Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide - Latest WMO figures

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

The World Meteorological Organization has just (9 Sep 2014) released its latest report on the atmospheric concentration of Carbon Dioxide (and other greenhouse gases). The recent annual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration (mole fraction) that has been widely reported on in today's media headlines is 2.9 parts per million between 2012 and 2013, reaching a record high CO2 concentration of 396 parts per million in 2013.

Here is the executive summary of the report:
https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentr...r_1002_en.html

And here is the WMO report itself:
https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentr...G_Bulletin.pdf

While the headline figure of an 0.74 percent annual increase in CO2 concentrations in 2012-2013 is important, and this annual increase is more than previous annual increases, the broad trend with time of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1985 has been a steady and roughly linear increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2. The media has made much of the fact that the annual increase of CO2 concentration may have got slightly larger since 2010, but to some degree the truth (or falsehood) of this result depends on how the data is analyzed.

The report notes that the increased radiative forcing since 1990 due to the increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases since 1990 is very significant; it can be thought of as the equivalent of an increased energy input of about 0.7 watts per each square meter of the Earth's surface. However, I note that the actual globally-averaged surface temperature has not increased meaningfully since year 2000.

While this thread is about science, and not about politics and policy, it should be noted that costly (that is, heavily subsidized by taxpayers and consumers) CO2 emissions mitigation efforts in the economically developed countries have so far had no effect whatsoever on reducing the annual increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

cheers,
Robert

[Robert9 (Robert)]

Hi Robert,
Very interesting figures. When I was a boy back in the 1940-50s, the CO2 concentration was 0.03% or 300ppm. If we say that was 60 years ago, then the latest figures indicate a rise of ~30% in that time or, if we average it out, increasing by 0.5% pa. or 50% every 100 years. Extrapolating that number, the world could expect a CO2 concentration in ~2050 of ~0.045%.
(Hope my maths measures up ok )
Robert

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

While this thread is about science, and not about politics and policy, it should be noted that costly (that is, heavily subsidized by taxpayers and consumers) CO2 emissions mitigation efforts in the economically developed countries have so far had no effect whatsoever on reducing the annual increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

cheers,
Robert

Hi Robert,
Sort of right. The USA which doesn't have much by way of emission mitigation programs, has cut its emissions significantly - mainly by using all that newly found fracking gas.

Which is kind of ironic.
Cheers,
Renato

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by Renato1

Hi Robert,
Sort of right. The USA which doesn't have much by way of emission mitigation programs, has cut its emissions significantly - mainly by using all that newly found fracking gas.
Which is kind of ironic.
Cheers,
Renato

Too right, Renato!

I don't really want to talk about the practicalities of energy generation and their consequences in this thread, but I totally agree with you.
(When I was talking of mitigation, I actually meant primarily solar, wind, and hydro)

As you say, some of the much despised and derided fossil fuels (which we are told are creating a "serious pollutant" that is apparently sending the biosphere rapidly towards its doom ) are the only energy option that have actually reduced greenhouse gas emissions so far (by burning gas instead of coal), because the 'renewables' are currently so costly that they too often end up producing a small amount of energy for a vast expenditure of money.

To give one example of a super-expansively financed green boondoggle, here is a two billion dollar facility that produces 'green' renewable energy, all very nice and none of those horrid fossil fuels, but note that it produces very little energy for the money expended:
http://www.ivanpahsolar.com/
(compare the energy output of this facility with its enormous cost)
(only 140,000 homes serviced, for a cost of two billion dollars)

But I will say no more about the politics and economics of energy, because to enter the realms of the political/moral/economic/'environmental' debate about global warming is to enter a world of zealotry, vested interests, passionate end-of-the-world believers, and also much more subtle biases, which is why I intend to keep to the climatic science itself in this thread!

cheers, Robert

Note 1:
Without the "pollutant" in question (CO2), all of the plants on our planet would die, and all the animals too, including all humans. The Carbon Dioxide "pollution" is what is essential for photosynthesis!

