Hi Jen,
I don't know if you have seen this new paper in the journal 'Energy and Environment' by Ernest-Georg Beck, entitled '180 Years of Atmospheric C02 Analysis by Chemical Methods', now available online here with supporting data.
The absract follows:
"More than 90,000 accurate chemical analyses of CO2 in air since 1812 are summarised. The historic chemical data reveal that changes in CO2 track changes in temperature, and therefore climate in contrast to the simple, monotonically increasing CO2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change. Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm.
Between 1857 and 1958, the Pettenkofer process was the standard analytical method for determining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and usually achieved an accuracy better than 3%. These determinations were made by several scientists of Nobel Prize level distinction. Following Callendar (1938), modern climatologists have generally ignored the historic determinations of CO2, despite the techniques being standard text book procedures in several different disciplines. Chemical methods were discredited as unreliable choosing only few which fit the assumption of a climate CO2 connection. [end of quote]
Regards,
Paul Biggs
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A note to potential Commentators, I suggest you read the paper before posting a comment below, try and limit comments to 2-3 posts per 24 hour period, and try and stay polite and on-topic. Cheers, Jennifer.
Hans Erren -- You seem think that the IPCC is not politically inspired.
Of course they are.
The proper question to ask is "Cui prodest? (Whom does it benefit?)"
Or even better, consider the original phrase by Seneca "cui prodest scelus, is fecit (The murderer is the one who gains by the murder)".
If carbon dioxide is so dangerous that we should spend huge amounts of money on decreasing emissions, what are the most economic ways to do so?
1. Main sources of energy for running the world economy are burning either coal or hydrocarbons. Since hydrocarbons produce about twice as much energy per unit carbon dioxide emission than coal, we should stop burning coal and use even more hydrocabons (natural gas, oil, bitumen) than we do right now.
2. Nuclear energy production comes with no carbon dioxide emission at all, so it's even better. The cost of guarding - or not guarding - inevitable plutonium mines for the next several hundred thousand years of human history is dismissed as irrelevant.
3. Any other potential energy source (including all the so called renewable sources) is much more expensive and/or absolutely insufficient.
So what? If one goes for limiting carbon dioxide emissions (like eg. the Kyoto Protocol does), it's nothing but supporting the hydrocarbon and nuclear lobbies while bashing the coal lobby.
The real problem with coal is that we have plenty of it, even conservative estimates make proven, cheap reserves last for several hundred years. This way it's not so attractive, it does not look like an outsanding business opportunity at all. Except if it could be made much more expensive somehow and exactly this is the job IPCC is supposed to do.
Of course all this hysteria is only for midterm financial gains, because solar energy will win in the long run, as it did in supporting life on earth ages ago.
After all we have got this huge power station called sun nearby with some 4x10^26 watts output and we can't even stop it.
The only doodad we need to tap this source economically is a solar panel that is not significantly more expensive than rooftiles and which produces some reasonable non-toxic, non-explosive, not flammable energy rich chemical like sugar (or aluminium) instead of electricity. Beacause the funny thing is that the sun pereferes to shine in daytime during the summer, while we need a good portion of the energy on winter nights. Of course a fuel cell should also be integrated into the device to convert stored energy to electric power on demand.
All this can be accomplished in fifty years (possibly much sooner) by molecular nanotechnology. Then we'll face a serious shortage of carbon dioxide, the universal feedstock of that time.
By 1944 London should have been buried under nine feet of horse manure as it was smartly predicted fifty years before. There was havoc indeed in the city that year, but it came from the skies, not from ordinary traffic.
SJT -- You seem think that the IPCC is not politically inspired. Just to recall, the "I" stands for Intergovernmental and governments work through politics, and incidently fund the IPCC either directly or via the UN and WMO. Note that the February 2007 Summary Report was written by a small group of scientists and advisors on government payroles, and they agreed that the April Technical Report would be modified as necessary to accord with the Summary.
As you observed, the rest of the planets and their moons (as well as Mars) will also warm if the cause is a change in solar constant.
You say that the cause of the Medieval Warm Period "might or might not be unexplained". If you have a good explanation, let's hear it and tell us which climate model will reproduce it. Please note also that during this period a rise in sea level did not apparently occur.
Maybe I was a bit uncompromising over the cloud issue, but you spell it out fairly: on the one hand clouds reflect solar radiation, but on the other hand they act like a blanket. Which effect predominates is not settled in the models, regardless of whether some clouds "look a little darker" than others.
Regards,
Beck's data was already rejected by Fonselius
http://www.someareboojums.org/blog/?p=25
blown up graph:
http://www.someareboojums.org/blog/wp-content/images/fonselius_fig_0001.jpeg
There is absolutely no reason why the three outliers in the 1940's should be representative for the global baseline co2 level.