If you really want a dialogue, we must concentrate on one or two issues at a time. I have only a limited amount of time to respond here, and I can't answer 100 questions in every post.
Another AGW tenet is that the buildup of CO2 in the Mauna Loa Record is an accumulation of CO2 throughout the brunt of the industrial era. To make that accumulation viable, AGW advocates claim the duration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a century or more.
See my analogy posted earlier. The increase is almost entirely due to anthropogenic CO2, because that is the only CO2 flux to the atmosphere sufficiently large to counter the CO2 fluxes from the atmosphere. A huge number of measurements indicate that the oceans are a net carbon sink (start HERE and you might also figure out where Hawaii really is on that plot). The carbon isotope measurements fully support this (the observed Suess effects are consistent with the isotopic signature of fossil fuel CO2 emissions AND the amount of these emissions).
Also by implication, cogitator tries to establish a contradiction by relying on the calculated isotopic fraction he discusses next. Proof by rubbing. 2. What is the accuracy in measuring the various isotopes of C and O? Are the errors correlated between different isotopes? What is the sensitivity to temperature? What is the resulting error in the fractions? Without this information, conclusions cannot be drawn from the isotopic data.
You can read a multitude of papers that have established this technique in the determination of carbon fluxes in paleoclimate studies, modern climate studies, oceanography, land biosphere, etc. to get the answers to your questions. Such procedures are performed with instruments like mass spectrometers, and can be performed with high accuracy.
And what contradiction are you talking about?
Your reference refers to the use of isotopic ratios for the investigation of paleoclimate fluxes; the application to the modern era is more straightforward because the fluxes can be estimated directly from the measurements rather than inferred from the model.
3. You wrote, “This 14C decline cannot be explained by a CO2 source in the terrestrial vegetation or soils.” That still leaves the ocean and subsurface as possible sources, and not just man.
I didn't write that. Perhaps there are other sources, which is why I provided the next reference, where the abstract concludes with "Model calculations indicate that in 1950 industrial CO2 emissions are responsible for at least 85% of the delta C-14 decline, whereas natural variability accounts for the remaining 15%."
5. You say, “Indeed, the 13C fractions in the atmosphere and ocean surface waters declined over the past decades. This fits a fossil fuel CO2 source and argues against a dominant oceanic CO2 source.” Is your point the following from the TAR?
I believe that the TAR paragraph may refer to both 14C and 13C/12 C.
So what? BTW, is the 30% figure based on ice core data?
So... if you're insisting that the current increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are due to outgassing from warmer oceans, you're wrong. And you also need to read Sigman and Boyle 2000, "Glacial/interglacial variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide". Forgive me if you've read it already, it doesn't appear that you have.
And Vostok isn't the only ice core ever drilled.
First, what is calculated is not the isotopic fraction of the increase, but of samples allegedly representative of the whole CO2 reservoir in the atmosphere.
The isotopic ratios in either living samples (tree rings) or actual atmospheric measurements are being examined.
Second, suppose the entire atmospheric reservoir were replaced by fresh ACO2 in any time period you might choose. What does that have to do with global warming?
If the concentrations remained the same, nothing. The issue is what's causing the concentration to increase.
Third, why don’t you use the rate of total CO2 increase and the rate of 14C decrease and compute the relative concentration of ACO2 in the atmospheric reservoir? That might be interesting for the carbon cycle, but still irrelevant to global warming.
The issue is what is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since the mid-1800s.
First, as shown in the Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, during the paleo period the natural source of CO2 was solely the oceans. We assume that the laws of physics are invariant, so it should be true today.
Notwithstanding the huge amounts of fossil fuel CO2 emissions? So is it truly your position that natural CO2 fluxes are so large that the contribution of mankind's activities (primarily combustion of fossil fuels) is negligible?
Second, global warming is apparent, and the natural efflux of CO2 from the oceans should be increasing due to an invariant solubility relationship.
That's why you have to read Sigman and Boyle 2000. Bulletin: Increasing ocean temperatures during glacial/interglacial transitions could only be responsible for at most 10% of the observed increase in CO2. The amount of ocean warming since the mid-1800s is not even close to enough to provide the amount of CO2 increase observed. But all the other data is consistent with the amount of CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning in that period.
Third, I remain skeptical that the data show what you claim, especially without quantifying “predominantly”. You don’t measure the 13C isotope of the increase, but something between a regional concentration and the whole atmospheric reservoir. Where is calculation that takes you from the domain of the measurements to the increase?