Note 2:
A further problem with concentrating solar thermal plants like Ivanpah, is that they literally cook many many thousands of birds (just wait for your dinner to be cooked as you stand by the mirrors in the plant, and it falls out of the sky, ready for eating)

[avandonk]

I will not argue with this as it is pathetic thoughts of people who do not know any science.

I honestly do not care as I turned 65 today.

We are trashing Our Planet. Yes even me!

Anecdotal 'evidence' is just that absolutely worthless.

If you do not believe what the experts in the field of climate science are telling you, you have a major problem with cognitive reality.

Cherry picking just does not cut it. See anecdotal.

Bert

[AstralTraveller (David)]

Originally Posted by Renato1

Hi Robert,
Sort of right. The USA which doesn't have much by way of emission mitigation programs, has cut its emissions significantly - mainly by using all that newly found fracking gas.

Which is kind of ironic.
Cheers,
Renato

Oh wow!! It's a fracking miracle; burning methane doesn't produce CO2. Either that or there is some slight-of-hand accounting.

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

Note 1:
Without the "pollutant" in question (CO2), all of the plants on our planet would die, and all the animals too, including all humans. The Carbon Dioxide "pollution" is what is essential for photosynthesis!

A revelation!! Well let's increase the conc to 1% .. no let's make it 10%. If a little bit is good then more must be better. And by the same 'logic', that faint red light in the observatory might as well be a floodlight.

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by AstralTraveller

A revelation!! Well let's increase the conc to 1% .. no let's make it 10%. If a little bit is good then more must be better. And by the same 'logic', that faint red light in the observatory might as well be a floodlight.

I wasn't really making a silly point about photosynthesis and CO2, in fact I was only criticizing the sort of people who talk about Carbon as being pollution.
However, my point about solar thermal plants cooking large quantities of birds was a serious one.

This thread is already getting people too "heated up", even though I originally hoped to have a calm discussion limited only to atmospheric science.
I thought that I had actually raised one or two serious issues, but someone in this thread has already accused me of "not knowing any science", which seems an absurdity when you look at the contents of my other posts.

[AstralTraveller (David)]

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

I wasn't really making a silly point about photosynthesis and CO2, in fact I was only criticizing the sort of people who talk about Carbon as being pollution.

Sorry, it didn't come across that way. It all sounded very serious.

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

... someone in this thread has already accused me of "not knowing any science", ...

And you're surprised .

[avandonk]

Here is a simple question. How much would sea level change on the shores of Greenland if all the ice on Greenland melted.

Note this is a trick question


Bert

[avandonk]

The sea level would drop on the shores of Greenland by about 200 feet due to isostatic rebound. The loss of the huge weight of the ice on Greenland would cause the land mass to rise.

The resultant melt water would flood London and all low lying regions in Europe. The USA would just say this is not happening.

Our Earth is not a bathtub. It is a very complex system.

When charlatans that claim that all the scientists in the world are part of a so called conspiracy with glib hand waving arguments that are not backed by any evidence let alone real Physics or logic. You have been had by a con artists. I call them out and out liars.

Bert

[clive milne]

Robert,
Prefacing a discussion with the terms 'scientific' and 'non-political' does not necessarily make it so. It is quite transparent that what followed was political commentary supported by inductive reasoning and was incorrect on many levels.
Frankly, I am surprised and disappointed to see it come from you of all people on this forum.

[casstony]

There's a series available on SBS on demand called 'Tipping Points' that outlines in simple terms some of the problems associated with a warming planet. The series has been aired for the last five weeks.

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by avandonk

The sea level would drop on the shores of Greenland by about 200 feet due to isostatic rebound. The loss of the huge weight of the ice on Greenland would cause the land mass to rise.
Bert

A Very Interesting prediction, Bert.

A situation somewhat analogous to that when an overloaded ship floats low in the water, but then it bobs up when the excess load is removed?
(with the Continental Crust "floating" on the more plastic Mantle)

Isostasy was mentioned in an introductory geology course that I did, but that discussion was in the context of the uplift and sinking of large sections of continental crust due to non-glacial events , for instance due to events occurring in the mantle (e.g. a classic case of uplift is the colossal uplift of the Colorado Plateau).

