Research claim: dropping CO2 caused formation of Antarctic ice cap

There was a sting cordon which read “No Lions or Hyenas beyond this point”

P Wilson (05:42:26) :
To Scott Mandia
I guess we’re all thankful that at least someone on here is representing the AGW perspective. However, the properties of c02 are logarithmic regarding heat absorption. It is true that it is a heat intercepting gas. The problem arises that it is a very weak one and not enough of one to change the climate.
To put the logarithmic equation into layman’s terms. If there were 150ppm in the atmosphere it will absorb, in its spectroscopic wavelength band, a certain amount of heat, after which point its saturation window closes. Then it can’t absorb or intercept any more heat
I’ve been waiting to answer a statement like yours for awhile. Unfortuanately there is plenty of room left for temperature change due to co2 increases. Realclimate does a good job of explaining in layman terms in this article to understand saturation of co2 in the atmosphere.
(a) You’d still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it’s the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts
(b) It’s not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2,
(c) Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and
(d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models.

Vincent (04:59:32) :
Joel Shore:
“If ice sheets across all of Antarctica were to completely melt then sea level rise would be something like 70 m, ”
Even Al Gore didn’t go that far. Great to hear the hysteria is alive and well.
You can find the numbers from wikipedia and calculate them yourself. I have already done that. Its a very simple eercise.

Wondering Aloud (14:05:36) :
One of the mechanisms is that cool oceans are net absorbers of c02 whilst warm oceans are net emitters. so yes, once tempratures drop, so does c02. However: It proves that there is warming, high c02, then cooling, with high c02, later falling in line with temperature. That 2500ppm of c02 cannot sustain the temperature, effectively meaning that warming and cooling are independent of c02. A highly marginal ghg it may be but not one to provide a forcing or even that much of a feedback.

Thanks for the reply Jeff.
In the upper level of the atmosphere the temperature is around -40C. The way we understand climate to work is that the greenhouse effect at this region has to be at least as warm at the surface to keep it heated enough at that temperature. -40C canot sustain warm temperatures at ground level. To say otherwise is tantamount to saying that cracking eggs on ice will cook them.

on you point c) Stratespheric water vapour does keep in some heat as it has some three times the bandwidth of heat absorption as c02. During warming phases, theres more of this stratospheric water vapour than low lying water vapour

