CO2 Levels Highest in Two Million Years

[seftonm]

The CO2 concentration ranged between 181 and 297 parts per million over the period studied. It may be necessary to go back as far as 2.7 million years to find levels of CO2 similar to today’s.

Maggie Koerth-Baker - NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC - June 18, 2009

Global warming or not, something needs to be done to curb emissions. --Ed.

What happens when carbon dioxide levels skyrocket? Most climate scientists think they know the answer: global warming.

But to determine just how high temperatures may climb and how climate patterns may shift, researchers may need to pinpoint, for comparison, a time in our planet's past when a similar carbon dioxide jump happened.

Doing that may have just gotten a lot tougher—a new study says atmospheric carbon dioxide levels haven't been this high in more than two million years.

Fuzzy But Far-Reaching New View

Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas that is also released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels, for example in cars and power plants.

"We really don't know how high CO2 has been in the geologic past. Thus we don't know how sensitive the surface temperature of the Earth is to CO2," said Don DePaolo, head of the Earth Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California.

Most global warming predictions are based on fluctuations in CO2 levels and temperature that happened between a relatively recent series of ice ages, said DePaolo, who was not involved in the new study, which will appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. ... [Read More]

[xcel]

Hi Mike:

___We have plenty of GW skeptics here at CleanMPG and rightfully so as there are still a lot of questions... What is not a question however is how fast and how high atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen in the past 150 years over and above the natural cycle from ice age to ice age over the past million plus years.

___I do not like playing Russian roulette just in case we are setting ourselves up for a global catastrophe. The reefs are already shot to hell because of high CO2 creating Calcium Carbonate deposits and god knows what else we are screwing over?

___Good Luck

___Wayne

[R.I.D.E.]

While I have my reservations about the whole Global Warming scenario, I look at it this way. Can we afford to find out we HAVE reached the tipping point of a self induced catastrophe?

What I would like to believe everyone here would agree to is there is a distinct possibility that we may be close to the tipping point.

Assuming that is the case, we should at least start to reverse the process. Much progress in improving the quality of life over the last two centuries is due to cheap energy. We no longer have cheap energy, but we do have the accumulated wealth to change the source of our energy.

In doing so we would also insure that we have made at least the effort to stop the current climb in atmospheric CO. The key is to do it in such a way that we have solved the problem without creating another problem.

regards
gary

[chilimac02]

I would hope that everyone could agree that climate and the environment are things which requires a delicate balance. As such we should attempt to limit our impact on the environment so as not to disturb that balance.

This idea is one that does not hang on whether or not global warming/cooling or catastrophic climate change is occurring.

[Radio_tec]

Well if we are agreed on the need to dramatically curb CO2 emissions, whatever the causes and the outcomes, then we'd better get on with it then. John Holdren, President Obama's Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says if we don't have our act together by 2015 then we will loose our ability to control CO2 levels.

[cpeter38]

I consider myself a fairly conservative person (in the original meaning of the word) - I believe we should conserve our resources and our planet. Profligate spenders who delighted in showing the world their Hummer commute vehicle are doing nothing to better the world. Hypermiling IS helping to save the world (albeit 1 gallon at a time).

As someone who has severe doubts about AGW (due mostly to the shoddy methods, models and secretive nature of the AGW scientists and their refusal to release the methods of data analysis that is used in their reports), I still believe that we need to restrict our emissions. In my case, I believe that conservation of oil is vital - this resource is limited. Coal is INCREDIBLY dirty - dirty to mine and dirty to process. Worse yet, burning coal spreads truly nasty pollutants for an incredible distance from the originating plant:

it is a source of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, which are harmful to human health and may be largely responsible for acid rain. Second, although not as well known, releases from coal combustion contain naturally occurring radioactive materials--mainly, uranium and thorium.

Former ORNL researchers J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, and R. E. Blanco made this point in their article "Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants" in the December 8, 1978, issue of Science magazine. They concluded that Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations.

