The CO2 – Temperature link

@Bill Illis
“we are likely to reach the doubled CO2 level of 560 ppm by 2070 or earlier (just 60 years away)”
The critics of icecore measurements arguments that high CO2 levels are surpressed from several chemical reactions, ecpecially under pressure.
Therefor, the further you go down in ice layers, the lower is the possible max-CO2-concentrations. This will of course result in a curve that over estimates CO2 growth lately since earlier layers show too little CO2. So, yes if you believe these icecores as a solid way of measuring CO2 in the past, yes, then you might conclude a lot. But for “us-that-do-not-find-CO2-data-from-icecores-reliable” these results are of course of no importance at all.

From someone who reads this stuff but whose ignorance is pretty profound. What is the possibility that increased CO2 is an effect not a cause?

Dave Dodd says:

Dr. Ball states that CO2 levels were ~355ppm in the early 1800s and today’s levels at ~385 ppm aren’t significantly different. There’s no debate: CO2 levels haven’t changed in 200 years! The 280 ppm numbers from “pre-industrial” times were cherry picked!
Case closed!

If you believe this, there is really no hope of convincing you otherwise; it is climate science equivalent to young-earth-creationism. There is simply no evidence to believe that those early measurements were accurate and that the CO2 levels miraculously stopped undergoing huge oscillations just at the time when the modern way to measure CO2 began in the late 1950s.
Furthermore, the hypothesis that temperature causes the CO2 changes fails on many grounds. It doesn’t explain why CO2 went up in the 1960s when temperatures were not going up. It doesn’t explain why the evidence shows the oceans are taking up CO2 and becoming more acidic, not releasing it. It is contradicted by isotopic analysis. It would require a much stronger relationship of temperature driving CO2 than occurred during the ice age – interglacial oscillations (and it is also important to remember that those changes occurred over much longer timescales too…which is the presumed reason why there is a several hundred year lag time between temperatures starting to rise or fall and CO2 starting to rise or fall). And, it contradicts all of our theoretical understanding of the carbon cycle.
crosspatch says:

Humans dump about 3% of total CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Decaying organic matter contributes about 30%.

Your comparison is completely bogus. Yes, there are relatively large cycles of CO2 between the atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere…but the point is that this is just moving carbon around and before human emissions it was pretty much in equilibrium. We, by contrast, are taking stores of carbon long locked away from the atmosphere and rapidly releasing them into the atmosphere.
David Holliday asks:

From someone who reads this stuff but whose ignorance is pretty profound. What is the possibility that increased CO2 is an effect not a cause?

For the modern rise in CO2 levels, it is zero.
However, I encourage those AGW “skeptics” who believe otherwise to make this claim when they write to politicians or scientists; it will certainly help those people to decide how seriously to take the skeptic’s correspondence!

David Holliday: The probability that modern increased CO2 is an effect of temperature, not a cause, is zero. This is known and understood the way that the probability that I will suddenly start floating in the air is zero.
The details of the ocean and terrestrial sinks are not even close to fully understood yet, but that doesn’t detract from the above statement anymore than the issues of reconciling gravity and quantum prevent us from making predictions about falling objects.
I will note that this is also a very different level of certainty from the “it is likely that increased CO2 will lead to sufficient warming to cause problems for humanity and ecosystems”, which I will posit is likely, but if CO2 went up to 600 ppm and temperatures in 2100 only increased by a degree or so, I would be very surprised but would not feel like the laws of physics had been repealed.
If humans were to stop emitting CO2 tomorrow, and we did not see CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere start dropping _regardless_ of what the temperature was doing, I would feel like the laws of physics had been repealed. Similarly, if temperatures were to drop to -0.37 degrees, and CO2 were to stabilize for a decade despite continued human emissions, I would also feel like the laws of physics had been repealed.
Trust me: anyone who thinks that it is possible that the 70 ppm increase in CO2 concentration seen in the Mauna Loa record would have happened without human CO2 emissions has no idea what they are talking about.
ps. Katharine: have you heard of thought experiments and hypotheticals? I was trying to show how the analysis of Lansner and Jerker is fundamentally flawed in attributing CO2 rise to temperature change just because the fluctuations in the rate of change matched temperature.

