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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.