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.)

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.

Is CO2 sentient? Ari Halperin and Anthony Watts claim the carbon cycle is "fraud"

After a rattled Anthony Watts spat out dummies yesterday, today he's going for broke and has posted an article denying the carbon cycle (archived here). You may recall how, earlier this week Anthony fibbed to his readers, claiming "I don’t like to use the word “fraud”"? Well, here he is not five days later with a blog article alleging IPCC fraud. The supposed fraud? Well, it turns out that Anthony's guest blogger doesn't believe in the carbon cycle. You could say he's a carbon cycle denier.

Excuse the lengthy article. It's not exactly a primer, but there's some detail. I figured people who've never heard of the carbon cycle might find it useful. (The image is because at one point, Ari seems to be suggesting that CO₂ is sentient.)

The carbon cycle

The carbon cycle has been described as a fast cycle plus a slow cycle. The fast cycle involves short term fluxes as happens with photosynthesis (an annual cycle) and other short term processes of the order of decades (vegetative growth and decay etc). The slow cycle involves medium term fluxes on a timescale of centuries, particularly the exchange between the ocean and atmosphere, as well as very slow chemical and geological processes (thousands to millions of years), such as weathering of rocks.

Anthony Watts fails fossil fuel arithmetic test posed by Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira

A new paper in GRL by Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira works out how long it takes for the greenhouse forcing by CO2 to exceed the combustion warming by fossil fuels. The heat from burning fossil fuels is soon outpaced by the heat retained from putting the CO2 into the atmosphere, released when those fossil fuels were burnt.

Update: See below

It's all too hard says veteran piker Anthony Watts at WUWT: on Hansen et al

Today I am writing about Anthony Watts at WUWT writing about Joe Romm at Climate Progress, who is writing about a new paper in PLOS by Hansen et al, which has been doing the rounds of science blogs and anti-science blogs alike.  (WUWT is an award winning anti-science blog.)

In a nutshell, what the paper shows is that if we allow 1000 Gt carbon to accumulate in the air, although the initial rise in surface temperature may be 2 degrees, over the medium term slower feedbacks would result in a rise of 3 to 4 degrees.  This of course means a lot of unpleasantness, not the least of which would be the huge sea level rise over time.

Going by his headline, Anthony Watts doesn't know the difference between being alarmed and being an alarmist.

Going by his article, Anthony Watts is a piker.  He gives up very easily.  He is a "can't be done" man, not a "can do" man.

Anthony Watts spends a bit of cyberspace letting his readers know that there is a chap called Tom Nelson who isn't familiar with people who work in climate science.  Apparently Tom didn't recognise any of these names:

James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Makiko Sato, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Frank Ackerman, David J. Beerling, Paul J. Hearty, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Shi-Ling Hsu, Camille Parmesan, Johan Rockstrom, Eelco J. Rohling, Jeffrey Sachs, Pete Smith, Konrad Steffen, Lise Van Susteren, Karina von Schuckmann, James C. Zachos.

(I'm not sure why Anthony Watts thought that Tom Nelson's ignorance was in any way newsworthy. Even I recognise quite a few of the authors and I haven't been blogging about climate science for nearly as long as Anthony Watts and Tom Nelson have been protesting it.)


Anyway, Anthony Watts thinks that humans aren't capable of switching to clean energy.  He writes:

They are clamoring not only for a carbon tax, but also for green technology. But, real world data they cite suggests they are living in a dream world: 

I put Anthony Watts in the same category as people who used horses and donkeys and swore that the motor car would never catch on.  Although Anthony doesn't appear to favour a switch to renewable energy, one thing he is in favour of governments spending taxpayers' money on is nuclear energy.  Anthony writes:

I will give them props for calling for more nuclear energy, but the rest of the paper is nothing more than a climate activist’s wet dream.

I'm in a rush today with lots to do, so I'll just post a link to the Hansen paper and the Climate Progress article and an archived version of the WUWT article.  If you want you can comment below.

Oh, I've just got to post this comment from one of the WUWT deluded.  This is the most scientific rebuttal that most of the WUWTers can come up with!

DesertYote says:

December 3, 2013 at 5:46 pm
One can not assume good intentions that have been misdirected by stupidity. Ever single person in this list is a Marxist. The destruction of capitalism is the goal. Peoples lives are unimportant.