact implies. You haven’t applied conservation of mass.

        Your calculation implies that about 39% (3.4/8.8) of CO2ff goes to atm each year.

        Nope. You made that up. My calculation shows what actually happened during a single year, 2004. Applied to data from other years it will show what happened in those years.
        But I will make it easy for you. The figure you are looking for, ||dAir/dAnthro|| averages 43% over those 51 years of the CDIAC data set, with the atmospheric carbon being 157GtC greater as a net result.

        MLO atm carbon increased 140 GtC … 37 GtC more than CO2ff alone by reasoning as above.

        Yes according to your reasoning which is not reliable and in this case demonstrably erroneous.

        …current CO2ff as a proportion of atm CO2 …
        … the anthro/natural carbon emission ratio

        Are two completely different quantities, more different than apples and oranges and just as incomparable. One is percentage composition at a point in time, the other is a ratio of fluxes over a time period.
        As I said, your reasoning is not reliable. How many years have you spent examining this issue and you still don’t understand the terminology, let alone how to answer the question.

        It doesn’t matter how quickly aCO2 is absorbed or cycled, the test is not whether every new CO2 molecule in the air since 1960 has a barcode on it stamped “Made In China”, the test is whether Nature is acting as a net source of CO2 molecules of any origin, the measurements prove it isn’t. It’s a net sink.
        I am not sure how much sense that explanation will make to someone who doesn’t understand the difference between a flux and a partial pressure, or the difference between a sink and a net sink.

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          Richard C (NZ)

          Andrew #32.3.3

          >”It [Tom Quirk’s graph] clearly shows industrial emissions higher than the resulting atmospheric increase”

          Actually it doesn’t (i.e. it is not a comparison in the same terms). I’ve already laid that out in #17 here:

          http://joannenova.com.au/2014/08/its-an-unsettling-climate-for-skeptical-scientists-like-murry-salby/#comment-1536116

          And again at #32.3 above that you have replied to. In the 48 yrs 1959 – 2006, MLO atm carbon increased 140 GtC (381.9 – 315.97ppm times 2.12 ppm to GtC conversion).

          Tom’s graph does not show the 140 GtC MLO rise (the y axis is only 0 – 9 GtC):

          http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/co2/co2-emissions-atmospheric-rise-quirk.gif

          From 1959 – 2006, total atm carbon rose 23.3 times faster than FF emissions growth (140/6 = 23.33).

          >”You haven’t applied conservation of mass”

          That gives a false result when time (even only a year of uptake and cycling) is neglected.

          >”43%” [not 39%]

          OK fine. I made the caveat at #17 that “these are rough calcs BTW”. The amended phrase is:

          “So for the 48 years of the graph, of the approx 264 GtC CO2ff total, [113.5] GtC went to atm by [43% allocation]”

          And,

          “MLO atm carbon increased 140 GtC…[26.5] GtC more than CO2ff alone”

          But this part remains essentially as it was:

          “If we assume that in 1958 none of the atm constituency was CO2ff then CO2ff as a percentage of total atm was increased from 0 to 17.3% 1959 – 2006 (381.9 – 315.97 = 65.93. 65.93/381.97 = 0.1726) by the rationale that all of the increase was CO2ff (which comes up [23.5] GtC short) and no other contributor”

          >”Yes according to your reasoning which is not reliable and in this case demonstrably erroneous”

          Corrected as above, case still stands.

          >’two completely different quantities, more different than apples and oranges and just as incomparable. One is percentage composition at a point in time, the other is a ratio of fluxes over a time period”

          Yes, exactly. I gave both for a relative comparison:

          “the natural/anthro carbon emission ratio as at 2013 from IPCC AR5, Figure 6.1 is 4.3%. IPCC TAR for 1990s was 2.9%”

          And,

          “In-situ this translates to approx 1.3% at Lutjewad, Netherlands being near-sfc CO2ff atm constituency according to Bozhinova et al (2014) Figure 4″

          >”It doesn’t matter how quickly aCO2 is absorbed or cycled”

          It matters critically as Quirk, Goldberg (both on this thread), and no doubt others have demonstrated. As Dr Quirk puts it:

          “fossil fuel derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted”

          In other words. a FF emission value of say 8 GtC for one year, doesn’t ever actually exist as a quantity in the atmosphere (or anywhere else except in a spreadsheet for example). It is simply a cumulative figure i.e. by the time of the last day of FF emissions for the year, the greater part (or all) of the emissions of the first day have been absorbed locally.

          This is why mass balance using cumulative vales spanning overly long time intervals gives unrealistic values for CO2FF constituency in the atmosphere i.e. do not reconcile with say, the approx 1.3% implied by Bozhinova et al (2014) Figure 4 at Lutjewad, Netherlands.

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            Richard C (NZ)

            Re #32.3.3.1, some emphasis:

            “From 1959 – 2006, total atm carbon rose 23.3 times faster than FF emissions growth (140/6 = 23.33)”

            Why?

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              Andrew McRae

              “From 1959 – 2006, total atm carbon rose 23.3 times faster than FF emissions growth (140/6 = 23.33)”
              Why?

              It’s the sort of nonsensical question I am coming to expect from you.
              You didn’t explain where the number 6 came from. Presumably it is some kind of average industrial carbon emissions per year if averaged across 1959-2006. Time for you to go back to high school:
              140[Gt] / 6[Gt/y] = 23.3[y]
              So your calculation only tells you hypothetically it would take 23.3 years to emit 140Gt at a constant rate of 6Gt/y. It took longer in practice because cumulative emissions started off slow and ramped up exponentially to catch up to 140Gt total near the end.

              However you called the 6 “FF emissions growth”, yet the growth rate in emissions would be measured in [Gt/y^2], which leads to an “answer” of 23.3[y^2] or 23 square years, a meaningless quantity. On top of that, from Quirk’s graph the “FF emissions growth” is closer to 0.15[Gt/y^2], nothing like 6.

              The simplest explanation here is you have no idea of the terminology, quantities, or physical principles involved in determining the sizes of the carbon fluxes. The fact the units of your ratio calculation did not produce a dimensionless ratio should have tipped you off that your input quantities were mismatched to the answer you were trying to reach. Basic high school error.

              No more on this.

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                Richard C (NZ)

                Andrew #32.3.3.1.1

                >”You didn’t explain where the number 6 came from. Presumably it is some kind of average industrial carbon emissions per year if averaged across 1959-2006.”

