Bishop Hill Diversionary tactics
Feb 22, 2011 Climate: Ward A truly Wardian performance by the LSE man at the Grantham Institute site today, taking a pot-shot at Christopher Booker because of his (entirely correct) observations about the inaccuracies in the science in Sir Paul Nurse's Horizon programme. No true statement should ever go unchallenged it seems:
Dr Bindschadler indicated that human activities emit the equivalent of about seven billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, whereas natural sources, such as volcanoes, only produce about one billion tonnes. Christopher Booker, whose weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph regularly recycles the content appearing on 'sceptic' blogs, attacked Dr Bindschadler's statements, describing them as "mind-boggling" and "a grotesque misrepresentation". Mr Booker claimed that natural sources account for more than 96 per cent of annual emissions of carbon dioxide. So who is right? With a typical flourish, Ward then proceeds to avoid the question he has just posed and embarks on a lengthy discussion of various aspects of the carbon cycle, but one that never quite gets back to the ratio between human and natural carbon dioxide emissions. As readers here know, Bindschadler got it wrong and Booker was right. The ratio is nothing like 7:1. Unfortunately, Ward just can't quite bring himself to say that truth.
Reader Comments (176)
JamesP
The point is, its predicted to have a significant effect. And modern warming is largely consistent with the predicted effect of rsing CO2. And what the stable isotope signature shows is that the increased CO2 is anthropogenic, not "natural"
But I doubt if we'd want to live in a world where the entire atmosphere was like that, with all the associated feedbacks that presumably don't occur in your greenhouses.
Anyway, I'm off to play tennis now, so I may not be able to respond to anything else on this thread.
But its been enjoyable talking to you all :-)
And so Paul B exits stage left, leaving "feedbacks" neatly dangling over our heads without any attempt to specify.
From the phrasing of his final comment I assume he is making the standard presumption that all feedbacks are ipso facto positive which is to say, in terms of how they affect the human condition, negative.
I am no more convinced than I was when this discussion started that CO2 within the sort of limits which are being discussed (at this point about 1200ppm) is likely to have anything other than a beneficial effect on life on earth.
When is somebody going to provide some sort of empirical evidence to replace the scaremongering and conjectures?
Bindcshadler, roughly translated from the German, means:
Bind—to fix, to prevent movement
Schade—damage, destruction
So, the name literally means "one who seeks to make great damage permanent", I imagine the intention of Herr Doktor Bindschadler is to hurt all of mankind by his feckless pronouncements.
bubbagyro
Bindschadler means 'cooper' as in barrel maker or 'tub binder'. Let's not be too harsh.
Give us a break Samtheskeptic, I've got to leave it somewhere if I want to do something else from time to time.
Anyway, very quickly, the thing about positive feedbacks is that they are amplifying feedbacks - they tend to change conditions relatively quickly. So when we have been used to quite stable conditions during the Holocene - probably the vital condition for the development of advanced human civilization - a change to a rapidly changing environment is quite likely to have a negative effect.
On the other hand negative feedbacks are stabilizing feedbacks, and are therefore broadly advantageous for the stability of human society.
Now I'm not saying that periods of rapid change don't sometimes bring advances in the process of adaptation, but they more often seem to result in societal collapse, simply because those societies aren't prepared for unexpected change.
Fortunately our science-based society is bright enough to be able to predict (to some extent) the course of future change. With enough foresight and political will, we may be able to adapt. So I'm definitely not arguing that "catastrophe" is inevitable. But its important not to be complacent. I honestly can't think of any scenario in which CO2 levels of 1200ppm are likely to be beneficial.
Paul:
Not to be snippy, butI can think of many scenarios. Don't have to think too hard, because most people know this. Farmers raise greenhouse levels to 1000-1500 ppm (1 part per thousand) routinely because plants grow better. That's what they say. But maybe they are stupid, and like to waste money on CO2 cylinders. Oh, and there have been countless papers on how 1000 ppm or higher protects plants from drought and lowers water utilization. This has been dealt with ad infinitum, so I won't go into it.
Animals were huge when CO2 was 3-15 parts per thousand. Plants grew very fast to supply the nourishment for the big brutes. Animals have shrunken in response to present-day CO2-starved conditions of 0.3 parts per thousand. Give us more CO2 now! (I wish we could control it up OR down, but puny man cannot).
Bright enough to predict? LOL! I really thought that , when I was 11 or so, that I would be living in aerial cities with magnetic cars flitting around. And you are—how old?
@Feb 23, 2011 at 9:35 AM | Eddy
"But you seem to be saying that volcanoes have increased their CO2 output by 8% over the same time frame. What is the evidence for that?"
