[RSJ: This is remarkably good news for the IPCC folks (the Consensus on AGW). For the Third Assessment Report, they had invented the naked theory that while CO2 may not have actually CAUSED global warming, it somehow amplified it! This was because some accepted investigators reported that CO2 lagged the Vostok temperature trace, making a shambles of the CO2-cause temperature-effect conjecture.

[Now by lagged, a scientist means that the sample cross-correlation function has a significant lagging peak. Assumedly, you meant that you calculated the cross-correlation between Dome-C temperature and CO2 concentration and found a significant lead component for the CO2 - didn't you? Quantify for the readers, if you would, how the function looked. You didn't just eyeball the graphs, did you?]

[RSJ: What do you mean by "age control of the Vostok cores"? What is the error in the handling or analysis of the Vostok cores, and in what way do you claim it affects the analysis in the Acquittal of CO2? What of the Vostok record must be disregarded? This will truly disappoint the Consensus.

[But not to worry. The analysis in the Acquittal of CO2 assumes that each CO2 concentration reading is at the temperature reading at the greatest ice age less than the given gas age. In theory, a large mean error between the two reported ages could disrupt the correlation and the pattern evident between CO2 and Temperature. This did not happen, however. With whatever errors were manifest in the data, the CO2 and Temperature traces were still highly correlated (86%). The pattern matched the complement of the solubility curve as well as any mathematical polynomial up to 10th order. Natural CO2 comes from the ocean. It is a product of global warming, not a cause.]

[RSJ: When you became not a doubter or promoter of global warming, but a fan and promoter of Anthropogenic Global Warming, how did you judge the science and reasoning? Was there something specific you appreciated, or was it just a matter of the alleged voting? In science, someone always has to go first. How do you measure the adequacy of his research? If the research in the Acquittal of CO2 was inadequate, it must have overlooked something relevant. You must have discovered a paper that refutes the Acquittal of CO2. Please share it.]

[RSJ: Physics has arrogance!? Climate models are filled with equations, and they still can't predict. Climatologists, not climatology, urge public policy based on models that neither predict nor match the historical record. That is not arrogant; it is unethical. A few more equations are certain to be added to the GCMs. But remember, climate is a statistic; don't expect precision. ]

[RSJ: As to "stoichiometric control over CO2 equilibrium", I give you Caveman's answer: "Yeah, I have a response. What?" Besides, how could the Acquittal of CO2 be negligent in not mentioning an irrelevancy?

[The Acquittal of CO2 shows that in the Vostok record, the atmospheric CO2 concentration is curved according to the complement of the solubility of CO2 in water. A sound physical reason supports this result. That curvature of atmospheric CO2 is not modeled in the GCMs. Instead, the operators insert a massive slug of CO2 as a forcing, allowing it to decay slowly over several decades to a century plus. That is now known to be false from the Vostok record, and it is contradicted by the climatologists calculations in the TAR showing 90 GT or more of carbon uptake by the oceans per year. The Consensus position is supported by their well-mixed CO2 conjecture, but that, too, is contrary to the IPCC admission of large gradients (at least ten times the minimum detectable) in CO2 atmospheric concentration. It is also contrary to the physics of the CO2 exchange with the ocean. These findings demolish the CO2 forcing model. As a minimum, the great majority of atmospheric CO2 should be represented as a climatology feedback.

[Not only did the Acquittal of CO2 not mention anything like a "stoichiometric control of CO2 equilibrium", it relied on no stoichiometry at all. Even the TAR refers to stoichiometry only three times, and then with no real consequence. Nor does the TAR make mention of any "Holocene anomaly". Climatologists recognize Holocene anomalies, as in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and in insolation. But the TAR says the CO2 concentration was flat, between 260 and 280 ppmv, during the Holocene, making it actually anomalous. Whatever you mean by "mid-Holocene CO2 anomaly", the paper needs no mechanism for it. It is irrelevant to the inconvenient Vostok data.

[The TAR says, "The total amount of carbon in the ocean is about 50 times greater than the amount in the atmosphere, and is exchanged with the atmosphere on a time-scale of several hundred years. Dissolution in the oceans provides a large sink for anthropogenic CO2, due in part to its high solubility, but above all because of its dissociation into ions and interactions with sea water constituents (see Box 3.3)." Then it says, "This process depletes surface CO3(2-), reduces alkalinity, and tends to increase pCO2 and drive more outgassing of CO2 (see Box 3.3 and Figure 3.1)." Thus the chemical processes are alleged to crate an excess of the carbonate ion, CO3, which is supposed to be a bottleneck to the absorption of CO2!

[This incorporates much of the following opinion of David Archer, a contributing author to the TAR, and while not W. S. Broecker, at least one of his co-authors. Elsewhere Archer has claimed,

[This is patent nonsense on two separate grounds. First according to the TAR, about 65% of the 730 GT of atmospheric CO2 is removed every year. That gives a mean residence time of 1.52 years, and a half-life of 0.65 years. Second, the dissolution of atmospheric CO2 in water is a physical process, not a chemical reaction. The ratio of carbonate, bicarbonate, carbon dioxide and carbonic acid, and hence the pH, will adjust thermodynamically until the CO2 concentration is on the solubility curve for CO2 in water. Archer and the TAR make the solubility depend not on just temperature and pressure, but also on the carbonate concentration or the pH. This would be a major new result in physics!

[Lastly, it is nonsense because the ocean is not stagnant as the ionic build-up conjecture suggests. The solubility pump loads CO2 in the cold waters, transports it deep and undersaturated at high pressure, returning it to the surface, heated and at atmospheric pressure, to be unloaded from saturated water. The water then circulates on the surface to cool and reabsorb CO2 from the air. The solubility pump depends on the solubility curve, and needs no modification. It accounts well for the Vostok record.]

[RSJ: If we assume the AGW conjecture is valid, then the AGW conjecture is valid. But, it is not. The adjectives "indeed" and "very effective" don't help. Anthropogenic CO2 is quite as effective as natural CO2, but not as effective as H2O, each of which overwhelm the ACO2 in quantity and effectiveness.]

[RSJ. Yes. It is not zero, just negligibly small. Watch this blog for additional explanations.]

[RSJ. It is published!]

[RSJ: Where along the AGW route did Morgan fall off the AGW bandwagon? Does he deny that he bought into yet another doomsday scenario?]

[RSJ: A full response appears as a separate entry: On Why Co2 Is Known Not To Have Accumulated in the Atmosphere & What Is Happening with Co2 in the Modern Era, 6/11/07. ]

[RSJ: Many articles are available on line that identify El Niño events in the Mauna Loa data. Keeling himself along with his fellow researchers, especially Bacastow, investigated the El Niño relationship to the Mauna Loa measurements.

[http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/program_history/charles_david_keeling_biography.html

[Note the References at

[http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm

[(2) Keeling's model of the Southern Oscillation Index included upwelling and releasing of about 0.6 GTons per year of CO2 from depths of 50 to 150 meters during periods when the SOI was positive, that is, during La Niña states. In the opposing, El Niño states, he claimed there was no appreciable CO2 flux. Keeling, C.D. and R. Revelle, Effects of El Nino/Southern Oscillation on the Atmospheric Content of Carbon Dioxide, Meteoritics, Vol. 20, No.2, Part 2, June 30, 1985. P. 437.

[(3) The great bulk of the 90 to 100 GTons of ocean CO2 outgassing appears to be associated with the thermohaline circulation, known under various names, including the ocean conveyor belt. By comparison, SOI effects may be minor eddy currents. Most of the outgassing occurs south and east of Hawaii, where it rises into the Hadley cells, then north and down into the trade winds feeding the Islands.

[Maps of air-sea CO2 flux, along with charts of the THC, strongly support the deep current theory. The maps, frequently attributed to Taro Takahashi, were prepared from pCO2 measurements, the surface wind, and the gas transfer velocity. IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report, p. 523, Figure 7.8. See also

[http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/CO2/carbondioxide/pages/air_sea_flux_rev1.html

[The following site provides a map of the Mean Annual Air-Sea Flux for 1995 for non-El Niño conditions! http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/images/fig06.jpg

[linked from

[http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/feel2331.shtml

[Somewhere on line you might find an animated, monthly Takahashi map.]

RSJ: Keeling and Revelle discussed the effects of El Niño, including on the carbon cycle, in Effects of El Nino/Southern Oscillation on the Atmospheric Content of Carbon Dioxide, Meteoritics, Vol. 20, No.2, Part 2, June 30, 1985. P. 437. The IPCC Third Assessment Report restates much of what K&R said, but in the summary omitting the part about the CO2. See Climate Change 2001, Technical Summary of the Working Group I Report, p. 52. Climate Change 2001 discusses the El Niño/CO2 link in the context of CO2 variability, and notes the conincident "reduced upwelling of CO2-rich waters". Id., pp. 208-209. Then it concludes with the following observation:

[This is your citation, and it contradicts Keeling's earlier model.

[The correlation between El Niño events and atmospheric CO2 concentration was shattered. It might be repaired by examining the correlation between SOI and the CO2 concentration data a bit less processed than the Keeling curve. For more, see RSJ, Solar Wind, El Niño/Southern Oscillation, & Global Temperature: Events & Correlations, 7/6/07.

[Outgassing from the thermohaline circulation is a better model than the damaged El Niño model because it, too, accounts for the shape of CO2 concentration with temperature (the complement of the solubility curve) and it accounts for the one millennium lag. Moreover, the THC-CO2 model fits the Takahashi maps. ]

[RSJ: Interesting points about the shape of data under positive feedback.

[If there were a positive feedback in effect between a greenhouse gas and temperature, the growth of water vapor caused by hotter surface temperatures could have turned Earth into a suffocating hothouse long ago. Sufficient positive feedback will destroy the system or exhaust its dynamic range. The dynamic range limit for water vapor is the vaporization of the last of the liquid water. (Rev. 8/27/07.)

[The paucity of good data is a huge problem in this field. The global "Temperature anomaly", like all other data series, should be published without temporal smoothing. The Mauna Loa CO2 concentration since 1958 should be accompanied by a record of the local wind vector and time of day, assuming those data were recorded. From time to time, I have suspected that the Mauna Loa data are a composite including other sites, that it has been adjusted for El Niño events, or that it has been subjected to temporal smoothing. The data should be unambiguous about any such processing, and it should be published without it.]

[RSJ: 10/5/04. The promos are appreciated. Sorry I don't know enough about your sites yet to comment on them.

[At some risk of pedantry, but in the interest of promoting the precision science demands, allow me to reflect on the names "Global Warming Skeptics" and the Atheist forum.

[Global Warming is a fact not to be rationally denied. That climate on any scale is either warming or cooling is a tautology. It's a fractal-like property. At present, Earth is warming from the last Ice Age, from the last Glacial epoch, and from the Little Ice Age. The inevitable turn-around is not in sight. But to the discredit of the Consensus on climate, it shows no sign of accounting for this warming background before it computes what it considers presently to be an anomalous warming. What should be controversial is not Global Warming but Anthropogenic Global Warming.

[Why "Global Warming Skeptics"? To deny global warming is equivalent to denying ice ages.

[But skepticism is a quality of every good scientist. When the Consensus attacks skeptics as contrarians, it exposes a deficit in its science literacy. As a minimum, every member of the Consensus community should be skeptical, especially of its own results, fraught with uncertainty, lack of success, and want of forthrightness. As to the contrarian accusation, it is the rejection of the crowd and a widely shared belief. Science is neither a democracy nor a repository for belief systems.

[I was piqued by the thought of a peculiar interest an atheist forum might have in errors in the AGW conjecture. I do grant you the Consensus is an evangelical group for a new theology. The fruits of conversions in the new temple are the heady stuff of power and money.

[On the other hand, scientific models are, and indeed must be, secular (in the theological not chronological sense). That is not atheistic, and no legitimate model should provide any support for atheism.

[Won't you share the unworthy comment?

[If you have difficulty at some point in reading one of my papers, please post a pointed comment. Perhaps a clarification would get you back on track, and help others.]

[RSJ: 10/29/07. Your numbers are part of a set that is a linchpin of the AGW theory: the residence time of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere. For a brief discussion of the topic see On Why CO2 Is Known Not To Have Accumulated in the Atmosphere & What Is Happening with CO2 in the Modern Era in the Journal, and written before the new Fourth Assessment Report could be absorbed. This is a good opportunity to update that report a bit.

[First, a brief facts check is appropriate. Your CO2 concentrations of 330 ppmv and 380 ppmv fit the data in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) (Figure 3.2a, p. 201) and its Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) (Figure 2.3, p. 138).

[Apparently you did a multiplication by volume or weight in the reservoirs for the two stocks, and something similar for the two fluxes, too. Your set of four numbers in Petagrams (1 Pg = 10^15g) along with the usual government authorities, is in the table below.

[8/24/08. Table corrected. Thanks to David.

[The IPCC TAR and 4AR columns are from Climate Change 2001, Figure 3.1, p. 188; and Climate Change 2007, Figure 7.3, p. 515, respectively. The NASA column offered as a check is from NASA at http://science.hq.nasa.gov/oceans/system/carbon.html.

[As discussed previously, the Consensus treats natural and anthropogenic as if they flowed in separate physical channels, and obeyed different physics. Now, the Fourth Assessment Report gives further evidence of this view. See Figure 7.3, http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Figures/AR4WG1_Ch07-Figs_2007-06-05.ppt .

[For 4AR Figure 7.3, the Consensus divides the 763 PgC in the atmosphere into 597 Pg of natural carbon plus 165 Pg of anthropogenic carbon. Its total exchange rate for all sources of natural carbon is 0 PgC/yr, while the net exchange of anthropomorphic CO2 is +3.2 PgC/yr.

[This model shows the ocean absorbing 70 Pg/year of natural carbon, and outgassing 70.6. Meanwhile, it has the ocean absorbing 22.2 PgC of anthropogenic carbon, and outgassing 20 PgC. The IPCC provides no physical basis to account for the oceanic uptake of 11.7%/yr (70/597) of natural CO2 (nCO2), while the uptake is 13.5%/yr (22.2/165) for anthropogenic CO2 (ACO2). If the Consensus on Climate relies on geographical differences in the concentration of nCO2 and ACO2, as might be coupled with differences in Sea Surface Temperature, then it runs afoul of its well-mixed conjecture.

[In this IPCC model of the carbon cycle, the total absorption rate of nCO2 from the atmosphere is 190.2 PgC/yr from a reservoir of 597 PgC. For ACO2, the total rate is 24.8 PgC/yr from a reservoir of 165 PgC. Then by the IPCC's own definition (4AR, Annex I, p. 948, Lifetime), the lifetime of nCO2 is 3.14 years and of ACO2 is 6.65 years.

