Re: OT - Hansen acknowledges solar forcing

In article <u89co45fn36cacn5ooo727utsq2u7vc0cs@xxxxxxx>, Raveninghorde wrote:
On Sun, 1 Feb 2009 07:58:59 +0000 (UTC), don@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Don
Klipstein) wrote:

In article <aqh5o4td0trqnat33rb4eoi9vvuv54bp2d@xxxxxxx>, Raveninghorde wrote:
On Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:34:40 -0800 (PST), bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:

I thought you would benefit from an overview I put together for my
younger daughter. Her school are opposing Kyoto in a UK youth
parliament debate. I've already posted many of the links for you in
previous posts.

Has CO2 increased or is this just natural variation?

Summary:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2/bayreuth/bayreuth1e.htm
detail:
http://www.biomind.de/nogreenhouse/daten/EE%2018-2_Beck.pdf

The CO2 data that the AGW denialists and skeptics like, as in well above
300 ppmv before the 1950's, comes from air samples close to ground over
land. A lot of the time those run high in CO2, due to frequent times of
lack of sunlight (plants do less to no removal of CO2 emitted by animals,
bacteria, molds, fungi, yeasts, etc.) combined with lack of convection
(which usually runs lower when sunlight is absent).
Check out the story that CO2 measurements from the Wisconsin Tower
tells for a time of year when plants are active there, even as opposed to
Wisconsin in winter!

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html

How reliable are current measurements:

CO2 has been measured at Mauna Loa Observatory Hawaii since 1959.
Mauna Loa is the world's largest active volcano and emits CO2.

http://www.mlo.noaa.gov/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volcanicco2.html

/quote

A volcanic component can be estimated by taking the difference in
concentration between periods when the plume is present and periods
immediately before and after that exhibit baseline conditions.

Right after the 1984 eruption, Mauna Loa emitted as much CO2 as an
American city of 40,000 people. By 2005, these emissions had fallen by
a factor of about 100.

/end quote

Mauna Loa does not erupt much, and the people at the observatory do take
care to exclude eruptions. Notice the Mauna Loa observatory record to
have a few gaps. They have sufficient accuracy to discern seasonal
variations of a couple ppmv through most years since 1958 despite the
volcano.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html

which links to

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

I doubt the measurements. The "globally distributed network of air
sampling sites" gives a corrected figure which agrees too closely with
the Mauna Loa data. Mauna Loa measurements should be higher than the
global average.

I look at the Mauna Loa and the global graphs on that page, and Mauna
Loa is indeed higher than global:

Time Mauna Loa Global
------------------------------------------------
2007 annual mean 383.71 382.71
2006 annual mean 381.85 380.92
2005 annual mean 379.76 378.78
2000 annual mean 369.40 368.77
1995 annual mean 360.62 359.85
1990 annual mean 354.16 353.83
1980 annual mean 338.68 338.67

ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_gl.txt
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt

Both linked from http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Look at the graphs themselves - the black smoothed curve for Mauna Loa
is at almost 377 ppmv for the beginning of 1994 and a bit over 386 ppmv
for November 2008 (second last point). The black smoothed curve for
global is at or a hair below 376 for start of 2004 and close to 385.5 for
November 2008.

The CO2 solubilty pump moves CO2 from higher latitudes to the tropics
where due to warming of the water outgassing occurs. Given Mauna
Loa's position in the tropics by the ocean the CO2 readings will be
significantly higher than the global average.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solubility_pump

How much higher? Air moves around quite a bit.

I need to look at the seasonal variation in the measurements at Mauna
Loa. Given the small amount of land in the area the seasonal variation
should be small due to local cuases.

The seasonal variation in CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa is overwhelmingly
believed to be due to global causes since air moves around the world so
much. The seasonal variation appears to me to have the downslope in the
middle of the year when vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere is receiving
more sunlight and upslope when the Northern Hemisphere has less sunlight.
Looks like land-based vegetation accounts for significant seasonal
variations in the amount of biomass in the world, and most of the world's
land is in the Northern Hemisphere.

The CO2 due to outgassing may be discernable but should be delayed and
would depend on the ocean currents. I'm not even sure wether the currents
in this area are from the northern or southern hemisphere but this
reflects my current ignorance in this area.

Hawaii is close to the northern fringe of the Pacific's North Equatorial
Current, which is the southern part of a clockwise-going loop in the North
Pacific.

