Professor Murry Salby is Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University. He’s been a visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, and he’s spent time at the Bureau of Meterology in Australia.
Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.
CO2 variations do not correlate with man-made emissions. Peaks and falls correlate with hot years (e.g. 1998) and cold years (1991-92). No graphs are available from Salby’s speech or paper yet. See Judith Curry’s reaction here.
This graph comes from Tom Quirk’s related work (see below).
The higher levels of CO2 in recent decades appear to be mostly due to natural sources. He presented this research at the IUGG conference in Melbourne recently, causing great discussion and shocking a few people. Word reached the Sydney Institute, which rushed to arrange for him to speak, given the importance of this work in the current Australian political climate.
The ratio of C13 to C12 (two isotopes of carbon) in our atmosphere has been declining, which is usually viewed as a signature of man-made CO2 emissions. C12 makes up 99% of carbon in the atmosphere (nearly all atmospheric carbon is in the form of CO2). C13 is much rarer - about 1%. Plants don’t like the rarer C13 type as much; photosynthesis works best on the C12 -type -of-CO2 and not the C13-type when absorbing CO2 from the air.
Prof Salby points out that while fossil fuels are richer in C12 than the atmosphere, so too is plant life on Earth, and there isn’t a lot of difference (just 2.6%) in the ratios of C13 to C12 in plants versus fossil fuels. (Fossil fuels are, after all, made in theory from plants, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to tell their “signatures” apart). So if the C13 to C12 ratio is falling (as more C12 rich carbon is put into the air by burning fossil fuels) then we can’t know if it’s due to man-made CO2 or natural CO2 from plants.
Essentially we can measure man-made emissions reasonably well, but we can’t measure the natural emissions and sequestrations of CO2 at all precisely - the error bars are huge. Humans emits 5Gt or so per annum, but the oceans emit about 90Gt and the land-plants about 60Gt, for a total of maybe 150Gt. Many scientists have assumed that the net flows of carbon to and from natural sinks and sources of CO2 cancel each other out, but there is no real data to confirm this and it’s just a convenient assumption. The problem is that even small fractional changes in natural emissions or sequestrations swamp the human emissions.
UPDATE Inserted: E.M.Smith covered this point well in 2009
“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?”
Chiefio also found some interesting quotes pointing out that corn (a C4 plant) absorbs more C13, and our mass fields of corn might just muck up the stats… (it’s a good post).
The sources of CO2 don’t seem to be industrialized areas
Suspiciously, when satellites record atmospheric CO2 levels around the globe they find that the sources don’t appear to be concentrated in the places we’d expect - industry or population concentrations like western Europe, the Ohio Valley, or China. Instead the sources appear to be in places like the Amazon Basin, southeast Asia, and tropical Africa - not so much the places with large human emissions of CO2!
But CO2 is a well mixed gas so it’s not possible to definitively sort out the sources or sinks with CO2 measurements around the globe. The differences are only of the order of 5%.
Instead the way to unravel the puzzle is to look at the one long recording we have (at Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, going back to 1959) and graph the changes in CO2 and in C13 from year to year. Some years from January to January there may be a rise of 0 ppmv (ie no change), some years up to 3 ppmv. If those changes were due to man-made CO2 then we should see more of those rapid increases in recent times as man-made emissions increased faster.
What Salby found though, was nothing like what was expected
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.
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.
A book will be released later this year: Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate.
“...In Fig. 5 we see that the yearly-average CO2 increase at Mauna Loa ends up being anywhere from 0% of the human source, to 130%. It seems to me that this is proof that natural net flux imbalances are at least as big as the human source. [Roy Spencer]
“… the human source represents only 3% (or less) the size of the natural fluxes in and out of the surface. This means that we would need to know the natural upward and downward fluxes to much better than 3% to say that humans are responsible for the current upward trend in atmospheric CO2. Are measurements of the global carbon fluxes much better than 3% in accuracy?? I doubt it.”
Tom Quirk in Australia has been asking these questions for years. Tom Quirk showed that while most man-made CO2 is released in the Northern Hemisphere, and the southern Hemisphere stations ought to take months to record the rises, instead there did not appear to be any lag… (ie. the major source of the CO2 is global rather than from human activity).
