Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

To presume that the "soil" absorbs CO2 in a quantity equal to 2/3 of what humans release would be looney.

okie wrote:

What is your opinion of historical CO2 measurements, in terms of just how far back can we safely go with it?

With icecores, you get one point of measurement for CO2 or temperature every century or millenium thousands years ago. So suppose if there were a 30% increase in the distant past similar to the past 50 years, nobody would see it since it is filtered out : CO2 is supposed to be sealed in ice's bubbles but it is a pure speculation, CO2, like any other gases migrates, is disolved by water, reacts with dusts or other aerosols...
Worse, CO2 in icecores is supposed to reflect direct measurements which exist only since the 50's. But it is not! People who speculate it SUPPOSE that there is a 30 to 50 (or 100, 200...) year lag beetwen the icecore age and CO2 age but this lag is just a fudge factor to mix apples (CO2 by icecores) to orange (CO2 by direct modern instruments) : see columns 4 and 5 of the Law Dome icecore data for example : http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/co2/lawdome.combined.dat .

And the AGW people use that crap to say the CO2 level is "unprecedented" whereas in fact, all that can be said is CO2 is unprecedented... since the 1950's. But hey, that's climate science !

Parados, if I interpret you correctly, you claimed Foxfyre was full of it in claiming that plants absorbed more CO2 than given off, but your explanation seems to indicate you are including dead rotting plants in the soil, is that correct?

So Foxfyre is correct.

Further, Foxfyre is then also correct in saying that earning carbon credits by planting trees is also a hoax because if you include the entire cycle of plants living and dying, then rotting, there is little or no benefit then?

Anyway, all of this is humorous at the least, and a total fiasco at worst. Picture Al Gore jetsetting around the world, then when he gets home, he plants a bunch of trees, all is fine, his conscience is clear just as long as when the trees die that he makes sure he hauls them to the dump where he no longer owns the trees so the dump is credited with the co2 emissions, not Al.

According to the links I previously posted:

CO2 ATMOSPHERIC TONS
1. The total number of billions of metric tons of CO2 humans entered into the earth's atmosphere up to 2005 = 305
2. The total number of these metric tons retained in the earth's atmosphere = 152.5

This quote from the above:
"Solar scientists are worried about the lows," he says. "They're calling it the 'disturbingly quiet solar cycle.' And we're faced with again just a lack of years ... of temperatures just sort of 'plateau-ing out' to the point where the head of the U.N. IPCC [Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change] has recently called for an investigation as to why temperatures were not continuing to rise as predicted."

So the head of the IPCC is calling for an investigation? Has a crime occurred here? Is mother earth not cooperating with them?

okie wrote:

Parados, if I interpret you correctly, you claimed Foxfyre was full of it in claiming that plants absorbed more CO2 than given off, but your explanation seems to indicate you are including dead rotting plants in the soil, is that correct?

Did you not read my original statement? The net effect of vegetation over the last several hundred years had been a zero sum.

Quote:

So Foxfyre is correct.

No, Foxfyre is NOT correct because vegetation does NOT remove all the human caused CO2 from the atmosphere. In fact it removes little of it since most of it is retained. Check ican's latest post where he finally admits that half of human caused CO2 is still in the atmosphere.

Quote:

Further, Foxfyre is then also correct in saying that earning carbon credits by planting trees is also a hoax because if you include the entire cycle of plants living and dying, then rotting, there is little or no benefit then?

No, again. Check the article by miniTax. Changing the vegetation can change the short term or long term sequestration. Planting trees increases the amount of CO2 sequestered short term because trees are not annuals.

Quote:

Anyway, all of this is humorous at the least, and a total fiasco at worst. Picture Al Gore jetsetting around the world, then when he gets home, he plants a bunch of trees, all is fine, his conscience is clear just as long as when the trees die that he makes sure he hauls them to the dump where he no longer owns the trees so the dump is credited with the co2 emissions, not Al.

Planting a couple of trees may reduce my carbon foot print but in the overall scheme of things my carbon use is minor compared to the world. But every little bit does help.

