This is an attempt to redefine the graph made famous by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth that showed temperature leading CO2.
From a press release embargoed until 1PM EST 4/4:
Work that may clarify the relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and temperature at the end of the last ice age is presented in this week’s Nature. The study reveals that rising temperatures were preceded by CO2 increases during the last deglaciation, contrary to prior findings derived from ice cores that were thought to represent larger global patterns. These results support an important role for CO2 in driving global climate change.
Antarctic ice-core records indicate that CO2 may have influenced climate changes during the Pleistocene ice ages, which began around 2.6 million years ago and ended about 11,700 years ago. However, the exact role of CO2 in producing climate changes has remained unclear, partly because ice-core records only reflect local temperatures. To better understand the relationship between CO2 and global climate change, Jeremy Shakun and colleagues reconstruct global surface temperatures for the last deglaciation. They show that rising temperatures are correlated with, and generally lag behind, increasing levels of CO2.
The reconstructed global temperatures were produced using proxy records of temperature variability, such as those recorded in planktonic microorganisms. Anomalies in the correlations, such as in the Antarctic where the CO2 changes lag behind temperature, are explained by redistribution of heat between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the authors suggest.
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Here is the long form press release (h/t to junkscience.com):
Rising CO2 levels linked to global warming during last deglaciation
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Many scientists have long suspected that rising levels of carbon dioxide and the global warming that ended the last Ice Age were somehow linked, but establishing a clear cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 and global warming from the geologic record has remained difficult.
A new study, funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Nature, identifies this relationship and provides compelling evidence that rising CO2 caused much of the global warming.
Lead author Jeremy Shakun, who conducted much of the research as a doctoral student at Oregon State University, said the key to understanding the role of CO2 is to reconstruct globally averaged temperature changes during the end of the last Ice Age, which contrasts with previous efforts that only compared local temperatures in Antarctica to carbon dioxide levels.
“Carbon dioxide has been suspected as an important factor in ending the last Ice Age, but its exact role has always been unclear because rising temperatures reflected in Antarctic ice cores came before rising levels of CO2,” said Shakun, who is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Columbia University.
“But if you reconstruct temperatures on a global scale – and not just examine Antarctic temperatures – it becomes apparent that the CO2 change slightly preceded much of the global warming, and this means the global greenhouse effect had an important role in driving up global temperatures and bringing the planet out of the last Ice Age,” Shakun added.
Here is what the researchers think happened.
Small changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun affected the amount of sunlight striking the northern hemisphere, melting ice sheets that covered Canada and Europe. That fresh water flowed off of the continent into the Atlantic Ocean, where it formed a lid over the sinking end of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – a part of a global network of currents that brings warm water up from the tropics and today keeps Europe temperate despite its high latitudes.
The ocean circulation warms the northern hemisphere at the expense of the south, the researchers say, but when the fresh water draining off the continent at the end of the last Ice Age entered the North Atlantic, it essentially put the brakes on the current and disrupted the delivery of heat to the northern latitudes.
“When the heat transport stops, it cools the north and heat builds up in the Southern Hemisphere,” Shakun said. “The Antarctic would have warmed rapidly, much faster than the time it takes to get CO2 out of the deep sea, where it was likely stored.
“The warming of the Southern Ocean may have shifted the winds as well as melted sea ice, and eventually drawn the CO2 out of the deep water, and released it into the atmosphere,” Shakun said. “That, in turn, would have amplified warming on a global scale.”
The researchers constructed a record of global surface temperature from 80 temperature reconstructions spanning the end of the Ice Age and found that average temperature around the Earth correlated with – and generally lagged behind – rising levels of CO2.
Peter Clark, an Oregon State University scientist and co-author on the paper, said changes in solar radiation were the likely trigger for the series of effects that followed. His 2009 study, published in Science, confirmed an earlier theory that wobble in the Earth’s axis, which changes the amount of sunlight captured by Earth, first caused melting of the large northern ice sheets.
“It has long been known that Earth’s slow wobble is caused primarily by the gravitational influences of the larger planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, which pull and tug on the Earth in slightly different ways over periods of thousands of years,” said Clark, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.
Shakun said there is “an enormous amount” of carbon sequestered in the deep ocean.
“The Southern Ocean is connected to all the deep ocean basins,” he pointed out, “so the most likely mechanisms to draw it out of the ocean were certainly there.”
The question now, the researchers say, is how human-generated carbon dioxide will affect the planet when there isn’t an ice age.
“CO2 was a big part of bringing the world out of the last Ice Age,” Shakun said, “and it took about 10,000 years to do it. Now CO2 levels are rising again, but this time an equivalent increase in CO2 has occurred in only about 200 years, and there are clear signs that the planet is already beginning to respond.”
“While many of the details of future climate change remain to be figured out, our study bolsters the consensus view that rising CO2 will lead to more global warming,” Shakun added.
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The paper is at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/nature10915.html and named:
Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation
Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, Feng He, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix, Zhengyu Liu, Bette Otto-Bliesner, Andreas Schmittner & Edouard Bard
Abstract:
The covariation of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration and temperature in Antarctic ice-core records suggests a close link between CO2 and climate during the Pleistocene ice ages. The role and relative importance of CO2 in producing these climate changes remains unclear, however, in part because the ice-core deuterium record reflects local rather than
global temperature. Here we construct a record of global surface temperature from 80 proxy records and show that temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation. Differences between the respective temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere parallel variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation recorded in marine sediments. These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.
METHODS SUMMARY
The data set compiled in this study contains most published high-resolution
(median resolution, 200 yr), well-dated (n5636 radiocarbon dates) temperature
records from the last deglaciation (see Supplementary Information for the full
database). Sixty-seven records are from the ocean and are interpreted to reflect sea
surface temperatures, and the remaining 13 record air or lake temperatures on
land. All records span 18–11 kyr ago and,85% of them span 22–6.5 kyr ago. We
recalibrated all radiocarbon dates with the IntCal04 calibration (Supplementary
Information) and converted proxy units to temperature using the reservoir corrections
and proxy calibrations suggested in the original publications. An exception
to this was the alkenone records, which were recalibrated with a global
core-top calibration41. The data were projected onto a 5u35u grid, linearly
interpolated to 100-yr resolution and combined as area-weighted averages. We
used Monte Carlo simulations to quantify pooled uncertainties in the age models
and proxy temperatures, although we do not account for analytical uncertainties
or uncertainties related to lack of global coverage and spatial bias in the data set. In
particular, the records are strongly biased towards ocean margins where high
sedimentation rates facilitate the development of high-resolution records. Given
these issues, we focus on the temporal evolution of temperature through the
deglaciation rather than on its amplitude of change. The global temperature stack
is not particularly sensitive to interpolation resolution, areal weighting, the
number of proxy records, radiocarbon calibration, infilling of missing data or
proxy type. Details on the experimental design of the transient model simulations
can be found in ref. 25.
The temperature stacks and proxy data set are available in Supplementary Information.
Full Methods and any associated references are available in the online version of
the paper at www.nature.com/nature.
PDF files
-
- Supplementary Information (9.2M)
- This file contains Supplementary Text and Data, Supplementary Figures 1-30, Supplementary Tables 1-3, additional References and Supplementary Appendices 1-2.
Excel files
-
- Supplementary Data (2.4M)
- This file contains Supplementary Data.
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Don Easterbrook has some initial thoughts on the Nature paper.
The paper is based on many assumptions without supporting data. Here are a few examples:
1. They assume that CO2 is capable of causing climate changes, even though 95% of the greenhouse gas (GHG) effect is from water vapor. In order to seriously consider CO2 as a causal mechanism, you first need to prove that very tiny increases in CO2 do indeed increase atmospheric water vapor. However, during recent warming, purported to be caused by increased CO2, atmospheric water vapor has not gone up, it has decreased slightly. CO2 by itself cannot cause significant warming because there is little of it in the atmosphere (0.038%) and CO2 accounts for only a few percent of the GHG effect.
2. They assume that the AMOC is the only driver of climate change, totally ignoring the influence of the Pacific Ocean, which covers almost half of the Earth’s surface and we can see in the modern data a strong influence of ENSO as a driver of climate changes (actually a closer correlation than the AMOC). They offer no evidence that the AMOC is the main and only driver of climate change.
3. They assume a hemispheric ‘see-saw’ of climate changes in which the North and South Hemispheres are out of phase, despite strong evidence in both hemisphere that climate changes were closely simultaneous, not out of phase with one another (Easterbrook, 2011).
4. The dismiss all other causal mechanisms by simply stating that they are only of ‘regional importance’, similar to the tactic of dismissing the MWP and Little Ice Age as only regional climate changes, not global. They also totally ignore the complete lack of correlation of CO2 with Holocene climate changes. They don’t even mention the very strong correlation of variation in 10Be and 14C with climate changes, suggesting a solar cause.
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The Antarctic Ice core graph is particularly troublesome.
In the long scale graph at top, I pointed out that the resolution of the temperature reconstruction diminished as the sample got older. Willis responded to my query with this:
The resolution for temperature drops, as does the CO2 resolution, because the ice is getting more compressed and so there is more and more time between equally spaced samples. Here’s one of my old graphs of the same data, showing the same phenomenon:
Where I think they go wrong is the claim that they can somehow reconstruct, not just the couple thousands of years of temperature that Mann claimed, but nearly a million years of temperature … and that the timelines for the two wouldn’t have errors.
My rule of thumb about these kinds of things is, no error bars … no science.
w.
Other rebuttals are in the works. I will add to this posting as they develop.
Pat Michaels writes to junkscience.com:
I am very unexcited about this. I have always thought that the timing of carbon dioxide changes and warming/cooling is pretty much irrelevant… What is interesting about this latest “finding” is that it demonstrates, yet again, the unfalsifiability of climate change “science”. The standard argument on the ice cores has been that temperature preceding carbon dioxide changes is simply evidence for positive feedback rather than lack of forcing. Now the argument will revert back to the other way around — that CO2 causes all the major pleistocene (which we are still in — see Greenland) climate fluctuations.
About that carbon dioxide–it’s just another attempt to explain the true mystery of climate change, which is why major glaciations ever go away.
My mantra is that “it’s not the heat, it’s the sensitivity”, which is obviously overestimated in climate models, for a variety of reasons that should be obvious.
Tom V. Segalstad Associated Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, at the
University of Oslo writes:
There are some serious problems with ice cores.
I’ll be surprised if the new Nature paper cites our paper by Jaworowski, Segalstad & Ono (1992): Do glaciers tell a true atmospheric CO2 story? in the professional peer-reviewed Elsevier journal “Science of the total environment”, Vol. 114, pp. 227-284 (1992). The paper is available on my website here: http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
There’s a follow-up paper (abstract) on the stable isotope temperature measurement technique in ice cores here: http://www.co2web.info/aig.pdf
I checked the references of the Shakun et al paper published today, and the paper Segalstad mentions is not part of the references section. I guess it was too inconvenient to mention.
This is the BBC’s take on it. Oh boy, they just keep on trying…
Sorry! Forgot the link…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17611404
They could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble by just using Mike’s Nature Trick (Mark 2) and shifting one set of data 1000 years to the left. 🙂
I was under the impression that even main stream climate scientists ( I say that tongue in cheek) agreed that CO2 follows temps
Has the stench of desperate “results-driven” science ever been stronger? I’m amazed these “researchers” would stake their reputatons on finding some proxy, any proxy, to blur the 100-year lead of temperature-to-CO2 during the last deglaciation, when the multi-thousand-year lead from the previous glaciation (125,000 BC to 110,000 BC) so clearly exposes their sophistry.
It’s those farting Mammoths they keep digging up wot dunnit!
In many areas of science, what you see on the large scale, you see on the small scale, and vice-versa. It is a principle of geology and, I think, astrophysics, two ends of the spectrum. So if your long-term data shows a rise in temp before CO2, that is, the larger scale features of temp pre-date CO2 releases, then you will expect to see the same in the small scale. Which is what was first seen, the 800-year disconnect. “Adjusting” or “correcting” the data for the smaller time-frame to show the opposite is reasonable only if you also can do it for the larger time-frame.
The problem is this: how do you have small changes add up to become the bigger changes, if sums of each part are opposites? The small have to add up to the big.
This article is unreal!!!How on Earth can any conclusions be drawn as to what leads what when reliant on Antarctic ice cores, especially they are the very low resolution Vostok cores? The time it takes the gas, in this case Co2 to be sealed off from the present day atmospheric source is hundrends of years. This means is simple terms the resolution is just that poor. Nature magazine should know better! But they have an agenda, as scientists like Dr. Easterbrook and Dr. Roy Spencer well know! Rod Chilton, http//www.bcclimate.com
The Models have Spoken. Dissent no more, ye Disbelievers.
Tremble at the destructive power of CO2.
Be it hereby revealed the True-Believers’ new mantra:
Climate Corrosion
So, what about Petit et al, Fisher et al and Callion et al ? Totally forgotten?
A I have said before, they will never give up.
If CO2 leads temperatures, then what’s causing it to increase in the first place when the earth is very cold? Cold oceans tend to retain it. It’s not anthropogenic. Global respiration ought to be lower in glacial periods compared to inter-glacials. I can’t think of a source that would provide enough CO2 to force temperatures up, even if it truly was the driver.
Of course the BBC is at it without any delay
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17611404
So their own graph shows that CO2 is nearly 400 ppm and the temperature now is less than the last interglacial and several past ones. How does that show CO2 is a driver of warmth?
Well I will have to read the paper in detail, and try to put actual dates to their data, such as what means the last deglaciation, but as to their overall conclusion, and specifically with reference to the first graph of 800,000 years of data in the first graph, my initial comment would be “poppycock”.
I’ll give just one observation; and you can easily see the repeats for yourself.
Looka t the spike upwards at around 120,000 years ago. Specifically look at the downward side of the CO2 and Temperature peaks. The CO2 decline is slow as all get out, compared to the much earlier and faster TEMPERATURE fall. No amount of mud snail prestidigitation can make that CO2 seem to fall before the Temperature decline that the lack of CO2 causes. They can try and fudge the rising edges all they want but you can look at every other peak in that sequence, and see that the CO2 declines later and much slower than the Temperature falls. And remember that is THEIR THESIS that the higher levels of CO2 is what is holding up the Temperature. And if the CO2 can’t hold up the Temperature in the Antarctic, where there are fewer competing distractions, it surely isn’t going to hold it up anywhere else.
I’ll let Don Easterbrook, have the genteel observations; my first reaction is, a lot of work for not much convincing. Balderdash, may be a more accurate evaluation of the claims. I’ll accept their “observations”, but the interpretation is full of holes.
So the first step in the process is that the Milankovitch cycle melts the ice but the melting of the ice is not a response to any increase in warmth because the change in the Milankovitch cycle itself does not increase warmth or produce climate change directly. The climate only warms once CO2 is released from the deep ocean which happens after the ice melts but before the climate warms in response to the CO2. The key insight of this paper is that the change in the Milankovitch cycle is a “climate neutral” event which melts the glaciers through an undisclosed process having nothing to do with climate.
h/t to Michael T in Craster, UK (April 4, 2012 at 10:42 am) for the BBC link
“So, in the last 100 years we’ve gone up about 100 ppm – about the same as at the end of the last ice age, which I think puts it into perspective because it’s not a small amount.”
100 parts per million? Yes. It. Is.
PS: Where’s BBC doomspinmeister Richard Black? Somewhere discussing global warming policies (nudge nudge) with professor Kari Norgaard?
I thought we had already cast doubt on proxy temperature measurements?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/03/proxy-science-and-proxy-pseudo-science/
I’ve always believed that ‘scientists’ were looking for a way to find CO2 leading temperature. And now they say they have…
My question is, the amount of rise in CO2 from those ice core graphs (about 100 ppm) only gives a few degrees of temp rise using the general CO2 warming equation of 5.2ln(c/co). If you look at how high the temperature changes, it changes by 10 to 12 degrees. What causes the other 8 to 10 degrees in temperature rise?
Garys post is very interesting, what is causing the ancient CO2 rise?
I suppose the one fact which nearly blew the top off my BSometer is this:
OK, but what caused the rising CO2 levels, which supposedly drove the temperature upwards?
The only realistic source is the oceans, which are not going to release the CO2 unless their temperatures rise. In other words, in order to have an egg, you first need a chicken, but where did the chicken come from etc.,etc.,
Someone suggested farting mammoths produced the increase in CO2, but even a ‘climate scientist’ would probably recognise this as being unlikely.
One possible explanation would be a huge increase in volcanic activity to explain the increase in carbon dioxide levels, but there is no evidence of that in the geological record.
A second explanation could be a huge increase in animal (including farting mammoths – although they died out before the Holocene began), insect and vegetation levels – the problem here is that you need the temperature to rise first to make the global climate more clement for life to thrive and begin exhaling more CO2.