See this LINK if you would like to learn more.

I suspect many "left wing environmentalists" would be surprised to see how many "conservative" people there are that "doubt" AGW, but fully agree with me that we need to start making significant reductions in pollutants that we release into our atmosphere. For the record I mean ALL pollutants!

[booferama]

the shoddy methods, models and secretive nature of the AGW scientists and their refusal to release the methods of data analysis that is used in their reports

What are you referring to? The peer-reviewed work that AGW is based on requires open sharing of methodologies.

[cpeter38]

Originally Posted by booferama

What are you referring to? The peer-reviewed work that AGW is based on requires open sharing of methodologies.

Let me put this in context - I STRONGLY believe that we need to reduce all pollutants that we release into the air. What we release into the groundwater may be even more important.
What makes me question the conclusion that man (as opposed to natural variation) is the dominant cause of global warming, is how they are going about the proof. I have been trained in 6-sigma statistical methodology. The studies I have seen would not pass muster at the lowest 6-sigma qualification (Green Belt) due to the methodology:

1. A majority of the air temperature sensors used to measure global warming are very poorly sited (on/near pavement, near buildings, on top of roofs, etc.). Significantly less than 50% of the sensors in the network are sited according to GISS guidelines.
2. Too many sensors in the network are quite poor quality. Even when this is discovered, the data is often kept!

a. This example in Hawaii, PHNL violated both 1 AND 2. this sensor is in the middle of an airport and it is truly bad. In a true example of irony, this data is being used instead of the data from a sensor that was handed over to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The PTWC sensor is quite well sited. It's siting actually appears to match GISS guidelines and it is within 4 miles of the PHNL sensor. The measured values of the 2 sensors were not even remotely close until they replaced the faulty one at PHNL - but they are going to keep the PHNL data!!! If you compare the PHNL and PWTC, the mean high temperature of the official one (PHNL) is 4.78571428571428 degrees higher. The mean low temperature is even further off - 7.57142857142857 degrees. Please note that I left all the significant digits in as a bit of humor. MMTS stations are only accurate to +/- 0.3F when they are brand new!

3. Although the raw data is shared, how the data is transformed into conclusions is not. The standard response from Schmidt, Mann, etc. is that they used RegEm to process the proxy data. When questioned further, they state that they just use standard methodology. Further questioning yields little usable information. This answer sounds very good if you are not familiar with RegEm.

Short description for those of you who are not familiar with this process - Estimating the mean and the covariance matrix of an incomplete dataset and filling in missing values with imputed values is generally a nonlinear problem, which must be solved iteratively. The expectation maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian data, an iterative method both for the estimation of mean values and covariance matrices from incomplete datasets and for the imputation of missing values, is taken as the point of departure
for the development of a regularized EM algorithm. In contrast to the conventional EM algorithm, the regularized EM algorithm is applicable to sets of climate data, in which the number of variables typically exceeds the sample size. The regularized EM algorithm is based on iterated analyses of linear regressions of variables with missing values on variables with available values, with regression coefficients estimated by ridge regression, a regularized
regression method in which a continuous regularization parameter controls the filtering of the noise in the data.

If you would like to read up on how this is done, check out this LINK.

a. You control the output by how you filter the data. This is done with a script. You have to use a script because the computer and software do not understand the significance of the data. Literally, it has no meaning to the software. The computer and program are just processing information.

b. Until the researchers release ALL data and methods (including programming scripts) used to arrive at a conclusion, we should question the conclusions.

c. The research is publicly funded. As taxpayers, we should have access to all the information. Anybody with knowledge of RegEm should be able to completely reproduce any publicly funded and published model results. If the model is not independently reproducible, we as taxpayers should not be funding it!!!

What should we do?

