Climate Change: Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2
Statement written for the US Senate Committee on Commerce,
Science, and Transportation
March 2004
Statement of Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski
Chairman, Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological
Protection
Warsaw, Poland
I am a Professor at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (CLOR) in Warsaw, Poland, a governmental institution, involved in
environmental studies. CLOR has a "Special Liaison" relationship with
the US National Council on Radiological Protection and Measurements (NCRP). In the past, for about ten years, CLOR closely cooperated with
the US Environmental Protection Agency, in research on the influence of
industry and nuclear explosions on pollution of the global environment
and population. I published about 280 scientific papers, among them
about 20 on climatic problems. I am the representative of Poland in the
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), and in 1980-1982 I was the chairman of this Committee.
For the past 40 years I was involved in glacier studies, using snow and
ice as a matrix for reconstruction of history of man-made pollution of
the global atmosphere. A part of these studies was related to the
climatic issues. Ice core records of CO2 have been widely used as a
proof that, due to man's activity the current atmospheric level of CO2 is
about 25% higher than in the pre-industrial period. These records became
the basic input parameters in the models of the global carbon cycle and a
cornerstone of the man-made climatic warming hypothesis. These records
do not represent the atmospheric reality, as I will try to demonstrate in
my statement.
Relevant Background
In order to study the history of industrial pollution of the global
atmosphere, between 1972 and 1980, I organized 11 glacier expeditions,
which measured natural and man-made pollutants in contemporary and
ancient precipitation, preserved in 17 glaciers in Arctic, Antarctic,
Alaska, Norway, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Ruwenzori Mountains in
Uganda, the Peruvian Andes and in Tatra Mountains in Poland. I also
measured long-term changes of dust in the troposphere and stratosphere,
and the lead content in humans living in Europe and elsewhere during the
past 5000 years. In 1968 I published the first paper on lead content in
glacier ice[1]. Later I demonstrated that in pre-industrial period the
total flux of lead into the global atmosphere was higher than in the 20th
century, that the atmospheric content of lead is dominated by natural
sources, and that the lead level in humans in Medieval Ages was 10 to 100
times higher than in the 20th century. In the 1990s I was working in the
Norwegian Polar Research Institute in Oslo, and in the Japanese National
Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo. In this period I studied the
effects of climatic change on polar regions, and the reliability of
glacier studies for estimation of CO2 concentration in the ancient
atmosphere.
False Low Pre-industrial CO2 in the Atmosphere
Determinations of CO2 in polar ice cores are commonly used for
estimations of the pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric levels. Perusal of
these determinations convinced me that glaciological studies are not able
to provide a reliable reconstruction of CO2 concentrations in the ancient
atmosphere. This is because the ice cores do not fulfill the essential
closed system criteria. One of them is a lack of liquid water in ice,
which could dramatically change the chemical composition the air bubbles
trapped between the ice crystals. This criterion, is not met, as even
the coldest Antarctic ice (down to -73°C) contains liquid water[2].
More than 20 physico-chemical processes, mostly related to the presence
of liquid water, contribute to the alteration of the original chemical
composition of the air inclusions in polar ice[3].
One of these processes is formation of gas hydrates or clathrates. In
the highly compressed deep ice all air bubbles disappear, as under the
influence of pressure the gases change into the solid clathrates, which
are tiny crystals formed by interaction of gas with water molecules.
Drilling decompresses cores excavated from deep ice, and contaminates
them with the drilling fluid filling the borehole. Decompression leads
to dense horizontal cracking of cores, by a well known sheeting process.
After decompression of the ice cores, the solid clathrates decompose into
a gas form, exploding in the process as if they were microscopic
grenades. In the bubble-free ice the explosions form a new gas cavities
and new cracks[4]. Through these cracks, and cracks formed by sheeting,
a part of gas escapes first into the drilling liquid which fills the
borehole, and then at the surface to the atmospheric air. Particular
gases, CO2, O2 and N2 trapped in the deep cold ice start to form clathrates, and leave the air bubbles, at different pressures and depth.
At the ice temperature of -15°C dissociation pressure for N2 is
about 100 bars, for O2 75 bars, and for CO2 5 bars. Formation of CO2
clathrates starts in the ice sheets at about 200 meter depth, and that of
O2 and N2 at 600 to 1000 meters. This leads to depletion of CO2 in the
gas trapped in the ice sheets. This is why the records of CO2
concentration in the gas inclusions from deep polar ice show the values
lower than in the contemporary atmosphere, even for the epochs when the
global surface temperature was higher than now.
The data from shallow ice cores, such as those from Siple, Antarctica[5, 6], are widely used as a proof of man-made increase of CO2 content in the global atmosphere, notably by IPCC[7]. These data show a clear inverse correlation between the decreasing CO2 concentrations, and the load-pressure increasing with depth (Figure 1 A) . The problem with Siple data (and with other shallow cores) is that the CO2 concentration found in pre-industrial ice from a depth of 68 meters (i.e. above the depth of clathrate formation) was "too high". This ice was deposited in 1890 AD, and the CO2 concentration was 328 ppmv, not about 290 ppmv, as needed by man-made warming hypothesis. The CO2 atmospheric concentration of about 328 ppmv was measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii as later as in 1973[8], i.e. 83 years after the ice was deposited at Siple.