I didn’t have time to read all of the comments above, so apologies if I repeat points made by others.
I have worked extensively on the issue of relating CO2 to temperatures, using a rate equation model, instead of just statistical correlations. Doing that, you get rid of the supposed “lag”. If there is a lag, it’s no more than about 1-2 months. My main conclusions so far do agree, however, with Frank’s in that the biosphere does seem to be more responsive to CO2. Not only does it absorb half the CO2 we pour into it, even that ratio is increasing slightly. But at some point, both the temperature data and the CO2 data are too uncertain to give a precise value to that effect.
I did, however, hypothesize that one factor has not so far been considered by most researchers in the field. That factor is adaptation by natural selection. Yes, that good old Darwinism. The point is that, not only will the biosphere expand by CO2 fertilization, but also the species, whether of plants or bacteria or phytoplankton, that fare better at higher atmospheric CO2 because they themselves are better at using it, those species will expand at the expense of those that don’t like CO2 that much. So in the end, you get a nonlinear response of the biosphere, that just gets better and better at eating up our CO2.
Just one example. Ocean phytoplankton is known to not generally respond to higher CO2. In other words, it’s not “fertilized” by CO2. But recently some researchers have found that some phytoplankton species do. So you wonder: if they co-inhabit an environment where CO2 increases, which species will expand the most? And if some mutation gives some individuals a better ability to ingest CO2, won’t they also thrive better?
Frank is also right in commenting that because of that, if temperatures do take a nosedive as they have done in the past couple of years, the expanded ability of the biosphere to eat up the CO2 will be even stronger. A couple of relatively cold decades (as some have recently predicted) could lead to a drastic slowing down of the CO2 increase, if not a reversal. This does depend on the CO2 response time. Some have claimed a very long response time, but my own analysis strongly points to a 1-2 year response time.
I’m still fascinated by the subject, but haven’t worked on it for a few months now. My initial excitement was based on a faulty conclusion that CO2 might be entirely driven by temperatures. There was a mistake in my model at the time. So the CO2 we see is clearly anthropogenic, however the rate of increase is greatly affected by the biosphere, and by the temperature, especially the ocean temperature. The Mauna Loa data are not that bad. However, the ocean temperature data are not that good. So it’s hard to figure out quantitatively exactly what’s going on.

Joel Shore said:

If you believe this, there is really no hope of convincing you otherwise; it is climate science equivalent to young-earth-creationism.

Why didn’t you just accuse him of being a holocaust denier? It has more emotional power. Try not to dress your ad-hominems up too cleverly or they miss the mark.

NO LAG. There doesn’t appear to be any lag by my analysis, except there is some leading / trailing depending on which year you look at. This is a preliminary result, I plan to look at the data in a couple of other ways to see if any other clear relationships develop.
I took the data used in the original article and used every data point for monthly CO2 and UAH MSU global available. I was careful to make sure that each month lines up correctly as the effect of the seasonal nature of the CO2 was removed (by 12 month averaging). The resulting chart shows a virtually instantaneous response of dCO2 to temperature. While some lag might be intuitively expected, remember, we are looking at the rate of increase of CO2 vs temp, so an instantaneous response makes a lot of sense.
I will be working on this for a few more days, but as a teaser, here is a chart:

I want to look at a few other methods of analyzing the data, for example a logarithmic method of analyzing CO2 and taking out CO2 seasonality might allow use of the data without any moving averages. Note: The 12 month moving averages are generated by the Excel trendline feature and I noticed that this alone introduces a small lag if used on one data set and not the other, so I let excel do both for the chart. I’m developing a work-around for that.
I’m also looking at a way of judging the response lag to see if that reveals anything. The 1998 El-Nino event shows a really striking response with no lag, while others show some leading / trailing. Taking this data with AMO / PDO, solar, etc. might explain some of these anomalies.
Anthony, if you could email me at naturalclimate at comcast.net I’d like to send you the sheet for your perusal once I get a little more work done on it. It is interesting indeed. Once we have the dCO2 element vs temp, it should be relatively easy to integrate dCO2 with some of the earlier known chemical CO2 analyses to drive a temperature proxy, and see if that matches with other temperature data sets going back earlier than this analysis.
Like I said, at first look, it appears there is a virtually instantaneous response of delta CO2 with temperature, as you might expect.
For anyone wanting to continue to look at the data backwards, an instantaneous change in delta CO2 causes an instant temperature response, just like you thought. (sorry, I had to throw that in).
Michael Smith

Francis O asks some good questions on the biosphere interaction
Just one example. Ocean phytoplankton is known to not generally respond to higher CO2. In other words, it’s not “fertilized” by CO2. But recently some researchers have found that some phytoplankton species do. So you wonder: if they co-inhabit an environment where CO2 increases, which species will expand the most? And if some mutation gives some individuals a better ability to ingest CO2, won’t they also thrive better?
With Phytoplankton there is another secondary and important effect,the modulation of the upper water temperature.
From Falkowsi and Dickie.
“Over 70% of Earth’s surface is covered by liquid water that absorbs about 95% of incident solar irradiance. In its upper 3 m the ocean contains the equivalent heat capacity of the entire atmosphere of the planet (Peixoto and Oort, 1992).As the average depth of the oceans is about 3800 m, this geophysical fluid acts as a huge heat storage system for the planet. That is, the oceans do not directly affect the radiation budget of the planet, but rather, affect the time constant by which the planet “experiences” changes in radiation.
As in the atmosphere, the direct physical interactions between solar radiation and
the ocean are wavelength dependent. Water itself effectively absorbs all incident
infrared solar radiation (e.g., Morel and Antoine, 1994),and this direct radiative
transfer process provides roughly half of the heat to the ocean surface waters. An
example of potential interactions between solar radiation and physical and biological
processes is, where the following sequence is illustrated
(1)forcing of the upper ocean physical condition through the input of solar radiation, including light, heat, and indirectly momentum at the ocean surface;
(2)upper ocean physical responses, including stratification and turbulent mixing that result in
(3) phytoplankton vertical and horizontal motions, which, in turn, lead to
(4) feedbacks on distributions of pigments and photosynthetic available radiation (PAR),
(5) modulation of the upper ocean heating via phytoplankton and their associated
optical properties. The balance between primary production and grazing determine
the concentration of phytoplankton at any moment in time and both processes must
be considered in biological–physical interactions.
Direct measurements of bio-optical as well as physical variables have been made in the warm-water pool of the western Pacific (Siegel et al., 1995; Ohlmann et al., 1998). This work is supportive of the previous assertions concerning the importance of the penetrative component of solar radiation and more generally biogeochemical processes. For example, it was determined that common values of the penetrative solar flux are about 23 W m−2 at 30 m (the climatological mean mixed layer depth), and thus a large fraction of the climatological mean net air–sea flux of about 40 W m−2. Synoptic scale forcing (e.g., wind bursts) were found to lead to tripling of phytoplankton pigment concentrations and a reduction in penetrative heat flux of 5.6 W m−2 at 30 m, or a biogeochemically mediated increase in the radiant heating rate of 0.138C/ month. In-depth analysis of the radiant heating and parameterizations of light attenuation for this experiment are given in Ohlmann et al. (1998)
A direct response to cold tongues in the subantartic ocean(44s) can be seen here
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4767410a7693.html