The fact remains, which you have also ignored, that the environmental gurus are allowing carbon credits, i.e. lower emission standards for countries with high amounts of vegetation, trees and otherwise, because those gurus know such vegetation reduces the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

There is probably some in the atmosphere, but I imagine most of the rest has been absorbed by plants, into the soil etc. To presume that any not absorbed into the ocean is loose in the atmosphere is rather tunnel visioned I think.

Interesting miniTax but in case you didn't notice Phytoliths make up less than 1% of the carbon in the soil from the last 200 years.

Forests have a better short term CO2 sequestration. Read the last paragraph of the article you linked.

ican711nm wrote:

According to the links I previously posted:

CO2 ATMOSPHERIC TONS
1. The total number of billions of metric tons of CO2 humans entered into the earth's atmosphere up to 2005 = 305
2. The total number of these metric tons retained in the earth's atmosphere = 152.5

It seems you can't agree with yourself.

What % of the total increase did you just now claim was the result of humans? It certainly isn't the 5% you have been using in your "math."

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/nowarm.htm
He [Essenhigh] cites a 1995 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel formed by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme in 1988 to assess the risk of human-induced climate change. In the report, the IPCC wrote that some 90 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide annually circulate between the earth's ocean and the atmosphere, and another 60 billion tons exchange between the vegetation and the atmosphere.
Compared to man-made sources' emission of about 5 to 6 billion tons per year, the natural sources would then account for more than 95 percent of all atmospheric carbon dioxide, Essenhigh said.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
1975 thru 2005 Yearly Mean Measurements Atmospheric CO2
1975 -0.0319
1976 -0.1107
1977 0.1282
1978 0.0503
1979 0.1406
1980 0.1887
1981 0.2293
1982 0.1133
1983 0.2716
1984 0.0798
1985 0.0625
1986 0.1496
1987 0.2870
1988 0.2888
1989 0.2087
1990 0.3700
1991 0.3241
1992 0.1894
1993 0.2227
1994 0.2815
1995 0.3981
1996 0.2586
1997 0.4615
1998 0.5764
1999 0.3947
2000 0.3630
2001 0.4934
2002 0.5573
2003 0.5565
2004 0.5337
2005 +0.6046
1975 -0.0319
2005 +0.6046
Difference = 0.6365°K

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/ann/global.html
The 1901-2000 average combined land and ocean annual temperature is 13.9°C (56.9°F), the annually averaged land temperature for the same period is 8.5°C (47.3°F), and the long-term annually averaged sea surface temperature is 16.1°C (60.9°F). [Temperature in degees Kelvin = 13.9 + 273.16 = 287.06°K]

http://co2.cms.udel.edu/Increasing_Atmospheric_CO2.htm
Emissions of Carbon from Human Activities
Several human activities release CO2 into the atmosphere (called anthropogenic, human-origin, emissions). Fossil-fuel burning is the predominant anthropogenic source of CO2, but cement production and other activities also contribute (including the "land-use" activity of deforestation). Using a combination of modern and historic data, scientists estimate that humans have sent a total of 305 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere since 1751; half of these emissions have occurred since the mid-1970s.
…
About half of the recent emissions are not accumulating in the atmosphere, but are going into the ocean and, to a lesser extent, into soils. These are considered "sinks" in the global carbon budget because they take up atmospheric CO2. The chemistry of the ocean changes as a result of increased CO2 concentrations; this subject is further examined in the section on "Ocean Acidification".

The net effect HAS been constant for centuries until humans started adding CO2.

http://co2.cms.udel.edu/Increasing_Atmospheric_CO2.htm
Emissions of Carbon from Human Activities
...
Using a combination of modern and historic data, scientists estimate that humans have sent a total of 305 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere since 1751; half of these emissions have occurred since the mid-1970s.
…
About half of the recent emissions are not accumulating in the atmosphere, but are going into the ocean and, to a lesser extent, into soils. These are considered "sinks" in the global carbon budget because they take up atmospheric CO2.

parados wrote:

Interesting miniTax but in case you didn't notice Phytoliths make up less than 1% of the carbon in the soil from the last 200 years.

Forests have a better short term CO2 sequestration. Read the last paragraph of the article you linked.

The soil stock of carbon is 20x to 40x the carbon in the atmosphere. So 1% of this stock would represent more carbon than the 30% increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration supposedly manmade over the past 200 years.
You are divining conclusions from noise, Parados.