                Wrong presumption. I thought the AE “growth” was obvious from the graph (perhaps not) given both atm carbon and AE carbon were expressed in the same terms (GtC) in order to get the relative 48 yr growth factor.

                Here’s Tom Quirk’s graph again:

                http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/co2/co2-emissions-atmospheric-rise-quirk.gif

                Anthro Emissions (AE) were 2.5 GtC in 1959 rising to 8.5 GtC in 2006. 8.5 – 2.5 = 6 GtC, the AE growth 1959 – 2006.

                Tom’s graph obviously does not show the 140 GtC atm carbon growth over the 48 years, instead he shows change each year. The calculation for atm carbon growth (140 GtC) is upthread.

                >”Time for you to go back to high school: 140[Gt] / 6[Gt/y] = 23.3[y]”

                Wrong presumption, wrong calculation. I don’t think I’ll be going back to the school you went to Andrew.

                140[GtC] / 6[GtC] = a factor of 23.3 i.e. atmospheric carbon grew 23.3 times faster than anthropogenic carbon emissions 1959-2006.

                The atmospheric carbon growth (140 GtC) is after total AE over the period (about 264 GtC, not the 6 GtC growth) has been taken up and cycled by all 3 reservoirs – atm, ocean, and land.

                If say (see comments above) 43% of AE is left in the atmosphere (dubious, measured at 1.3% above, but lets say) then that’s a contribution of 113.5 GtC to atm carbon growth of 140 GtC. A shortfall of 26.5 GtC.

                Obviously, even by this very generous allocation of AE to atm (43%), there is another contributor to atm carbon than just anthro emissions.

                01

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            Kenneth Richard

            Richard (NZ):

            Long shot, but wondering if you might know the answer to this question.

            According to this WUWT post from a few days ago, it says that:

            http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/10/the-diminishing-influence-of-increasing-carbon-dioxide-on-temperature/
            “The recent IPCC report now admits that currently increasing CO2 levels are probably only ~50% man-made.”

            I’m wondering if you know where in AR5 this 50/50 ratio is discussed, and where I might locate this information. Hopefully you’re still lurking here.

            Thanks.

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              WUWT is lying to you, again. Have you learnt nothing? Notice the characteristic absence of anything approaching a checkable reference. The WGI SPM says:

              “The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have
              increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Carbon dioxide
              concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel
              emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed
              about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification (see
              Figure SPM.4). {2.2, 3.8, 5.2, 6.2, 6.3}”

              http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf

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                Kenneth Richard

                No, if it’s not in there, it’s likely a misinterpretation of the analysis, not a “lie.” Your quote comes from the SPM, which is notorious for slanting the wording (or excluding inconvenient commentaries) found in the WG1 documents.

                You, on the other hand, when considering your track record of dishonesty, are the last person I would look to for a reference. My opinion of your disingenuous “work” molesting the Wikipedia pages on climate change by deleting science that you didn’t like or agree with couldn’t be lower. I regard your commentaries as entirely untrustworthy.

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                the Griss

                The WC.. the IPCC summary is lying with you. !

                That is the political summary for policymakers.

                It does NOT represent any science of any sort.

                In fact it is a total mockery of real science.. a propaganda rag.

                You know that, but it is all you have..

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                the Griss

                Serious, the WC, it would be a tosser between the IPPC summaries, SkS, and the Stoat, as to which has the highest percentage of mis-information.

                Each would be around 97% lies and propaganda BS, with little to choose between them.

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              • #

                > Your quote comes from the SPM

                You do need spoon feeding, don’t you? Read the whole thing if you want more.

                > it’s likely a misinterpretation

                How very forgiving and unskeptical of you. Clearly anything at WUWT can do no wrong, no matter how ridiculous.

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                Kenneth Richard

                “The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification.”

                If rising from 300 ppm to 400 ppm has caused the oceans to become acidic, how is it that the oceanic biosphere was able to evolve and thrive with 1,800 to 2,000 ppm of CO2 for 10s of millions of years during the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous ages? Were the oceans made of acid back then? If not, why not, since the IPCC says they’re acidic with 400 ppm?

                Carbon dioxide concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions.

                From glacial to interglacial periods during the last 800,000 years, CO2 concentrations increased by 67%, or from 180 ppm to 300 ppm, which is more than what CO2 levels have increased by from the preindustrial era to the present (40%). But that 67% increase in CO2 concentration had nothing (0%) to do with the human-caused combustion of fossil fuels, or human-caused land-use changes—which is what the IPCC (SPM) claims today’s 40% increase in CO2 concentrations exclusively comes from. That 67% increase in CO2 concentration from glacials to interglacials had everything (100%) to do with natural sources and sinks (mainly biomass respiration/decay and ocean outgassing following temperature increases). So how did this 100% natural cause of CO2 amplification just disappear (reduce to 0%) starting in the 1700s? Is it even scientific to think that physical mechanisms that cause physical outcomes for 100s of millions of years just…stop working, or vanish from the causal equation? That’s what the IPCC and true believers like William Connelley are asking us to swallow.

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                the Griss

                Why would anyone bother reading the SPM unless all they were interested in was propaganda from the Green Blob.

                Oh.. that would be you, wouldn’t it, WC.

                WUWT is about 97 times as reliable as Stoat or SkS.

                Oh wait.. I betterrephrase that….. 97 times zero is still zero..

                Make that 97% more reliable than Stoat or SkS

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                > So how did this 100% natural cause of CO2 amplification just disappear

                You *do* need spoonfeeding. The answer is timescales. Look at a graph of CO2, on a 800,000 yr scale: you see the relatively slow 100 kyr ice age cycles, and then a vertical line for the present increase in CO2.

                Really, if you want to talk about this stuff, you need to do some background reading. You’re like some kindergarden child saying “but look! I don’t understand the equations of general relativity! Therefore the equations must be wrong!”

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                the Griss

                And even if fossil fuel burning is increasing atmospheric CO2…

                This is totally and absolutely beneficial to the world.

                Go China, Go India, go Germany.. keep pumping that CO2 out. 🙂

                CO2 is LIFE !!!!!!

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                Kenneth Richard

                “Clearly anything at WUWT can do no wrong, no matter how ridiculous.”

                Since I haven’t claimed that “anything at WUWT can do no wrong,” it is dishonest of you to purposely mischaracterize my “it’s likely a misinterpretation” comment in a way that suits your disingenuous purposes, which is to intentionally concoct straw men.

