It continues to unravel

What paper? He hasn't published anything yet -- the only thing available is an audio recording of his talk -- no slides, no powerpoint file, no supporting documentation... nothing.

Show you how much of an understanding that I have about carbon isotopes? After you admitted this earlier in this thread?

Frankly, that's about the only thing that you have said here that I agree with.

 

more ad homs ...yawn

You seem to think he is a crackpot so you must have some reason for that view. If you are not open to a opposing view then you either should have some valid reasons for that point of view.

So either you can pick apart his lecture logically like some are doing on other forums or you are just some random person with a belief that gets all flustered when someone presents evidence that their belief is false.

If I disagree with Jim Hansen or Mike Mann I research it and can present valid points as to their methodology or I keep my mouth shut. Ben Franklin once said it is better to keep ypur opinions to yourself and have people think you are a fool than open it and give them proof you are a fool. Take that for whatever it is worth, but unless you can present me with some data that shows Professor Salby's theories are wrong then your opinions are just that , a opinion.

If you want to debate then provide a reason you disagree otherwise it appears that yours is nothing more than a uneducated defense of a political position from someone who either has a vested monetary interest in that position or a illogical faith in it.

If you want to be uncritically accepting of your political betters that is your option, me I want to see some scientific points being made.

study question of the day for the CAGW believers, what are the Earths three reservoirs of carbon and what is the appx ratio of carbon stored in each?

 

All the scientific reasons why Salby's paper is mistaken, that you're asking for, have already been presented in post #10 but you weren't able to comprehend them. You haven't even read the supposed and still unpublished 'paper', you're only parroting some idiotic 'conclusions' that some denier cult 'reporter'/nutcase named Bolt is feeding you, based on a single podcast.

 

Yup. Jackdog's "unraveling" contradicts Jackdog's other "unraveling". I think Jackdog is unraveling. Deniers either aren't aware of or don't care if they contradict themselves. They just heap garbage at the wall and hope something sticks.

 

There are several problems with Salby's claims -- here's the biggest one.

Salby is promoting the notion that temperature increases, not human CO2 emissions, are responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

For Salby's claim to be correct, the increase in the amount of CO2 in atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution must greatly exceed the amount of CO2 emitted by fossil-fuel combustion over that same period of time.

This is a very simple thing to check. We know that fossil-fuel combustion has put about 1.8 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere since the beginning of the IR -- reference here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7242/full/nature08019.html.

We also know that the atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by about 100 PPM over that same time period.

It is a straightforward high-school math exercise to determine how much CO2 must be emitted to increase the atmospheric CO2 concentration by 100 PPM.

For Salby to be correct, it must take much more than 1.8 trillion tons of CO2 to increase the atmospheric CO2 concentration by 100 PPM; that is, an additional large natural source of CO2 must be required (over and above the 1.8 trillion tons of fossil-fuel CO2) to increase the atmospheric CO2 level by 100 PPM. Determining whether this is true is a simple high-school math/science exercise. You should have no trouble figuring out how to do this, as I have laid out in detail the necessary steps in this post of mine: http://www.politicalforum.com/environment-conservation/200766-continues-unravel-2.html#post4290985

 

Tim Lambert should stick to computer graphics instead of blogging about atmospheric physics. The Earth has three Co2 reservoirs and 1 Co2 sink, his argument seems to be all the Co2 end up in the atmosphere.

 

more ad homs ....boooorrrrriing and major fail GMB, got any science ...think not

 

same thing as above, here are three separate Co2 reservoirs and one Co2 sink on Earth. Tim Lambert probably is very good at computer animation. He sucks at Earth science. Next time you are at Lambert's site , ask him what the half life of 14Co2 in the atmosphere is.

 

It's rather remarkable that none of the people who have been pushing Salby's claim that humans may not be responsible for the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels even attempted to perform the simple sanity check that I described earlier in this thread.

To show folks how simple it is, I'll just run through the calculations very quickly myself:


1) To get the total weight of the atmosphere, you can look it up and get a published figure of 5.5 quadrillion tons.

To run your own check on that figure, simply multiply the average sea-level atmospheric pressure (14.7 PSI) by the surface area of the Earth in inches^2. Do that and you get a figure of about 5.7 quadrillion tons. That figure's a little high because we made the assumption that the entire Earth's surface is at sea level. Even so, it's not a bad ballpark estimate, and it's *very* easy to compute.



