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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: teevee who wrote (56310)

7/31/2014 10:35:15 AM

From: Wharf Rat

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 86363

"having trouble spinning the fact that human made CO2 emissions are trivial and only account for 3% of annual increases?......I will go with the EIA government data"

Maybe you should go with Reading Comprehension, instead. Math and science seem to be well beyond you.
Math for simpletons... 97% naturally produced + 3% ours - 97% naturally removed = 3% more.. ours.

Thursday, July 31, 2014
That CO2 added to the air is ours

For some reason there has been an ongoing patter of theories about how the recent increase in CO2 in the air is due to natural causes, and nothing to do with the 400 Gt of fossil fuel that we have have brought to the surface and burnt.

I wrote here about the somewhat related "Temperature drives CO2" meme. And I wrote here a few days ago about a weird revival, involving a total misreading by blogger Hockey Schtick of a recent paper on local CO2 perturbations, and the vanishing of that thread.

Vanishing is a relative term nowadays, and sure enough, the story reappeared at WUWT as if nothing had happened. Various oddities ensued; HS turned up to say that his thread hadn't been canned; it was only resting. And the original author, Denica Bozhinova, turned up to say some of the things that had been disappeared at HS. Her paper had been grossly misinterpreted.

Anyway, the usual folk continued as if nothing had happened, with the usual story that natural fluxes greatly outweighed human. I responded thus. But the most direct refutation is the simple graph of mass changes over the years. This is too rarely seen, though there is a good article and plot at SkS, which I cited.

So I did my own. Emissions data (including cement making) is from CDIAC, including BP estimates for 2011 and 2012 (no 2013 yet). CO2 ice core data from Law Dome (Dethridge, via CDIAC), and recent from Mauna Loa Scripps, using annual averages. I converted ppmv to Gt C using the factor 1 ppm CO2 = 2.13 Gton C. I found the following units conversion table useful:

	Gtons C	Gtons CO2	ppmv CO2
1 Gton C=	1	3.666	0.433
1 Gton CO2=	0.272	1	0.128
1 ppmv CO2=	2.13	7.81	1

Here is the plot:

It must be really hard to sell the story that the CO2 response is just natural variation, nothing to do with what we emitted. I'll show more plots below the jump.

Here's a plot just since 1800, for better resolution

And here is the SkS plot:

Here is a plot from Scripps Details here: (Scripps seems to be down at the moment)

It shows how the curves superimpose with a constant airborne fraction factor. Smooth version here.

moyhu.blogspot.com