Guessing At CO2 Emissions

[Sunsettommy]

The Resilient Earth

Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Fri, 06/04/2010

EXCERPT:

Supposedly, human activity is responsible for the detected rise in atmospheric CO2 levels over the past century. But do we really know were gas emissions come from and how great they are? As it turns out, greenhouse gas emissions are measured using statistical data without testing the results against the actual increases of these gases in the atmosphere. Regardless, climate change alarmists insist that human emissions must be reduced. A revealing perspective article in the June 4, 2010, issue of Science states “this is like dieting without weighing oneself.” Currently, science is only guessing at where CO2 emissions come from.

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The Science paper summary from Science publications is below.The full paper is available if you want to pay for it.


Science

Science 4 June 2010:
Vol. 328. no. 5983, pp. 1241 - 1243
DOI: 10.1126/science.1189936

Euan Nisbet1 and Ray Weiss2

Greenhouse gas emissions are currently quantified from statistical data without testing the results against the actual increases of these gases in the atmosphere. This is like dieting without weighing oneself. Data are produced by greenhouse gas emitters of all sizes, from factory or farm to nation, and are quoted to high precision—yet misreporting occurs, whether by simple error, ignorance, or intention. But now scientists on both sides of the Atlantic are arguing that regulation of greenhouse gas emissions can have integrity only if verified by direct atmospheric measurements (1, 2).

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Thus we have now come full circle.

ROFLMAO!

[Richard111]

But do we really know were gas emissions come from and how great they are?

Well now, here are some figures that I've cooked up about manmade CO2 emissions. I read somewhere recently that people breathe out about 856 grams of CO2 daily, lets call it 800 grams or 0.8 kilos.

Back in 1940 the world population was about 2 billion, that means the population produced 1.6 megatons of CO2 every day.

The present population is 6.5 billion and CO2 production is up to 5.2 megatons per day. 325% increase!

Now go figure what happens to the food supply to make that carbon available.

[Derek]

he he he...

I was trying to explain the size of our CO2 emissions (none) problem to someone the other day.
My explanation went something like this (the figures being drawn on a tissue box with a felt tip pen).

At present CO2 atmospheric concentration is generally roughly agreed to be about 400 parts per million (ppm).
It is suggested by the IPCC that the pre industrial atmospheric level of CO2 was about 275ppm.
Jaworoski, most notably, convincingly shows the maths / method used was biased and a more realistic level would be 331ppm.
Yet other researchers show that there is good evidence that CO2 levels varied far more than we have / had realised, and infact
in the 1940s some suggest (ie, Ernest Beck) global CO2 levels were equal to, or higher than today..
Let us stick here though to the 400, and 275, 331ppm figures respectively.
(It is worth remembering however that the later figures of 62.5ppm and 35ppm I will use later,
could well be a lot, lot lower, nearer zero infact, or even minus figures....)

The IPCC states that it believes man contributes about 54% of the rise in CO2 levels (just over half).
Again this is a very questionable figure, realistically we just don't know.

Let us convert these figures into percentages, to illustrate better what is being said is the problem by the IPCC (read AGW).

CO2 level at present. 400 ppm, which equals 0.04%.
Less than half of one tenth, of one percent of the atmosphere.
To this CO2 "concentration", or rather level, man has contributed according to the IPCC,
400 MINUS 275, DIVIDED BY 2 = 62.5PPM.
There is good reason to believe that these figures could be.
400 - 331 divided by A LOT LESS THAN TWO. ie, at most, 34.5 but let's call it 35ppm.

So, we may have contributed upto as "much" as 62.5ppm CO2 to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.
That in percentage terms is..... 0.00625% - Let's be generous and round it up to 7 hundredths of a percentage.
But it could (and most probably is) a lot lower than that, a maximum (but probably far less of) being, 35ppm.
Or, .........0.0035% - Again let's generously round up to 4 hundredths of a single percent.
Since the start of the industrial revolution.

In short, since 1875 we "may" have "added" a maximum of about 7 hundredths of one percent of CO2 to the atmosphere,
but it appears the actual figure will be far lower than this.

Either CO2 is an incredably powerful gas, but yet we can not definately observe it's effects...
Or, it is actually a none problem in the first place for ongoing perfectly natural climate variations.
The reasons for which we are only just beginning to (re)investigate and (re)understand very incompletely so far.

[MostlyHarmless]

I subscribe to the proposition that measurement of CO2 (as at Mauna Loa) is seriously flawed. Data is "carefully selected" according to the NOAA website GLOBALVIEW-CO2 : Methodology. However objective the observers might be, there's no doubting that the measurements at ML are made at an altitude of almost 4000m on the slopes of an active volcano thousands of miles from any heavy industrial activity. CO2 is a relatively heavy molecule, and since it's gravity that keeps the atmosphere in place, it should be no surprise to learn that CO2 concentration decreases with altitude. Several of the global measuring stations are at a similar altitude to ML, but these "estimates" of CO2 concentration (they can't be accurate measurements as the data is selected) are used to calculate global atmospheric CO2 quantity.

A parallel would be if global temperature were calculated from selected readings at say a dozen stations worldwide, at 1000m altitude, and with one of the stations close to a large city in the tropics.

As previous comments state, there's a massive uncertainty in estimates of emissions and sinks. The CRU emails reveal a bunch of scientists discussing the problem of the "missing CO2", the apparent discrepancy between emissions, sinks and a pre-determined guesstimate of atmospheric CO2 concentration. This might be summarised as:

"we don't know" - "our best guess" - "predetermined figure" = "missing CO2" (quoted to one decimal place!)

[Questioning_Climate]

Quote:Greenhouse gas emissions are currently quantified from statistical data without testing the results against the actual increases of these gases in the atmosphere.

There is good reason for this and it is simply that it cannot be done. The natural annual variability is greater than the annual trend increase in atmospheric CO2 and there is no evidence that the observed increase is due to human activities. Ocean temperatures have a far greater correlation.

The guestimates are largely based upon inventories which are often manipulated for numerous reasons, for example avoiding tax.

[Richard111]

More "carefully ignored" data on the global CO2 cycle.

Ocean Acidification (Effects on Marine Plants: Phytoplankton, Diatoms) -- Summary

Quote:Tortell et al. concluded that "potential CO2-dependent productivity increases and algal species shifts could thus act to increase the efficiency of the biological pump, enhancing Southern Ocean CO2 uptake and contributing to a negative feedback on increased atmospheric CO2."

Another negative feedback not included in climate models.

It just goes on and on.