by Roy Spencer, Apr 14, 2023 in WUWT
This is an update of my CO2 budget model that explains yearly Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1959 with three main processes:
- an anthropogenic source term, primarily from burning of fossil fuels
- a constant yearly CO2 sink (removal) rate of 2.05% of the atmospheric “excess” over 295 ppm
- an ENSO term that increases atmospheric CO2 during El Nino years and decreases it during La Nina years
The CO2 Budget Model
I described the CO2 budget model here. The most important new insight gained was that the model showed that the CO2 sink rate has not been declining as has been claimed by carbon cycle modelers after one adjusts for the history of El Nino and La Nina activity.
If the sink rate was really declining, that means the climate system is becoming less able to remove “excess” CO2 from the atmosphere, and future climate change will be (of course) worse than we thought. But I showed the declining sink rate was just an artifact of the history of El Nino and La Nina activity, as shown in the following figure (updated through 2022).
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by Roy Spencer, Aug 15, 2022 in WUWT
From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog
Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
SUMMARY: A simple time-dependent CO2 budget model shows that yearly anthropogenic emissions compared to Mauna Loa CO2 measurements gives a declining CO2 sink rate, which if continued would increase atmospheric CO2 concentrations and presumably anthropogenic climate change. But accounting for ENSO (El Nino/La Nina) activity during 1959-2021 removes the decline. This is contrary to multiple previous studies that claimed to account for ENSO. A preprint of my paper (not yet peer reviewed) describing the details is at ENSO Impact on the Declining CO2 Sink Rate | Earth and Space Science Open Archive (essoar.org).
UPDATE: The CO2 model, with inputs and outputs, is in an Excel spreadsheet here: CO2-budget-model-with-EIA-growth-cases.
I decided that the CO2 model I developed a few years ago, and recently reported on here, was worthy of publication, so I started going through the published literature on the subject. This is a necessary first step if you want to publish a paper and not be embarrassed by reinventing the wheel or claiming something others have already “disproved”.
The first thing I found was that my idea that Nature each year removes a set fraction of the difference between the observed CO2 concentration and some baseline value is not new. That idea was first published in 2013 (see my preprint link above for details), and it’s called the “CO2 sink rate”.
The second thing I found was that the sink rate has (reportedly) been declining, by as much as 0.54% (relative) per year, even after accounting for ENSO activity. But I only get -0.33% per year (1959-2021) before accounting for ENSO activity, and — importantly — 0.0% per year after accounting for ENSO.
This last finding will surely be controversial, because it could mean CO2 in the atmosphere will not rise as much as global carbon cycle modelers say it will. So, I am posting the model and the datasets used along with the paper preprint at ENSO Impact on the Declining CO2 Sink Rate | Earth and Space Science Open Archive (essoar.org). The analysis is quite simple and I believe defensible. The 2019 paper that got -0.54% per year decline in the sink rate uses complex statistical gymnastics, with a professional statistician as a primary author. My analysis is much simpler, easier to understand, and (I believe) at least as defensible.
The paper will be submitted to Geophysical Research Letters for peer review in the next couple days. In the meantime, I will be inviting the researchers who live and breathe this stuff to poke holes in my analysis.
by University of Exeter, September5, 2020 in WUWT/Nature
The world’s oceans soak up more carbon than most scientific models suggest, according to new research.
Previous estimates of the movement of carbon (known as “flux”) between the atmosphere and oceans have not accounted for temperature differences at the water’s surface and a few metres below.
The new study, led by the University of Exeter, includes this – and finds significantly higher net flux of carbon into the oceans.
It calculates CO2 fluxes from 1992 to 2018, finding up to twice as much net flux in certain times and locations, compared to uncorrected models.
“Half of the carbon dioxide we emit doesn’t stay in the atmosphere but is taken up by the oceans and land vegetation ‘sinks’,” said Professor Andrew Watson, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute.
“Researchers have assembled a large database of near-surface carbon dioxide measurements – the “Surface Ocean Carbon Atlas” (http://www.socat.info) – that can be used to calculate the flux of CO2 from the atmosphere into the ocean.
“Previous studies that have done this have, however, ignored small temperature differences between the surface of the ocean and the depth of a few metres where the measurements are made.
Continuer la lecture de Ocean carbon uptake widely underestimated →
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