So what are we left with?
1. Natural climate cycles warming the oceans and releasing CO2, and
2. Faulty data readings, analysis, or maybe even outright untruths and/or falsification of data.
As I recollect EG Beck’s paper on the 180 year CO2 record was slated because it relied on local measurements which varied widely from location to location (probably due to pollution). I have never understood why Antarctic ice-core records should be considered suitable proxies for global CO2. How do modern Arctic readings compare with those of Mauna Loa? Has CO2 atmospheric penetration been measured consistently over a period in, say, a remote Antarctic area and, if so, how does that data relate to Mauna Loa’s?
As Gary says – it is illogical for increased CO2 before temp rises – about the only thing I could think of that would cause significant increased natural CO2 before temp rises would be volcanoes (obviously of the super dooper type) or perhaps mega amounts of acid rain falling on all the carbonate rocks releasing stored CO2! Neither seem very plausible on a global scale….
The BBC article somebody linked to above says
““At the end of the last ice age, CO2 rose from about 180 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere to about 260;”
If you plug in those numbers to the general CO2 equation of dF = 5.35 ln(C/Co), you get:
1.967 (not sure of units, either K, C, or F)
According to many ice core temperature graphs I have seen, the temperature rise from the last ice age was 20 degrees F:
http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2007/06/29/human_cause-3/
So unless I plugged in some wrong numbers or did a math error, how could a 80 ppm rise in CO2 give 20F of warming when their own warming equation gives 1.97 (which could be in C or K…)?
This has appeared on the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17611404
Dr Shakun’s team has now constructed a narrative to explain both what was happening on Antarctica and what was happening globally:
This starts with a subtle change in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun known as a Milankovitch “wobble”, which increases the amount of light reaching northern latitudes and triggers the collapse of the hemisphere’s great ice sheets
This in turn produces vast amounts of fresh water that enter the North Atlantic to upset ocean circulation
Heat at the equator that would normally be distributed northwards then backs up, raising temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere
This initiates further changes to atmospheric and ocean circulation, resulting in the Southern Ocean releasing CO2 from its waters
The rise in CO2 sets in train a global rise in temperature that pulls the whole Earth out of its glaciated state
I’ve read this a few times and all I see is, the warming starts first and the oceans get warmer.
Warmer water holds less gas than colder water
Dr Shakun’s narrative suggests that the warming precedes the rise in CO2 or am I losing it?
Over hundreds of millennia rising temperature always precedes rises in CO2.
I have several other charts from both hemispheres, all of which show CO2 rises after temperature rises. Either they are all wrong, or Shakun et al. are wrong.
I hate to be cynical [not really], but Jeremy Shakun seems to be in need of tenure. Mann tried to erase the LIA and the MWP. Now Shakun is trying to erase the very substantial ice core evidence showing that rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature, the same way that a Coke will outgas CO2 as it warms.
“ . . . , but this time an equivalent increase in CO2 has occurred in only about 200 years, and there are clear signs . . . ”
During the last glacial the CO2 ppm was about 180. Then pre-industrial it went to about 280. So now at just under 400 it seems that is about an “equivalent increase” but a doubling would have it at 580 (and we are not there now and may never be). So based on the increase over the last 200 years there would be, then, a logarithmic response in temperature (or not). To the nearest whole number this comes out to be zero or maybe 1. And they see “clear signs.” Color me dubious.
A quick general comment (and reply to Gary’s inquiry)
The paper does not claim that CO2 led everything going on, and you need to distinguish between Antarctic temperatures and global temperatures. A big point of this paper is that considerable spatial structure exists in the deglaciation process.
The *initial* cause centers around changes in orbital parameters (Milankovitch cycles) which then had an influence on the AMOC strength (and the bipolar seesaw, which has been documented in countless studies) ultimately warming Antarctica. Antarctic temperatures led CO2, but that does not apply to global temperatures (which lagged CO2 as you’d expect). The asymmetric bipolar seesaw response is antiphased between hemispheres, though superimposed on a global-mean warming.
Chris Colose:
1. CO2 is globally well mixed in the atmosphere
2. Arctic and Antarctic ΔT rises and falls in synch
3. Therefore, your assumption that rises in CO2 lead rises in T is wrong.
The Press Release BS says: “…identifies this relationship and provides compelling evidence that rising CO2 caused much of the global warming.” The Abstract says: “These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.” Dennis says: “compelling my ass!” Dennis says, “indicating and supporting and or combined with other factors contributed to..and so on.” That is the best they can do, all any kind of modeling based on more assumptions that data can do. Lets at least be honest about what it is we think we know, would like to think we know, actually know and just out and out speculate about.
Now that this paper has taught me how heat and cold really work, I’m going to disconnect the thermostat from my house’s heating system, and instead use the temperature in Argentina to regulate my house. This will be much more appropriate.
I was trying to match this up against Murry Salby’s lecture from last year. What has become of that man and his is-it-published-yet paper?
I feel compelled to point out what looks like a source of systematic error.
Is there anybody else that finds it VERY suspicious that the “CO2 concentration ppmv” curve and the “Antarctic temperature °C” curve mimic each other in about 24 peaks, over the entire temporal range, all the way down to relative timing AND relative magnitude?
It is almost like one was used for a proxy of the other *directly*, save for a 3 point-moving average data filter.
These 24 matching peaks, were they points on a fingerprint, would bring in a verdict of guilty in almost any US courtroom.
The last I checked the solubility of CO2 in water, although more complex than N2, is still inversely proportional to temperature, so I’m a bit lost with how CO2 precedes temperature increase if the assumption is all of the CO2 is coming from water. If they want to propose other CO2 sources, then they should have done so. My barley pop goes flatter faster if it is kept warm after being opened than if it is kept cool. Climate science seems to operate by different laws than the chemical science I studied. Of course the periodic table is a lot bigger than it was way back then.
The next logical conclusion of this is that plants cause ice ages.
I second what R Taylor at 10:49 says.
And Go Smokey!
Duluth,MN records its warmest March in its long record. Avg temp was 39.2. It finally broke the long held record of 38.8(1878) by a whopping 0.4F. 134yrs ago it was just as warm on the avg. Albeit there were some daily records handily broken that were 50 to 100 years old. But if it can get so damn warm then, why is it such a surprise that it can do it again?! And CO2 is suppose to be a driver? If that’s the best that CO2 can do now with much higher ppms and it can barely squeak out an 1878 record, I think its time to put this AGW thing to rest.
Shame there’s no massive NH ice sheets to put a lid on the Atlantic this time.
“bolsters the consensus ”
All I have to see .
Interesting how “An Inconvenient Truth” comes up being “A Baldfaced Lie”.
Sure sorry I listened to his shills and paid actual money for that book. Especially since he can now live in fat greasy luxury on the money up stupid people provide.
I know I’m an evil denier, but when I see “funded by the National Science Foundation”, “published in the journal, Nature” and “doctoral student at Oregon State University”, my BS meter pegs out and I give absolutely no credence to anything that is written.
Jay Davis
Peter Miller says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:22 am
So what are we left with?
1. Natural climate cycles warming the oceans and releasing CO2, and
2. Faulty data readings, analysis, or maybe even outright untruths and/or falsification of data.
I think it may be 1. AND 2. Natural climate cycles or catastrophes (meteors, etc.) have to be, logically, the impetus for the melting. I think the analysis of proxies is so fraught with variables as to be dumbfounding the investigators. The data, moreover, as others have said, is inconclusive without error bars of measurements. Not having ± SD is both unscientific and unethical, and I am being charitable.
Another example of changing the facts to fit the scenario of CAGW?
Have they found where the missing heat goes?
Now all they have to explain is why CO2 remains high when the temperature drops, after the interglacial.
By moving the rise in CO2 (on the graph) to before the rise in temperature, they have increased the average time between the temperature dropping and the CO2 level following from an average of 1900 years to nearly 3000 years.
Like the Earth’s orbit, this theory seems to be a bit wobbly…
What a steaming pile of crap. The very idea that a minuscule amount of the lesser-important GH gas CO2 “drives” temperature changes via the comparatively massive amounts of the much more important GH gas water vapour is utterly ludicrous. It’s obvious what “drives” this thinking though: political power. History teaches us how persuasive that can be to those willing to be persuaded.
Chris Colose says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:45 am (Edit)
A quick general comment (and reply to Gary’s inquiry)
The paper does not claim that CO2 led everything going on, and you need to distinguish between Antarctic temperatures and global temperatures. A big point of this paper is that considerable spatial structure exists in the deglaciation process.
###############
Thanks chris. It’s astounding how few people actually read and understand the argument.
It’s also sad to see easterbrook repeat the silly “trace” gas argument. Smokey doesnt buy that argument. Anthony doesnt. Lindzen doesnt. Monckton doesnt. Christy doesnt. Spencer doesnt.
Jeff Id doesnt. Singer doesnt. McIntyre doesnt. Scafetta doesnt. and thousands of engineers who build working devices have to account for the powerful behavior of this “trace” gas dont buy that argument. Its funny too, how people forget that GCRs are even “more tracer” than C02.
Oh well. The only people who deny that C02 will warm the planet are those who fail to understand the experimental evidence.
Every piece of information that is inconvenient to AGW is either rewritten or adjusted.
Wonder who was driving the SUVs back then.
The comments here are representative of the problems of politicized science. Even if this work was valid, it will be dismissed out of hand as unreliable / unconvincing by many because it supports a certain (pro-AGW) point of view.
Likewise, if there were a valid paper which crushed the AGW theory, it would also be dismissed by many on the other side of the political spectrum simply because it didn’t conform to their dogma.
I can’t comment on the validity of this paper, but it is certainly more intriguing than the average pro-AGW stuff that comes out.
Mosher: “Oh well. The only people who deny that C02 will warm the planet are those who fail to understand the experimental evidence.”
Why would you bring that up Mosher? You know damn well that it’s about climate sensitivity, not lab experiments with CO2.
Steven- I stopped caring about this article after I read the first sentence of point #1, but I suppose it’s worth clarifying what the article actually says, since I suspect most people won’t get around to reading it.
They are still assuming natural causes started the temperature rise. Why not just assume that those natural causes caused all of the temperature rise, instead of complicating it with CO2?
Thanks
JK
They just have to find an “excuse ” for everything that goes against their beloved religion.
Mosher you can be such a prat at times and that’s sad. CO² Experiment indeed. What’s that a glass bottle again. OR IR light of very narrow energy or some other misrepresentation of the planet.
Atmospheric Argon responds to changes on ocean temperature by changing its partition into the atmosphere, warming causes oceanic outgassing. I would be interested in looking at the known Ar data with their new ‘Temperature’ proxies.
Are we seeing the AGW psychosis creating observer, indeed researcher bias here?
Unbelievable that this has gone through peer-review.
It sure means that the reviewers of that article are just a bunch of activists. I never want a subscription to Nature now for sure. The chief editor should be fired.
How can ice sheets melt in the Northern Hemisphere without additional warmth by the sun?
Take a good look at the green line (cause that’s climate in the Netherlands) in the following graph:
http://www.knmi.nl/klimatologie/grafieken/jaar/index.cgi
That green line is caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axes to the sun. A very slight change causes huge temperature changes in the Netherlands.
For example the change between the end of July and early September means at least a 2 degrees Celsius change. What a little bit of less sunlight can do for just one lattitude.
Milankovitch cycles are different. These cause a more longterm change in orbital distance, axial tilt and axial precession on a global scale. Causing somewhat more or less solar radiation towards Earth and thus changing temperature.
How on Earth are these scientists able to cancel Milankovitch warming/cooling out and let CO2-increases lead temperature changes?
It’s the same like Japan’s coastal line was already destroyed before the tsunami hit. It was the destruction which caused the tsunami.
Didn’t the lowering of CO2 content of the atmosphere to 180ppm nearly cause the extinction of life as we know it on Earth because the green plants would have starved? Once the plants die, the animals that live by eating them die and so on and so on.
Either the measurements were wrong or the atmosphere was not well mixed and CO2 levels in places warm enough for plants to live was higher.
According to the Antarctic Ice core graph above CO2 increased by approx. 43% (~185 to ~265 ppmv) and the global temperature rose by ~3.5°C.
What about the similar CO2 increase of 40% from pre-industrial times (280 ppmv) till today (392 ppmv)?
In case that CO2 primarily drives the global temperature there surely was a similar temperature increase. No? Well, then there must be some other primary cause…
And it looks like the antarctic temperature drove CO2 concentration and global temperature.
So, what caused the change in the antarctic temperatures?
The sun? The oceans? Or maybe the penguins?
In the first place all of this discussion is too short-term to be meaningful: 800,000 years is less than half of the Pleistocene, after all. I suggest we go back and look at the global temperature from the end of the Eocene (say 34 MM YBP), and refer to M. Zack on the initiation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the effect of that event on the climate of Antarctica (it was temperate before the ACC started up, if I remember rightly), and then fold in the rise of the Isthmus of Panama and the blocking of the warm Pacific Current. These two events coincide with two major cooling phases of global temperature, culminating with the beginning of ice ages at the end of the Pliocene. Ice appears at the poles in the Miocene or late Oligocene, for the first time in 200 MM years, during which icecaps and glaciers were absent from the Earth. Looks like ocean currents have a bigger impact on global climate than any other factor, and they are controlled largely by plate tectonics. Does CO2 even enter into the equation?
George CPG
Interesting article. I have a question that those with more knowledge of climate science may be able to help me with. My understanding is that ice cores can provide an understanding of early atmospheric CO2 levels on the basis that air (and thus CO2 along with oxygen, nitrogen and other gases) would be dissolved in water. By melting the ice core samples at different depths we can infer by analyzing the dissolved gas composition what the atmospheric composition would have been at the time. This seems straightforward but I’m curious if this accounts for any diffusion of the dissolved gases over time through the ice. While I realize diffusion of a gas like CO2 thorugh a solid (frozen water) is probably very slow we are talking about samples from hundreds of thousands of years. Over that length of time it would seem that some gas migration through the ice due to simple chemical diffusion and buoyancy would have occured making the measurements less accurate. Perhaps this is already accounted for by the scientists. I’m just curious if anyone knows anything about this. Thanks.
Personally, I don’t have a lot of trouble believing that GHGs do affect atmospheric temps. Where I get screwed up with this hypothesis is that the most obvious GHG to get released into the atmosphere when the ice melts is good ole’ H2O. And I imagine that ice contains a LOT more H2O versus CO2. But that obvious observation isn’t addressed in the paper. Why? Could it be because H2O isn’t / can’t be controlled by humans? Hmmmm….
If lots of CO2 came out of the ocean to trigger a temperature rise then the ph of the oceans must have been lower (more acidic) than now. What evidence is there for damage done to life in the ocean by that lower ph?
What volume of ice would have to be turned into water to start this process? And what kind of energy does that require over what time frame? Did those questions get addressed in this paper? I didn’t see it.
>>My rule of thumb about these kinds of things is, no error bars … no science.
Is that blur on the green and red temperature lines supposed to represent an error bar ? If it is, it looks like it’s about +/- 0.1 deg C, same as Phil Jones claims for 1850 with thermometer temperatures. Ridiculous. It would make more sense to have an error of a couple of degrees in an estimate of temperatures 20,000 years ago.
The CO2 measurements follow the temperatures in Antarctica, not the northern hemisphere.
Remember the north has much more variability (the Dansgaard-Oeschger events) and this variability is not exhibited in the high resolution CO2 estimates. Temperatures in Greenland nearly reached today’s level 14,000 years ago but CO2 didn’t budget at all.
Last ice age, Greenland and Antarctica Ice Cores.
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/9484/lasticeageglant.png
Last 800,000 years, Antarctica, North Atlantic proxies, and CO2 (at 3.0C per doubling).
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/4670/last800knaant.png
But this paper is going to be cited over and over again by the pro-AGW people (no matter how poorly done it is).
Okay, it’s a Rube Goldberg mechanism, or it’s new subspecies, a Rahmstorf-Maschine (so called after the seminal work of the famous German PIK inmate). They’re trying to construct these things all the time; a little change here leads to larger changes there. This confronts them with two problems (ironically, on the meta level, the chaotic amplification also works!):
-If true, it would show that their models are incapable of predicting, as the chaotic nature of the global climate system shows, so forget about predicting to 2100. (The Gavin Schmidt defense of GCM’s was always that no matter how chaotic the system, the alleged global energetic imbalance must always lead to a warming; this argument breaks down when the amplification mechanisms of this new paper hold; Steven Mosher’s and everybody elses belief in usefulness of GCM’s would be collateral damage.)
-Their proposed mechanism only exists in their models or reconstructions and is not observable in present or past data. So it’s all conjecture anyway.
I’m glad this is now settled.
/sarc
But seriously, where did these turkeys get their CO2 data from? The temperature and CO2 data must be from the SAME REGION at the very least.
Otherwise, it’s garbage!