                My assumption of where the author of the essay on WUWT got his 50% figure is from this quote from WG1:

                http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Chapter06_FINAL.pdf
                “[T]he increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and those arising from land use change are the dominant cause of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2  concentration. About half of the emissions remained in the atmosphere (240 ± 10 PgC) since 1750. The rest was removed from the atmosphere by sinks and stored in the natural carbon cycle reservoirs. The ocean reservoir stored 155 ± 30 PgC. Vegetation biomass and soils not affected by land use change stored 160 ± 90 PgC.” Chapter

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              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                You *do* need spoonfeeding. The answer is timescales. Look at a graph of CO2, on a 800,000 yr scale: you see the relatively slow 100 kyr ice age cycles, and then a vertical line for the present increase in CO2.

                You have completely avoided the question…again. I’m not asking you to describe what a hockey stick graph of CO2 looks like. I’m asking you to identify what physical mechanism caused CO2 levels to rise from 180 ppm to 300 ppm every 100,000 to 125,000 years in the ice core record. It was NOT fossil fuel combustion that caused CO2 levels to increase by 67%, or 120 ppm, every 100-125,000 years. It was something else. What was that physical mechanism that caused CO2 levels to ramp up, William?

                No more of your disingenuous little games where you decide to fabricate that I’m really asking you to describe what a hockey stick graph of CO2 levels for the 20th century relative to the last 800,000 years looks like. You knew that’s not what I was asking, and yet you decided to lie and claim that’s what I was saying so you could get your spoon-fed “kindergarten child” ad hom dig in there.

                You also dodged my other question about how it is that the oceans have acidified at 400 ppm, but yet somehow oceanic life evolved and thrived for 10s of millions of years with CO2 levels 4 to 5 times as high as they are now. Explain that, William.

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              • #

                > hockey stick graph of CO2 looks like

                It doesn’t look like a hockey stick. You’re confusing CO2 and 1000-y temperature, perhaps.

                As to what the mechanism is that controlled CO2 over ice age timescales: AFAIK, that’s a subject of current research: to caricature, we don’t know. We do however know its slow, which is why I’m trying to hammer home the point about timescales, and why you’re so stoutly resisting. The “mechanism” (its not a mechanism of course, its a set of processes) is still there, it still operates, its just too slow to be important on the timescales that humans are changing CO2.

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              • #
                PhilJourdan

                Says the serial prevaricator.

                You claiming someone lies is a badge of honor. Because that is the only thing you do.

                01

              • #
                Kenneth Richard

                William Connelley:

                As to what the mechanism is that controlled CO2 over ice age timescales: AFAIK, that’s a subject of current research: to caricature, we don’t know.

                ——————–
                Uh, yes we do know what controlled CO2 in the past…and what continues to control it (for the most part) today. It’s temperature (mostly), and this is well-established science, supported by dozens of peer-reviewed papers. Warmer temperatures caused by increased solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface in turn cause the oceans to warm, and when they do, they release their vast stores of CO2, causing an imbalance in favor of the outgassing over the sinks/absorption. This raises atmospheric CO2 levels. Also, when the climate warms to the point that ice sheets melt and vegetation expands, there is more and more biomass to respirate and decay, which again releases vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and increases CO2 ppm levels.

                Temperature changes caused mostly by increased SR reaching Earth’s surface (warming) is why CO2 levels were in the 180 ppm range during glacials, and then increased by 67% (to 300 ppm) during interglacials. Oceans and terrestial bio sources released more CO2 than were pulled back into sinks after warming. And, according to the IPCC, the CO2 emissions from ocean outgassing and bio respiration represent 96% of CO2 emissions.

                The lag time for CO2 to change after temperature changes varies on both short term (within months) and long term (between 200 to 1,000 year lag) time scales. These processes (the long-term CO2 lag in the ice core record) have been well known since the late 1990s. Salby’s textbook (referenced in this threade is only summarizing that which has already been determined by many other scientists regarding temperature changes leading CO2 changes.
                ——————–
                You probably are already aware of the several hundred years of lag for CO2 when modified by temperature in the ice core record. Below are some of the less familiar papers regarding the short-term lags (> a year) in CO2 behind temperature.
                ——————–
                http://www.tech-know-group.com/papers/Carbon_dioxide_Humlum_et_al.pdf
                Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature.

                Highlights

                ► The overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere.

                ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.

                ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.

                ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.

                ► Changes in ocean temperatures appear to explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.

                CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2, and changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.
                ———————-
                http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v343/n6260/abs/343709a0.html
                The hypothesis that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is related to observable changes in the climate is tested using modern methods of time-series analysis. The results confirm that average global temperature is increasing, and that temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide are significantly correlated over the past thirty years. Changes in carbon dioxide content lag those in temperature by five months.
                ——————-
                http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-paper-demonstrates-temperature.html
                A recent paper published in Nature Climate Change…

                http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n5/full/nclimate1817.html

                ….finds a disconnect between man-made CO2 and atmospheric levels of CO2, demonstrating that despite a sharp 25% increase in man-made CO2 emissions since 2003, the growth rate in atmospheric CO2 has slowed sharply since 2002/2003. The data shows that while the growth rate of man-made emissions was relatively stable from 1990-2003, the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 surged up to the record El Nino of 1997-1998. Conversely, growth in man-made emissions surged ~25% from 2003-2011, but the change in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 has flatlined since 1999 along with global temperatures. The data demonstrate temperature drives CO2 levels due to ocean outgassing, man-made CO2 does not drive temperature, and that man is not the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels.
                ———————
                http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gbc.20028/abstract
                In contrast to recent claims, trends in the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon cannot be detected when accounting for the decadal-scale influence of explosive volcanism and related uncertainties. Our results highlight the importance of considering the role of natural variability in the carbon cycle for interpretation of observations and for data-model intercomparison.
                ———————

                From Salby’s atmospheric physics textbook referenced in this thread:

                “[Global Mean Temperature] cannot increase without simultaneously increasing CO2 emission – from natural sources.” pg. 253
                —————————–
                “The results for the two periods are in broad agreement. Together with the strong dependence of CO2 emission on temperature (Fig. 1.43), they imply that a significant portion of the observed increase in r˙CO2 derives from a gradual increase in surface temperature.” pg. 253
                —————————–
                “Warming of SST (by any mechanism) will increase the outgassing of CO2 while reducing its absorption. Owing to the magnitude of transfers with the ocean, even a minor increase of SST can lead to increased emission of CO2 that rivals other sources.” pg. 546
                ————
                “Together, emission from ocean and land sources (∼150 GtC/yr) is two orders of magnitude greater than CO2 emission from combustion of fossil fuel. These natural sources are offset by natural sinks, of comparable strength. However, because they are so much stronger, even a minor imbalance between natural sources and sinks can overshadow the anthropogenic component of CO2 emission.” pg. 546

