Surveying sites? Why didn’t the people running them do that? They don’t care? But I can see him being interested; he is a weatherman after all. Certainly more of a reason to do it than a reason for a lot of the people running blogs to be compaining about him doing it. Why would anyone care if it does or not.

Lucia: “In any case, we are still emitting carbon at a significant clip; so the CO2 will likely resume rising as it has in the past.”

If there’s actually a net increase due to the release. As there probably is, due to the fact it’s long-lived of course. I’ll wait for the empirical proof though, thank you very much.

It seems logical that it’s probably mostly in the plants and ocean rather than the air. The evidence is simply unclear at how well the atmosphere either a) gets rid of CO2 by sequeestering it in the biosphere and hydrosphere b) moves the humidity and lapse rate around to take a percentage rise into account. Quantifying it is difficult.

Nature not reacting in a fully predictable manner month to month is interesting, and that is all I saw Anthony pointing out.

Unfounded? why is that so? Not a very strong scientific argument, in my opinion. Certainly everyone agrees that half of human emissions have been “gobbled up”. Do you deny that too?

So the current thinking is that half of the emissions have been gobbled up, mostly by the oceans. But the current thinking is not capable of explaining the temperature dependence of CO2 uptake. I can. But that does imply that not 50%, but 100% of emissions have been gobbled up, or would have been if temps had stayed constant. You’ve got to realize that the carbon cycle models are tuned to get the 50% figure, because we don’t have all the numbers to build a carbon cycle from first principles. So those parameters might as well be tuned to give 100% gobbling up, and then add the temperature response (that most don’t have), and voilà!

Anyway, I don’t see the point arguing further, if you don’t even want to read it, or get informed on the current knowledge of the carbon cycle.

Just remember that in the end, the theory and the models have to agree with observations. I’ve commented at CA on how an abusive use of models leads right back to Aristotelian science: academic debate without any link with reality. Comparing models between themselves without regards with how well they agree with observations is an example. I’ve tried to come up with a model that can be directly compared with observations.

If you think that a theory that disproves the current AGW paradigm is wrong because it stalls policy, you should not mess around with science.

And by the way, I do not agree with the theory that CO2 will have no effect on temperatures, that would not be a very intelligent position to take. What I do think, though, is that CO2 is having a much smaller effect then is generally shouted about. I think Boris hit the nail on the head earlier, without knowing it, when he said as you increase the CO2 every time you increase it you get a smaller and smaller increase in temperature.

Basically CO2 has decreasing effect on temperature, the first 20 ppm have the largest effect, some estimate about 1.2 degrees for the first 20 ppm. The next 280 pp however, only increase the temperature by 1.8 degrees. This is all estimates, as it is difficult to pin down a number in the lab, but you get the point I am trying to make. If you increase the CO2 concentrations by a factor of 10 you might double they effect it has on temperatures.

On page 11 they used Global temperatures as well.

And they used arctic figures because the way the Earth’s magnetic poles wrap around us, the maximum effect of the solar radiation is going to be at the poles. If you have ever looked at iron fillings around I magnet, the magnetic field is at its lowest at the poles. So they used the arctic temperatures to show the correlation between solar radiation and temperatures.

The paper doesn’t give a reason for why they used the North American temperatures, so lets assume that they did what you said and found the data that fit their curve the best. So lets through out that graph.

That still leaves the Page 4 graphs (I have responded to your criticism of them) and the page 8 graph and the page 11 graph.

For those who don’t feel like scrolling up to find the link,

http://icecap.us/images/upload.....limate.pdf

Okay, page 4. They compare the arctic basin temps with the Hoyt-Schatten solar reconstruction. So they cherry pick another area (remember this is GLOBAL warming) and then cherry pick the most favorable solar reconstruction. Unfortunately for them, in this case multiple cherries do not win a jackpot.

If I know the RC crowd, Boris will not look at your link. BTW the skeptics seem to be similar not wanting to look at AGW data LOL. However the AGW science boys have jobs and families at stake.. they cannot afford at the moment to admit AGW is dead

I would like you to take a look at them please Boris and explain why the match is so much better then the CO2 match. Show me what part of the experiment is wrong please so I can understand. Anyone who is a AGW supporter please take a look at these graphs. It shows the direct correlation between the fluctuations of the sun and the temperatures, with a correlation of .79 vs a correlation of .22 for the CO2 levels vs temperature.

http://icecap.us/images/upload.....limate.pdf

Page 4, 8, 11 (for just the pretty pictures)

Please everyone take a look, it is amazing.

So if I understand you correctly, there has been no connection recently with cloud cover vs temperature in relation to sunspot activity?

