It's time to pull the plug on our long-running CO2 experiment

In the last 140 years or so, humans have added almost 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 to the air (equivalent), or 1,000 billion tonnes. It would have been more except for oceans and land absorbing around half of it.

We are adding a lot of CO2 to the air

This leads me to talk about one of the many misconceptions thrown around by climate disinformers. Some deniers wrongly claim our CO2 emissions add little to atmospheric CO2. How they could ever think that is a mystery. It's not a secret that CO2 is a product of burning hydrocarbons. (Some are very confused, mixing up various numbers they've heard and tossing them back together in strange and wrong patchwork.)

Denier quote of the day: Why should I waste 24 minutes..(learning climate)

The Twitter conversations I've written about before is giving more insight into the denial crowd. The bots and trolls are ramping up as the US election campaign gears up. (It goes on forever, doesn't it. The election is still more than a year away.) Among the bots there are some real people. One of them was happy to summarise the denier's stance.

I wouldn't devote even 24 minutes to learn science

Someone put up a chart purporting to show CO2 and temperature going back 4.5 billion years. I doubt the person tweeting it understood it. They said they got the picture from another denier called Nasif Nahle, who even put a copyright on it! It didn't matter. According to deniers, the tweet was from an acceptable denier so it must mean the greenhouse effect is a hoax.

Do your bit - help with a survey of climate blog readers

How about helping out some researchers by taking a survey of climate blog readers. It's for a project being done jointly by researchers at Cambridge University and Wageningen University. The results will be made available to me and every one who completes the survey so, with luck, we all might learn something and HotWhopper could be better for it. And before you ask, it has ethics approval and yes, the survey is anonymous, responses confidential etc etc.

It'll only take up to about 10 minutes or so. If you start and get interrupted, I'm told you can save where you're up to and finish it later.

So don't hold back - go for it. It's in a very good cause.

Sou.
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A short primer on global energy flows, for the twitter deniers

Energy balancing when no forcing

There have been two or three people on the climate denial conversation on Twitter who cannot conceptualise global energy flows. Remember, almost all the deniers in this particular conversation are greenhouse effect deniers who don't "believe" physics and chemistry. Nonetheless they've discovered a wonky diagram in the deniosphere somewhere and have asked how it works. The short answer is, it doesn't. Not the way it's portrayed in their diagram.

Dr Kevin Trenberth has kindly allowed me to publish this updated global energy flow schematic, which is about to be published. (I'll post the doi when it is available.) Here it is, with an explanation below: