Phytoplankton love carbon dioxide

Further to the last post, and with truly magnificent timing, I come across a new paper from John Hopkins University:

As anthropogenic CO₂ emissions acidify the oceans, calcifiers generally are expected to be negatively affected. However, using data from the Continuous Plankton Recorder, we show that coccolithophore occurrence in the North Atlantic increased from ~2 to over 20% from 1965 through 2010. We used Random Forest models to examine >20 possible environmental drivers of this change, finding that CO₂ and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation were the best predictors, leading us to hypothesize that higher CO₂ levels might be encouraging growth. A compilation of 41 independent laboratory studies supports our hypothesis. Our study shows a long-term basin-scale increase in coccolithophores and suggests that increasing CO₂ and temperature have accelerated the growth of a phytoplankton group that is important for carbon cycling.

So the population of coccolithophores has increased by an order of magnitude. And since coccolithophores sequester carbon dioxide when they calcify, that means a favourable carbon cycle feedback just got a whole lot bigger.

Excellent news, I'm sure you'll agree.

Observations are the darnedest things

One of the more iconic figures from the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report was SPM10, which purports to show the relationship between cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.

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Jumping the climate shark

Yes folks, we may have reached peak climate drivel, with the news that we are being saved from impending climate disaster by the heroic actions of a hardy bunch of...sharks.

Turtle-eating sharks help slow global warming, scientist says

Sharks help to reduce global warming by eating sea turtles and other creatures that consume carbon-rich sea grasses, an Australian scientist said on Tuesday.

Sometimes there are no words adequate to describe the silliness of the climate change researcher.

Weak sink sunk

In the years after the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report a small group of scientists claimed to have demonstrated that carbon sinks were weakening, so that a progressively smaller proportion of carbon dioxide emissions would be mopped up and locked away. Alarm, it would seem, was required. Josep Canadell and Michael Raupach, both of CSIRO, together with Corinne le Quere of UEA, published these claims in a series of papers from 2007-9 and their ideas have led to a great deal of worry among climatologists and licking of lips among environmentalists.

However, since then other scientists have challenged these views. Emanuel Gloor at Leeds published a paper that found that that the earlier claims were assigning to carbon sink weakening changes that should have been explained by other factors, like land-use change.

One of the carbon sinks that was claimed to be weakening was the Southern Ocean, but last night, Science published another paper (£) that finds that this was wrong too:

Several studies have suggested that the carbon sink in the Southern Ocean—the ocean’s strongest region for the uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ —has weakened in recent decades. We demonstrated, on the basis of multidecadal analyses of surface ocean CO₂ observations, that this weakening trend stopped around 2002, and by 2012, the Southern Ocean had regained its expected strength based on the growth of atmospheric CO₂. All three Southern Ocean sectors have contributed to this reinvigoration of the carbon sink, yet differences in the processes between sectors exist, related to a tendency toward a zonally more asymmetric atmospheric circulation. The large decadal variations in the Southern Ocean carbon sink suggest a rather dynamic ocean carbon cycle that varies more in time than previously recognized.

Wrong-speed dating

Last year I posted a series of articles about statistical issues surrounding radiocarbon dating, a subject that is important in its own right but also directly impinges on the climate debate because of the way in which it informs our knowledge of past climates and the carbon cycle.

However, it looks as though a new paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters is going to extend the debate still further, arguing that radiocarbon dating falls down badly in samples that are over 30,000 years old. According to an article in the South China Morning Post,

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Defusing the methane bomb

Environmentalists and some of the more eccentric members of the scientific community like to allude to the possibility that the Arctic permafrost will melt, releasing a methane time bomb into the atmosphere which will inevitably end in runaway global warming and an apocalypse. There is even an Artic Methane Emergency Group featuring our old friend Peter Wadhams, among others, and with headlines along the lines of "The Arctic is rapidly heading for meltdown".

It's a good story, and no doubt good for business too, but unfortunately somebody has gone and spoiled it all:

[N]ew research led by Princeton University researchers and published in The ISME Journal in August suggests that, thanks to methane-hungry bacteria, the majority of Arctic soil might actually be able to absorb methane from the atmosphere rather than release it. Furthermore, that ability seems to become greater as temperatures rise.

The Salby lecture

Murry Salby's recent lecture in London can now be seen on YouTube.

Lord Deben and the bureaucratic mindset

Experts (it says here) at the University of Leeds have declared that the UK is not really cutting its carbon emissions; it is merely exporting them to China.

The analysis shows that CO2 emissions produced within the UK fell 194 million tonnes in 2012 compared with 1990.

But the cuts were outweighed by a rise of 280m tonnes created abroad during the manufacture of goods imported to Britain.

So it seems that these experts have discovered what Nigel Lawson has been saying for nearly ten years (H/T Paul Matthews). As he put it in An Appeal to Reason (2008):

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Carbon conversation

This is a guest post by Peter Gill, a retired physicist who may be familiar to readers as a central character in my Institutional Bias pamphlet. I have lightly edited a couple of paragraphs to make the meaning clear.

The ClimateSceptics Yahoo Email Group is very active and includes contributions from some, notably Mike MacCracken who are certainly not sceptics of the AGW set of hypotheses. On 7 January 2015, Mike MacCracken wrote two pieces on carbon dioxide. The first on 7 January included this:

But what I really want to write you about is the statement: “(Also recall than man's CO₂ is different than nature's CO₂ because man's CO₂ magically stays in the atmosphere while nature's doesn't.)” The statement results from a misunderstanding­ all CO₂ molecules are the same and experience the same processes. There are two different times to be aware of: 

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Sinks and sources

Over the years I haven't really devoted much time to the carbon cycle, but I wonder if some of the attention of the climate debate will be switching to this area with the advent of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite deployed last year to measure carbon dioxide concentrations across pretty much the whole planet.

The first maps were presented at AGU last month and the data is now publicly available:

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Ridley's response to Lynas

This is a guest post by Matt Ridley and is a response to this post by Mark Lynas.

As far as I know Mark Lynas is an honourable man. He changed his mind on the benefits of genetically modified crops, going against the views of nearly all environmental campaign groups and bravely putting up with much criticism for doing so. I know how he feels, because I have done the same – changing my mind about the dangers of climate change, going against the views of nearly all environmental campaign groups and putting up with much criticism for doing so.

That Mark does not agree with my change of mind on climate (which happened gradually but was cemented by the way the green and scientific establishments reacted to the Climategate controversy) is fair enough. I don’t, however, understand why he chooses to take the low road in his attacks on me. His latest blog post is entitled “On Matt Ridley’s latest attempt at climate change denial”. He knows full well that I have never advocated climate change “denial” and that that very phrase was invented as a way smear sceptics who think the dangers of climate change are being exaggerated by associating them with holocaust denial. Yuk.

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Carbon cycle: better than we thought

A new paper in PNAS has been getting quite a bit of media play today, which is slightly surprising because the overall theme is "it's better than we thought". The original paper is here and there is a rather helpful "Significance" section alongside the abstract.

Understanding and accurately predicting how global terrestrial primary production responds to rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations is a prerequisite for reliably assessing the long-term climate impact of anthropogenic fossil CO₂ emissions. Here we demonstrate that current carbon cycle models underestimate the long-term responsiveness of global terrestrial productivity to CO₂ fertilization. This underestimation of CO₂ fertilization is caused by an inherent model structural deficiency related to lack of explicit representation of CO₂ diffusion inside leaves, which results in an overestimation of CO₂ available at the carboxylation site. The magnitude of CO₂ fertilization underestimation matches the long-term positive growth bias in the historical atmospheric CO₂ predicted by Earth system models. Our study will lead to improved understanding and modeling of carbon–climate feedbacks.

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Salby in Blighty

Mike Haseler emails a link to a new video recording of Murry Salby's visit to the UK last year.

New paper from the Netherlands on C02 emissions

 'A paper published today in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics finds that only about 3.75% [15 ppm] of the CO2 in the lower atmosphere is man-made from the burning of fossil fuels, and thus, the vast remainder of the 400 ppm atmospheric CO2 is from land-use changes and natural sources such as ocean outgassing and plant respiration.'

 Read all about it at Climate Depot and H/T to Swiss Bob in the BBC and Lawson comments.

Gassing

Updated on Jul 4, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Robin Wylie, an academic at University College London, has written a fascinating piece at Live Science on volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide, which is an area of geoscience that is, like so many others, characterised more by ignorance than understanding - only 33 of the known 150 "smokers" have been examined by scientists.

According to Wylie, the latest research suggests that volcanic emissions are many times what they were thought to be a couple of decades ago:

In 1992, it was thought that volcanic degassing released something like 100 million tons of CO₂ each year. Around the turn of the millennium, this figure was getting closer to 200. The most recent estimate, released this February, comes from a team led by Mike Burton, of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – and it’s just shy of 600 million tons. It caps a staggering trend: A six-fold increase in just two decades.

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