The critics of GCR have spent a lot of time attacking strawmen and have not provided any compelling counter argument that addresses the GCR theory *as described by the proponents*. For example, GCR propoponents do not claim that the effect of GCR is global since GCRs must compete with other cloud forming nuclei such as aerosols. Yet that has not stopped alarmsists from using global cloud averages to argue against GCRs.

More information can be found here: http://www.sciencebits.com/SloanAndWolfendale
and here: http://www.sciencebits.com/RealClimateSlurs

Dr. Shaviv is quite good a posted thoughtful replies to criticisms that appear in the literature or on the net. No one should form an opinion on GCRs based on critiques in realclimate or elsewhere without looking at his counter arguments.

So if I understand you correctly, there has been no connection recently with cloud cover vs temperature in relation to sunspot activity?

Earlier you stated that the correlation between sunspot activity and temperature was bogus

I said no such thing. The bogus theory is that the sun is causing the warming of the past half century.

The GCR theory is separate from sunspots, IIRC. sunspots affect TSI. More sunspots, hotter sun (because apparently the area around sunspots burns brighter/hotter.)

But the GCR theory has been debunked as well. There is no recent correlation between GCR and cloudiness or GCR and temperatures. The CCN that have been proven to be caused by GCR are much smaller than they need to be to actually create clouds. SO, GCR can create proto CCN, but it is unproven whether they can actually create CCN and if those CCN will actually make a material difference given all the other CCN already in the atmosphere. But there’s no correlation at all.

See Real Climate’s take on this.

Francois, your assertion that if temps had remained constant, then human CO2 would be all gobbled up by the ocean is unfounded.

Please read a full argument before you start to try and tear it down. Francois’ argument has reasoning behind every counter argument you have made so far, but you have failed to reply directly to his.

During the 1970’s our CO2 was increasing but our temperature was decreasing. It only happened for 30 years! This is a very short time frame in terms of biomass and ocean CO2 absorption. So the long term trend in CO2 increased.

Earlier you stated that the correlation between sunspot activity and temperature was bogus. If this was true, how do you explain the Maunder minimum lining up exactly with the little ice age, and the recent temperature drop lining up with the drop off in sunspot activity.

Here is the basic theory, with references for those who wish to argue it. Please do, as I see a direct correlation, and if I am wrong please tell me how I am wrong. Please explain it to me like I am a complete idiot!!!

The Earth is constantly bombarded with cosmic radiation. The Sun’s magnetic field protects us, and the rest of the solar system, from most of this radiation, similar to the way the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the solar wind. The number of sunspots on the sun directly correlates to the strength of the sun’s magnetic field. So far each of the previous statements is not disputed. Here is where it gets tricky.

Cosmic radiation, when it hits our atmosphere, “have been experimentally determined to be able to produce ultra-small aerosol particles”(1). Clouds need what are called “cloud condensation nuclei”(2) to form. Cloud formation is hindered by a lack of these CCN’s. The logical conclusion is that if you increase CCN, you increase clouds. This is the conclusion the entire theory makes.

So here is the theory combined:

As sunspot numbers fluctuate, the Sun’s magnetic field fluctuates. More sunspots means a stronger magnetic field. Stronger magnetic field means less cosmic radiations striking the planet. Less radiation means less cloud formation nuclei. Less nuclei means fewer clouds. Fewer cloud means warmer weather (which days are warmer, a cloudy one or a non cloudy one?). The reverse is also true.

The idea is that the great big nuclear reactor in the sky has the greatest effect on the temperatures on this planet.

As an aside here is a paper with calculations showing that the green house effect of anthropogenic GHG emissions (including CO2, Methane CFC’s and Nitrous oxides) are less then .3% of the total greenhouse effect. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFoss....._data.html

1- Henrik Svensmark, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, Nigel Marsh, Martin Enghoff and Ulrik Uggerhøj, “Experimental Evidence for the role of Ions in Particle Nucleation under Atmospheric Conditions”, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, (Early Online Publishing), 2006.

2- Wikipidea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.....ion_nuclei

Human emissions add carbon to the entire cycle. I certainly don’t deny that! What is discussed here is how that CO2 is distributed between the various parts of the cycle. Just take the scenario where temperatures are not increasing. Then human emissions would all be absorbed by, most probably, the oceans, but also the land biomass, through the CO2 fertilization effect. Then you would find that the atmospheric concentration would not rise (or much less than what we are observing), but the amount of CO2 in the oceans and in the land biomass would indeed increase. Now we are in a situation where temperatures are rising, but humans also emit CO2. There is more CO2 in the atmosphere, but that’s because the increased temperature has raised the equilibrium value. There is more CO2 in the oceans because there is more CO2 in the entire cycle. It won’t disappear. It just goes somewhere else.

