[...]the Foresight Institute » Blog Archive » New Freitas paper: Diamond Trees[...]…

Oh and by the way Jim Moore is my real name and I am a scientist.
Do you have the courage to put your real name on the comments you have been making and for the record do you have a degree in any field of science?

Isotopic analysis of tree-ring carbon is a nice fairy tale but does not explicate other processes accelerated by man or otherwise, known and unknown, which can mobilize sequestered carbon deposits, preferentially mobilize istotopes, or differentiate between fossil fuel oxidation from any of those other processes which mobilize carbon into the biosphere. And given recent history, such analysis probably needs to be investigated for fraud and data manipulation, sad but true. The key word in your statement is INFER.

Like almost all of these AGW theories, they are poorly differentiated from your basic WAG [wild ass guess]. Until actual experimentation vs observational investigation into carbon cycles becomes the norm, and predictive science becomes more accurate than looking out the window to predict rain, AGW is BS. Show me the error bars, if any, and I will show you the state of play. .5 degree C ROFL – the daily temperature noise is a 100 to a thousand times larger and you expect us to trust a totally arbitrary temperature and questionable recording schema accurate to the closest degree or two to allow a .5 c anomaly ? u r joking.

None of this is science – it’s witchcraft.

” CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels or burning forests has quite a different isotopic composition from CO2 in the atmosphere. This is because plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes (12C vs. 13C); thus they have lower 13C/12C ratios. Since fossil fuels are ultimately derived from ancient plants, plants and fossil fuels all have roughly the same 13C/12C ratio – about 2% lower than that of the atmosphere. As CO2 from these materials is released into, and mixes with, the atmosphere, the average 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere decreases.

Isotope geochemists have developed time series of variations in the 14C and 13C concentrations of atmospheric CO2. One of the methods used is to measure the 13C/12C in tree rings, and use this to infer those same ratios in atmospheric CO2. This works because during photosynthesis, trees take up carbon from the atmosphere and lay this carbon down as plant organic material in the form of rings, providing a snapshot of the atmospheric composition of that time. If the ratio of 13C/12C in atmospheric CO2 goes up or down, so does the 13C/12C of the tree rings. This isn’t to say that the tree rings have the same isotopic composition as the atmosphere – as noted above, plants have a preference for the lighter isotopes, but as long as that preference doesn’t change much, the tree-ring changes wiil track the atmospheric changes.

Sequences of annual tree rings going back thousands of years have now been analyzed for their 13C/12C ratios. Because the age of each ring is precisely known** we can make a graph of the atmospheric 13C/12C ratio vs. time. What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning. Furthermore, we can trace the absorption of CO2 into the ocean by measuring the 13C/12C ratio of surface ocean waters. While the data are not as complete as the tree ring data (we have only been making these measurements for a few decades) we observe what is expected: the surface ocean 13C/12C is decreasing. Measurements of 13C/12C on corals and sponges — whose carbonate shells reflect the ocean chemistry just as tree rings record the atmospheric chemistry — show that this decline began about the same time as in the atmosphere; that is, when human CO2 production began to accelerate in earnest.***

In addition to the data from tree rings, there are also of measurements of the 13C/12C ratio in the CO2 trapped in ice cores. The tree ring and ice core data both show that the total change in the 13C/12C ratio of the atmosphere since 1850 is about 0.15%. This sounds very small but is actually very large relative to natural variability. The results show that the full glacial-to-interglacial change in 13C/12C of the atmosphere — which took many thousand years — was about 0.03%, or about 5 times less than that observed in the last 150 years.

For those who are interested in the details, some relevant references are:
Stuiver, M., Burk, R. L. and Quay, P. D. 1984. 13C/12C ratios and the transfer of biospheric carbon to the atmosphere. J. Geophys. Res. 89, 11,731-11,748.
Francey, R.J., Allison, C.E., Etheridge, D.M., Trudinger, C.M., Enting, I.G., Leuenberger, M., Langenfelds, R.L., Michel, E., Steele, L.P., 1999. A 1000-year high precision record of d13Cin atmospheric CO2. Tellus 51B, 170–193.
Quay, P.D., B. Tilbrook, C.S. Wong. Oceanic uptake of fossil fuel CO2: carbon-13 evidence. Science 256 (1992), 74-79

So do you agree we shouldn’t be burning gigatons of fossil fuels every year?

Jim, indeed have good numbers on fossil fuel co2 generation, relatively speaking. The problem is that number is only part of the contribution to global CO2 budget. What we do NOT have numbers for are MANY geochemical processes, natural in/organic decomposition, cycling, and sequestration of CO2. In fact the missing numbers could dwarf the fossil fuel co2 generation, reflecting an entirely hidden set of numbers of both CO2 generation and sequestration. As you say, they KNOW they are missing some sequestration process/es. And very few budgets provide a number for the carbonic acid sub-cycle, deep ocean cycles, and centuries-period cycles, which all potentially are HUGE sinks/generators of CO2. So we don’t know the actual percentage contribution of fossil fuel CO2 to the global CO2 budget.

I keep on seeing people who are obviously NOT scientists think that humans know so much. BULLSHIT ! What we don’t know dwarfs what we do know like the universe to your big toe.

Isotope ratios are just more AGW bull as well. There are tenuous assumptions there we could drive a truck thru.

At I said, it IS possible that fossil fuel consumption is responsible for atmospheric CO2 increases but we don’t know if other processes are also at work, eg ocean surface temperature increases, which potentially could be responsible for all or some of the increase, and have been noted in ice cores, for what those proxies are worth.

The point is that taking action to play with global geochemical processes given our state of knowledge is presumptuous if not potentially catastrophic. We start this crap and then find out we are WRONG, and what is the fallout ? We don’t know that either. ROFL

So I have a few questions for you:
What happened to the CO2 from burning fossil fuels if it is not in the air?
(Did it go to Gault’s Gulch?)
What natural process actually explains the data we have on CO2 concentration?
Sense burning fossil fuels changes the carbon isotope ratio in the air, it also changes the carbon isotope ratio in tree rings, and these changes matches up with the historical pattern of burning fossil fuels. How else are you going to explain that?
Are you ignorant or just lying?

1) you all ARE aware that scientists have NOT definitively established that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations are actually the result of fossil fuel burning – it seems likely but there are other possibilities eg land use changes, ocean warming, natural cycles, etc …..

2) we do not know whether increased atmospheric CO2 will naturally be sequestered and returned to pre-1945+ levels by existing processes

3) the amount we understand concerning global carbon cycles is vastly exceeded by what we DON’T know and anyone who says otherwise is a idiot (or AGW warmista = same thing)