Private communication from Terigi Ciccone to John Shanahan
Where is the additional atmospheric carbon dioxide coming from? Terigi Ciccone August 24, 2022 John, you asked: “1) Where did the additional atmospheric CO2 come from? Fossil fuels or oceans and land off-gassing. (This is a scientific question with inferences for climate dynamics.) This can be answered when we have enough scientific data and knowledge. 2) Should politicians stop the use of fossil fuels because there is more atmospheric CO2? (This is a question of political power and preservation or destruction of many human lives.) This must be answered at the voting booth or by other means.” Sorry! I’m not going to get suckered into this UN/IPCC-inspired wild goose chase to waste our time and sow dissent among us Skeptics. Reading their F 7.3 of AR4, it’s apparent that the IPCC scientists don’t know the values of the natural sources and sinks of CO2. They put up cartoons with numbers, with nothing to back them up. Their only goal is to show that the main producers and consumers were balanced before humans came along with the human-made CO2. So, I took what they gave us and threw it back in their face. For example, below is a table I constructed for my book “A Hitchhiker’s Journey Through Climate Change.” I got the data provided from this IPCC-friendly site in 2019 https://skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions-basic.htm. I went back there today, and the numbers are changed, even though they still refer to the source as “Figure 7.3, AR4.” The most important feature of this chart which I stress in the book, is how tiny the human CO2 is, 3.6% of total CO2, and the residual CO2 human-made portion is a laughable 0.06%.
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The party lines. One of the minor changes is that the Skeptical Science site has since added 0.3 GT for volcanic CO2. But the fundamental premise is that this represents the annual flux of sources and sinks. Quote: “As Figure 2 shows, the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 is unseen in the past 800,000 years and, as will be explained below, must be caused by human activity.” So that’s the party line, that all additions are strictly due to human activities. Then we are told that these human additions are cumulative because CO2 supposedly remains in the air for hundreds of years. Of course, this is nonsense based on the simple fact that NASA tells us that over a 35-year period, the earth has greened by more than twice the size of the continental USA. And what about the phytoplankton? How much have they greened by? And now we are to believe that all these additional plants /phytoplankton did not increase the CO2 consumption and did not increase CO2 production by their decomposition? It’s blatantly demonstrated that the IPCC wants this human-made CO2 to reside in the atmosphere for hundreds of years; why? That way, nations that first industrialized 230-200 years ago, like the UK and the USA, should bear the full blame and the costs for decarbonizing, while China and India get a pass because they are not yet industrialized. My favorite climate change book is “What Really Causes Global Warming” by Peter Langdon Ward. In one section, he shows ice core data, temperature (black), and volcanic sulfate emissions (red). Note the spike in temperature following a near-perfect relationship with the volcanic sulfates. As he describes the process, it starts by warming the oceans and notes it almost did during the Belling Warming. But then the volcanoes came back even stronger, about 10,000 YA, and the oceans warmed up enough so that even after the volcanic activities dropped, the oceans were warm enough to sustain the present warm period. But now, look at the far right. Starting several hundred years ago, the volcanoes roared back, which terminated the little ice age and brought us today’s warm weather. The volcanoes he describes are basalt flooding volcanoes, and nearly all of them are along the plate boundaries and at the bottom of the deepest oceans. These have been warming the waters in the deepest oceans for several hundred years, with nearly all unseen and unnoticed. He estimates that 80-85% of the earth’s volcanoes and gas vents are below the oceans. Pumping out gazillion tons of CO2. In addition, the warming of the deepest oceans releases/out-gassing CO2. And along with warming the waters, it causes it to expand and thus also explains most of the so-called “sea-level rise.”
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