[The lifetime numbers are not indeterminate. They are not in the range of a decade to centuries. And they imply a profound difference in physics that at best might provide a fragile alternative to account for small measurement differences in isotopic fractions.

[The Consensus assumes that the natural greenhouse gases, and specifically CO2, are in equilibrium and constant. Then it claims the measured concentration increases from the "Keeling curve" are anthropogenic in origin (4AR, ¶1.3.1, p. 100), confirmed by the 13C/12C isotopic decline at Mauna Loa (id., pp. 138-139). Consequently, the Consensus concludes the residence time of CO2 and the uptake and outgassing fluxes must differ between the natural and the anthropogenic species of CO2.

[The Mean Residence Time for CO2 is about 4 years. Climate Change 2001, p. 793. It is 150 years, too. Id., p. 386. It is 5 to 200 years, and "[n]o single lifetime can be defined for CO2 because of the different rates of uptake by different removal processes." Id., Table 1, Technical Summary, p. 38. "CO2, which has no specific lifetime". Id., p. 824.

[But to the contrary, the IPCC provides a definition and formula for lifetime in the Appendices to both the TAR and the 4AR. While the IPCC gives lifetime several equivalent names, it remains unambiguous. It depends on the size of the reservoir, M, and the total rate of removal from all sources, S. It is a balloon with multiple leaks, some large and some small. This is exactly the same analogy as a bucket with several leaks in the bottom provide earlier on this blog. The concept is elementary and is not confused by different size leaks. The formula depends on the total rate of removal, and not on the individual rates of removal comprising the total.

[To the IPCC, policy trumps science. Residence time is more than just a technical matter. As the Consensus says,

[In the TAR, the IPCC offers an explanation for the "current thinking" on physics that "may" distinguish between natural and anthropogenic CO2. See Climate Change 2001, ¶3.2.3.2, Uptake of anthropogenic CO2, p. 199. It uses inconclusive words and phrases, including "implies", "may play a significant role", "tended to increase", "implying", and "tightly correlated … but not exactly … matching". It introduces the concept of "'old' waters" with differing rates of CO2 uptake as the discussion touches on the physics of the carbon cycle, limitations on the solubility of CO2, and methods for assessing the ratio of nCO2 to ACO2 in the atmosphere and the ocean.

[Three years later on 12/16/04, the AGW proponents at RealClimate.org posted, "How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?" It was an effort to shore up the IPCC explanation. It introduced the isotopic discrimination method, saying "One of the best illustrations of this point, however, is not given in IPCC. Indeed, it seems not all that well appreciated in the scientific community, and is worth making more widely known." The first try didn't work, so it was rewritten ten days later. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87. It says, "However, it is the fact that we produce CO2 faster than the ocean and biosphere can absorb it that explains the observed increase." This alleged fact begs the question.

[Then the RealClimate defense says,

[No error analysis is offered for this method of discrimination. The references are variously immaterial or not publicly available.

[RealClimate's rehabilitated explanation still doesn't work to explain a model that implies that nCO2 and ACO2 have different solubility curves, nor that they can be faithfully modeled as if physically segregated.

[The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center makes a good case for a steady decline in the 13C/12C isotopic ratio background since 1980. Each of ten sites distributed across the globe from 150W to 180W shows a decline. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/iso-sio/graphics/iso-graphics.html. Consequently, a model other than burning fossil fuels is needed, and the IPCC provides it for the first time in the Fourth Assessment Report. It is an even more implausible model: the ocean outgases 20 PgC/yr of ACO2. The IPCC struggles to maintain its anthropogenic CO2 conjecture but has no coherent model.

[Is this a reference to two turnover times, one for the ocean and one for land, or to four turnover times, taking into account different physics for light and heavy CO2? The Consensus doesn't reveal how the turnover times affect the calculation, nor why the lifetimes run into centuries, which is contrary to its own data.

[Three of the four references are not freely available to the public, and are not sufficiently cited by the IPCC Report. The abstracts can be read on line, but none even suggests the claims made for the IPCC passage. For Keeling et al, 1980, see

[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980GeoRL...7..505K. Back issues available only from 1994.

[For Ciais et al., 1995a, see

[http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/269/5227/1098?ijkey=376bc8031f92290b46a51f3ef76686e6f6d4c9a8&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha. AAAS membership required.

[For Ciais et al, 1995b, see

[http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1995/94JD02847.shtml. This paper may be purchased for $9.

[The fourth reference, Tans et al., 1993 ("Tans"), by Pieter P. Tans, Joseph A. Berry, and Ralph F. Keeling, is the only reference freely available, and it not only does not support the IPCC claims, but refutes them.

[In the abstract, Tans declares,

[This would indeed support the IPCC claims, except that it is a presumption for the analysis to follow. Nowhere in the paper does Tans establish that fossil fuels produce lighter CO2, nor that other sources of CO2 are all heavier. Without evidence, it is a presumptive, requisite incantation to peers.

[For Tan's analysis to proceed, his presumption implies that light CO2 emissions be uniquely from fossil fuel. Then to evaluate his equations, Tams assigns a "reasonable value" (p. 364) for δ13C of fossil fuel CO2, δf , of -27.2‰. Tans, p. 357, Table 1. With that, he compares two methods. If they had agreed Tans et al would have had corroboration for the light CO2 presumption. But they didn't. So Tans theorizes,

[Indeed! The overlooked process is the solubility pump, the cycle of oceanic surface currents from Equator to the poles, and back through the thermohaline circulation. The surface waters cool, absorbing CO2, descending to the ocean depths to rise at the Equator, warmed and again at atmospheric pressure to exhaust CO2 back into the atmosphere. See The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide.

[Tans' isotopic model represents the ocean surface as a point, and the ocean as a column. With respect to the ocean, his is a one dimensional model. He represents the concentration of carbon as Co(z), a variable dependent on depth in the ocean, z, alone, and not as Co(x, y, z), where x and y are Cartesian equivalents of latitude and longitude. The total concentration of C in the ocean would be ∫Co(x,y,z)dA = ∫Co(x,y,z)dxdydz, which is equal to A∫Co(z)dz if Co is constant over the surface of the ocean. The last term is Tans expression for the total oceanic surface carbon (id., equation (3), p. 354), so he has tacitly assumed Co is constant over the surface of the ocean. That is known not to be true. Also, Tans has a single variable, Foa, representing the outgassing of CO2 from his single point ocean model. Instead, Foa is highly dependent on location, as represented in the solubility pump model above, and by Takahashi and now cited by the IPCC (Fourth Assessment Report, p. 523, Figure 7.8). Tans model does not account for the dynamics of the solubility pump.

[Tans models the isotopic equilibrium of carbon for an atmosphere fed by three sources: fossil fuel emissions, interactions with the terrestrial biosphere, and the ocean. He has difficulty with terrestrial concentration, and so postulates a delay factor, &tau, in reaching equilibrium. Id., p. 356. He expresses no analogous problem with the ocean, though. He represents dissolved inorganic carbon as a single variable, DIC in the text and Co in equations, and asserts that it comprises "the sum of dissolved CO2, bicarbonate ions, and carbonate ions". Id., p. 355. He should have broken Co into the sum of at least two variables, e.g., Cmolecular + Cionic. This would introduce the missing, analogous oceanic equilibrium problem necessitating an analogous delay, but it would make explicit his tacit assumptions that the distribution between molecular and ionic carbon in the DIC is constant and instantaneous.

[Partitioning DIC into Cmolecular + Cionic allows for the ocean chemistry to interact with Cionic, and the dissolution of atmospheric carbon in the ocean to adjust to Cmolecular. The first is a physical necessity, and the second permits the physics of solubility to operate without adding a novel dependence on ocean chemistry. It divides the ocean carbon reservoir in two, adding a molecular CO2 reservoir to instantaneously adjust to atmospheric CO2 pressure, and to supply ions to ocean chemistry at the pace of thermodynamic equilibration.

[Tans model has the effect of tying solubility to ocean chemistry, an error repeated in the IPCC Reports.

[Tans conclusion is

[In addition to Tans' speculation about a missing process, he restates his conclusion in the abstract and in the main body of his paper:

[Tans et al doesn't just fail to support the IPCC's reliance on his paper, but asserts that isotopic ratio analysis is not ready to support anything.

[The suggestion that a CO2 transfer process might have been overlooked is manifest. It is the oceanic thermohaline circulation, dominantly absorbing CO2 at the poles and exhausting it in Equatorial waters. This phenomenon is all but ignored by the Consensus.

[Tans et al repeat two IPCC errors, both evident in Tans' Figure 1, p. 354. First, both allows for different flux rates for total carbon and heavy carbon, necessarily implying the novel phenomenon that CO2 solubility is isotopic dependent. Secondly, both introduce novel physics by making solubility dependent on oceanic chemical processes.

[Tans et al, the IPCC's sole, freely available authority, refutes the claim for which it was cited. While nothing invalidates the measured decline in the isotopic ratio of atmospheric CO2 at some sites, the source of lighter CO2 is open to speculation. With nothing more, the phenomenon cannot support the claim that the change in atmospheric CO2 concentration is due to man.

[WATCH THIS SPOT FOR MORE IN PREPARATION ON ISOTOPIC MEASUREMENTS AND THEIR ORIGIN.]

[RSJ: 10/24/07. Interesting conjectures. Are you sure that the lockup of CO2 in Calcite is permanent? Does subduction carry the Calcite into the melt of magma to be released in volcanoes? What else might be the source of CO2 from volcanoes?

[And considering volcanoes, Earth is likely to experience many super volcano eruptions in the next 1.5 million years. Yellowstone alone erupts about ever 600,000 years and the next one is geologically imminent. Those events may cause a mass extinction and radically alter the composition of the atmosphere.

[We live in a most benign era.]

[RSJ: 10/23/07: The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide doesn't deal with the modern era at all beyond showing some errors in the models reported by the IPCC (aka the Consensus). The paper does not attempt to solve the problem of modeling the climate.

[The notion that the post industrial increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is due to man is false. It is false notwithstanding the fact that the increase is accompanied by a decrease in the isotopic ratio of 13C to 12C, which is expected from the burning of fossil fuel. It is false because this model requires that the solubility of light CO2 be less than the solubility of heavy CO2. A corollary of that problem is that this model treats natural and manmade CO2 as if they could be successfully segregated in the carbon cycle.

[You say that "some, but not all of the CO2 humans produce, has been absorbed by the oceans." That is true, but determinative of nothing. That is because it is equally true of the CO2 outgassed by the oceans and the biosphere. The CO2 from the multiple sources is irreversibly mixed in the atmosphere and distributed throughout the carbon cycle. The 90 to 110 Gigatons of carbon released just by the ocean alone swamps the 6 Gigatons of manmade CO2.

[No evidence exists that the ocean has ever operated per your explanation. It doesn't switch between global outgassing and global absorbing of CO2. The two processes are continuously underway so long as the ocean is substantially liquid. Cold, dense waters at the poles, heavily laden with recently absorbed CO2, descend, pushing the thermohaline circulation. A millennium later, the circulation resurfaces, especially in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific, warmed and under reduced pressure to outgas CO2 according to the physics of solubility. This cycle, ignored in the Consensus' GCMs, would continue even if the slow chemical and vertical circulations (which it does include in the GCMs) didn't exist at all.

[Natural CO2 in the atmosphere increases with great regularity on glacial scales, as revealed by the Vostok data. Not only that, but the process naturally reverses itself. This year, over 90 Gt of C from the ocean is not going to cause a runaway effect. The notion that man's 6 Gt will, even over 10 years, is ludicrous.

[In 1984, James E. Hansen said,

[In 2007, Hansen says,

[According to this Guru of Anthropogenic Global Warming, we're at "t minus ten years" and holding. We have been for 23 years.

[The climate is warming. The turn around in the warming since the last ice age, or the last glacial epoch, or even the Little Ice Age, is not yet apparent, notwithstanding any distribution of "hottest years on record".

[The Consensus reckons that the current level of CO2 is 379 ppm, which is actually Mauna Loa data. It says that this is "very likely much higher than any time in at least 650 kyr". To the contrary, Siple data show a peak of 390 ppm occurring within the last 140 kyr. For discussion and citations, see On Why Co2 Is Known Not To Have Accumulated in the Atmosphere & What Is Happening with CO2 in the Modern Era, RSJ response to comment of 10/14/07 12:13 PM. Not only has the recent high CO2 level, measured in the plume of the Eastern Equatorial Pacific outgassing, been exceeded within 650 kyr, it was exceeded within the Antarctic CO2 sink within only 140 kyr.

[The political problem is the technical fact that man has had nothing perceptible to do with it. It's a false alarm.]

[[RSJ: The link appears in our April dialog, above. See RSJ response to your post of 4/19/07.]

[RSJ: See IPCC Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001, Technical Summary, Figure 10, p. 40 or Figure 3.2, p. 201. You'll find an overlay of South Pole data on Mauna Loa data, undoubtedly due to Keeling. Figure (a). The IPCC gives no hint how or why the two traces agree as well as they do. You'll also find a separate Vostok chart. Figure (d). The coarsest resolution goes back half a billion years. Figure (f). It shows past CO2 concentrations about 20 times as great as today's.

[The IPCC needs the assumption that the CO2 is well-mixed, so it argues that because the lifetime of CO2 in the air is decades to centuries, it must be well mixed. The conclusion does not follow from the premise, and the premise is false. By IPCC's own figures and formula, the lifetime is less than four years.

[An approach to characterizing the global CO2 concentration might start with a model of the global pattern of natural CO2 flow. The seasonal and global temperature dependence could be then added. Now the model would be ready to add the small signal of manmade CO2. The model would be far from linear. It would resemble a seasonally varying, temperature dependent pattern like the prevailing winds.

[All this would make a fine, career enhancing, academic study, but little more. The GCMs and the Consensus have several, much more profound problems.]

[RSJ: The IPCC didn't ignore the spectral properties of greenhouse gases, but it could have put a lot more effort into reporting on the subject. Many others have made such a contribution. See for example Kiehl, J. T. and K. E. Trenberth, Earth's Annual Global Mean Energy Budget, Bull. Am. Met. Soc. 78, 197-208, 1997 for a nice discussion of the importance of the spectral properties of the atmosphere in filtering the incoming solar radiation and retaining the outgoing blackbody radiation. This paper is also the source of the radiation budget that is the heart of the IPCC's radiative forcing paradigm, the method by which the Consensus hoped to solve a knotty thermodynamics problem. Climate Change 2001, Figure 1.2, p. 90.

[A couple of papers by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a "lead author" of the IPCC reports, are actually worthwhile and relevant. The first is Lecture 6 of a series of Conceptual Models of the Climate given at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute beginning 6/18/01. It is titled "Energy Balance Models (How I learned to stop worrying, and taught myself radiative transfer …". He discusses the absorption spectra of greenhouse gases, observing at one point,

[This difficulty may have given weight to the IPCC's decision not to invest too heavily on absorption spectra discussions. For a more extensive discussion of the climate problem, see the on-line text, Pierrehumbert, R. T., Principles of Planetary Climate, 7/31/07, a work in progress.