Now that I start to look through some of my geology notes, I see that there might potentially be some complicating factors in the process of modelling and predicting the future vertical response of the crust in Greenland:
(1) there may already be some existing (as of now) upwards rebound of the Greenland crust, due to the removal of significant amounts of ice at the end of the last Ice Age. I am given to understand that the so-called "post-glacial rebound" of the crust that was under an ice sheet can continue for many thousands of years after the ice sheet has melted.
(2) Because the ice sheet in Greenland varies in thickness from place to place, the amount of depression of the underlying crust should also vary; so the amount of upwards rebound should also vary from point to point in Greenland.
(3) As I mentioned above, there could be ongoing asthenosphere and mantle events that act to further modify the amount of vertical uplift.

On the one or two occasions when I did look, in detail, into the physical modelling that was done of a geological event on a very large physical scale, I was amazed what a small amount of data geologists actually had to work with; indeed it seems to be harder to get data on the physical conditions within the Earth than to figure out the physical conditions within the Sun! [ It seems to be extremely hard to figure out exactly what's going on "down there"; an example of this is the ongoing controversy about "mantle plumes" ]

Robert

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

In the paper: 2014, Solar Physics, 289, 3961,
Chapman & de Toma & Cookson report an observed decline in the amplitude of the peaks of the solar cycle between Cycles 22 and Cycle 24.

[[ Incidentally, this is a well-respected journal which is known for stringent peer review.
There also exist many "free public access" science journals that are funded by the researchers themselves paying for their paper to be put in, and many of these journals have turned out to be corrupt, in that they claim to be peer-reviewed but in fact they are willing to publish just about anything. ]]

I quote here the abstract of this paper:
There has been much speculation about the extended minimum between Solar Cycles 23 and 24. Cycle 24 itself has been unusually weak compared with recent cycles. We present quantitative evidence for the weakness of both Cycles 23 and, particularly, 24. The data are objective indices derived from precision photometric images obtained on a daily basis at the San Fernando Observatory. These data form the longest running, homogeneous photometric record known to us. We show sunspot areas from red images and facular/network areas from Ca ii K-line images. Spot and facular area are a simple and direct measurement of the strength of solar activity. The data clearly show the decline in the amplitude of sunspot maxima for Cycles 23 and 24 compared with Cycle 22. The relative amplitudes of mean spot area for Cycles 22 through 24 are 1.0, 0.74, and 0.37, respectively. There is also an indication that the facular-to-spot area ratio has increased in Cycle 24.

Here is the paper itself:
_________________Solar cycle amplitude.pdf

Of course there does not have to be any causal relation whatsoever between declining solar activity and the current decline in the rate of global temperature increase, though this question does deserve investigation. The results published in this paper suggest to me that global climatic modelling is a complex problem with large numbers of incompletely-understood components that must be accounted for.

Apparently, if I say that climate scientists don't fully understand every aspect of global climate, that makes me some sort of heretic who should be shouted down and even called a scientific ignoramus. I have no trouble accepting the broad thrust of the most recent IPCC report, but I think that a little more humility should be shown in the face of a complex problem in which even the best predictive models for Global Temperatures produce very large discrepancies between the various forecast temperatures for each and every year in the 21st Century.

cheers,
Robert

[tonybarry (Tony)]

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

...if I say that climate scientists don't fully understand every aspect of global climate, that makes me some sort of heretic who should be shouted down and even called a scientific ignoramus. I have no trouble accepting the broad thrust of the most recent IPCC report, but I think that a little more humility should be shown in the face of a complex problem in which even the best predictive models for Global Temperatures produce very large discrepancies between the various forecast temperatures for each and every year in the 21st Century.

cheers,
Robert

Hi Robert,

It's the way with religion. Doesn't matter whether it's Catholics versus Protestants, Mac versus Windows, or global warm versus global cool.

When it's faith based, it seems to get ugly really quickly. Don't know why, but it appears to be a common reaction for many people.