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              • #
                Richard C (NZ)

                Kenneth #32.3.3.1.1.13

                >”…finds a disconnect between man-made CO2 and atmospheric levels of CO2″ [Francey et al (2013)]

                Figure 3: Comparison of anthropogenic emissions and atmospheric trends [1990 – 2010]

                Annual anthropogenic emission (FF+LUC, black) estimates are plotted on the left axis3, 8 with horizontal grid lines. (Note: the FF uncertainty9 is small compared with that in LUC.) On the right axis, also spanning 6 Pg C yr−1, the blue band bounds the ±3 [sigma] uncertainty in dC/dt–IAV, using the CGO record with 5-yr smoothing, adjusted for wildfires, volcanoes and ENSO; the light blue dotted curve is dC/dt–IAV with 1.8-yr smoothing. The right axis is aligned to get overlap of dC/dt–IAV and emissions between 2004 and 2007.

                http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n5/fig_tab/nclimate1817_F3.html

                From,

                ‘Atmospheric verification of anthropogenic CO2 emission trends’

                Francey et al (2013)

                >”…trends in the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon cannot be detected….” [Frölicher et al (2013)]

                Also see Knorr (2009) at #32.3.3.1.3

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            • #

              > About half of the emissions remained in the atmosphere

              Yeeees. That’s commonplace. Its not new in the AR5. Its also totally different to what your Wattie said, viz “currently increasing CO2 levels are probably only ~50% man-made”. Can you spot the difference?

              By all means assert that your Wattie author is incapable of reading if you like, I won’t disagree.

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              • #
                the Griss

                “currently increasing CO2 levels are probably only ~50% man-made”

                Yep, there’s the error. Its probably much less than 50%.

                But with the help of the developing countries, like China, India, and hopefully soon several African nations…

                … and those that care about providing good solid reliable electricity to their citizens, like Germany and Australia…

                … we should be able to keep contributing our little bit of the Gas of Life to the prosperity of the planet. 🙂

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              • #
                PhilJourdan

                Juvenile name calling now? I guess that is all you are good for. I am sure a georgie porgie is your next childish trick.

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            • #
              Richard C (NZ)

              Kennith

              >”I’m wondering if you know where in AR5 this 50/50 ratio is discussed, and where I might locate this information. Hopefully you’re still lurking here.”

              I didn’t know but I see you’ve found it in WG1 Chapter 6.

              The term is “Airborne Fraction (AF)” and it is not 50/50. It is by estimation so you find papers like this:

              ‘Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?’

              Knorr (2009)

              Abstract
              [1] Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.

              http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL040613/abstract

              Full paper at that link too.

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    • #
      Mark D.

      Andrew is more the authority than Salby.

      Well, that is what I see is the gist.

      Carry on.

      00

    • #
      Vince Whirlwind

      In every year of the last 40 years the industrial repository is the only net source of CO2 on a year-on-year basis.
      The conclusion is inescapable.

      Precisely.

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      • #
        the Griss

        Thank goodness for industry 🙂

        CO2 is the Gas of Life.. It allows the carbon cycle to function.

        An atmospheric level of 1000-1500ppm would do wonders for the whole planet. (so long as there isn’t too much cooling over the next few decades)

        The use of carbon in the form of coal and fossil fuels has been hugely responsible for the development of the civilised world.

        It helps power nearly all you have and all you do. 🙂

        If I were religious, I would say it was God’s gift to man, and was put there for us to use.

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  • #
    motvikten

    Joanne, you mention Lennart Bengtsson. I searched for his opinion on Salby in swedish and found: (translated by google)
    Send LB an email and ask him to enlighten you.
    I hope it it still in use, as it his contact at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

    [email protected]

    “Pehr You’ll have to excuse me but I have great difficulty in taking this very seriously. Firstly, as has largely CO2 increase in the atmosphere have been monotonous and as a result the increase of emissions, where basically about half of the emissions accumulated in the atmosphere. Measurements of CO2 concentration since 1957 when they began at Mauna Loa until today’s 3-dimensional measurement system including the Japanese Ibuki satellite, shows this clearly. No one questions the longer these data as well as the CO2 emissions reported by the IEA. Secondly , we have now had a period in over 15 years when, according to measurements, no increase occurred in mean sea temperature, although we had areas where temperatures have risen slightly but also areas where the temperature dropped. During these 15 years, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased by 30 ppm (v) corresponding to approximately 60 billion tons of coal, or 220 billion tons of CO2. , I have therefore extremely difficult to understand the reasoning that both Murray Salby and Gosta Pettersson defends. Now, if the carbon dioxide of some odd reason wanders back and forth between the ocean and atmosphere that is of course quite uninteresting as it is the actual net increase in the atmosphere, which is what is important. Thirdly , we have good reason to believe that CO2 increases in sea by the slow acidification and addition, we have good reason to believe that CO2 is also a net increase in the biosphere. Here the course of the many proposals put healthy fertilization of CO2 a role. It seems to be more or less unanimous among the experts involved in these estimates Although there are several relevant questions regarding I have a hard time understanding all of this reasoning but it could be due to my lack of ability. Greets Lennart B”

    /http://www.klimatupplysningen.se/2013/06/28/murry-salby-klimatvetenskaplig-nytankare-som-uppror/

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    • #
      TdeF

      “Half of the emissions accumulated in the atmosphere”. Really? Why not prove that using C14?

      As for mean sea temperature, temperature varies greatly with day to night, wind, depth, latitude and longitude, seasons and storms and is not a stable system but 4km deep on average with major currents at all levels. While our thermometers are excellent, my calculations using Henry’s law show that even 1 degree difference in the top layer could produce the entire increase observed. I find it hard to believe that anyone can report on an average sea temperature which is relevant. You cannot average temperature for this effect as there is no such thing. No one place has a constant average temperature. So balancing the outgassing in the equatorial area with the intake in the polar regions would be near impossible without amazing models which gave the areas the right weightings in their effects to gauge the nett effect as you go from 32C in the Persian Gulf to 0C at the poles? Along the way you do not need much difference and hotter may be substantially more effective in changing CO2 than cooler.

