I have no intention of trying to change your mind on this. But I will state that shifting from being an Anglican to a Baptist is not a shift from one failed theory to a better one. So it goes with “economics”. I am happy to stick with my views until proven otherwise. I speak as someone who worked on the inside as a high cardinal. I talked the talk well, and it all made perfect sense to the Board and the staff and the Banks. It’s all mirrors and a pea and shell game. It’s a game not a science.
HadCRUT has now posted for April with the global anomaly +0.926ºC which is equal 4th highest anomaly on record behind 1st- March, 2nd- Feb, 3rd- Dec 2015. The El Nino of 1998 showed a similar (but single month) peak temperature in the early part of 1998 but then a slow rise for the following months to a second lower peak in July 1998. This is all pretty much as per GISTEMP & NOAA. Comparing recent months with 1997/98, the temperature rise since 1997/98 is averaging at 0.39ºC (GISTEMP 0.5ºC, NOAA 0.43ºC) The HadCRUT rise would yield a warming rate of 0.217ºC/decade if attributed to AGW, a rise a little less than those seen in GISTEMP & NOAA.
……….1997/98 … 2015/16
Dec … +0.505ºC … +1.01ºC
Jan … +0.483ºC … +0.908ºC
Feb … +0.763ºC … +1.061ºC
Mar … +0.558ºC … +1.063ºC
Apr … +0.636ºC … +0.926ºC
May … +0.573ºC
Jun … +0.592ºC
Jul … +0.672ºC
Aug … +0.603ºC
Thomassays
370 Killian says: “Funny…. I predicted the 2008 crash. Did you? Well, to be fair, I understood the analysis of those who did and warned those around me.” iow you merely relied on other authorities who knew far more than you did. Besides the crash was in 2007, held together with band aids in a desperate attempt to get through 2008 election before it really hit the fan. Did you also ‘predict’ the demise of Gov Spitzer and why he was busted? I did. Given ego and “successes” are so important to you Killian, did you know I predicted the 2007 crash in 2003 and just sat back watching it unfold? I deserve a jelly bean at least. :-)
More than that I wonder have you (or your advisers) also predicted the even bigger 2017 global economic crisis and financial system breakdown followed by the collapse of the EU in 2018 and NATO shortly thereafter? There’s a lot happening and for most it will be a surprise. Meanwhile how about chilling out a little because it’s counterproductive to create unnecessary agro over minutia with people who are essentially on the same team. Peace out! :-)
Highest-ever daily average CO2 at MLO: 409.44 ppm on April 9, 2016 (Scripps)
2nd highest daily average CO2 at MLO: 409.39 ppm on April 8, 2016 (Scripps)
Highest daily peak CO2 recorded at MLO for 2015: 404.84 ppm on April 13, 2015 (Scripps)
Ooops, in the post above I`ve made an false assertion I hereby want to correct: Australian coal production did NOT double every 10 years; it rised lineary, NOT exponentially.
Sorry for that mistake.
Mike, I suggest you look at the primary sources for the CO2 info, not the bloggers who reprint numbers without the explanations that help make sense of them. You mentioned last month that you quit posting numbers for a few days when they didn’t increase, then started again when the numbers got larger again.
This is focusing on the noise, the natural variation. It’s the “escalator”
Seriously — think of new readers and younger readers coming here for the first time who need to understand what’s going on.
It’s no favor to them to post only the numbers going up, ignore the numbers going down, and lose a lot of information about the world.
The source sites for CO2 measurements all have explanations of how the numbers are collected — and how they’re corrected for known problems over the following days and weeks.
They also explain how much of the up and down is natural, and why it’s ‘noise’ in doing the statistics.
Tamino’s very good on how to understand trends.
Just saying — seriously — that you should look up the escalator and understand how it’s misused to focus attention on short term changes.
Learning is hard. Learning from primary sources is possible.
There are lots of secondary sources out there that lose too much information.
You’re a third or fourth hand source by the time you repost from their sites.
Add some links to the primary sources and explanations — please?
Pay your AGU dues, folks, and get the publications.
More science, less belief and opinion — couldn’t hurt the discussions.
The “Bickersons and Lockhorns meet for dinner and drinks” byplay is entertaining …. not much.
Two this week of interest at least to me.
One each for those of the “no problem” and the “apocalypse already” persuasions (sigh)
____________________________________
No significant increase in long-term CH4 emissions on North Slope of Alaska despite significant increase in air temperature
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069292
Abstract
Continuous measurements of atmospheric methane (CH4) mole fractions measured by NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network in Barrow, AK (BRW) …. Twenty-nine years of measurements show little change in seasonal mean land-sector CH4 enhancements, despite an increase in annual mean temperatures of 1.2 ± 0.8 °C/decade (2σ). … The lack of significant long-term trends suggests more complex biogeochemical processes are counteracting the observed short-term (monthly) temperature sensitivity of 5.0 ± 3.6 ppb CH4/°C. Our results suggest that even the observed short-term temperature sensitivity from the Arctic will have little impact on the global atmospheric CH4 budget in the long-term if future trajectories evolve with the same temperature sensitivity.
—————————
Revealing the early ice flow patterns with historical Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs back to 1960s
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL068990View/save citation
Abstract
The reconnaissance ARGON satellites collected the earliest images of Antarctica from space dating back to the 1960s …. This allowed us to extend the ice velocity records of Larsen Ice Shelf back into 1960s ~ 1970s for the first time. The retrospective analysis revealed that acceleration of the collapsed Larsen B occurred much earlier than previously thought.
Ice flow dynamics and mass loss of Totten Glacier, East Antarctica from 1989 to 2015
Xin Li, Eric Rignot, Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl
Accepted manuscript online: 30 MAY 2016
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069173
First compilation of 26‐year ice discharge to quantify the impact of ice dynamics on Totten Glacier.
Ice dynamics has changed significantly over the last decade and contributed to glacier mass loss.
Totten Glacier may be more sensitive to ocean temperature than previously thought.
——
Oops.
Racetrack Playasays
Here’s something recent and comprehensive from the USGS on northern hemisphere wildfires and permafrost melting as sources of atmospheric CO2 increases:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1826/pp1826.pdf
“Baseline and Projected Future Carbon Storage and Greenhouse-Gas Fluxes in Ecosystems of Alaska”
USGS Zhu & McGuire, Eds, 2016
“. . . these increases in temperature may expose the substantial stores of carbon in the region to loss from more wild re and permafrost thaw, which could turn the ecosystems of Alaska into a net carbon source. Therefore, the assessment of Alaska ecosystem carbon stocks and uxes as well as methane fluxes, as reported here, was conducted to better understand the baseline and projected carbon distributions and potential responses to a rapidly changing environment.”
It points to Alaskan forests becoming net emitters of stored carbon dioxide to the atmosphere due to the steady increase in wildfires, well about the forest regrowth rate. It’s not just the forests; Alaskan permafrost melting is also driving carbon dioxide and methane emissions from very old reservoirs of permafrost carbon, also from the USGS (2015):
“. . .Here we overcome complex interactions among surface and subsurface conditions to map near-surface permafrost through decision and regression tree approaches that statistically and spatially extend field observations using remotely sensed imagery, climatic data, and thematic maps of a wide range of surface and subsurface biophysical characteristics. . . .Taken together, these results have obvious implications for potential remobilization of frozen soil carbon pools under warmer temperatures. Additionally, warmer and drier conditions may increase fire activity and severity, which may exacerbate rates of permafrost thaw and carbon remobilization relative to climate alone.”
There’s no going back now – better start those infrastructure projects to deal with floods, droughts, rising sea levels while we still have time.
Alastair B. McDonaldsays
The following got posted in the “Comparing models to satellite data” comments. Since my relevant posts there are receiving little attention, this irrelevant post is doomed to go unanswered. So I have copied here. Any answers?
====================================
Questions:
1) If we are seeing the transition from what has been a strong el nino cycle back to a la nina by the end of the summer would it not be anticipated that in the short term the observational record will not be expected to catch up to modelled projections?
2) What ever happened to Michael Mann’s theory that the relative frequency of la nina to el ino events could itself be a feedback mechanism?
3) In regards to the suggestion prior by MM to converge on the most accurate models and the subsequent discussion of using a rational approach based on physical principals: (1) Is hindcasting not already a part of model creation in ways that lets statistical success drive forward projections? (2) should we not have models that are exclusively focused on projecting global temperature even if they poorly with other parameters? (3) What is a reasonable time period to let the effects of stochastic noise even out? Gavin previously claimed that a 20 year time period would likely suffice. I understand the argument that if you started 10 earths at the same time there would be significant variability in short term and even long term trajectories. However, if you added carbon dioxide to their atmospheres at the same rate to all 10 earths you would expect to be able to predict a range of possibilities that all 10 would fall within over a 20 yr period, particularly when the known natural “stochastic” variabilities happened historically over 10 year periods would you not? It seams to me to be a larger problem when the observations go out of the range of projections than when they do not correlate well to the mean.
4) Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies? that would be the empirical approach given that carbon dioxide levels are continuously going up without any rational belief that this will change in the next 20 years.
The daily CO2 number is noisy. I mention that very often. The monthly average is less noisy. The comparison from one year to next allows a person to see the annual up and down cycle of CO2 cycle.
I enjoy reading a lot of what you post, Hank, and I am not inclined to get in a hissing and spitting match with you about what I post. The numbers are what the numbers are. They are very bad news. Anyone who does not understand that it missing something very fundamental and important about AGW. If people read the numbers and get worried, they need to read more and educate themselves about these very important numbers. The CO2 ppm level is the ballgame. If it goes up, we get more heat. The number does go up and down on an annual cycle. A person can grasp that if they try. The more critical number is the rate of increase. The current rate of increase, in the 3 ppm plus range is new. A month where we are seeing an average increase over 4 ppm over the same month last year is new. That has not happened in the time that our species has been on the planet. We should be worried about that.