Does anyone know?
Morrel says:
April 4, 2012 at 2:03 pm
“By melting the ice core samples at different depths we can infer by analyzing the dissolved gas composition what the atmospheric composition would have been at the time. This seems straightforward but I’m curious if this accounts for any diffusion of the dissolved gases over time through the ice.”
I’m not an expert but Ferdinand Engelbeen is.
Jaworowski had similar arguments:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
But Ferdinand Engelbeen says it has been refuted:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/22/omitted-variable-fraud-vast-evidence-for-solar-climate-driver-rates-one-oblique-sentence-in-ar5/#comment-900613
If climate processes are in play that cause the oceans to warm, that then releases CO2, you still haven’t managed to turn CO2 into a primary driver. It still follows. Their “problem” is still there.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/04/feathered-tyrannosaur/
“The average temperature would have been about 10 degrees C,” says Sullivan, an associate professor at the Beijing paleontology institute.
‘It’s possible that some dinosaurs that were even bigger had feathers but we can’t tell one way or
the other because most dinosaurs are known only from bones’
“That is perhaps not too different from northern China today,” he says, but was an “unusually cool” period in the age of the dinosaurs.
What George E. Smith; says on April 4, 2012 at 11:16 am seems to be similar to what I always say, which is that if CO2 is the main “Climate-driver” there should be no possibilities of Ice Ages happening because, under “AGW – CAGW Law”, global temperatures cannot possibly decline by some 6 – 8 deg. Celsius at a time when atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising or is at its maximum.
Bill Illis says (April 4, 2012 at 2:34 pm)
But this paper is going to be cited over and over again by the pro-AGW people (no matter how poorly done it is).
——
Yeah, odd coincidence. They had a hole in the AGW theory that was just this size and this shaped. And then along comes Dr Shakun with a jigsaw piece just so big and just so shaped.
Isn’t science wonderful! (sarc)
PS: Anyone notice Dr Shakun and Kari Norgaard are both at U of Oregon? Is there something in the water over there?
Bill Illis says:
April 4, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Thanks for the useful images and data.
If anything, looking at both figures, it seems that temperature rises at the start of interglacials begin in the NH before, not after, the SH. This is especially clear at the start of our current interglacial. This is the precise opposite of what the above paper asserts – that NH moves later than the SH allowing CO2 to lead. Instead CO2 lags even further behind.
The authors seem to have forgotten about Greenland.
Mosher and Colose,
So the argument is that a change in the Miliankovich cycles melted the northern hemishere glaciers (which prior to this event covered Europe and North America with a sheet of ice more one mile thick in places) and also raised temperatures significantly in antartica but this only represented a trivial change in the global climate? It was only when CO2 increased as a result of these minor changes that global climate underwent any signficant change? Have I got that right?
Wait a second…In this study of the end of the previous glaciation, they are claiming that the Northern Hemisphere ice cap began to melt due to an increase in solar energy caused by a wobble in the Earth’s orbit. So the N.H. is warmed and the melting ice decreases the Earth’s albedo, gradually adding more warmth. The fresh water flows into the North Atlantic and puts the breaks on the Atlantic currents that take tropical warmth to the high northern latitudes, causing the Southern Atlantic to warm. While this would then begin to release CO2 from the oceans, the warmer waters would also be warming the Southern Hemisphere air. The article above does not mention albedo or the immediate impacts of a warming ocean on atmospheric temperatures, but certainly the laws of physics applied then as well as now.
So, in a nutshell, the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are both warming before the CO2 is released. How is that any different than what has been said all along? The temperature in the north is rising, or else the ice would not be melting. The temperature in the south is warming because you can not warm an ocean without warming the atmosphere over it. The paper plainly shows that warming atmospheric temperatures preceded the increasing CO2.
Certainly, once the CO2 begins to increase, it has an impact. So now we are back to the same argument about the climate sensitivity to increasing CO2. The authors claim that the CO2 accounts for ‘much’ of the warming, what ever that means, but they give no evidence to support that claim.
Frankly, I don’t see anything new here, other than wording in the conclusion that is even more ambiguous than usual.
Steven Mosher says:
April 4, 2012 at 1:05 pm
“The only people who deny that C02 will warm the planet are those who fail to understand the experimental evidence.”
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Sorry Steven, that will not wash. Some of us have actually taken the time to conduct empirical experiments into this issue.
I have tried the Tyndall tube experiment and it does indeed work. I have also tried a similar experiment with SW radiation and a black target surface inside the CO2 chamber. I found that just as CO2 has the ability to adsorb and back radiate part of LWIR leaving the target surface it also has the ability to radiate away energy it has acquired through conduction.
I have also checked the ability of incident LWIR to slow the cooling of materials. This does indeed work, and is quite measurable. However it is negligible in the case of water that is free to evaporatively cool. What makes up 71% of Earth’s surface?
Just how powerful is that supposed 300 w/m2 pouring down from the night sky? Take a flat matt black aluminium plate and attach a peltier cooler to the underside. Insulate the base with EPS foam. Cover the upper side with a screen double glazed with IR transparent film. Cool the plate to -10 C, then expose to the night sky. Does the plate heat up or continue to cool after the peltier is switched off? Now try illuminating with 300 w/m2 from a halogen globe.
Is the surface air temperature 33C warmer than it would otherwise be due to GHGs in the atmosphere? Or is the surface air temperature 150 to 190C warmer than it would be at .01 bar because we actually have a surface pressure of 1.0 bar? Take two identical IR transparent containers with identical internal black target surfaces. Regulate the pressure in one container to 1.25 bar. Illuminate both with an identical amount of SW. Which chamber reaches the higher air temperature? Does changing the CO2 content change the result?
I am dismissive of CAGW because I understand the empirical evidence.
Climate Lysenkoism as its finest. Anything goes in Nature and Science as long as it supports the cause.
Ahhh Edouard Bard is a co-author… Bard is a also a anti hero of climategate, when Jouzel called on Jones to help poor Edouard in the Courtillot affair. It is funny to see a pure speculation paper co signed by Bard, published in Nature when in fact all observations are showing Leroux’s work, the climatologist IPSL and Grenoble teams have systematically ganged up against, is being verified as the time passes!
Jouzel and Bard are desperate…
Smokey says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:42 am
Over hundreds of millennia rising temperature always precedes rises in CO2:
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yearslarge.gif
I have several other charts from both hemispheres, all of which show CO2 rises after temperature rises. Either they are all wrong, or Shakun et al. are wrong.
Useful chart – although some more labelling and source info wd be helpful. The earlier comment by George E Smith is important – in your graph, look at the DESCENDING temps post interglacial – the long ragged and protracted falls from interglacial to full glacial. During these unstable downslopes the lag of CO2 behind temperature is at its most obvious.
Why are units measured in “parts per hundred” (pph) i.e. Celsius degrees and units measured in parts per million (ppm) i.e. CO2 concentration shown together on the same Graph-paper? – On the Gore-graph CO2 is enhanced by a factor of 10 000. – No wonder the “general public” think we are doomed!
Morrell- I’m not an expert on this but one good read is:
Richard Alley, Reliability of ice-core science: historical insights, Journal of Glaciology, Vol. 56, No. 200, 2010
Diffusion (in the ice) is a very slow process and there’s been some studies on this, but it’s a small issue. Diffusion occurs in the firn and will smoothe out, for example the seasonal cycle that you in Mauna Loa records, and the bubble trapping in the so-called buuble close-off zone. There’s some other issues that would prevent good atmospheric composition reconstructions (e.g., frequent formation of melt layers and reaction between acidity and carbonate; for this reason CO2 paleo-records are not taken from Greenland but some of them aren’t too bad).
“The melting in the north could have been triggered “because the ice sheets had reached such a size that they had become unstable and were ready to go.” ”
Well. I nominate that as dumbest climate quote of the decade.
The press release above says ” Small changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun affected the amount of sunlight striking the northern hemisphere, melting ice sheets that covered Canada and Europe.”….. Er.. So it warmed first then?….. But that doesn’t count somehow?
This climate “science” sure is tricky…… or is that trippy.
I think Ferdinand Engelbeen(sp?) has shown pretty convincingly that the rise in CO2 during the start of the interglacial follows Henry’s Law closely — the CO2 rise is simply a result of the warming ocean not able to hold as much CO2 & thus gradually released it to the atmosphere (and then reverses at the start of a new glacial period). Seems pretty simple & clear-cut.
mwhite says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:41 am
Makes a good point:
But furthermore: if initially there is more heat, to melt the northern ice masses, which then causes an warming of the Antarctic, which causes CO2 to rise, which then causes more temps to go up … we are leaving out the continued heating that initiated the whole ball of wax rolling in the first place.
Heat, then, while continuing to heat, CO2, then more heat … which was happening before, during and, I dare say, after the CO2 increase.
So many games, so few research grants!
This whole “CO2 lagged behind the warming” has been one of the foundations for believing there is nothing to worry about . This finding is a major blow to the wall that is the skeptic argument. This is not the removal of one or two bricks, but a major structural failure. In fact I can hear the falling of debris as I write.
Steven Mosher says:
April 4, 2012 at 1:05 pm
The only people who deny that C02 will warm the planet are those who fail to understand the experimental evidence.
============================
So give the evidence. Give it now. Do not run away. Do not ignore this request. Do not refer to some amorphous ‘it’s in all the text books’ or ‘it is well known’ – DAMN WELL PRODUCE IN ALL ITS DETAIL.
NOW.
Shakun’s own hypothesized account says that warming came first. First there was a Milankovitch warming of the northern hemisphere that melted enough northern ice to shut down the ocean conveyor, then this shutdown caused heat to accumulate in the south, eventually warming the southern oceans enough to release CO2, which is then hypothesized to have induced further warming. How is this at all consistent with his claimed finding that CO2 increase preceded warming? All this northern hemisphere melting and southern ocean warming was supposed to have occurred in the absence of any warming? WTF?
Here is the story as Shakun tells it in his press release, copied from above for handy reference:
After this elaborate story of northern and then southern hemisphere warming leading eventually to the release of CO2 (which is presumed to have further warming effects), the press release states the finding that CO2 precededwarming without any note of the complete contradiction with the story just told:
Their attempt to come up with a story of how CO2 could have preceded warming is an utter failure. Their own story has warming coming first. This is beyond strange. They don’t mention the Younger Dryas, but the only way I can see to make sense of their story at all is as an attempt to account for the Younger Dryas as primarily a northern hemisphere event.
Melting from northern hemisphere warming shuts down the ocean conveyor, refreezing the north and warming the south. That way southern ocean CO2 can be released while the planet on average is still semi-glacial. As an account of the Younger Dryas, this story is at least POSSIBLE, but it still does not imply any significant role for CO2. By hypothesis Milankovitch effects were already strong enough to de-glaciate the north and would presumably do so again when the conveyor started back up. Wouldn’t that start to happen as soon as the north stopped melting? Could take a while, but there is no role for CO2 in it. According to their story–where melting interferes with the conveyor–CO2-induced-warming would only interfere with the restarting of the gyre. CO2 release from the warming oceans could have had a warming effect, but there is still no evidence for it.
Jeremy Shakun et al. is contradicted by this paper. And every year it gets harder to dispute this
This chart shows another view of the ∆T/∆CO2 lag. And CO2 is currently about as low as it has ever been throughout geologic history. If it doubles from here — extremely unlikely — CO2 will still be a tiny trace gas. But the biosphere will benefit, because more CO2 is good for life on earth.
With the rise in CO2 the IPCC’s conjecture says that the planet’s temperature should be rising smartly. It is not. Therefore, the IPCC is as wrong as Shakun et al. They both need to give up their failed conjectures and listen to scientific skeptics; the only climate realists.
Am I am sending this correctly? They’re using CO2 data from ice cores, and comparing it temperature data from other proxies? This despite the fact that temperature data from ice core is when compared to CO2 data from the same core, shows CO2 following temperature change? How can they be sure that the timing from the global temperature sets corresponds to the timing of the ice cores? If the data are both taken from the same ice cores, you have some assurances; however, from the current study you cannot.
Imagine for a moment, that the authors are completely correct.
They have shown that CO2 increases precede temperature rises.
The postulated mechanism involves potentiation of the effect of water in the atmosphere. This causes a positive feedback system that causes runaway warming.
Thus, they should find that atmospheric water levels, thus polar precipitation, and thus the line-shape of depth vs age, should be affected, BEFORE the temperature signal.
Indeed, at the end of each glaciation even we should find that the slopes of depth vs age should track CO2 changes, alas they do not.
Even worse, they know that the rate CO2 fall during the cooling part of the cycle lags temperature changes, now, using this ‘global’ signal, the lag will get worse. The climate sensitivity for CO2 vs Temperature will now have to be quoted for cooling and warming cycles, no longer invariant.
The thing is….. As soon as that extra sunlight (thermal energy) vaporizes the water, it is instantly increasing the only GHG that counts…. H2O in vapor form….. The CO2 that follows after this is inconsequential….. You already have the enhanced feedback loop…. Water vapor responding to the increased heat…. When the oceans heats up enough to release extra CO2, you don’t see any steepening of the warming curve as you would expect if CO2’s effect was significant.
The most telling part is when the thermal energy lessens, straight away the water vapor lessens…. Instead of CO2 maintaining temps, it does nothing to maintain the water vapor and the global system cools, CO2 goes back into solution within the oceans again.
As far as I am concerned the only significant driver is the sun producing more water vapor. CO2’s effect is too small to worry about.
I do think that Chris Colose has touched upon one of the main problems of this whole scenario, and that is Carbon Dioxide is affected by diffusion in the Greenland cores, so is very difficult to use as a proxy for past CO2 changes. Thus, scientists have has to rely fairly heavily upon the much lower resolution Antarctic ice cores. Hence, a huge problem rears its ugly head and that is because of this much lower resolution proxy and the very long time (hundreds of years in some cases) it takes to close or seal off the ice. This leads to the problem I indicated in a post earlier and that is just how much of a lag there was in the closing off the ice. And therefore how does one determine what leads what (CO2 or temperature)?
Myrrh says
“So give the evidence. Give it now. Do not run away. Do not ignore this request. Do not refer to some amorphous ‘it’s in all the text books’ or ‘it is well known’ – DAMN WELL PRODUCE IN ALL ITS DETAIL.”
It’s only been known for over a hundred years, but read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
All there.
I’m with Mosher (mostly), it is basic physics that CO2 absorbs certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. And that is what is emitted by or bounces off of the earth’s surface.
In the end (without going into the full chain of events) THAT WILL CAUSE WARMING at the surface. There really isn’t much to argue with here (except that the person who dubbed it the ‘greenhouse effect’ has a lot to answer for!).
The significant question is ” how much warming will be caused by a certain level of CO2? “. That is the climate sensitivity question. And that is most assuredly not yet settled.
On the other hand, I didn’t read Mr. Easterbrook’s comment(s) as raising the “trace gas argument”, so I think Mosher was being a bit rough on him there.
mysteryseeker,
Apparently you are willing to throw out the entire peer reviewed literature regarding the CO2 lag, in addition to ice core proxies from both hemispheres [and which are in close agreement], just because the Shakun et al. fatally flawed paper makes some baseless claims in its attempt to turn all the evidence upside down. Mann08 did that with the Tiljander proxy, and he has received universal derision ever since Steve McIntyre exposed his devious shenanigans.
For one example, Caillon’s peer reviewed paper has never been falsified. What makes you think that Shakun’s paper is anything but grant-trolling nonsense? Be specific, now.
All energy in a system must be accounted for in that system. Does that mean that when carbon and oxygen molecules bind there is some new formed energy? Does that mean that when humans exhale carbon dioxide we are sending energy forms from our body?
My understanding says that carbon dioxide is a lagging indicator and not a cause and effect relationship per se. Where is the new energy then coming from?
I am not sure that estimates from proxies at a handful of locations can yell us anything accurately about climate globally. Warmists keep making claims based on the “temperature record”, but very few places had any kind of methodical temperature record prior to the spread of military and commercial aviation, and even those records tend to be clustered in more developed countries.
Okay, here is the highest resolution CO2 and Greenland temperature estimates you can get.
First, the transition out of the last ice age from 22,000 years ago. In this case, the CO2 estimates are all less than 200 years apart (mostly less than 100 years) and the temperature estimates are at less than 25 years apart. Note the large temperature increase at 14,500 years ago.
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/4267/transliagrnld.png
And then the whole Last Ice Age back to 123,000 years ago. (The resolution of CO2 estimates is not as high over this whole period but there is an estimate at least every few thousand years). Note the Dansgaard Oeschger events – 25 of them.
http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/7671/liagrnld.png
I don’t see CO2 leading anything except that its changes are so small, it cannot have made much difference. It takes 5,000 years to get 0.5 degree out of the CO2 change. More importantly, the northern hemisphere temps are so variable and CO2 is so stable, that there is no way to say there is a cause and effect.