2) Calculate the average atmospheric molecular weight. A good approximate answer is dead-simple to compute. Just compute a properly weighted average of the N2 and O2 molecular weights. (You can safely ignore all the other gases -- their contributions are negligible).

Do this, and you will get an average atmospheric molecular weight of approximately 29 AMU.



3) Determine the molecular weight of CO2 (ignoring trace C and O isotopes) -- again, dead simple: 12(C) + 2*16(O2) = 44 AMU.



4) Compute the ratio of the total human CO2 emissions in tons to the total weight of the atmosphere in tons.

That's 1.8 trillion divided by 5.5 quadrillion = 0.000327



5) Scale by the ratio of the average atmospheric molecular weight to the molecular weight of CO2 and multiply by 1 million to get the total increase in PPM if all human emissions of CO2 had stayed in the atmosphere.

i.e. .000327 * 29/44 * 1,000,000

Do that, and you get something like 215 PPM.



6) Compare the 215 PPM equivalent that humans have emitted with the actual CO2 concentration increase of 100 PPM since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.



Obviously, the net effect of natural processes has been to *remove* CO2 from the atmosphere, not add to it.

It should be pretty obvious that the claim that humans might not be responsible for the rise in atmosphereic CO2 concentrations is completely and utterly absurd.

 

Why do you tell such silly lies?

Murry Salby is not the Chair of anything at Macquarie University


Here is their website
http://www.mq.edu.au/
Where TF is he "Chair of Climate"?




You told a lie


You should apologise to the forum

Why is it you need to tell lies to progress your arguments?

 

Here is the info for that Professor:
http://www.envsci.mq.edu.au/staff/ms/index.html

Certainly he is a Professor in the Environmental Science Department of MacqU, and I'm sure he does very fine work - but there is no mention anywhere of "Chair of Climate".

When you google "Chair of Climate" with that chaps name - the only references that come up are nutjob conspiracy theory sites like Jo Nova!

Doesn't this sort of stuff ever make you just a little bit suspicious of these websites you get all of your information from?

 

I havent been posting for a while and am really too busy for forums right now. Over time I expect to go the way of JLB but I did have to comment on this. Your red haring is the 1.8 trillion. That comes from Allen et. al. 2009. That estimate is based entirely on computer models that assume net zero natural carbon uptake. This is not a correct analysis. Its circular. It assumes that atmospheric rise in CO2 is anthropogenic. So a model that assumes that atmospheric rise in CO2 is anthropogenic then proves that the rise is anthropogenic.

The official record of estimated carbon emissions comes from the CDIAC which estimates 337 billion tones of carbon emitted from fossil fuel burning since 1751 based on records and estimates of fuel usage. This is not circular reasoning. It is derived from a different data set, fossil fuel usage.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html


Using your same numbers with the CDIAC's 337 billion I get 40ppm.

I suppose that when you want to prove something just run a model that over states the official estimate by a factor of 5.

 

Just a couple of notes -- not going to waste much time here.

The cumulative figure I used includes CO2 emissions from *all anthropogenic sources* (i.e. land-use/agriculture/deforestation as well as fossil fuel emissions). The figure cited by Windigo is for fossil-fuel/cement-production only.

But that's not the big problem. The big problem here is that Windigo screwed up and confused carbon with carbon dioxide. As a result, his PPM number is too low by about a factor of about 3.7. Correct that silly error and his whole argument goes right down the toilet.

Even if you ignore all emissions except fossil-fuel and cement-production emissions, you still end up with the conclusion that humans must be the source of the additional atmospheric CO2. There is no other way to reconcile the numbers.

And no, Allen et al. did not rely on computer models for their historical (cumulative) CO2 emission figure -- the only way you can conclude that is if you don't read the abstract (available on-line for free) carefully.

Once again, folks -- if a denier claims to have overturned a well-founded aspect of climate science, you can be sure that he/she f@#!ed up somewhere. That you can take to the bank.

 

337 billion tonnes C x 3.66 = 1.235 trillion tonnes CO2.

1.235 x 10^15 kg CO2 / 5.148x 10^18 kg (atmosphere) = 240 ppm by mass

234 ppm by mass / 1.52 = 158 ppmv from fossil fuel burning.

Actual increase: 110 ppmv.

Net natural sink: 48 ppmv.

Salby's idea is still toast.