But there are 38,000 GtC in the oceans!!!

But CO2 is RISING in the oceans!

But there are 38,000 GtC in the oceans!!! Human emissions are less than 6GtC per year. There’s plenty of carbon everywhere in the cycle to make the atmospheric concentration rise. How do you think it got so high in the distant past?

Did you know that the biological pump alone is thought to remove about 200 ppm of carbon from the atmosphere? So only a couple of percent change in its efficiency is enough to account for how much CO2 is added to the atmosphere. Do you know by how much bacterial respiration and phytoplankton primary production can vary with temperature? Well, I told you to give me journal references if you want to debate. Sir, you are the one who’s not making any sense.

Oh, and why did it keep rising from 1950-1975? Did you read my paper???? The lifetime is 30 years or more!!! I showed that in that case, even if temperatures were to start dropping today, CO2 would keep rising for another 25 years. That’s figure 6, if you can read that far…

But perhaps you can explain to me why temperatures didn’t rise for 25 years while CO2 was rising? Talk about cause and effect…

If you agree that CO2 is rising in the atmosphere, the ocean and the biosphere, then where is the extra CO2 coming from? What natural source? It can’t be volcanoes because of C12/C13 isotope evidence and volcanoes do not produce CO2 in such large amounts.

This point has been explained a number of times but you don’t seem to be listening. Higher temperatures lead to a higher equilibrium point. If humans weren’t emitting CO2 then this CO2 would have to come from other sources. However, humans are emitting CO2 so the CO2 does not need to come from other sources. Think about a water tank with a level regulated by a feedback system – the amount of water will stay the same even if new water is added to the system. This means the level of water in the tank cannot be ‘blamed’ on the water from external source. Similarly, if the carbon cycle would naturally cause the CO2 to levels to rise to 340ppm no matter what then that portion of the CO2 content cannot be attributed to human causes even if the individual molecules can be traced back to fossil fuels.

The CO2 gets squeezed out of the air under all of that ice, huh? And where does it go? Venus

He explains the mechanism in his paper:

In the bubble-free ice the explosions form a new gas cavities and new cracks[4]. Through these cracks, and cracks formed by sheeting, a part of gas escapes first into the drilling liquid which fills the borehole, and then at the surface to the atmospheric air.

In any case, his claims would not be interesting on their own, however, the stomata data suggests that the variations in CO2 are larger than what the ice cores say. Since we cannot prove that either proxy is correct we cannot assume that one must be wrong and the other must be right.

Your argument makes no sense to me on logical grounds, so I think it’s fair to criticize it in the way that I have.

If you agree that CO2 is rising in the atmosphere, the ocean and the biosphere, then where is the extra CO2 coming from? What natural source? It can’t be volcanoes because of C12/C13 isotope evidence and volcanoes do not produce CO2 in such large amounts.

Fossil fuel burning explains the extra CO2 in the atmosphere and the sinks. The extra CO2 has the same chemical fingerprint as CO2 from fossil fuels. What’s more, the oxygen content of the atmosphere has decreased in line with he combustion of fossil fuels. The oxygen is leaving to form CO2.

I believe you are flipping cause and effect, especially if you are focusing post 1958, since this is the time that CO2 forcing has become dominant.

Why did the CO2 keep rising unabated during the 1940s to 1970s slight cooling trend? Why can we discern the great depression and the fall of the Soviet Union in the CO2 record?

As for ice cores, once again, they line up better than any other method to the direct atmospheric measurements. They are a proxy–I think a “more direct” proxy, but that’s a judgment call. But they are a much better proxy, and I don’t think it’s even close.

Raven,

I’m well aware of Jaworowski and his nonsense. The CO2 gets squeezed out of the air under all of that ice, huh? And where does it go? Venus? Do you actually buy that?

You say there is no doubt that temperature affects uptake. Well, then, the logical conclusion is that if there is a long period of sustained warming, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will rise. I even have one paper that says exactly that, as a remark in passing, without attempting to quantify it. But that’s what I’ve done, in a purely phenomenological way

CO2 rising when the temperature rises is a requirement for the positive feedback look Gore alludes to in “An Inconvenient Truth”, and which those at Real Climate assure us exists.

From time to time, I’ve even read the more alarming versions of AGW suggesting that mans additional CO2 causes heating which then triggers additional CO2 release, resulting in yet more heating.

So, it was appear that this general idea that, under natural circumstands, CO2 is released from the oceans when temperatures rise is not controversial.

