Historic Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels?

[deeps]

This has been discussed on the climate thread, but it really deserves a thread of its own (if that's ok mods) as it's so easy to miss amongst the many pages of that thread, and it's fundamental to the existence of MMGW Theory.

We are told that up until man started burning fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 concentration was around 280ppmv. Now it is around 380ppmv (an increase of 0.01% from 0.028 to 0.038%). We are told man is responsible for the increase, and it is this increase that causes global warming, thus the Man Made Global Warming Theory springs to life.

But what if CO2 levels in recent history have been as high if not higher than they are today? That would mean mans fossil fuel burning is negligible in terms of global warming.

From my limited knowledge on this subject, I believe accurate measurements of atmospheric CO2 didn't commence until circa 1958, and all figures before this date are proxy measurements gained using ice core analyses.

My question is, how reliable is the method of measuring CO2 levels from ice core samples, and accurately dating it? Is there a possibility that air bubbles trapped in ice would give an inaccurate CO2 reading due to CO2 being more soluble in cold water? Is there a variance in CO2 levels depending on where the samples are taken - is atmospheric CO2 universally consistent, or variable depending on other factors?

I know that chemical records of atmospheric CO2 concentration were kept by scientists going back many decades before 1958.

More here, with a graph of historical CO2 levels ...

http://www.biomind.de/nogreenhouse/daten/EE%2018-2...

Article said:

More than 90,000 accurate chemical analyses of CO2 in air since 1812 are summarised. The historic chemical data reveal that changes in CO2 track changes in temperature, and therefore climate in contrast to the simple, monotonically increasing CO2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change. Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm.
[cut]
During the late 20th century, the hypothesis that the ongoing rise of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is a result of fossil fuel burning became the dominant paradigm. To establish this paradigm, and increasingly since then, historical measurements indicating fluctuating CO2 levels between 300 and more than 400 ppmv have been neglected.

It appears to me that Government funded scientists deny the accurate chemical historical CO2 record because it doesn't fit with their hypothesis, and blows MMGW Theory to smitherines.

[Jasandjules]

According to ice core samples the atmospheric CO2 has been 4-7000ppm in the past. Wonder what temp it was then? Hint, look up Ordivician period on your paleoclimate search...........

Not to mention how did it ever come back down to less than 300ppm without the taxation...

[turbobloke]

The IPCC's reports appear to use assumption backed by faith to maintain that carbon dioxide levels are the result of a long residence time giving a near-static balance (plus magic missing sink). In the context of that and this thread we need to re-visit Essenhigh (2009), a paper that uses atmospheric data and basic kinetics and thermodynamics to indicate that, contrary to the IPCC position, carbon dioxide levels are responding via partition equilibria to natural changes in temperature. This doesn't mean that there isn't any human tax gas up there - though it's not doing anything visible in temperature data anyway - but it means that human emissions aren't solely determining atmospheric levels. This really does blow MMGWT out of the water, since partition equilibria responding to natural temperature changes implies that emissions reductions policies and related CO2 taxes are an utterly pointless scam.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef800581r

Last paragraph with abbreviations expanded:

With the short (5−15 year) Residence Time results shown to be in quasi-equilibrium, this then supports the (independently based) conclusion that the long-term (100 year) rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is not from anthropogenic sources but, in accordance with conclusions from other studies, is most likely the outcome of the rising atmospheric temperature, which is due to other natural factors. This further supports the conclusion that global warming is not anthropogenically driven as an outcome of combustion. The economic and political significance of that conclusion will be self-evident.

[turbobloke]

Clearly this basic science (Essenhigh) is very relevant to historic carbon dioxide levels over all timescales, and is in total agreement with the data which shows carbon dioxide levels change after a temperature shift.

[deeps]

TB, do you think ice core data give reliable analyses of CO2 concentration?

Also, do CO2 levels vary ie not consistent globally, as in Antarctic ice core analyses may show lower levels than equatorial ice cores, if they existed.

Btw, I expect you've read the link below, I've just started reading through the many replies which are interesting.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/25/a-short-prim...

[turbobloke]

deeps said:

TB, do you think ice core data give reliable analyses of CO2 concentration?

Also, do CO2 levels vary ie not consistent globally, as in Antarctic ice core analyses may show lower levels than equatorial ice cores, if they existed.