Surely we must have found a better way of estimating global atmospheric paleo CO2 concentrations by now than looking at squashed gas bubbles in ice cores, particularly as CO2 is such an intimate part of the plant and animal lifecycle, as preserved in the fossil and microfossil record? I know there are other variables that impact on the health, development and fosilisation of life forms (temperature, food availability, poor preservation of sub-aerial fossils, etc.), but even so, you would think there might be some species of microscopic flora or fauna that was exquisitely sensitive to atmospheric CO2 concentration and also inclined to drop into varved (dateable) lake sediments or even ice itself? Are we even looking?
So just to get this clear.
The N. Hemisphere warms without any reference to CO2.
This melts all the ice.
The meltwater flows south cutting off the warm upward flow from the S. Hemisphere…
.. thus causing the S. to warm and the S. oceans to emit CO2….
.. thus ‘amplifying a warming’ which had already wiped out the N. hemisphere ice sheets?
And all this to explain the embarrassing plain-as-day fact that warming precedes CO2 in the Antarctic records?
And BTW in this byzantine theory the warmth preceded the CO2 release, so now we can junk the anti-AGW idea that, er, warmth precedes a CO2 release?
And this happened once, at the end of the last Ice Age, never mind all the others?
Sledgehammer and nut come to mind. Particularly nut.
PS: Welcome to the new troll. Simon, how is it for you?
I would take this field more seriously if before purporting to explain how the climate system behaved millions of years ago, they figured out why the planet warmed ‘rapidly’ as recently as 1910-1940.
Well I guess the science of global warming is finally settled.
Lets be real simple:
You can not melt a significant part of an ice cap without the atmosphere over that icecap warming at the same time.
You can not significantly warm an ocean without the atmosphere over that ocean warming at the same time.
It does not matter what their fussy proxies tell them. The warming had to come first to release the CO2. They admit that in their explanation and deny it in the headline and conclusion. This paper is a study in cognitive dissonance. The only way it could pass peer review is if the entire climate of the science is one of cognitive dissonance.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with climate sensitivity to CO2, which is the only real issue in the debate.
Sorry, Simon. This paper actually makes the skeptical argument stronger, first by showing that the warming came first. Second by showing the warmista’s have a serious problem with logic, when they directly contradict there own research in the conclusions of their papers, and the rest of their comrades think that it is great science!
Re: cui bono says:
April 4, 2012 at 3:16 pm
“PS: Anyone notice Dr Shakun and Kari Norgaard are both at U of Oregon? Is there something in the water over there?”
Shakun and three other authors are at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Norgaard is at University of Oregon in Eugene, about an hour’s drive south of OSU. OSU focuses on hard sciences like engineering, agriculture, forestry, and oceanography. To further identify the schools, OSU is noted for its beaver mascot and UofO is noted for its duck mascot.
I would need to exhume my old oceanography texts to weigh in on any details on the paper. However, sea level rise needs to come into the picture. At time zero in the paper, sea level was about 100 meters lower than it is now. All that continental ice melted and caused a ~100 m rise in sea level over several thousand years. The rate of sea level rise combined with volume of the global ocean basin would provide an estimate of timing and rate of ice melting.
The water supplies? You would have to check with the respective city engineering departments. The Willamette River flows through both cities. Eugene is upstream.
Neil Jordan OSU ’68, ’70
My rule of thumb about these kinds of things is, no error bars … no science.
w.
That’s really funny. Its clear that only a cursory reading was made before this criticism was issued. Trying reading the whole article (including the supplementary) before preaching to the choir. Your rule of thumb is taken care of in the supplementary data.
kramer says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:36 am
The BBC article somebody linked to above says
““At the end of the last ice age, CO2 rose from about 180 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere to about 260;”….
_______________________
That is the part I always laugh at.
1. Warmists insist that CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere so the Ice Core data represents the world.
2. The give CO2 as 180 ppm during the ice age. Also since so much water is tied up in ice … the climate is drier.
If all that was true plants would die out because it was cold, dry and there was not enough CO2 to allow growth and seed production.
Validation from the people who know and depend on the truth – FARMERS
Hydroponic Shop
Simon says:
April 4, 2012 at 4:56 pm
“It’s only been known for over a hundred years, but read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
All there.”
Simon, do you also have a reliable source? wikipedia says of itself that it isn’t a reliable source.
Dirk H
Have you noticed those things called references (yes wikipedia has some in there also)? They are those pesky things supporters of AGW feel obligated to provide and but rarely seen in the diatribes of critics
So how did plants get on during the Devonian when CO2 levels were for the most part above 2000ppm ?
see http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf
Seems they did quite well and colonised the continents but got into strife at the end of the Devonian when CO2 levels plunged [ a bit of a glaciation]. Modern plants may have evolved to tolerate low CO2.
Interestingly, corals and other subaqueous limey critters didn’t do badly either. The carbonate fringing reefs of the Kimberley in Western Australia [equivalent to today’s Great Barrier Reef of Queensland] also formed in the Devonian. The critters seemed to tolerate an ocean in equilibrium with atmospheric CO2 levels 10 times current levels [if proxies can be believed].
What–they got the ice cores upside down?
I thought they only did that with graphs.
Nature can be understood pretty well by its own editorials, like this:
“To make sure they are not, scientists must acknowledge that they are in a street fight, and that their relationship with the media really matters. Anything strategic that can be done on that front would be useful, be it media training for scientists or building links with credible public-relations firms. In this light, there are lessons to be learned from the current spate of controversies.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7286/full/464141a.html
Other defining characteristics of Nature are the disturbing Hockey Stick papers which are still in circulation and not retracted, and how they treated the groundbreaking discoveries of McIntyre.in the past.
I’m betting this “Simon” character is actually Connolley with a bogus email addy–he likes to reference Wikkipedia sources and makes terse comments just like William did. But then again, I’m just speculating.
And it isn’t worth my time to delve deeper. (We gotta have SOMEBODY that’s a contrarian to whom we can display our knowledge and resources, right?)
So, if I understand correctly, they say what happened is:
Changes in the amount of sunlight melted the ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere WITHOUT raising the temperatures. The meltwater changed the ocean currents, which released CO2 and only did the temperatures begin to change …
Anybody see a problem here?
Simon says:
This whole “CO2 lagged behind the warming” has been one of the foundations for believing there is nothing to worry about . This finding is a major blow to the wall that is the skeptic argument. This is not the removal of one or two bricks, but a major structural failure. In fact I can hear the falling of debris as I write.
======================
I thought that the standard alarmist position was that CO2 lag was not all that important. Now that a speculative paper attempts to “refutes” the claim, strangely it becomes “foundational.” If it was “foundational” to CAGW theory and you seem to be admitting as much, does that imply that up until now CAGW was a problematical proposition? Good to hear this paper has fixed that for you.
Wow the reverse logic is flowing tonight. Will: the CO2 lag was the last straw held by critics of AGW. They no longer have a factual basis to stand on
keith says:
April 4, 2012 at 10:29 pm
“Wow the reverse logic is flowing tonight. Will: the CO2 lag was the last straw held by critics of AGW. They no longer have a factual basis to stand on”
Makes me think of
“We have surrounded them in their tanks.”
good to see MSNBC looked for objections! anthony, u need to let Miguel know how to spell WUWT though:
4 April: MSNBC: Miguel Llano: Study aims to settle climate battle over temperatures, CO2
But a website critical of the science was quick to post comments by other skeptics.
“The paper is based on many assumptions without supporting data,” Whatsupwiththat.com quoted Don Easterbrook, a geology professor emeritus at Western Washington University, as saying.
University of Oslo geologist Tom Segalstad was quoted as citing a 1992 study that questioned any data from ice cores…
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/04/11021276-study-aims-to-settle-climate-battle-over-temperatures-co2
Another paper along the road to the Rio ‘global government’ fest. I wonder what else is in the pipeline?
They are saying that Milankovitch raised the temperature, however minutely; that meltwater put a brake on the thermohaline circulation (pullease, let’s lose the antiquated concept of MOC); and that the deep oceans released the CO2.
It is a plausible hypothesis.
It has been clear since Shackleton in the 70’s that forams just luuv Milankovitch but other proxies and ice cores are not so enamored.
Milankovitch gives us three signals, 20, 40, and 100 thousand years in round numbers. Statistical significance has been found for 20 and 40k in glacial advances and other proxies, but the strongest and most stable 100kyr signal has no power in the Pleistocene.
Off the coast of New Jersey, temperature seems to have risen before CO2 in the PETM.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007Natur.450.1218S.
Doug Proctor says: April 4, 2012 at 10:55 am
In many areas of science, what you see on the large scale, you see on the small scale, and vice-versa. It is a principle of geology and, I think, astrophysics, two ends of the spectrum. So if your long-term data shows a rise in temp before CO2, that is, the larger scale features of temp pre-date CO2 releases, then you will expect to see the same in the small scale. Which is what was first seen, the 800-year disconnect. “Adjusting” or “correcting” the data for the smaller time-frame to show the opposite is reasonable only if you also can do it for the larger time-frame.
The problem is this: how do you have small changes add up to become the bigger changes, if sums of each part are opposites? The small have to add up to the big.
__________
Doug you are correct. In the near term, CO2 lags temperature by about 9 months on a shorter temperature–CO2 time scale.
See http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf
Shakun et al is highly improbable.
So many armchair experts and google galileos having a say here. Better get writing people, The journals will be keen to present your detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound debunking off this detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound research. You should all probably go and do some university level science courses at least at undergraduate level first though.
agreeing with OH Dahlsyeen
Prehaps the wrong questions are being asked.
If CO2 has such a powerful greenhouse gas effect — why does the earth ever cool down? Once CO2 has been let loose in the atmosphere the earth should remain hot forever. There should be no ice ages. Even if the output of the sun were to decrease by 10% the CO2 greenhouse effect should keep the earth sweltering.
And I glean from what i read above that falling temperatures precede falling levels of CO2. That can only mean that some force controls the earth’s temperature and CO2 levels are of little importance. Certainly CO2 levels should drop before temperature levels drop if CO2 creates this overwhelming greenhouse gas effect. Yet high levels of CO2 can’t even maintain the earth temperature.
So if you reason from this direction and ask questions from this direction does it help to clarify the inanities of “global warming”? i mean, how could the earth ever cool down? How can they possibly explain the cooling? Boy, I cant wait to hear their answers.
bmcburney says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:17 am
So the first step in the process is that the Milankovitch cycle melts the ice but the melting of the ice is not a response to any increase in warmth because the change in the Milankovitch cycle itself does not increase warmth or produce climate change directly.
So, the ice melts, but there’s no warming to cause the melt…
The climate only warms once CO2 is released from the deep ocean which happens after the ice melts but before the climate warms in response to the CO2.
…and CO2 spontaneously comes out of solution in response to the no-warming…
The key insight of this paper is that the change in the Milankovitch cycle is a “climate neutral” event which melts the glaciers through an undisclosed process having nothing to do with climate.
…thus, the paper proves the existence of — magic.
Interestingly enough, after I expanded the graph horizontally to decompress the timeline, I got a typical CO2-lags-temperature graph…
keith says:
Wow the reverse logic is flowing tonight. Will: the CO2 lag was the last straw held by critics of AGW. They no longer have a factual basis to stand on
======
Static temperatures for 15 years during a period of unprecedented forcing, ice core proxies apparently now rubbish because someone’s speculative climate model says they are, missing tropical hot spot, lack of expected warming trend in the oceans (ARGO), tiny 30 year linear trend in the troposphere, lack of stratospheric cooling for 15 years, missing water vapour feedback, analysis of ERBE data shows opposite of expectations of climate models, models inability to explain early 20th century warming… could go on but I’ll keep it short.
You know I always thought environmentalism was a good thing when environmentalists did things like fight for rain forest protection. Since it’s gradually turned itself into an apocalyptic cult backed up by speculative junk science, I’ve become less enthusiastic.
So strange that the graph includes the current CO2 levels but not the current Antarctic temperatures. Trying to hide the decline? After all, if they maintain the same scale, shouldn’t current Antarctic temperatures be around 10°C? Fear-mongering psientists.
I would have expected the BBC’s article (link provided at top of comments) to have been written by Black or Harrabin, but unfortunately the normally excellent and unpoliticised Jonathon Amos has been dragged into the mire.
Amos’s articles on astronomy will no longer have the same aura and demeanour of erudition and professionalism.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/edc.jpg
The temperature falls a lot faster than the CO2 falls!
tautology tsk tsk
“…. during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation…”
Some devil being in the detail I have a question: Why does the supplementary data document supplied in support of the Shakun paper record in its properties as last being modified at 15:16 on 23 January, 2012, having only been created at 03:48 on 26 November, 2011, whereas the paper itself was submitted to Nature well over two months earlier on 16 September 2011?
The BBC summarises: “…a subtle change in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun known as a Milankovitch “wobble”, which increases the amount of light reaching northern latitudes and triggers the collapse of the hemisphere’s great ice sheets…this in turn produces vast amounts of fresh water that enter the North Atlantic to upset ocean circulation….heat at the equator that would normally be distributed northwards then backs up, raising temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere…this initiates further changes to atmospheric and ocean circulation, resulting in the Southern Ocean releasing CO2 from its waters…..the rise in CO2 sets in train a global rise in temperature that pulls the whole Earth out of its glaciated state….”.
What stops this alleged process? Why doesn’t the global rise in temperature due to CO2 out-gassing from the oceans continue indefinitely?
Something very strange about the graph concerning the slopes of the Antarctic temps, Global temps and CO2.
From 18000 yr to 14000 yr the slopes for Antarctic temps and CO2 are very similar, but not so Global temps.
From 13000 yr to 11000 yr all three slopes are very similar.
Why is that?
Why did the Global temps respond so slowly to rising CO2 for one period of time, but not for the other?
Looking at the graph more closely there is a definite anamoly/divergence between 18000 yr and 15000 yr between the slope of Antarctic temps, CO2 and the Global temps.
The slopes of all three are very similar for the period 22000 ye to 18000 yr, and 15000 yr to the present.
So why did the slope of Global temps diverge for only 3000 years of this 22000 year period when CO2 concentrations rose from 190ppm to 210ppm?
That is a very strange!
I say they should study the amounts of BS in the press relating to climate, and how that BS drives the temperatures, because the correlation is obvious. And proving causation, with their superior “scientific” methods should be a doddle.
/sarc
OH dear ! more mannian statistical methods.
The original work on Vostok showed CO lagged by 1000 +/-800y . ie *at least* 200 year lag with a proper uncertainty estimate. WHAT IS THE UNCERTAINTY OF THIS NEW RESULT?
Just one look at the principal graph makes it blindingly obvious. Their Younger Dryas event happens about 1500y later than that in the Vostok record. So why are they comparing it to CO2 from Vostok !?
The temperature proxy from that same physical bit of ice as the CO2 measurement, is deemed to be less relevant than some fuzzy mangle of different proxies from around the world where they overtly admit they have ignored the fundamental experimental uncertainties.
They recognise that the deglaciation was triggered by planetary influence on the Earth’s orbit causing melting of the NH ice sheet but their proxy shows Antarctica warming 1500 years earlier.
Their own paper more or less proves they’ve mis-calibrated their timescale.
It is unbelievable in this day and age that can be presented as science.
Neil Jordan says (April 4, 2012 at 7:45 pm)
—–
Thanks Neil. I stand corrected. 🙂
“Peter Clark, an Oregon State University scientist and co-author on the paper, said changes in solar radiation were the likely trigger for the series of effects that followed. His 2009 study, published in Science, confirmed an earlier theory that wobble in the Earth’s axis, which changes the amount of sunlight captured by Earth, first caused melting of the large northern ice sheets.”
So it’s a bit more than a “trigger” if it *first* melted the norther ice sheets that were kilometers thick !!
Shakun said. “The Antarctic would have warmed rapidly, much faster than the time it takes to get CO2 out of the deep sea, where it was likely stored.
Yeah, so “rapidly” that it got there first , by about 1500 years.
The only way to resolve this massive contradiction in their explanation is to recognise that one of the time scales is seriously in error.
Whichever it is (possibly the one without error bars), once you realign the Y-D event, it brings the two temperature records back into line and CO2 lags temperature as had already been established.
bmcBumley: “The key insight of this paper is that the change in the Milankovitch cycle is a “climate neutral” event which melts the glaciers through an undisclosed process having nothing to do with climate.”
So deglaciation is “climate neutral”? Absolutely priceless!
If the Church of AGW was properly recognised as a cult there would be help for these people. There would be support groups, counseling, help with deprogramming, etc. But currently there is nothing. This is just so, so unfair.
For those who query the accuracy of ice core gas samples, the paper mentioned in the last few paragraphs of the posting is well worth a read (all 58 pages) as it points out at least 20 ways that are shown to contaminate results. As far as I could make out any conclusion other than general trends over large periods of time would be futile. See:-
Tom V. Segalstad Associated Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, at the
University of Oslo writes:
There are some serious problems with ice cores.
