Death of Global Warming, Part 1

Saw this website that claimed to refute the "Deniers":

Anti-global heating claims – a reasonably thorough debunking

Before we start swinging our ax to chop through the nonsense list, let's first dispose of the prelude.

0. "The Earth is heating up, and human beings burning fossil fuels are the dominant cause"
This is a damned lie. In two parts.
a. Looking at the UAH global temperature anomaly it is really hard to see any trend in the last 10-15 years. Climate4you.com has all the various anomalies. The NCDC and GISS maturity (the fact that historic data is being changed) render them unusable as a reference. Bob Tisdale has a good example of the problem. The data has been manipulated to more closely resemble the climate model results.

b. Wikipedia (no friend of "Deniers") list fossil fuel use as contributing 10 GT of carbon per year and other causes (mostly land use changes) causing 25 GT of additional carbon per year. Burning down rainforests to grow palm oil for biodiesel puts more carbon into the atmosphere than fossil fuels. At any rate burning fossil fuels is 30% of the problem.

1. Myth #1: All the CO₂ in the air at present comes from the mantle. I don't know what to do with this statement. It is true that all the CO2 originally came from the mantle - the CO2 was there before the plants or animals and volcanoes are constantly injecting more CO2. However if you divide 10**4 or 10**6 (the ratio of CO2 from the mantle to anthropomorphic CO2) by 10**9 (a billion years) you get nada (0.001 or less), this is why volcanoes and man-made CO2 are always compared. All that CO2 is lime, coal, or oil. However this is apparently a straw man. The Khilyuk and Chilingar article was in a geology journal, was looking at the temperature over long time frames (by and large) based on best information and accidentally stepped on some AGW toes.

Lets look at the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. The vast majority of the CO2 in the atmosphere is produced animals and consumed by plants. There are 730 Gigatons in the atmosphere and photosynthesis converts 150-175 Gigatons a year. So the average lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is in the range of 5-7 years. There is a common lie that the lifetime of CO2 is 100 years but if you replace between 20% and 25% of the atmospheric CO2 per year, well - just do the math.

The author tries to make the point that fossil fuel CO2 is a significant portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere. The fossil fuel CO2 is only 1/17 (10/170 Gigatons) the amount normally consumed by plants. According to USDA studies doubled CO2 results in 50% greater growth (and presumably 50% more CO2 consumption) and consumption continues to increase to 1200ppm. For example: at 680ppm of CO2 cotton produces a 200% higher yield and 87% more mass than at 340 ppm. At 200 ppm of CO2 land plant photosynthesis stops - see this chart from www.Hydrofarm.com. 280 ppm of CO2 is not ideal for plants, being almost a starvation level of CO2 - it is the result of competition for resources. So, yes there is a significant amount of man-made CO2 but it is rapidly compensated for by increased plant growth.

The only way to significantly increase CO2 is to completely cut down all the rainforests or empty the oceans.

2. Myth #2: Increasing CO₂ in the air is due to gases coming out of solution as the ocean heats up. "The source of the CO₂ in the air is thermal heating of the ocean causing dissolved gases like CO₂ to come out of solution and enter the atmosphere"
I don't know anyone who actually says this but the literal statement is indeed a myth. However I read through the Monckton article that was linked and searched on solution, heating, and other key words in the quoted statement and Monckton didn't make the statement. So I don't know where the author's myth comes from.

Although this is another straw man, let's sort out the facts. The amount of natural CO2 emitted due to increasing land temperature is evident but doesn't appear to have been quantified, doesn't appear to be more than man-made emission, and since there is no reason to guess, we'll have to ignore it for now. We know from myth 1 that we are injecting 1.3% (10/730 Gigatons) new CO2 into the atmosphere on a yearly basis. We know from the prelude analysis that 3.4% (25/730 Gigatons) is due to land use changes and other issues (from Wikipedia). Taken together this is 4.7% or 18ppm (.047 * 400ppm). Here is the only estimate I could find for ocean heating induced CO2 of 20 - 40 ppm per degree of warming. So if we assume the worst case and average a one degree increase over a century we get .4 ppm per year which is a very small increase compared to anthropomorphic CO2.

However the rate of increase of CO2 is not 18.4 ppm. The CO2 is increasing at 2.0 ppm and the current level is almost 400 ppm so the rate of increase is 0.5%. This is mostly caused by anthropomorphic CO2. Much of the "new" CO2 is absorbed by the ocean or converted by plants. The ocean is probably a net absorber of CO2.

The author tries to make the point that CO2 in the ocean is increasing and given that the atmospheric CO2 concentration (and thus the ocean concentration) is rising faster than the ocean heat induced outgassing, it is expected that the ocean would still be a net carbon sink.

Just note that there was some switching above between gigatons and ppm (730 gigatons of carbon is about 390 ppm of CO2).