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Originally Posted by Cato
Okay, onon, let's make this simpler.
Let's start with your equation. You wrote:
Now, I may be wrong, but I believe you actually intended this equation:
Natural Contribution = CO2 Rise - Human Contribution. That's the only way you could've arrived at a negative number for Natural Contribution. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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You are right, my mistake.
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For brevity's sake I'll abbreviate this equation as: NC = CR - HC, if that's okay?
You claim to know the values for CR and HC. Although you've given several different values for these numbers, from several different timeframes, I'll use the numbers from here, and here; sources you provided. You've argued these statements:
and...
were made relative to "current" conditions, and the cited sources deal with "current" numbers. All discussion will stick with these assumptions, agreed?
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Right ok
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CO2 Rise (CR)
Now, this is difficult since you've given several different numbers over several different time frames. If we want to stick to "current" conditions we'll need some idea of what the "current" rise in CO2 is.
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I am saying any time period you want to choose shows a higher anthropogenic co2 emission rate than atmospheric co2 rise. You could pick a single year like 2006, or the range of the last decade, or 30 years, 50 years, or 250 years. But obviously if you want more certainty about accuracy of the figures, then the last 10 years is on of the best periods of time.
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This document explains that samples are taken in pairs. Pairs with a difference of less than, or equal to, .5ppm are rejected. That would imply that the measurements could be off as much as .5ppm. So, again, you pick. But recognize there will be an error range.
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I can easily accept a given year's value may be off by .5ppm (but is it measurement error, or natural fluctuation?). That kind of inaccuracy is problematic for a single year (given that a year of 2ppm rise has a 25% error rate), but far less problematic for a longer period of time.
Remember that a rise over time only matters about the error rate on the absolute levels.
Ie if this was the case:
1996 360ppm +- .5ppm
2006 380ppm +- .5ppm
Then the overall rise over the last 10 years would be 20ppm +-1ppm.
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I'm willing to accept it, but I think there's an interesting section of this source that really makes the above exercise moot. Just below the carbon dioxide sources for anthropogenic carbon fluxes is a section on "Partitioning among reservoirs". These numbers are:
Storage in the atmosphere 3.3 (3.1-3.5)
Oceanic uptake 2.0 (1.2-2.8)
Uptake by Northern Hemisphere forest
regrowth 0.5 (0.0-1.0)
Additional terrestrial sinks: CO2 fer-
tilization, nitrogen fertilization,
climatic effects 1.3 (-0.2-2.8)
Of course, these numbers balance to the anthropogenic CO2 emissions (3.3 + 2.0 + .5 + 1.3 = 7.1). But not if we look at the ranges. For example, if anthropogenic sources of CO2 were at the lower limit of 6.0, and the anthropogenic sinks were at the upper range of 10.1
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There is no such thing as anthropogenic sinks because human activity does not absorb co2. The 7.1 figure is entirely co2 going out of human "storage" and into the atmosphere, we don't draw co2 out of the atmosphere and store it anywhere else. So the human contribution into the atmosphere is always positive, it cannot be negative (as it says - the amount of human co2 emissions that goes into the atmosphere is 3.1-3.5 GtC per year, ie it cannot be taking co2 out of the atmosphere)
The point of the table is to show that not all human emissions stay in the atmosphere in the long term - as it says "Today, about 45 % of the anthropogenic CO2 stays aloft" (it's not that we are taking some of our own emissions out of the atmosphere - it's the oceans are taking some of it out)
The table is to show where the human emitted co2 that doesn't stay in the atmosphere goes to, and in what quantities. We find out that about 28% of human emissions each year end up in the ocean, and about 45% end up in the atmosphere (of course that doesn't mean it's the exact same co2 molecules emitted in that particular year - it's just giving the transfer rates in relation to human emissions)