[An interesting diagram of spectral absorption in greenhouse gases is at http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png. Be wary, though, because the spectra are smoothed and normalized, and presumably are at constant and unspecified temperature and humidity. Nevertheless, this diagram serves to show that the absorption of water vapor leaves a couple of windows, one open and one ajar, where CO2 has absorption bands. It is here that CO2 can contribute to the greenhouse theory.

[The water vapor windows not only admit CO2 to the greenhouse gas effect, but together produce an opening for the IPCC's AGW conjecture. Its story begins with the growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration reported by Keeling, coincident with increasing fossil fuel emissions and with a global warming trend. Invoking the century-old greenhouse gas model along with the spectral window opportunities, the Consensus postulates that the CO2 must be the cause of the warming. QED.

[Of course, that's not the end of the AGW story, but it's the end of the absorption spectra part. The window is open for the GCMs.]

[RSJ: MMCC ~ man made climate change, and here Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).]

[RSJ: Thanks for contributing to the on-line peer review. The lofty comparisons are a bit over-the-top, though. Rene Descartes' reference to a "major waste of time" is found in the 3/22/07 RSJ response to why the work on this blog has not been submitted to a peer review journal.

[But for the IPCC (aka the Consensus), there would be no global warming problem. The IPCC reports are public, addressed to "policymakers", and they are not a product of peer review. RealClimate.org, the defender of the AGW conjecture, is a blog, and not subjected to any independent peer review panel. Greenpeace and its black list of AGW critics, exxonsecrets.org, are not peer reviewed, academic, operations. The Kyoto Protocol is neither peer reviewed nor academic. These are not "cop outs", but a political movement for power and control in the guise of science. Policymakers respond with laws, not peer-reviewed journal papers.

[The unsymmetrical mantra of "not peer reviewed" is indistinguishable from its cousin, the ad hominem attack. Neither has merit.

[Rene Descartes, like the Consensus, doesn't realize that a rise in CO2 would cause the climate to warm, per Arrhenius and Fourier, all other things being equal. All other things are far from equal in the climate.

[For further enlightenment, watch for a paper soon to be published here that presents a new climate model, one that accounts for the failure of greenhouse gases to warm as predicted by the Consensus.]

[RSJ: 10/4/07. Lord Monckton correctly points out a problem that the IPCC (aka the Consensus on Climate) climate models regionally don't match observations. This does seem to be admitted by the Consensus. Monckton legitimately takes this inconsistency to the point of invalidating the models, something the Consensus is sure to reject.

[However in reaching his conclusion, Monckton overlooks several other, higher order problems.

[First what might be called a matter of scale is that global warming by its very name is a thermodynamic problem. It deals with the hypothetical concepts of a global average solar radiation and a global average surface temperature, two parameters which don't exist in the real world to be measured. Just consider, for example, the diurnal (day night) and surface elevation problems. The values of these parameters must be inferred. At the next level, and all but overlooked by the Consensus, is the global average albedo. It, too, is impossible to measure directly, and the Consensus has failed to emulate it dynamically in its GCMs.

[The GCMs are a simulation experiment, so far unsuccessful, to assess the thermodynamic problem with a vast network of adjusted weather models, predominantly simplified to represent mostly radiation, real or equivalent. The problem Monckton addresses is a specific, regional problem in this once noble exercise. He notes,

[Considered on the appropriate scale, both sides are correct.

[Next Monckton summarizes six causes postulated by the Consensus to account for the particular zonal temperature patterns:

[This set of causes omits the profound, natural effect of albedo variations, especially the negative feedback due to cloud albedo. As bad as GCMs might be at representing regional temperature distributions, the thing they do least well is to model clouds, all as admitted by the Consensus. Moreover, what has yet to be published is that the Consensus does not understand feedback, and does not model it correctly.

[Next, the set of causes omits the natural emissions of CO2. These are 30 times as great as the anthropogenic emissions it does include. The natural emissions from the ocean dominate the paleo record, and are 16 times as great as the ACO2. See The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide.

[The atmospheric CO2 is not well-mixed. The presumption that atmospheric CO2 is long-lived, which gives rise to the well-mixed conclusion, is false.

[The Consensus' GCMs model the atmosphere on the margin. The climate in this representation has a large, unstable, natural component and a small, anthropogenic disturbance. Of course, the natural world cannot be unstable, and the anthropogenic forcings cannot be simple add-ons, especially so under the well-mixed conjecture. Moreover, the GCMs do not model the natural world with a warming component. The natural world was (before man, that is) always either warming or cooling. Consequently the natural warming trends since the last ice age, since the last glacial epoch, and since the Little Ice Age, which almost exclusively were natural, are in the GCM models attributed to the anthropogenic forcings. The GCMs are highly flawed, and far from being validated as Monckton recently witnessed, hence to be theories on which to base public policy, are mere conjectures on which one might someday build a theory.]

[RSJ:10/4/07. Most encouraging! You have perceived the underlying problem with the AGW crisis: it fails as an exercise in science.

[Our generation of waste heat is a problem in economics. That is not a lesson from Economics Departments, but the sometimes curricula of Engineering Schools. I calculated once that the total energy used by man was one 24,000th of the energy collected from the Sun. Just the known variations in solar radiation, negligible with respect to the climate, swamp what man uses, much less what he wastes.

[I'd like to see your curriculum include the theories of interest and present value, plus probability and risk. Then you'd have a rather full set of tools to understand the waste heat problem. It might be too much for a single course in college chemistry, but these concepts should be taught in K-12 anyway.

[You're Philosophiae Doctor program I'd wager belied its name, containing nothing explicit about the philosophy of science. That seems to be taught nowhere, except incorrectly in philosophy departments, as with Popper, Feyerabend, etc. You might acquire it by osmosis, but that's OK, too. Don't return your PhD -- just enjoy that it led to the philosophy.

[Thanks for the link to the RSJ. (See http://www.chem.tamu.edu/class/fyp/stone/.)]

[RSJ:10/4/07, rev. 4/16/08. You're gas-saturated water in a room is not too far off the mark, considering the thermohaline circulation. Sea water returning on the surface from its outgassing sites, cools and absorbs increasing amounts of CO2 on its routes to the poles. There, nearly in equilibrium with ice, it absorbs the last of the CO2, and plunges to depths. After a millennium or so, it surfaces at the Equator, at reduced pressure (relative to the depths) and increased temperature. This is the surface solubility pump, and it would account for part of your model. But that is a continuing process at most any global temperature (until the oceans freeze), and doesn't account for the sawtooth pattern.

[You conjecture that the absorption takes longer than outgassing. But that's in the context of the global temperature, and not the solubility pump. I am unaware of any such physics model that would account for differing rates.

[You have highlighted an important feature for the GCMs to replicate. Whatever might account for the glacial epochs, the unsymmetrical cooling and warming must be represented. Three possibly related phenomena appear to be involved -- switching of ocean circulations, changes in total albedo, and changes in atmospheric water vapor concentration. None of these is obviously a cause for asymmetric temperature change, and none of them is sufficient to cause the entry to and exit from the ice ball state. An external source is needed, and the best yet advanced are the Milankovitch cycles. Still, not all the climate changes that Milankovitch cycles would predict are evident, nor can they account for the ice ages.

[Read more at http://www.lakepowell.net/sciencecenter/paleoclimate.htm. This may prove to be a jewel of a site -- a breath of fresh air devoid of CO2, of anthropogenics, and of greenhouses, but rich in science. A "global warming" is but a candidate for a future exhibit.

[Skepticism is to science as ashes are to the Phoenix.]

[RSJ: 10/4/07. Sorry, no. I'm constantly on the alert for such data. The data that are available are shrouded in secrecy.

[First, much of what Charles Keeling has produced is for sale only. Second, if you navigate to a website with raw data, you'll find files too large to be downloaded to a personal computer. The data that are available have been have been subjected to smoothing, correcting, baseline shifting, and special calibrating. I have yet to find potentially key data like wind parameters and temperature.

[Though I cannot offer proof, my feelings are that Charles Keeling, et al. did account for volcanic emissions, but did not account for Pacific outgassing. The investigators report on calibration applied to account for differences between reduction of identical samples by different sites. My fear is that a similar technique may have been applied to make data from different sites support climatologists' well-mixed assumption. I understand that the Mauna Loa data may have been corrected for El Niño events. Were they corrected for other events?

[These problems are most unsettling, but not critical. The Consensus is so far off base on a number of other issues that data sharing doesn't matter.]

[RSJ: I saw the same article. This simple theme pops up from time to time. As we both know from experience, the shorter the answer must be, or the more naive the audience, to a complex question the more difficult (and risky) the answer.

[1. Check figure 3.2 from the IPCC (the U.N.'s Nobel Prize Winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the voice of the Consensus on Climate) Third Assessment Report. Figure 3.2b supports your question. But Figure 3.2f shows perhaps just over half of the studies on Earth's CO2 concentration, each at a different time period, with momentously more CO2 than at the present. About 11 of those studies show CO2 as high as 10 times the present, and four studies are 20 times as high. Here's a link to the figure:

[http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig3-2.htm

[2. The Consensus data on CO2 flux has the oceans exchanging about 90 GtC/yr, land about 120 GtC/yr, and leaf water another 270 GtC/yr not always included in the Consensus's budget. That's a total of 480 GtC/yr. Man adds as much as 6 GtC/yr, about 1.3% to 3%, through fossil fuel burning and indirectly through deforestation The total atmospheric CO2 is around 750 Gt, so it is replaced in about 1.5 years, not centuries. The Consensus models the climate as being in equilibrium (but unstable), except for man's (destabilizing) contribution. As a result, it has the natural flux in sweet, delicate balance, and the manmade CO2 building to dangerous levels. It has no physical basis for different physics of absorption of the two species of CO2. The Consensus models the two gases as if they were transported around the globe in separate pipes. See IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, p. 515, Figure 7.3. Instead, the two species of CO2 are irreversibly mixed in both the atmosphere and the ocean.

[3. You didn't mention warming. Global warming is on-going since the last ice age, since the last glacial epoch, and since the Little Ice Age, and though we are nearing a local maximum on a geological scale, no turn around is yet visible on any scale. We also can prove that warming produces more CO2. Of course, they're correlated! The Consensus just has cause & effect reversed in its model.

[The conclusion that either greenhouse gas (for reasons not discussed here) or CO2 is producing runaway global warming is premature, if not a scientific fraud. Piltdown man on 'roids.]

[RSJ: Trends, along with other links from CDIAC, cited and data discussed passim on this blog.]

[RSJ: Don't put too much stock in the millennium time lag. One thing the correlation function between CO2 concentration and the temperature anomaly shows clearly is that zero lag is the poorest choice. The millennium lag is one of several possible peaks, suggesting multiple paths in the solubility pump. That would not be an unreasonable model.

[The surface of the ocean and the atmosphere are both warmed by the sun and cooled by radiation into space. The surface waters are limited in temperature rise by contact with deep waters, which are not reached by solar radiation. The atmosphere temperature rise is limited by conduction to the surface waters. The ocean dominates the process because the heat capacity of water is so much greater than that of air. How quickly the exchanges occur depends on relative heat capacity (including humidity), greenhouse gases (including clouds), and winds, among other things. How quickly changes occur is evident from the seasonal (10/29/07: and diurnal) experience, and it is instantaneous compared to the millennia time scale you suggest.

[Your opening hypothetical has a few technical and semantic problems. The solubility of CO2 in water depends primarily on the water temperature, but not the atmospheric temperature. Next a greater water temperature (at any time, T), regardless of whether increasing or decreasing, would result in a lesser, not greater CO2 absorption.

[Stepping over those little problems, the model I suggest for the solubility pump begins with poleward moving, cooling surface waters accumulating CO2. The waters are CO2-saturated, or nearly so, at the poles where the water temperature is fixed because ice is in equilibrium with sea water. Regardless of the global temperature, as long as Earth has ice at the poles the uptake of CO2 is fixed by the solubility curve at the freezing point (and the geometry of the ice caps). For multiple and complex reasons, the cold, CO2-saturated waters feed the thermohaline circulation, descending to depths, undersaturated by higher pressure, for a millennium of process interactions at high pressure. When these waters resurface, they return to atmospheric pressure to outgas at the modern sea surface temperature (SST).

[This model operates all along the solubility curve from the freezing point to the current SST at the regions of outgassing. One would expect the effective average SST to be a reasonable proxy for the global atmospheric temperature, a thermodynamic parameter representing global warming.

[Nothing, not even The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, dictates the form of the model for atmospheric and oceanic circulations and the mechanism of the solubility exchanges. Many models of varying complexity might provide reasonable or sufficient fits with the data. This is manmade, creative, and the modeler's art. The importance of The Acquittal is that every valid GCM, absent anthropogenic forcings, must reproduce the relationship between CO2 concentration and global temperature, whether represented by valid proxies or otherwise, evident in the ice core data.

[Either that, or postulate an objective criterion to exclude ice core data from the model domain.

[A corollary of this scientific mandate that a hypothesis (or better, a theory or law) must reproduce all the data in its domain is that a valid GCM must hypothesize a solution to the mystery of global warming pre-man, an event or a set of events also consistent with all the data. Without this capability, GCMs will, as they now do, erroneously attribute the background, natural warming to the effects of man.

[But for the IPCC, the voice of the Consensus on Climate, no climate crisis would exist. Since its models for the climate do not satisfy scientific rigor, the impending catastrophe is a false alarm.]

[RSJ: In context, your quotation from Jaworowski says,

[First, a quibble about Jaworowski's logic. If A is true, then A or B is true even if B is lunacy. Since he claimed that both parts were true anyway, he should have used the conjunctive and instead of the disjunctive or.

[But worse, Jaworowski left out a third branch in his disjunction: (C) the ice core proxy data need recalibrating. He appears to admit C, too, is true when he says,

[Proxy data by their nature require calibration to a reliable standard, or even intercalibration to make sense of multiple, diverse data streams, especially where no reliable measurement exists. This is exactly what the IPCC has done as shown by its charts and some of its authorities. But care is necessary in drawing conclusions from such calibrated data, which the IPCC ignores.

[The Vostok data acquisition and reduction is a major scientific accomplishment, calibrated correctly or not. The data reveal profound patterns in temperature and CO2 concentration, some obvious and some subtle. Both the temperature anomaly and the CO2 concentrations can be mis-calibrated without disturbing the patterns. The data reveal the glacial epochs of the past 0.7 million years, plus or minus something, in both temperature and CO2 concentration. They reveal that CO2 lagged the temperature by a millennium, plus or minus something else. And as shown on this blog in The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, the CO2 and temperature relationship is well represented by the solubility of CO2 in water. These results stand, notwithstanding the problems troubling Jaworowski. The ice core data are not, as you wonder, invalidated.

