by Kenneth Richard, October 16, 2017 in NoTricksZone
A recently highlighted paper published by atmospheric scientists Scafetta et al., (2017) featured a graph (above) documenting post-2000 trends in the published estimates of the Earth’s climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentrations (from 280 parts per million to 560 ppm).
by Uzbek, 29 septembre 2017, in Climato-Réalistes
Dans quelle mesure les émissions anthropiques qui s’élèvent à 9 Giga Tonnes par an (dont 1,5 dues au changement d’utilisation des sols) perturbent le cycle du carbone contribuant à l’augmentation de la concentration de CO2 dans l’atmosphère?
by Connaissance des Energies, 13 octobre 2017
Les émissions américaines de CO2 liées à l’énergie ont baissé de 1,7% en 2016. Elles ont toutefois encore atteint près de 5,2 milliards de tonnes l’an dernier, ce qui fait toujours des États-Unis le 2e émetteur mondial après la Chine.
by Nicole Jacobs, October 3, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch
The report, which bases its CO2 emissions estimates off International Energy Agency (IEA) and BP data through 2016, found the global CO2 levels essentially remained flat in 2015 and 2016. As BP noted earlier this year, the global trend is “well below the 10-year average growth of 1.6% and a third consecutive year of below-average growth” and that “during 2014-16, average emissions growth has been the lowest over any three-year period since 1981-83.”
by Ross McKitrick, September 26, 2017 in ClimateEtc.
A number of authors, including the IPCC, have argued that climate models have systematically overstated the rate of global warming in recent decades. A recent paper by Millar et al. (2017) presented the same finding in a diagram of temperature change versus cumulative carbon emissions since 1870.
by University of California, September 12, 2017 in WUWT
A trend toward greater discrimination under higher CO2 levels is broadly consistent with tree ring studies over the past century, with field and chamber experiments, and with geological records of C3 plants at times of altered atmospheric CO2, but increasing discrimination has not previously been included in studies of long-term atmospheric 13C/12C measurements. We further show that the inferred discrimination increase of 0.014 ± 0.007‰ ppm−1 is largely explained by photorespiratory and mesophyll effects.
by Arthur Viterio, 2016, in J Earth Science Climate Change
Earth’s climate is a remarkably “noisy” system, driven by scores of oscillators, feedback mechanisms, and radiative forcings. Amidst all this noise, identifying a solitary input to the system (i.e., HGFA MAG4/6 seismic activity as a proxy for geothermal heat flux) that explains 62% of the variation in the earth’s surface temperature is a significant finding.
See also here
by André Bijkerk, September 17, 2017
Considering the likelihood of future presentations and discussions, an update of paleoclimatological information was overdue. I was amazed to bump into a full overview of the atmospheric CO2 content of the last 420 million years published much earlier this year. An important milestone in the history of climate on Earth
by F. Pretis and M. Roser, June 2017, Energy, Elsevier
The wide range of socio-economic scenarios in climate projections results in high uncertainty about climate change.
We compare socio-economic scenario projections to observations over 1990–2010.
Global CO2 emission intensity increased despite all major scenarios projecting a decline.
Under-projection of emission intensity raises concerns about achieving emission targets.
by Marcus Gutjah et al., August 30, 2017 in PhysOrg
A natural global warming event that took place 56 million years ago was triggered almost entirely by volcanic eruptions that occurred as Greenland separated from Europe during the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean,
…The amount of carbon released during this time was vast—more than 30 times larger than all the fossil fuels burned to date and equivalent to all the current conventional and unconventional fossil fuel reserves we could feasibly ever extract.” Ridgwell said.
An unexpected finding was that enhanced organic matter burial was important in ultimately sequestering the released carbon and accelerating the recovery of the Earth’s ecosystem without massive extinctions.
See also here
by P.A.E. Pogge von Strandmann et al., August 2017, in WUWT and Geochemical Perspectives Letters
(…) “Nevertheless, we need to be clear that the changes in temperature are gradual, and that recovery can take hundreds of thousands of years. Given the rapid increase in the rate of global warming at present, this kind of wait is not an option for us”.
by Roger Andrews, August 23, 2017 in Energy Matters (blog)
Between 2007 and 2015 total annual US CO2 emissions decreased by 740 million tons (12%). An updated analysis shows that 35% of this decrease was caused by natural gas replacing coal in electricity generation, 30% by lower fuel consumption in the transportation sector, 28% by renewables replacing
by Alex Barral et al., 2017 (U. Lyon-CNRS)
La comparaison des fluctuations du CO2 atmosphérique retracées à partir de ces estimations avec des courbes des changements de température a révélé de fortes baisses du CO2 atmosphérique (200-300 ppm), couplées à de fortes hausses de la température moyenne à la surface du globe (5-8°C) à l’échelle de quelques millions d’années.
