Reply To: Cap and Trade

[Brian H]

Lerner wrote: Brian, CO2 in the atmosphere is currently rising by about 0.5% per year. As your figures show, the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning alone (not counting deforestation) is 1% of total CO2 in the atmosphere. So, fossil fuel consumption alone is more than enough to account for the whole rise in CO2.
To see the situation clearly, imagine a water tank with a faucet and a pump. Water from the faucet enters at 1 gallon per minute and leaves by the pump at 1 gallon per minute. The amount of water in the tub—50 gallons—remains constant. Now start pouring water into the tub from a pitcher at the rate of 1 gallon per hour. The amount of water in the tank will then increase by 1 gallon per hour. ALL the increase is due to the water from the pitcher, even though that flow is much less than the flow from the faucet and the pump.
With CO2, the situation is more complex because rising temperatures cause the release of CO2 from the oceans and increased CO2 may cause increased plant growth, which drains CO2 from the atmosphere. Probably most significantly, concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now a lot larger than that for equilibrium with CO2 in the oceans, leading to large absorption of CO2 by the oceans.
But there is no doubt that human-created CO2 is very large compared with the CHANGE in CO2 now occurring. It is more than double that change, not 3.5% of it. Whether or not that change in CO2 is responsible for the 0.5C increase in global temperature is a more complex issue. Have fun debating it, but keep your numbers straight.

At the very least, the absorption ratios apply to the entirety of the CO2 load. The point of the article is that the behavior of ocean/air CO2 exchanges is independent of source, and in scope significantly outweighs human influence. CO2 historically/geologically etc. has risen and fallen by huge ratios, long before any human influence could possibly have existed.

Further, the 0.5% “trend” of CO2 increase is significantly smaller than diurnal or seasonal variation. It is utterly implausible to attribute seasonal or diurnal variance to humans, and in the face of that variance, plus the long historical record, it is implausible to suggest that somehow human emissions are significant variables within such a large, self-regulated system.

Examine again that geological image above ( http://www.biocab.org/Climate_Geologic_Timescale.html ) For literally hundreds of millions, indeed billions, of years CO2 and temperature went their separate ways. What changed when human CO2 release commenced? On the scale, say, of the Cambrian Era, the variance in the Holocene Epoch is minor noise on the signal.

A final note about “straight numbers”. The assertion was that the human contribution is ~3.5% of the TURNOVER (flux) of CO2. That remains true. Further, it also remains true that CO2 contributes about 3.5% of total GH gas load. (Most of the rest is H2O, which substantially overlaps, and has a wider absorption spectrum–and swings in HUGE ranges across the planet, over short and long periods of time, and in virtually every layer of the atmosphere.) Hence the net effect of 0.125% on the (changes in) GH behavior of the atmosphere. Trivial.
Addendum:
I may be overstating human influence. From the paper referenced above:

A correlation (Chapter 5) between the annual increase of the CO2 concentration in the
atmosphere and the mean annual global temperature anomalies was demonstrated and human
emissions were found to be insignificant. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches in a
very short time an equilibrium with the CO2 concentration in the oceans when ocean
temperatures are changing or when CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere change. This has
also been verified by measuring the reduction of Carbon-14 isotopes in the atmosphere after
the Soviet nuclear testing activities on Novaja Zemja in the 1960-ies [17].

The additional greenhouse effect caused by man-made emissions (which amounts to 1% of
the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as earlier reported) amounts to 1% of 1% of
the total greenhouse effect in the atmosphere resulting in a total of 0,01%. This is too
insignificant to be measured due to the large natural variations.