Once upon a time in a galaxy not very far away there was some scientific research that found the global carbon sinks (oceans, soils, vegetation) were not saturating — assuming, of course, that its general methodology and simplifying assumptions were in fact correct.
The research, by Wolfgang Knorr, had a title that tried to do too much in too few words: “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?“ And so when the American Geophysical Union published this interesting-if-true study, it issued a press release with the catastrophically wrong headline, “No rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide fraction in past 160 years.”
As an aside, Joseph Pulitzer’s “standing order to his staff” of reporters was: ACCURACY. TERSENESS. ACCURACY. For science reporting, you probably need to drop “terseness.” My motto is “better a long headline, than a wrong headline” — especially since a large fraction of people never go much beyond the headline, even more especially in the internet age, where the headline can truly take on a life of its own.
Now it’s kind of scary this particular headline got through whatever editors AGU uses, since it is directly at odds with what is arguably the single most famous chart of observational data in the entire climate arena, the Keeling Curve of Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2):
In fact, not only has the atmospheric CO2 fraction (i.e. concentration) risen sharply in recent decades, it has risen at a rate that is unprecedented in the past million years (see “Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks“). As the author of 2008 study on this subject noted, “the average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume.” Humans have run up CO2 levels 100 ppm over the last two centuries! The author added, “”Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium.”
And that makes this a truly scary fable (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher “” “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”).
Back to our story. The bad headline was then picked up by Science Daily, as is their wont:
[They later quietly fixed it, after being beaten up by the likes of Micheal Tobis and RealClimate -- but how about printing some sort of apology/explanation?]
The anti-science gang leaped all over themselves to turn this story into a real fairy tale — without the benefit of actually having read and/or understood this study and/or, apparently, even the press release. Ken Ward Jr. of the WV Charleston Gazette did a great debunking of one such piece of muddled nonsense by the Charleston Daily Mail‘s Don Surber, who declared on his blog that he had discovered “The Final Nail in the Global Warming Coffin,” ending “You can fool all of the people some of the time “” and some of the time is all Al Gore needed to make a pile of money.”
You can in fact fool some of the people all of the time, as the professional deniers prove every day. Ward then notes that in an editorial published yesterday, the Daily Mail summarized Knorr’s study this way:
Then there is the contention by Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol in England that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are about where they were 160 years ago.
Seriously. And they still haven’t retracted this egregious blunder.
For the spin by a true extremist, see “Climate Change Fanatics Shocked as New Scientific Paper Reveals Zero Atmospheric Carbon Increase.”
ARE THE CARBON SINKS SATURATING OR NOT
Knorr’s study is, of course, only about whether the fraction of human-emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere — the “airborne fraction — changes over time. He finds that it hasn’t. His work is at odds with work by Le Qu©r© and more than two dozen colleagues as part of the Global Carbon Project. For an open-access paper led by the GCP, see Canadell et al., “Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks.”
The GCP seem to me to be doing a much more impressive and thorough job of looking at all the data and analyzing it. Here’s what they find:
Between 1959 and 2008, 43% of each year’s CO2 emissions remained in the atmosphere on average; the rest was absorbed by carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. In the past 50 years, the fraction of CO2 emissions that remains in the atmosphere each year has likely increased, from about 40% to 45%, and models suggest that this trend was caused by a decrease in the uptake of CO2 by the carbon sinks in response to climate change and variability. Changes in the CO2 sinks are highly uncertain, but they could have a significant influence on future atmospheric CO2 levels. It is therefore crucial to reduce the uncertainties.
Skeptical Science has an excellent analysis of the issue and these papers, “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?“ I must confess, though, that headline remains too opaque for the general reader. I’d prefer something simpler and clearer, like “Are the carbon sinks saturating or not.” SS notes that if the answer is no, it’s not really the “bombshell” WattsUpWithThat claims it is:
The 2007 IPCC verdict on the airborne fraction was “There is yet no statistically significant trend in the CO2 growth rate since 1958 …. This ‘airborne fraction’ has shown little variation over this period.” (IPCC AR4) I’m not sure the move from “not much happening” “to “still not much happening” warrants the label “bombshell”.
It is a tricky calculation with large uncertainties, especially the farther you go back in time, since we have less accurate measurements in key areas:
The airborne fraction is calculated from the rate of human CO2 emissions and changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The global increase in atmospheric CO2 has been directly measured since 1959 and can be calculated from ice cores for earlier periods. Primarily, CO2 emissions come from fossil fuel combustion with a lesser contribution from land use changes. Fossil fuel combustion is calculated from international energy statistics. CO2 emissions from land-use changes are more difficult to estimate and come with greater uncertainty. Land use emissions are estimated using deforestation and other land-use data, fire observations from space and carbon cycle modeling.
