Hello Ivan,
The next “fact” with which you deal in your summary is this:
Since 200 years—since the so-called industrial revolution—these changes have become dramatically fast, like putting an unprecedented amount of Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
I hadn’t seen this chart before, and as I’ve told you I’m no CO₂ expert. However, when I saw this chart I thought: “no way this can be right”. What do you do when you see some information on the internet that immediately seems suspect to you? You probably go to snopes.com or find some other way to verify or falsify it. Likewise, I briefly researched this chart. Here’s what I found.
The chart mentions two sources:
Luthi et al. provide CO₂ from 800k years ago to around 1900. Keeling et al. provide CO₂ from 1958 to today. They do this using completely different methods, and the results are not comparable. Luthi et al. don’t mention in their paper that their results are comparable to Keeling et al.’s, neither vice versa. In fact, I can’t find any climate scientist who claims these things are comparable. It’s some anonymous guy at Climate Central who decided to get Luthi et al.’s results and Keeling et al.’s results and plot them on the same chart.
While I don’t know exactly how CO₂ is measured, I believe that Keeling et al. have some sensors or take samples from the air and analyze them; so they measure CO₂ in the present, and since they’ve been doing so since 1958, we have measurements since 1958.
Luthi et al., on the other hand, tell us how much CO₂ there was in the past. How do they know? From ice cores. In Antarctica and Greenland a new layer of ice is added each year, covering the ice of the previous year. These places have one long night and one long day each year, and the night ice is slightly different than the day ice, resulting in slightly different colours. We can therefore see horizontal stripes in ice columns extracted by drilling, and each stripe is one year. There are little bubbles of air trapped in the ice. You analyze these bubbles, you find out how much CO₂ there was in the past.
It appears, however, that it’s not that simple. One reason it’s not simple is that these bubbles are tiny and they don’t have enough air to perform a measurement, so you have to take many bubbles together. These many bubbles can span one hundred or more years. So Luthi et al.’s figures are more a kind of moving average, and the plot by Climate Central combines Luthi et al.’s moving averages with Keeling et al.’s direct measurements in a very naive way.
I believe all this just scratches the surface of the problem. As I told you, I’m no CO₂ expert. If you want to learn more, you can start at “What do the ice core bubbles really tell us?” by Tim Ball.
Thank you very much Antonis for your post, which unfortunately doesn’t convince me of the wrongness of the graphic.
Timothy Ball (the Author of the page you mention) is a very controversial denier according to the Wikipedia. Also, his logic is very strange: there is doubt on the measurements, therefore there is no human induced climate change.
Despite that, the measurements on ice has been corroborated by different scientists on different positions on Earth and are in accordance with the current measurements on the Mauna Loa Observatory (about 300 ppm on 1960, about 400 ppm now). Ice measurements oscillates around 200 and 300 ppm. See http://www.climatedata.info/proxies/ice-cores/
There have been also comparisons of different laboratories, methods and calibrations. See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/303410a0
What is more, there is a strong correlation of the anthropocentric CO2 emissions with the atmospheric measurements, which also corroborates the increase of 100 ppm in the graphic you are questioning – without proving it is wrong. See https://skepticalscience.com/CO2-emissions-correlation-with-CO2-concentration.htm
The first link you posted, http://www.climatedata.info/proxies/ice-cores/, says this (my emphasis):
This is exactly what I said in the post. CO₂ measurements from ice cores are moving averages; direct CO₂ measurements from the atmosphere are, well, direct. You can’t plot a direct measurement and a moving average on the same chart, at least not in the way it has been done here.
I’m not claiming that CO₂ isn’t increasing in the atmosphere. I am claiming that the chart is misleading. It implies that CO₂ was less than 300 ppm for about half a million years, and then it suddenly jumped to 400 ppm within 100 years. This is not the case. It’s the moving average that was less than 300 ppm for half a million years; it’s the actual value that apparently jumped from 300 ppm in 1958 to 400 ppm in 2015 (and this assumes that moving average is the only problem of ice cores, which it probably isn’t).
The chart also uses the “uncharted territory” headline, implying that this has never happened before (in the last half million years, that is). Wrong again. The ice cores don’t give much evidence that the actual value didn’t jump well above or well below the moving average.
When Galileo asked to look at the evidence that the Moon is not a perfect sphere through a telescope, the proponents of perfect celestial bodies argued that there is a transparent gas that covers the craters making the Moon a perfect sphere. Galileo ironically looked again through the telescope and answered: oh yes, there is an invisible gas, but it makes the craters even more protuberant.
My answer to your invisible spikes much above the 300 ppm mark during the last half a million years before modern times is as follows: oh yes, there were eventually extreme values averaged out in the graph, but they were all exclusively below 200 ppm.
Now seriously. Do you have evidence that there were periods during which the CO2 was above 300ppm? What were the peak values? How long did they last? And, how fast was the increase from 300ppm to 400ppm or more? They are all important question in my humble opinion because if they were none – or not as fast as now- then we are in an uncharted territory, in which a risk of severe, adverse consequences is not worth it. At the end, is all about risk management, isn’t it? See e.g. https://thebulwark.com/what-changed-my-mind-about-climate-change/
You say: “there were eventually extreme values averaged out in the graph, but they were all exclusively below 200 ppm”. May I ask what exactly you mean by that and how do you know it?