An ad hoc assumption, not supported by any factual evidence[3, 9], solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped. The "corrected" ice data were then smoothly aligned with the Mauna Loa record (Figure 1 B) , and reproduced in countless publications as a famous "Siple curve". Only thirteen years later, in 1993, glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the "age assumption"[10], but they failed[9].
The notion of low pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric level, based on such
poor knowledge, became a widely accepted Holy Grail of climate warming
models. The modelers ignored the evidence from direct measurements of
CO2 in atmospheric air indicating that in 19th century its average
concentration was 335 ppmv[11] (Figure 2) . In Figure 2 encircled values
show a biased selection of data used to demonstrate that in 19th century
atmosphere the CO2 level was 292 ppmv[12]. A study of stomatal frequency
in fossil leaves from Holocene lake deposits in Denmark, showing that
9400 years ago CO2 atmospheric level was 333 ppmv, and 9600 years ago 348 ppmv, falsify the concept of stabilized and low CO2 air concentration
until the advent of industrial revolution [13].
Improper manipulation of data, and arbitrary rejection of readings that
do not fit the pre-conceived idea on man-made global warming is common in
many glaciological studies of greenhouse gases. In peer reviewed
publications I exposed this misuse of science [3, 9]. Unfortunately,
such misuse is not limited to individual publications, but also appears
in documents of national and international organizations. For example
IPCC not only based its reports on a falsified "Siple curve", but also in
its 2001 report[14] used as a flagship the "hockey curve" of temperature,
showing that there was no Medieval Warming, and no Little Ice Age, and
that the 20th century was unusually warm. The curve was credulously
accepted after Mann et al. paper published in NATURE magazine[15]. In a
crushing criticism, two independent groups of scientists from disciplines
other than climatology [16, 17] (i.e. not supported from the annual pool
of many billion "climatic" dollars), convincingly blamed the Mann et al.
paper for the improper manipulation and arbitrary rejections of data.
The question arises, how such methodically poor paper, contradicting
hundreds of excellent studies that demonstrated existence of global range
Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age, could pass peer review for NATURE?
And how could it pass the reviewing process at the IPCC? The apparent
scientific weaknesses of IPCC and its lack of impartiality, was diagnosed
and criticized in the early 1990s in NATURE editorials [18, 19]. The
disease, seems to be persistent.
Conclusion
The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic causes and on
projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in
the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological
studies, is false. Therefore IPCC projections should not be used for
national and global economic planning. The climatically inefficient and
economically disastrous Kyoto Protocol, based on IPCC projections, was
correctly defined by President George W. Bush as "fatally flawed". This
criticism was recently followed by the President of Russia Vladimir V. Putin. I hope that their rational views might save the world from
enormous damage that could be induced by implementing recommendations
based on distorted science.
References
1. Jaworowski, Z., Stable lead in fossil ice and bones. Nature, 1968.
217: p. 152-153.
2. Mulvaney, R., E.W. Wolff, and K. Oates, Sulpfuric acid at grain
boundaries in Antarctic ice. Nature, 1988. 331(247-249).
3. Jaworowski, Z., T.V. Segalstad, and N. Ono, Do glaciers tell a true
atmospheric CO2 story? The Science of the Total Environment, 1992. 114:
p. 227-284.
4. Shoji, H. and C.C. Langway Jr., Volume relaxation of air inclusions
in a fresh ice core. Journal of Physical Chemistry, 1983. 87: p.
4111-4114.
5. Neftel, A., et al., Evidence from polar ice cores for the increase in
atmospheric CO2 in the past two centuries. Nature, 1985. 315: p. 45-47.
6. Friedli, H., et al., Ice core record of the 13C/12C ratio of
atmospheric CO2 in the past two centuries. Nature, 1986. 324: p.
237-238.
7. IPCC, Climate Change - The IPCC Scientific Assessment. ed. J.T.
Houghton et al. 1990, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 364.
8. Boden, T.A., P. Kanciruk, and M.P. Farrel, TRENDS '90 - A Compendium
of Data on Global Change. 1990, Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Oak
Ridge, Tennssee, pp. 257.
9. Jaworowski, Z., Ancient atmosphere - validity of ice records.
Environ. Sci. & Pollut. Res., 1994. 1(3): p. 161-171.
10. Schwander, J., et al., The age of the air in the firn and the ice at
Summit, Greenland. J. Geophys. Res., 1993. 98(D2): p. 2831-2838.
11. Slocum, G., Has the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
changed significantly since the beginning of the twentieth century?
Month. Weather Rev., 1955(October): p. 225-231.
12. Callendar, G.S., On the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Tellus, 1958. 10: p. 243-248.
13. Wagner, F., et al., Century-scale shifts in Early Holocene
atmospheric CO2 concentration. Science, 1999. 284: p. 1971-1973.
14. IPCC, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis., ed. J.T. Houton
et al. 2001, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 892.
15. Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, Global-scale temperature
patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries. Nature, 1998.
392: p. 779-787.
16. Soon, W., et al., Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes
of the past 1000 years: A Reappraisal. Energy & Environment, 2003. 14:
p. 233-296.
17. McIntyre, S. and R. McKitrick, Corrections to the Mann et al.
(1998) proxy data base and Northern hemispheric average temperature
series. Energy & Environment, 2003. 14(6): p. 751-771.
18. Editorial, A., IPCC's ritual on global warming. Nature, 1994. 371:
p. 269.
19. Maddox, J., Making global warming public property. Nature, 1991.
349: p. 189.
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