No Thats not what I am saying, the other 8% is from CO2 outgasing from oceans due to the warming up from the little ice age, (soda bottle effect) .
Bubbagyro
Its perfectly possible to imagine things working in a stable environment with higher levels of CO2. What's problematic from the point of view of a functioning developed society is the process of getting there .
Simple example: a much warmer word would presumably have no ice caps, so the the process of getting there would involve quite substantial rises in sea levels as the present day ice caps melted. And many large centers of populations are close to the coasts and therefore vulnerable to sea level rise.
So I think my point remains valid - if CO2 levels rise rapidly, and if there turn out to be significant positive feedbacks, then modern societies will need to adapt or they'll suffer badly.
57. So you read Dan Dare as well?
Things don't always work out as predicted. You might not have got your magnetic cars, but could you even have conceived what the Internet might be?
Paul:
Where do you think Algore got the idea for the internet?? Not from his Divinity School studies, but from yours truly. The internet, BTW, had been in the works for decades, and only awaited the stepwise developing technology. Computing is a simple exercise compared to prediction of the chaotic climate system. Or the coming of extraterrestrials, for that matter, that should have heard the SETI broadcasts and responded years ago. Or did they???
BTW: Co2 positive feedback has been falsified repeatedly. Maybe your internet is not current?Turn to WUWT or Real Science for further information and reference works of recent years.
Paul B
OMG! And they spent all those millions to make Gaseous Diffusion plants to separate U235 from U238 for the Manhattan project! And all they needed was a plant with a stomatal opening of (p0.1mm). Who would have known, and there is a carbonisotopicselectase!
Sir, you are blowing smoke. You do not have the vaguest idea about what you speak. I am done with you.
Don Pablo:
Please explain to Paul the difference between passive transport and active transport. I don't seem to be able to help him, maybe my approach is bad. I feel sorry for him-see what you can do.
@James P
"What I would like to know is what the surface temperature would be without any CO2 in the atmosphere..."
That's a very good question. We've often heard that without greenhouse effect the Earth would be a snowball, but I've never seen an explanation as to what the temps would be if we removed CO2's contribution to greenhouse effect. Surely, climate models should be tell us that, if those models were good enough to predict how the atmosphere would behave to the doubling of CO2.
@bubbagyro
"Don't have to think too hard, because most people know this. Farmers raise greenhouse levels to 1000-1500 ppm (1 part per thousand) routinely because plants grow better. That's what they say. But maybe they are stupid, and like to waste money on CO2 cylinders. Oh, and there have been countless papers on how 1000 ppm or higher protects plants from drought and lowers water utilization. This has been dealt with ad infinitum, so I won't go into it."
Frankly, I don't think this has been discussed much recently. We know that plants do grow better with high CO2 concentrations, and this comes up occasionally in debates. But I didn't know that farmers went so far as purchasing CO2 cylinders in order to increase CO2 concentrations in greenhouses. It just goes to show how widespread the ignorance is among urban-dwellers. Oh, my!
Well, Paul, I'm sorry to have delayed your tennis game; it just didn't seem right for you to change the subject and then quietly wander off. Thankyou for the reply.
I may be stuck in my own mindset here -- probably am, like a lot of people -- but you still aren't coming up with anything evidential. My position is that until the climate technicians can convince me otherwise I am going with the idea that (ice ages apart) the state of the planet has varied within a certain temperature band many, many times and we haven't had the sort of catastrophes they are predicting.
You say you're not predicting catastrophes but you can't see "any scenarios" in which 1200 ppm of CO2 can be beneficial. Then you talk of disappearing ice caps without explaining how a continent with an average surface temperature of about -30 is going to melt on a temperature increase of 2 or 3 degrees.
On the same theme you appear to be ignoring the fact that 1000 years ago Greenland was more ice-free than it is at present without (so far as we know) catastrophic effects on the rest of the world.
There is research which contradicts your views. I'm not saying it's right or that you are wrong. I simply don't know why you (and those who support the cAGW meme) are so damn sure they're right and the rest of us should (at best) keep quiet and (at worst) be made to keep quiet.
MMMM. As far as I'm aware there is no chemical difference between isotopes. The chemistry depends purely on the atom's electron shells and the number of electron is determined by the number of protons. Isotopes have differing numbers of neutrons. C(13)02 is about 2% heavier than C(12)02 so diffusion effects could seperate them. The mass difference of uranium isotopes is about 1% but this is reduced by the need to get the uranium into a coumpound that can be diffused (uranium hexaflouruide?).
