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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (10528)	3/18/2007 2:19:47 PM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

"Get back to us with your conclusions." Ok, no problem. Here they are. With questions. From the abstract of Quay, P.D., B. Tilbrook, C.S. Wong. Oceanic uptake of fossil fuel CO2: carbon-13 evidence. Science 256 (1992), 74-79: "The 13C value of the dissolved inorganic carbon in the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean has decreased by about 0.4 per mil between 1970 and 1990." Did they collect all "surface waters" in the Pacific, twice, to determine that the net change was 0.0000004? Do you (they) realize how many assumptions have to be true to make this numerical estimation from just a dozen of surface measurements they have in hands? "This decrease has resulted from the uptake of atmospheric CO2 derived from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation." 97% of atmospheric CO2 is derived from natural fluxes from oceans and lands. Fossil fuel combustion is the rest 3%, at most. With substantial amount of atmospheric CO2 coming from 1000 tears old deep oceans waters with _unknown_ C13/12 ratio, the statement is not warranted. "The net amounts of CO2 taken up by the oceans and released from the biosphere between 1970 and 1990 have been determined from the changes in three measured values: the concentration of atmospheric CO2, the 13C of atmospheric CO2 and the 13C value of dissolved inorganic carbon in the ocean." Did they pumped the _whole_ atmosphere through their gas chromatograph (which has 0.1% accuracy at most)? Did they took samples of waters on each square mile of the ocean _simultaneously_, under exacltly the same wave conditions? Or did they take measurements at few ship stations over the course of a half-year expedition, and then _assumed_ that every other ocean location is the same to 0.00004%? Did they measure the same values in Atlantics?, What about Nothern seas? "The calculated average net oceanic CO2 uptake is 2.1 gigatons of carbon per year." Calculated. As you say, it "Sez it all". "This amount implies that the ocean is the dominant net sink for anthropogenically produced CO2 and that there has been no significant net CO2 released from the biosphere during the last 20 years." To calculate the global CO2 uptake from concentration measurements, one needs to know the effective mass transfer coefficient across the air-water boundary. This coefficient is usually modelled via a "stagnant film" concept, and is dependent on local wind velocity. As I remember, the stagnant film thickness varies by +- 80% according to different researchers. The direction of flux is also critically dependent on local temperature difference between air and water. Unless you prove that all five fields, CO2 in air, Co2 in water, wind, air temperature, and water temperature have been measured _simultaneously_ over all ocean surfaces with sufficient spatial resolution, pardon me if I would remain sceptical about 0.0000004 differences, and about all subsequent implications they derive from this number, and call it what it is: misinterpretation of data, and BS. Cheers, - Ali