Cheers,
Mike
Thomassays
6 Barton Paul Levenson says: And you’re an ignoramus, not a scientist.
Oh really? How nice. How clever. How mature of you to say so.
RP at 11: I read the Guardian coverage of this USGS article abt boreal forest fires. The USGA spokesperson was quoted thusly:
Northern wildfires must now be recognised as a significant driver of climate change – and not just a side-effect, according to the report from the US Geological Survey.
“This is one of the surprises that we haven’t talked about much,” said Virginia Burkett, chief climate scientist at the USGS. “It has tremendous implications for the carbon that is locked up in Alaska soils and vegetation.”
It’s possible that Burkett is misquoted, but if not, I am not sure why Ms. Burkett is posing the fires and net positive emissions of the boreal forest on a warming planet as a surprise. Boreal forest fires have been understood as a AGW tipping point event for many years.
It’s weird to read scientists talking about these “surprises.” Hey, CO2 and CH4 emissions from thawing permafrost, loss of sea ice, etc. are likely to increase as AGW continues. Forest fires, loss of forest vitality to AGW, changes in rainfall patterns, increases in the bugs that can devastate forests, etc. – these are all on the radar. I don’t think folks should talk about them as surprises. Lots of us have been talking about the various tipping points for years. The time frame, the escalation of these tipping points, the accumulation of tipping points toppling like dominoes into runaway global warming is very hard (impossible?) to calculate. These things are simply the known bad possibilities that are out there.
As the rate of increase in CO2 ppm ramps up, we will be able to nail down the timing of the various tipping points, the bad possibilities, in the rear view mirror. I am no fan of geo-engineering, but I think direct air capture and sequestration is going to increasingly in the news as CO2 ppm continues to ramp up. We cannot allow the CO2 ppm to just continue to cruise upward unless think the extinction event is going to be a good time.
But, hey, what do I know?
Warm regards
Mike
Edward Greischsays
12 Alastair B. McDonald: 4. Your question on mitigation: Is off-topic. I would discuss it elsewhere, but only without the same group.
Thomassays
14 mike: Yes I agree “tipping points” should not be a surprise to working climate scientists and ecologists. As the observations continue unfolding later backed up with detailed science studies, papers and articles by the experts in the field there are many tipping points looming now that were not ‘forecast’ to occur for decades ahead. The GBR acidity effects and bleaching events, plus the arctic sea ice extent being only three of many. The unprecedented jump in annual CO2 ppm rise in both nth and sth hemispheres is another ‘canary in the mine’.
Some people have noted the disconnect between the CO2 rise and the compiled/estimated figures for CO2 emissions by nations in recent years. Why anyone would have accepted the later as valid or accurate in the first place points to the constant problem that needs to be faced with much more honesty and awareness. imo.
Thomassays
12 Alastair B. McDonald says: “4) Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies?”
I think for 3 main reasons. First their energy and focus is still on understanding better the dynamics of the climate & AGW effects. Second that that work is partly intended to prove to governments & society that AGW really is real, dangerous, and requires primary attention now, and then thirdly because ‘mitigation strategies’ is outside their “en mass” areas of expertise.
Mitigation is a broad ranging social & political / nation state issue and not a core climate science component. well imo, given what I have seen in recent years (denial hijacking power plays etc) and know about life on earth in general.
When the political class gets real then more scientists of various fields will become more engaged and funded to do the detailed studies research analysis into mitigation specifically. Sure I wish it was already happening “en mass” now too.
Thomassays
7 Hank Roberts says: “Think of the children ….”
Yes a good idea. When I think of the children I wonder how Hank could get access to new APP that automatically distributes the first rate science papers and essays he finds, provides the original web links as well as a short summary note as why this APP note is important to AGW/CC today.
A user friendly APP that then automatically intersects other directly relevant studies, science lectures and so on on youtube or the web which again provides the children with short summary notes … things they cna then easily share on Facebook and other APPs at the touch of an icon.
Without anyone ever needing to know that RC exists or having to come here and scroll though thousands of pages of artciles and posts on the forum.
When I think of the children I imagine a computer game approach that takes the essence of climate science and builds up to higher levels of knowledge and challenges like every other computer game does .. and that being distributed free as another APP equivalent to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Mobile Strike” Game without all the blood and guts and extra charges or using our children as ‘profit centers’.
So yeah i agree 100%, think of the children, and the teens and the young adults of today and ponder why they never come to RC to learn about AGW/CC or to get the hard facts form the “horses mouth”.
Thomassays
“Start with the impossible. It will expand your idea of what is possible.”
What is artistic activism? “There is an art to every practice, activism included,” explains Stephen Duncombe. “It’s what distinguishes the innovative from the routine, the elegant from the mundane.” The “art of activism” requires art, that is: applying an artistic aesthetic and method to activist tactics, strategy, and organization.
Chuck Hughessays
So I have a question…
I was told, at another “science” blog that I will not mention at this time, that this paper and it’s findings are “pseudo science” and somehow promoting the use of fossil fuel. I won’t quote this person word for word but that was the gist of their assessment.
I read the paper carefully and I’m not a scientist of course but I did look up the sources and authors and it all looked credible to me. Does anyone know if the findings in this paper would qualify as “pseudo science” or if the source or sources are in any way connected to the fossil fuel industry or maybe helping to promote the use of fossil fuel. And, is the information contained in the paper correct? If anyone can help me out on this I would greatly appreciate it.
UAH has been posted for May at +0.55ºC, the 8th highest anomaly on record. Both UAH & RSS show the temperatures during this 2015/16 El Nino event peaking strongly this January and now falling, a fall that is continued by this latest month’s UAH data. The fall began earlier than its 1997/98 equivalent and for the second month the 2016 UAH data sits below that of 1998. The sharper peak of this 2015/16 El Nino is suggestive of a weaker event. The rate of fall back towards non-El-Nino conditions may be worth monitoring.
……….1997/99 … 2015/16
Dec … +0.250ºC … +0.450ºC
Jan … +0.479ºC … +0.540ºC
Feb … +0.653ºC … +0.832ºC
Mar … +0.475ºC … +0.734ºC
Apr … +0.743ºC … +0.715ºC
May … +0.643ºC … +0.55ºC
Jun … +0.575ºC
Jul … +0.511ºC
Aug … +0.516ºC
Sep … +0.441ºC
Oct … +0.403ºC
Nov … +0.123ºC
Dec … +0.246ºC
Jan … +0.060ºC
Feb … +0.166ºC
Mar … -0.081ºC
Apr … +0.009ºC
May … -0.037ºC
Jun … -0.154ºC
Vendicar Decariansays
UAH (for what it’s worth) is reporting for May….
0.55’C
Which is essentially identical to the Jan. 2016 temp.
Thomas, you and BPL are peas in a pod, so far. Complex sentences, sure, but not saying much. Hypocrisy never helps and I certainly didn’t call you out first.
You seem to understand econ isn’t what it what like to think, but you also have not said what it is, so who knows whether you belong in the Peanut Gallery. Some belong in threads *and* the gallery.
We’ll see.
As for any coming crash, I was hearing summer this year, but talk has cooled. Mixed, perhaps. Such things are becoming less important, and are never interesting these days. Bigger fish…
Simplification is the only option, so if more crashes help or force that, then good.
“I am not sure why Ms. Burkett is posing the fires and net positive emissions of the boreal forest on a warming planet as a surprise.”
Well, I’m not sure, either, Mike. But remember that the context in which the question was posed can never be identical to the context in which it is reported–meaning that the answer may have been intended to address a more specific part of the general topic. (Ie., the ‘surprise’ is a narrower portion of the whole than appears as quoted.)
And sometimes, alternately, I suspect that some so-called ‘climate scientists’ may have more of a ‘silo view’ than thee or me; that is, they know their specialty inside and out, up and down, backwards and–well, you get the idea–but may not be so conversant with other aspects of the beast. It’s a darn big interdisciplinary topic, after all.
I can’t imagine why. I don’t see anything particularly new in it, it reminds me of Catton’s _Overshoot_ and many papers on the same subject. It just uses a different analogy to describe what Catton calls detritovores overshooting carrying capacity.
Fresh words, familiar concept, no way it supports burning more fossil fuel faster.
Generally, all. The tone here has got pretty nasty. Seems we are mostly on the same side. Can we focus on science questions and answers? Less mud-slinging?
#12 – I would have said that the main reason the climate science community doesn’t focus on mitigation is that it isn’t their area of expertise. But these days I’m more convinced than ever that masses more climate science needs to be done. Change is happening now. We don’t understand well the impacts this change will have on human society (over all sorts of timescales). There is a challenge for engineers, economists, politicians etc. to reduce GHG emissions (which as Edward so rightly points out at #14 is off topic for RealClimate).
It seems to me that there’s a huge challenge for climate scientists to work to improve regional climate predictions, and alongside that, working with a vast range of other scientists (from soil scientists all the way through to people who understand migration patterns) to build an increasingly sophisticated picture of climate impacts, to give politicians information they can use to react to/prepare for the impacts.
It seems to me that we (that is the policy, rather than the science, community) woefully underestimate the potential impacts of climate change on people, woefully underestimate the rate of change, and don’t really have the first idea about what we should be preparing for.
This is hard stuff, as it’s about stitching together many many different strands of expertise.
(No criticism of existing science work in this area is implied!)
