A Matter of Degrees - The Gormogons

We’ve debated various aspects of Anthropogenic Global Warming here for years. Largely the AGW models identify the increase CO₂ contribution to the environment by industrialization and fossil fuels by humans as the primary factor in the change to global climate. Of course, there have been various predictions or forecasts of the increase in global temperature – a degree, 0.8º, etc. So let’s walk through a little science and examine this theory.

There are two isotopes of carbon in our atmosphere: C₁₂ and C₁₃. C₁₂ makes up 99% and C₁₃ is a paltry 1% of the atmospheric carbon (which is almost all in the form of CO₂). Fossil fuels are a bit richer in the C₁₂ isotope and that is a crutch that the AGW proponents lean on but there is a wrinkle. Plants are also rich in the C₁₂ isotope – because, really, fossil fuels are made essentially from plants – with a small variance. So, it’s hard to identify the source of the CO₂ from the carbon isotope signature.

Man-made emissions are fairly well estimated at 5 Gigatonnes (Gt) per year. But, as we’ve mentioned before, through sequestration, there are other natural sources of CO₂: the oceans (emitting about 90Gt per year) and land-based plant life (emitting about 60Gt per year). It is however, difficult to measure and the error thresholds on these numbers are wide. E.M. Smith presents it as follows:

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“It is often asserted that we can measure the human contribution of CO₂ to the air by looking at the ratio of C₁₂ to C₁₃. The theory is that plants absorb more C₁₂ than C₁₃ (by about 2%, not a big signature), so we can look at the air and know which came from plants and which came from volcanos and which came from fossil fuels, via us. Plants are ‘deficient’ in C₁₃, and so, then, ought to be our fossil fuel derived CO₂.

The implication is that since coal and oil were from plants, that “plant signature” means “human via fossil fuels”. But it just isn’t that simple. Take a look at the above chart. We are 5.5 and plants are putting 121.6 into the air each year (not counting ocean plants). There is a lot of carbon slopping back and forth between sinks and sources. Exactly how closely do we know the rate of soil evolution of CO2, for example?”

So if the natural sources vary by 3%, which is entirely possible in a year, that would constitute the entire industrialized contribution of CO₂ to the atmosphere. Murray Salby, the Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University and a visiting professor at a number of international universities and a former member of the Bureau of Meterology in Australia and the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, gave a speech ahead of a paper that is due out this year. Salby found that the largest increases year-to-year occurred when the world warmed fastest due to El Nino conditions. The smallest increases correlated with volcanoes which pump dust up into the atmosphere and keep the world cooler for a while. In other words, temperature controls CO₂ levels on a yearly time-scale, and according to Salby, man-made emissions have little effect.

Read that again: temperature controls CO₂ levels on a yearly time-scale.

The climate models assume that most of the rise in CO₂ (from 280 ppmv in1780 to 392 ppmv today) was due to industrialization and fossil fuel use. But the globe has been warming during that period (in fact since the depths of the Little Ice Age around 1680), so warmer conditions could be the reason that CO2 has been rising.

Salby does not dispute that some of the rise in CO₂ levels is due to man-made emissions, but found that temperature alone explains about 80% of the variation in CO₂ levels.

The up and coming paper with all the graphs will be released in about six weeks. It has passed peer review, and sounds like it has been a long time coming. Salby says he sat on the results for six months wondering if there was any other interpretation he could arrive at, and then, when he invited scientists he trusted and admired to comment on the paper, they also sat on it for half a year. His speech created waves at the IUGG conference, and word is spreading.

According to Salby, science is about discourse and questioning. He emphasized the importance of debate: “Excluding discourse is not science”. He felt that it was not his position to comment on policy, saying the scientists that do are more activist than scientist.

He finishes his presentation saying that “anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic, is in fantasia”.

Salby was once an IPCC reviewer, and comments, damningly, that if these results had been available in 2007, “the IPCC could not have drawn the conclusion that it did.”

So it is a matter of degrees: temperature controlling CO2 levels and the amount of natural CO₂ emissions compared to industrialized sources.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.