      Selby was not proposing the detailed mechanism, but he was drawing the conclusion that the computer models were quite wrong. He did however find a correlation between temperature and CO2, but as said before, it was the integral of temperature. That is significant as discussed before. There was no point at which his presentation was anything more than a reasonable interpretation of the data shown. The importance is that instead of proving the CO2 (only) model of changing global temperature was right, he showed that the CO2 theory was wrong and that CO2 might be irrelevant. The only controversial part of this is that many people do not want to hear that the earth goes around the sun. How must Copernicus, a very religious monk, have felt with his discovery? Or even Darwin who kept trying to see God’s hand in evolution. The truth however must be discussed.

      Despite his casual dismissal of Selby as not serious, I find his logic odd. He says that CO2 wandering between the ocean and atmosphere is ‘uninteresting’! However if CO2 wanders freely and quickly, this is all subject to physical chemistry rule of exchange. So admitting that CO2 moves freely and presumably quickly actually supports Selby. If the principles of equilibrium are working quickly even if uninteresting, there is then no excuse for arguing that man can change the balance between sea and ocean at all. So he has actually undermined the very argument that man generated CO2 from fossil fuels could unilaterally increase CO2 on one side of the boundary. The only hope the IPCC had was that the exchange did not happen or was very slow.

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      • #
        Richard

        TdeF, you say: “My calculations using Henry’s law show that even 1C difference in the top-layer could produce the entire increased observed”. That’s very interesting. If not too much trouble could you post your calculation here?

        00

        • #
          TdeF

          Richard, it has been a while but the notes should be in my personal blog globalnonsense.blogspot.com.au using Henry’s law. (I keep this as a public record of the ideas as there are so many.) From memory the calculation is relative. Henry’s law requires concentrations, a constant, temperature and pressure at the surface. You can work on the volumes of air and ocean being (amazingly) about the same. The bulk of the atmosphere is in the first 4km, the same as the ocean depth. The key is to x50 as the true concentration of the CO2 in the ocean is 50x what it should be from a simple application of Henry’s law. So the outgassing is 50x as well.

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          • #
            Unmentionable

            TdeF,

            I looked up your blog and got this message bounce:

            Blog not found

            Sorry, the blog you were looking for does not exist. However, the name globalnonsense is available to register!
            Register globalnonsense

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          • #
            Richard

            Thanks TdeF. I typed into Google and the URL but I can’t seem to find your blog.

            00

            • #
              TdeF

              globalcarbon.blogspot.com.au
              Copied from my own browser.
              Anyway, I have checked and this calculation is not posted yet. Sorry. I will see to it.

              00

              • #
                TdeF

                I have found it. I didn’t use Henry’s law but just solubility graph for CO2 in water at around 8 degrees.

                So a 1 degree change in the ocean temperature from say 8 degrees to 9 degrees produces a solubility reduction from 0.2492 to 0.2403 gm CO2 per 100mm of H20. This is 0.0089/0.2492 or 90/2500 or 90/25%, 3.5%.

                That would increase atmospheric CO2 by 3.5% x 50 or 75%.

                The key here is the x 50. The amount of CO2 in the air is only 2%. If the solubility of oceanic dissolved CO2 is reduced by 3.5%, the impact on the atmosphere is 50x.

                00

              • #
                Richard

                “So a 1 degree change in the ocean temperature from say 8 degrees to 9 degrees produces a solubility reduction from 0.2492 to 0.2403 gm CO2 per 100mm of H20. This is 0.0089/0.2492 or 90/2500 or 90/25%, 3.5%”.

                The graph you used I don’t think can be applied to normal atmospheric conditions because the graph is CO2 at 1atm whereas the CO2 in the atmosphere is at 0.0004atm.

                00

          • #
            Richard

            @TdeF

            I saw your calculations for determining how much CO2 is released into the atmosphere from a temperature of 1C from 10C (283K) to 11C (284K) here and you used a graph from engineeringtoolbox.com. However the website you cited says that all the graphs (presumably including the CO2 solubility graph as well) are taken at a pressure of 1atm. I think this is important because the concentration of CO2 in water depends on the partial pressure. If the partial pressure is high then the same temperature change will cause more CO2 to outgas than if the partial pressure were lower. The current partial pressure of CO2 is 0.0004atm. At a temperature of 10C (283K) kH stands at 29.41exp(-2400(1/283-1/298) = 19.19. Increasing the temperature to 284K changes kH to 29.41exp(-2400(1/283-1/298) = 19.77. Applying Henry’s law (and reversing the formula) to get the concentration of CO2(aq) we get: c = p/kH. Where p is the partial pressure of CO2 above the solute, kH is the proportionality constant (L-atm/mol) and c is the PCO2(aq).Therefore the concentration of CO2(aq) at 0.0004atm at 283K = 0.0004/19.17 = 0.0000208mol/L. Meanwhile the concentration of CO2(aq) at the same pressure at 284K = 0.0004/19.77 = 0.0000202mol/L representing a decrease of 0.0000006mol/L. That’s not very much. I haven’t translated that into an increase in atmospheric CO2 yet (because my notes for converting that into a CO2 increase are at home and I’m in the library) but I dare say based on that calculation it would take quite a large temperature increase in the oceans to account for the total 120ppmv increase since 1850. This is my only reservation with idea that the warming oceans are responsible for the increase in CO2. I wonder if Salby is aware of this.

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  • #
    Richard

    I think a common counter-argument to what you’re saying (and I agree with what you say) is that the oceans cannot act as a source and sink similtaneously. Therefore if the oceans are absorbing the vast majority of human CO2 they cannot be outgassing natural CO2 at the same time. But I believe this argument is borne out of a misunderstanding of Henry’s law. It should be pointed out that even the IPCC’s own carbon-cycle diagram in AR4 shows that the oceans are outgassing natural CO2. I think the IPCC’s figure is 0.6 gigatonnes of natural CO2 outgassed annually although don’t quote me on that and at the same time the oceans are absorbing 35% of human CO2 emissions annually. They can act as a source and sink similtaneously because the amount of dissolved CO2 in water is dependent not only on water-temperature but also the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere. So hypothetically let’s say the water-temperature changed and altered the 1:50 partitioning ratio to 1:49 and this released CO2 into the atmosphere. If you introduced new CO2 into the atmosphere at the same time as we are doing this would be forced down and absorbed by the oceans in accordance with the new 1:49 equilibrium ratio. The point here is that increasing oceanic temperature would not stop the oceans absorbing human CO2 if they are outgassing natural CO2 because a change in the water-temperature only alters the partitioning ratio, not the oceans’ absolute capacity to absorb CO2. The IPCC’s computer-models even shows this, but the ratios are different. (Typed though Xbox).