Btw, I expect you've read the link below, I've just started reading through the many replies which are interesting.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/25/a-short-prim...

The ice core measures are likely to give self-consistent values for obvious reasons but there are problems.

Try these two after you finish WUWT on the GHE, the first has good Milankovitch and causality content:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/06/ice-ages-or-20...

http://www3.hi.is/~oi/Nemendaritgerdir/Ice%20core%...

And then for good measure (not just ice cores) to compare with WUWT including for objectivity and neutrality

http://home.comcast.net/~pdrallos131681/CO2/co2.ht...

http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2...

[turbobloke]

Also this may well be of interest in this thread:

http://www.klima2009.net/de/papers/4/6

Pertinent approach in terms of any notion of 'well mixed greenhouse gases' - the wind speed vs tax gas plots.

390ppmv in 1940...

[deeps]

Cheers, I knew alot of that stuff, but it's always good to learn more. I like this at the end...

Rocketscientist said:

The GCMs (Greenhouse Catastrophe Models ) need to be revamped. They need to have the primary thermodynamic loop restored. This is the chain of dynamic events from solar radiation, through the shading and reflection of clouds responding to temperature changes, absorption primarily in the ocean, and the transport and exchanges of heat and gases by which the oceans create and regulate the earth’s climate and atmosphere. The models need to reflect the mechanisms which make the earth’s climate not vulnerable, but stable.

The CO2 concentration is a response to the proxy temperature in the Vostok ice core data, not a cause. This does not contradict that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it does contradict the conjecture that the presence of a greenhouse gas has any destabilizing effect on global climate. Other forces overwhelm the conjecture of a runaway greenhouse effect. The concentration of CO2 is dynamic, controlled by the solubility pump. Global temperature is controlled first by the primary thermodynamic loop.

The Vostok data support an entirely new model. Atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. Fires, volcanoes, and now man deposit CO2 into the atmosphere, but those effects are transient. What exists in steady state is CO2 perpetually pumped into the atmosphere by the oceans. Atmospheric CO2 is a dynamic stream, from the warm ocean and back into the cool ocean.

Public policy represented by the Kyoto Accords and the efforts to reduce CO2 emissions should be scrapped as wasteful, unjustified, and futile.

Lovely that! I'll leave reading all the responses to the article till tomorrow, enough reading for one day, time for beer

[turbobloke]

deeps said:

I'll leave reading all the responses to the article till tomorrow, enough reading for one day, time for beer

Sure

Give trhe Klima 2009 link a click when you've got a mo. I posted it on another thread another time so you may experience déja vu but it's an interesting piece.

[deeps]

turbobloke said:

I posted it on another thread another time so you may experience déja vu but it's an interesting piece.

No I hadn't seen that before, very interesting reading.

Out of curiosity, do you know how Dr.Francis Massen is funded?
I mean generally how can scientists afford to carry out all that research if the main funding is biased towards supporters of MMGWT? Also, as someone in the comments section mentions, is this released for peer review, in which case will it be up against the likes of Mann/Jones?

[turbobloke]

deeps said:

turbobloke said:

I posted it on another thread another time so you may experience déja vu but it's an interesting piece.

No I hadn't seen that before, very interesting reading.

Out of curiosity, do you know how Dr.Francis Massen is funded?
I mean generally how can scientists afford to carry out all that research if the main funding is biased towards supporters of MMGWT? Also, as someone in the comments section mentions, is this released for peer review, in which case will it be up against the likes of Mann/Jones?

I don't know how Luxembourg academics are funded either in general or for that research in particular, but the paper was refereed (reviewed).

Even prior to Climategate I was alongside many scientists in questioning the state of the peer review process for this field of enquiry and with several well-known publications, and afterwards the relative merit of publishing here or there has been revised further since it's clear that quality science has been kept out of print or mismanaged through interference by individuals who saw their role differently to the traditional co-enquirer offering disclosure of full details and methodology and even offering 'opponents' a helping hand in stress-testing ideas and results.

This seems to be from a bygone era where the science mattered more than other more personal considerations and although there was never any alternative my own position has always been as posted in these threads from very beginning (since my view pre-dates the 7 to 8 years I've been posting here) namely that the source and vehicle of communication for the science are immaterial and that the science should be judged on its own merits and nothing else, by those fit to judge. If the science is obviously duff it can be determined without recourse to origin or transmission, likewise for innovatory break-through research.