WARNING: young children, people with pacemakers or impaired immune systems should not read this post. (sorry, Hank, could not help myself)
Daily CO2
June 1, 2016: 407.08 ppm
June 1, 2015: 403.12 ppm (3.96 ppm increase in noisy daily number)
April CO2
April 2016: 407.57 ppm
April 2015: 403.45 ppm (4.12 ppm increase in less noisy monthly number)
May monthly is not posted yet at co2.earth. I expect it to come in around 4 ppm increase based on what I am seeing. It’s about trends, rates of increase, etc. even though a headline daily number of 410 ppm or above would cause folks to sit up and take notice again.
I think we are down from the high number of 409 plus for the rest of the year as vegetation growth draw-down starts to overcome the early soil warming emissions. I am continuing to watch anyway because if the monthly average does not stay down in current 407 range it would suggest to me that we are seeing significant new sources of atmospheric CO2. That would be stuff like emissions from thawing permafrost, drying/warming peat deposits, etc. I can’t get a handle on the pulse of CO2 that arises with a large forest fire like Fort McMurray. I think this single fire is significant at about 10% of Canada’s annual emissions, but if we are lucky and rainfall patterns allow, we can expect a lot of new growth in the burned over areas (in the next decade or two) to cycle CO2 back out of the atmosphere and into foliage. This does not happen as much if the FF emissions contain a lot of deep soil burn emissions. Plus, the FF emissions are a mix of ghg, not all CO2, but most will degrade to CO2, so the pulse could take a while to see by looking primarily at CO2, as I do.
Still, the levels last week were a bit higher, maybe by a part per million or two, than I would have projected even taking El Niño into account. I’m frankly not sure what is causing this, but I would not expect it reflects anything other than an unusual blob of air that temporarily settled over the central Pacific. It is clear that other sites around the world where CO2 is meansured are showing the El Niño boost, but I haven’t consulted the most recent data to see if they show anything special over the last few weeks. The bump last week was seen on both the NOAA and Scripps analyzers at Mauna Loa.”
I think the “unusual blob of air” story does not hold water. But, hey, what do I know?
I would love to be wrong about the import of these CO2 numbers and trends.
(agree with Kevin at 26 about the USGS surprise quote, press coverage is not peer-reviewed as far as I can tell)
Warm regards,
Mike
(and yes, I think it’s funny to question the water retention capacity of “unusual blobs of air” as in Pee Wee Herman quote: I meant to do that)
Dan DaSilvasays
12 Alastair B. McDonald says: “4) Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies?”
Good question, the science is of course settled. The more it is studied the more deniers will find to attack. Look at how the deniers attacked Dr. Mann’s “Hockey Stick”. It was one of the most outstanding studies in history of climate science but it was attacked without merit. If these considerable talents went to mitigation and stopping to climate studies the earth would be in a better place support future life.
AmateurSciencesays
From Alaska News reported on InsideClimateNews: “Melting Alaska may not accelerate climate change as expected, scientists now say. My sense is this is counter to observations in other recent reports”; is this a case of less, but still a huge amount? Would be interested in Gavin’s take.
“The results of new research released by the U.S. Geological Survey have surprised scientists: Alaska is not likely to emit as much carbon this century as they’d previously expected.
The report marks the first statewide inventory of natural sources of carbon emissions and carbon storage. The research has been in the works since 2012, as part of a nationwide effort by USGS to examine carbon storage.
In recent years, scientists have sounded the alarm on the climate change implications of Alaska’s melting permafrost, the frozen layer of soil and rock that covers from one-third to two-thirds of the state. As it melts — far faster than once expected — it releases methane, which is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. And thus, climate change in the Arctic begets more climate change.
But the new peer-reviewed government report released Wednesday found that may not be the case, at least through the year 2100.”
Alastair B. McDonald @12.
You appreciate that as this is an open thread, it does not exclude comment solely because it would still be on-topic on another thread, and would surely be proper in this case where that on-topic thread is moribund. Thus re-posting your own unanswered enquiry here would have been more appropriate than re-posting somebody else’s post.
I did read your poster and I have to say that the idea that CO2 is saturated is your point of fundamental divergence from the science. I’m no expert on the literature but I’m entirely sure that the findings of Very & Angström (1901) have not been overlooked by today’s climatology but that the 1901 paper has long since been shown to be flawed. Do note Mlynczak et al (2016) ‘The spectroscopic foundation of radiative forcing of climate by carbon dioxide’ that featured in May’s open thread.
MAR at 22: why are you posting the 1997 to 1999 number to compare with the 2015 to 2016 number? Why not post 1997 to 1998 or 1998 to 1999? I am sorting apples and oranges in the data. Thanks for posting this stuff. I learn from reading what you have to say.
If 2015 El Nino turns out to be a weaker event (as seems likely) and the 2016 peak temp differential is still significantly higher, then I think we are just seeing amplification of temp rise as AGW and El Nino interact in the current time frame. Or we are seeing significant ramp up of AGW global temp that was overdue for some reason (hiatus factors).
I definitely agree with you that watching the rate of fallback is interesting.
Cheers,
Mike
SecularAnimistsays
Alastair B. McDonald asked: “Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies?”
For the same reason that mitigation strategies are off-topic for this site — they are outside the expertise of climate scientists.
Scientists in other fields with expertise relevant to eliminating GHG emissions are of course doing plenty of work on mitigation strategies.
And there are plenty of websites where you can follow that work and even interact with those scientists, much as people can interact with climate scientists here.
Professor Bartlett has given his celebrated one-hour lecture, “Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101” over 1,742 times times to audiences with an average attendance of 80 in the United States and world-wide. His audiences have ranged from junior high school and college students to corporate executives and scientists, and to congressional staffs. He first gave the talk in September, 1969, and subsequently has presented it an average of once every 8.5 days for 36 years. His talk is based on his paper, “Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis,” originally published in the American Journal of Physics, and revised in the Journal of Geological Education.
Professor Al Bartlett began his one-hour talk with the statement, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” ….
Nemesissays
Economy is at the very heart of our complex, interdisciplinary problem. Modern economy is a great deal of Hokus Pokus, it is modern magick. Look at a dollar bill:
” In god we trust.”
Written on a colored piece of paper. It is a piece of magick. You can buy things with it, you give some colored pieces of paper and you get a car or a house or bread or tanks. The next stage is virtual money. Now you have just numbers, virtual computer bits and bytes, NOTHING at all. But you still buy things with it. This money makes the world go round, like the saying goes. It makes more and more and ever more go round (Globalization), like at a carnival. The money business IS a magickal carnival. I don’t have to tell you about wall street and shit. These guys are interested in money only, they are no treehuggers for sure, they deal with trillions of dollars in a millionth of a second, they are not interested in “saving the planet” and shit, but they make the world go round and the whole planet pays for that carnival, the whole planet dances to the music of dollars more and more. The economy is a musical chairs game and nobody will be left over:
This money machine will eat the whole planet, if nobody stops it.
Overview opinion? Short and Long term solutions to AGW/CC rest upon using / channeling the combined wisdom/power/knowledge of Climate sciences, tech R&D, economics & politics mixed with sound Business Principles and Advertising (aka mass psychology & beliefs) all together and despite the real shortcomings of each component! iow use the tools we already have that helped to cause the problem to fix the problem. No need to reinvent the wheel, yet.
The tsunami of climate science research and reports coming out now is the ‘EverReady Bunny’ driving everything else towards major reform.
eg Simply bring the maths of impending climate change disaster $costs into the matrix of today’s economic numbers and everything changes including a sea of red in Govt Budgets as far as the eye can see – this has already started but is not being applied by all openly yet. Even War has become uneconomical and unsustainable now!
The real driving power is of course collective human desire/passion to make the necessary changes toward a more equitable and sustainable future – we are not yet at the 100th Monkey but very close imo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
AGW/CC deniers (and global war-mongers) will be going the way of the dinosaurs soon enough (maybe 2020-2025?) which is why none of them or what they say worries me much. I haven’t lost faith in the good will and common sense of humanity.
Thomassays
Oh, I am using the 100th Monkey idea metaphorically and not scientifically. Good ideas eventually catch on and spread like wild fires. :-)
‘The Soda Creek Fire raged through 16,500 acres in the same area last summer, according to Alaska Dispatch News. It smoldered underground, survived the winter, and finally reignited on Sunday, spreading to an acre within an hour.’
‘Fire can burrow deep into the roots of old-growth trees, where it burns slowly, insulated by a thick, moisture-absorbing blanket of decomposing moss, leaves, and twigs on the forest floor. And once the ground freezes, the embers are sealed in, sometimes under feet of snow. Come spring, the ground warms up, the surrounding brush and trees dry out, and the fire can spring back to life.’
That will be having a nice impact on decomposition of calthrates in permafrost!
For several years I have been interested in climate feedbacks that have been missing from climate models (e.g. the CMIP5 models used in AR5). After asking climate scientists, I have been asking UK government how this effects the IPCC remaining carbon budgets.
the models used vary in what they include, and some feedbacks are absent as the understanding and modelling of these is not yet advanced enough to include. From those you raise, this applies to melting permafrost emissions, forest fires and wetlands decomposition.
and
DECC doesn’t estimate the remaining global carbon budget, however others such as the Global Carbon Project) have estimated updates to the IPCC’s budget, based on emissions since 2010.
I haven’t fought my way into what the Global Carbon Project says but does anyone here have any estimates that aren’t too difficult to follow. I mad a rough start with Carbon budget shock: 4 years remaining but with no reduction for missing feedbacks.
The remaining carbon budget for a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5˚C becomes
21 tonnes CO2 per person: 4 years to 1.5˚C
The remaining carbon budget for a 66% chance of avoiding 2.0˚C becomes…
85 tonnes CO2 per person: 16 years to 2.0˚C
Easimates based on average world emissions, without reduction for feedbacks.