I’ll be surprised if the new Nature paper cites our paper by Jaworowski, Segalstad & Ono (1992): Do glaciers tell a true atmospheric CO2 story? in the professional peer-reviewed Elsevier journal “Science of the total environment”, Vol. 114, pp. 227-284 (1992). The paper is available on my website here: http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
Mike says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:35 pm
“So many armchair experts and google galileos having a say here.”
Sadly , all it takes is a google galileo to see through this kind of drivel. You only high school science not a PhD.
” Better get writing people, The journals will be keen to present your detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound debunking off this detailed”
Oh really, what universe are you living in ? I’ll pop over for a visit, Sounds like a lovely place to spend the summer.
“Mike says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:35 pm
So many armchair experts and google galileos having a say here. Better get writing people, The journals will be keen to present your detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound debunking off this detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound research. You should all probably go and do some university level science courses at least at undergraduate level first though.”
Dear Mike,
Niee of you to write. Read your blog. You may be paid to be a “research scientist” but a scientist you’re not. You need to spend a year or two as a fellow studying an allied, and more critical research (for you) topic: confirmation bias.
I presume you’re a relatively new graduate at some level. You call yourself an ecologist, if true, that makes you technically unqualified to be a climate science reviewer, or even criticise most of the commenters on WUWT. You simply don’t have the depth of technical training needed. You should be able to comment intelligently on the use of biological proxies, but I’m guessing you don’t have near enough experience yet, and you still have the hump of confirmation bias to crawl over. Take some advice from an old biologist who’s an applied ecologist (there’s even a fancy name few can say: epizooiologist): STFU and listen, read and study. The designation T.R.O.L.L. after your name is universally recognized, but no one pays for it. It might get you into a peer-reviewed climate journal, but so will a letter to the editor of any daily newpaper. Humility is the hallmark of an experienced biologist, not arrogance. Many a farmer can put you in your place without even half trying. “Best to be thought a fool, than to open one’s mouth and prove it.”
Best wishes for successful and enlightened career..
You gleaned all that from a blog I spend 5 minutes a day on? You are in the wrong profession. You should be a clairvoyant. They also overestimate their abilities and are never correct beyond chance. I guess someone finds you impressive. So, what is epizooiology? I’ve never heard of that discipline. Is it a climate science? Oh, you mean epizoology or epizootiology, neither of which are climate sciences either although I suppose as AGW really starts to ramp up we can expect animal diseases to undergo range shifts. I might even have a reference or two over at my blog. Anyway, its probably time for your nanna nap, so its been a pleasure. Thanks for your hypocritical criticism.
See? Hard to say and even tougher to write: epizootiologist. sigh.
Mike says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:35 pm
So many armchair experts and google galileos having a say here. Better get writing people, The journals will be keen to present your detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound debunking off this detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound research. You should all probably go and do some university level science courses at least at undergraduate level first though.
You forgot the /sarc tag…
/sarc
“Peter Clark, an Oregon State University scientist and co-author on the paper, said changes in solar radiation were the likely trigger for the series of effects that followed. His 2009 study, published in Science, confirmed an earlier theory that wobble in the Earth’s axis, which changes the amount of sunlight captured by Earth, first caused melting of the large northern ice sheets.”
I assume that Peter Clark has been through Kari’s treatment program for deniers at Oregon State. His earlier study ( 2009) says it’s the sun and orbital wobble that causes the melting. After Kari’s treatment for deniers it is now the CO2 what done it!!!!! Well done Kari Norgaard!
Here is another Chart showing the “smoothed” data that Shakun 2012 used compared to Greenland, Antarctica and CO2.
It is a little busy given one needs to see all the data together to get the right perspective.
Shakun 2012 moves the known temperature trends out by several hundred years to get the result wanted (by the pro-AGW science that is).
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/6066/transliashakun2012.png
Let me get this right. In every 85,000 molecules of air, 33 molecules are CO2 molecules. The IPCC AR4 indicated 3% of CO2 entering the atmosphere each year is from human activity, and the overwhelming 97% is natural. This mean of the 33 molecules of CO2, only 1 of these CO2 molecules comes from human activity.
They want us to believe it is this one CO2 molecule in every 85,000 molecules of air that represents the key driver of atmospheric temperature, creating catastrophic global warming?????
This suggestion is scientific insanity!!!!!!!!!!!!
The new study suggesting CO2 drives temperature is simply a desperate but poor attempt at producing the world’s first peer reviewed scientific paper proposing such nonsense, nonsense which the IPCC can then use to support its greenhouse gas effect supposition, which has underpinned its mantra since the IPCC was created, and for which the IPCC has, to date, failed to support with empirical evidence.
Smokey says:
April 4, 2012 at 4:34 pm
With the rise in CO2 the IPCC’s conjecture says that the planet’s temperature should be rising smartly. It is not.
Is there any chance you will stop linking to graphical representations which are both misleading and dishonest. Apart from the fact that your linked graph uses US–only temperatures (we’ll let that pass) the choice of scaling on the vertical axis is nonsense. Even the IPCC are only predicting 3 deg C (~5 deg F) increase for a doubling of CO2 (290ppm -> 580 ppm) yet the graph uses a temperature range of 60 deg F alongside a CO2 scale of 100 ppm (290 -> 390).
At best, the graph is meaningless. At worst it’s a perfect example of the kind of rubbish that gives AGW scepticism a bad name.
Saying that rising atmospheric CO2 levels precede interglacials is one thing. Saying that said rises in atmospheric CO2 CAUSE interglacials is a completely different statement, the latter being a leap of faith at best.
All other things being equal, and just to name one, a more likely cause for the start of an interglacial period could be as simple as a sustained change in the frequency of this type of geological activity:
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/23-1_staudigel2.pdf
Best,
J.
Ok so let me get this straight. Some ice cores show CO2 rising before temperature and other ice cores show temperature rising before CO2. This makes me question the validity of using ice cores to try to show a causal relationship. I’ve never trusted ice cores and now this study demonstrates that they are not reliable. That’s my take on this topic.
mwhite says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:41 am
This has appeared on the BBC
I’ve read this a few times and all I see is, the warming starts first and the oceans get warmer.
Warmer water holds less gas than colder water
Dr Shakun’s narrative suggests that the warming precedes the rise in CO2 or am I losing it?
____________________________
No you are not losing it, I think you caught his lies. ( Good catch)
First by using the words Milankovitch “wobble” he is referring only to Obliquity ~ On a 42,000 year cycle, the earth wobbles and the angle of the axis, with respect to the plane of revolution around the sun, varies between 22.1° and 24.5° and leaves out “Eccentricity ~ the change in the shape of the earth’s orbit” and Precession ~ the shift of the seasons around the calender years so “the Northern Hemisphere will experience summer in December and winter in June” That is lie number one.
Next Shakun uses the words “increases the amount of light” to describe the increase in solar insolation implying that the solar insolation increase was not translated into heat at the earth’s surface. Shakun is of course talking about SOLAR INTENSITY AND SNOW SUBLIMATION where the air temperature would not necessarily rise because the energy is going directly into sublimating the ice.
This is another case of misdirection. While the ice sheets are sublimating at the higher latitudes the rest of the earth is also receiving more solar energy. That is why Shakun only refers to Obliquity, the “wobble” that would effect the northern latitudes and not the rest of the parts of the Milankovitch cycle which effects the earth as a whole..
This study, that only discusses solar energy changes in the Holocene, gives an indication of the type of increase in solar insolation under discussion and what it can do.
Once you look at it you can see the whole edifice is a case of misdirection so the rise in temperature can be said to be caused by an increase in CO2 instead of by the primary cause an increase in solar energy especially at the 65N A change in the order of +/- 60 Wm^2 in June. http://lh4.ggpht.com/_4ruQ7t4zrFA/TDL7RSCEgZI/AAAAAAAAEGE/0HeA3XYGVmM/milankovitch-roe-fig2.JPG
The Warmist reinterpretation of the “Milankovitch Model” http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/studentresearch/climate_projects_04/glacial_cycles/web/data.html Particularly note the part:
Luboš Motl, a contributor to WUWT has a pointer and discussion on his website about a new paper In defense of Milankovitch, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L24703, doi:10.1029/2006GL027817, 2006
A site with good animation illustrating Obliquity, Eccentricity, and Precession: http://www.sciencecourseware.org/eec/GlobalWarming/Tutorials/Milankovitch/
John Finn,
You’re fooling no one here talking about scientific skeptics, when you are a dyed in the wool, wild-eyed climate alarmist. However, you didn’t identify which chart you’re complaining about. Was it this one? Or maybe this one? Or this one?
They are all based on real data, so if the axes are not to your liking, you can rescale and post them yourself. Nobody is stopping you. This chart was made by your fellow alarmist “Deep Climate“. Even he knows the IPCC’s predictions diverge far from reality.
Your defense of the IPCC is based on your belief system, not on real world observations. Face it, the IPCC is wildly overestimating sensitivity. My advice: listen to what the planet is saying, not to what the self-serving IPCC is promoting.
Once again, the long term rising temperature trend shows us that nothing unusual is occurring. And your attempt to question the existence of the LIA — one of the coldest periods of the Holocene — is irresponsible nonsense that is contradicted by a mountain of peer reviewed evidence.
So there are two step changes in CO2 concentrations that according to these published results resulted in lagged step changes in global temperature of approximately 1000 years.
What caused those two step changes in CO2? Why did they stop and not continue to rise? Why the substantial lag in changing global temperature? Why didn’t global temperatures immediately rise as CO2 rose?
This study poses more questions than the answer the scientists saught to discover.
I’m a bit confused are they saying that ice melts at the pole(s) first? and through the domino effect the final stage is CO2 is released and then this causes multiple degrees of warming?
That’s a lot of dominos. What happens if one of the so far guessed at dominos is wrong?
I’d be just as impressed if they could prove a meteorite of pure water and CO2 crashed into the planet adding GHG’s to the atmosphere (Post-Modern Science states you have to prove me wrong for me to be wrong, I think that’s the way these grant seekers work anyway).
Mike, on 4-4-12 @11:35 pm
You come off as a typical AGW troll who assumes he is smarter than everyone who comments on this site. While I’m not a “scientist”, I am a degreed accountant, was a CPA, and took (and passed) classes while in university in biology, microbiology, inorganic chemistry and organic chemistry. Until I came down with rheumatoid arthritis, I was a SCUBA diving instructor and certified in mixed gas diving. In my SCUBA and mixed gas training, I became very familiar with CO2 and physics as they pertain to gasses. As an accountant, I was an auditor, trained to audit financial statements and government programs and grants. In financial auditing, I was trained to look at all management statements with a critical eye. In auditing government programs and grants, especially when there was a problem, I was trained to look for condition, cause and effect. Therefore, while I might not be a “scientist”, I do have enough education and practical experience to tell when someone may be BS ing me. And I know how to do the research to confirm my suspicions! And this paper is BS.
Jay Davis
ars technica has latched onto the report too. They tend to report only that which supports global warming, and dismiss anything else. Here’s their take:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/greenhouse-gases-drove-the-close-of-the-last-ice-age.ars
Mike says:
April 4, 2012 at 11:35 pm
So many armchair experts and google galileos having a say here. Better get writing people, The journals will be keen to present your detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound debunking off this detailed, scientifically valid and statistically sound research. You should all probably go and do some university level science courses at least at undergraduate level first though.
For those of you who don’t know what negative feedback is, this is a fine example!
****
Gail Combs says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:12 am
****
Gail, you have it right. Since the ice changes/65N summer insolation are so tightly correlated, it leaves little else to affect the ice changes — unless CO2 level changes are the same as the Milankovitch changes (which they are obviously not).
Smokey says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:20 am
John Finn,
You’re fooling no one here talking about scientific skeptics, when you are a dyed in the wool, wild-eyed climate alarmist.
I can point to a number of online ‘exchanges’ I’ve had with AGW proponents (including Michael Mann). In fact one particular case involving Mann was cited on WUWT. I’ve been challenging AGW issues for several years.
However, you didn’t identify which chart you’re complaining about. Was it this one? Or maybe this one? Or this one?
It was the US chart I referring to in the post, i.e. the last ‘this one’, but it’s largely immaterial. Most of what you link to is nonsense.
They are all based on real data, so if the axes are not to your liking, you can rescale and post them yourself.
The choice of axes and the presentation of the graphs has been done with the specific intention of obscuring the detail.
Your defense of the IPCC is based on your belief system, not on real world observations. Face it, the IPCC is wildly overestimating sensitivity
I’m not defending the IPCC. I think their estimate of climate sensitivity is probably too high.
Once again, the long term rising temperature trend shows us that nothing unusual is occurring.
Again you show the CET record, but the calculated trends contradict your assertion that “nothing unusual is occurring”. The trends for the last 3 centuries are as follows
1700-1800 -0.3 deg per century i.e. NO warming
1800-1900 0.04 deg per century i.e. flat – NO sig warming
1900-2000 0.7 deg per century i.e. Warming
The trend for the last 50 years is ~1.6 deg per century. So, after 200 years with very little trend in the CET record, we have significant warming in the most recent 100 years – and that warming is accelerating. As I stated earlier constructing a trend line from the start of the data may give the visual impression of ‘sameness’ but the numbers say different.
And your attempt to question the existence of the LIA — one of the coldest periods of the Holocene — is irresponsible nonsense that is contradicted by a mountain of peer reviewed evidence.
I didn’t question the existence of the LIA. I asked for the start and end dates. The fact that you appear unable to provide them suggests the “mountain of peer reviewed evidence” is not as clear cut as you’d like to think.
Gail Combs says: April 5, 2012 at 6:12 am
Surely this paper is a HUGE piece of information?
Rate of change of ice volume is directly related to the Milankovitch cycles.
“…comparing June 65N insolation anomaly with the time rate of change of global ice volume (dV/dt). …”
original paper http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GerardWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf )
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-milankovitch-by-gerard.html
Mervyn says:
Unfortunately, you didn’t get it right at all.
First of all, the claim you’ve heard that 97% of emissions is natural is what we might call a lie of omission: It considers only one side of the equation. It is like computing your bank balance by considering only paycheck deposits and only withdrawals. In particular, there are large exchanges between the atmosphere and the biosphere + ocean mixed layer, but these exchanges were, before the industrial revolution, virtually imbalance. So, of the rise in CO2 that we see in the atmosphere (from ~280 ppm before the industrial revolution) to 390+ ppm today, humans are responsible for all of it. In fact, the change in concentration would have been about twice as large as we observed if all of the excess CO2 remained in the atmosphere. However, about half of what we emit rapidly segregates in the biosphere and ocean mixed layer (which are hence now net absorbers of CO2, not emitters).
Second of all, it is not particularly useful to count molecules. About 99% of the atmosphere consists of diatomic molecules that are transparent to the IR radiation emitted by the Earth. Hence, that 1% that are greenhouse gases have a disproportionate effect on the Earth’s radiative balance. Add to that the fact that the effect of a particular gas is not (except over a very small range) linear in concentration, but more like logarithmic in concentration and you get a further disproportionate effect for small amounts of a substance. Finally, consider that the most prevalent greenhouse gas, water vapor, is condensable and has huge sources available…so that, as a result, its concentration in the atmosphere is determined by the temperature. This means that it is the non-condensable greenhouse gases like CO2 that help to support the effect of water vapor by warming the atmosphere enough that water vapor concentrations increase. All this put together means that CO2 (and the other non-condensable greenhouse gases like CH4) play an extremely important role in the radiative balance of the Earth.
Further note re Roe paper mentioned above :
it goes on to say: “The Milankovitch hypothesis as formulated here does not explain the large rapid deglaciations that occurred at the end of some of the ice age cycles (i.e., the several
large negative excursions in Figure 2):…”
original paper http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GerardWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf )
Smokey says (to John Finn):
Smokey’s idea of skepticism is that it is a one-way street. One is supposed to be skeptical of science that happens not to agree with Smokey’s political ideology but one is supposed to be completely gullible about anything that agrees with that ideology. He is what tamino rightly calls a “fake skeptic”. Fake skeptics despise real skeptics.
@ Milankovitch
Time derivitaves of sunspots also produce impressive correlations.
My hairline recedes, the tree in the backyard gets taller=correlation.
There is confusion between the glacial-interglacial oscillations within a large scale glacial period and the large scale periods themselves that briefly punctuate earth’s predominantly warm and CO2 ridden climate every 200 million years or so.
Just lucky I guess, we are living somewhere near the end of an interglacial period within a large scale glacial punctuation.
Milankovitch seems to be no help explaining the large scale glacial periods. Obliquity and precession have no effect on net insolation, but redistribute the same insolation between seasons and hemispheres. Eccentricity is the only signal that changes insolation, but the net change is very small because the long trajectory out in the cold is offset by being closer to the sun at perihelion.