If PHers have read the Douglass and Christy article in which they map out the appalling treatment of their research in a post-Climategate context ( it can be read here) compare that to the suspicions expressed (below) by Scafetta before Climategate demonstrated what was going on. This takes my post away from the carbon dioxide levels OP but it's relevant to considerations of review and publication raised by the Massen and Beck paper, since Beck has almost certainly found 'issues' with publishing the work that I posted earlier on in this thread.

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Benestad and Schmidt have recently published a paper in JGR. (Benestad, R. E., and G. A. Schmidt (2009), Solar trends and global warming, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D14101, doi:10.1029/2008JD011639).

This paper criticizes the mathematical algorithms of several papers that claim that the temperature data show a significant solar signature. They conclude that such algorithms are “nonrobust” and conclude that “the most likely contribution from solar forcing a global warming is 7 ± 1% for the 20th century and is negligible for warming since 1980.”

By using the word “robust” and its derivates for 18 times, Benestad and Schmidt claim to disprove two categories of papers: those that use the multilinear regression analysis [Lean and Rind, 2008; Camp and Tung, 2007; Ingram, 2006] and those that present an alternative approach [Scafetta and West, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008]. (See the references in their paper.)

Herein, I will not discuss the limitation of the multilinear regression analysis nor the limits of Benestad and Schmidt’s critique to those papers. I will briefly focus on Benestad and Schmidt’s criticism to the papers that I coauthored with Dr. West. I found Benestad and Schmidt’s claims to be extremely misleading and full of gratuitous criticism due to poor reading and understanding of the data analysis that was accomplished in our works.

Let us see some of these misleading statements and errors starting with the less serious one and ending with the most serious one:

1. Since the abstract Benestad and Schmidt claim that they are rebutting several our papers [Scafetta and West, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008]. Already the abstract is misleading. Indeed, their criticism focuses only on Scafetta and West [2005, 2006a]. The other papers used different data and mathematical methodologies.

2. Benestad and Schmidt claim that we have not disclosed nor detailed the mathematical methodology and some parameters that we use. For example:

a) In paragraph 39 Benestad and Schmidt criticize and dismiss my paper with Willson [2009] by claiming that we “did not provide any detailed description of the method used to derive their results, and while they derived a positive minima trend for their composite, it is not clear how a positive minima trend could arise from a combination of the reconstruction of Krivova et al. [2007] and PMOD, when none of these by themselves contained such a trend).” However, the arguments are quite clear in that paper and in the additional figures that we published as supporting material. Moreover, it is not clear to me how Benestad and Schmidt could conclude that our work is wrong if Benestad and Schmidt acknowledge that they have not understood it. Perhaps, they just needed to study it better.

b) In paragraph 41 Benestad and Schmidt claim that: “It is not clear how the lagged values were estimated by Scafetta and West [2006a]“. However, in paragraph 9 of SW06a it is written “we adopt the same time-lags as predicted by Wigley’s [1988, Table 1] model.” So, again, Benestad and Schmidt just needed to study better the paper that they wanted to criticize.

c) In paragraph 48 Benestad and Schmidt claim that: “over the much shorter 1980-2002 period and used a global surface temperature from the Climate Research Unit, 2005 (they did not provide any reference to the data nor did they specify whether they used the combined land-sea data (HadCRUT) or land-only temperatures (CRUTEM).” However, it is evident from our work SW05 that we were referring to the combined land-sea data which is properly referred to as “global surface temperature” without any additional specification (Land or Ocean, North or South). We also indicate the webpage where the data could be downloaded.

d) In paragraph 57 Benestad and Schmidt claim that: “The analysis using Lean [2000] rather than Scafetta and West’s own solar proxy as input is shown as thick black lines.” However, in our paper SW06a it is crystal clear that we too use Lean’s TSI proxy reconstruction. In particular we were using Lean 1995 which is not very different from Lean 2000. Benestad and Schmidt apparently do not know that since 1978 Lean 1995 as well as Lean 2000 do not differ significantly from PMOD because PMOD was build (by altering the published TSI satellite data) by using Lean 1995 and Lean 2000 as guides. Moreover, we also merge the Lean data with ACRIM since 1978 to obtain an alternative scenario, as it is evident in all our papers. The discontinuity problem addressed by Benestad and Schmidt in merging two independent sequences (Lean’s proxy model and the ACRIM) is not an issue because it is not possible to avoid it given the fact that there are no TSI satellite data before 1978.