Emissions in the rich part of the world are much higher that the average.
Are there any official estimates – anywhere?
dnemsays
@Chuck Hughes #21:
I was really disappointed by the discussion on “that other site” following your post. First of all the paper was published in PNAS, a solid, high impact journal. To dismiss a paper in that journal out of hand as “pseudo-science” seemed extreme to me. I found the basic premise that humanity has been “rapidly discharging a battery” trickle charged by solar energy over the millennia and stored as fossil fuels totally sound. I’ve since vetted the idea with several academics and generally get strong support for the idea. That said, I did find the authors’ statement “Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown” to be rather odd. It strikes me as untrue. Enough solar energy DOES reach the planet to completely meet human needs, regardless of how much standing biomass there is. In fact the amount of living biomass seems utterly irrelevant (apart from the obvious other impacts on the biosphere!) to the question of meeting humanity’s energy needs.
That’s why I took the discussion in a slightly different direction (for which I was pilloried). I accepted the point that we have this huge, industrialized human population that was built on the back of highly energy dense fossil fuels and now we have a big problem: how to transition society over to using a highly diffuse, distributed energy source (solar). Cost is not the biggest part of the problem in my mind. In fact, grid price parity for solar is all but irrelevant. Without it, we’ve got a bigger problem. But with it, we still have the same big barriers. Building out a huge renewable infrastructure will take lots and lots of fossil fuels and our carbon budget is all but shot. Lithium and rare earth supplies and geopolitical issues will loom large. Mining all the materials, moving them around and installing them all will take huge amounts of FFs and create all sorts of other environmental mayhem.
Saying these things out loud got me branded a FF apologist and co-conspriator. I hope we can overcome these issues but wishing they weren’t there doesn’t help anybody.
Scott Stroughsays
There is somewhere between 35 and 40 Gt CO2 emissions yearly worldwide. To draw down CO2, (decrease the stocks in the atmosphere) we must adjust the flows into and out of the atmosphere until we achieve a net negative flux.
There are approximately 5 Giga Hectares of land in the world currently being used to produce food for human populations. Agriculture has been proven to be capable of being an emissions source or a sequestration sink depending on the methods used. Currently right now agriculture is an emissions source.
Working backwards, for agriculture to offset emissions and achieve a net negative flux for atmospheric CO2 worldwide each hectare of agricultural land producing food would need to sequester long term into the soil over approximately 8 Gt CO2/year. 8t CO2/ha/year X 5 Gha = 40Gt CO2/year
There are numerous case studies showing a change in agricultural methods achieving 10, 15, 20 or more tonnes CO2e/ha/year increases in soil carbon by using various organic/permaculture/ecoagriculture methods. I have posted several on various other threads over the years. That’s more than enough.
My biggest gripe with the ipcc, climate scientists and even this site is the fact that the potential of changing agriculture as a mitigation strategy is completely either ignored, or underestimated. It is the blind spot in this whole thing that I have mentioned multiple times in these discussions and elsewhere on every climate science website I can find, and as of yet not once has been properly refuted. It is as if the subject is taboo. I am even taking an EDX course on climate science for the purpose of communicating these ideas better, getting my terminology correct etc.
I really wish someone would either tell me where my math is wrong, or tell me exactly why this is ignored. Is it the “too good to be true” effect? Or something else?
Chuck Hughessays
#17 – “Some people have noted the disconnect between the CO2 rise and the compiled/estimated figures for CO2 emissions by nations in recent years. Why anyone would have accepted the later as valid or accurate in the first place points to the constant problem that needs to be faced with much more honesty and awareness. imo.”
Comment by Thomas — 1 Jun 2016
I said something about this in an earlier thread; “if emissions are going ‘down’ then why are CO2 levels going ‘up’?” I still don’t get that. It’s a maddening situation. Talk about a “disconnect”. I would love for someone to address this conundrum.
And once again, thank you Mike for continuing to point out our daily CO2 levels. Gotta keep our noses to the grindstone.
I don’t think it’s too hard to see these tendencies at work in the modern environmental movement (generating “deep ecology” critiques, on the one hand, and environmental apocalypticism on the other). The solution to both problems is one and the same — to recognize that it is a collective action problem, that collective action problems are hard to solve, and so we need to stop freaking out and just get to work on it.
That said, I did find the authors’ statement “Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown” to be rather odd. It strikes me as untrue. Enough solar energy DOES reach the planet to completely meet human needs, regardless of how much standing biomass there is.
I think you’re missing a big point here, dnem. It’s not just energy that’s at issue in this paper. All human necessities involve ecosystem services. No biomass (except presumably us), no ecosystem services.
CH 45: “if emissions are going ‘down’ then why are CO2 levels going ‘up’?
BPL: Because you’re confusing a quantity with a change in quantity, a 0th derivative with a 1st derivative. Decreased emissions are still ADDING to the stock. The stock is not somehow instantaneously linked to the amount in the atmosphere.
If I have ten gallons of gas in my car, and I’ve added two gallons at a time, five times, then I suddenly only add one–I’ve halved the rate at which I add gasoline. But the amount will now be 11 gallons total, which is higher, not lower.
Jon Kirwansays
@44 I really wish someone would either tell me where my math is wrong, or tell me exactly why this is ignored. Is it the “too good to be true” effect? Or something else?
I’m no scientist and I don’t pretend to be one. I do talk with them, from rare time to time, though. And I can offer my rather provincial views only. But it might trigger a thought or two.
The whole planet respirates. Each year it breathes out once and breathes in once. It takes a huge breath. (Of course, there is a daily cycle as well, and the imposed gradual drifts up and down following the seasons.) The green photosynthetic plants on the continents inhale so much carbon each year that they take out something like 100 gigatons of carbon. Simultaneously, animals and plants exhale about the same 100 gigatons of carbon, as well. Normally, that’s in balance. When I was first reading, the entire atmosphere contained about 700 gigatons of carbon from CO2. It’s now about 800 gigatons. But the point here is that the respiration rate is HUGE. It vastly exceeds the comparative pittance we humans add, which I gather is more on the order of 10 gigatons a year.
We’ve been playing with a massive experiment with our lives on a global scale. We are doing nothing about population, which underlies everything. We are doing nothing to show we will reverse the flux direction until it is way too late. But we not only keep doing what we know we shouldn’t be doing with the atmospheric greenhouse gases, but we transform whole complex cultures into monocultures for farming and cattle, in order to feed and continue to grow the huge weight of our boots on the neck of every bit of life on this planet.
Now, go back and look at those respiration figures. You are right that a LOT could be done with photosynthetic plants on land. It’s obvious from the figures. 100 is bigger than 10 and it seems reasonable on the surface to say, let’s go do that. But the fact is, we have been doing that. And doing a bang-up terrible job of it. Farming converts complex, interwoven ecologies into monocultures and in doing so greatly weakens its ability to cope with environmental changes and/or to provide some meaningful negative feedbacks that may help to counter them for a while. We are learning a lot. No question. Maybe we can do something. But I frankly DO NOT TRUST such attempts, because it won’t be the scientists controlling the farms. It will be for-profit corporations.
It’s not just that, though. Keep in mind that we do have rising global temperatures and changes in the hydrologic cycles ahead. Photosynthetic plants change their respiration in response to temperature (among other things.) If it turns out that we are somehow “smart” about it and we manage to arrange things on a global scale (already, I don’t believe you if you think we will be that good about it) so that photosynthesis outpaces respiration changes. Well, then the biosphere will take carbon out of the air. (I’m avoiding a discussion about where that carbon is stored — and there is quite a different balance there depending on the latitude and ecological system.) But if photosynthesis doesn’t outpace respiration, then the biosphere will put carbon into the atmosphere, instead.
What scares me about all this is the Q10 factor that George Woodwell and others helped define and measure. They found that a warming of 4C could increase a forest’s respiration by 100%!! Do you think you can outpace this with enough increased photosynthesis? Do I trust others here.
Look. We’ve been playing with matches for centuries. We’ve been dumping a few gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere each year for a while. We’ve also been clear cutting and decimating ecologies in order to convert assets taking thousands of years to build up into immediate value for an ever growing, and much more so this last century, global population. If you start playing with the global photosynthetic space on this planet, more than we already are??? That’s playing with nuclear weapons, by comparison. You make a mistake with plant respiration here and the already terrible releases humans are already guilty of will be child’s play by comparison.
Do you really feel you know that much about how to play this global photosyntheic plant game on land that you feel perfectly competent to know for certain that you will tilt this massive scale in the right way? I sure don’t. I don’t want you to even think about it. Not now. We are still way, way too stupid to be playing with those kinds of weaponry and the scales needed to make a serious dent.
I don’t know how others feel. But I have feel for just how huge the existing respiration rates already are and a feel of how little we still understand about the impacts of temperature and other factors on respiration rates and how little else we understand…. to even begin to think that you or anyone else should be turned loose on the largest living system of carbon exchange rates.
Just thinking you might actually present a credible threat to go out there and “engineer it” scares me spitless. You are talking about tinkering around with a 100 gigaton annual respiration in order to deal with a 10 gigaton annual human mistake. I’d much rather we clean up our own house before we run around risking burning down everyone else’s house.
369 BPL https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/unforced-variations-may-2016/comment-page-8/#comment-654016
I have no intention of trying to change your mind on this. But I will state that shifting from being an Anglican to a Baptist is not a shift from one failed theory to a better one. So it goes with “economics”. I am happy to stick with my views until proven otherwise. I speak as someone who worked on the inside as a high cardinal. I talked the talk well, and it all made perfect sense to the Board and the staff and the Banks. It’s all mirrors and a pea and shell game. It’s a game not a science.