The emissions from land-use change (LUC) are especially tough because there are so many hard-to-measure factors, include CO2 uptake and loss from the soils. As the GCP explains:
Emissions from LUC are the second-largest anthropogenic source of CO2. Deforestation, logging and intensive cultivation of cropland soils emit CO2. These emissions are partly compensated by CO2 uptake from the regrowth of secondary vegetation and the rebuilding of soil carbon pools following afforestation, abandonment of agriculture (including the fallow phase of shifting cultivation), fire exclusion and the shift to agricultural practices that conserve soil carbon. Unlike fossil fuel emissions, which reflect instantaneous economic activity, LUC emissions are due to both current deforestation and the carry-over effects of CO2 losses from areas deforested in previous years.
Knorr makes a few simplifying assumptions about LUC which may or may not be correct, including this remarkable statement:
Another finding is that reducing the land use emissions by a scalar causes total emissions to be more consistent with a model of a constant airborne fraction… The analysis also shows that recent trends after 2000 can be explained by re-scaling land use emissions within their uncertainty ranges.
I’d welcome a comment from an expert on this tricky arena of modeling net CO2 emissions from LUC, but it certainly looks like Knorr has to change his scale factor over the past decade to get a consistent answer. That does not, of course, mean he’s wrong, but again GCP and Le Qu©r© et al. seem to me to be doing a much more comprehensive job of trying to model this.
SS notes:
There are several differences in methodology between Knorr 2009 and Le Quere 2009. Knorr’s result does not include the filtering for ENSO and volcanic activity employed by Le Qu©r©. However, when Knorr does include this filtering in his analysis, he finds a trend of 1.2 ± 0.9% per decade. This is smaller than Le Quere’s result but is statistically significant.
Knorr also finds the 150 year trend while Le Qu©r© looks at the last 50 years. This may be significant. If the airborne fraction is increasing, it is possibly a recent phenomenon due to natural carbon sinks losing their absorption ability after becoming saturated. Several studies have found recent drops in the uptake of CO2 by oceans (Le Quere 2007, Schuster 2007, Park 2008). However, with such a noisy signal, this is one question that will require more data before being more fully resolved.
If we’re seeing the saturation of the ocean carbon sink, it looks to be a relatively recent phenomena. After 10 years and more than 90,000 ship-based measurements of CO2 absorption in the North Atlantic, University of East Anglia researchers reached this stunning conclusion in 2007:
CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.
In general, it would be awesome news if the sinks weren’t saturating. Many major climate models predict that they will — and, even worse, that some sinks will become major sources — leading to various positive or amplifying feedbacks:
- The defrosting of the permafrost
- The drying of the Northern peatlands (bogs, moors, and mires).
- The destruction of the tropical wetlands
- Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees “” thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
- Wildfires and Climate-Driven forest destruction by pests
- The desertification-global warming feedback
Needless to say, this would complicate efforts to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at levels needed to preserve a livable climate and makes action now all the more urgent.
CONCLUSION
The moral of our fable is write better headlines and read the whole damn press release and paper before writing about it. And since this is a fable for our times, what better way to end than with a talking bunny, Dr. Rabett, providing a version for children of all ages on Tobis’s “Only In It For The Gold“:
There is a very simple way to put it:
We know the amount of CO2 emitted by us per year (pretty well) Call it X.
We know the amount of this CO2 that stays in the atmosphere (the rest goes into the oceans and the biological bits of the land). That is, for reasonable purposes X/2 or 50%.
That means that 50% of the CO2 that we emitted each year remains in the atmosphere.
The question is whether the fraction is changing. Maybe only 48% is absorbed and 52% remains in the atmosphere.
Knorr says the fraction is not changing. Canadell says the fraction remaining in the atmosphere is increasing.
Canadell is really serious trouble. Knorr is only serious trouble.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
It amazed me that so many sources actually claimed this study concluded that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere hadn’t changed. Ever heard of the Keeling Curve, people?
Personally when I hear something which sounds so intuitively wrong, I do a little checking before advertising it. For example, reading the freaking paper itself! It’s just amazing that sources which get such basic information so wrong so consistently are still considered reliable. Science Daily I can forgive (though it would be nice if they issued a statement on the correction), because at least the details of their story were correct. Unfortunately many people don’t read past the headline. And unfortunately we’re dealing with people who also don’t care about being wrong.
While Knorr may be right now, carbonate chemistry assures us that not so long from now Canadell will be right instead. Unless, of course, we quite burning fossil fuels or otherwise eliminate the excess carbon.
Given that they were based on the Knorr paper, the headlines weren’t really wrong. They just used a term, “airborne fraction”, that sounds like it should mean the fraction of CO2 in the air (which is how the “skeptics” have treated it), when in fact it refers to the fraction of emitted CO2 that remains in the air. I guess I’d call the headline “accurate but potentially misleading”.