Over 95% of [man-made emissions of] CO2 has been released in the Northern Hemisphere…
“A tracer for CO2 transport from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere was provided by 14C created by nuclear weapons testing in the 1950’s and 1960’s.The analysis of 14C in atmospheric CO2 showed that it took some years for exchanges of CO2 between the hemispheres before the 14C was uniformly distributed…
“If 75% of CO2 from fossil fuel is emitted north of latitude 30 then some time lag might be expected due to the sharp year-to-year variations in the estimated amounts left in the atmosphere. A simple model, following the example of the 14Cdata with a one year mixing time, would suggest a delay of 6 months for CO2 changes in concentration in the Northern Hemisphere to appear in the Southern Hemisphere.
“A correlation plot of …year on year differences of monthly measurements at Mauna Loa against those at the South Pole [shows]… the time difference is positive when the South Pole data leads the Mauna Loa data. Any negative bias (asymmetry in the plot) would indicate a delayed arrival of CO2 in the Southern Hemisphere.
“There does not appear to be any time difference between the hemispheres. This suggests that the annual increases [in atmospheric carbon dioxide] may be coming from a global or equatorial source.”
Tom has done a lot of work on this:
The constancy of seasonal variations in CO2 and the lack of time delays between the hemispheres suggest that fossil fuel derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted. This implies that natural variability of the climate is the prime cause of increasing CO2, not the emissions of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.
‘Sources and Sinks of Carbon Dioxide’, by Tom Quirk, Energy and Environment, Volume 20, pages 103-119.
More info from Tom Quirk: SOURCES AND SINKS OF CARBON DIOXIDE [17 page PDF]
But what about the ice cores?
The Vostok ice core record suggests CO2 levels have not been this high in the last 800,000 years, but if Salby is right, and temperature controls CO2, then CO2 levels ought to have been higher say, 130,000 years ago when the world was 2 - 4 degrees warmer than it is now.
Salby questions the ice core proxy and points out that in the ice cores, as temperature rises, C13 falls, much as it has been in the last 50 years. If it was also responding that way hundreds of thousands of years ago, then the C13 to C12 ratio can hardly be called a fingerprint of human emissions.
On the nature of science
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.
After speaking in carefully selected phrases, he finished 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.” I guess he’s also giving them an out.
Prof Murry Salby has worked at leading research institutions, including the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado, and is the author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, and Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, due out in 2011. [Thanks to Andrew Bolt]
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow, Weatherbell co-chief Meteorologist
This is August and the east coast season peaks in September with activity in October. August systems often provide just a hint at what is to follow. This year after the winter record cold and snows, spring heavy rains and record flood and tornadoes, a 60 to 100 year drought in Texas and nearby areas. A year without a summer in the Northwest and brutal heat in the south central and at times most other areas of the central and east. Now comes the hurricane season. La Ninas often do far more damage from El Ninos. This was a super La Nina, the second strongest in history (either behind 1917/18 if you use the atmospheric measure, 1955/56 if you use the Multivariate ENSO Index of NOAA CDC Klaus Wolter).
We have already had 5 named storms...nothing significant. But the season really doesn’t kick in most years until mid August. NWS NHC has upgraded their forecast for the hurricane season. Here is the normal hurricane tracks from August to October.
The warm Atlantic and cold Pacific usually mean an east coast landfall. The analogs and model forecasts suggests the trough which has been off the east coast moves inland far enough to threaten trouble for the east coast. These troughs amplify than lift out leaving a weakness a storm in the waters off the east coast can penetrate. The Carolinas and the coast further north including New Jersey and New York are vulnerable. This region is is overdue. This summer was a lot like the 1954 and 1955 summers.
It was estimated to be a category 3 or even 4 when it brushed New Jersey before making landfall on New York CIty 1930 UTC on September 3. This makes it the only major hurricane to directly hit the city since 1800. The late great weather historian David Ludlum summarized it below and enlarged PDF here.
The hurricane produced a storm surge of 13 feet (4 m) in only one hour at Battery Park. Manhattan Island was completely flooded to Canal Street. The flooding would have been much worse, had the hurricane not struck at low tide However, few deaths were reported in the city, since the flooding affected neighborhoods much less populated than today. Strong waves and winds blew many ships ashore along Long Island. One ship sank, killing 17 people.