jorgekafkazar (17:12:03) :
Taking a 12 month average of the CO2 could not only remove the “seasonal nature” but other information, including the lag, as well. Twelve month averaging irons out the peaks and shifts them laterally, depending on how the 12 month average was taken. Which 12 months were used for each data point? Was the temperature data statistically smudged to remove its seasonal nature, as well? (You were working with dCO2, yes?)
Jorge –
dCO2 was first taken over 12 months, then a new X axis value was created for the center of that 12 month average (it will be at a 1/2 month point, with 6 values in front, and 6 values behind). This keeps the X axis aligned. Then the dCO2 value is calculated monthly by subtracting the later month from the earlier, and another X axis value is created to center those values about the time involved. This way the data is always centered with the monthly temp data. Nothing was done with the temperature anomaly data at all. From this point, with both X axes aligned, the raw data is shown on the chart, but is a little difficult to interpret. As a convenience, I let excel chart 12 month moving average trendlines that it uses in its charting algorithms. This DOES introduce a lag compared to doing my own method of making sure X stays aligned, but the lag should be equal in the dCO2 and the temperature data since they were aligned to start with. You can see that Excel’s moving average has shifted both curves right compared with the original data. I’ll make my own algorithm that eliminates this effect, but for now, the data is time coherent.
I had also read the subject article on Icecap earlier and started this work to take all of the data instead of a few points to see what it would look like. It is interesting to say the least and supports the idea that small temperature changes have a large effect on dCO2, and if taken over time will produce considerable changes in CO2 levels. For CO2 to stay constant in previous centuries as the IPCC claims does imply an incredibly static temperature on earth, which is something that has never been observed. There is much more work to be done here, I hope to provide more info in the near future. I see from your blog that you have a strong background in mathematics. If there are any suggestions you could make as I analyze this further, I would like to hear from you. Thanks, – Mike S.
http://home.comcast.net/~naturalclimate/CO2_growth_vs_Temp.pdf

Oh, and apparently there is just as much CO2 in the air at the South Pole as there is in Hawaii. That Wikipedia article is incorrect.

“” Joel Shore (17:02:18) :
George E. Smith says:
>delete<
What you are talking about is a hypothesis by Ruddiman, who is a well-respected climate scientist. And, while other climate scientists certainly respect Ruddiman, a lot of them are skeptical of this hypothesis. (And, I think even Ruddiman himself, while defending his hypothesis, doesn’t claim that he is sure it is correct…I think he concedes that it is just a hypothesis.) One reason for skepticism (among others)is that it seems to require a climate sensitivity at the high end…or beyond the high end…of the generally accepted range. “”
Joel, I’m Sure that is the article I was referring to, and since I was just retrieving from memory, I likely was quite garbled on the details. I have tried to locate that issue, since I wanted to keep that article handy.
I don’t know if it was in that paper, or a differnt one by a different author, but I think it contained some graphs of some Antarctic ice cores going back just a few thousand years; nd what I found interesting was that two such ocres that he graphed showed exactly the opposite CO2 trends from each other over the same time frame that was in the last 1ooo years; one core was steeply rising, and the other was steeply falling at the exact same time.
But I can’t swear it was Ruddiman’s paper or another
The amount of different material that was in the paper, was far more than I could possibly research to verify, or find more detail on; so I typically take those articles at face value, and assume the author/s know what they are talking about; So I made no Judgement of Ruddiman as a result; I thought the idea was interesting. But like I say, I mentioned it from recent memory, so my recall was probably pretty scrambled..
SA’s articles have become far more political than they were when I started subscribing 45 years ago, and all of those earlier years issues are long gone