Or am I misreading?
[JR: In general, a headline writer bears virtually all of the blame for a confusing headline. Science headline writers have to be doubly vigilant, since science literacy in this country is not terribly high. I'd suggest never using the word "fraction" in a headline, for instance. And "airborne fraction" is technical jargon (i.e. shortand) that is clearly opaque.]
Knorr’s paper has been brought up by denidiots in many places. Their claims about this tell us:-
1. They are even more dishonest than we previously thought; or
2. They are even more incompetent (stupid) than we previously thought, in one of 2 ways
2a. They really don’t understand Knorr’s claim;
2b. They actually think they can get away with (1).
In other news, the fraction of humans capable of giving birth has not changed much over the centuries, thus proving that the world’s population is not growing.
I’m glad you took the trouble to once again perfrom the best debunking of this absurd claim, Joe, but a gnawing thought keeps cropping up: The whole goofy narrative of World Government leftists working with greed crazed scientists and future billionaire Al Gore to fool honest folk etc. probably gained a little more traction with this incident.
From the point of view of CP readers, both those who actually believe this and the fossil fuel companies who are behind them in this case are stupid and evil. Not so fast on the stupid part, though- as Roggan pointed out, there are very sophisticated PR professionals at work here. Their button-pushing sound bites are road tested on sample audiences. The precise verbiage is carefully developed and disseminated to compliant outlets. The uneducated public, few of whom even read books, never mind study climate science, are easy marks. That’s whey American awareness of the danger we are in lags behind that of practically every other country.
The lessons for those who understand what’s going on are twofold: Aggressive calling out of phony claims such as this one in all kinds of media outlets, via press releases and personal phone calls to those in the media who care about accuracy. Second, to the extent that it’s possible, expressing key climate change points in language that average people understand on multiple levels.
While the basic communications skills on this blog are excellent (including commenters), maybe it’s time someone thought about bringing in some professionals. The deniers are not the only ones who can come up with snappy sound bites. Our advantage is that we will be telling the truth, which is more of an edge than many realize.
I wrote a post on this back in November when WUWT first dropped it’s “bombshell.”
http://akwag.blogspot.com/2009/11/duds-skeptic-bombshell-that-never-went.html
I didn’t realize deniers would start recycling the same argument so soon. They really must be running out of things to say.
Thanks, Joe. I see I was somewhat sloppy myself, in trying to debunk Knorr in the other thread.
One technical issue that is not made clear in this post or in Knorr’s paper is that the “airborne fraction” of 40% of CO2 emissions does not mean that 40% of the actual molecules of CO2 emitted by human activities remain in the atmosphere. Individual CO2 molecules have a relatively short lifetime in the atmosphere.
Archer and Brovkin (2008: 284) noted that the lifetime of individual CO2 molecules released into the atmosphere may only be a few years because of the copious exchange of carbon with the ocean and the land surface. However, the CO2 concentration in the air remains higher than it would have been, because of the larger inventory of CO2 in the atmosphere/ocean/land carbon cycle.
That is, the equilibrium processes removing fossil fuel CO2 emissions from the atmosphere operate at a system-wide level and individual CO2 molecules do not last for millennia in the atmosphere. Thus today’s fossil fuel CO2 emissions will not be “in” the atmosphere (literally) for a long period but they will continue to “affect” the atmosphere, the climate, and the oceans for many thousands of years.
Reference:
Archer D and Brovkin V (2008), “The millennial atmospheric lifetime of anthropogenic CO2” Climatic Change 90:283-297 DOI 10.1007/s10584-008-9413-1, available at http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2008.tail_implications.pdf
I read this blog to experience both utmost despair – the realization of my worst fears (going to scary movies are a thrill, because it makes us feel alive), and because it’s a brilliant combination of science and propaganda (in the best way – understanding the role of propaganda, it’s best aspects: bringing the public awareness to their own best interests, and the worst: getting the public to vote against, and destroy, the institutions that are the last best hope for the future of our community.)
For me the despair of our inept response to the climate catastrophe that looms before us is just one arrow glancing against my flesh. The other arrows come from commenters on this site who fail to recognize the simplest communication errors.
There are the faithful devotees of the shrine of “Facts will persuade”.
Then there are the acolytes of “Give em more arithmetic and education.” Who remain unpersuaded when they’re informed that the vast majority of educated Americans don’t know what a percentage means, let alone a “fraction”.
We will prevail or fail based upon our understanding of and concern for our fellow humans, in all their foibles and failures.
Joe understands this and policy too.
When we express our concern for tangibles, for instance: Children, food on the table, water to drink and raise that food on the table, we engage the hearts and sway the minds of many millions who are not certain of the best course for the next hour of their lives, let alone the next decade.
We will make the science clear and simple, or we will despair. We will make the science concrete and obvious to the lives of everyday people, or we will all suffer.