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    • #
      Andrew McRae

      I think a common counter-argument to what you’re saying (and I agree with what you say) is that the oceans cannot act as a source and sink similtaneously.

      No the counter argument is that the ocean cannot be a net source and net sink simultaneously. That is true from the definition of net.
      Your business may lose money on costs and it may gain money from sales, but whether it will eventually become profitable depends on whether it is a net sink of money for the economy. It has to be gaining more money from sales than it is losing in costs to be a net winner. You would not say a business is both a net winner and net loser, that’s a contradiction. The total of all transactions must be either negative or positive, it can’t be both.

      Likewise the ocean’s total carbon must be either increasing or decreasing over a given time period, it cannot be both.

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  • #
    The Backslider

    If we know one thing it is this: looking at the trolls who have hit this thread, the warmists are sh*t scared of Murray Salby.

    It does not at all surprise me that the attacks on Salby began way back then and continue today, with a dire lack of scientific discussion. Clearly even then he was seen as a dire threat to the “consensus”.

    72

    • #
      Vince Whirlwind

      The only people who are “scared” of Murry Salby are the financial controllers of any institution that is unwise enough to employ him.

      43

    • #
      The Backslider

      Oh lookee…. the tag team in action! LMAO.

      Any more drivel for us Vince?

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  • #
    tonyM

    Let me see if I have it right. Salby claims that CO2 increase in air is not due to man made emissions but rather it is due to T increase and outgassing.

    T has remained basically static for 17 years. CO2 has gone up. So, who dunnit?? Cow farts perhaps?

    10

    • #
      The Backslider

      It’s known as “lag”.

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      • #
        tonyM

        I see. He is now into paleoclimate “lags” just like Hansen and Trenberth’s missing heat captured by gnomes. So why does he bother showing the Keeling curve in the video when he says that T controls CO2 levels?

        I also note that the Keeling curve from 1959 shows a fairly uniform increase yet the only T increases which occurred were the 20 years from 1978. We had a major T increase from 1910 to mid forties. Where is the CO2 effect?

        I do not suggest that outgassing does not occur. But, it seems absurd to conclude it is the major component and human emissions are mainly innocent bystanders in all this.

        10

        • #
          The Backslider

          I don’t think you understand. It has to do with ocean temperature, not atmospheric.

          10

          • #
            tonyM

            The problem with both warmists and skeptics most often is their predilection to see the world only from their pre-positioned viewpoint.

            Either you are saying that sea T differs markedly from what we know or Trenberth was right with heat going into the oceans and hence the continual out-gassing.

            Now if you have a better data set than Hacrut and HadSST for oceans and land please show us. The data I see are so close to each other as to be almost identical.

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            • #
              The Backslider

              I am not going to waste more time with an ignoramus. Go and learn.

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              • #
                tonyM

                You have been asked to present your evidence and you resort to an ad hominem.

                That says much.

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              • #
                The Backslider

                Let me put it another way: Your arguments are peurile.

                00

              • #
                tonyM

                Now that is two ad homs in a brief period.

                I take it you reached the limits of your argument quite some time back.

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              • #
                The Backslider

                I take it you reached the limits of your argument quite some time back.

                No, I realised that I had pushed the limits of your comprehension.

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            • #
              the Griss

              OMG, what an hilarious post !!!

              Please don’t stop Tony.

              They say laughter is the best medicine. .. so thanks 🙂

              20

              • #
                tonyM

                I have heard about small minds being easily amused. Do enjoy your pleasure. Have a nice day.

                00

              • #
                the Griss

                I have had a very good day, thank you.

                And watching the ineptitude of the alarmista shills that have been dragged out by the name “Salby”,really quite tops it off.

                So please.. keep going !! 🙂

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              • #
                KinkyKeith

                Hi Griss.

                A good assessment there.

                Obviously to put so much time and effort into disrupting an analysis of Salbys work and treatment there can be only one

                CONCLUSION:

                THEY ARE DRIVEN BY FEAR THAT OTHERS WILL HEAR, UNDERSTAND AND PROLIFERATE HIS IDEAS TO THE DETRIMENT OF THE CAUSE.

                They know he is right and FEAR him!

                KK

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              • #
                the Griss

                What puzzles me, if why they haven’t hired someone at least partially competent to try and attack Murry Salby’s work.

                All they seem to have found is a low level PR/Arts student, probably from Macquarie Uni, and wanting extra credit so he can pass first year.

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              • #
                the Griss

                And of course, the low-level Con man.. always lurking, sitting in his little cubicle, conjuring his next technicolour yawn.

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              • #
                tonyM

                The issue I see is that you make assumptions without much thought.

                Now this will surely amuse you; I am a total skeptic. So have a really nice day and laugh to your hearts content at your lack of perception.

                Perhaps you should have picked it up from gnomes comment re Trenberth or my Hansen remark which had a tinge of sarcasm.

                It seems to me that the only thing worse than a myopic warmist is an equally myopic skeptic when presented with an argument not to his liking. Perhaps a little introspection might be in order.

                Have a nice, warm, amusing day.

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              • #
                the Griss

                “I am a total skeptic.”

                Yes… of COURSE you are. 😉

                20

              • #
                tonyM

                So glad you had your Damascus moment. 🙂

                10

              • #
                the Griss

                So glad you had your Damocles moment. 🙂

                10

              • #
                tonyM

                Seems we were standing shoulder to shoulder; glad you were taller than I. 🙂

                10

              • #
                the Griss

                Give up while you have still got a head, even though you are dragging behind.

                10

              • #
                tonyM

                I have mine still; yours was chopped off in the last swing. Interesting with the usual smile stuck on.

                Not sure how this addressed the issues I raised.

                11

              • #
                the Griss

                Still dragging your behind, I see.

                Saw a dog doing that the other day.. same reason, probably.

                10

              • #
                tonyM

                How closely related to you was the dog?

                Same litter perhaps.

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          KinkyKeith

          A Scientific Quote from tonyM:

          ” it seems absurd “.

          Yes Tony, the attack on Professor Salby does “seem absurd”.

          KK

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        Vince Whirlwind

        Er, “lag” as in the mythical 800-years where temperature *follows* CO2?…..Oops, Backslider slips up again!

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          The Backslider

          “lag” as in the mythical 800-years where temperature *follows* CO2

          Wow Vince…. that is some Freudian slip.

          Try this Vince:

          Take two thermomenters. Suspend one of them in a Stevenson screen and the other 20 meters deep in the ocean. Carefully record the minimum and maximum temperatures over a one month period.

          Then, think about the results. Come back when you have something interesting to say about them.