[The IPCC errs to conclude from its mix of data from different sources, which it calibrated into agreement in time or intensity, that modern measurements are unprecedented. The IPCC errs to conclude from its manipulated data that atmospheric CO2 is well-mixed. It also errs to conclude from 420,000 years worth of measurements at an interval of 1.5 millennia that the record of the last 50 years is unprecedented. Notwithstanding calibration errors, the confidence level is only 3%.

[Jaworowski's conclusion that the IPCC handling of data is bad science is true. The 83 year shift to plot Siple ice core data and Mauna Loa data contiguously is enough to arouse a modern high school graduate's suspicions. However, Jarowowski's diagram (Figure (2b)) is an incomplete reconstruction of the IPCC chart (Third Assessment Report, p. 201, Figure 3.2b)). After all, what counts is just what's in the IPCC Reports. The IPCC shows coherence too with Law Dome, Adelle Land, and South Pole data streams. Did the IPCC calibrate each of the traces into agreement? Probably it did, judging by the 83 year shift. Were the time calibrations all the same? Is there a pattern to the necessary calibrations?

[Before any government accepts the IPCC reports as legitimate, the IPCC should be oblliged to make all its data freely available over the Internet in text format. It should also make its entire bibliography similarly available, since it does not quote from its copyrighted sources nor does it cite the origins of its referenced material. A full exercise of the Freedom of Information Act is needed. Let the UN buy the rights to all its references and give them away as a down payment on the $30 trillion it thinks the world should spend for tankage and suppression of a benign and beneficial gas.

[Jaworoski's concern about data calibration is a slip knot in the rope with which to hang the IPCC. Assuming it might ever respond, it could argue its way out of the predicament with calibration excuses. This is analogous to what it did when, after first claiming that Vostok proved that CO2 caused global warming, it learned that the CO2 lagged the temperature. It invented the naked model that while CO2 may not have initiated global warming, it surely amplified it.

[Similarly, since the IPCC and the Consensus on Climate have no capability to reproduce or predict climate, they re-targeted their mission to model climate change. Accuracy in calibration is less demanding in a model for climate change. This is weasel wording, not science.

[Jaworowski's conclusion that the CO2 has had no effect on climate agrees with other analyses. As he observes, large surges in CO2 did not cause a runaway effect. He could say the same thing about the full greenhouse effect. Through ignorance of feedback, a failure to understand stability, and its failure to model the solar wind, clouds and albedo, the IPCC has exaggerated both effects to create a global catastrophe out of whole cloth.

[The Consensus on Climate succumbed to the Delicate Blue Planet model learned in K-3, and failed to appreciate and model Earth's conditionally stable state.]

[RSJ: Hypography Science Forums commentary is welcome, and I am happy to pass on the link.

[In the commentary, you correctly observed,

[Maintaining a single blog is tasking. Sometimes I run a month late researching and composing an answer, and I have been experimenting with quicker posts with promises to answer. In this blog I can respond more or less in a threaded, dialog style to minimize the burdensome restatements. More importantly, the objective of this initial topic in the Rocket Scientist's Journal is to build a self-contained, lasting resource of scientific criticism on the Anthropogenic Global Warming model. The policy is to post all civil comments and to reply, regardless of credentials. You post at the risk of minor edits and in extreme cases, ridicule.

[So, please post any comments or discussion to this site for a fair and honest, if slow, reply. Feel free to extract what you might from anywhere. Links are welcome, but please quote what is important so the reader can follow the argument on a single page. The IPCC routinely relies on citations to papers not freely available or not searchable. This is poor scientific writing, unnecessary, and excessively burdensome on the reader. Copyright material is subject to the fair use exclusion by which it may be freely quoted for the purposes of criticism, commentary, or reporting.

[With that said, here are a couple of comments on the postings in the Science Forum.

[Some readers have not recognized that The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide paper analyzes one particular data record, the Vostok ice core data. It is a paleontological record, and so the reader should not expect that the resulting model would have any manmade component. The important new result is the extent to which solubility in water accounts for this ancient record. The analysis has implications for the modern era, of course, because nothing suggests that the science of climate processes changed since Fourier invented the greenhouse model or Keeling his Curve. A massive river of CO2 is flowing around the globe, but just not yet through the GCMs.

[The IPCC GCMs fail to account for the record. They fail to model the circulation of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean and return. They fail to model the Great Conveyor Belt (less accurately known as the thermohaline circulation (THC)) as the main engine of CO2.

[The IPCC GCMs fail, too, to account for the ice ages (not in the Vostok record) or the glacial epochs (some of which are in the Vostok record). A scientific model that doesn't account for all the data in its domain is doomed to be a conjecture. The GCMs either need to be restated in such a way as to objectively exclude the known record, or be revised to account for that record, even if the triggering events are unknown. That is to be valid, the GCMs need to produce ice ages and glacial epochs, even if the timing is off.

[Climatologists have put forth an accounting for the Little Ice Age, resulting in controversy and the disparaging Hockey Stick appellation. What the critics say, and this may have support in the IPCC reports, is that instead of having the models reproduce a Little Ice Age-like event, the climatologists calibrated away the whole event! In the same way, the self-proclaimed Consensus on Climate calibrated away the variations in the CO2 record to make it fit the preconceived notion that the Keeling Curve represents global CO2. See RSJ, "Gavin Schmidt's Response to the Acquittal of CO2 Should Sound the Death Knell for AGW", comment from Sunsettommy dated 11/26/07, and posted today.

[As to peer review, this is now the coward's refuge. The peer review process is broken, and nowhere so badly as in this field. Climate journals are under control of the Consensus on Climate, and they have a long record of failing to publish criticism. See RSJ, The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, response to Jeff Steward, dated 3/22/07. Furthermore, the peer review process is far too slow. DARPA founded the Internet on the need to improve technical communications. Let it be so. Posting a paper on the Internet is publication.

[The observation that the IPCC Reports are not peer reviewed stands as a counterpoint to the claim that its criticism must be peer reviewed. Peer review is never self-review, no matter how many authors might be named. The response that the IPCC Reports make extensive reference to published data and published, peer reviewed papers is to the IPCC's discredit because the organization fails to quote sufficiently from those papers, because the papers are only available for a fee (science for sale), and because the sources often prove unsupportive of the claims. Examples available on request. I look forward to the Freedom of Information Act next year forcing the IPCC to make every citation and data source freely available, on line, and at least Mac accessible. Let the UN pay for any copyright fees.

[Thank you for asking InfinteNow to justify some of his accusatory comments. You missed a few of his excesses. He first quotes from the Abstract, then claims that it "opens the entire presentation". Actually, Part I, Introduction does that. He again quotes from the Abstract to a paper critical of the IPCC results, and points to a link to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to show that results of the paper are wrong. He accuses me of "classic denialist tactics", a term he freshly minted without example or definition. He objects to the Introduction stating that the climatologists have been unable to reproduce the ice ages and glacial periods, providing two entirely irrelevant links.

[The question of the presentation of data is not so much graphical as it is substituting eyeball correlation of snippets of smoothed data for numerical calculations (and presentation) of correlation. The problem is one of quantitative signals in noise. It's not a matter of "doesn't this look convincing held this way"?

[InfiniteNow lifts single sentences out of The Acquittal to say they are unsupported. Then he lifts another to say, "It doesn't matter how many times he says the same thing. It's still unsupported and without basis in evidence." He never mentions the Vostok record or the data analysis, though. This is an exquisite example of out-of-context argumentation. It is snide.

[For more on the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, see RSJ, "On Why CO2 Is Known Not To Have Accumulated in the Atmosphere & What Is Happening With CO2 in the Modern Era". You might also be interested in the following recently posted by me in response to comments on another website.

[RSJ: The true hazard of Global Warming: getting burned by a colleague. The main cause of warming appears to be friction between believers and skeptics.

[Shame on the Associate Professor for interrupting your lecture. Common courtesy if not professional courtesy requires that he bring his concerns to your attention in private.

[I assume from your description of the event that the Associate Professor was not just defending his department's economic interest in its rice bowl, but instead was trying to control information given to students. That is indoctrination, not teaching, and that, too, is to his deep discredit.

[The Associate Professor's action suggests yet another defect in his makeup: he is a believer in a scientific model. He needs some training himself in the principles of science and therefore how to teach science. It is about models of the real world with predictive power. It is not about belief systems. Science is the objective branch of knowledge; it is not about the false attributes of explanation and description, for they are subjective. Nothing is wrong with a scientist having beliefs -- that would be unavoidable. What is wrong is a scientist's failure to separate his beliefs from his science, or even science in general.

[I would also quibble with your claim to be a scientific skeptic only because it is redundant. An essential virtue in a scientist is skepticism. As this applies to the Associate Professor, he should have welcomed all expressions of skepticism, especially yours, as challenges to his model of the real world. Scientific models only advance to theories to the extent they can be validated, and responding to skepticism is a start.

[He should have raised his hand and the end of your lecture to thank you for a most interesting talk. He should have expressed his general disagreement, and invited the students to enroll in his department's class for what he considers better considered viewpoints.

[As an aside, my model for the optimum university emphasizes debate, not lecture. This is the How To Think University, not the What To Think Academy. Proponents of views should be obliged alternatively to defend their views, if they happen to have been revealed, and those of the opposition with equal proficiency. Earned debate points would out rank subject matter proficiency for advancement. The catch here is to create debatable topics, and that's hard to do with algebra and plate tectonics. It's not so hard with evolution, global warming, and the philosophy and ethics of science.

[Just as I don't like belief systems, I'm not a fan of expert opinions, even Reid Bryson's. Give him credit instead for the model his has built, the results it has achieved, and the reasoning behind it. In the end, though, there would be no climate crisis but for the IPCC, and the only way to defeat that movement successfully is to debunk its modeling. Alternative theories just won't do. The predictions of all models are on the climate scale, a lifetime in the future. So alternative models will be weighed against the Consensus models according the number of hands raised.

[You said "water was one thousandth as important as water", surely intending carbon dioxide to be one thousandth as important as water. [On review of your slides, Bryson's units are feet, not meters.] The number is unimportant and somewhat debatable. The transcendent problem with this observation is that it is in the context of a particular model for climate: the greenhouse effect, which is actually the open-loop greenhouse effect.

[I submit that Earth resides in conditionally stable states, not to be upset by a slug of greenhouse gas and its alleged positive feedbacks. It is not well-modeled as a "Delicate Blue Planet" with "tipping points" accessible to man. Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), Box 10.1, p. 775; see also Third Assessment Report (TAR), ¶7.1, p. 421.

[Instead, the surface temperature is controlled by the negative feedback of cloud albedo. This is not even recognized, let alone modeled, by the IPCC. The Consensus on Climate discusses feedback extensively, but in the end doesn't even understand the concept. Except for accidental feedback in its radiative forcing GCMs, its feedback loops consist of correlation vectors between elements of the climate. Compare its diagrams of feedback loops, TAR, Figures 7.4, 7.6-7.8, pp. 439-454, with any text on feedback control systems. The IPCC's GCMs cannot model clouds, and so it models albedo as a constant. It does not and cannot close the loop between warming and increased cloud and cloud albedo.

[If asked to compute the closed loop gain, the IPCC would be at a loss. With an albedo sensitivity to temperature too small to be detected in the current state of the art, the greenhouse effect may be reduced from the levels predicted by the IPCC by an order of magnitude.

[Consequently, fine tuning the contributions of greenhouse gases to global warming is waste heat in the unmasking of the IPCC.

[You won't be burned at the stake, but your career will be unless we put out the fire. A well-balanced debunking on the other hand has genuine career promise.

[Except for one insertion, the comments above are without the benefit of your presentation. It can be found at http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/nemostone-32224-Presentation-TAMU-Geosciences-Students-Globa-Slide-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24-25-26-27-Earle-Stone-Dept-Ch-global-ppt-powerpoint/. Here is a full response to your slides. I hope it is helpful.

[Slide 2: compares climate changes on Mars and Triton to Earth. Climate modeling by analogy is doomed to be a conjecture. Earth's climate is primarily a thin byproduct of our unique, liquid phase oceans, significant in the ratios of their heat capacities. We are more likely to be visited by a life-snuffing calamity, internal or external (but natural), before we confirm the existence of another Class M planet.

[Slide 3: sea ice changes in 20 years. Scientific models are notoriously scale dependent, from thermodynamic, unmeasurable, conceptual macroparameters down to microparameters for chemical reactions and cloud formation. In the middle are the human sensible parameters like those of weather. Global warming is a thermodynamic, macroparameter problem involving global parameters that cannot be directly measured, especially the global mean surface temperature (GMST), and the global mean albedo. If you were to picture Earth's climate (i.e., GMST) on a single slide for most of its existence, you would see that the climate has yet to turn around from the warming from the last ice age 2 Myrs ago. If you did the same thing for the period covering the Vostok record, Earth is still warming from the last glacial epoch 20,000 years ago. A graph for the 2000 year period of the Christian calendar shows Earth warming since the Little Ice Age (erased by the IPCC) about 200 years ago. Viewed on these scales, yes, Virginia, the climate is warming. Ice pack changes over 20 years seem like a weather phenomenon or a minor trend. Does the ice pack breathe in and out as the ozone hole might? Can we extrapolate from sea ice to total ice?

[Slides 4-6: infrared spectra. Infrared spectra are sure important, especially if the greenhouse effect is! But the greenhouse effect is held in check, and the spectra are not macroparameters. A net global effective irradiance, absorption, and albedo (i.e., the Bond albedo) should suffice to swamp spectral fine structure considerations. CO2 is not "evenly distributed". That is a major assumption of the IPCC so that it can interpret Mauna Loa data as global. A massive river of CO2 circles the globe, 16 times as great as ACO2, beginning mainly in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific, laying down a plume across Mauna Loa, and gradually working its way along mean atmospheric circulation patterns, dispersing while being reabsorbed by the cooler ocean, descending to depths at the poles for a millennium journey back to the Eastern Equatorial Pacific. The IPCC puts the latitudinal gradient at 10 ppm, but, alas, with no ratio units such as "per degree" or "per 90 degrees".

[Slides 7 & 8: two decades of tropospheric and stratospheric temperature anomalies. The parameter of interest lies at the bottom of the troposphere. Don't the stratospheric measurements show the featured upper atmosphere is irrelevant?

[Slide 9: ten hottest and ten coldest years and the GISS surface temperature graph. Weather is the noise of climate. It's difficult to get excited about warm seasons, or the number of hot or cold days in some period. Such considerations distract the lay person from the climate problem. They should be pooh-poohed. The full graph, though, is an objective start at making climate estimates out of weather measurements. What is the outlier datum around 2100?