The measurement is made on atmospheric and ocean water samples. The change in the ratio (speaking of stable carbon here, i.e., 13C/12C) is a function of the increase and indicative of the source.
Feel free to respond; I will be unable to respond again until tomorrow.
cogitator’s Citations
In your recent posts, you linked to three documents as if they supported your writing. They don’t, and here’s why.
1. Coker, Rory, “Distinguishing Science and Pseudoscience”. http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pseudo.html
You refused to defend your charge in post 171 that my work is “pure pseudoscience at its best”. You would not define pseudoscience, nor state the factors you perceive in my work by which you reached your conclusion. As a result, any reader would be quite unable to verify your accusation.
In post 171, you linked to a 1/30/05 paper by Coker posted on Quackwatch, “Your Guide to Quackery, Health Fraud, and Intelligent Decisions”. The paper is entitled “Distinguishing Science and Pseudoscience”. It contains a rambling discussion of pseudoscience as perceived by the author, lumped into 22 non-exclusive categories. You refused the opportunity to show how my paper fit even one of those categories. The paper itself is scientifically worthless as it fails to defined either science or pseudoscience, and is all concluionary. Science begins with language and the definitions of terms. No scientist would rely on such a work.
If you need a good defintion of science, you might be able to find my out-of-print book, Evolution in Science, Hollowbrook, New Hampshire, 1992 in a local library. It answers that question in full. (Watch for this book to be posted on my blog this year.)
2. Sigman, D. M. & E. A. Boyle, Glacial/interglacial variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide, Nature, Vol 407, 10/19/00, 859-869. http://www.geosc.psu.edu/Courses/Geosc320/Sigman.pdf
You cited Sigman & Boyle when asked what was your basis for quoting the frequently claimed 30% increase in CO2. On that subject, Climate Change 2001 says,
>> The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from close to 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1800, at first slowly and then progressively faster to a value of 367 ppm in 1999, echoing the increasing pace of global agricultural and industrial development. This is known from numerous, well-replicated measurements of the composition of air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice. P. 187.
In case you missed it, this says the increase is a comparison of Mauna Loa data with polar data! Furthermore, necessary to this logic is that the CO2 is well-mixed, or at least that polar measurements may be intermixed with tropical! This is as weak as the well-mixed argument.
The IPCC also says,
>>East-west gradients of atmospheric CO2 concentration are an order of magnitude smaller than north-south gradients. Climate Change 2001, p. 185
This observation about ill-mixed CO2 is never resolved in the Report. The north-south gradient is caused by the sinks at the polls and the sources at the equator. As I wrote to you, Keeling warned against reliance on two sets of measurements where either is near a sink or a source. In this case, both are.
Regardless, the Sigman paper doesn’t seem to support your reliance on an 1850 concentration in any way and so doesn’t answer the question.
On the plus side, Sigman makes one valuable and most significant point for the Global Climate model. That is on page 862 where he formulates the dissolution process in sea water by the following two lines of equations:
>> CO2(gas) <--> CO2(aqueous)
>> <--> H2CO3 <--> H[+] + HCO3[-] <--> 2H[+] + CO3[2-]
The first equation is the physical uptake CO2 from the atmosphere into solution. The second string of reactions are chemical, taking place in the ocean. As shown, they occur not from CO2 available in the atmosphere, but from CO2 in aqueous solution. Aqueous CO2, not gaseous CO2, is the reservoir for the chemical processes.
To the contrary, the IPCC says, “CaCO3 … takes up CO2 from the atmosphere in a 1:1 ratio.” P. 189. And it omits the first equation above from its Figure 3.1(c), p. 188.
The IPCC says, however, that dissolved, non-ionic CO2 in the surface sea water is “about 1%” of the total Dissolved Inorganic Carbon (DIC). Interpretting Figure 3.1 (a), the total DIC is 38,000 PgC, so 1% to one significant figure would be about 380 PgC or a range of 190 PgC to 570 PgC. The same Figure 3.1 places the total atmospheric carbon at 730 PgC. These numbers do not suggest a bottleneck in uptake by solubility.
Nevertheless, the IPCC reported
>>Uptake of anthropogenic CO2 by the ocean is primarily governed by ocean circulation and carbonate chemistry. The fraction of anthropogenic CO2 that is taken up by the ocean declines with increasing CO2 concentration, due to reduced buffer capacity of the carbonate system. Climate Change 2001, p. 185.
