Oceans are Source of CO2

According to an article entitled "Hemispheric Timing Shows Oceans are Source of CO2" by Dennis T. Avery, there are a number of badly flawed assertions in the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming claims based on CO2 emissions from man's use of fossil fuels.

Tom Quirk, an Oxford-trained Australian research physicist has observed that the carbon 14 isotope generated by nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s took several years to travel from the northern to the southern hemispheres. Since 95% of the use of fossil fuels is in the northern hemisphere, northern hemisphere CO2 atmospheric concentrations should be higher than southern hemisphere concentrations, but they are not. Tom Quirk says:

“The seasonal variations in CO2 and the lack of time delays between the hemispheres suggest fossil-fuel-derived CO2 is almost totally absorbed locally in the year it is emitted,” he says. “This implies that natural variability of the climate is the prime cause of increased CO2, not the emissions of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels.”

Dennis Avery proceeds to remind us how the great "Nobel scientist" Al Gore informed us that more CO2 in the atmosphere caused the last four interglacial warmings over the last 400,000 years. But, .....more recent Antarctic studies have clearly shown that it is the CO2 atmospheric concentrations which are responding with increases to temperature increases. The oceans absorb massive amounts of CO2 from the air when they cool. The oceans hold at least 70 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere does. When oceans warm, they cannot hold as much dissolved CO2 gas. Since 1850, the climate has generally warmed as we have left the Little Ice Age behind and atmospheric CO2 concentrations slowly rose accordingly.

Avery says that we now know that the correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures over the last 150 years is 22%, while that with sunspots is 79%. So, there is a CO2 warming according to him, but it is a function of CO2 being emitted from the oceans, not the results of man's puny contribution from the combustion of fossil fuels. The rapid local absorption of CO2 indicated by the nearly identical northern and southern hemisphere concentrations, indicates that the land and oceans can hold very much more CO2 than they presently do.

The heat energy content of the oceans is about 2000 times that of the atmosphere. Because of this, it is better to make judgments about whether the earth is warming or cooling slightly based on the temperature of the ocean than based at land surface stations. This is especially true given that so many land temperature stations are disproportionately sited in population centers and are not infrequently placed near asphalt parking lots and other heating sources. The Argo diving floats have given us the most accurate ocean temperature measurements ever. These measurements show that the oceans stopped warming in 2003. The atmosphere stopped warming after 1998, but it is reasonable that it takes awhile to fully transfer heat from the atmosphere to the ocean and that the ocean itself then takes awhile to come to be in a quasi-equilibrium state. Of course there will remain large thermal gradients in the ocean for any overall heat content, but if the atmosphere is warmer than the ocean surface, the overall ocean heat content will increase until the ocean and the atmosphere achieve a new quasi-equilibrium.

Avery says "the earth is now cooling, and any drastic actions to reduce fossil fuel emissions are premature." Dr. Kanya Kusano of Japan's Earth Simulator Project is advising Japan that the man-made CO2 emissions argument for global warming is an "unproven hypothesis."