1. Fix the data collection problems

A. Upgrade the sensor network.

i. The sensor's should have an accuracy and repeatability that is at least twice as good as the what you are trying to measure. That is a bare minimum. If we are trying to measure 100ths of a degree, we should have a minimum accuracy of .005 degree.
ii. Take and report continuous data. There is this wonderful thing that was invented sometime before this millenium. I believe it is called a COMPUTER. System on a Chip (SoC) technology is really cheap. Combine a new generation of Continuous Temperature Sensor (CTS) to replace the old MMTS (Max Min Temperature sensor). Couple it with a cellular telephone node to report the data back to a central repository.
iii. Incorporate solar/battery backups for all weather stations and keep a rolling 1 month record of data on site in non-volatile memory.

B. Calibrate the sensors on a yearly basis (as an absolute minimum).

C. Hire Qualtiy Control engineers to monitor the network. This data is important, we should treat it like it is valuable! If I were hired to do this, I know that I could personally monitor and QC check at least 25 stations on a monthly basis. I suspect it would be reasonable to check more (about 40), but I am being conservative. This includes calibrating each sensor 2 times per year.

D. Any station that does not meet GISS siting guidelines should be replaced. In order to do this properly, the new station should be set up with proper equipment as soon as possible. Once the new station is operating and calibrated, the data should be compared over the course of the next 5 years. If the data on the old station is more than .1 degree off, but the 2 data sets are statistically similar (with just an offset), the data should be adjusted. If the data sets are statistically different, the old data should be removed from official use.

2. Bring the data analysis up to industrial level quality standards

A. All publicly funded research needs to be independently reproducible
B. The data and models must hold up to expert scrutiny.
C. The rationale for all "adjustment factors" needs to be fully explained with physics and data.
D. Encourage scientific debate and correct problems.

3. Use public policy to encourage public demand of "good" behaviors. We need to practice conservation of our scarce resources.

A. Increase taxation of gasoline (a good start would be $0.10 cents per gallon every 2 months for the next 2 years).

i. We have ample evidence that cheap gasoline encourages people to purchase incredibly inefficient vehicles.

ii. People modify their behavior (driving habits) based on a penalty function.

iii. Recent history shows that increasing the cost DOES reduce demand. Gasoline demand IS ELASTIC. It does behave according to the laws of supply and demand. The big difference is that it is less elastic than most commodities. Increasing taxation would increase governmental funding and cause a slight reduction of petro-dollars to the source countries (a VERY good thing).

B. Make a concerted public effort to synchronize traffic.
C. Reduce maximum speed limits.
D. Make it expensive to pollute (let us be careful about the question of whether CO2 is a pollutant until we have gathered more data).

What I have outlined above are the minimum requirements for good research and public policy.

Doing it right will cost money. I think it is worth it. We are planning on spending $Trillions per year to "cure" global warming.

I think it is worth spending an additional $1 Billion per year for the next 3 years to fix the temperature sensor network and models. After that, we should spend at least $100Million per year to ensure good quality data and models.

I could go into all the budgetary numbers and how it would work, but I have already killed the horse. Hopefully you will look at my information above and trust me a little when I say that that amount of money would fix the problems (if you are a "trust but verify" type person, I will be more than happy to go into detail in a subsequent post - just ask).

I know that fanatics on both sides will hate my views. However, I hope that people who consider themselves rational would agree that we need to make our decisions based on good data. I would hope that they also agree that the decisions need to be aimed at producing quantifiable results!

The time to get good data is NOW!

The longer we procrastinate, the longer we make decisions that are very questionable because they are based on bad data!

[seftonm]

Originally Posted by cpeter38

I suspect many "left wing environmentalists" would be surprised to see how many "conservative" people there are that "doubt" AGW, but fully agree with me that we need to start making significant reductions in pollutants that we release into our atmosphere. For the record I mean ALL pollutants!

Very well said. I believe in the AGW theory but know many do not. We could debate back and forth but something that shouldn't need debating is the need to reduce pollution. There are still plenty of other reasons that we should all try to reduce our emissions, from CO2's effects on the oceans to simply reducing consumption of finite resources.