[Slide 11: greenhouse gas proportions. Good chart to show IPCC's gamesmanship in pushing aside water vapor. Where does condensed water vapor, i.e., clouds, fit in this budget?

[Slide 12: relative greenhouse values of H2O vs. CO2. The data and quote are good, but the slide over-emphasizes Bryson's credentials. Science is never decided by experts, by voting, or by consensus forming. Honor the experts, but don't train student's to rely on them or to compare expertise. The odds are the best of us will be proved wrong one day anyway as science advances, one honored man at a time. Credentials are nice but carry no scientific weight.

[Slide 13: Beck's discovery of omitted CO2 data. Beck has made a nice contribution here. See RSJ response to Sunsettommy on 11/26/07 in "Gavin Schmidt's Response to the Acquittal of CO2 Should Sound the Death Knell for AGW". Beck shows that the IPCC selected data to fit its model. (Vostok is not spelled with a c.) Contrary to the slide, the Vostok record has profound implications to climate modeling and how the IPCC got so far off track. This should also serve as a fine example to students about cause and effect vs. correlation. The record was the smoking gun for climatologists -- at first. It proved that CO2 causes global warming, just as Keeling, Revelle, and Fourier had predicted. Then, whoops! Someone checked, and the CO2 substantially lagged temperature. Why then are the two correlated? The answer is that the CO2 is produced from the ocean, confirmed by the solubility curve shape of CO2 concentration with respect to temperature. Now we have a new datum to which the GCMs must be faithful - the outgassing of CO2, appropriately shaped like the complement of the solubility curve, and 16 times the ACO2 emissions. The GCMs need a trip back to the drawing board.

[Slide 14: Sherlock Holmes on scientific method. Actually, the scientific method has a number of steps in the development of a model, but the ordering is unimportant. Nothing is wrong with a conjecture for which one next seeks to accumulate relevant data. Philosopher Feyerabend rejected the existence of the scientific method altogether, in large part because he conceived of the method as an ordered procedure. He was wrong. A related sin of the IPCC is the selection of data that fit the model. That is another nail for the IPCC coffin.

[Slide 15: imperceptible Kyoto protocol gains. Imperceptible is quite right, but not the 0.05ºC. The Kyoto protocol effects would be unmeasurable in the background of variable natural forces. Even if one were to qualify the claim with the stock phrase, "all other things being equal", the effects predicted by current models (the only reasonable source for the 0.05ºC figure) are open loop and are an order of magnitude too great in their temperature sensitivity to greenhouse gases. All other things being constant, the Kyoto protocol presumably will cost $30 trillion for 0.005ºC maximum gain by 2050. To whom should I submit my bill for a finder's fee?

[Slide 16: random citations. What is the point of this slide? Slides 15, 16, and 17 stray off into socio-political views of counteracting AGW, and are sure to inflame atmospheric science associate professors. Your presentation was making inroads into showing that the threat was a phantom. Now you give the threat unwarranted credence by considering alternatives such as other uses for the money and the impending ice age threat.

[Slide 17: man and the environment. Hang on to the soot. Unlike the imaginary Venus-like state, Snowball Earth is a known state.

[Slide 18: energy efficiency and albedo. As I suggested in response to your post of 9/6/07, the best treatment of energy use is economic. Don't ban pollution; tax it and the market will take care of the problem. The albedo analysis is interesting, but incomplete and relatively unimportant for a couple of reasons. You show only surface albedo by surface type without the corresponding relative area of the type. Atmospheric albedo is three times as large as the total, effective surface albedo. Most important is that almost all the surface albedo is static, while the atmospheric albedo has a component proportional to surface temperature. The static part does not contribute to albedo feedback, but the temperature dependent part while quite small nonetheless has a strong negative feedback effect against global warming from any source. It is the latter that puts Earth in a conditionally stable climate state. GCMs on the other hand are unstable.

[Slide 19: Benford's solutions to an implicit global warming problem. What does "a 0.5% change" in albedo mean? Is that a percent of the 30%, or does it stand for 29.5% or 30.5%? Albedo estimates run from around 28% to maybe 36% or 37%. How much of the albedo range is measurement accuracy and how much is albedo variation? Regardless, global albedo is barely known to one significant figure. In the end, what counts in modeling is the global mean albedo, which is unmeasurable. But as your text says, a minute change can have a profound effect. These considerations don't affect Benford's planetary defense mechanisms, but they toss IPCC model results to the winds. What is your expected result from putting iron filings in the Arctic Ocean? Is the idea to interfere with the thermohaline circulation?

[Slide 20: meddling with a complicated open system. What is the meaning of the word "open"? Open as in open loop? Open as in a thermodynamic model? Is the system complicated, or is the model? Do you contend a successful model for the climate must be complicated?

[Slides 21 & 22: automobile experimental technology. This treatment is simplistic, featuring a small part of the technology as positive with respect to a phantom threat. Instead, teach the student to estimate life cycle costs, or energy usage, or cost of ownership of each candidate. Take the hydrogen fuel cell car for example. Will the hydrogen be produced from electricity generated by low efficiency, free air burning of coal? What are the fuel costs? What are the development costs of the vehicle and of fuel distribution, and how might they be recovered? What are the tax consequences? What are the manufacturing costs at various rates of production? What are the costs in disposal of the fuel cells at the end of life or after accidents? What are the costs or gains as a result of differing performance? We can do the same thing with homes considering the initial costs and life cycle costs comparing well-insulated sealed construction with minimal insulation, well ventilated styles, and here we might add in health costs. The student should learn to make trade studies and to resist the temptation of a single attractive parameter. Knowing how to build a better automobile is for a few skilled engineers. Knowing what questions to ask is a matter of science literacy for everyone. Brilliant engineers cannot compensate for stupid legislators. The converse is not true.

[Slides 24 & 25: alternatives to fossil fuels. These are more examples of technological solutions to a purely political problem, and they give credence to the phantom AGW threat. No greenhouse gas, much less benign and beneficial CO2, poses a threat. Sensible technologies to pursue are nuclear power (see next slide) and economical recovery of shale oil.

[Slide 26: alternative nuclear technologies. The implication here is that only nuclear fuels are finite. Does the illegible chart suggest that nuclear technology is at some limit of efficiency? Here's a hot link to a legible copy and the full article: http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsSA1205.pdf. Why do we care about waste heat? The chart assumes again that CO2-free energy is a positive outcome. The chart implies that storage is problematic. Here is a great place for students to practice honing a healthy skepticism.

[Slide 27: we are not claymation chickens. Isn't this the work of Nick Park and Peter Lord, and shouldn't you give attribution? Who are the "we [who] are not chickens"? Remove the politics? Through science literacy we might steer politics into some semblance of rationality. Politics was removed from the scene of energy use and environmental protection under Communism and in the emergence of the Japanese industrialization, one at the expense of economic development, and the other to the great eastward shift of economic prosperity. Meanwhile Eastern Europe and Tokyo Bay became Technicolor nightmares of pollution. Does a positive example exist anywhere for the removal of politics? Is this the familiar call for the chickens to rise up? Are the Kyoto Accords, soon to be the Bali Accords, an example of international political interference, or of chickens rising up? Or, do the chickens represent legislators? We do have "the time" so long as the Legislatures don't panic. And I agree we have strong capabilities. But, to do what? Switch to alternative fuels, or demonstrate why a switch has no climatic effect? This presentation did not set forth any well-defined problem in need of a solution, except to head off the AGW panic and its instigators, which the slides obfuscated.

[RSJ: Thermohaline is a word derived from combining forms for heat and the oceanic term for salt. Since in the IPCC model, the most important factor in AGW is CO2, and since the THC is a major conveyor of CO2, the name thermohaline is rather obsolete. Your diagram and later text makes clear the salt component, but at the first mention you say it carries water and heat.

[This is a helpful if dated diagram. There might be an animated version on the 'Net. The one you chose doesn't quite fit the recent measurements by Takahashi, as shown by the IPCC in the Fourth Assessment Report, p. 523, Figure 7.8, which has the major uptake of CO2 located around the poles and the major outgassing of CO2 located in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific. Some climatologist should redraw the thermohaline circulation accordingly.

[You might want to mention a few other things about the circulation. Waters moving poleward on the surface are cooled, absorbing more and more CO2 along the way. Waters at the pole are heavily laden with CO2, helping drive the circulation down and forward. As the water descends, the water becomes under-saturated because of the pressure increase and the loss of heat to the deep waters. When the water is driven back to the surface it is warmed to tropical temperatures, so it is oversaturated and the CO2 is instantly released. This is the soda pop phenomenon with regard to both temperature and pressure.

[A major challenge to the AGW model is for the Consensus to justify its conclusion that the Mauna Loa data represent the global concentration of CO2. One thing the Consensus needs to overcome is the location of Mauna Loa in the plume of the major outgassing from the ocean. Therefore, the THC needs to be placed correctly in three dimensions to support the challenge.

[The 1/7th calculation is good, but that is due to the ocean alone. Terrestrial flux of CO2 is 20% larger than the ocean (according to the IPCC), so the total life of CO2 is already down to a mean of about 3 years. The figure of 1.5 years includes the exchange of CO2 with leaf water. These figures are all found in the IPCC reports, as is the lifetime formula.

[If we could visualize the stream of CO2 through the atmosphere, it should look like the circulation on one of the gas planets. The stream is concentrated at the sources and sinks, and diffuses in between. Spiral stripes circle the globe and move poleward.

[On the Global Warming Skeptics web site, the last sentence preceding the Carbon Dioxide Stream figure is garbled. The words up and to are run together in the third paragraph after that figure. Two paragraphs later "too merely indicate" should be "merely to indicate"

[The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide doesn't say anything about volcanoes or the volcanic nature of Hawaii. What it does say is that the plume of the Eastern Equatorial Pacific outgassing flows across Hawaii because of the Hadley cells which rise along the Equator and descend upwind of Hawaii into the trade winds. Also without more study, one cannot say that Hawaii now sits directly in that plume. The plume wanders back and forth seasonally with the winds. Hawaii may actually sit on the edge of the plume so that the well-known seasonal winds shifts directly cause a seasonal shift in the measured CO2 concentration.

[For the record, the IPCC calculates the CO2 budget in a special way. It assumes the natural CO2 is in equilibrium. It assumes that the build up at Mauna Loa, assumedly representing global CO2, is therefore all manmade. Since the build-up is only half the total, calculated anthropogenic emissions, man's emission account for half the buildup. This is poppycock -- the 50% figure. ACO2 mixes immediately into the atmospheric reservoir of CO2, slightly lowering the isotopic ratio of 14C:13C:12C. Thereafter, the processes of the solubility pump and ocean chemistry treat the whole mixture alike, with a minor exception for some plants that prefer one isotope of carbon over another. The solubility pump cannot distinguish natural CO2 from ACO2. The IPCC model implies that the solubility of the two is different.

[Your suggestion for a graph of CO2 across the planet would be delightful, but alas not realizable today. The data just don't exist. The IPCC reports a data network of just 131 stations, and I know of only about eight of them to be available on the Internet. A world of study is needed even on those data because of the investigators extensive calibration. This graph would be a version of the visualization of CO2 flow around the planet that I suggested. Perhaps this will come to pass through satellite imaging in the near future. Some climatologist should cartoon the concept.

[Similar remarks hold for the similar graphics you suggest of the Solubility Pump predictions and the raw data. This is all in the best traditions of science. Time will tell.]

[RSJ: Your question touches on the core of science - the scientific method. The objective of climatologists is to build a model for the climate with predictive power. It is not to compare now with then. The model initialized for the past must produce the appropriate climate to some degree better than guesswork.

[If the model includes the past but fails to reproduce the past, it is invalid. The model must be repaired or discarded. If the past doesn't apply to the model, it must have objective criteria by which it excludes the past.

[Your billions of tonnes of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere is clearly a reference to the nearly 6 GtC attributed annually to anthropogenic CO2 (ACO2), and that certainly was not in existence in the paleontological record. But it is a negligible distinction for several reasons, and it does not cause the GCMs to exclude the paleo record.

[o         ACO2 is chemically and physically indistinguishable from natural CO2 (nCO2). They differ only in their isotopic ratio, 14C:13C:12C. The two mix immediately in the atmosphere to create a different mixture with an intermediate isotopic ratio. Some plants are known to discriminate (called fractionate) between 13C and 12C, but it is a trivial difference on the scale of climate. No other process distinguishes between the two species of CO2. There is no way to discriminate between old and new CO2 of either species. Differences in 14C might have some bearing, but it has no effect on the carbon cycle.

[o         The nCO2 outgassed from the ocean (90 or more GtC/yr), let alone the total including emissions from the land (120 GtC/yr and leaf water (270 GtC/yr), swamp the 6 GtC/yr ACO2 contribution.

[Your reference to an event 251 million years ago would be an event measured by total atmospheric CO2 concentration on the scale of ice ages. However, that particular one is not included in the 14 events reported by the IPCC. See Figure 3.2, Third Assessment Report, p. 302. In each of these events, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 was substantially larger than the present. About nine of them were an order of magnitude greater than the Mauna Loa data. These events dwarf the catastrophe predicted by the Consensus on Climate. However, no data exists on this ice age scale to examine the relationship between CO2 and temperature, so these events can't affect the GCMs. They are not comparable to the GCM results, or to the small additions made by ACO2. An event measured by total CO2 concentration is not directly comparable to an event measured by a rate of emission any more than the total known oil reserves relates to the rate of pumping. A model is needed to make any connection.

[The analysis in The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, like the analysis in Solar Wind, El Niño/Southern Oscillation, & Global Temperature: Events & Correlations, has no accuracy limitation beyond the inevitable limits imposed by a finite stream of noisy, sampled data. The analysis is not a climate model. It assumes nothing about the fate of the ACO2, and it hypotheses nothing beyond the implication that the physics of the past is unchanged.

[The analysis does not as you suggest assume that the solubility of CO2 in water depends on the atmospheric concentration of CO2. The analysis instead shows that the natural CO2 concentration in the Vostok record depended on global temperature according to the complement of the known solubility relationship at one atmosphere, which depends primarily on temperature alone.

[This discovery from the Vostok record must have a profound effect on global climate models. It is a major, positive feedback not in the current GCMs. If the global surface temperature increases due to added CO2, the ocean will exacerbate that increase with additional CO2. The fact that CO2 in the paleo record lags global temperature is confirmation of the analysis.

[This major positive CO2 feedback from the ocean would make the climate unstable. (Note that the word feedback here means what is described above: because of the output temperature increase in the model, CO2 is added back to the input, external driving signal of added CO2.) But the paleo record shows increases in CO2 which did not produce an instability. The inevitable conclusion is that CO2 does not cause the feared greenhouse effect, hence CO2 is acquitted.

