About those errors in the climate change “gold standard” of CO2 in the atmosphere

What does the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere actually mean? How flawed are its measurements?

Disclaimer: The following is a blog post that is poorly sourced and lacks critical references etc. However, the blog post does raise some valid issues.

Remember: CO2 in the air is a life essential trace gas! It is measured in parts per million! I have always wondered, why CO2 in the air is measured in PPM. According to the blog post below, there is much more to it!

I have recently blogged here that there is apparently only one meteorological observatory in the world that for many years provides the reference data for the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, i.e. Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. Which by itself is highly suspicious and dubious!

Following issues are mentioned in the blog post:

1. That the amount of CO2 in the air is the result/residual of very complicated  and complex chemical processes involving various natural and human CO2 sources and sinks. I don't think anyone, but pseudoscientists, can claim that we yet fully understand these processes
2. "... they [e.g. NOAA] have removed a huge variability in CO2 data by removing water and water vapor from the sample.  CO2 gas is highly absorbed by water, the concentration of water and water vapor in air is more than 10 times larger than CO2, and humidity is highly variable.  In practice, if they do not remove the water from the air samples, then the variability in the data is so large that it prevents the CO2 measurement; for this reason they use a molar mass measurement (ppm) instead of a volume measurement such as micrograms CO2 per liter of air (or ppmv); ppm and ppmv are not equivalent units. ..." Tricks of the trade?
3. "... estimations of the mass of the atmosphere vary tremendously.  The denominator in ppm is mass of the atmosphere or portions thereof.  This mass is highly variable, but the uncertainty implied by that variability is almost never propagated to the ppm ratio.  This second problem is a partial derivative of the first problem above, but also there are additional variables. ..."

About those errors in the climate change “gold standard” | budbromley