HadCRUT has now posted for April with the global anomaly +0.926ºC which is equal 4th highest anomaly on record behind 1st- March, 2nd- Feb, 3rd- Dec 2015. The El Nino of 1998 showed a similar (but single month) peak temperature in the early part of 1998 but then a slow rise for the following months to a second lower peak in July 1998. This is all pretty much as per GISTEMP & NOAA. Comparing recent months with 1997/98, the temperature rise since 1997/98 is averaging at 0.39ºC (GISTEMP 0.5ºC, NOAA 0.43ºC) The HadCRUT rise would yield a warming rate of 0.217ºC/decade if attributed to AGW, a rise a little less than those seen in GISTEMP & NOAA.
……….1997/98 … 2015/16
Dec … +0.505ºC … +1.01ºC
Jan … +0.483ºC … +0.908ºC
Feb … +0.763ºC … +1.061ºC
Mar … +0.558ºC … +1.063ºC
Apr … +0.636ºC … +0.926ºC
May … +0.573ºC
Jun … +0.592ºC
Jul … +0.672ºC
Aug … +0.603ºC
370 Killian says: “Funny…. I predicted the 2008 crash. Did you? Well, to be fair, I understood the analysis of those who did and warned those around me.” iow you merely relied on other authorities who knew far more than you did. Besides the crash was in 2007, held together with band aids in a desperate attempt to get through 2008 election before it really hit the fan. Did you also ‘predict’ the demise of Gov Spitzer and why he was busted? I did. Given ego and “successes” are so important to you Killian, did you know I predicted the 2007 crash in 2003 and just sat back watching it unfold? I deserve a jelly bean at least. :-)
More than that I wonder have you (or your advisers) also predicted the even bigger 2017 global economic crisis and financial system breakdown followed by the collapse of the EU in 2018 and NATO shortly thereafter? There’s a lot happening and for most it will be a surprise. Meanwhile how about chilling out a little because it’s counterproductive to create unnecessary agro over minutia with people who are essentially on the same team. Peace out! :-)
watching paint dry:
Daily CO2
May 31, 2016: 407.01 ppm
May 31, 2015: 403.44 ppm
April CO2
April 2016: 407.57 ppm
April 2015: 403.45 ppm
Highest-ever daily average CO2 at MLO: 409.44 ppm on April 9, 2016 (Scripps)
2nd highest daily average CO2 at MLO: 409.39 ppm on April 8, 2016 (Scripps)
Highest daily peak CO2 recorded at MLO for 2015: 404.84 ppm on April 13, 2015 (Scripps)
May numbers not posted yet at https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
Mike
@ Alf, #364 (May 2016):
Ooops, in the post above I`ve made an false assertion I hereby want to correct:
Australian coal production did NOT double every 10 years; it rised lineary, NOT exponentially.
Sorry for that mistake.
T 1: It’s a game not a science.
BPL: And you’re an ignoramus, not a scientist.
Mike, I suggest you look at the primary sources for the CO2 info, not the bloggers who reprint numbers without the explanations that help make sense of them. You mentioned last month that you quit posting numbers for a few days when they didn’t increase, then started again when the numbers got larger again.
This is focusing on the noise, the natural variation. It’s the “escalator”
Seriously — think of new readers and younger readers coming here for the first time who need to understand what’s going on.
It’s no favor to them to post only the numbers going up, ignore the numbers going down, and lose a lot of information about the world.
The source sites for CO2 measurements all have explanations of how the numbers are collected — and how they’re corrected for known problems over the following days and weeks.
They also explain how much of the up and down is natural, and why it’s ‘noise’ in doing the statistics.
Tamino’s very good on how to understand trends.
Just saying — seriously — that you should look up the escalator and understand how it’s misused to focus attention on short term changes.
Learning is hard. Learning from primary sources is possible.
There are lots of secondary sources out there that lose too much information.
You’re a third or fourth hand source by the time you repost from their sites.
Add some links to the primary sources and explanations — please?
Think of the children ….
@BPL
” Neither are you. You’re a fictional character.”
Believe it or not:
Nemesis is a very real character 8-)
Pay your AGU dues, folks, and get the publications.
More science, less belief and opinion — couldn’t hurt the discussions.
The “Bickersons and Lockhorns meet for dinner and drinks” byplay is entertaining …. not much.
Two this week of interest at least to me.
One each for those of the “no problem” and the “apocalypse already” persuasions (sigh)
____________________________________
No significant increase in long-term CH4 emissions on North Slope of Alaska despite significant increase in air temperature
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069292
Abstract
Continuous measurements of atmospheric methane (CH4) mole fractions measured by NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network in Barrow, AK (BRW) …. Twenty-nine years of measurements show little change in seasonal mean land-sector CH4 enhancements, despite an increase in annual mean temperatures of 1.2 ± 0.8 °C/decade (2σ). … The lack of significant long-term trends suggests more complex biogeochemical processes are counteracting the observed short-term (monthly) temperature sensitivity of 5.0 ± 3.6 ppb CH4/°C. Our results suggest that even the observed short-term temperature sensitivity from the Arctic will have little impact on the global atmospheric CH4 budget in the long-term if future trajectories evolve with the same temperature sensitivity.
—————————
Revealing the early ice flow patterns with historical Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs back to 1960s
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL068990View/save citation
Abstract
The reconnaissance ARGON satellites collected the earliest images of Antarctica from space dating back to the 1960s …. This allowed us to extend the ice velocity records of Larsen Ice Shelf back into 1960s ~ 1970s for the first time. The retrospective analysis revealed that acceleration of the collapsed Larsen B occurred much earlier than previously thought.
(emphasis added)
_______________
C’mon. Science, people.
Also from AGU just now:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068898/abstract
Ice flow dynamics and mass loss of Totten Glacier, East Antarctica from 1989 to 2015
Xin Li, Eric Rignot, Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl
Accepted manuscript online: 30 MAY 2016
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069173
First compilation of 26‐year ice discharge to quantify the impact of ice dynamics on Totten Glacier.
Ice dynamics has changed significantly over the last decade and contributed to glacier mass loss.
Totten Glacier may be more sensitive to ocean temperature than previously thought.
——
Oops.
Here’s something recent and comprehensive from the USGS on northern hemisphere wildfires and permafrost melting as sources of atmospheric CO2 increases:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1826/pp1826.pdf
“Baseline and Projected Future Carbon Storage and Greenhouse-Gas Fluxes in Ecosystems of Alaska”
USGS Zhu & McGuire, Eds, 2016
“. . . these increases in temperature may expose the substantial stores of carbon in the region to loss from more wild re and permafrost thaw, which could turn the ecosystems of Alaska into a net carbon source. Therefore, the assessment of Alaska ecosystem carbon stocks and uxes as well as methane fluxes, as reported here, was conducted to better understand the baseline and projected carbon distributions and potential responses to a rapidly changing environment.”
It points to Alaskan forests becoming net emitters of stored carbon dioxide to the atmosphere due to the steady increase in wildfires, well about the forest regrowth rate. It’s not just the forests; Alaskan permafrost melting is also driving carbon dioxide and methane emissions from very old reservoirs of permafrost carbon, also from the USGS (2015):
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425715300778
Distribution of near-surface permafrost in Alaska: Estimates of present and future conditions
Remote Sensing of Environment October 2015 Pastick et al.
“. . .Here we overcome complex interactions among surface and subsurface conditions to map near-surface permafrost through decision and regression tree approaches that statistically and spatially extend field observations using remotely sensed imagery, climatic data, and thematic maps of a wide range of surface and subsurface biophysical characteristics. . . .Taken together, these results have obvious implications for potential remobilization of frozen soil carbon pools under warmer temperatures. Additionally, warmer and drier conditions may increase fire activity and severity, which may exacerbate rates of permafrost thaw and carbon remobilization relative to climate alone.”
There’s no going back now – better start those infrastructure projects to deal with floods, droughts, rising sea levels while we still have time.
The following got posted in the “Comparing models to satellite data” comments. Since my relevant posts there are receiving little attention, this irrelevant post is doomed to go unanswered. So I have copied here. Any answers?
====================================
Questions:
1) If we are seeing the transition from what has been a strong el nino cycle back to a la nina by the end of the summer would it not be anticipated that in the short term the observational record will not be expected to catch up to modelled projections?
2) What ever happened to Michael Mann’s theory that the relative frequency of la nina to el ino events could itself be a feedback mechanism?
3) In regards to the suggestion prior by MM to converge on the most accurate models and the subsequent discussion of using a rational approach based on physical principals: (1) Is hindcasting not already a part of model creation in ways that lets statistical success drive forward projections? (2) should we not have models that are exclusively focused on projecting global temperature even if they poorly with other parameters? (3) What is a reasonable time period to let the effects of stochastic noise even out? Gavin previously claimed that a 20 year time period would likely suffice. I understand the argument that if you started 10 earths at the same time there would be significant variability in short term and even long term trajectories. However, if you added carbon dioxide to their atmospheres at the same rate to all 10 earths you would expect to be able to predict a range of possibilities that all 10 would fall within over a 20 yr period, particularly when the known natural “stochastic” variabilities happened historically over 10 year periods would you not? It seams to me to be a larger problem when the observations go out of the range of projections than when they do not correlate well to the mean.
4) Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies? that would be the empirical approach given that carbon dioxide levels are continuously going up without any rational belief that this will change in the next 20 years.
Comment by Jeff — 29 May 2016 @ 6:09 PM
Hank,
I am thinking of the children. The numbers have not been going down per your post 7. I think these are primary and respected sources that provide good context for understanding the numbers:
https://www.co2.earth/
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker-ch4/summary.html
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
The daily CO2 number is noisy. I mention that very often. The monthly average is less noisy. The comparison from one year to next allows a person to see the annual up and down cycle of CO2 cycle.