[I do not dispute the greenhouse effect. What is disputed is a GCM which produces an unstable climate because of the greenhouse effect. Such a model throws into doubt the competence of the modeler because the climate is in a quasi-stable state. Everything known about Earth and other planets is in a quasi-stable state, albeit with a finite life or past changes due to external events.

[What the GCMs omit is the stabilizing mechanism that prevents a greenhouse catastrophe. The best bet is the albedo effect. In particular, the stabilizing effect is the tiny but critical dependence of albedo on surface temperature because of clouds. The dependence is known to climatologists, but it is not included in the current rash of GCMs. The models are not capable of reproducing clouds, much less the cloud albedo. If they could, the Consensus would learn that the greenhouse effect is reduced by the closed loop gain, by which any increase in surface temperature reduces the solar radiation reaching Earth. Cloud albedo can reduce the greenhouse effect by an order of magnitude with an albedo sensitivity to temperature too small to be measured in the state of the art.

[The physics of why the ocean has not "absorbed about a third of anthropogenic CO2" is the subject of much of the Rocket Scientist's Journal. Here you can read why Mauna Loa does not represent the global CO2 concentration. And why CO2 does not accumulate in the atmosphere. And why ACO2 does not undergo significantly different processes than nCO2. RSJ accepts the IPCC number for the rate of emission of ACO2 and for the rate of CO2 concentration increase at Mauna Loa, but disputes that the cause and effect conclusion about ocean absorption. The nCO2 cycle is not in equilibrium, being absorbed as fast as it is outgassed, while ACO2 is absorbed at a slower rate to account for the Mauna Loa increases. But this is how the climate is modeled in the GCMs. To the extent that global CO2 might be increasing, it is due to, and not the cause of, global warming.]

[RSJ: Apparently you've heard of it, but disparage it for some reason. If you're an AGW advocate, it must be terribly uncomfortable for you.

[You must dispute one of the following; which is it? Clouds have been observed. Clouds have been observed to reflect sunlight. These two factors establish the existence of cloud albedo. Cloud albedo is not modeled in the current rash of Global Catastrophe Models.]

[RSJ: Why must I propose a better measure, by which I presume you mean a better measure of global CO2 concentration? Why would I even want to estimate such a parameter? The AGW modelers would want to do that. The best analysis of the data available shows that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, so why look for a better estimate of its global concentration? The best hypothesis about the climate is that the same conclusion is true for the entire greenhouse effect, and including especially water vapor.]

[RSJ: The only data worth examining is that relied on or explicitly omitted by the IPCC, as determined from its reports. The only climate crisis is that created by the IPCC and its self-proclaimed Consensus on Climate.

[You accept what the IPCC says about the paleo record, then you leave the IPCC to introduce a couple of other geological scale events of unknown pedigree, then return to the IPCC to rely on its models. In this process, you claim to have validated the two events. You make this validation by the AGW-doubling-CO2 conjecture. Even the rash Consensus on Climate doesn't claim that its GCMs are valid on the paleo (i.e., Vostok) scale, much less the geological (Ice Age) scale.

[The 251 MYA and 55 MYA measurements may indeed be wrong. Certainly the IPCC climate sensitivity of 3 ± 1.5ºC per doubling of CO2 is wrong. CO2 has an imperceptible effect on climate.

[Of course, the other mechanism for climate warming is right in front of your eyes.]

[RSJ: The IPCC claims that the ocean absorbs about 92 GtC/yr. I rely on IPCC data at every juncture, and occasionally bring in additional but not conflicting data. The objective is to hang the IPCC with its own rope.

[The model for the absorption of CO2 is presented in The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide. Whether it explains the process is a subjective question, but apparently it doesn't work for you. That's why the scientific method is not about either explanation or description, but about objectivity, validation, and ultimately prediction. The model I presented invalidates the GCMs, and hence their predictions. The Consensus needs to go back to the drawing board.]

[RSJ: The assumptions about equilibrium are made by the Consensus. I dispute those assumptions. At no time was the global temperature or the global concentration of CO2 known to be in a state of equilibrium.

[One of the problems with the GCMs is that they ignore the initial condition of the on-going warming of the climate. They initialize with an equilibrium budget. See Fig. 1.2, TAR, p. 90. Then they compound the error by assuming that natural CO2 is in equilibrium, so to model climate on the margin responding to just Anthropogenic CO2. The on-going warming thus appears to be attributed to the ACO2.

[No claim is made here that the increase in CO2 is solely due to anything. The claim is that the oceanic outgassing varies with global temperature according to the complement of the solubility curve. That it did during the Vostok record is shown quite well by the data. Assuming that the physics of the ocean hasn't changed, the outgassing today should be increasing as the climate warms.

[The temperature-dependent outgassing is likely what accounts for the record at Mauna Loa because the observatory sits in the plume of the greatest locale of outgassing, the Eastern Equatorial Pacific. The seasonal modulation of the Mauna Loa record is likely caused by the seasonal wind pattern there, moving the plume back and forth across the Islands.

[Accordingly, the GCMs need to be repaired.]

[RSJ: Not quite, and fear not. The theory of solubility is that the partial pressure of the gas in the atmosphere and of the gas in the water quickly adjust to be equal. This is called equilibration. We know neither, however.

[The IPCC doesn't handle this problem well. It defines pressure in the TAR Appendix in terms of Pascals (Pa, one Newton/meter^2) on p. 869 and in bars (bar) or millibars (mb) (p. 870), and it provides the unit conversion factors. But then it discusses the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in the dimensions of concentration, parts per million (ppm). TAR, p. 200. This is common in the literature, too, and it may have led to your confusion.

[The tropical waters, and especially the Eastern Equatorial Pacific, are the most affected by global warming, and not as you say, the cold waters. This is because so long as Earth has ice caps and liquid surface oceans, the cold waters are in equilibrium with ice and so are at a constant temperature of about 0ºC.

[Whether the physics of solubility might be better modeled with partial pressures or with such refinements as salinity is irrelevant to the Acquittal of CO2. The known physics of solubility is sufficient. It represents the curvature of CO2 with temperature better than any polynomial fit. The solubility curve is the equivalent of about a fifth or sixth degree polynomial on the Vostok data set. However, the solubility curve extends beyond that domain of the ice core temperature measurements, so it has none of the physically impossible results that polynomials give beyond that domain.

[This curvature of CO2 concentration with global temperature needs to be incorporated in the AGW models, even if a better model for solubility might be possible.]

[RSJ: The 251 MYA event corresponds to a notable mass extinction, now popularly attributed to an asteroid. The 55 MYA event corresponds to the Palaeocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). I have been unable to find either event or the modeling you describe in the IPCC reports. Apparently these events are part of neither the GCMs nor their data on which the IPCC and the Consensus rely, but are someone else's model. Therefore, these results are irrelevant to the promised global catastrophe, and not worth debugging. Just out of curiosity, where is this modeling published, and does it corroborate the GCMs? Are you the one who is doing the hypothesizing that you mention?

[I don't see how the volcanic activity and the fires might be similar to the modern state of the climate. ACO2 is swamped by nCO2; CO2 is swamped by water vapor; the total, the greenhouse effect, is controlled by the sensitivity of albedo to surface temperature to a negligible level. On the other hand, some severe volcanic activity appears to have snuffed out much of the life on Earth.

[A note of caution: when reviewing data, be sure that it has not been calibrated into agreement with other data or with some preconceived conjecture. The IPCC and the Consensus are guilty of this often unacceptable practice. This is especially true of the calibration of proxy data, and in the matching of CO2 records from around the globe.]

[RSJ: The greenhouse effect is not logarithmic. The greenhouse effect enhanced by feedbacks as modeled by the IPCC and the Consensus in their radiative forcing models exhibits a logarithmic effect. TAR, p. 93. You left out all the qualifiers. In fact, the greenhouse effect, much less the CO2 effect, is negligible. The IPCC left out the albedo dependence on surface temperature.

[Your plausible scenario is not the IPCC's, so it's not worth debugging.]

[RSJ: For the IPCC treatment of the Milankovitch cycles and the CO2 lag, see TAR ¶3.3.2, p. 203. The IPCC says that indeed some event other than an increase in CO2 must have initiated the warming periods, but that the CO2 amplified it. That amplification is not evident in the data. The IPCC says that the Milankovitch cycles are "Implicated as a key factor" in global climate. Bold added. They are not a cause because some warming periods expected from the orbital variations failed to materialize in the climate record. As to changes in solar radiation, the IPCC and the Consensus have found those changes to be too small to account for observed climate changes. TAR, Summary for Policy Makers, p. 9; 4AR, ¶9.5.1.1, p. 705.

[The IPCC considered another factor arising from changes in the sun - variations in the solar wind. It dismissed this phenomenon for lack of evidence. The evidence, though, exists. See Solar Wind, El Niño/Southern Oscillation, & Global Temperature: Events & Correlations for the evidence the IPCC overlooked.

[Note that correlation here properly supports a physical model for cause and effect.]

[RSJ: Why must these be included? How would they help debunk the AGW conjecture? Once the GCMs are repaired to include the already discovered omissions, such as temperature dependent albedo and temperature dependent outgassing, then they might be ripe for disclosure of other errors.]

[RSJ: You need to replace your suspicion with skepticism. That is the scientific way.

[You knock down straw men of your own creation. You won't find a universal theory proposed here. Nor will you find here an example of correlation substituting for causation. Nor will you find a claim that curves tell the whole story.

[You misunderstand what is presented here to date. So far you have seen only analyses of errors and omissions by the IPCC and the Consensus on Climate.]

[RSJ: The measured lag, as stated in the Acquittal of CO2, has several peaks from which a characteristic number, 1073 years, is a fair representation and produces a desirable organizing of the scattered data. It tends to support the figure of 1200 years quoted from Wikipedia, which is used in the article only in passing discussion of the Carbon Dioxide Stream of Figure 23.

[The timescale of the mixing helps build the model for the The Acquittal of CO2, but it is not critical. The shape of the CO2 concentration with temperature is now known from the paleo record, and it shows that the ocean governs the concentration of atmospheric CO2 through well-known solubility effects. That this is connected to the THC (thermohaline circulation) is hypothesized from the CO2 flux volume, the uptake and outgassing spots on the globe, the geometry of the THC, and the time lag, measured and known from other sources.

[The Conveyor Belt as a phenomenon for further study should prove a fertile field to plow. For an interesting animated discussion of the circulation, see http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/thc/. The animation has the circulation well-focused at the polar waters where the circulation begins its characteristic descent, but it is not well-defined where it surfaces. This circulation needs to be integrated with what is known about the flux of CO2, as shown for example in the Fourth Assessment Report, Figure 7.8. Also the weight of dissolved CO2 might prove as significant as salinity in propelling the circulation.

[In any case, the THC is a physical/mechanical transport system, but not chemical. The entire circulation structure provides a dynamic reservoir for ions and molecules, a moving lunch counter and garbage disposal for chemical reactions from surface waters to the depths around the globe. To some unknown extent, those chemical reactions should have an effect on the concentration of molecular CO2, principally for the outgassing return to the atmosphere. However, those chemical reactions should not have any first order effects on the net rate of CO2 flux between atmosphere and ocean. The IPCC notions that chemical reactions put backpressure against the dissolution of CO2 in water, and that chemical reactions are age-dependent causing the life-expectancy of CO2 in the atmosphere to be decades to centuries, challenge basic physics.

[Expecting a first order model for the climate to be affected by details of the biological processes is unreasonable. A net flux between the physical/mechanical sphere and the biological sphere will suffice as at most a second order effect.]

[RSJ: Feel free!]

[RSJ: If a problem is truly economic, trust capitalism to find an optimum solution within the boundary conditions of the infrastructure and a free (i.e., auction-driven) market place. In that context, to work through an entrepreneurial endeavor, sound engineering and economics would be university goals of choice.

[On the other hand, the notion of public ownership of the air and water, by which the government taxes our effluents, is attractive. That puts pressure back on the capitalism to fix problems. Our approach too often has been over-kill: to ban, killing whole industries or forcing them off shore to pollute at will, and shifting problems to the criminal justice system. Half a problem solved is rarely any solution at all.

[Most hypothetically speaking, if the AGW problem were valid, then a carbon tax might be just the ticket. The problem is that legislators don't have the scientific literacy to see through the fraud, and getting them to tax is like pushing a car downhill. They just gather speed. Science literacy, healthy skepticism, and a little economics need to be K-12 goals. After the twelfth grade, most legislators are beyond reach.

[Legislatures are the poorest defenders of capitalism. So in today's environment, the technician needs to be extra sure the problem is both real and well-defined.]

[RSJ: You're welcome.]

[RSJ: McKitrick and Michaels 2007 is the next response in a dialog with the IPCC, which responded negatively to McKitrick and Michaels 2004 on the same subject. 4AR, ¶3.2.2.2, p. 244. McKitrick and Michaels 2007 correct an allegedly minor error in their 2004 paper, but conclude "the IPCC gridded data is [sic] contaminated by extraneous socioeconomic signals, a finding that is confirmed and strengthened in the present paper." P. 3. This gridded data set Climatologists use to initialize certain GCMs (4AR, ¶8.2.7, p. 607), and it comprises, at least at times, daily temperature data (4AR, ¶9.4.3.2, p. 698). Strictly speaking, that would not be interpreted to be daily temperature trend data, which McKitrick and Michaels analyze. Writers sometimes refer to temperature trend data simply as warming.

[Upon a couple of reads through the full paper, the math has all the earmarks of a sound and thorough approach, with a couple of exceptions. A full expert opinion would require copies of the data sets and a couple of months to reproduce the analysis. In any case, here are some problems with the 2007 paper.

[McKitrick and Michaels should have provided a link to temperature trend data in the IPCC reports, one which would show the importance the IPCC attaches to those data. The IPCC discussion seems rather thorough, mostly concentrated in 4AR, ¶3.2.2, pp. 241-245, but in the end troubled and inconclusive. The IPCC does report somewhat ambiguously that socioeconomic factors are statistically insignificant in the warming record. Clearly, the IPCC wants the best record of surface temperature possible just on scientific principles. What is not clear is the IPCC concern and need for accuracy for initializing its GCMs, as opposed to its concern for a warning system for impending global catastrophe.

[McKitrick and Michaels model the following equation:

[First, temperature and temperature differences are directly measurable as with thermometers and infrared sensors. I am unaware of any transducer that responds to temperature trends, so trends would not be "actually measured." Therein lies a problem.

