From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog
Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
SUMMARY: A simple time-dependent CO2 budget model shows that annual anthropogenic emissions compared to CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa reduce the rate of CO2 sinking, which if continued would increases the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and is probably due to anthropogenic climate change. But taking into account ENSO (El Nino/La Nina) activity for the period 1959-2021 eliminates the decline. This is in contrast to many previous studies that have claimed explanations for ENSO. A pre-print of my paper (not yet peer-reviewed) is detailed at ENSO Impact on CO2 reduction rate | Earth and Space Science Open Archives (essoar.org).
UPDATE: The CO2 model, with input and output, is in the Excel spreadsheet here: CO2-budget-model-with-EIA-growth cases.
I decided that the CO2 model I developed a few years ago and recently reported on here, was worth publishing, so I started going through the published literature on the subject. This is a necessary first step if you want to publish a paper and not be embarrassed to reinvent the wheel or claim something that others have “disproved”.
The first thing I noticed was that my idea that Nature would each year remove a small fraction of the difference between the observed CO2 concentrations and some baseline values was not new. That idea was first published in 2013 (see my preprint link above for details) and it’s called the “CO2 sink rate”.
The second thing I’ve noticed is that the sink rate is (supposedly) decreasing, about 0.54% (relatively) per year, even after taking ENSO activity into account. But I only get -0.33% per year (1959-2021) before ENSO activity is taken into account, and – importantly – 0.0% per year after ENSO is taken into account.
This last finding is sure to be controversial, because it could mean that atmospheric CO2 won’t increase as much as global carbon cycle modelers say. So I’m posting the model and dataset used along with a preprint on paper at ENSO Impact on CO2 reduction rate | Earth and Space Science Open Archives (essoar.org). The analysis is quite simple and I believe it is defensible. The 2019 paper had a -0.54% per year decline rate using complex statistical fitness, with a professional statistician as the lead author. My analysis is simpler, much easier to understand and (I believe) at least defensible.
The paper will be submitted to Geophysical Research Letters for peer review over the next few days. In the meantime, I will invite researchers to live and breathe this tool to uncover the holes in my analysis.
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