I enjoy reading a lot of what you post, Hank, and I am not inclined to get in a hissing and spitting match with you about what I post. The numbers are what the numbers are. They are very bad news. Anyone who does not understand that it missing something very fundamental and important about AGW. If people read the numbers and get worried, they need to read more and educate themselves about these very important numbers. The CO2 ppm level is the ballgame. If it goes up, we get more heat. The number does go up and down on an annual cycle. A person can grasp that if they try. The more critical number is the rate of increase. The current rate of increase, in the 3 ppm plus range is new. A month where we are seeing an average increase over 4 ppm over the same month last year is new. That has not happened in the time that our species has been on the planet. We should be worried about that.
Cheers,
Mike
6 Barton Paul Levenson says: And you’re an ignoramus, not a scientist.
Oh really? How nice. How clever. How mature of you to say so.
RP at 11: I read the Guardian coverage of this USGS article abt boreal forest fires. The USGA spokesperson was quoted thusly:
Northern wildfires must now be recognised as a significant driver of climate change – and not just a side-effect, according to the report from the US Geological Survey.
“This is one of the surprises that we haven’t talked about much,” said Virginia Burkett, chief climate scientist at the USGS. “It has tremendous implications for the carbon that is locked up in Alaska soils and vegetation.”
It’s possible that Burkett is misquoted, but if not, I am not sure why Ms. Burkett is posing the fires and net positive emissions of the boreal forest on a warming planet as a surprise. Boreal forest fires have been understood as a AGW tipping point event for many years.
It’s weird to read scientists talking about these “surprises.” Hey, CO2 and CH4 emissions from thawing permafrost, loss of sea ice, etc. are likely to increase as AGW continues. Forest fires, loss of forest vitality to AGW, changes in rainfall patterns, increases in the bugs that can devastate forests, etc. – these are all on the radar. I don’t think folks should talk about them as surprises. Lots of us have been talking about the various tipping points for years. The time frame, the escalation of these tipping points, the accumulation of tipping points toppling like dominoes into runaway global warming is very hard (impossible?) to calculate. These things are simply the known bad possibilities that are out there.
As the rate of increase in CO2 ppm ramps up, we will be able to nail down the timing of the various tipping points, the bad possibilities, in the rear view mirror. I am no fan of geo-engineering, but I think direct air capture and sequestration is going to increasingly in the news as CO2 ppm continues to ramp up. We cannot allow the CO2 ppm to just continue to cruise upward unless think the extinction event is going to be a good time.
But, hey, what do I know?
Warm regards
Mike
12 Alastair B. McDonald: 4. Your question on mitigation: Is off-topic. I would discuss it elsewhere, but only without the same group.
14 mike: Yes I agree “tipping points” should not be a surprise to working climate scientists and ecologists. As the observations continue unfolding later backed up with detailed science studies, papers and articles by the experts in the field there are many tipping points looming now that were not ‘forecast’ to occur for decades ahead. The GBR acidity effects and bleaching events, plus the arctic sea ice extent being only three of many. The unprecedented jump in annual CO2 ppm rise in both nth and sth hemispheres is another ‘canary in the mine’.
Some people have noted the disconnect between the CO2 rise and the compiled/estimated figures for CO2 emissions by nations in recent years. Why anyone would have accepted the later as valid or accurate in the first place points to the constant problem that needs to be faced with much more honesty and awareness. imo.
12 Alastair B. McDonald says: “4) Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies?”
I think for 3 main reasons. First their energy and focus is still on understanding better the dynamics of the climate & AGW effects. Second that that work is partly intended to prove to governments & society that AGW really is real, dangerous, and requires primary attention now, and then thirdly because ‘mitigation strategies’ is outside their “en mass” areas of expertise.
Mitigation is a broad ranging social & political / nation state issue and not a core climate science component. well imo, given what I have seen in recent years (denial hijacking power plays etc) and know about life on earth in general.
When the political class gets real then more scientists of various fields will become more engaged and funded to do the detailed studies research analysis into mitigation specifically. Sure I wish it was already happening “en mass” now too.
7 Hank Roberts says: “Think of the children ….”
Yes a good idea. When I think of the children I wonder how Hank could get access to new APP that automatically distributes the first rate science papers and essays he finds, provides the original web links as well as a short summary note as why this APP note is important to AGW/CC today.
A user friendly APP that then automatically intersects other directly relevant studies, science lectures and so on on youtube or the web which again provides the children with short summary notes … things they cna then easily share on Facebook and other APPs at the touch of an icon.
Without anyone ever needing to know that RC exists or having to come here and scroll though thousands of pages of artciles and posts on the forum.
When I think of the children I imagine a computer game approach that takes the essence of climate science and builds up to higher levels of knowledge and challenges like every other computer game does .. and that being distributed free as another APP equivalent to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Mobile Strike” Game without all the blood and guts and extra charges or using our children as ‘profit centers’.
So yeah i agree 100%, think of the children, and the teens and the young adults of today and ponder why they never come to RC to learn about AGW/CC or to get the hard facts form the “horses mouth”.
“Start with the impossible. It will expand your idea of what is possible.”
http://civicengagement.uchicago.edu/
http://artisticactivism.org/
http://www.vividsydney.com/event/ideas/masterclass-steve-lambert
http://visitsteve.com/news/school-for-creative-activism-announced/
http://art.350.org/nyc-launches-artistic-activism-research-group/
What is artistic activism? “There is an art to every practice, activism included,” explains Stephen Duncombe. “It’s what distinguishes the innovative from the routine, the elegant from the mundane.” The “art of activism” requires art, that is: applying an artistic aesthetic and method to activist tactics, strategy, and organization.
So I have a question…
I was told, at another “science” blog that I will not mention at this time, that this paper and it’s findings are “pseudo science” and somehow promoting the use of fossil fuel. I won’t quote this person word for word but that was the gist of their assessment.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534254/
Comment by Alf — 31 May 2016 @
I read the paper carefully and I’m not a scientist of course but I did look up the sources and authors and it all looked credible to me. Does anyone know if the findings in this paper would qualify as “pseudo science” or if the source or sources are in any way connected to the fossil fuel industry or maybe helping to promote the use of fossil fuel. And, is the information contained in the paper correct? If anyone can help me out on this I would greatly appreciate it.
UAH has been posted for May at +0.55ºC, the 8th highest anomaly on record. Both UAH & RSS show the temperatures during this 2015/16 El Nino event peaking strongly this January and now falling, a fall that is continued by this latest month’s UAH data. The fall began earlier than its 1997/98 equivalent and for the second month the 2016 UAH data sits below that of 1998. The sharper peak of this 2015/16 El Nino is suggestive of a weaker event. The rate of fall back towards non-El-Nino conditions may be worth monitoring.
……….1997/99 … 2015/16
Dec … +0.250ºC … +0.450ºC
Jan … +0.479ºC … +0.540ºC
Feb … +0.653ºC … +0.832ºC
Mar … +0.475ºC … +0.734ºC
Apr … +0.743ºC … +0.715ºC
May … +0.643ºC … +0.55ºC
Jun … +0.575ºC
Jul … +0.511ºC
Aug … +0.516ºC
Sep … +0.441ºC
Oct … +0.403ºC
Nov … +0.123ºC
Dec … +0.246ºC
Jan … +0.060ºC
Feb … +0.166ºC
Mar … -0.081ºC
Apr … +0.009ºC
May … -0.037ºC
Jun … -0.154ºC
UAH (for what it’s worth) is reporting for May….
0.55’C
Which is essentially identical to the Jan. 2016 temp.
[enough]
Thomas, you and BPL are peas in a pod, so far. Complex sentences, sure, but not saying much. Hypocrisy never helps and I certainly didn’t call you out first.
You seem to understand econ isn’t what it what like to think, but you also have not said what it is, so who knows whether you belong in the Peanut Gallery. Some belong in threads *and* the gallery.
We’ll see.
As for any coming crash, I was hearing summer this year, but talk has cooled. Mixed, perhaps. Such things are becoming less important, and are never interesting these days. Bigger fish…
Simplification is the only option, so if more crashes help or force that, then good.
“I am not sure why Ms. Burkett is posing the fires and net positive emissions of the boreal forest on a warming planet as a surprise.”
Well, I’m not sure, either, Mike. But remember that the context in which the question was posed can never be identical to the context in which it is reported–meaning that the answer may have been intended to address a more specific part of the general topic. (Ie., the ‘surprise’ is a narrower portion of the whole than appears as quoted.)
And sometimes, alternately, I suspect that some so-called ‘climate scientists’ may have more of a ‘silo view’ than thee or me; that is, they know their specialty inside and out, up and down, backwards and–well, you get the idea–but may not be so conversant with other aspects of the beast. It’s a darn big interdisciplinary topic, after all.
> When I think of the children I imagine a computer game approach
That’s — explicitly — what Peter Ward is asking climate scientists to develop, in the video recently linked here.
Alf apparently found some “science” site (alf’s quotes) disparaging this article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534254/
I can’t imagine why. I don’t see anything particularly new in it, it reminds me of Catton’s _Overshoot_ and many papers on the same subject. It just uses a different analogy to describe what Catton calls detritovores overshooting carrying capacity.
Fresh words, familiar concept, no way it supports burning more fossil fuel faster.
Generally, all. The tone here has got pretty nasty. Seems we are mostly on the same side. Can we focus on science questions and answers? Less mud-slinging?
#12 – I would have said that the main reason the climate science community doesn’t focus on mitigation is that it isn’t their area of expertise. But these days I’m more convinced than ever that masses more climate science needs to be done. Change is happening now. We don’t understand well the impacts this change will have on human society (over all sorts of timescales). There is a challenge for engineers, economists, politicians etc. to reduce GHG emissions (which as Edward so rightly points out at #14 is off topic for RealClimate).