[Temperature trend data are calculated from temperature data. This is called filtering or, in part, smoothing. Done properly, which is not terribly difficult, it can have the effect of reducing the variance (variability or noise) inherent in raw data. But if the trend calculations use overlapping raw data, for example, as in running averages, the filtering introduces color into the noise. Also where data samples are subject to common errors, as in calibration or registration errors, the measurement errors become colored. With colored noise, trends in the noise compete with trends in the underlying, or systemic, process to be analyzed. Where the sampling interval is itself noisy, as with synchronization or missing data problems, calculated trends have another component of error not present in the raw data. Engineers might recognize this problem in filtering as the "differentiation of noise", which good signal processing techniques assiduously avoid. A trend is a time or spatial rate involving the ratio of two random variables, and the analyst needs to be careful that the denominator is nearly noise free, as with perfect clocking of samples. The ratio of two random variables can behave quite badly, and can even be unstable.

[A second problem with filtering and smoothing is that samples of filtered random variables are likely to be correlated even when the raw random variables were not. The smoothed, nonzero population growth rate of nematodes is correlated with the smoothed, nonzero temperature trend.

[Good data reduction practices are not to rely on statistical analysis of filtered data. Instead, one should apply the statistical methods to the raw data, developing a model for the underlying system process, then extract the rate from the process model. I would like to see McKitrick and Michaels repeat their analysis on the raw temperature data, then apply their techniques to the removal of geographic, socioeconomic and other factors.

[In favor of McKitrick and Michaels work is the strength of their results. That is, their results should hold even if they had worked from raw data. On the other hand, the correlations, fits and rejections would have been even stronger had they used raw data. Additional information might be extracted from the data using the preferred method. The set of significant parameters might be brought even more into focus.

[Similar observations apply to the set of parameters McKitrick and Michaels chose for their surface processes and inhomogeneities. They used derived parameters calculated as rates, as in parameters expressed per capita and per unit area. The validation of their technique lies in their success, but I would have preferred a study including the numerators and denominators comprising the rates as independent variables.

[At the end of their analysis, McKitrick and Michaels compare "distributions of temperature trends" for (a) IPCC surface data, (b) satellite (Microwave Sounding Unit) tropospheric data, and (c) IPCC data filtered again by their results to remove residual socioeconomic effects. Figure 3, p. 11. They say, "The effect of removing the local distortions as estimated by the model is to bring the shape of the surface data distribution more closely into line with that of the satellite-measured lower troposphere data".

[First, a quibble to get the vocabulary right: the curves of Figure 3 are densities, not distributions. A distribution always runs from 0 to 1 (100%), increasing monotonically (i.e., maybe flat for awhile, but never decreasing). More importantly, as the number of samples increases (for real, physical variables) the distribution curve will converge to the underlying process distribution. That is not true for the densities!

[Also, the shape of the density histograms can be quite sensitive to the selection of the histogram interval. A little change in registration or a different selection of the width can have a sudden and unexpected effect on the shape of the envelope. This is not true for distribution histograms. But even at that, histograms are unnecessary, and an ill-advised source of data reduction error. What should be calculated is the cumulative number of samples less than or equal to every point on the abscissa, requiring just n calculations for n points.

[McKitrick and Michaels appear to have fit curves to the densities. They should recalculate using the cumulative number of samples for each parameter, fit a cumulative distribution curve to the cumulative plot, then differentiate the cumulative distribution curve to portray a density curve. Some of the wiggles in their density curves should disappear as data reduction artifacts. Comparing the distribution curves for the three parameters can remove other artifacts, such as insignificant tales. The curves should be compared for the bulk of the data, usually clustered around the means.

[McKitrick and Michaels say,

[I was unable to verify that the IPCC used gridded temperature trend data to initialize their models, as McKitrick and Michaels imply. A more reasonable initialization for the GCMs should be the local temperature, not the temperature trend.

[However, I do agree that wherever the IPCC has neglected a warming influence, that has contributed improperly to its model and to its conclusions about anthropogenic influences. The best example with the most profound effect is the IPCC's neglect of the cloud albedo.

[I agree with you that CO2 is not guilty. And changing the minds of believers is somewhat a pointless task. We must work on the subset of believers who forgot that science is not about belief, but about predictive power. We must work on the subset of climatologists who forgot that scientific models must fit all the data in their domain before making predictions. The IPCC is a ponderous, barnacle-covered supertanker with a cargo and crew of believers and non-skeptical scientists. Science is the tugboat that will eventually turn it.]

[RSJ: I compare your arguments to the IPCC reports for the reason I gave you in response to your post of 12/23/07: "The only data worth examining is that relied on or explicitly omitted by the IPCC, as determined from its reports. The only climate crisis is that created by the IPCC and its self-proclaimed Consensus on Climate."]

[RSJ: Our exchange so far hasn't used the phrase "pure correlation".

[Here's a restatement of some relevant points from my modeling that you have failed to discover. The solar wind affects Earth's mean cloud cover. The surface temperature also affects cloud cover variability, causing a dominant negative feedback that controls Earth's surface temperature. The concentration of CO2 is dominantly controlled by the ocean temperature.

[Your model of ACO2 increasing the air and sea concentration of CO2 is fine. It's just trivial. Consider the amount of ACO2 added to the amount of nCO2 added, and the share of CO2 as a GHG compared to water vapor. Then consider the possible effects of any GHG increase in light of the negative feedback of cloud albedo. Finally consider how little the GHG can affect climate compared to a little change in average cloud albedo. The AGW conjecture is way down in the noise.]

[RSJ: Your reference contradicts your summary:

[The base of CO2 appears to have been about 2000 ppm, unless you have some other meaning for "off a lower base" it was much higher than today's 370 ppm or so. Tanner et al also say,

[Your link of PT event -> atmospheric CO2 -> catastrophe, presumably the mass extinction, is contrary to your authority.]

[RSJ: You're trying "to see if the science is substantially correct"? By that you must mean the IPCC science! The answer to that is in. The IPCC is wrong on its modeling and its ultimate conclusions. According to Tanner, et al., CO2 at five times the present concentration could not have caused the PT event. Also five times as much CO2 did not produced the IPCC's feared "tipping point" leading to irreversible changes or catastrophe.

[Science postulates models with which to make predictions. The models first must fit all the data in their domain, or they are invalid. The GCMs are invalid. What the GCMs do predict is unprecedented and unreasonable in light of what is known about the past and about physics. Science needs to put a moratorium on this hunt for errors pending the next generation of GCMs. Meanwhile, government spending and voting to reduce carbon emissions should be seen as contraindicated, another pseudoscientific folly. Carbon dioxide is benign and beneficial. It is a greening agent, and probably the optimum effluent.]

[RSJ:Fantastic?

[RSJ: The IPCC is quite capable of understanding the papers posted here, and should have had the work done itself. Its Reports and the authorities it cites are rich in excellent science, written by many capable scientists. Its conclusions, though, are unwarranted, and they have distorted many of its authorities. Its promotion of what is no more than an incomplete conjecture for public policy is unethical.

[RSJ:A repeated theme on this blog is that there would be no climate crisis but for the IPCC, at least no rational crisis, nor any crisis which man could reasonably avert. The IPCC and its supporters promote anthropogenic global warming by models with gaping holes, and rely instead on an alleged consensus to promote political action.

[In an address to a Climate Action Summit in 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said,

[The IPCC declares without limitation,

[The IPCC comes right up to the edge of saying AGW is supported by a consensus. When it gets close, it resorts to a form of passive voice, saying its models are in agreement, or that a consensus exists within its models. On many fine points, the Reports clarify that no consensus exists, implying that on the larger scale consensus has been reached. IPCC supporters are not so cautious. See: Just what is this Consensus anyway?, which says "the IPCC report contains the consensus". It continues with four "main points", of which the first three are unqualified:

[http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86. See also, The Wall Street Journal vs. The Scientific Consensus. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/06/the-wall-street-journal-vs-the-consensus-of-the-scientific-community/. Statistical analysis of consensus, which "proves" the existence of the consensus by showing that 100% of peer reviewed papers in N Oreskes' sample "support the consensus view that a significant fraction of recent climate change is due to human activities." http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=80. Of course, what the survey supports is that peer-reviewed journals simply do not publish non-conformist papers.

[On 6/7/05, eleven prestigious science academies, including the National Academy of Sciences for the United States, signed an agreement calling for "prompt action to reduce the causes of climate change". Its note section begins,

[The RSJ reference to the IPCC report as the Consensus on Climate is well-supported. It should grate on everyone, scientist and politician alike, and every businessman, that a scientific body would rely on a consensus, real or alleged, to validate a conjecture, and to promote political action based on such a model. Its own authorities recognize that science does not advance by consensus-forming, but nonetheless the IPCC does so to teach politicians that there is no dispute, and "the science is in".

[As fallacious as science by consensus is, a counterargument based on a contrary consensus is equally fallacious. That applies to Seitz's list of 19,000 and Senator Inhoff's list of 400. Consensus forming is no part of the scientific method, and it should not be given credence by assembling a counter consensus. Also, that argument is off-target, disputing what the IPCC does not expressly state.

[Consensus formation is inevitable. It's human, and it happens all the time - until some individual comes up with a better model, or disproves the existing model. The old model is then discarded, or modified to accommodate the new. That is part of the scientific method.

[What is missing in the Schwarzenneggers, Gores, Hillarys, Obamas, and McCains is not scientific skill, but minimal scientific literacy. It's the kind of stuff that should be taught in K-12 to give citizens some protection against charlatans and quackery.

[The rest of your comment is omitted because it amounts to about 600 words copied almost verbatim from Tom Harris and John McLean, The UN Climate Change Numbers Hoax, 12/14/07, which is your citation to http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/968. The authors touch on Mann's Hockey Stick reduction, adopted by the IPCC in its Third Assessment Report, and criticized by McIntyre and McKitrick. Based on that reduction, the IPCC downgraded the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age to, at most, regional phenomena. See TAR, ¶2.3.3, pp. 133-136. McIntyre and McKitrick seem to have had some effect. In the Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC restores some credibility to these epochs, adding dates and a definition for the Little Ice Age, and here and there dispensing with quotation marks around the terms. Regardless, the acceptance of an erroneous Mann reduction is not a fatal flaw to the primary results of the IPCC model.

[Harris and McLean contains neither an alternative climate model nor a significant contradiction to the IPCC model. Their article deals mostly with the numbers game of consensus counting. It is a non-scientific distraction from this blog's developing objective: exposing the IPCC AGW model as invalid, based on its own data and omissions.]

[RSJ: The answer won't be known or knowable until the Fifth Assessment Report, likely another five years in the future. In the meantime, modelers will be free to experiment, publish in closed journals, repair their models into some semblance of consistency, and announce the new Consensus in the 5AR.

[Even then, don't expect the GCMs, built around vertical cells and radiative forcing, to be able in any straightforward manner to model the three-dimensional behavior of the THC or the global average cloud cover which is dependent on the hydrological cycle. Efficiency demands that climatologists come to appreciate the effects of cloud albedo first, for then they would lose any ardor for faithful modeling of the carbon cycle and the feedback-controlled greenhouse effect.]

[RSJ: Laymen aren't asked to be scientists. In this case, however, laymen are asked to make sacrifices on the scale of their economies, their health care systems, their national defense, and any other program competing for a major part of a nation's budget, in response to an unvalidated scientific model. You should have or should develop, or insist your government representative have or develop, a minimal scientific literacy, one sufficient to put that model on public trial. You should learn the differences between the grades of scientific models -- conjectures, hypotheses, theories, and laws - and the ethical imperative for scientists to urge public action on nothing less than an established theory. You should come to appreciate why the Anthropogenic Global Warming model is at most a mere conjecture. And why it is a scientific fraud growing to unprecedented proportions.

[But you have lots of time. No one is coming across the border to kill all the laymen. It's only capital -- your money and your industries -- perfectly expendable as waste.]

[RSJ: Good point. But as entertaining as the game may be, it's not match play decided by how many fans sit on each side of the field. Nor is it to be decided by a clutch of clever sportswriters. It's the strength and skill of the players in the contest.

[To the extent you make decisions by voting, you're on a random walk to doom and ruination. The same is true of decision-making by expert opinion. What is needed is objectivity, and that requires facts, not opinions, and the light of day.]

[RSJ: Let's characterize the problem. A group of scientists claim, based on modeling, that a calamity affecting all humanity is looming, and urge world governments, and especially the US, take immediate and extremely expensive action. Science would thus drive politics. The two fields, politics and science, are inextricably linked. What is the appropriate response for politicians?

[On the 4/18/08 morning show, Fox News Channel carried an interview by Brian Kilmeade of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, including the State's actions to reduce greenhouse gases. Brian asked the Governor's thoughts about the lack of consensus on climate warming, and what he knew that the critics did not. His answer: "I think that they know the reality, I think they are just trying to protect business." He might have meant "trying to protect American industrial might", but that hopeful interpretation is unlikely in light of the popular blacklisting of AGW skeptics. E.g., Greenpeace's exxonsecrets.org; realclimate.org.

[The proponents of AGW have scored political points by (1) proclaiming a false consensus, and (2) libeling all opposition by association or by ad hominems. Politicians in the majority need a sensitivity to both these practices. One prerequisite is a modicum of science literacy, which seems surprisingly lacking even among highly honored scientists.

[The AGW model is invalid, and it fails minimum scientific standards for use as a basis for public policy. Principles of science transcend any particular field of science, and must be satisfied. A model must fit all the data in its domain just to be a sensible conjecture. To be a hypothesis, I say it must advance at least one non-trivial prediction. A model has predictive power when a significant prediction is validated by experiment, and then it is a theory. And only then is it ethically suitable for public action.

[GCMs are scientific models, but they neither fit all the data nor contain a testable proposition, except the catastrophe a century from now. Short term discrepancies are weather, or are chalked up to climate variability. The models cannot be qualified for use to prevent the disaster. Politicians need enough science literacy to demand the AGW proponents validate their GCMs before any government acts on them.

[Beyond the missing prerequisites of science, the IPCC reports fail for abuses of data, inconsistencies, omissions, misperceptions, and exaggerations. Here's a sampler:

[In addition, the IPCC reports rely on thousands of citations to papers only available for a fee, and generally without sufficient quotations. The Freedom of Information Act should be imposed.

[Reputable scientists would have discovered these problems for themselves, and never have left them unresolved before going public. None of these questions is inherently incomprehensible to politicians. They need to know enough to demand the IPCC respond to each, and disallowing the IPCC the political defenses of consensus or expert qualifications.]

[RSJ: You're correct about 14C being absent in fossil fuel emissions. Also those emissions are low in 13C, and hence in δ13C, the ratio 13C/12C. The IPCC recognizes these facts as signatures of fossil fuel emissions. TAR, ¶3.1, p. 188. Nevertheless, the IPCC uses only δ13C to estimate the content of ACO2 in the record of CO2 concentration. For a discussion of δ13C see Stable carbon isotopes in atmospheric CO2, TAR, Box 3.6, p. 207. In the Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC shows Global emissions in GtC/yr between 1970 and 2005 and δ13C from Mauna Loa for the years 1981 to 2005 on a single, dual ordinate graph. 4AR, ¶2.3.1, Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Figure 2.3, p. 138. (These two references introduce the IPCC reliance on the isotopes of carbon. At the same time, they are also examples of abysmal scientific practices by the IPCC, but beyond the scope of and distracting from your questions.)