The only open questions would appear to be of this sort: What are the various mechanisms for the release and sequestration? What is the “normal” rate of rise in CO2 when temperature rises (this would be without the presence of anthropogenic emissions)? How much more release or absorption happens as a result of both man’s CO2 addition and/or naturally occurring oscillations in surface temperatures?

Ice cores are the most accurate and direct way of measuring past CO2. Stomatal measurements are subject to the same problem that early chemical measurements were–proximity to sources of CO2. There may be other problems as well. Ice cores are the only method that have captured accurately (to tenths of a ppm) the CO2 concentrations since the beginning of direct measurements in 1958. Ice cores also accurately measure other trace gas concentrations.

Not everyone accepts that claim: http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/

This perfectly closed system, frozen in time, is a fantasy. “Liquid water is common in polar snow and ice, even at temperatures as low as -72C,” Dr. Jaworowski explains, “and we also know that in cold water, CO2 is 70 times more soluble than nitrogen and 30 times more soluble than oxygen, guaranteeing that the proportions of the various gases that remain in the trapped, ancient air will change. Moreover, under the extreme pressure that deep ice is subjected to — 320 bars, or more than 300 times normal atmospheric pressure — high levels of CO2 get squeezed out of ancient air

Furthermore, the stomatal measurements follow the temperature changes over the last 2000 years – a relationship that would not happen if they were biased by noise due to local factors.

If you haven’t taken the time to read my (relatively short) paper, how can you criticize it?

You say there is no doubt that temperature affects uptake. Well, then, the logical conclusion is that if there is a long period of sustained warming, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will rise. I even have one paper that says exactly that, as a remark in passing, without attempting to quantify it. But that’s what I’ve done, in a purely phenomenological way. I have used as a starting point a very simple model where the equilibrium CO2 concentration is temperature dependent. At the beginning, I just wanted to see if I could better match the CO2 uptake data. Others like McRae had used a linear relationship between uptake and temperature, but that didn’t have a very physical meaning, in my opinion, whereas the exponential model is probably the most common in the world (and is used in all carbon cycle models, as I found out later).

So I did obtain a better fit with the CO2 uptake curve. But that’s when I realized that simple fact: if temperatures have been rising, then CO2 has been rising. So I took the data for temperatures since 1880, and I used the very same parameters that gave me the best fit for the uptake curve. Understand this, as it is very important: I used the same parameters, without knowing what the result would be. But it turned out that, using those very same parameters, I could get an exact replica of the CO2 growth curve from Mauna Loa. To within 1%. We’re not talking about correlations with r2 of .3 here. This is not statistics, this is curve fitting of a physical model using experimental data.

Boris, you’re an intelligent person. But are you a practicing scientist? If you were one, you would know that when you find something like that, bells start ringing. You don’t get such a perfect link between independent data set with a plausible physical model, without having hit some underlying truth. Or else, there is a fantastic coincidence. But nevertheless, I thought that that simple discovery should at least be published somewhere, preferrably not on a blog message board. The Arxiv preprint site seems to me to be the perfect place for this, as it allows me to now take the time to dig further on the issue, and see if I can make sense of all this.

Now to your criticism. You say that CO2 increases in all the sinks. I know. I’m saying the same thing. But if my model is right, the same thing will happen. Others say we can find the anthropogenic CO2 in all those sinks. Well, of course, since it was emitted in the first place, it’s got to go somewhere. What I’m saying is that, if CO2 increases because of rising temperatures, the end result will be the same as if it increases because of human emissions. Only the cause is different.

Now to the ice cores. You say: “Ice cores are the most accurate and direct way of measuring past CO2.”

Well, I’m sorry, but they are not a “direct” way. They are a proxy, and as such, they are based on a number of assumptions. We don’t know if they are right, because nobody was there to make an independent measurement. You can claim as loud as you like that stomatal index measurements have problems, ice cores have problems too. But the truth is that both methods often give contradictory results. Trusting one more than the other is a choice based on opinion. If you learn a bit of philosophy of science, you will find that there is no answer to that. It’s the “experimenter’s regress”. So I readily admit that, to build a coherent picture in accord with my model, I have to chose stomatal index reconstructions, and not ice core reconstructions. That’s my choice.

But don’t worry too much. This is just for fun, at least for me. Science can be fun, you know. What I find the most fun here, is that everybody takes this CO2 thing so much for granted. Challenging the most taken for granted assumptions is a lot of fun. Climate scientists don’t do it often enough. I’m no climate scientist, I have no more affiliation with any academic institution, I don’t have to boost my CV with ten papers a year, I don’t have to worry about having my papers rejected with stupid reviewers comments. I can just do the most fun thing in the world (to my taste at least): scientific inquiry.

The most frightening thing here is that I could even be right.