By Bud Bromley | July 19, 2021
The problem that global warming skeptics have had for years is they are arguing a point where their opponents – that is the proponents of AGW or human-caused global warming – are using estimates of human CO2 emissions. But skeptics in rebuttal have no measurements of global human CO2 emission, obviously because it is buried in the noise of CO2 fluxes which are at least 10 times larger. Skeptics are arguing with a straw man on a yellow brick road.
AGW proponents, as they tend to do, proposed a hypothesis which they believe cannot be validated by measured data, then get grant funding to gather and analyze expensive data (instruments, super computers, ocean going ships, etc.) to attempt to prove and justify their hypotheses. But that is not science; that is advocacy. In science, you design hypotheses which can be falsified by experiment and observations. AGW proponents are doing the opposite. They produce hypotheses (aka computer models) to justify spending billions on bigger computer models, research expeditions and conferences. Meanwhile, AGW proponents and “luke-warmers” and fence sitters as well as most skeptics and so-called “deniers” ignore the answers in nature staring them in the face.
With regard to oil, gas and coal companies, remember these companies make much higher profit if their supply and demand are constrained by government policy. Never lose sight of that fact. They are not to blame for the CO2 concentration, but don’t expect those shareholders to harm themselves based on politics. The global warming / climate change agenda means per dollar of revenue these companies need less exploration and R&D, achieved at lower risk, less production, and lower distribution expenses to produce higher profits. So, most of these companies support the green initiatives rather than fight the politicians. They prefer to sell gasoline for $5 per gallon than $0.5 per gallon, and return higher profits to their shareholders. Politicians win with $5 gasoline because taxes on the higher profits result in higher tax revenue for government, and politicians have a target for their indoctrinated “green” constituency, which enables division of voter constituencies and political contributions. Shareholders, boards, executives and employees have no obligation to spend their money to protect voters and citizens from bad political decisions.
The concentrations of CO2 in both atmosphere and in ocean are independent of the source of the CO2. Don’t blame yourself or fossil fuel energy or those suppliers for the increasing CO2 or temperature. You and they are scapegoats. The carbon footprint of an individual, of a country, or the entire population does not change the CO2 concentration in the air. Since ocean is an infinite sink for CO2 and since CO2 is highly soluble in ocean water and also reacts with ocean water and many ions in ocean water, and since the concentration of CO2 gas in ocean and in air are determined ONLY by temperature, pH, salinity and pressure, then no amount of CO2 subtracted from or added to the atmosphere by humans will change the CO2 concentration trend.
Burning all of the fossil fuel on earth and putting all of that CO2 in the air would not change the net global CO2 concentration trend, but by the way, it would be impossible to burn all of the fossil fuel on earth unless we destroyed the ocean, because fossil fuels are still being created in enormous quantity. Perhaps you thought fossil fuels came only from dinosaurs and hundred million year old plants. The fact of the matter is that hydrocarbon fuels are being generated in the oceans in the form of methane hydrate also called methane clathrate which are principally found in the shallow lithosphere < 2,000 meters in depth.
Notice that AGW proponents including IPCC report that earth’s atmosphere contains ~800 gigatonnes of CO2 gas, while ocean surface CO2 gas reservoir is ~1000 gigatonnes, and deep ocean contains ~ 40,000 gigatonnes of carbon. (One gigatonne is equal to 10^9 metric tonnes or 10^12 kilograms, that is 1,000,000,000,000 kilograms.) And they also report that fossil fuel CO2 emission flux by humans is ~8 gigatonnes per year and that there are annual CO2 fluxes between air and ocean in opposite directions of ~90 gigatonnes in each direction (into air from ocean, and into ocean from air). Using their estimates, there are two annual CO2 fluxes which are each 10 times larger than human CO2 flux. These two ~90 gigatonne fluxes are continuously circulating between an ~800 gigatonne atmospheric CO2 reservoir and a ~1000 gigatonne ocean surface CO2 reservoir. Incredibly, they claim to be concerned about an annual CO2 concentration slope of about 2.5 parts per million per year and persist that this tiny slope is due to humans. But try to find an explanation in their literature for the cause of these two giant natural fluxes and their size and continuous giant dilution relative to human emission.
It is obvious that the relatively tiny human CO2 flux cannot be causing or disrupting a CO2 balance between these two giant fluxes in opposite directions (each of which are 10 times larger than human CO2 emissions) which are continuously flowing between two CO2 gas sinks/sources which are both 100 times larger than human CO2 emissions. The climate crisis is a fabrication. They are attempting to lay a guilt trip on humanity. I will leave the reasons for that for another discussion.
The net global average CO2 concentration and its slope are dominantly controlled by ocean surface temperature, and ocean is 98% of the water on earth and over 70% earth’s surface area. Ocean is the sink for ~ 5000 times more dissolved CO2 than humans emit per year, and then there is much carbonate which has reacted with calcium ions and solidified into carbon rocks such as limestone. There is no causal connection between CO2 emission sources and earth’s temperature nor with earth’s climate, nor with net global CO2 concentration nor with any other climate variable that is a co-variable with net global average CO2 concentration.
CO2 concentration in air and ocean is defined by Henry’s Law. Henry’s Law is independent of the source of the CO2 and dominantly dependent on the temperature of ocean surface and the net surface area of ocean at that temperature, while being less dependent on pH, salinity and pressure because the average net global variability of these other factors is low. The trend or slope of average ocean surface temperature has been slowly increasing, therefore the Henry’s Law coefficient that defines the partition ratio of CO2 between ocean surface and air has been adjusting to the slowly warming ocean temperature surface. The result is a net global average CO2 concentration trend or slope observed at Mauna Loa which is slowly increasing in lock-step with slowly increasing ocean surface temperature.
The late geologist Lance Endersbee graphed this relationship at 99% correlation using CO2 data from the NOAA Scripps Keeling lab on Mauna Loa with respect to ocean surface temperature (SST) after removal of time. This graph is the derivative of atmospheric CO2 concentration with respect to sea surface temperature. You are typically shown these two data sets as derivatives with respect to time.
