In Germany the news from the NOAA that the Barrow, Alaska station has recorded a CO2 concentration at 400 ppm “for the first time” is sweeping through the media – along with fresh warnings of impending climate doom.
“The northern sites in our monitoring network tell us what is coming soon to the globe as a whole,” said Pieter Tans , an atmospheric scientist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colo. “We will likely see global average CO2 concentrations reach 400 ppm about 2016.”
Average global levels of CO2 were 390.4 ppm in 2011, according to NOAA measurements.
The NOAA press release also writes that the concentration of the greenhouse gas has increased every year since 1959. “In the early 1960s, it rose about 0.7 ppm per year. For the last decade, it has been rising at about 2 ppm per year. That observed increase, independent of the seasonal ups and downs described above, is due to the accelerating pace of emissions from human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.”
What impact has that had on temperature over the last decade?
Spiegel online tells us:
The data, however, have not shown any warming for 13 years.
At the same time the question of whther the CO2 increase will warm the climate is still always disputed. The strength of the warming depends mostly on how much water evaporates; water vapour enhances the greenhouse effect considerably more than CO2. Estimates on the water vapour effect diverge greatly. Thousands of scientists are working on that question.
Global temperatures just aren’t listening to the climate models. And so much for consensus.
“The northern sites in our monitoring network tell us what is coming soon to the globe as a whole,” Hmm… Why doesn’t the CO2 level increase the most near well populated areas, closest to the emission sources, and slowly spreads to the distant poles?
Locally and near the surface , CO2 levels fluctuate wildly all the time, that’s exactly why you measure in remote areas. So what Pieter Tans has said there probably just shows how completely clueless he is.
On a sunny day without wind, corn plants, for example, deplete the CO2 around them within minutes, and stop photosynthesizing until air movement brings new CO2.
(Liebig’s Law; the growth of plants is limited by the scarcest of the elements they need; might be water, might be light, might be CO2…)
On the other hand, if you want to get very high levels, just measure the CO2 on a busy highway. The old chemical measurements that the late Ernst Beck collected were dismissed exactly because they were affected by local sources.
Beck’s site:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/literatur/kreutz/Kreutz_english.pdf
see also here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/25/beck-on-co2-oceans-are-the-dominant-co2-store/
Look here for how great “natural” CO2 swings can be:
http://meteo.lcd.lu/7days_04.png
During the week from 28/05 to 04/06 CO2 peaked 520 ppmV
All what is needed is slow wind and as a consequence poor air mixing… et voilä!