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More on calibration. 1996

Department of Commerce, Mountain Administrative Support Center, Procurement Division, MC3, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80303-3328

"The calibration shall consist of a determination by the Scripps manometer of the mole fraction of CO2 in each NOAA reference gas cylinder..."

"...it is the intent of the Government to award a sole source contract under the authority 41 U.S.C. 253 (c)(1) to the University of California at San Diego. Scripps Institute of Oceanography, 2314 Ritter Hall, LaJolla, CA 92093, as this source is considered to be the only responsible source and no other type of supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements."

Not only were Scripps AKA Mauna Lua the only collector of data, they were the only calibrator of the equipment.

If Scripps was wrong, then there was no independent check of the calibration, because they did it themselves, and all the other later CO2 measurers presumably had their equipment calibrated from Scripps.

The average increase Mauna Lua measured was 1.3 parts per million by volume. That is 0.00013%.

Anyone confident that their measurements and calibration errors weren't responsible for that?

http://www.fbodaily.com/cbd/archive/1996/10(October)/31-Oct-1996/Bsol001.htm

So, in other words, they've been using a rubber ruler to measure the so-called greenhouse-global-warming marker of CO2 and no one is sure what earth normal for CO2 is or how the ration of CO2 to the rest of the atmospheric gasses has or has not changed.

For this they want me to drive a Prius and live in a cold house?

I'm just trying to put the magnitude of the calibration errors in prespective with observed changes in CO2 levels. You cite Mauna Lua as the only collector of data. So what you are basically saying is that there is only 1 source for benchmark atmospheric CO2 levels in the world? And that, based on the figures your posted article cites, there is an apparent downward drift in the calibration figures over time and that this downward drift is of similar size to the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 levels?

Are the Scripps calibration standards supposed to be world wide gold calibration standards used by everybody doing climate change work? Or are they for U.S. researchers? In other words does Europe have a gold standard calibration set or are we relying only on 1 measurement center on which we base all our measurements? If that is the case, then all the previous CO2 measurements need to be redone. How many papers using the faulty calibrations will be revised and republished? How many key fiundings, long accepted by the climate change establishment will be significantly questioned. On that, I won't hold my breath what knowning the politics of climate research today.