Atmospheric CO2 Content Hits New Peak - 392 PPM In December 2008 - Up 2-3 PPM From 2007 - Reuters

[hatrack]

OSLO (Reuters) - Atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas are hitting new highs, with no sign yet that the world economic downturn is curbing industrial emissions, a leading scientist said on Thursday. "The rise is in line with the long-term trend," Kim Holmen, research director at the Norwegian Polar Institute, said of the measurements taken by a Stockholm University project on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard off north Norway.

Levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities, rose to 392 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere in Svalbard in December, a rise of 2-3 ppm from the same time a year earlier, he told Reuters. Carbon dioxide concentrations are likely to have risen further in 2009, he said. They usually peak just before the start of spring in the northern hemisphere, where most of the world's industry, cities and vegetation are concentrated.

Plants suck carbon dioxide, which is released by burning fossil fuels, out of the atmosphere as they grow. Levels fall toward the northern summer and rise again in autumn when trees lose their leaves and other plants die back.

"It's too early to make that call," he said when asked if there were signs that economic slowdown was curbing the rise in emissions. And he said any such change would be hard to detect. "That's a tricky one to do," he said. "If we had, for example, a year with an unusually warm Siberian winter, that could cancel the human variation."

EDIT

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE51B44Z20090212?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews

[n2doc]

1. I suppose it is good news that it ain't "Faster than Expected"

'cause everything else seems to be going that way. 3-4 years to 400 ppm, sheesh....

[hatrack]

2. We'll hit 400 before the 2012 election - that's my wager . ..

Any takers?

[n2doc]

3. Nope, either I would lose

Or things globally will be in such bad shape that I will wish I had....

[XemaSab]

5. My only thought:

Who wants to camp out at Svalbard in December? :scared:

[wroberts189]

10. 4 friggin hundred.... great Gods of the earth.

Sorry ..can't take that bet ..you may be right.

[wroberts189]

11. funny it's always faster then expected ...

Perhaps their models are a bit too CONSERVATIVE?


Guess I am not the only one that keeps reading these things and wondering the same.

Yet we have idiots on the radio still insisting this is some great liberal conspiracy.


They look dumber every day.

[gulfcoastliberal]

4. k&r.... nt

[excess_3]

6. water vapor is the main greenhouse gas

who writes this rubbish?

[XemaSab]

7. Welcome to DU!

:hi:

[GliderGuider]

8. Do you understand the difference between forcing and feedback?

Try these links on water vapor (or as we say up here where the stuff freezes and the Queen's English is still spoken, "water vapour")...

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/climate-scientists-hide-water-vapor.php

There is no climate model or climate textbook that does not discuss the role water vapor plays in the Greenhouse Effect. It is the strongest Greenhouse gas, contributing 36% - 66% to the overall effect for vapor alone, 66% to 85% when you include clouds. It is however, not considered as a climate "forcing" because the amount of H2O in the air basically varies as a function of temperature. If you artificially increase the level of H2O in the air, it rains out immediately (in terms of climate response times). Similarly, due to the abundance of ocean on the Earth's surface, if you somehow removed all the water from the air it would quickly be replaced through evaporation. This has the interesting consequence that if one could somehow instantly remove all CO2 from the atmosphere, the temperature would begin to drop, causing precipitation to remove H2O from the air causing even further drops, in a feedback effect that would not end until no liquid water was left, only ice sheets and frozen oceans.

For a more scientific look at the question, we take you now to Realclimate.org, where the discussion is already in progress:

Water vapour: feedback or forcing?

Whenever three or more contrarians are gathered together, one will inevitably claim that water vapour is being unjustly neglected by 'IPCC' scientists. "Why isn't water vapour acknowledged as a greenhouse gas?", "Why does anyone even care about the other greenhouse gases since water vapour is 98% of the effect?", "Why isn't water vapour included in climate models?", "Why isn't included on the forcings bar charts?" etc. Any mainstream scientist present will trot out the standard response that water vapour is indeed an important greenhouse gas, it is included in all climate models, but it is a feedback and not a forcing. From personal experience, I am aware that these distinctions are not clear to many, and so here is a more in-depth response.

While water vapour is indeed the most important greenhouse gas, the issue that makes it a feedback (rather than a forcing) is the relatively short residence time for water in the atmosphere (around 10 days). To demonstrate how quickly water reacts, I did a GCM experiment where I removed all the water in the atmosphere and waited to see how quickly it would fill up again (through evaporation from the ocean) . The result is shown in the figure. It's not a very exciting graph because the atmosphere fills up very quickly. At Day 0 there is zero water, but after only 14 days, the water is back to 90% of its normal value, and after 50 days it's back to within 1%. That's less than 3 months. Compared to the residence time for perturbations to CO2 (decades to centuries) or CH4 (a decade), this is a really short time.

When surface temperatures change (whether from CO2 or solar forcing or volcanos etc.), you can therefore expect water vapour to adjust quickly to reflect that. To first approximation, the water vapour adjusts to maintain constant relative humidity. It's important to point out that this is a result of the models, not a built-in assumption. Since approximately constant relative humidity implies an increase in specific humidity for an increase in air temperatures, the total amount of water vapour will increase adding to the greenhouse trapping of long-wave radiation. This is the famed 'water vapour feedback'. A closer look reveals that for a warming (in the GISS model at least) relative humidity increases slightly in the tropics, and decreases at mid latitudes.

How do we know that the magnitude of this feedback is correctly simulated? A good test case is the response to the Pinatubo eruption. This caused cooling for up to 3 years after the eruption - plenty of time for water vapour to equilibriate to the cooler sea surface temperatures. Thus if models can simulate the observed decrease of water vapour at this time, it would be a good sign that they are basically correct. A good paper that demonstrated this was Soden et al (2002) (and the accompanying comment by Tony DelGenio). They found that using the observed volcanic aerosols as forcing the model produced very similar cooling to that observed. Moreover, the water vapour in the total column and in the upper troposphere decreased in line with satellite observations, and helped to increase the cooling by about 60% - in line with projections for increasing greenhouse gases.

[tom_paine]

13. Great stuff, Paul. Denier probably won't look at it, Rushpublican Infoganda enough for him.

But these are an excellent couple of articles.

Thanks.

:hi:

[wroberts189]

9. We are going back in time.....

Get ready for lots of plants and large bugs.

If we get enough flora... it could bring it back down...possibly.

But I do not think it will turn out that way.

Very important post knr

[Delphinus]

12. Important, indeed.

I wish I understood these things more - I just yesterday watched a video over in that section on Global Dimming, which (I think) throws another thing into the mix. The Earth's systems are quite complex and it really reminds us how this web of life works.

[Barrett808]

14. Atmospheric CO2 levels make huge jump ... or do they?

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/02/atmospheric_co2_levels_make_hu.php

2ppm/year is still fast enough to cook us all.