Alas.

Regards,
Tony Barry

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by tonybarry

Hi Robert,
It's the way with religion. Doesn't matter whether it's Catholics versus Protestants, Mac versus Windows, or global warm versus global cool.
When it's faith based, it seems to get ugly really quickly. Don't know why, but it appears to be a common reaction for many people.
Tony Barry

G'day Tony,

I wouldn't say this of all my critics in this thread!

I have had my critics in this thread;
some of them had a logical point to make, while others of them resorted to what amounts to a variety of argumentum ad hominem.
Nonetheless, some of my posts did helpfully provide the results of some peer-reviewed scientific research that had been published in respected journals.

Thank you for your support.

cheers,
Robert

[Tropo-Bob (Bob)]

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

The report notes that the increased radiative forcing since 1990 due to the increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases since 1990 is very significant; it can be thought of as the equivalent of an increased energy input of about 0.7 watts per each square meter of the Earth's surface. However, I note that the actual globally-averaged surface temperature has not increased meaningfully since year 2000.



cheers,
Robert

Two points here. First: water in the form of oceans acts as a heat sink. Secondly, BOM reports say the last decade was the hotest decade and this is consistent with the reports of other weather agencies.

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Originally Posted by Tropo-Bob

Secondly, BOM reports say the last decade was the hotest decade and this is consistent with the reports of other weather agencies.

Thanks for your comments.

Sometimes the derived 'trend line' on a graph depends on how the data points are analyzed. There is more than one way to draw a trend line on a graph, as we all found out when we did science experiments at school and university and we graphed data points of the measured quantities "all over the place" instead of along the particular mathematical function (curve or line) that we had hoped for.

Numerous tools of statistics and error-analysis have been developed to try to extract meaningful trends from the mass of messy data, and to estimate the error budget of each measurement that scientists make, but when there is only a slight trend on a graph, it is easy enough to draw two different trend lines, one in each direction (increasing and decreasing) through the data points.

[gaa_ian (Ian)]

The evidence on the ground for a global climate shift is pretty overwhelming. How much is anthropogenic and how much is part of some as yet unseen natural cycle is semantics. The real question is how do we as a species, the Future Eaters of the planet, adapt to the environment that we have been steadily modifying for the past 10,000 years and rapidly modifying for the past 50-100 years. Any system that is out of equilibrium will seek to right it self (simple physics) & in this adjustment we will clearly come off 2nd best. So what do we do about the part of the change that we have been demonstrated to clearly have induced, how can we change the environment in a way that is clearly to OUR benefit ?

[Shiraz (Ray)]

Robert, I think the reason that you have stirred people up is that you restated some of the old and discredited ideas that the sceptics continue to use:
- CO2 is not pollution. Semantics - if pollution is "something that we put into the environment at levels that will cause harm", then CO2 is right up there
- the data can be analysed to get any result. This was recently tested by a group with sceptics leanings. To their surprise and credit, their published analysis showed that the temperature data are very robust and that the atmosphere really has warmed by 1C, no matter how you analyse it.
- it could be the sun. the models include solar influx, but by far the most telling result is from satellites that measure the incoming and outgoing radiation from the earth - more radiation is currently going in than is going out. This result is independent of sunspots, historical proxies, modelling etc etc - it is a direct measurement that shows that the earth is currently a net absorber of energy (ie it is warming up), independent of variations in solar flux.
- it hasn't warmed since 2000. (Actually it has warmed a lot in that period - your start point needs to be moved to 1998...). Variability can be expected - the temperature will not be always upwards on all timescales - but the long term trend certainly is.

Rather than revisit these old controversies, could you accept what seems to be the overwhelming advice of the experts and go to the next question - what do we do about it? It would be great to have a discussion of what we could do to maximise current benefits and minimise the downside to future generations - provided that political sound-bite thinking could be kept out of it. For example, it would be great to have other opinions on the prisoner's dilemma, the economics concept of future discounting and strategies for adaptation. As your original post shows, we are currently doing nothing at all - I would like to understand why we have chosen that and also what action makes sense.