I still feel that volcanic CO2 has been removed too successfully from
the data. I fear that any odd measurment has been rejected and
replaced by a suitable typical figure.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html#data_selection

They reject data points that show that they are not of "background air"
but of air having local addition/removal of CO2. They say so.

"Figure 2 shows an example of the data selection procedures we use to
eliminate air that has likely been influenced significantly by nearby
sources/sinks."

They explain for quite a few paragraphs afterwards what they do.

Rejections are generally hours in scale, and they average 13.6 "retained
hours" per day. They only use days that have at least 2 unrejected hours
(my words for this sentence).

They also collect air samples from the intake line to their main
instrument and from the roof of one of their buildings and send those air
samples in flasks to a lab in Boulder CO as one of the checks against
their main instrument.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html#replication

Keep in mind good agreement with all heights on the Wisconsin Tower
during times of day or weather conditions favorable to convection so that
the sensors on the Wisconsin Tower are exposed to air representative of
at least a good part of the troposphere over that location of Wisconsin.

Looks to me that a fair value for Wisconsin in July 1999 was 358-360
ppmv give or take a couple, no more than a few ppmv. And January 2000
looked to me like Wisconsin had around 378 ppmv give or take a couple at
most. Average 359 and 378, and I get 368.5.

Mauna Loa says July 1999 without seasonal correction was 369.10, and
January 2000 was 369.06 without seasonal correction. I think it's plenty
fair for the general Wisconsin area to exceed Northern Hemisphere average
in seasonal variation due to above-N.-Hemisphere-average concentration of
both land-based seasonal biological activity and wintertime-specific
fossil fuel burning. The discrepancy is still easily down to about 10
ppmv with analysis techniques obvious enough to "eyeball in a matter of
minutes" and seasonal, and annual discrepancy may be down to less than 1
ppmv.

Meanwhile, 1999-2008 annual change averages about 1.86 more ppmv per
yeat at Mauna Loa and 1.885 for the global marine surface atmosphere
determination.

The data before 1959 is taken from Law Dome ice core samples.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome.html

Note that the air is actually 40 to 80 years younger than the ice it
is trapped in. Or is it? Has the information been massaged to give the
right answer?

/quote

The enclosed air at any depth in the ice has a mean age, (aa), that is
younger than the age of the host ice layer (ai), from which the air is
extracted.

/end quote

Can you cite something to support this claim other than highly
questionable stuff that likely uses highly questionable sources (such as
CO2 determinations at low altitude over land having life forms and failing
to exclude the there-localized spikes that the Wisconsin Tower exposes)?

Of course the air trapped in the ice is at least as old as the ice!

OK, I did notice admission in another article in this thread that the
air can date to a more recent date when the air in the ice became
"sufficiently encapsulated" (my words).

However, I expect trends correlating with the comings and goings of the
Ice Ages glaciations to be true and any newly unusual (compared to the few
hundred thousand years before 1910) to show something modern and new.

That is not what they say here:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome.html

which is where I got my quote. If you disagree it is not with a highly
questionable source.

That one claims time precision down to discernment of seasonal
variations based on oxygen isotope ratio. That makes their claim of
determination to +/- 2 years for 1805 to sound not too unreasonable to me,
though I might not get into too good a mood to argue in favor of
determination +/- 5-10 years for 1805.

Graph that they publish:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/lawdome.gif

What is the temperature increase?

SNIP to reduce length

The global distribution of surface stations is nearly useless:

We still have the UAH and RSS determinations from the satellite data.
NASA GISS also uses satellite determinations of surface temperature and
trends thereof to develop and modify correction factors for surface
station data.

http://www.cao-rhms.ru/krut/OAO2007_12E_03.pdf section 2.

OK, I dared to visit a .ru website...

Fig. 4: Of the 4 plots in the graph, 2 are coin-flipping results. The
caption under the graph does say in part "and results of random variation
of global temperature with an annual step of .066 K". The graph covers
1855-2005.
I have trouble believing that annual step of .066 K/C degree over 150
years results from an average honest set of coin tosses.

You are commenting on section 3. Section 2 covers the problem with
poor surface staion distribution. The article claims an error of 0.28K
due this. I can't spot a flaw in this part of the article.

Section 2 you say claims an error of .28 K. I see in that section that
"annual error" is .28 K. I expect that a few years should smooth that
down to more like to .1-.15 K. While the title for that section is:

"Can we detect an increase of 0.6 K in global temperature?"

SNIP to reduce length

- Don Klipstein (don@xxxxxxxxx)
.

Relevant Pages

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