NC Media Watch

No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years(updated 1-1-10)

Russ Steele

Science Daily (Dec 31, 2009)

Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase.

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Will Lake Tahoe soon reach boiling point? (Updated 12-27-09, 20:47:27)

Russ Steele

If that headline caught your attention so did this article in the Bee catch my attention reporting that the Lake Tahoe surface temperature have gone up 3.7 degrees F. in 16 years. This article was based on a study published by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

"Tahoe's surface waters warmed 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit from 1992 to 2008 – a mean annual increase of 0.23 degrees."

 This last year I did some research on Lake Tahoe air temperatures, which was sparked by a UC Davis Tahoe: State of the Lake Report 2008. I recalled reading about lake surface temperatures in that report

Surface water temperatures have been recorded at the mid-lake station since
1968. Despite year-to-year variability, water temperatures show an increasing
trend. The average temperature in 1968 was 50.3 degrees F. For 2007, the
average surface water temperature was 51.9 degrees F. 

According to this report in 39 years the surface temperature only went up 1.6 degrees F. Here is the graphic from the study. (Updated graphic based on 2009 Report)


  So how did the surface temperatures go up 3.7 degrees in sixteen years?  These are measured temperatures vs the study satellite temperature?  Which is right?  As time allows I will be doing some more digging on this issue.Stay Tuned!

Humans caused 120% Arctic warming without CO2.

Russ Steele

I was wondering about this non CO2 warming, but did not get around to posting with all the Christmas prep and grand kids coming for a visit. Thanks to Tom Nelson's Blog for this post. 

Settled science?: If dark carbon causes 94 percent of Arctic warming, and if contrails account for another 15-20%, how much is caused by natural variability and trace amounts of CO2?

Yet Another Human Climate Warming Effect In The Arctic – Aircraft Contrails « Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr.

...an article in Scientific American by David Biello based on a study by Charlie Zender, a climate physicist at the University of California, Irvine stated

““…. on snow—even at concentrations below five parts per billion—such dark carbon triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming”.

Now we have yet another human climate forcing that was reported by Rex Dalton of Nature News in the article how aircraft emissions contribute to warming – Aviation contributes up to one-fifth of warming in some areas of the Arctic.

The article includes the text

“The first analysis of emissions from commercial airline flights shows that they are responsible for 4–8% of surface global warming since surface air temperature records began in 1850 — equivalent to a temperature increase of 0.03–0.06 °C overall.

The analysis, by atmospheric scientists at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, also shows that in the Arctic, aircraft vapour trails produced 15–20% of warming.”

Another stake in the heart of CO2 warming consensus

Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming

WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, Dec. 21, 2009) - Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

"My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

Full Report here. Paper is on line here.

Mother Nature is not nice

Russ Steele

I have written often that our climate is controlled by Mother Nature, and she could give a rats tush about what we humans are doing on this planet. Howard Bloom provides some perspective on Mother Nature in his Wall Street Journal article.

       
Climate Change Is Nature's Way  By Howard Bloom, Wall Street Journal

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet's climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We've been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

It was the sun after all

Russ Steele

New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining phase of the current solar cycle. For the first time, researchers can show a timely link between the Sun and the climate of Earth's thermosphere, the region above 100 km, an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere.

Earth's thermosphere and mesosphere have been the least explored regions of the atmosphere. The NASA Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) mission was developed to explore the Earth's atmosphere above 60 km altitude and was launched in December 2001. One of four instruments on the TIMED mission, the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument, was specifically designed to measure the energy budget of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The SABER dataset now covers eight years of data and has already provided some basic insight into the heat budget of the thermosphere on a variety of timescales.

The extent of current solar minimum conditions has created a unique situation for recent SABER datasets. The end of solar cycle 23 has offered an opportunity to study the radiative cooling in the thermosphere under exceptionally quiescent conditions.

"The Sun is in a very unusual period," said Marty Mlynczak, SABER associate principal investigator and senior research scientist at NASA Langley. "The Earth's thermosphere is responding remarkably -- up to an order of magnitude decrease in infrared emission/radiative cooling by some molecules."

The TIMED measurements show a decrease in the amount of ultraviolet radiation emitted by the Sun. In addition, the amount of infrared radiation emitted from the upper atmosphere by nitric oxide molecules has decreased by nearly a factor of 10 since early 2002. These observations imply that the upper atmosphere has cooled substantially since then. The research team expects the atmosphere to heat up again as solar activity starts to pick up in the next year.

For more information: http://stp.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions/timed/timed.htm

Paper to be presented at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco this week.

Oops, another Al Gore green dream is on the rocks

Russ Steele

Geothermal Project in California Is Shut Down according to a New york Times report by James Glanz.

The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.

A method of tapping energy from bedrock has been linked to increased earthquake activity.
The project by the company, AltaRock Energy, was the Obama administration’s first major test of geothermal energy as a significant alternative to fossil fuels and the project was being financed with federal Department of Energy money at a site about 100 miles north of San Francisco called the Geysers.

But on Friday, the Energy Department said that AltaRock had given notice this week that “it will not be continuing work at the Geysers” as part of the agency’s geothermal development program.

