No, you are wrong Wharfie. Mq's correct statement: <"But if you look at the last 10 and 20 years, you'll see that even though the rate of carbon production has continued to increase, the rate of CO2 accumulation has not increased - it's running in a straight line now [seasonal variation aside].">
Your incorrect statement.
<Actually, accumulation has increased, and the rate of accumulation has increased >
Nobody has disputed that the level of CO2 has increased. That's established by measuring it, which isn't very difficult and has been done lots. So the first part of your statement is as correct as pointing out that the sun comes up each day. Well done.
The second part is where you go AWOL. Yes, if you go back far enough, the rate of accumulation increased. You can see the gradient of the curve increasing right up to the beginning of the 1990s [or not long before that]. But then, the gradient dropped for a few years before turning back up to the previous gradient over the last 10 years.
Carbon production rate has been increasing, but the CO2 accumulation rate hasn't been increasing - it has been going up in a straight line. Which means it's emptying out of the atmosphere at an increasing rate as the concentration of CO2 increases. Which is exactly what one would expect when trying to fill a leaky bucket. Unless one continues to increase the flow rate into the bucket, the depth stops increasing and reaches a stable level.
Merely believing it all stays in the atmosphere for 100 years doesn't make it so. It doesn't. It's being stripped out at an increasing rate.
<Historically, the greatest rate of change of concentrations occurred at 0.025 ppm/year ; 1/50 of the current change of 1.18PPM/yr. >
Since there were never any oil wells, gas wells, coal mines and cement kilns, it's not surprising that the rate of change has been huge. People have made a vast effort to rescue fossil carbon from eons-old graves and return it to the ecosphere. To achieve that, we've had to dig amazingly complex oil wells, pumping systems, shipping, refineries, distribution systems and fuel burning units. It has been a huge effort costing umpty $billions. We should expect to have achieved quite a good result in CO2 increase. 1.18 ppm per year doesn't seem much for all the effort.
The 2.2 ppm increase from 2004 to 2005, presumably on the same date in 2005 is an odd increase since the carbon production rate hadn't doubled. There is obviously another vastly huge source of CO2 other than human efforts. Where did that CO2 come from?
Mqurice |