Please come to WeatherBell and see the daily posts that Joe Bastardi and I provide all through the hurricane and winter seasons ahead. If you have energy, agriculture or retail interests, we provide special services to those markets.
Scientific misconduct almost certainly demonstrable
You may have forgotten about it but one of the early stimuli that energized the recent wave of hysteria about the so-called “global warming” was a claimed observation of four dead polar bears floating on the sea after a thunderstorm in September 2004 - exactly when TRF was getting started.
The main relevant articles ultimately appeared in 2005 and 2006:
Potential effects of diminished sea ice on open-water swimming, mortality, and distribution of polar bears during fall in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea (2005)
Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea (2006)
The authors of the 2006 article, Charles Monnett (lead author of both articles) and Jeffrey S. Gleason, have de facto claimed that 5/6 of a group of polar bears died in a 16-year period and it’s surely due to global warming and it’s gonna get worse.
As the media - see e.g. AP and CBS news - just figured out, Charles Monnett, employed by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy, Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, was put on leave until the verdict about the investigation of his “integrity issues”. Obama administration officials are behind the investigation: they confiscated Monnett’s hard drives and notebooks, among other possible proofs. Gleason, the second author in both papers, has told the investigators that none of the polar bears in either article had anything real to do with global warming (and they haven’t even mentioned the term global warming) and Monnett has added this spin to his interpretations (which has surely sweetened his life until 2011, I add).
Polar bears have developed modern techniques to adapt to global warming.
As you may determine if you study some literature, Charles Monnett is the world’s main scientist behind the idea that polar bears are increasingly drowning because of global warming - something that added a couple of scenes to Al Gore’s movie (which was a part of the investigation as well), too. Until these days, he de facto controlled the U.S. Arctic Wildlife research and decided about $50 million of its funding (see the AP report).
Arctic sea ice as of yesterday, via The Cryosphere Today. It’s Summer and the ice is receding, reaching the minimum in mid September. Some polar bears may have chosen the pack ice for the Summer which makes it impossible - as the gap has grown - to reach e.g. North Asia. If they got stuck on a shrinking area of pack ice near the pole and if the sea ice went to zero, they would be in trouble but be sure it won’t happen in 2011.
He was told the charges. They are related to his polar bear research and chances are 50-50 that they can either demonstrate that this whole research has been fraudulent or the same thing holds for the “climate change” interpretations of it. See Where are all the drowning polar bears? at World Climate Report (2008) for more details why Monnett’s results never looked right.
It seems increasingly likely that the research backing the global warming doctrine is corrupt at every conceivable level. We can’t know what the final verdict of the investigation will be - but I am pleasantly surprised that the Obama administration dares to investigate at all when the target is a top doomsday-believing would-be defender of a climatic holy cow, I mean the holy polar bear.
Just a trivial point: many people, including myself, tended to think in the past that the polar bears live near the North Pole where the ice has been diminishing in recent 3 decades (and doing many other things before that) which would clearly affect them. If you have these tendencies, you should check the map of their habitat. Of course that the normal range is on the firm land, near the Arctic Circle, far enough from the pole, and the experienced animals probably know damn well that the pack ice and especially open sea increase the likelihood of drowning. Right now in the Summer, when the ice is still receding, they’re probably careful not to get too far from the land. (The minimum ice is achieved around mid September.)
Five days ago, media highlighted the observations that polar bears may swim up to 700 km without a pause.
For many reasons, I don’t really think that the polar bears are endangered or threatened. But if they were, I would be a support of actions to save them and my guess is that it couldn’t cost more than a billion of dollars (a fancy Mercedes for each polar bear would cost just about that). At any rate, it’s preposterous to use polar bears as an argument in the attempts to reduce the integrated GDP by trillions of dollars.
Note: Despite the story that follows, the modellers are still pushing for bigger, faster computers to predict cloimate on a smaller scale.
Source: C3 Headlines
Read here. Kevin Trenberth, like so many of his IPCC AGW - comrades recently, is finally admitting there exists many shortcomings and failures in the global warming “consensus” science. In Trenberth’s case, he body slams the climate models, which all the alarmist catastrophic predictions are based on.