It seems to me that there’s a huge challenge for climate scientists to work to improve regional climate predictions, and alongside that, working with a vast range of other scientists (from soil scientists all the way through to people who understand migration patterns) to build an increasingly sophisticated picture of climate impacts, to give politicians information they can use to react to/prepare for the impacts.
It seems to me that we (that is the policy, rather than the science, community) woefully underestimate the potential impacts of climate change on people, woefully underestimate the rate of change, and don’t really have the first idea about what we should be preparing for.
This is hard stuff, as it’s about stitching together many many different strands of expertise.
(No criticism of existing science work in this area is implied!)
WARNING: young children, people with pacemakers or impaired immune systems should not read this post. (sorry, Hank, could not help myself)
Daily CO2
June 1, 2016: 407.08 ppm
June 1, 2015: 403.12 ppm (3.96 ppm increase in noisy daily number)
April CO2
April 2016: 407.57 ppm
April 2015: 403.45 ppm (4.12 ppm increase in less noisy monthly number)
May monthly is not posted yet at co2.earth. I expect it to come in around 4 ppm increase based on what I am seeing. It’s about trends, rates of increase, etc. even though a headline daily number of 410 ppm or above would cause folks to sit up and take notice again.
I think we are down from the high number of 409 plus for the rest of the year as vegetation growth draw-down starts to overcome the early soil warming emissions. I am continuing to watch anyway because if the monthly average does not stay down in current 407 range it would suggest to me that we are seeing significant new sources of atmospheric CO2. That would be stuff like emissions from thawing permafrost, drying/warming peat deposits, etc. I can’t get a handle on the pulse of CO2 that arises with a large forest fire like Fort McMurray. I think this single fire is significant at about 10% of Canada’s annual emissions, but if we are lucky and rainfall patterns allow, we can expect a lot of new growth in the burned over areas (in the next decade or two) to cycle CO2 back out of the atmosphere and into foliage. This does not happen as much if the FF emissions contain a lot of deep soil burn emissions. Plus, the FF emissions are a mix of ghg, not all CO2, but most will degrade to CO2, so the pulse could take a while to see by looking primarily at CO2, as I do.
On Keeling site – https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2016/04/20/comment-on-recent-record-breaking-co2-concentrations/ – there is discussion about the record numbers we have been seeing. from that piece:
Still, the levels last week were a bit higher, maybe by a part per million or two, than I would have projected even taking El Niño into account. I’m frankly not sure what is causing this, but I would not expect it reflects anything other than an unusual blob of air that temporarily settled over the central Pacific. It is clear that other sites around the world where CO2 is meansured are showing the El Niño boost, but I haven’t consulted the most recent data to see if they show anything special over the last few weeks. The bump last week was seen on both the NOAA and Scripps analyzers at Mauna Loa.”
I think the “unusual blob of air” story does not hold water. But, hey, what do I know?
I would love to be wrong about the import of these CO2 numbers and trends.
(agree with Kevin at 26 about the USGS surprise quote, press coverage is not peer-reviewed as far as I can tell)
Warm regards,
Mike
(and yes, I think it’s funny to question the water retention capacity of “unusual blobs of air” as in Pee Wee Herman quote: I meant to do that)
12 Alastair B. McDonald says: “4) Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies?”
Good question, the science is of course settled. The more it is studied the more deniers will find to attack. Look at how the deniers attacked Dr. Mann’s “Hockey Stick”. It was one of the most outstanding studies in history of climate science but it was attacked without merit. If these considerable talents went to mitigation and stopping to climate studies the earth would be in a better place support future life.
From Alaska News reported on InsideClimateNews: “Melting Alaska may not accelerate climate change as expected, scientists now say. My sense is this is counter to observations in other recent reports”; is this a case of less, but still a huge amount? Would be interested in Gavin’s take.
“The results of new research released by the U.S. Geological Survey have surprised scientists: Alaska is not likely to emit as much carbon this century as they’d previously expected.
The report marks the first statewide inventory of natural sources of carbon emissions and carbon storage. The research has been in the works since 2012, as part of a nationwide effort by USGS to examine carbon storage.
In recent years, scientists have sounded the alarm on the climate change implications of Alaska’s melting permafrost, the frozen layer of soil and rock that covers from one-third to two-thirds of the state. As it melts — far faster than once expected — it releases methane, which is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. And thus, climate change in the Arctic begets more climate change.
But the new peer-reviewed government report released Wednesday found that may not be the case, at least through the year 2100.”
http://www.adn.com/alaska-news/environment/2016/06/01/melting-alaska-may-not-accelerate-climate-change-as-expected-scientists-now-say/?utm_source=Inside+Climate+News&utm_campaign=c72a97a7ef-Today_s_Climate12_10_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-c72a97a7ef-327792125
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1826/pp1826.pdf
Alastair B. McDonald @12.
You appreciate that as this is an open thread, it does not exclude comment solely because it would still be on-topic on another thread, and would surely be proper in this case where that on-topic thread is moribund. Thus re-posting your own unanswered enquiry here would have been more appropriate than re-posting somebody else’s post.
I did read your poster and I have to say that the idea that CO2 is saturated is your point of fundamental divergence from the science. I’m no expert on the literature but I’m entirely sure that the findings of Very & Angström (1901) have not been overlooked by today’s climatology but that the 1901 paper has long since been shown to be flawed. Do note Mlynczak et al (2016) ‘The spectroscopic foundation of radiative forcing of climate by carbon dioxide’ that featured in May’s open thread.
MAR at 22: why are you posting the 1997 to 1999 number to compare with the 2015 to 2016 number? Why not post 1997 to 1998 or 1998 to 1999? I am sorting apples and oranges in the data. Thanks for posting this stuff. I learn from reading what you have to say.
If 2015 El Nino turns out to be a weaker event (as seems likely) and the 2016 peak temp differential is still significantly higher, then I think we are just seeing amplification of temp rise as AGW and El Nino interact in the current time frame. Or we are seeing significant ramp up of AGW global temp that was overdue for some reason (hiatus factors).
I definitely agree with you that watching the rate of fallback is interesting.
Cheers,
Mike
Alastair B. McDonald asked: “Why has the climate change scientific community not moved on mass towards mitigation strategies?”
For the same reason that mitigation strategies are off-topic for this site — they are outside the expertise of climate scientists.
Scientists in other fields with expertise relevant to eliminating GHG emissions are of course doing plenty of work on mitigation strategies.
And there are plenty of websites where you can follow that work and even interact with those scientists, much as people can interact with climate scientists here.
Where were you in 1969?
This is worth remembering as an early warning still being repeated:
http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html
Economy is at the very heart of our complex, interdisciplinary problem. Modern economy is a great deal of Hokus Pokus, it is modern magick. Look at a dollar bill:
” In god we trust.”
Written on a colored piece of paper. It is a piece of magick. You can buy things with it, you give some colored pieces of paper and you get a car or a house or bread or tanks. The next stage is virtual money. Now you have just numbers, virtual computer bits and bytes, NOTHING at all. But you still buy things with it. This money makes the world go round, like the saying goes. It makes more and more and ever more go round (Globalization), like at a carnival. The money business IS a magickal carnival. I don’t have to tell you about wall street and shit. These guys are interested in money only, they are no treehuggers for sure, they deal with trillions of dollars in a millionth of a second, they are not interested in “saving the planet” and shit, but they make the world go round and the whole planet pays for that carnival, the whole planet dances to the music of dollars more and more. The economy is a musical chairs game and nobody will be left over:
This money machine will eat the whole planet, if nobody stops it.
25 Killian: “you also have not said what it is”
I explain my brief opinion/s here https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/recycling-carbon/comment-page-2/#comment-652159 (and a few posts down the page) and here https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/unforced-variations-may-2016/comment-page-8/#comment-653905 & Market forces here https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/recycling-carbon/#comment-652073
Overview opinion? Short and Long term solutions to AGW/CC rest upon using / channeling the combined wisdom/power/knowledge of Climate sciences, tech R&D, economics & politics mixed with sound Business Principles and Advertising (aka mass psychology & beliefs) all together and despite the real shortcomings of each component! iow use the tools we already have that helped to cause the problem to fix the problem. No need to reinvent the wheel, yet.
The tsunami of climate science research and reports coming out now is the ‘EverReady Bunny’ driving everything else towards major reform.
eg Simply bring the maths of impending climate change disaster $costs into the matrix of today’s economic numbers and everything changes including a sea of red in Govt Budgets as far as the eye can see – this has already started but is not being applied by all openly yet. Even War has become uneconomical and unsustainable now!
The real driving power is of course collective human desire/passion to make the necessary changes toward a more equitable and sustainable future – we are not yet at the 100th Monkey but very close imo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
AGW/CC deniers (and global war-mongers) will be going the way of the dinosaurs soon enough (maybe 2020-2025?) which is why none of them or what they say worries me much. I haven’t lost faith in the good will and common sense of humanity.
Oh, I am using the 100th Monkey idea metaphorically and not scientifically. Good ideas eventually catch on and spread like wild fires. :-)
12 Alastair B. McDonald: 4. Go to https://bravenewclimate.com
http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-zombie-wildfires-have-awakened-in-alaska/
‘The Soda Creek Fire raged through 16,500 acres in the same area last summer, according to Alaska Dispatch News. It smoldered underground, survived the winter, and finally reignited on Sunday, spreading to an acre within an hour.’