As far as I am aware there is no size difference between C(12)O2 and C(13)O2, but I'd be interested in any contrary information. Likewise an explantion of how C12 might be chemically prefered to C13 would be interesting.
To follow up my own post, the wiki entry on Isotope is most informative. Isotope fractionation is the name given to isotope effects on chemical bonds. For the lighter elements (in particular C, N and O) it can be significant.
Eddy --
There was a post earlier on this thread (Feb 23, 2011 at 6:17 PM -- page 4 of comments) about isotope fractionation by diffusion in stomata. Seemed somewhat speculative about the mechanism, but there's a link to a paper there. if you wish to follow up. Also a non-referenced claim that biological processes are biased toward C12 vs. C13.
Paul B
This will not, perhaps, enhance my popularity here, but I think someone should appear pleased by your solid, erudite and well-referenced contributions to this thread.
Thank you.
BBD
Agree, its been an interesting thread.
HaroldW and others:
It was my my very great honor to be a minor student of Robert W. Holley, who in 1968 receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on Transfer RNA. Soon after he moved from Cornell to Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla CA. He was a small man, barely 130 pounds, but intense. He told me that if I wanted to understand biochemistry, I would have to work the laboratory, so I did.
We used all sorts of radioactive isotopes to track biological reactions in the the lab, and while the atomic weight of such isotopes slightly changed the reaction rates, it was not in the range of 2% or 3% reported in the "scientific environmental proxy" literature for the bull shit reported by PaulB above.
I was there, I did it and I can say to PaulB and all his pseudo-scientists, BULL SHIT
Show me the data! You do not have.
Sadly, Bob died in 1993. He was a real scientist, who taught me what being a real scientist was all about.
It is in his memory I p### on the bullshit PaulB is claiming.
PaulB
Don't bullshit. You never know who will will meet on-line. You are an scientific ignoramus. Go get a real education. BuyScience for Dummies It would be a good start.
Harold, Harold:
Much as I disagree with Paul's basic science knowledge, you blunder also.
You confuse chemical reactions with biological ones. Biological means can and do distinguish isotopes. Look up deuterium uptake in plants as an example. Fast chemical reactions are, as you said, less discriminatory, but in the lab we (I am a biochemist, a radiochemist, and organic chemist) are spoiled by fast reaction times. But if a reaction takes years to complete, rather than minutes, you would see isotope favoring, especially with light elements.
Enzyme catalysis is exquisitely discriminating. Biochemistry is different than chemistry.
Don Pablo & Bubbagyro,
I'm not capable of any insight into this disagreement, and have not expressed any opinion, because I haven't the faintest idea about biochemistry. I did, however, trace as far as Farquhar, O'Leary & Berry, "On the Relationship between Carbon Isotope Discrimination and the Intercellular Carbon Dioxide Concentration in Leaves, Aust. J. Plant Physiol. 1982, 9, pp.121-137:
Don Pablo:
Sorry Harold. That correction was meant for Don Pablo. Too many names in Don Pablo's posting.
Don: Physiology is not a basic science, so temper yourself. You compare apples and oranges when you compare biological and chemical processes.
Harold:
Good answer. I remember that paper.
The stomata of plants also utilize active transport processes to discriminate minuscule differences in weight, chirality and polarizability.
Bubbagyro -
No offence taken. Eddy posted above, and I thought perhaps he had missed the post on the previous page so I mentioned it. Then I went and traced the reference from that post back a couple of links.
Think of me as the freshman at the back of the lecture hall trying to take in the topic, while the upperclassmen debate earnestly at the front. In this matter, I'm a complete novice, and am merely trying to form an informed opinion.
I am an accomplished scientist of 40+ years. The knowledge I gained is secondary to keeping an open mind and letting the data do its own work. I think your use of corroboration and the way you seek truth is a tribute to your educational background. Knowledge always has to take a back seat to wisdom. The scientific method is the wisdom we use to find out knowledge. It is the Yellow Brick road.
I have been surprised by how Nature can turn one's (my) best hypothesis or common sense on its head! Keep up the good work, Harold. Always keep that humility, and consider yourself wrong until proven right. Don't appeal to authority, because the majority opinion often turns out wrong, especially because there is the corruption of politics that has always been a participant in the scientific arena.
BBD and Harold W and others
Thanks for your polite and open response to me, even though I know you don't agree with my basic view about AGW.
Its a great shame that my attempt to engage with Don Pablo resulted in the intemperate ramblings at 12:29, but in spite of that I do enjoy posting here, and will return again.
I'm not at home work work right now, so not able to contribute any more to this thread
All the best, Paul