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      TdeF

      The difference could be quite subtle. As previously discussed, while you can manufacture an average ocean temperature, averaged over a huge number of situations even over one day and across a planet, no actual place has that temperature. It is like a stopped clock being right twice a day. It does not mean it is working. The idea of an average temperature for the planet or the earth or the sky or the oceans may not be enough to explain what is happening on a smaller local scale. As previously shown, CO2 will be higher at ocean hot spots.

      No it is possible that a shift upwards of even 1 degree in say the cooler parts of the ocean would produce a 50% increase in CO2. You would hardly notice this in a world average.

      The other aspect of the exchange depicted by Henry’s law is that this law is about laboratory situations where the air is stationary, the water is stationary without waves on the surface or currents below and the pressure is constant in the liquid and the gas. None of these conditions are met in a storm or even on a nice day. The air is generally a quite different temperature to the water. The water pressure varies dramatically from one atmosphere to 400 atmospheres as you go down. So Henry’s law is only a guide to idealized conditions, not real life. I guess I am saying when you x50 because the gaseous CO2 dissolved in the oceans is 50x as much in the air, it does not take much disturbance in temperature anywhere to have a dramatic effect, even if the notional average is unchanged.

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      TdeF

      The temperature differences which are producing higher CO2 could be quite subtle.

      As previously discussed, while you can manufacture an “average” global ocean temperature, averaged over a huge number of situations even over one day and across a planet and seasons, even years, no actual place has that temperature. It is like a stopped clock being right twice a day. It does not mean it is working.

      The idea of an average temperature for the planet or the earth or the sky or the oceans may not be enough to explain what is happening on a smaller scale at which thing actually happen. The world result is the sum of a lot of local results with local conditions. For example and as previously shown, CO2 will be higher at ocean hot spots and presumably lower over cold spots. Who knows what is going on in a storm?

      No it is possible that a shift upwards of even 1 degree in say the cooler parts of the ocean would produce a 50% increase in CO2. You would hardly notice this in a world average.

      The other aspect of the exchange depicted by Henry’s law is that this law is about laboratory situations where the air is stationary, the water is stationary without waves on the surface or currents below and the pressure is constant in the liquid and the gas. None of these conditions are met in a storm or even on a nice day. The air is generally a quite different temperature to the water. The water pressure varies dramatically from one atmosphere to 400 atmospheres as you go down. So Henry’s law is only a guide to idealized conditions, not real life. I guess I am saying when you x50 because the gaseous CO2 dissolved in the oceans is 50x as much in the air, it does not take much disturbance in temperature anywhere to have a dramatic effect, even if the notional average is unchanged.

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    jimheath

    It’s not Craig’s fault, it all the sand in his eyes.

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    Roy Hogue

    Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

    It’s hardly an important distinction in any case, just another distinction without a difference, since it’s now pretty obvious that CO2, regardless of the source, isn’t doing anything detectable to Earth’s climate.

    I suspect Salby will catch a lot of flack for pointing out the result of actually looking at evidence (that pesky E-word again). And I wonder if his findings will change any minds.

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      TdeF

      No. Those people who think it is rubbish include those who promote it. It is self evident when so many rich eco warriors buy beach houses or sea side apartments including Tim Flannery and Al Gore.

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    Crakar24

    TO ALL

    IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING INTELLIGENT TO SAY THEN BY ALL MEANS SPEAK UP

    OTHERWISE PLEASE STOP CLOGGING UP MY INBOX WITH INCOHERENT GIBBERISH

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      the Griss

      Crakar, Turn off the notifiers ! 🙂

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        Crakar24

        Well I suppose I could do that………………………………………………………………………………….i am subscribed to over 300 posts!!!!! who da thought.

        All this because of a moron.

        Cheers

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          The Backslider

          I think we should be allowed to vote them off once we get tired of them……

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          the Griss

          I look at the “recent posts” on the top at the right.

          See what is worth looking at… and what is worth a bit of fun playing with for laughs 🙂

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          Roy Hogue

          Crakar,

          You can turn off notification for individual threads. Also most browsers will let you search for anything you want to find. Since I began to get my inbox flooded I shut off all notifications and just look for anyone replying to what I’ve said. I can look from there up or down for other interesting stuff.

          When things reach the ridiculous state they’re in now there’s little to be said except sarcasm, ridicule and whatever else it is that you don’t care to see. I doubt you’ll be able to discourage this very much. The situation is way beyond arguing the science with anyone.

          🙂

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    KR> Wikipedia is so much more reliable as a resource than highly referenced textbooks… there are 14 pages of references in the back of the textbook

    Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas) says “Schmidt et al. (2010)[19] analysed how individual components of the atmosphere contribute to the total greenhouse effect. They estimated that water vapor accounts for about 50% of the Earth’s greenhouse effect, with clouds contributing 25%, carbon dioxide 20%, and the minor greenhouse gases and aerosols accounting for the remaining 5%”. The ref 19 is to http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Schmidt_etal_1.pdf So, that’s a nice clear statement with a nice clear reliable source. If you wonder whether the statement is true, you can easily check it against the source. You won’t bother, of course, because you know its true.

    Salby’s textbook says ” Together with cloud, it accounts for 98% of the greenhouse effect”. But you’ve got absolutely no idea what ref he uses for that. Apparently, to find it, you’re suggesting scrabbling through 14 pages of refs, in the hope that one of them might be relevant. There’s no way to find what source Salby uses for his statement; Salby’s textbook is clearly inferior to wiki in this respect. And, his number is wrong.

    As to the rest, you’re making the usual mistake of regurgitating other people’s errors. See http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/01/04/a-childs-garden-of-wikipedia-p/

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      the Griss

      As opposed to regurgitating.. period.. as you do.!

      Again the link to that absolutely worthless piece of crap called Stoat..

      and a link to the total mis-information that is Wikipedia.

      And then to the GISS data torturer Schmidt.. that is truly hilarious. !!

      You truly have lost ALL credibility, WC..

      You have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to offer any credible scientific discussion.

      That is your life as it is. !!!

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        Raven

        Again the link to that absolutely worthless piece of crap called Stoat..

        I wasn’t entirely sure what a stoat was, so looked it up in Wiki.
        Apparently it’s a weasel . . .

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      the Griss

      “conjuring his next technicolour yawn.”

      And there it is.. right on cue !!! 🙂

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        DeltaCharlie

        Griss – they hate you – but they keep coming back for more punishment.. Their carbon must be dangerously low.
        There must be a nest of them somewhere.