‘Fire can burrow deep into the roots of old-growth trees, where it burns slowly, insulated by a thick, moisture-absorbing blanket of decomposing moss, leaves, and twigs on the forest floor. And once the ground freezes, the embers are sealed in, sometimes under feet of snow. Come spring, the ground warms up, the surrounding brush and trees dry out, and the fire can spring back to life.’
That will be having a nice impact on decomposition of calthrates in permafrost!
Forest fires, feedbacks and
For several years I have been interested in climate feedbacks that have been missing from climate models (e.g. the CMIP5 models used in AR5). After asking climate scientists, I have been asking UK government how this effects the IPCC remaining carbon budgets.
Finally, I have a straightforward answer form the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change:
and
I haven’t fought my way into what the Global Carbon Project says but does anyone here have any estimates that aren’t too difficult to follow. I mad a rough start with Carbon budget shock: 4 years remaining but with no reduction for missing feedbacks.
Easimates based on average world emissions, without reduction for feedbacks.
Emissions in the rich part of the world are much higher that the average.
Are there any official estimates – anywhere?
@Chuck Hughes #21:
I was really disappointed by the discussion on “that other site” following your post. First of all the paper was published in PNAS, a solid, high impact journal. To dismiss a paper in that journal out of hand as “pseudo-science” seemed extreme to me. I found the basic premise that humanity has been “rapidly discharging a battery” trickle charged by solar energy over the millennia and stored as fossil fuels totally sound. I’ve since vetted the idea with several academics and generally get strong support for the idea. That said, I did find the authors’ statement “Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown” to be rather odd. It strikes me as untrue. Enough solar energy DOES reach the planet to completely meet human needs, regardless of how much standing biomass there is. In fact the amount of living biomass seems utterly irrelevant (apart from the obvious other impacts on the biosphere!) to the question of meeting humanity’s energy needs.
That’s why I took the discussion in a slightly different direction (for which I was pilloried). I accepted the point that we have this huge, industrialized human population that was built on the back of highly energy dense fossil fuels and now we have a big problem: how to transition society over to using a highly diffuse, distributed energy source (solar). Cost is not the biggest part of the problem in my mind. In fact, grid price parity for solar is all but irrelevant. Without it, we’ve got a bigger problem. But with it, we still have the same big barriers. Building out a huge renewable infrastructure will take lots and lots of fossil fuels and our carbon budget is all but shot. Lithium and rare earth supplies and geopolitical issues will loom large. Mining all the materials, moving them around and installing them all will take huge amounts of FFs and create all sorts of other environmental mayhem.
Saying these things out loud got me branded a FF apologist and co-conspriator. I hope we can overcome these issues but wishing they weren’t there doesn’t help anybody.
There is somewhere between 35 and 40 Gt CO2 emissions yearly worldwide. To draw down CO2, (decrease the stocks in the atmosphere) we must adjust the flows into and out of the atmosphere until we achieve a net negative flux.
There are approximately 5 Giga Hectares of land in the world currently being used to produce food for human populations. Agriculture has been proven to be capable of being an emissions source or a sequestration sink depending on the methods used. Currently right now agriculture is an emissions source.
Working backwards, for agriculture to offset emissions and achieve a net negative flux for atmospheric CO2 worldwide each hectare of agricultural land producing food would need to sequester long term into the soil over approximately 8 Gt CO2/year. 8t CO2/ha/year X 5 Gha = 40Gt CO2/year
There are numerous case studies showing a change in agricultural methods achieving 10, 15, 20 or more tonnes CO2e/ha/year increases in soil carbon by using various organic/permaculture/ecoagriculture methods. I have posted several on various other threads over the years. That’s more than enough.
My biggest gripe with the ipcc, climate scientists and even this site is the fact that the potential of changing agriculture as a mitigation strategy is completely either ignored, or underestimated. It is the blind spot in this whole thing that I have mentioned multiple times in these discussions and elsewhere on every climate science website I can find, and as of yet not once has been properly refuted. It is as if the subject is taboo. I am even taking an EDX course on climate science for the purpose of communicating these ideas better, getting my terminology correct etc.
I really wish someone would either tell me where my math is wrong, or tell me exactly why this is ignored. Is it the “too good to be true” effect? Or something else?
#17 – “Some people have noted the disconnect between the CO2 rise and the compiled/estimated figures for CO2 emissions by nations in recent years. Why anyone would have accepted the later as valid or accurate in the first place points to the constant problem that needs to be faced with much more honesty and awareness. imo.”
Comment by Thomas — 1 Jun 2016
I said something about this in an earlier thread; “if emissions are going ‘down’ then why are CO2 levels going ‘up’?” I still don’t get that. It’s a maddening situation. Talk about a “disconnect”. I would love for someone to address this conundrum.
And once again, thank you Mike for continuing to point out our daily CO2 levels. Gotta keep our noses to the grindstone.
from: http://induecourse.ca/hobbess-difficult-idea/
hat tip to http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2016/06/02/the-climate-movement-needs-to-get-radical-but-what-does-that-mean/
who dug a bit deeper into something I’d noticed
I think you’re missing a big point here, dnem. It’s not just energy that’s at issue in this paper. All human necessities involve ecosystem services. No biomass (except presumably us), no ecosystem services.
No ecosystem services, very soon no us, either.
N: Modern economy is a great deal of Hokus Pokus, it is modern magick.
BPL: Try conducting every transaction by barter. See how far you get.
CH 45: “if emissions are going ‘down’ then why are CO2 levels going ‘up’?
BPL: Because you’re confusing a quantity with a change in quantity, a 0th derivative with a 1st derivative. Decreased emissions are still ADDING to the stock. The stock is not somehow instantaneously linked to the amount in the atmosphere.
If I have ten gallons of gas in my car, and I’ve added two gallons at a time, five times, then I suddenly only add one–I’ve halved the rate at which I add gasoline. But the amount will now be 11 gallons total, which is higher, not lower.
I’m no scientist and I don’t pretend to be one. I do talk with them, from rare time to time, though. And I can offer my rather provincial views only. But it might trigger a thought or two.
The whole planet respirates. Each year it breathes out once and breathes in once. It takes a huge breath. (Of course, there is a daily cycle as well, and the imposed gradual drifts up and down following the seasons.) The green photosynthetic plants on the continents inhale so much carbon each year that they take out something like 100 gigatons of carbon. Simultaneously, animals and plants exhale about the same 100 gigatons of carbon, as well. Normally, that’s in balance. When I was first reading, the entire atmosphere contained about 700 gigatons of carbon from CO2. It’s now about 800 gigatons. But the point here is that the respiration rate is HUGE. It vastly exceeds the comparative pittance we humans add, which I gather is more on the order of 10 gigatons a year.
We’ve been playing with a massive experiment with our lives on a global scale. We are doing nothing about population, which underlies everything. We are doing nothing to show we will reverse the flux direction until it is way too late. But we not only keep doing what we know we shouldn’t be doing with the atmospheric greenhouse gases, but we transform whole complex cultures into monocultures for farming and cattle, in order to feed and continue to grow the huge weight of our boots on the neck of every bit of life on this planet.
Now, go back and look at those respiration figures. You are right that a LOT could be done with photosynthetic plants on land. It’s obvious from the figures. 100 is bigger than 10 and it seems reasonable on the surface to say, let’s go do that. But the fact is, we have been doing that. And doing a bang-up terrible job of it. Farming converts complex, interwoven ecologies into monocultures and in doing so greatly weakens its ability to cope with environmental changes and/or to provide some meaningful negative feedbacks that may help to counter them for a while. We are learning a lot. No question. Maybe we can do something. But I frankly DO NOT TRUST such attempts, because it won’t be the scientists controlling the farms. It will be for-profit corporations.
It’s not just that, though. Keep in mind that we do have rising global temperatures and changes in the hydrologic cycles ahead. Photosynthetic plants change their respiration in response to temperature (among other things.) If it turns out that we are somehow “smart” about it and we manage to arrange things on a global scale (already, I don’t believe you if you think we will be that good about it) so that photosynthesis outpaces respiration changes. Well, then the biosphere will take carbon out of the air. (I’m avoiding a discussion about where that carbon is stored — and there is quite a different balance there depending on the latitude and ecological system.) But if photosynthesis doesn’t outpace respiration, then the biosphere will put carbon into the atmosphere, instead.
What scares me about all this is the Q10 factor that George Woodwell and others helped define and measure. They found that a warming of 4C could increase a forest’s respiration by 100%!! Do you think you can outpace this with enough increased photosynthesis? Do I trust others here.
Look. We’ve been playing with matches for centuries. We’ve been dumping a few gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere each year for a while. We’ve also been clear cutting and decimating ecologies in order to convert assets taking thousands of years to build up into immediate value for an ever growing, and much more so this last century, global population. If you start playing with the global photosynthetic space on this planet, more than we already are??? That’s playing with nuclear weapons, by comparison. You make a mistake with plant respiration here and the already terrible releases humans are already guilty of will be child’s play by comparison.
Do you really feel you know that much about how to play this global photosyntheic plant game on land that you feel perfectly competent to know for certain that you will tilt this massive scale in the right way? I sure don’t. I don’t want you to even think about it. Not now. We are still way, way too stupid to be playing with those kinds of weaponry and the scales needed to make a serious dent.
I don’t know how others feel. But I have feel for just how huge the existing respiration rates already are and a feel of how little we still understand about the impacts of temperature and other factors on respiration rates and how little else we understand…. to even begin to think that you or anyone else should be turned loose on the largest living system of carbon exchange rates.
Just thinking you might actually present a credible threat to go out there and “engineer it” scares me spitless. You are talking about tinkering around with a 100 gigaton annual respiration in order to deal with a 10 gigaton annual human mistake. I’d much rather we clean up our own house before we run around risking burning down everyone else’s house.