by Paul Voosen, August 15, 2017
Scientists announced today that a core drilled in Antarctica has yielded 2.7-million-year-old ice, an astonishing find 1.7 million years older than the previous record-holder
(…)
If the new result holds up, says Yige Zhang, a paleoclimatologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, the proxies will need to be recalibrated. “We have some work to do.”
by Blair King, April 10, 2016
Specifically the Bureau of Land Management Health Risk Evaluation for Cabon Dioxyde points out:
A value of 40,000 ppm is considered immediately dangerous to life and health based on the fact that a 30-minute exposure to 50,000 ppm produces intoxication, and concentrations greater than that (7-10%) produce unconsciousness (NIOSH 1996; Tox. Review 2005). Additionally, acute toxicity data show the lethal concentration low (LCLo) for CO2 is 90,000 ppm (9%) over 5 minutes (NIOSH 1996).
See also The Lake Nyos Disaster
See also here
by Howard Lee, geologist, August 9, 2017 in WUWT
Earth’s most severe mass extinction, the “Great Dying,” began 251.94 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, with the loss of more than 90% of marine species. Precise rock dates published in 2014 and 2015 proved that the extinction coincided with the Siberian Traps LIP, an epic outpouring of lava and intrusions of underground magma covering an area of northern Asia the size of Europe.
But those rock dates presented science with a new puzzle: why was the mass extinction event much shorter than the eruptions? And why did the extinction happen some 300,000 years after the lava began to flow?
by W. Liu et al., August 1st 2017
And what did these analyses reveal?
Not surprisingly, when all was said and done, the authors report that “increasing [the] CO2 concentration to 3000 ppm at 35°C did not cause changes in any of the measured responses.” They did note, however, that the heart rates of the subjects were slightly reduced under elevated CO2 conditions (Figure 1, top left panel), although these reductions were not statistically significant.
by JoNova, August 2017
Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of the entire world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world’s major carbon polluters.
by Wim Röst, August 1, 2017 in WUWT
Today ‘warm’ is strongly connected with ‘climate change’, if not with ‘dangerous climate change’. In the minds of people ‘cold’ should be more stable. But, paleo data show that it is‘cold’ that is unstable. While ‘warm’ always shows a high stability in climatic conditions.
by H. D. Lightfoot and O.A. Mamer, July 31, 2017 in NoTrickZone
The purpose of this study is to present robust evidence that the sun is working with water vapour to control the Earth’s climate and to show that the influence of CO2 on atmospheric temperature is so small as to be negligible.
See also here
by Alan Siddons, July 26, 2017
The chart below is taken directly from figures provided by the U.S. government’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) website, specifically its 2016 Global Carbon Project spreadsheet on the Historical Budget tab. In terms of gigatons of carbon, and from 1770 to 2004, it itemizes the growth rate of radiative forcing by atmospheric CO2 and the growth rate of oceanic absorption, what is known as a “carbon sink.”
by Dr S. Lüning and F. Vahrenholt, July 26, 2017 in NoTricksZone
About half of the CO2 emitted by man gets absorbed by the oceans and so does not stay in the atmosphere. Here there are certain areas of the ocean that are especially efficient CO2 sinks, while others do not absorb so well. What follows is a look of the newest literature on the subject.
by Robert Lyman, June9, 2017 in FriendsOfScienceCalgary
French version here
Each country is committed “to prepare and maintain successive individual nationally determined contributions (INDCs) that it intends to achieve”, to update these plans every five years and to pursue and report on the related domestic emission reduction measures. After three years, a Party may withdraw from the Agreement with one year’s notice.
There is an unresolved debate as to whether to call COP21 an agreement or a treaty.
by David Middleton, July 17, 2017 in WUWT
The Tethys Sea couldn’t have been a better place for petroleum source rock deposition even if it had been designed for such a purpose. The “Tethyan realm” encompassed much of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods…
by Kenneth Richard, July 17, 2017
A Swiss scientist known to have published hundreds of scientific papers in physics journals has authored a new scholarly paper that casts serious doubts on the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas influencing Earth’s temperatures.
This paper has been added to a growing volume of peer-reviewed scientific papers that seriously question estimates of a high climate sensitivity to significant increases in CO2 concentrations.