About a million years ago the glacial-interglacial periodicity changed from correlating with the 40kyr Milankovitch cycle to correlating to 100kyr, but the correlation is inverse. A 100kyr signal can be construed without invoking eccentricity.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3610
Joel Shore said:
Ughh…That should have read: “It is like computing your bank balance by considering only paycheck deposits and not withdrawals.”
Mike says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:05 am
You gleaned all that from a blog I spend 5 minutes a day on? You are in the wrong profession. You should be a clairvoyant. They also overestimate their abilities and are never correct beyond chance. I guess someone finds you impressive. So, what is epizooiology? I’ve never heard of that discipline. Is it a climate science? Oh, you mean epizoology or epizootiology, neither of which are climate sciences either although I suppose as AGW really starts to ramp up we can expect animal diseases to undergo range shifts. I might even have a reference or two over at my blog. Anyway, its probably time for your nanna nap, so its been a pleasure. Thanks for your hypocritical criticism.”
Thank you for proving my point. You are what you write. 5 minutes a day for slurs and slams. Why bother? That’s your arrogance, not your intellect (well, maybe), talking. You don’t know science, yet (least of all the science of zoonoses). You’re welcome, but there’s nothing hypocritical about it. I don’t challenge the science I’m not up on; I leave that to much more learned folk, while I read, listen and learn. You, it took less than 5 minutes to figure out. Done troll-baiting, won’t waste anymore of Anthony’s/mod’s time. Time for my nap. /sarc.
I see that Joel Shore is busy posting right in the middle of the work day again, a privelege that honest folks in the private sector don’t get. And once again Shore’s psychological projection is on display, labeling anyone he disagrees with as an ideologue. That is simply a lazy jamoke’s way of admitting that he doesn’t have a credible argument. Poor old Joel doesn’t like it when scientific skeptics present facts that he can only object to with his baseless opinions, and by labeling those he doesn’t agree with using self-projection terms like “ideologue”. And there is another name for “fake skeptics”: alarmists. I am a true scientific skeptic; I know the difference between a conjecture and a hypothesis. But Joel Shore, being a climate alarmist and a fake skeptic, can’t handle the truth. AGW is a conjecture.
. . .
John Finn, if one of the many charts that I posted bothers you so much, just disregard it. The rest of them make my case. And I have plenty more I can post… Which bring up a funny story: when Joel Shore objected to a chart I had posted, I replied by posting FIFTY [50] more charts, from dozens of peer reviewed sources, and all showing the same thing as my original chart. Joel Shore objected to every one of them! So who is really the blinkered ‘ideologue’?☺
And please post all those ‘exchanges’ with Mann. I’d be interested in seeing his tap dancing. Could even be a duet. We’ll see.
Smokey says:
That is Smokey’s M.O.: Throw up as much nonsense as possible with the hope that a little of it sticks. Apparently, the notion of credibility is foreign to him. (Oh, no, right that is another one of those concepts that applies only to one side of the discussion! AGW “skeptics” don’t have to be credible.)
“dozens of peer reviewed sources”? Right! I have rarely seen you show anything from a peer-reviewed source. (And, no, graphs produced by Icecap using real data but cherrypicking it or otherwise distorting it don’t count as peer-reviewed sources!)
John Finn, the interesting thing about HADCET is seasonally ranked data.
Warmest DJF 1869, 1834, 1989, 2007
Warmest MAM 2011, 1893, 2007, 1945
Warmest JJA 1976, 1826, 1995, 2003
Warmest SON 2006, 2011, 1731, 1730
I don’t see any catastrophic warming …
You can talk about trends … but if UHI is .25C or .5C which I think is most likely ….
Joel Shore says:
April 5, 2012 at 9:28 am
Joel Shore has jumped the shark.
“So, of the rise in CO2 that we see in the atmosphere (from ~280 ppm before the industrial revolution) to 390+ ppm today, humans are responsible for all of it.”
I rest my case.
referring back to a comment made by LC Kirk Perth. There is another method for determining past Co2 levels that I am aware of, and that is the use of mosses and sedges. A study a number of years ago done in South America by researchers Figge and White, determined Co2 amounts as far back as the Youngter Dryas about 13,000 BP. I still do not think the resolution was that good that it could be said with certainty whether Co2 lead tmeperature or the other way around.
Theo Goodwin says:
“Joel Shore has jumped the shark.”
Actually, that happened quite a while ago. And he’s still posting throughout the work day. This isn’t some sort of paid holiday, is it?
LC Kirk, Perth says:
April 4, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Surely we must have found a better way of estimating global atmospheric paleo CO2 concentrations by now than looking at squashed gas bubbles in ice cores…. Are we even looking?
_________________________________________
Actually it was looked at first using stomata on the leaves of plants: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html
Simon says:
April 4, 2012 at 4:17 pm
This whole “CO2 lagged behind the warming” has been one of the foundations for believing there is nothing to worry about . This finding is a major blow to the wall that is the skeptic argument. This is not the removal of one or two bricks, but a major structural failure. In fact I can hear the falling of debris as I write.
_______________________________
Wrong. Skeptics do not believe there is just one “knob” that controls the climate. Most of us believe there are a number of variables with confounding effects.
There is no way to deny that various molecules absorb energy at specific wavelengths. Chemists (like me) use these “signatures” to identify different molecules.The atmospheric absorption spectrum is known: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png
This is a graph of Sunlight as it hits the earth that also includes absorption by the ocean: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/images/instruments/sim/fig01.gif
The elephant in the room is not CO2 but H2O (water) As the last graph shows the Oceans (70% of the earth surface) absorbs the high energy area of the spectrum (UV) As the first graph showed H20 has much wider absorption bands and accounts for most of the infrared radiated by the earth that is absorbed by the atmosphere. There are about 20000 ppm of water vapor in the air, versus about 400 ppm of CO2. Also the amount of water vapor varies wildly. The Ocean surface is on average warmer than the surface temp above it, temps lag SSTs, processes like ENSO lag the kinetic energy budget. When you throw in the albedo (sun reflection) effect of clouds, snow and ice, the heat absorption capacity of the oceans and lakes vs air, as well as the ability of rapid transport of heat to the upper atmosphere by thunderstorms, CO2 is insignificant when compared to water.
This paper in no way refutes the role of water. Heck because the increase in solar insolation increases the rate of sublimation, Shakun is making a case for an increase in the total water vapor content of the atmosphere causing the increase in temperature and not a case for CO2. If nothing else you have a lot of confounding factors with an increase in total solar insolation, an increase in water both liquid and vapor, as it is unlocked from the glaciers, and a change in albedo because the melting of glaciers will make them “dirtier” giving a positive feed back effect. (See: Scientists: Soot may be key to rapid Arctic meltand WUWT guest post by Kiminori Itoh of Yokohama National University )
To me it is incredible that anyone with the least bit of knowledge of science could ignore the fact that water is a big player in our climate and instead pick a minor gas that is a plant food. If there is a “Tipping point” (and I think there is) it is caused by water not CO2. Specifically the accumulation of sun reflecting snow when the TSI descends to the critical number that tips the earth into an Ice Age or into an Interglacial.
To me it looks like sensitivity to solar UV, not TSI, that could be the more interesting solar trigger of climate affects.
Given the vast number of variables we have tentatively identified can any one of us point to which knob to turn? As a chemist with over thirty years experience wrestling with production batch and continues processes that were not as well understood as the research chemists thought,, the idea that CO2 is “THE FACTOR” in climate is just plain laughable.
Theo Godwin says:
You haven’t even made a case at all! I assume you think that some of it might be due to ocean outgassing from warming. However, while it is true that the effect of ocean warming alone has been to outgas some CO2, this ignores the fact that the bigger contribution from the oceans is in absorbing CO2 as the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere increases. Hence, as I have noted, the oceans and biosphere have in net absorbed CO2…in fact, about half of the CO2 that we have emitted into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
sunshinehours1 says:
April 5, 2012 at 10:51 am
John Finn, the interesting thing about HADCET is seasonally ranked data.
Warmest DJF 1869, 1834, 1989, 2007
Warmest MAM 2011, 1893, 2007, 1945
Warmest JJA 1976, 1826, 1995, 2003
Warmest SON 2006, 2011, 1731, 1730
I don’t see any catastrophic warming …
I never mentioned catastrophic warming. I’ m disagreeing with Smokey’s claim that recent warming is a continuing trend back to the LIA – or back to 1659 in the case of the CET graphs. Mind, though, it is perhaps worth pointing out that of the 16 years specified above only 7 (less than half) are in the first 300-year period (up to 1959) while the rest are in the 50-odd year period up to 2011.
You can talk about trends … but if UHI is .25C or .5C which I think is most likely ….
CET is adjusted for UHI. I know this to be the case because I live in the CET region and I know that the local stations have higher recorded temperatures than those in the CET data. In fact, on the CET site, you can check the actual measured temperatures for each month and compare them with the recorded values. The recorded values tend to be about 0.3-0.4 deg below the measured values.
There’s an argument to suggest that there is some over-compensation for UHI. Where I live experienced a significant decrease in population throughout the 1970s and 1980s yet the local station data shows a greater warming trend than the CET data over the last few decades. Also the 100- year trend (up to 2000) at the rural Armagh Observatory is almost exactly the same as the CET trend.
beng says:
April 5, 2012 at 8:47 am
****
Gail Combs says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:12 am
****
Gail, you have it right. Since the ice changes/65N summer insolation are so tightly correlated, it leaves little else to affect the ice changes — unless CO2 level changes are the same as the Milankovitch changes (which they are obviously not).
__________________________
Actually that is ONE of the factors.
Geologist think Plate Tectonics are also a factor.
As I under stand it A shift in the Caribbean tectonic plate joined North and South America… changed the flow of the ocean currents and caused the creation of the Gulf Stream.The Gulf Stream introduced warm and saline water masses to the north creating deepening of the thermocline. http://www-odp.tamu.edu/publications/202_SR/synth/synth_5.htm
The configuration of the planet is still pretty much the same BTW
Lots of discussion at: The End Holocene, or How to Make Out Like a ‘Madoff’ Climate Change Insurer
@John Finn,
Still waiting for your accounts of challenging Michael Mann: [“I can point to a number of online ‘exchanges’ I’ve had with AGW proponents (including Michael Mann). In fact one particular case involving Mann was cited on WUWT. I’ve been challenging AGW issues for several years.”].
If you’re challenging AGW, why do your arguments sound like you’re a true believer? The short term trends are still well within the long term parameters. Natural variablility causes natural fluctuations. Wake me when the global temperature breaks through the upper band. So far, it’s not happening.
If CO2 had a role in increasing temperatures and bringing us out of the last ice age, where did the CO2 come from? An ice covered Earth?
The most important thing is that it is a metastudy, which is an implicit admission of observational failure.
Joel Shore says: @ April 5, 2012 at 9:28 am
….So, of the rise in CO2 that we see in the atmosphere (from ~280 ppm before the industrial revolution) to 390+ ppm today, humans are responsible for all of it. In fact, the change in concentration would have been about twice as large as we observed if all of the excess CO2 remained in the atmosphere. However, about half of what we emit rapidly segregates in the biosphere and ocean mixed layer….
_______________________________________
And Thank Gaia we are recycling the CO2 that is locked up in coal. I am sure plants would thank us if they could talk. Without plants higher life forms would become extinct. There is plenty of evidence that we were entering into a “Carbon Dioxide Starvation Age”
If you look at the very long term, the amount of CO2 has decreased in fits and starts and the amount of O2 has increased. The Cambrian Period was nearly 7000 ppm of CO2, the Late Ordovician Period was ~ 4400 ppm of CO2. and the Cretaceous between ~ 700 and 1400 ppmv.
This is supported by plant biology and evolution.
C3 and C4 photosynthesis are the two most common photosynthetic pathways contributing to global primary productivity, with Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM), a third pathway found in succulents, being of limited importance to global productivity (Sage and Monson 1999; Still et al. 2003). Atmospheric CO2 is the carbon source for all three pathways; one key distinguishing feature among them, however, is that both C4 and CAM photosynthesis involve a CO2-concentrating mechanism to create high CO2 concentrations at the site of photosynthetic carboxylation. In contrast, C3 photosynthesis relies solely on diffusion of CO2 from the outside atmosphere to the sites of photosynthetic CO2 fixation (Fig. 10.1). Hence, it is clear that changes in the atmospheric CO2 levels will more likely influence the photosynthetic activities of C3 than of C4 and CAM plants….
C4 photosynthesis is found only among the most advanced land plants. C4 is known to occur among the Angiosperms but has not been reported among older taxonomic groups, such as Gymnosperms (e.g., pines and other coniferous trees) or the Pteridopyhta (e.g., ferns)….
Within both monocots and dicots, C4 photosynthesis has polyphyletic origins and appears to occur among only the most recently derived taxa, suggesting an evolutionary origin of only 10 to 15 million years ago.… C4 photosynthesis is found most commonly among herbaceous vegetation (both as annuals and as perennials)….
…while C4 taxa represent only approx 2% of the total species, they account for 25% to 30% of the global terrestrial primary productivity (Still et al. 2003)…. Second, there is ample evidence to suggest that herbivores (both insect and mammal) exhibit dietary preferences for one photosynthetic pathway over the other (summarized in Caswell et al. 1973; Ehleringer and Monson 1993; Sage and Monson 1999)…. http://www.ehleringer.net/Jim/Publications/328.pdf
So the lowering of CO2 levels was slowly pushing about 97% of the plant species towards extinction.
Since CO2 is more soluble in cold water and the Holecene was characterized by an already low level of CO2 would the onset of the next glaciation also have been the demise of C3 plants due to CO2 starvation?
Would there have been enough CO2 partial pressure for the C4 plants to survive?
I am just an amateur, but doens’t the Al Gore famously made graphic show CO2 rising after the temp rises? Just a thought 😉
Someone may have pointed this out already, but this appears to be an attempt to get the “last word” in the record supporting a particular ideology.
As opposed to any form of “science.”
Simon says:
April 4, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Myrrh says
“So give the evidence. Give it now. Do not run away. Do not ignore this request. Do not refer to some amorphous ‘it’s in all the text books’ or ‘it is well known’ – DAMN WELL PRODUCE IN ALL ITS DETAIL.”
It’s only been known for over a hundred years, but read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
All there.
=======
I’ve just demanded that I’m not given this effin excuse again!
Don’t keep passing the buck, it really is so very tiresome. I’m asking for convincing proof, surely you must have it somewhere..? Show and tell. You fetch. You explain. You show and tell. Convince me.
“The greenhouse effect is a process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases, and is re-radiated in all directions. Since part of this re-radiation is back towards the surface and the lower atmosphere, it results in an elevation of the average surface temperature above what it would be in the absence of the gases.”
Show and tell. You fetch. You explain. You show and tell. Convince me.
That’ll do for a start. Get on with it.
Joel Shore says:
April 5, 2012 at 12:24 pm
“You haven’t even made a case at all! I assume you think that some of it might be due to ocean outgassing from warming.”
You made the assertion so you must make the case. No one remotely knowledgeable about climate science would claim that mankind is responsible for (110/280 = 40%) a forty percent increase in CO2 concentration during the last 162 years. The claim is absurd on its face. If you do not agree then justify your claim.
“CO2 change slightly preceded much of the global warming …”
Wow, this kind of exactness to timing over millions of years.
“Here is what the researchers think happened.” Wow this kind of inexactness….
The finding that CO2 rise followed temp rise was noted decades ago and was witnessed a zillion times on a microscale by all who have opened a warm beer or soft drink. The finding of CO2 most obviously following temp was the embarrasing Greenland records and that is why attention shifted to Antarctica where it apparently wasn’t so patently obvious. Like the LIA and the MWP, the reverse CO2-temp findings have been a troubling thorn to the CAGW folks. And like these other confounding issues, it was only a matter of time before some “team” sought to extract the thorn.
Well I have a question for these CO2 control knobs. Once you have a warm period like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, what cools things down 8-10C and puts the CO2 back in the ocean? Here, surely they will agree that the temperature led CO2 downwards and it accomplished this large temperature change naturally. If the earth’s wobble can do that all by itself then the present hysteria is totally off the wall.
This paper, as all others emanating from the climate establishment, takes it for granted that any observed warming is caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. There is just this one problem with their assumption: the chief greenhouse gas on earth is not carbon dioxide but water vapor. They both absorb outgoing infrared (long-wave) radiation and it is their combined absorption of radiant energy that causes the atmosphere to get warm.
But now consider this: when we don’t change the amount of carbon dioxide in the air we have a stable climate. There are local temperature and humidity variations, to be sure, but long-term drift is absent. What guarantees this?