TomP and Scott
Tom P (01:34:52) : said
TonyB
“Firstly, the .7C warming since 1880 is reliant on James Hansens calculations which commence from a period immediately following the end of the LIA.”
No it isn’t. There are plenty of datasets to look at here. For example both the instrument record and the glacier-derived temperature profile:
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Tom, Hadley relies on 20 plus stations to 1850 for their records which Hansen -to his credit- (how often is that phrase used here!!) thought was far too few, so based his on the 1880 records, which are still very sparse and constantly changing in numbers and location. Are you suggesting proxy glacier records are a substitute for actual temperature records, albeit only of their specific place and not an accurate global record however they may be portrayed.
The co2 measurements cited were carried out by Angus Smith and are originally given in his book ‘Air and Rain’ published in 1872. The above locations are in London apart from Ben Nevis (mountain in Scotland, tallest mountain in UK) and the values recorded in mines. Out of that data, the closest to a background level would be the Ben Nevis value. Beck’s historical instrumental CO2 curve seems to include the Ben Nevis data point. Rather than what the RealClimate bloggers and ‘Eli Rabbett’ would have you believe, these old CO2 measurers did fully understand that CO2 values varied with location.
Scott
Both you and Joel are very welcome here as far as I’m concerned and I’m pleased to hear you don’t have a closed mind 🙂
This extract from the Book ‘The Callendar effect’
“Callendar’s 1938 paper did not include a citation of Arrhenius’s 1896 paper, although there are many parallels between the two. Callendar analysed just one set of data on atmospheric CO2 content taken at Kew, near London, between 1898 and 1900. These data were taken near a source of CO2 and were analytically very uncertain. From this analysis, he concluded that at around 1900 the free atmosphere over the North Atlantic region contained 274 ± 5 parts per million (p.p.m.) of CO2. Then, after arguing that only a small fraction of the CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels would dissolve in the ocean, he calculated from an estimated global production rate of CO2 the amount that he thought would be there in 1936 (290 p.p.m.), 2000 (314–317), 2100 (346–358) and 2200 (373–396).
With a simple model of the absorption of infrared radiation, he worked out the amount of global warming to be expected from his predicted CO2 levels, concluding that temperature would then have been increasing at a rate of about 0.03 °C per decade. Callendar’s 1938 attribution of early twentieth-century warming to CO2 increase might have been believable if global cooling had not ensued in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Callendar was an amateur meteorologist and steam engineer. After reading Callendars papers-and corresponding with him-Keeling used his research as the basis for his own estimates of co2.
From Callendars biography;
“In 1944 climatologist Gordon Manley noted Callendar’s valuable contributions to the study of climatic change. A decade later, Gilbert Plass and Charles Keeling consulted with Callendar as they began their research programs. Just before the beginning of the International Geophysical Year in 1957, Hans Seuss and Roger Revelle referred to the “Callendar effect” — defined as climatic change brought about by anthropogenic increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, primarily through the processes of combustion.”
Callendar examined 19th and 20th century CO2 measurements, and rejected those he considered inaccurate for a variety of reasons, (he was a man who wanted to prove his theory) the ones he selected leading him to conclude that the pre-industrial CO2 level was about 290 ppm (G. S. Callendar, “The Composition of the Atmosphere through the Ages,” The Meteorological Magazine,vol. 74, No. 878, March 1939, pp. 33-39.). temperatures, and had written a paper to that effect in 1938, at a time when Europe had just experienced five warm years.
This lower 280/290 figure is important as it is the one that Charles Keeling accepted.
Among the criteria that Callendar used to reject measurements were any that deviated by 10% or more from the average of the region, and any taken for special purposes such as such as “biological, soil air, atmospheric pollution”. The first criteria is said to be a rather circular argument, while the second seems to ignore the accuracy of the results. Whatever the validity of these exclusions, it turned out that the mean of 19th century samples he chose to include was 292 ppm. The mean of the samples he had available to include was 335-350 ppm.
That Keeling later came to believe in the accuracy of the old measurements has already been cited here.
Bearing in mind the size of the natural co2 flux I find it surprising that the annual change shows only a tiny unnatural linerar increase when it would be expected to vary greatly up and down, as measurements apparently did prior to 1957.
tonyb

“Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, ”
And even less CO2 remember the molecular weight is nearly 2.5 times that of water. And while the physics may be ‘understood’ it seems the climate itself doesn’t agree and flatly refuses to do what the models say.

Final reply to the above, by Jeff: 4th power lapse of infrared radiative forcing is what counts for AGW theory. The 1st power of course, is the solar energy reaching the earth which c02 is invisible to. The 2ns is re-radiation to the tropopause (1-3% of the original energy budget) The 4th power is the re-radiation back to the earth from the tropopause downwards and upwards – absorbed radiation is re-emitted bi directionally – so we can assume that 50% of withheld radiation goes back into space – In other words, thermal re-emission beyond the tropopause – whilst the other 50% does in fact go back to the earth. From 1-4 there is a huge energy loss. No additional energy is re-introduced during this process, so it can be assumed that the coefficient of solar energy is the dominant factor. The IPCC assumes that the ratio isn’t 1:1 even but entirely downwards, which is the first fundamental mistake. So when warming projections looked exagerrated, they assumed that it was a cooling effect from aerosols. What they are also ignoring is the strong water vapour feedback – it also witholds heat at 15Mc’s and many other wavelengths – far more than c02, and given that from the tropopause to the earth is where water vapour resides, it effectively means that there is less radiation for c02 to absorb. Efectively, the water vapour feedback neutralises the c02 feedback, and climatically they are both feedbacks and not forcings, and are dependent on atmospheric temperatures. This is the case for all c02, and not just the 3% anthropogenic

“New carbon dioxide data confirm that formation of the Antarctic ice-cap some 33.5 million years ago was due to declining carbon dioxide in the atmosphere”
Again the presumption of “Cause and Effect”

“By using a rather unique set of samples from Tanzania and a new analytical technique that I developed,….
Why does that statement cause me to be much more skeptical than usual?
I don’t have time to read the paper. Do the authors speculate why CO2 was dropping?