At a glance - What is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2?

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "What is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2?". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there.

FactMythBox

At a glance

Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy? A mysterious entity that turns up when people are sleeping, to remove unwanted things and replace them with something nicer? Because, you see, Murry Salby's ramblings require a Tooth Fairy to help him out. Let's take a look.

Murry Salby was a briefly popular character in the circus that is organised climate science denial, with the same few dozen names cropping up repeatedly in books, conferences, speaking tours and so on. If Salby was right, the army of scientists that have worked on the carbon cycle over many decades must have missed something glaringly obvious. They have not.

The fast part of the carbon cycle is represented by the annual near-symmetrical 'wiggle' on graphs of CO2 concentration. The peaks and troughs of the wiggle pretty much cancel one another out. This is unsurprising when one considers their source - the living world and particularly plants.

Plants take in CO2 when they are in the growing season - so the concentration falls by a few parts per million (ppm), hence the troughs. In the depths of winter, many plants die or enter dormancy and the opposite happens, hence the peaks. The sizes of the peaks and troughs both fluctuate together depending on things like certain natural climate cycles. For example, in the well-known El Nino Southern Oscillation, vegetation takes up more CO2 during La Nina.

There's also the slow carbon cycle that operates over geological time-spans of thousands to millions of years. We have a range of tools with which to interrogate the record of the slow carbon cycle. An obvious one is air bubbles trapped in ancient glacial ice and sampled from ice-cores. Over pre-industrial Holocene times (11,700 years ago-recent), CO2 concentrations show little variation - an erratic 20 ppm (or about 7%) increase over all that time. That suggests the net natural CO2 flux was small: what the planet was putting into the atmosphere was largely taken back out. Going back further, into the glacial-interglacial cycles, we see that CO2 fell to less than 200 ppm in the ice-ages and in the milder interglacials it rose to about 280 ppm. That was the case from at least a million years ago.

Now, all of a sudden, CO2 has shot up to around 420 ppm since the late 19th Century. It's gone up 50% in less than 150 years. What's the big difference about the world now and the one over the previous million years? The answer is the intensification of the industrial era, post-1950. Back then we were emitting 6 billion tonnes of CO2 per annum. That figure has now risen to 44.25 billion tonnes a year - it's gone up more than sevenfold.

If you still insist the recent CO2 increase is not due to human activity, you need to make that 44.25 billion tons of emissions per annum (and rising) magically disappear somehow. That's where the Tooth Fairy has to come to your aid – and as any rational person knows, it doesn't in fact exist.

Please use this form to provide feedback about this new "At a glance" section. Read a more technical version below or dig deeper via the tabs above!


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In case you'd like to explore more of our recently updated rebuttals, here are the links to all of them:

Myths with link to rebuttal Short URLs
Ice age predicted in the 1970s sks.to/1970s
It hasn't warmed since 1998 sks.to/1998
Antarctica is gaining ice sks.to/antarctica
CRU emails suggest conspiracy sks.to/climategate
What evidence is there for the hockey stick sks.to/hockey
CO2 lags temperature sks.to/lag
Climate's changed before sks.to/past
It's the sun sks.to/sun
Temperature records are unreliable sks.to/temp
The greenhouse effect and the 2nd law of thermodynamics sks.to/thermo
We're heading into an ice age sks.to/iceage
Positives and negatives of global warming sks.to/impacts
Global cooling - Is global warming still happening? sks.to/cooling
How reliable are climate models? sks.to/model
Can animals and plants adapt to global warming? sks.to/species
What's the link between cosmic rays and climate change? sks.to/cosmic
Is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth accurate? sks.to/gore
Are glaciers growing or retreating? sks.to/glacier
Ocean acidification: global warming's evil twin sks.to/acid
The human fingerprint in global warming sks.to/agw
Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming sks.to/evidence
How do we know more CO2 is causing warming? sks.to/greenhouse
Explaining how the water vapor greenhouse effect works sks.to/vapor
The tricks employed by the flawed OISM Petition Project to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change sks.to/OISM
Is extreme weather caused by global warming? sks.to/extreme
How substances in trace amounts can cause large effects sks.to/trace
How much is sea level rising? sks.to/sealevel
Is CO2 a pollutant? sks.to/pollutant
Does cold weather disprove global warming? sks.to/cold
Do volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans? sks.to/volcano
How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions? sks.to/co2
Climate scientists could make more money in other careers sks.to/money
How reliable are CO2 measurements? sks.to/co2data
Do high levels of CO2 in the past contradict the warming effect of CO2? sks.to/pastco2
What is the net feedback of clouds? sks.to/cloud
Global warming vs climate change sks.to/name
Is Mars warming? sks.to/mars
How the IPCC is more likely to underestimate the climate response sks.to/underestimat
How sensitive is our climate? sks.to/sensitivity
Evidence for global warming sks.to/warming
Has the greenhouse effect been falsified? sks.to/falsify
Does breathing contribute to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere? sks.to/breath
What is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2? sks.to/CO2increase

 

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Posted by John Mason on Tuesday, 19 December, 2023


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