[The source of the Mauna Loa data is Keeling, C.D., A.F. Bollenbacher, and T.P. Whorf, 2005: Monthly atmospheric 13C/12C isotopic ratios for 10 SIO stations. In: Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, TN, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/iso-sio/iso-sio.html, dated March, 2005. A contemporaneous paper prepared by S. C. Piper for the Scripps Institution on the same subject, and involving the same participants, discusses the 14C signature. See A Study of the Abundance and 13C/12C Ratio of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide to Advance the Scientific Understanding of Terrestrial Processes Regulating the GCC, October, 2005, http://www.osti.gov/bridge/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=861630. It discusses development of the ratio δ14C (14C/12C), claiming "unprecedented precision of 1 to 2‰" on 5-liter samples, but without a comparison, calling it an "underutilized tracer" and suggesting it might be used for three other applications, including "constraining rates of fossil-fuel burning".

[So your question about whether the increase in 14C due to a shift to non-fossil fuels would be noticeable, the answer is almost. The state of the art appears to be that 14C measurement is just now becoming accurate enough to be useful, given the sample size. The small and gradual increase in 14C due to the shift should require further improvements, or much larger samples.

[Relative to your other question, whether the shift to non-fossil fuels would make a difference in the greenhouse effect, the answer is no. The shift would cause ACO2 to become more like natural CO2, where the prevalence of 14CO2 is about one molecule in a trillion. http://hypertextbook.com/physics/modern/half-life/. So if 100% of ACO2 had the signature of natural CO2, 14C would have no measurable greenhouse effect just due to its abundance.

[Natural CO2 would need 14C to be 10 billion times as prevalent, 1% of CO2, for it to be significant as a greenhouse gas, assuming it had a significantly different absorption spectrum. But in lieu of actual data, the odds are that the spectrum of 14C compared to, say, 12C, would be minute, comprising slight line shifts or small lines on the skirts. The absorption spectrum of CO2 in general is quite different than that of H2O, but the effect is arguably second order in the total calculus of the greenhouse effect.

[Also, CO2 is only one fourth of the greenhouse effect. It is far less important than H2O as a greenhouse gas, in the ratio of about 60% for water to 26% for CO2. The ACO2 is quite small compared to natural CO2, about 6 GtC/yr compared to 90 GtC/yr from the ocean plus 120 GtC/yr from the land, which is only 3% (per year), not including leaf water exchanges.

[Lastly, the IPCC greatly exaggerates the greenhouse effect. It computes an open loop effect, ignoring the reduction by the closed loop gain through cloud albedo feedback. The error I predict could easily be an order of magnitude.

[Bottom line: you needn't worry about the greenhouse effect, much less CO2, much, much less 14CO2 from non-fossil fuels.]

[RSJ: Ocean currents are rather ragged, comprising eddies or gyres, probably in three dimensions, and possibly random jumps or turbulence in the THC between quasi-stable states, like a tightly twisted cable. The current patterns are long term averages, subject to daily variations, and especially poorly characterized below the surface. Such natural randomness, to say nothing of the major measurement errors, will color the delays, turning any sharp lines into multiple, broad correlation peaks. So one shouldn't put too much emphasis on a specific number for the millennium delay.

[The Vostok data show two or three CO2 lagging peaks around 1000 years, and any one of them is a far better selection than any smaller lag, including any CO2 lead term. However, the states of ocean and atmospheric currents at the time are not known.

[The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide is an analysis of the Vostok record, and that is not suited to resolving a 9 month cycle. If a nine month signal appears in the modern atmospheric CO2 and temperature cross-correlation, you might look for a previously unrecognized, deep current to account for it.

[In the outgassing concept developed from The Acquittal, ocean currents collect CO2 all across the ocean surface, effectively instantaneously in equilibrium given by the solubility curve. When the currents descend at the poles, they are in equilibrium with ice, so they are saturated with CO2 at 0 ºC and one atmosphere pressure, regardless of the global average surface temperature at the time. As the currents descend, they become undersaturated because of increasing pressure, and stay so until rising to the surface. The outgassing would then equilibrate according to the solubility curve at one atmosphere and for the hottest ocean temperature at the time of the outgassing. In this model, the outgassing concentration depends on the climate at the time, and not at all on the age of the water.]

[RSJ: You are correct that these are important considerations for heat and material flow over the globe, but at what level? Scientific principles and models are strongly scale dependent. Generally a science can be divided into micro, meso, and macro scales, where the meso scale contains the sensible processes, and the other two are too small and too large, respectively to be perceived, unaided, by the senses. This is natural in light of the fact that science is a branch of knowledge, the objective branch, and it began with what could be sensed and progressed through the technology of instruments and logic.

Often the scale has a profound effect on the nature of successful models, and may prevent models at one scale from having any predictive power at a different scale. Linear models will work here, but not there. Deterministic modeling and stochastic modeling may have to change places.

All the questions involving climate concern macroparameters, and this by definition is the domain of thermodynamics. The key parameters are global averages of the surface temperature, planetary albedo, which throttles the incoming, short wave solar radiation, and the opacity of the greenhouse gases, which resists the outgoing, long wave radiation. All of these parameters are known by estimation, based on sampling, but none is directly measurable. The relationships between the parameters are known by the laws of thermodynamics and conservation, and by thermodynamic models relating heat and capacity.

The IPCC posed macro level questions about Earth, and elected to model the climate by the radiative forcing paradigm using modified weather simulators. The latter are meso scale devices, and have progressed into non-linear and even chaotic (i.e., scientifically worthless) models. To effect their radiative forcing methodology, climatologists first presume that Earth is in a state of equilibrium under natural forces. Then it computes how man perturbs the natural climate by his actions, especially his emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, amplified by the positive feedback of water vapor. Then it assumes the climate response is the sum of these two responses, the natural plus the anthropogenic.

The IPCC's addition of the natural and manmade responses to estimate the climate is an application of the principle of superposition. But superposition applies if and only if the model is linear, and the IPCC admits its models are not linear! The method on its face is not valid. The IPCC cannot bridge the gap to answer its macroparameter questions with mesoscale models. Its modeling effort has demonstrated no predictive power. The work needs to be refocused on accounting for the dominant features of the climate - the quasi-periodic ice ages, interlaced with natural global warming. Until that is demonstrated, and without reliance on superposition, using the models for public policy is unethical.

Much of what is sensible in the weather involves processes far beyond man's power to affect, either to intensify or mitigate. Storms and draughts, floods and dust bowls, extreme heat and cold, exact a terrible toll, and might threaten extinction. These are the phenomena that dominate weather forecasting. They motivate the questions about climate, which is the average background upon which weather rides. The sensible parameters are heat and cold and cloud formations, plus El Niño and La Niña, tornados and, as motivates you, hurricanes. But on the macroscale, the latter are mere eddy currents in the heating and cooling of Earth. These are below the horizon, as we say, irrelevant to the thermodynamics of Earth. Such regional, local, and temporal effects, including the particular distribution of heat in the troposphere as you point out, so far have no predictive value for climate models. They are lost in the large scale averaging into macroparameters.

Your interests in the rain cycle, including the transport of CO2, and the slow oceanic sequestering of carbon are good, but they need to be placed in the context of the question of the day. The IPCC has sounded its public alarm over CO2 using models that are faithful to neither the carbon cycle nor the hydrological cycle, and worse. They have no predictive power.

Even small variations from the Sun would have a major impact on climate. But from what is known for the last million years or so, such variations have not been the climate driver. Nor have the Milankovitch cycles; nor has the greenhouse effect. In my model, ice ages are cloudless, locked by surface albedo. But warm climates are driven by cloud albedo, a high loop gain, negative feedback that mitigates the positive greenhouse effect, including CO2 effects, and even the Milankovitch effect, to smidgens. Cloud albedo thereby stabilizes Earth's more temperate climate, but is itself modulated, most likely by gamma rays coupled with solar cycles.

This would be my opening message to the politicians and the public.]

[RSJ: To say "huge forces of sun and ocean and atmospheric" is to wax poetic. Instead of poets, though, you might want to follow the lead of thermodynamicists. Imagine an envelope around Earth and try to account for everything that passes through that envelope, coming in or going out. The Sun is first in power, followed distantly by gravitational forces and cosmic rays. Neither the ocean nor the atmosphere contribute mass or energy to the reckoning through the envelope, but instead deflect or absorb incoming energy, modulate ancient heat left from Earth's creation and added heat absorbed, and they react to the warming by distributing the absorbed energy in a most complex manner.

[However, the technical issue does not boil down to the CO2, and that is true by a wide margin. It doesn't even boil down to greenhouse gases, notwithstanding that they have a blanket effect that staves off the frozen planet phase of the ice ages.

[Nor does it boil down to the Sun, although a relatively tiny change in solar energy could drive Earth into a state of ice or toast.

[No. What governs our climate within the bounds of our measurements and deductions is albedo, the reflection of solar energy by clouds in the warm and generally livable phases like the present, and by the surface in the frozen states of the ice ages. This is a powerful, dynamic, negative feedback, yet to be modeled in global climate models used to predict catastrophe. It has a latching effect to hold Earth in its existing state, whether cold or warm.

[Because the GCMs don't model dynamic cloud albedo, they incorrectly account for the greenhouse effect. The put the greenhouse effect in open loop. In reality, that loop is closed through cloud albedo. Surface warming increases specific humidity, which then increases cloud cover. This is a dynamic feature of the hydrological cycle, missing in the GCMs which only provide an arbitrary statistical estimate of cloud cover.

[In today's benign climate, changes in the long-term average cloud albedo too small and too obscure to be measured, mitigate warming from any cause by about an order of magnitude. That includes variations in solar power, the Milankovitch effect of distance to the sun, as well as the greenhouse effect. The power of minute changes in albedo to regulate climate against large changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases is easily seen by recognizing that albedo alters incoming solar radiation, which is two orders of magnitude more powerful than the outgoing, longwave radiation from Earth. In control system theory, this is known as the closed loop gain.]

[RSJ: Except, for example, where a large loop gain exists, as in the case of cloud albedo, as explained above.]

[RSJ: More like 0.038%.]

[RSJ: A few more adjustments to your model are needed to answer your questions. Even though the absorption window for CO2 is limited as you suggest, the net effect of CO2 is about one fourth of the greenhouse effect, and the balance is almost entirely due to water vapor. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leverages CO2 to have a greater effect by taking into account that global warming increases specific humidity, so its total greenhouse is CO2 plus the added water vapor from the induced warming. This it recognizes, in part correctly, as the positive feedback of water vapor. It recognizes the increased water vapor from global warming, but for the purposes of its added greenhouse effect and not for its added cloud cover effect.

[Another positive feedback that the IPCC ignores is the outgassing of CO2. The ocean is a natural source of CO2 15 times as great as man's fossil fuel emissions. If CO2 were to warm the climate, the ocean surface would also warm, and the flux of CO2 from the ocean would increase. This is a positive feedback caused by the solubility of CO2 in water, which decreases with increasing temperature. Like the cloud cover problem with the GCMs, this effect is not simulated at all. As a result, the GCMs do not correctly simulate either the carbon cycle or, more importantly, the hydrological cycle.

[So, CO2 has a greater effect than you might guess because of the positive feedbacks of reduced solubility and increased water vapor. Increases in these greenhouse gasses always have a net positive effect, but it is much less significant to global warming than one might suspect, to the point of being all but irrelevant, because of the overwhelming negative feedback of cloud cover.

[Within the last half billion years covered by climate studies, atmospheric CO2 has sometimes been as much as 20 times the present level. The reasons are unknown, but no catastrophe ensued. Atmospheric CO2 has repeatedly increased at substantial rates in recovery from ice epochs, again with no runaway effect or perceptible, induced warming. Net, CO2 increases are an effect of global warming, not a cause.

[The answer to your question about the warming computation lies in the climate sensitivity as defined by the IPCC. It defines that parameter to be the rise in global average surface temperature caused by a doubling of CO2. The IPCC gives a best estimate of 3ºC, with a 66% confidence range of 2ºC to 4.5ºC. However, as described above, the IPCC makes these computations using models without CO2 positive feedback from the ocean, with positive feedback of water vapor from the ocean, but without albedo negative feedback.

[In an overdue paper still in the queue for the Rocket Scientists Journal, the open loop climate sensitivity is shown to be about 1.4ºC, falling within an 85% confidence band for the IPCC calculation. That paper also shows that changes in albedo, so small as to be swamped by the noise in modern day albedo measurements, are sufficient to make the climate sensitivity about 0.1ºC with the albedo feedback loop closed.

[In short, CO2 has not been, is not being, and will not be the cause of any more than a trivial global warming.

[P.S. Just moments ago, Denver's Mayor John Hickenlooper was on TV boasting that Denver was proudly doing its bit as the green city host to the green Democratic convention - by cutting carbon dioxide emissions. He sports a pedometer on his belt.

[Mayor, mayor! CO2 is a greening agent. Benign in all other respects, it is an optimum effluent.]

[RSJ:Thanks for the links. The files from NOAA are of a much finer resolution than I had previously discovered. They contain hourly averages of CO2 measurements in separate files for each year, covering 32 years 7 months. That's a total of just over 284 thousand records, which would consume over 4 full Excel columns. That ought to bring Excel to its knees.

[Clearly these are not raw data, though the term "raw data" may be vague and situational. They are not raw because even the hourly figures are averages. A viable criterion for raw data might be the point in the acquisition and reduction at which the data first appear in physical dimensions appropriate to the parameter, such as units of mass fraction. In another investigation, raw might mean transducer outputs in volts or count.

[These records should prove useful to an analysis to extract the diurnal variations in CO2 concentration. For someone with obsessive compulsive data reduction disorder or a lot of spare time, a little scientific treasure might be waiting. However, they are not sufficient to understanding whether calibrations made records from various stations or instruments appear contiguous, nor to understanding whether the seasonal variations observed are due to biosphere respiration and precipitation as opposed to seasonal wind currents coupled with patterns in spatial concentration. Do the data include corrections for Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) (El Niño) conditions, or for volcanic activity?

[These records do not include any wind vector measurements or temperatures. They do show the results of quality control decisions, in particular tags indicating "rejected, diurnal variation (upslope)", but neither a basis nor data for making the decision. The label upslope seems to indicate a wind pattern observation.

[A magnificent amount of work has gone into these records, but sometimes the results and conclusions seem too pat. Suspicions will be resolved only upon full, free, public disclosure, including the reference papers downloadable in text format. That should be done long before another dime is spent on CO2 abatement.]