The project’s apparent collapse comes a day after Swiss government officials permanently shut down a similar project in Basel, because of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007. Taken together, the two setbacks could change the direction of the Obama administration’s geothermal program, which had raised hopes that the earth’s bedrock could be quickly tapped as a clean and almost limitless energy source.

The Energy Department referred other questions about the project’s shutdown to AltaRock, a startup company based in Seattle. Reached by telephone, the company’s chief operations officer, James T. Turner, confirmed that the rig had been removed but said he had not been informed of the notice that the company had given the government. Two other senior company officials did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear whether AltaRock might try to restart the project with private money.

In addition to a $6 million grant from the Energy Department, AltaRock had attracted some $30 million in venture capital from high-profile investors like Google, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Ooops, does his include Al Gore? Looks like it.  "Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byershas announced an historic alliance with Generation Investment Management and its chairman Al Gore who has become a KPCB Partner. The combined network, expertise, vision and global reach of Gore, Generation and KPCB will help our entrepreneurs change the world." I guess that just got a major set back.

Investing in green technology is a high risk business.

Why worry about the lack of sunspots - increased clouds!(Updated 12-09-09)

Russ Steele

At the end of November the cumulative number of spotless days (days without sunspots) in the transition into solar cycle 24 stood at 761.For 11 months from November 2008 to September 2009, the Ap index had been hovering near rock bottom with reading of 4’s and 5’s. But, the for the last two months (October and November) the Ap index broke through the floor and spawned the lowest Ap monthly index value in the past 77 years with values of "3".


Why should Nevada County worry about the lack of sun spots and declining Ap Index? The lack of sunspots has been associated with long periods of extreme cold on this planet. This cold had major impacts on agriculture and the ability of humans to feed large populations.

There seem to be an connection between sunspots and cloud cover.  Less cloud cover and more of the sun's radiation reaches the earth.  The more cloud cover the more that radiation is reflected back into space. A presentation by Jasper Kirkby, CLOUD Spokesperson, CERN, shows what we currently know about the correlations between Cosmic Rays and variations in the climate.

The CLOUD  experiment uses a cloud chamber to study the possible link between galactic cosmic rays and cloud formation. Kirkby talks about the results from the first CLOUD experiment and the new CLOUD experiment and what it will deliver on the intrinsic connection between Cosmic Rays and cloud formation.

Kirkby's one hour presentation is hosted at Seeking Alpha. Get your coffee, coke or cocktail, or what ever helps you think and learn about the cosmic ray and cloud connection. Seeking Alpha Link.  

Update (12-09-09): Anthony Watts has more information on the declining solar geomagnetic activity at Watts Up With That including an updated graphics. Anthony recommend watching the Kirkby presentation.  I am hoping to find a Kirkby's Power Point Presentation. 

Watching the ocean rise and fall

Russ Steele

Alan Stahler has an interesting story in the Friday Union online discussing the current El Nino pattern in the Pacific. See Soundings: Watching the Ocean Rise and Fall. Alan does a good job explaining complex scientific concepts.

You might want to avoid the comments following the story, there is more than enough misinformation to confuse the typical reader. Stick with Alan's and let him explain how the El Nino forms. Here is a graphic of the latest sea levels measured by the JASON-2 spacecraft mentioned in the article.



Note that since 2006 the sea level have essentially stopped rising. File this information away and use it at the next cocktail party when the token liberal at the party tries to convince you sea levels are rising and we are all domed unless we support Al Gore in a life style beyond his wildest dreams, by buying his carbon credits. 

The Sun Defines the Climate

Russ Steele

The folks at the A.P.P.L.E Center for Sustainability want Nevada City and the surrounding region to be more sustainable and resilient under times of stress. Here is a heads up by a Russian scientist that the planners at the Sustainability Center at might want to consider - Long term global cooling.

(Habibullo Abdussamatov, Dr. Sc. - Head of Space research laboratory of the Pulkovo Observatory, Head of the Russian/Ukrainian joint project Astrometria - (translated from Russian by Lucy Hancock)

Key Excerpts: Observations of the Sun show that as for the increase in temperature, carbon dioxide is "not guilty" and as for what lies ahead in the upcoming decades, it is not catastrophic warming, but a global, and very prolonged, temperature drop. [...] Over the past decade, global temperature on the Earth has not increased; global warming has ceased, and already there are signs of the future deep temperature drop. [...] It follows that warming had a natural origin, the contribution of CO2 to it was insignificant, anthropogenic increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide does not serve as an explanation for it, and in the foreseeable future CO2 will not be able to cause catastrophic warming. The so-called greenhouse effect will not avert the onset of the next deep temperature drop, the 19th in the last 7500 years, which without fail follows after natural warming. [...] We should fear a deep temperature drop -- not catastrophic global warming. Humanity must survive the serious economic, social, demographic and political consequences of a global temperature drop, which will directly affect the national interests of almost all countries and more than 80% of the population of the Earth. A deep temperature drop is a considerably greater threat to humanity than warming. However, a reliable forecast of the time of the onset and of the depth of the global temperature drop will make it possible to adjust in advance the economic activity of humanity, to considerably weaken the crisis.

Full Study is here.