To prevent a long term temperature drift the IR absorption by greenhouse gas concentration that determines IR transmittance of the atmosphere must respond to any such temperature drift. And water vapor is the only greenhouse gas that can easily do that. Starting from this qualitative picture Ferenc Miskolczi brought in radiation theory and showed that for a stable climate to exist the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared had to have a value of 1.86 (15% transmittance). This transmittance is determined by the combined absorption of infrared radiation by all the greenhouse gases present, but the adjustment is maintained by water vapor, the only adjustable greenhouse gas in the lot.
The blogosphere was hostile to the idea because it wiped out the sacrosanct Arrhenius law. But Miskolczi went on to test it using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948. He found that the IR transmittance of the atmosphere had been constant for the previous 61 years as his theory predicted. During that same period of time the amount of carbon dioxide in air increased by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of all this carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever upon the absorption of of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed.
This is an empirical observation, not derived from any theory, and it overrides any theoretical calculations that do not agree with it. Specifically, it overrides any calculations based on climate models that use the greenhouse effect to predict warming. In accord with this, a close examination of the temperature history of the last 100 years reveals that there has been no greenhouse warming at all during this entire period.
Starting with the twentieth century, the first part of the twentieth century warming started in 1910 and stopped in 1940. There was no corresponding increase of carbon dioxide at the beginning of this warming which means that according to the laws of physics it cannot be greenhouse warming. Bjørn Lomborg attributes this warming to solar influence and I agree with him. There was no warming in the fifties, sixties, and seventies while carbon dioxide relentlessly increased. There is no satisfactory explanation for this lack of warming, only various contorted excuses to explain it away.
The true reason for this lack of warming is clear from Miskolczi’s work. There was no warming in the eighties and nineties either according to the satellite temperature measurements. There was only a short spurt of warming between 1998 and 2002 caused by the warm water that the super El Nino of 1998 had carried across the ocean. And there was no warming from that point on to the present while carbon dioxide just kept on going up on its merry way. And if you still think Arctic warming proves the existence of greenhouse warming think again: Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming and is caused by Atlantic Ocean currents carrying warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic.
Taking all this history and Miskolczi’s theory into account the attempt in the Nature article to explain the end-Pleisticene warming as greenhouse warming is nothing more than hopelessly misguided global warming doctrine.
Theo Goodwin says:
I don’t need to waste my time proving everything to your satisfaction (which is impossible anyway because your objections are not based on science but on ideology). It is the accepted view in the scientific community. If you don’t want to believe it, you are welcome not to. It will just make you look “AGW skeptics” look even sillier in the eyes of the scientific community (if such a thing is possible).
Merovign says:
April 5, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Someone may have pointed this out already, but this appears to be an attempt to get the “last word” in the record supporting a particular ideology.
As opposed to any form of “science.”
_______________________________________
Oh that much is obvious. This is a pure propaganda piece not science.
They know darn well the climate will be cooling over the next couple of decades. Just because they trash any studies that do not support “The Cause” does not mean they are not paying close attention to them. Nopenhagen, where a world wide carbon tax (and World Government) was supposed to be formed bombed. Public opinion is starting to nose dive and therefore they have to push the agenda through very shortly. This paper gets bundled with a bunch of others into the next IPCC report and is sold as AAA rated just like Subprime Mortgage Bonds were sold as “AAA rated mortgage backed securities” We know what the effect of that con-job was. If they manage to sell this con it will be even worse.
This is an attempt to erase the warmth preceding CO2 increase. Note the runaway greenhouse effect in this morning’s NPR piece on this.
Text of NPR piece on the Nature article this morning
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/05/150000446/shake-it-off-earth-s-wobble-may-have-ended-ice-age
April 5, 2012
The last big ice age ended about 11,000 years ago, and not a moment too soon — it made a lot more of the world livable, at least for humans.
But exactly what caused the big thaw isn’t clear, and new research suggests that a wobble in the Earth kicked off a complicated process that changed the whole planet.
Ice tells the history of the Earth’s climate: Air bubbles in ice reveal what the atmosphere was like and what the temperature was. And scientists can read this ice, even if it’s been buried for thousands of years.
But when it comes to the last ice age, ice has a mixed message.
The conventional wisdom is that carbon dioxide increased in the atmosphere starting about 19,000 years ago. Then the ice melted. The logical conclusion? The greenhouse effect.
But the Antarctic was getting warmer even before CO2 levels went up. So which came first in the Antarctic, warming or CO2?
A carving of a beast on a bone, found years ago in Vero Beach, is now seen as important early art.
“The problem is, [the Antarctic is] just one spot on the map, and it’s a dicey way to slice up global climate change by looking at one point,” says Jeremy Shakun, a climate scientist at Harvard University. So he went way beyond the Antarctic — he collected samples of ice, rock and other geologic records from 80 places around the world and found that CO2 levels did, in fact, precede global warming.
Here’s his scenario for what killed the ice age, which was published in the journal Nature this week.
About 20,000 years ago, the Earth — the whole planet — wobbled on its axis. That happens periodically. But this time, a lot more summer sunlight hit the northern hemisphere. Gigantic ice sheets in the Arctic and Greenland melted.
“That water is going to go into the North Atlantic, and that happens to be the critical spot for this global conveyer belt of ocean circulation,” Shakun says.
The conveyer belt is how scientists describe the huge, underwater loop-the-loop that water does in the Atlantic: Cold Arctic water sinks and moves south while warm water in the southern Atlantic moves north.
The trouble is that the sudden burst of fresh meltwater didn’t sink, so the conveyer belt stopped.
“It’s like, you know, sticking a fork in the conveyer belt at the grocery store,” Shakun says. “The thing just jams up; it can’t keep sinking, and the whole thing jams up.”
So warm water in the south Atlantic stayed put. That made the Antarctic warmer. Eventually, ocean currents and wind patterns changed, and carbon dioxide rose up out of the southern oceans and into the atmosphere.
Eric Wolff, a climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, isn’t convinced a wobble was the trigger — the planet had wobbled before and not melted the ice. But he says whatever did start the process during the ice age, the subsequent increase in CO2 created a runaway greenhouse effect worldwide.
“The CO2 increase turned what initially was a Southern Hemisphere warming into a global warming. That’s a very nice sequence of events to explain what happened between about 19,000 and 11,000 years ago,” Wolff says.
But that’s a process that has taken about 8,000 years. And Shakun’s research found that the amount of CO2 it took to end the ice age is about the same amount as humans have added to the atmosphere in the past century.
Joel Shore says:
“…ideology…”
If I had a nickel for every time Joel Shore blamed his inadequacy on ‘ideology’ my piggy bank would be full.
The CBC has jumped all over this:
“Last ice age ended by carbon dioxide increase. Climate skeptics’ popular argument discredited by clear global trend”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/04/05/environment-climate-co2-ice-age-end.html?cmp=rss
The ignorant climate doomsday cult just does not give up. Too bad we did not cut the CBC’s funding completely. I can get propaganda for free from Suzuki’s Desmogblog, don’t need to pay 1.1 billion for it at the CBC.
It seems to me that at some point in the elevation of the percentage of CO2… the heat from the Sun will stop reaching the surface of the Earth.
Fairly certain we’d all be narc’d out on it by that point.
The trouble is that the sudden burst of fresh meltwater didn’t sink, so the conveyer belt stopped.
“It’s like, you know, sticking a fork in the conveyer belt at the grocery store,” Shakun says. “The thing just jams up; it can’t keep sinking, and the whole thing jams up.”
This is why I hate the concept of Meridianal Overturning Circulation (MOC). The meridian is several axes of longitude transecting the north and south Atlantic oceans. It was discovered and named by observant European and American sailors who ruled the seas in the 19th century. It is a simple convection cell where the Gulf Stream flows north and sinks and the bottom water flows south and warms.
Bathospheres in the 60’s painted a far more complex and amazing picture and subsequent isotopic dating showed that the thermohaline circulation was neither meridianal nor predominantly overturning (but hey, aside from that what’s not to like about the name?).
By accident of geography the North Atlantic is the only outlet for Arctic Ocean bottom water. Seawater becomes haline (saline) not only from evaporation of warm surface water, but also from freezing of cold surface water.
I seriously doubt the meltwater put a fork in the thermohaline circulation, but it could slow it down.
The output of propaganda by the MSM; the ongoing revelations of scientific and financial fraud, of bankruptcy and missing billions; the fevered demands/ pleas by warmists to view their model outputs as scientific evidence of change in the physical world (other than what’s happening between their own ears); increasing frequency of ad-hominem attack that lately has even included a shrill call from an academic to “treat” AGW “deniers” – reminiscent of tactics used by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks and their ideologue friends; and even just last week a call from the leader of Greens in Australia (which holds the balance of power) for one-world government…
Others have said it, and I agree with them: the most important single thing that threatens the plans of tyrants is opportunity for unregulated mass communication via the internet. And it is here that the next front in the age-old conflict between totalitarianism and libertarianism will be fought.
Reading these comments prompted me to think: “OK, so what really ended the last Ice Age.”
There must have been some major feedback system – there is no way the modest change in CO2 levels could have been responsible for the dramatic increase in temperature, likewise nor could the positive effect of Milankovitch cycles have been sufficient.
It can only have been increasing levels of water vapour in the atmosphere, which created ‘the greenhouse effect’ we are enjoying today.
So:
1. In the beginning (~12,000 years ago), a natural climate cycle causes a very modest amount of warming.
2. Consequently, a little more ice melts (now the water can vaporise), frosts melt more easily – atmospheric water vapour levels rise, so temperature increases, then the process starts to feed on itself.
3. The surface area of the oceans increase as they start to rise as a consequence of glacier melt, likewise so do inland lakes, making more surface area from which water can evaporate.
4. Eventually as temperature rises, more life can exist on Earth – a combination of warmer oceans and greater amounts of life result in CO2 levels starting to rise.
It is self-evident that atmospheric water vapour levels today are a significant multiple of what they were 15,000 years ago.
So CO2’s impact in this process of creating the last 10,000 years’ ambient temperatures?
Answer: Almost nothing.
Gail Combs says:
April 5, 2012 at 2:25 pm
I fail to understand why anyone would demonize CO2 or try to convince people we are all going to die if the levels of CO2 rise when the evidence points to more CO2 is better especially at the end of an interglacial.
A very important argument about recent C4 evolution indicating a biosphere flora under stress from decreasing CO2. A candle of reason in a dark age of ideological irrationality and fanaticism. We need to lower CO2 like we need a hole in the head.
The Oregon nest of Talebanic AGW fascist-fanaticism has come up with an interesting innovation here – the Younger-Dryas two-step. The same nest from which only last week professor Kari Norgaard proclaimed Soviet style political psyciatry as a solution for climate change skepticism.
There were two rises in global temperatures at the start of the current interglacial – a first abortive one and then a second, after the Younger Dryas (a cold glacial period interrupting the initiation of the interglacial). Here comrade Shakun cherry-picks global temp proxies to show temperature rise apparently later than CO2 rise. What they have probably done is selected proxy records which track the second, post Younger-Dryas, temperature rise, not the first.
From the study it is revealing that at the start of deglaciation that both global and Antarctic temperatures were rising for a 1000 years BEFORE CO2 started to rise.
For CO2 to lag and then lead rises in global temperatures but not Antarctica seems very odd behaviour!
– The item was released on Wednesday lunchtime before Easter, not giving much time for rebuttal, before the meme has settled into peoples brains over Easter. (maybe just a coincidence)
– It was reported on the BBC Science in Action radio prog on Thu, but I not they were not over alarmist.
– In an item about the part retitling of the new British film, the word “Scientists” was replaced by “Misfits” for US & the rest of the world
QUOTE “another example of what some commentators in the United States see as a growing anti-science culture? Science in Action spoke to Dr Eugenie Scott, Director of the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organisation that helps defend the teaching of subjects such as evolution and climate change which they perceive as being under attack in the US.”ENDQUOTE
-… the presenter directed the talk to be about creationist disruptions & kept her from stirring on Climate Change. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00q88gq#synopsis
Without prejudice regarding the additional bobbers and spinners the authors have added to the Ptolmaic system of temperature control by CO2, remember that CO2 leading temperature is a necessary condition for causation, but not a sufficient one. The lead of temperature during periods of glacation, too great to be obfuscated, doesn’t prove that temperature controls CO2, it merely makes this the only plausible relationship.
Looking at the graph, as CO2 causes the global temperature to go up, wouldn’t you expect that delayed warming to feed back into the Antarctic temperatures which are already being raised by the sun? Or does the Antarctic respond quickly to CO2 forcing where the rest of the world doesn’t?
There are sections of the graph where the global temperature is rising while the Antarctic is cooling. What is the cause of the localised cooling in the Antarctic? Variations in the Milankovitch cycle?
(BTW what are the units for Antarctic temperature? It doesn’t appear to be degrees C)
Elmer, are you seriously going to use the jailed, fraudulant Young Earth Creationist, Kent Hovind as your scientific advisor on the subject of climate change? Really? I’m not even going to bother delving into his “The Lost Squadron” evidence for a young Earth because it is so preposterous. I can only wonder if the other climate denial people in here turn on you as vehemently as they turn on AGW proponents like me. I doubt they will though. They have been known to accept any sort of “evidence” no matter how poor, to suit their cause.
The finding of Lindzen and Choi that the planet’s feedback response to a change in forcing is negative (clouds in the tropics increase or decrease to reflect more or less energy off into space which) removes the forcing amplification which is required to try to explain why the weakest of the orbital parameters eccentricity can cause the 100 kyr glacial/interglacial cycle.
The discussion is pointless and goes in circles as there are multi incorrect mechanisms posited to explain what is observed. Naturally when the mechanisms are incorrect, the proxies are misinterpreted or in the case of the problem manipulated to try to save the incorrect mechanism.
Insolation changes, due to orbital changes, are not the cause of the glacial/interglacial cycle. Temperature changes cannot and do not cause of the observed glacial/interglacial atmospheric changes in CO2. The long term reduction in atmospheric CO2 is not due to the Himalayas forming.
The theoretical assumed mechanism what controls and varies atmospheric CO2 is incorrect. The posited cause of the glacial/interglacial cycles (changes in summer insolation at 60 degree latitude north is incorrect.)
Look at figure 3 which is Greenland Icesheet temperature over the last 12,000 years Vs atmospheric CO2.
The planet warms and cools during the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. The Dansgaard-Oechger climate change is not an event. It is a cycle. It is a cycle.
Question 1: What the heck causes the Dansgaard-Oeschger cyles? That is rhetorical question. As I know what causes it. Hint there are cosmogenic isotope changes each and every time during the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle. The late Gerald Bond was able to track 23 cycles. The same suspect is always at the scene of the crime. It is the bloody sun.
The assumed model for the sun is fundamentally incorrect. The sun cyclically causes a very sever climate change. The paleoclimatic data unambiguously shows there are cyclic abrupt climate changes such as the Younger Dryas. The paleoclimatic specialist refer to the Younger Dryas as Heinrich event 0. The Heinrich event is not a stupid event it is cycle. It is a cycle. An event is something that occurs randomly due to for instance comet impacts. A climate cycle requires a cyclic forcing function. A cycle is something that will happen again. All of the past interglacials ended abruptly.
The cyclic Heinrich abrupt climate change cycles are not caused by CO2 changes. The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle is not caused by CO2 changes.
Question 2: Why the heck does CO2 not change during the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle? Planetary temperature increases and decrease. That also is rhetorical question.
The planet cooled during the Holocene interglacial period. Why does CO2 gradually rise? Temperature is decreasing.
http://climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://climate4you.com/
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000PA000571.shtml
On the 1470-year pacing of Dansgaard-Oeschger warm events
The oxygen isotope record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was reanalyzed in the frequency and time domains. The prominent 1470-year spectral peak, which has been associated with the occurrence of Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events, is solely caused by Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5, 6, and 7. This result emphasizes the nonstationary character of the oxygen isotope time series. Nevertheless, a fundamental pacing period of ∼1470 years seems to control the timing of the onset of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A trapezoidal time series model is introduced which provides a template for the pacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Statistical analysis indicates only a ≤3% probability that the number of matches between observed and template-derived onsets of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between 13 and 46 kyr B.P. resulted by chance. During this interval the spacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger onsets varied by ±20% around the fundamental 1470-year period and multiples thereof. The pacing seems unaffected by variations in the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water formation, suggesting that the thermohaline circulation was not the primary controlling factor of the pacing period.
Atmospheric CO2 does not change significantly when temperature changes. There is an estimated maximum change of 30 ppm in CO2 for the total temperature change from glacial/interglacial and visa versa. Due the change in ocean salinity atmospheric CO2 increases when there is there is more ice in the ice sheets. As the vast regions of the biosphere is covered by ice and there is massive reduction in rainforest (roughly 30% of the Amazon is converted from rainforest to savanna) there is massive reduction in vegetation which increases the amount of the CO2. The total net change in atmospheric CO2 due to ice sheets forming causing a saltier ocean and the reduction in vegetation is no net change in atmospheric CO2 and likely an increase in atmospheric CO2. (Volcanic input continues yet there is a reduction in vegetation to remove the CO2.)
