Bombing out: Christopher Monckton goes in to bat for two professors at WUWT

Update - click here for a follow up article demolishing disinformation from Murry Salby.

This is still "utter nutter" week at WUWT.  Today Anthony Watts has posted an article by the potty peer from the UK, Christopher Monckton.  Christopher writes in his usual "schoolboy" fashion, using words such as "schoolboys at the University of Queensland", probably referring to John Cook, who runs the award-winning climate website, SkepticalScience.com.

Christopher is resurrecting a couple of old and utterly silly denier memes arguing that the CO₂ we emit somehow disappears by magic and goes goodness knows where.  It's a very mixed up article altogether.

One of the main difficulties I had with the WUWT article is that Christopher keeps referring to other articles and comments but doesn't provide any links to what he is talking about.  I guess he has the WUWT target audience summed up well.  He'd have assumed that no fake sceptic would ever follow a link - that would be heresy to the fake sceptic creed.  They might be mistaken for a real sceptic.  However - in this case Christopher would have assumed wrongly.  His article generated much discussion and got lots of people doing lots of sums.  (Archived here)

Two wrongs don't make a right

As far as I can tell, Christopher Monckton is trying to make a whole out of two disparate denier memes.  One is propagated by an older retired professor Gösta Pettersson.  The other is some convoluted hypothesis or two or three of a younger retired ex-professor Murry Salby.  The two hypotheses don't make any sense on their own.  Try to put them together and you end up with a helluva mess.  But that's what Christopher Monckton is proposing.

The short version is as follows:

Gösta Pettersson

AFAIK, Gösta tries to claim that all the extra CO₂ will only stay in the air for a very short time.  He bases this on flawed deductions from analysis of  ¹⁴CO₂. (Note: In the comments, Lars Karlsson says that Gösta Pettersson has acknowledged he made an error in his analysis.)

Following the bomb testing of the 1950s and 60s, analysis has been done to work out how quickly CO₂ circulates between the atmosphere and the surface.  You can think of it as how long it takes for individual molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide to disperse through the atmosphere and surface.  This time is quite short.  A matter of a few years.  By contrast, if we stopped adding any CO₂ to the air altogether, it would take around 300 years to remove something like 65% to 80% of the extra we've added in the last 150 years or so, and hundreds of thousands of years to completely remove all the carbon we've added to the air.

Murry Salby

I think, based on what Christopher Monckton has written, that Murry has things completely back to front.  I believe he tries to claim that rising temperature has caused CO₂ to outgas from the ocean and that's why atmospheric CO₂ is rising.  He reckons it's not from burning fossil fuels.

I gather that Murry doesn't have any answer to what happens to all the waste CO₂ we've been tossing into the air.  Nor does he seem to understand that the oceans are getting more acidic - because they are absorbing more CO2 than they are outgassing.

If carbon dioxide is not going into the ocean (it is), in fact if as Murry apparently maintains, CO₂ was coming out of the ocean (it's not), and since biomass on earth hasn't increased that much, then where is all that fossil fuel CO₂  ending up?

That's it in a nutshell.  Murry Salby and Gösta Pettersson both have it wrong.  Christopher Monckton is trying to argue that "two wrongs make a right".

There's more - if you're game :)

Researching this article I found myself delving into all sorts of interesting areas and learnt a heap of new stuff.  This article evolved into a longer post reflecting my meandering travels.  It's probably the longest article I've written and I won't blame anyone for not reading it.  If you've landed on the home page and you're not deterred by my sloppiness in not cutting back to bare bones, you can click here to read more.

CO2 is a resident of the atmosphere

Sometimes it's as if WUWT is going methodically through the list of SkepticalScience myths, trying valiantly to revive them.  This time someone called Gösta Pettersson is muddling the residence time of an individual CO2 molecule with the time taken for all the CO2 in the atmosphere to go through a complete carbon cycle or the time taken to get to a new equilibrium state in the earth system.

Edit: Lars Karlsson has made a couple of comments pointing out that the issues in Gösta Pettersson's article are not as simple as I made them out to be.  (See comments below).

Any individual molecule of CO2 will get used up in photosynthesis or absorbed by the ocean (at present the ocean is still a net absorber of CO2 rather than a net emitter, because of the partial pressure of atmospheric CO2). But no sooner does that happen than another molecule pops into the air to replace it - maybe in exchange with the ocean or via plant respiration.  And while all this is going on we keep adding more CO2 to the air and the oceans, by burning fossil fuels and other activities like land clearing.

That ongoing cycle between vegetation, oceans, soil and atmosphere determines the residence time of a single molecule.  The length of time taken before atmospheric CO2 reaches a new equilibrium is much longer - of the order of centuries to millenia.

I rather like this diagram from realclimate.org to get a sense of the time frames involved.  It's designed to illustrate climate sensitivity.  Click the diagram to see a larger version.

Source: RealClimate.Org

There are any number of diagrams of the carbon cycle. For example this one from the NASA/Globe program. (Click to enlarge):

Credit: NASA/Globe Program

In the comments a number of people point out the mistake Gösta Pettersson made. Some deniers refuse to accept it, but that's par for the course at WUWT.  The question remains - why does Anthony Watts promote these false myths on his blog?  It can't be for any good reason.