This statement and conclusion replace the physical solubility pump with a chemical reaction between the atmosphere and the ocean’s carbonate chemistry. Instead, the solubility pump is a validated model for the physical exchange of a gas between the atmosphere and water. The carbonate chemistry operates within the water, on the aqueous CO2 in solution, as modeled by the two lines of equations.
The flux model is important because, as shown by David Archer in numerous publications, the chemical reaction is extremely slow. Archer calls himself a computational ocean chemist, and he is a contributor to Climate Change 2001 and to RealClimate.org, a cite that openly promotes AGW. But Archer concludes that the residence time of carbon in the atmosphere is between 30 and 35 kyears. (Climate Change 2001 is more circumspect, but seems to suggest 5 kyears. See ¶3.2.3.2, p. 199.) Archer has wrongly presumed that the reaction is between CaCO3 and CO2(gas) when it’s actually between CaCO3 and CO2(aqueous)! Therein lies a contribution by Sigman.
On the other hand, Sigman is in the company of a large number of climatologists who carelessly express partial pressure in the units of concentration (ppm or ppmv). This is off–putting to the reader versed in physics. Climate Change 2001 makes clear that the units of pressure or partial pressure are Pascals, bars, or millimeters of mercury (mmHg). Pp. 869-870. But it violates its own rule, as in
>>[T]he equilibrium pCO2 in seawater increases by about 10 to 20 ppm per °C temperature increase. Climate Change 2001, p. 200.
and just to be sure of the definition of pCO2, we have “the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2)” on p. 199.
A relationship will exist between partial pressure of CO2 and its concentration in the atmosphere because, as shown in the Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, the natural concentration is determined by the solubility pump. As is well known, solubility varies with temperature and partial pressure.
Climatologists need to straighten out their units and dimensions before they will be able to implement CO2 correctly as a feedback.
3. Feely, R. A., C. L. Sabine, T. Takahashi, R. Wanninkhof, Distribution of the Climatological Mean Net Sea-air CO2 Flux, in Uptake and Storage of Carbon Dioxide in the Ocean: The Global CO2 Survey, 2001. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/mean.shtml
You wrote,
>>The increase is almost entirely due to anthropogenic CO2, because that is the only CO2 flux to the atmosphere sufficiently large to counter the CO2 fluxes from the atmosphere. A huge number of measurements indicate that the oceans are a net carbon sink (start HERE and you might also figure out where Hawaii really is on that plot).
First, you are confused. Anthropogenic CO2 does not counter any other fluxes. There is no bottleneck, restriction, or competition between manmade and natural sources.
Perhaps your confusion stems from an erroneous analysis in the IPCC Third Assessment Report. It computes an annual budget for CO2 emissions (6.3 PgC), subtracts the atmosphere increase (3.2 PgC), and apportions the difference to the net uptake flux to the ocean and land. See Climate Change 2001,Table 3.1, p. 190. It concludes, “Currently the ocean and the land together are taking up about half of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions.” P. 7. The reliance on the net is clumsy modeling, but it is common in the AGW field.
Without some way to discriminate between natural and manmade CO2, there is no way for the uptake of CO2 to have one rate for natural CO2 and another for anthropogenic. The isotopic fraction and the preference some biological pathways have for one or another fraction is neither sufficient nor well enough developed to be said to be such a discriminant.
The IPCC says in the same Report that the atmosphere holds 730 PgC (p. 188), and that the annual uptake is 270 PgC to leaf water (p. 191), 120 PgC to photosynthesis (p. 191), and 90 PgC to the ocean (p. 188). That’s a total annual uptake of 480 PgC, or 66%.
The Report, however, omits the leaf water in its graphical representation of the “natural carbon cycle”. Figure 3.1(a), p. 188. If the leaf water is not included, the annual uptake according to the report is 210 PgC, or 29%.
The 50% analysis on the net basis (p. 7) doesn’t match the results using the IPCC uptake data as they are aggregated by the IPCC, which yield 29% and 66%.
Referring to Feely (2001) in post 207, you say that I “might also figure out where Hawaii really is on that plot”. You must be referring to the “Mean Annual Air-Sea Flux for 1995”. In fact that chart is the source of my claim in Post 200 that Mauna Loa sits in the chimney of a massive outgassing of CO2, while the ice core data are taken from an area surrounded by the deepest CO2 sink.
You falsely imply that I misplaced Hawaii on that chart.
The AGW conjecture is full of errors. This is a natural consequence of a deception.