Specifically, Trenberth takes issue with the climate models’ inadequacies in regards to precipitation. Such as:
“…all models contain large errors in precipitation simulations, both in terms of mean fields and their annual cycle, as well as their characteristics: the intensity, frequency, and duration of precipitation…”
“…relates to poor depiction of transient tropical disturbances, including easterly waves, Madden-Julian Oscillations, tropical storms, and hurricanes…”
“…confidence in model results for changes in extremes is tempered by the large scatter among the extremes in modeling today’s climate, especially in the tropics and subtropics…”
“…it appears that many, perhaps all, global climate and numerical weather prediction models and even many high-resolution regional models have a premature onset of convection and overly frequent precipitation with insufficient intensity,…”
“…model-simulated precipitation “occurs prematurely and too often, and with insufficient intensity, resulting in recycling that is too large…”
“…a lifetime of moisture in the atmosphere that is too short, which affects runoff and soil moisture…”
and finally, he has a NSS moment…"major challenges remain to improve model simulations of the hydrological cycle.”
Sooo, climates models can’t do precipitation (rain/snow/hail). That’s not much of a surprise to skeptics, plus it is widely known throughout the scientific world that climate models are also unable to do: water vapor, wind, clouds, ocean oscillations, atmospheric oscillations, ocean currents, polar ice sheets, positive feedback, negative feedback, climate sensitivity, aerosol impacts, submerged volcano impacts, solar/cosmic impacts, monsoons/hurricanes/typhoons, ocean heat, missing heat, missing CO2, minimum surface temperatures, maximum surface temperatures, regional warming/cooling, and of course, global warming, which is Trenberth’s personal brass ring travesty.
Clearly, the climate models themselves are travesties, which the IPCC’s lead dogs are finally starting to turn on. Although Trenberth shows some courage in publicly admitting a major (billions of dollars) climate science failure, he will likely resort to his true self in the near future to make amends to the green radical fringe.
The Australian press have done better (from their perspective) than last time at ignoring, or minimizing, Monckton’s press coverage.
That said, he has still got quite a lot of cover, and the debate appearance (which he won by the length of the straight) at the Press Club was priceless publicity for the cause. See:
Followed by Vaclav Klaus’appearance at the same venue yesterday, in which he completely wiped the floor with every reason that is given for Australia introducing a CO2 tax. From their body language and lame questions, it is clear that most in the audience were absolutely stunned and had no idea how to handle such a head-on, but beautifully low key, dismissal of their much-loved AGW shibboleth.
Priceless, but, of course, scarcely mentioned in the mainstream press.
Everyone should buy and read Vaclav Klaus’s book Blue Planet in Green Shackles. I was pleased to meet this courageous world leader in New York City and get a signed copy of his book. He gave a very moving address - go to the Heartland wesbite and look up ICCC I and watch for yourself.
Over the centuries, mankind has experienced tremendous rainfalls and massive floods, monster hurricanes and typhoons, destructive tornadoes, parched-earth droughts, strong gales, flash floods, great snowfalls and killer blizzards, lightning storms sent down from the heavens, blind dense fogs, freezing rain, sleet, great hail, and bone-chilling cold and even an occasional mudstorm or two and in-between, periods of warm sunshine and tranquility.
And we are still here. We are perhaps a little battered and bruised from the wear. But there is nothing new in the weather to fear because we have been there before. We have learned to cope. We have developed knowledge, skills and tools to reduce the effects of weather extremes.
Today, every time a heat wave or a great flood occurs (such as those in Russia and Pakistan this year), voices arise claiming this is more proof of man-made global warming. I wonder to myself if these voices are intentionally ignorant of historical weather extremes or just dishonest.
Early meteorologist and historians have documented weather for many centuries. Recently, I have compiled several of these accounts into “A Chronological Listing of Early Weather Events” and published this document on the Impact website.
This chronology covers the years 0 to 1900 A.D. (When downloading the file, please be a little patient. This is a master resource and the 6.5 MB file may take a few minutes to access.)
Why is a chronological listing of weather events of value? If one wishes to peer into the future, then a firm grasp of the past events is a key to that gateway. This is intrinsically true for the scientific underpinnings of weather and climate.
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A fascinating chronology that believes the Gorian, enviro and media claims that recent extremes are unprecedented. Even the Little Ice Age had brutal summer heat waves like we saw last year in Russia or this year in Texas. See many examples of brutal winters like the last 4 followed by significant floods, drought and heat waves in summer causing major crop and livestock issues and famine.