3. In Paragraphs 48-50 Benestad and Schmidt try to explain one of our presumed major mathematical mistakes. Benestad and Schmidt’s states: “A change of 2*0.92 W/m2 between solar minimum and maximum implies a change in S of 1.84 W/m2 which amounts to 0.13% of S, and is greater than the 0.08% difference between the peak and minimum of solar cycle 21 reported by Willson [1997] and the differences between TSI levels of the solar maxima and minima seen in this study (~1.2 W/m2; Figure 6).” Benestad and Schmidt’s are referring to our estimate of the amplitude of the solar cycle referring to the 11-year modulation that we called A7,sun = 0.92 W/m2 in SW05. Benestad and Schmidt are claiming that our estimate is nor reasonable because in their opinion according to our calculations the change of TSI between solar maximum and solar minimum had to be twice our value A7,sun , so they write 2*0.92=1.84 W/m2, and this would be far too large. However, as it is evident from our paper and in figure 4a in SW05 the value A7,sun refers to the peak-to-trough amplitude of the cycle, so it should not be multiplied by 2, as Benestad and Schmidt misunderstood. This is crystal clear in the factor ½ before the equation f(t)= ½ A sin(2pt) that we are referring to and that Benestad and Schmidt also report in their paragraph 48. It is hard to believe that two prominent scientists such as Benestad and Schmidt do not understand the meaning of a factor ½! So, again, Benestad and Schmidt just needed to think more before writing a study that criticizes ours.

4) Finally, Benestad and Schmidt’s paper is full of misleading claims that they are reproducing our analysis. Indeed, Benestad and Schmidt’s paper is self-contradictory on this crucial issue. In paragraph 85 Benestad and Schmidt claim that they “have repeated the analyses of Scafetta and West, together with a series of sensitivity tests to some of their arbitrary choices.” However, in their paragraph 76 Benestad and Schmidt acknowledge: “In our emulation, we were not able to get exactly the same ratio of amplitudes, due to lack of robustness of the SW06a method and insufficient methods description.” It is quite singular that Benestad and Schmidt claim to have repeated our calculation, at the same time they acknowledge that, indeed, they did not succeed in repeating our calculation and, ironically, they blame us for their failure. It is not easy to find in the scientific literature such kind of tortuous reasoning!

In fact, the reason why Benestad and Schmidt did not succeed in repeating our calculation is because they have misapplied the wavelet decomposition algorithm known as the maximum overlap discrete wavelet transforms (MODWT). This is crystal clear in their figures 4 where it is evident that they applied the MODWT decomposition in a cyclical periodic mode. In other words they are implicitly imposing that the temperature in 2001 is equal to the temperature in 1900, the temperature in 2002 is equal to the temperature in 1901 and so on. Any person expert in time series processing can teach Benestad and Schmidt that it is not appropriate to impose a cyclical periodic mode to a non stationary time series such as the temperature or TSI records that present clear upward trends from 1900 to 2000. By applying a cyclical periodic mode Benestad and Schmidt are artificially introducing two large and opposite discontinuities in the records in 1900 and 2000. This same error in data processing also causes the reconstructed solar signature in their figures 5 and 7 to present a descending trend minimum in 2000 while the Sun was approaching one of its largest maxima.

There are several other gratuitous claims and errors in Benestad and Schmidt’s paper. However, the above is sufficient for this fast reply. I just wonder why the referees of that paper did not check Benestad and Schmidt’s numerous misleading statements and errors. It would be sad if the reason is because somebody is mistaking a scientific theory such as the “anthropogenic global warming theory” for an ideology that should be defended at all costs.

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Post-Climategate that saga takes on a whole new flavour.

There is a General Medical Council and similar body also for lawyers, in many countries - perhaps there should be an over-arching body for scientists in the same vein so that being struck off is a possibility for those that fail to uphold the highest standards of scientific enquiry. The Royal Sorcery is not relevant (pun intended) since it isn't an over-arching body but a self-elected supposed elite group. ALso its record on climate science 'speaks for itself'.