“[Were there] periods during which the CO2 was above 300ppm? What were the peak values? How long did they last? And, how fast was the increase from 300ppm to 400ppm or more?”
These are all valid questions, of course. It won’t surprise me if researchers spend lifetimes trying to answer them.
Each chart tells a story. If you can put up a chart that asks the questions you are asking, I’m fine. But the chart in question tells the story that “for half a million years CO₂ concentration was between 180 and 280 ppm, but after 1900 it soared to 400 ppm”. That story is wrong.
I understand that the values of CO2 from ice bubbles are averages of some years. But, as far as I know, there is no study that confirms that there were peak values above 300 ppm, which would confirm your statement that the story of the graph is wrong. Thus, the irony of my sentence: I just say, as you do, that there were extreme peak values averaged out, but that all these values were lower, not higher than 300 ppm, also without any empirical data – that is what Galileo did when he was confronted with a similar statement. However, on the contrary, there are many empirical, independent studies on the bubbles at hand, some published on Nature, which the scientists of the IPCC have read and summarized in their reports that tell the same story as the graph. Moreover, that story is confirmed by the calculations of anthropocentric CO2 since the industrial revolution, which matches the recent sensor data of CO2 increases in the atmosphere – as I have referenced.
If the story is wrong, if there were periods in the past half million years were the CO2 concentration were like it is now (400 ppm), how do you know?!
Granted, the story may be wrong, new studies could prove the opposite, but as far as they are not conducted, the logical consequence is to be very worry about (mainly anthropocentric CO2 induced) climate change. And if you think the probability of the IPCC reports (and the graph at hand) being wrong is high, I still don’t understand why.
Note: The chart in question has been extensively analyzed by fellow denier David Middleton at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/02/resolution-and-hockey-sticks-part-deux-carbon-dioxide/ (I’m writing this for completeness and for my own convenience).
And his arguments has been extensively invalidated by his commentator Ferdinand
Engelbeen (see his multiple comments on the page you mention). Some of that arguments are also at http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
He also has a page explaining the (only possible) origin of the recent CO2 high increase in the atmosphere at http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_origin.html
There are other commentators indicating that a high level of CO2 would have been detected in the ice cores as it takes hundreds of years to lower. Additionally, they indicate that there is no known cause of an increase in the past.
From my readings, I’m still convinced that the graph is correct. I’m aware I have not deeply followed and checked all arguments, but I believe very few people have done it, and most of them seem to agree on the validity of the graph.
As a side note, I found funny that Middleton comes from the oil industry who might be some more biased than independent researchers, if you understand me. As he says himself in a comment:
Engelbeen’s analysis is very interesting. Since (at this time) I don’t intend to become a CO₂ expert, I can’t tell whether I agree or disagree with it. I’d also need to read Beck’s original work for that.
So, let me summarize my position on all this:
You have presented the “uncharted territory” chart as a fact. But this chart does not follow from the claimed sources of Luthi et al. and Keeling et al. What does follow relatively easily is Middleton’s Figure 4:
The reason is that if you want to do a fair comparison between Luthi et al.’s data, which according to Luthi et al. have a “resolution” of 570 years, and Keeling et al.’s data, you have to smooth out Keeling’s spike by applying a 500-year smoothing filter.
In order for Climate Central’s chart to be valid, Luthi+Keeling are insufficient, and a third premise is required: evidence that such spikes did not occur in the past. If you have good reason to believe this (e.g. if you think that Engelbeen/Beck make this case convincingly), then I can’t argue with you. I won’t agree (since I haven’t examined Engelbeen/Beck carefully), but I won’t disagree either.
A similar graph of the “uncharted territory graph” is to be found at the NASAs webpage on climate, but citing other (additional) sources. The NASA’s graph tells exactly the same story. See https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
In my opinion, you (or anyone) cannot deny the “story” told by just saying you haven’t examine the sources – specially when almost all experts say the “story” is the truth. Either you prove the opposite, or you have to accept the results of the people who have studied it, don’t you? Who has studied it – and to which conclusions they have come – has been researched many times. Here you can find references of that research (the page is in German, but the references are in English): https://www.scientists4future.org/infomaterial/konsens-unter-klimawissenschaftlern/
NASA’s graph is still missing evidence that spikes did not occur in the past (and I can’t find any paper “Etheridge et al. 2010”).
You say: “In my opinion, you (or anyone) cannot deny the “story” told by just saying you haven’t examine the sources.”
Indeed. That’s why I said: “If you have good reason to believe [that spikes did not occur in the past] (e.g. if you think that Engelbeen/Beck make this case convincingly), then I can’t argue with you. I won’t agree (since I haven’t examined Engelbeen/Beck carefully), but I won’t disagree either.”
For what I have understood, there are studies on the ice cores with a resolution small enough to rule out spikes, as CO2 cannot appear and disappear that fast.
The Ice Facility of the NSF lists a lot of research on ice cores with different methods, and it writes:
No spikes!
https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores
If there were no spikes, then the 500-year moving average would be constant, wouldn’t it?
No Spikes above 300 ppm was meant.