We have more than enough facts. What we need is a vision that leapfrogs the denier camp. They’re fighting for their existence. So are we.
Communication trumps science every time. Which route will we take in this snowy woods?
I am looking forward to president Obama, Dr. Chu, and other science advisors speaking to our senators and to the nation in coming months. Perhaps they can make a dent in the carbon curtain of misinformation and denial we struggle to penetrate. Otherwise—otherwise I hate to think about the alternative.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
Tom Fuller over at the SF Examiner, has decided that conducting inspections of the work of climate scientists by inspectors like Steve McIntyre in order to uncover errors and mistakes made by climate scientists is a good idea. I decided to help him out, and drafted a proposed memo from a climate science inspection team to Dr.Hansen;
Tom Fuller:
Is this the kind of science inspection you envision?
Dr. Hansen:
Goddard Institute of Space Studies
Under the new Inhoff Science Inspection Act, our inspection team will be conducting the GISS inspection to ensure that your scientists have not made any errors or mistakes.
In our first inspection round, we will particularly focus on auditing your statistical analyses to identify calculation errors. This inspection will be led by our Climate Science Auditor, Steve McIntyre. Mr. McIntryre is here on guest worker visa, so the information gathering phase of his audit should take less than six months. Based on previous inspection work on the Hockey Stick, we anticipate that multiple followup inspections will be needed over the next ten years, until his discretionary final audit report is published in 2020. Please communicate to your staff, that additional statistical analyses should not be attempted, until Mr. Mcintyre and his team of internet bloggers have finished correcting the mistakes in the existing calculations.
Our lead climate theorist, The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley will be reviewing the purely theoretical equations used for calculating radiative forcing. The Viscount will also be interviewing each of your staff to ensure they understand the basic theories of climate science. He will also conduct mandatory lectures each day from 9 AM to 9 PM Greenwich Mean Time, and to ensure that your staff doesn’t err in calculating the time zone differential, he will conduct these lectures in Greenwich, England. Until these interviews are concluded, please desist from using any equations being reviewed by Viscount Monckton. In particular, under no circumstances are computers to be used to conduct any calculations for any model runs. Henceforth, and until further notice, all model run calculations will be checked using an abacus, to prevent computer malfunctions from causing mistakes. In addition, all input data, will be adjusted to ensure that results don’t differ from Viscount Monckton’s expected results.
Our Lead Inspector of your temperature measurement systems will be Mr. Anthony Watts. Mr. Watts will begin his inspection with a slide show of every land based temperature measurement site in the world, with a oral commentary of the siting and installation mistakes of each station. Mr. Watts requests that your staff prepare this slide show, and present a comparison of the temperature measurements at each station, with data from the nearest measurement stations. Mr. Watts also wants measurement data from every urban heat source in the world, and expects your staff to compare this data to special important data that Mr. Watts will personally select from the temperature measurements.
Our second science inspection team will be arriving immediately after the departure of the first wave team. We are fortunate to have energy industry experts on the second team, who are currently preparing their list of inspection demands. The team will be accompanied by the father and son Pielke team who will make up analyses on the spot, publish their impressions and conjectures, and then demand your staff provide analysis supporting their conclusions.
The third inspection team will be led by one of the self-declared brilliant people on the planet, Mr. Glenn Beck. He is assembling a particularly august group of similar climate experts such as Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Hannity and Dr. Plimer. Mr. Beck will be supported by a million Tea Party workers who will be happy to come in personally and help your team get the science done right (and we mean done RIGHT, and not left).
The entire inspection process will be monitored and reported by our Super Examiner Thomas Fuller, who has a spotless record when it comes to mis-reporting mistakes in climate science uncovered by the experts on our inspection team.
Love and Kisses,
Mr. Marc Morano
Science Inspection Team Manager
Climate Depot
I recently came accross your blog and have been re… I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Bristol research does not support climate change denial . . . . 11.10.09
http://jonesthenews.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/bristol-research-does-not-support-climate-change-denial/
Audio interview with the author:
Martin Jones: (Bristol broadcast journalist) As you say this is quite controversial stuff isn’t it, because the people who deny that climate change is real could use this to say, “Yeah, you know it’s all fine – we don’t need to do anything.”
Dr. Wolfgang Knorr: That would be a very superficial interpretation of the results because, still almost half of the CO2 we emit stays in the atmosphere and that’s enough to cause global warming. And also the research is only on the path. We are pushing the (climate) system to a limit and it might, at a certain stage break, as the models suggest. But it hasn’t happened yet. So uh, I wouldn’t experiment with the climate system.
(Snip)
Martin Jones: But you still believe that limits have to be placed and we have to cut down on the amount of CO2 we are emitting?
Dr. Wolfgang Knorr: There is no other way. That is correct. (snip)