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.)

The global inconsistency of climate science denier, Larry Hamlin, at WUWT

This is rich.

Yesterday I wrote how climate disinformer Larry Hamlin picked out years of hot Junes in the USA and California, as if to argue that global warming isn't worth worrying about because there have been occasional hot Junes in California and the USA in the past. Today he wants to ignore local and go global (cached here).

In the last article I showed how, when you put Larry's USA/Californian June temperatures in the global context, it highlights the ridiculousness of deniers. Early last century the world as a whole was much colder than it is today. This century we're really getting a taste of what's to come. This past few weeks we've been getting a horrific taste of what's to come much more often, with deadly fires, drought, killer heat waves and floods widespread over the northern hemisphere, not to mention the drought back here in Australia. It isn't just hot in California and the USA, it's hot in lots of places as this map of June temperatures shows (from GISTemp).

Right wing anti-intellectuals can't get into university - so implies the dimwits at WUWT

Looking through comments to the latest article at WUWT, it's clear that the general view of Anthony Watts' fans think that science deniers are incapable of getting into academia. Every comment implies that a university job in whatever field, which entails going to conferences, is restricted to people who accept climate science. Deniers are incapable of getting a job at a university, according to WUWT-ers. At best, they are in such a tiny minority that they don't count.

This is a rather strange position for science deniers to take though it does make sense, in a weird way. WUWT fans are assuming people who deny science don't do PhDs or post-docs, let alone make a career for themselves as a lecturer and/or researcher. They assume that science deniers do not have the inclination (or the wherewithal) to do academic research.

If you want evidence, see for yourself. Eric Worrall has copied and pasted some of an article at Huffington Post, written by two academics: Nives Dolšak and Aseem Prakash. The article was suggesting ways that universities and academics could offset their air travel, though Eric didn't write about that. His focus was on the fact that academics fly across the country and around the world to conferences, to exchange ideas with their colleagues.

Flashback to 1883: Burning coal is polluting the atmosphere

The letter below gets some things right and quite a bit wrong. What it does show is that 133 years ago, back in 1883, the general public was reading about how burning coal is polluting the atmosphere. Other newspaper flashbacks can be seen here, including my favourite, from 1884. Weirdly, there are still a few very vocal people who think gravity is a hoax or should I say the equivalent - that climate science is a hoax.

From the Wallaroo Times, South Australia, Saturday 1 September 1883

(The paragraph breaks and emphasis are mine.)

Pollution of the Atmosphere

There was a letter in Nature some time since, calling attention to the pollution of the atmosphere by the burning of coal; and it was calculated that in the year 1900, all animal life would cease, from the amount of carbonic dioxide; but, the author had overlooked the fact that the rain is continually cleansing the atmosphere of this, and the fall of this rain on the ground, and the combination of this with various salts ; besides the oceans alone would absorb their own bulk at normal pressure, but at an increased pressure of, say half a mile deep, would dissolve more than we are likely to need for hundreds of years.

But there are other products of combustion, or rather of incomplete combustion, that are not brought down in this manner by rain, as hydrogen and the hydrocarbons, chiefly marsh gas and ethylene. The latter has, I believe, been observed by the spectroscope on the Alps, and was supposed to have come from space.

Head slap: Deniers feign "shock" at James Hansen. It's just @wattsupwiththat using denier tricks

There are several points to note in this rather silly WUWT article (archived here), written by someone called Robert Bradley Jr. (who I'm guessing is this one-man show - of fossil fuel advocates). The article provides a good illustration of common denier tricks - as well as the usual misrepresentation of climate science:

• The headline is completely wrong. It is a "fake news" article typical of WUWT.
• Robert has applied the Serengeti strategy - attacking a single scientist, Dr James Hansen, hoping to isolate him and bring him down (as if!).
• It resorts to quote mining and quote splicing to fake that Dr Hansen said something different to what he actually said.
• It illustrates that the author doesn't understand much of anything about greenhouse gases - or pretends he doesn't and assumes WUWT readers don't.
• It is trying to persuade readers that Dr Hansen is saying there's no rush to cut CO2 emissions - when he isn't.

Robert's WUWT article is a quote mine of things Dr James Hansen has written over the years. Problem is that Robert is either incapable of understanding what he copies and pastes, or believes that WUWT readers are incapable.

Robert Bradley Jr. seems to think that all it takes to reduce atmospheric GHG amounts is to reduce GHG emissions.  In fact, from what I can tell, Robert doesn't know the difference between atmospheric greenhouse gases and human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Deluded deniers at WUWT about why CO2 emissions growth is stabilising and what it means

The 2016 Global Carbon Budget paper was published this week. The report is by sixty-seven people from all around the world. It is described as the "11th annual update of emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land, and ocean. This data synthesis brings together measurements, statistical information, and analyses of model results in order to provide an assessment of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties for years 1959 to 2015, with a projection for year 2016".

What the authors found was that carbon emissions dropped slightly in 2015, and are likely to increase only slightly this year. Over the last three years there has been almost no growth in emissions, which might be a sign that the world will soon see a decline in emissions - or not (if Donald Trump has his way).

Willis Eschenbach and his carbon uptake mistake at WUWT

Willis Eschenbach is wondering about how much extra CO2 can go into the air (archived here, latest here). He's done some calculations and figured that atmospheric CO2 can't double. Even without doing any calculations it's easy to see that he's wrong. This is why.

Willis has used two models for his estimate, and two estimates of fossil fuel available to burn. He got his estimates from a diagram in the IPCC WG1 AR5 report, which put fossil fuel reserves at between around 900 GtC (gigatonnes of carbon) and 2000 GtC.  I will leave it to the experts to quibble over how much of the remaining fossil fuel reserves would be technically feasible to exploit. This article is about how and perhaps why Willis has underestimated the impact - or so it seems to me. Willis' two examples are described here as:

• Example 1: burning 900 GtC by 2100 and
• Example 2: burning an extra 2,000 GtC by 2100.

As far as I can tell, where he went wrong was in using single pulse models. That is, there's an inherent assumption in the models he used that CO2 will be released as a single pulse, followed by nothing. (Willis doesn't assume that himself, but the models he uses do, I think. That leads to a flaw in his reasoning.) Update: Willis mentions a tau of 33 years, suggesting he has factored in additional removal of CO2 from the air, over and above what the biosphere, oceans and land surface can already handle. In other words, he's erroneously double counted.