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    JoeThePimpernel

    I’ve been saying this for years. You can prove it yourself with a thought experiment. Think of your favorite carbonated beverage. The colder it is, the more CO2 it retains. Heat it up, and CO2 starts bubbling off. Same thing with the oceans. It’s not rocket surgery.

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    […] paging down Joanne’s site I came across a post, called Unsettled Climate, in which she discusses an article by Rupert Darwall. The article, which I can’t actually […]

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    TdeF

    For those interested, I found my very simple logic to explain the increase in CO2 from increased ocean temperatures, with the rider that there is no such thing as an average temperature in practice.

    I have found it. I didn’t use Henry’s law but just solubility graph for CO2 in water at around 8 degrees.

    So a 1 degree change in the ocean temperature from say 8 degrees to 9 degrees produces a solubility reduction from 0.2492 to 0.2403 gm CO2 per 100mm of H20. This is 0.0089/0.2492 , 3.5%.

    That would increase atmospheric CO2 by 3.5% x 50 or 175%. This at least demonstrates the sensitivity of the tiny CO2 component in the atmosphere to the huge reservoir of gaseous in the ocean, as opposed to that trapped in trees, grass etc.

    The key here is the x 50. The amount of CO2 in the air is only 2%. If the solubility of oceanic dissolved CO2 is reduced by 3.5%, the impact on the atmosphere is 50x.

    As for Henry’s law, it does not predict this 50x concentration in the atmosphere. However it does predict exchanges both ways, perhaps amplified by the vast reservoir at depth, a reservoir which the IPCC says is out of reach because of ocean currents, but who said gas has to obey the mechanics of moving water? You can get gas rise in stationary water, or beer.

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    Bart

    Atmospheric CO2 is, in the modern era since MLO measurements began in 1958, well described by the differential equation

    dCO2/dt = k*(T – Teq)

    CO2 = atmospheric CO2
    k = coupling scale factor (ppmv/K/unit-of-time)
    T = average surface temperature
    Teq = an equilibrium level of temperature

    The relationship is most evident using the satellite data, the rate of change here, and the total amount from the integrated rate of change here.

    The relationship can be readily observed using other data sets, as the rates of change amoung them are all more or less affinely related, but there may be quality issues which make it not quite as straightforward. My best fit with longer surface temperature data sets appears to be with SH temperatures, here for the rate of change, and here for the integrated total. I say there may be quality issues because matching the peaks in the rate of change requires greater filtering (24 month running mean instead of 12 month).This is probably a result of the method of data collection which amplifies noise in the data.The SH producing a better fit than the NH could indicate this is mostly an oceanic phenomenon, as I speculated here, or it could simply indicate that SH data are not as corrupted by “adjustments” or other factors.

    In any case, the fact that the trend in the CO2 rate of change is explained by the temperature relationship indicates that the rise is not significantly dependent upon human inputs. The reason is that human inputs also have a trend, and the trend is already accounted for by the temperature relationship. Moreover, as seen in the plot of the last link, the superficial similarity between human emissions and CO2 rate of change which held earlier in the modern era can be seen to be diverging. A different plot scale could make it appear that the emissions and CO2 still fit, better in the most recent decades and less well in earlier, but even that bit of graphical legerdemain cannot hide the fact that emissions are currently accelerating (the trend in the rate of emissions over the past 15 or so years) while the rate of change of atmospheric CO2 is at a standstill, coincident with the “pause” in temperatures.

    It is apparent that human inputs are easily handled by the terrestrial carbon sinks, and that atmospheric concentration is essentially determined naturally by shifting equilibrium conditions over time. People who are not familiar with the concepts of feedback control may imagine this be fantastic or exotic, but in reality, it is very commonplace behavior for systems governed by feedback mechanisms which react to diminish the effects of disturbances.

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      Bart

      PS: As discussed at this link from above, the fact that CO2 has this integral relationship with temperature indicates that temperature sensitivity to CO2 must be less than or equal to zero, or at least negligible, if we allow the possibility of other particularly suitable stabilizing feedbacks kicking in at some level. Otherwise, the planet’s regulatory system would be unstable, with an unstoppable positive feedback cycle: rising temperature produces rising CO2, producing rising temperature, producing rising CO2, and so on. Because of the integral relationship, the negative feedback of T^4 radiation from the planet is not of the kind suitable to quench this cycle.

      The upshot is that temperatures are not significantly influenced by atmospheric CO2, to which the present 18 year “pause” attests, and moreover, humans have essentially no control over atmospheric CO2 levels anyway. The entire brouhaha is an utter fiasco, and an embarrassment for science. That’s what happens when the scientific method is abandoned for the sake of advocacy. Hopefully, the world will be better off for the lesson when the fewmets hit the windmill, and not sink into the anti-science funk that I fear.

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    Terry Krieg

    A bit late I guess but China are going to build another 200 nuclear power plants by 2050. And at least 17 other countries are building nuclear reactors right now. They know that the “renewables” will NEVER give them base load electricity. Check what has/is happening in Denmark and Germany with wind Craig. It’s only in South Australia which is governed by a bunch of rather dull people that wind is surging ahead. That’s why we have, with Germany the most expensive electricity on the planet. You’d be aware Craig that SA has the largest uranium reserves on the planet and the best nuclear waste disposal site on the planet yet the best we’ve so far been able to do is to make yellowcake for other countries to generate emissions-free power. Bloody pathetic don’t you reckon? Did you know Craig that there’s enough uranium at Olympic Dam, using the developing IFR’s, to keep the entire planet powered for tens of thousands of years?

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    A bit late, but pertaining to (or even caused by) this entry:

    Unsettled Climate Science

    And a quite good summary of the Salby affair too, I might add …

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    Richard C (NZ)

    ‘How Much of Atmospheric CO2 Increase is Natural?’

    August 27th, 2014 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

    http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/08/how-much-of-atmospheric-co2-increase-is-natural/

    Carbon Isotopes
    The arguments from carbon isotopes (C13…sorry for the unconventional notation) that fossil fuels are the source of all the atmospheric increase don’t hold water as far as I can tell. As I posted nearly 6 years ago, the C13 fraction in the long-term trends of atmospheric CO2 are not inconsistent with a natural source, after I examined the observed C13 variations at three time scales: seasonal, interannual, and long-term trends: [See Fig 2]

    I believe that pointing this out is part of the reason why Murray Salby got into trouble recently. The scientific community doesn’t take kindly to some of us suggesting nature itself might be causing “carbon pollution”. Baaad scientist.

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