There is no explanation as to what causes the reduction of 80 ppm to 100 ppm of atmospheric CO2 during the glacial/interglacial cycle. That is the so called Holy Grail of the carbon cycle specialists.
http://www.up.ethz.ch/education/biogeochem_cycles/reading_list/sigman_nat_00.pdf
A reasonable estimate for ice age ocean cooling of 2.5C in the polar surface and 5C in the low-latitude surface leads to a CO2 decrease of 30 p.p.m.v., with the low-latitude and polar temperature changes playing roughly equivalent roles in this decrease. It has recently been noted that ocean general circulation models predict a greater sensitivity of CO2 to low-latitude surface conditions than do simple ocean box models like CYCLOPS17. However, the significance of this observation is a matter of intense debate.
An opposing effect on atmospheric CO2 to that of glacial/interglacial temperature change is provided by the increased salinity of the glacial ocean, due to the storage of fresh water on land in extensive Northern Hemisphere ice sheets. Based on the approximately 120m depression of sea level during the last ice age18, the whole ocean was about 3% saltier than it is today. All else being constant, this increase would have reduced the solubility of CO2 in sea water and raised atmospheric CO2 by 6.5 p.p.m.v. Taking the estimated temperature and salinity effects together, we would expect the atmospheric CO2 concentration of the ice age world to have been 23.5 p.p.m.v. lower. Folding in the effect of a 500 Pg C transfer from the continents to the ocean/atmosphere system, we are left with an 8.5 p.p.m.v. decrease in CO2 (Table 1). There are uncertainties in each of these effects, but it seems that most of the 80±100 p.p.m.v. CO2 change across the last glacial/interglacial transition must be explained by other processes. We must move on to the more complex aspects of the ocean carbon cycle.
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
Prof. George Lytwynyshyn of Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) teaches that, in the past, temperature preceded the rise in carbon dioxide levels. He presented excellent data to support this and contends that the Gore-Hansen et.al theory that carbon dioxide causes warming is bogus. I believe his theory is the accurate one (he is a geologist & engineer by training, very smart guy).
The Gore-Hansen et al theory? Would you care to provide a reference to any peer reviewed papers put forward by Gore?
Steven Mosher: The only people who deny that C02 will warm the planet are those who fail to understand the experimental evidence.
There are people who think that the experimental evidence does not rule out negative feedbacks in the atmosphere. So as written, that sentence is false.
It seems that many posters here would like to ignore some important new facts that were presented in the paper. Instead they rant about “Talebanic AGW fascist-fanaticism”.
Previously, the only data on temperature that went along with the CO2 data from the Antarctic cores was the local Antarctic temperature. The new information is that global proxies show that global temperature lagged the Antarctic temperature so that it looks like CO2 increases could have driven a good part of the temperature change.
The mechanism presented to explain this is physically reasonable. The lighter fresh water, melted by the increase in solar energy in the Northern Hemisphere, blocks surface ocean current from the warmer regions of the Atlantic and causes heat to back up into the Southern Hemisphere. The fact is that warming in the Arctic will certainly reduce the flux of warm surface water from the tropics to the Arctic. The vast southern ocean is a sink of CO2, so warming of the southern ocean will release CO2. The greenhouse effect is real, as is the feedback effect of water vapor. These effects, plus the decrease in reflectivity due to reduced ice and snow in the Northern Hemisphere, are going to reinforce the initial warming effect of the warming due to the combination of axial tilt and orbital precession.
This is a viable theory and does not deserve to be ridiculed. If people are skeptical, the burden is on them to provide an alternative explanation for what was observed.
For the most part, what we get from the vast majority of posters is invective. It is a sorry spectacle.
CRS, DrPH says:
April 6, 2012 at 11:55 am
“Prof. George Lytwynyshyn of Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) teaches that, in the past, temperature preceded the rise in carbon dioxide levels. He presented excellent data to support this and contends that the Gore-Hansen et.al theory that carbon dioxide causes warming is bogus. I believe his theory is the accurate one (he is a geologist & engineer by training, very smart guy).”
The professor is not doing research in this area, even though he is a smart guy.
It seems that he is a part timer. His listing at Northwestern says:
George R. Lytwynyshyn Principal, Supply Chain Risk Management, Inc. Environmental Management
In fact, unitil this new paper was published, all that was available was the Antarctic temperature data, along with the CO2 data, which showed an 800 year lag between warming of the Antarctic and CO2 increase. Obviously he could not have known about the new paper which looked at global temperatures rather than Antarctic temperatures and shows a much shorter lag.
Your claim that Gore and / or Hansen originated the theory that CO2 caused warming shows that either you are a poor student, or the good professor did not know what he was talking about. The theory that CO2 causes global warming originated with John Tyndall and who did research on the spectrum of atmospheric gases in 1859. The idea that human industrial emissions of CO2 will warm the earth was proposed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
Eric Adler says:
“If people are skeptical, the burden is on them to provide an alternative explanation for what was observed.”
First, there are no observations other than ice cores and similar proxies, which all show that rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature. And second, the burden is on the authors, not on skeptics. Skeptics have no burden to provide an “alternate explanation” for anything. The onus is entirely on the promoters of this already debunked conjecture. Ice core evidence shows that CO2 follows temperature, and there is direct observational evidence that even on short time scales CO2 follows temperature.
The planet itself is falsifying Shakun’s ridiculous paper. And there is a mountain of geological evidence showing that temperature leads CO2. This fatally flawed paper is a desperate attempt to overturn real world evidence, and the ‘say anything’ crowd clings to it like a drowning man clings to a cork.
joeldshore says:
April 5, 2012 at 6:19 pm
“I don’t need to waste my time proving everything to your satisfaction (which is impossible anyway because your objections are not based on science but on ideology). It is the accepted view in the scientific community. If you don’t want to believe it, you are welcome not to. It will just make you look “AGW skeptics” look even sillier in the eyes of the scientific community (if such a thing is possible).”
So, why do you post? You appear to be an obsessive-compulsive ideologue who is screaming just like the rest of them as your little scam melts before your eyes. I will ask again. Why do you post?
Septic Matthew/Matthew R Marler says:
April 6, 2012 at 1:57 pm
“Steven Mosher: “The only people who deny that C02 will warm the planet are those who fail to understand the experimental evidence.”
There are people who think that the experimental evidence does not rule out negative feedbacks in the atmosphere. So as written, that sentence is false.”
“Sceptic” Matthew,
The preponderance of the evidence is that the long term feedback is positive. The papers claiming negative feedback have been shown to be flawed.
Even if there is some negative feedback, the planet will still get warmer, but the warming would be less than what would occur due to CO2 alone.
So the sentence is correct.
Eric Adler says:
“The theory that CO2 causes global warming …”
Get your terms straight. There is no “theory” that CO2 causes global warming or anything else. As for AGW, that is a conjecture. It may be true. But it is not empirically testable or falsifiable, thus it is a conjecture.
And the statement…
“The preponderance of the evidence is that the long term feedback is positive. The papers claiming negative feedback have been shown to be flawed.”
…should be under the heading “Science Fiction”. “Preponderance” means more than half. Therefore [even if that term is used correctly, which it is not], that means there exists contrary evidence, thus falsifying your belief system. Septic Matthew is correct, as verified by the ultimate Authority, planet earth.
Smokey says:
“First, there are no observations other than ice cores and similar proxies, which all show that rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature. And second, the burden is on the authors, not on skeptics. Skeptics have no burden to provide an “alternate explanation” for anything. The onus is entirely on the promoters of this already debunked conjecture. Ice core evidence shows that CO2 follows temperature, and there is direct observational evidence that even on short time scales CO2 follows temperature.”
Your brain is so clouded you don’t even understand what the paper is saying even when it is explained. The authors have met their burden. Their proxies show that CO2 does not lag global temperature change. The ice core only gives temperature change in the Antarctic.
Eric Adler says:
“The authors have met their burden.” Wishful thinking. And:
” The ice core only gives temperature change in the Antarctic.”
Listen up, Skippy: There are numerous ice core bore holes from both hemispheres. The temperature fluctuations in both hemispheres are in synch.
Dream on in your own private reality. The fact is that the Shakun paper is crap, as this and this make crystal clear. I could explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you. Cognitive dissonance controls alarmist numpties, and there is apparently no cure in your case.
[snip. Read the site Policy. Labeling those with a different view as “deniers” is a pejorative that is not tolerated on the internet’s Best Science & Technology site. ~dbs, mod.]
So why does the temperature drop at the start of a new ice age but carbon dioxide levels stay high for thousands of years afterwards? And, why do carbon dioxide levels shoot up with an almost clockwork like regularity every 120000 years or so and then shoot down again? Answers please on a postcard to WUWT.
For the real truth about which comes first, one must obviously go to the source:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/
There it is, in black-and-white; the temperature moves before the CO2.
I haven’t had a chance to read through all the comments so it may have been mentioned already but Shakuns work doesn’t seem to acknowledge the Huybers/Langmuir study about the feedback between deglaciation, volcanism and atmospheric CO2. I’ll link it below but I’m curious why a strong suggestion of an increase of 20-80 ppm CO2 from that cycle during that period would be ignored like that?
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3659701/Huybers_FeedbackDeglaciation.pdf?sequence=1
SBMorris,
Thanks for pointing out the paper on the possible volcanic feedback due to additional emissions of CO2 between 12Ka and 7Ka BP. If you look at the graph, you can see that CO2 plateau’s between about 15Ka and 12.5Ka BP and then rises sharply once again.
Eric,
Isn’t that paper suggesting the increase in CO2 is due to increased volcanism as a result of deglaciation over that time, not due to increased emissions? I’m not sure if you’re saying that CO2 caused that or not so sorry if I’m misinterpreting/misreading you. If the argument is ‘CO2 is the driver, therefore…’ I can see why you’re saying that but I certainly don’t see it in the data, those proxies are all over the place but still suggest to me that CO2 chases temp..
The graph seems to line up but it isn’t acknowledged in Shakun’s paper as such from what I can tell.
Eric Adler says:
April 6, 2012 at 5:41 pm
It seems that many posters here would like to ignore some important new facts that were presented in the paper. Instead they rant about “Talebanic AGW fascist-fanaticism”.
Previously, the only data on temperature that went along with the CO2 data from the Antarctic cores was the local Antarctic temperature. The new information is that global proxies show that global temperature lagged the Antarctic temperature so that it looks like CO2 increases could have driven a good part of the temperature change.
My “rant” about Talebanic AGW was directly in the context of the call by Kari Norgaard, Oregon University, to have AGW skeptics consigned to psyciartic treatment (with implication of forcible consignment). Who is the one here using extremist and even violent language?
My point that you did not address was a straightforward scientific one – due to the Younger Dryas there were two abrupt global temperature rises separated by just over a thousand years at the start of the current interglacial. This provides an element of ambiguity to the precise timing of rises of both CO2 and temperatures, with temperature rise being effectively smeared over a long period. This gives scope for cherry-picking of proxies to paint a picture of (some) temp rises following CO2 rise.
SMorris says:
April 7, 2012 at 3:17 pm
“Eric,
Isn’t that paper suggesting the increase in CO2 is due to increased volcanism as a result of deglaciation over that time, not due to increased emissions? I’m not sure if you’re saying that CO2 caused that or not so sorry if I’m misinterpreting/misreading you. If the argument is ‘CO2 is the driver, therefore…’ I can see why you’re saying that but I certainly don’t see it in the data, those proxies are all over the place but still suggest to me that CO2 chases temp..
The graph seems to line up but it isn’t acknowledged in Shakun’s paper as such from what I can tell.”
The abstract seems to say that the volcanism contributed to increase in CO2 which further increased the warming and caused more deglaciation.
“If such a large volcanic output of CO2 occurs, then volcanism forges a positive feedback between glacial variability and atmospheric CO2 concentrations: deglaciation increases volcanic eruptions, raises atmospheric CO2, and causes more deglaciation.”
This is an alternative to the theory that CO2 causes warming which causes more emission of CO2 from the ocean.
Both theories say that CO2 causes more warming as a feedback mechanism.
Eric Adler says:
“…the theory that CO2 causes warming which causes more emission of CO2 from the ocean… Both theories say that CO2 causes more warming…”
Ignorance on display. There is no such ‘theory’ regarding CO2. None. It is all conjecture, and nothing more.
Mike says:
April 6, 2012 at 9:14 pm
[snip. Read the site Policy. Labeling those with a different view as “deniers” is a pejorative that is not tolerated on the internet’s Best Science & Technology site. ~dbs, mod.]
I would like to apologise to any people with an alternate view to the AGW consensus who may have taken offence to being referred to as “deniers” or “denialists”. Having read the Policy I am aware now that personal attacks and namecalling is not on and as such I will not engage in that behaviour on this site any longer.
I would however like to refer the moderator to the numerous breaches of the Policy by a number of posters in here. I believe that being told to STFU and being referred to as fascists, warmists, and alarmists would be in breach of the very same policy, unless of course there are different standards for different posters based upon their position? That would by extremely disppointing. Surely someone claiming to be the “internet’s Best Science & Technology site” would not wish to be seen as a bastion of double standards and hypocrisy?
But to return to my legitimate comment which you also snipped out. I am curious as to how many of the posters in here who are criticising the Shakun et al paper have actually read the paper and its supplements in their entirety and really understood it? I get the impression that a number of you haven’t but have instead tried eyeballing the graphs as presented in here looking for lags before making uninformed statements. As for those of you who have read it and feel you have legitimate informed criticisms of their methods, results or interpretations, how many of you are actually going to write it up and submit for publication? Any takers?
[one strives for uniformity in moderation, but hey, we’re all human. Comments noted ~ac, mod]
Full text of this excellent article is here:
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/shakun-et-al.pdf
Alex
Snarkmania
Thanks for that. If you do indeed go as far as to write that up, you’d be one of the rare ones from this kind of forum. It would be interesting to see how you go. Feel free to track me down through my blog and keep me informed how that goes for you.
I did my own study into this paper. It is a reprehensible example of using numbers to tell a lie. They are intentionally increasing the misunderstanding of the Earth’s climate.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2012/04/flagrant-attempt-to-mislead-the-public-about-the-holocene-onset/
The old lag/lead meme. I haven’t read the comments.
Don Easterbrook writes:
I’ve had regulars here wag their finger at me for daring to suggest that ‘thoughtful’ skeptics deny that elevated CO2 levels can warm the planet. Yet here again this canard is published by the blog host. When will these zombie notions stop rising from the grave?
That is incorrect. I thought that meme had long ceased to be propagated.
Actually, most studies say otherwise, but some very detailed studies came out in the last few years which agree with what Easterbrook has said here. Rather unskeptically, Easterbrook stakes out a position instead of simply speaking the truth, which I would describe as ‘we are not certain of the true trends in atmospheric water vapour.’
What are we still in kindergarten? An increase of 0.00001% of ozone depleting gases over Antarctica caused a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer. 0.038% of my body weght in arsenic will kill me.
Let’s consider some other numbers: atmospheric CO2 has increased by 40% due to anthropogenic emissions since the industrial revolution. We emit 32 billion tonnes of the stuff yearly, and increasing. That is 100 times more than volcanoes emit annually, and 14% of the amount all natural sources emit in a year. Currently the Earth’s sinks absorb annual natural emissions + half of the amount emitted by human industry. 15 billion tonnes of CO2 are added to the atmophere every year and growing.
But whether you attach large or small numbers to it, that tells you zip about the warming effect. The paragraph above is simply counterpropaganda to Easterbrook’s rhetoric. Difference is, I’ll tell you straight up that it is. Easterbrook will actually try to sell his verbiage.
———————————————————
Regarding the paper, there are changes in the details, but the salient points are unchanged regarding the last glacial/interglacial. We have long had proxy data showing warming following CO2 in some parts of the world (notably Greenland). Orbital variation initiates warming, oceans outgas CO2, CO2 mixes through the atmosphere and amplifies initial warming, as well as making that warming happen globally, instead of being localised around the point of insolation. It makes sense. If CO2 wasn’t strongly involved, how would a global temperature change happen from a localised insolation change?
But let me ask that question here. We know that orbital variations trigger ice age shifts. We know that the chief dynamic is the shift of insolation focus between the tropics and the high latitudes. How do skeptics see the process occuring? What is/are the mechanisms whereby a local insolation change becomes a global temperature change?
No! There is no disagreement with these papers.
(Smokey, I hope you’re paying attention, because you have at least twice in the comments referred to Caillion as putting the kybosh on the new study.)
Let me quote directly from Caillion et al.
The new paper confirms Caillion et al – CO2 lagged in the South and led in the North.
How about Petit et al?
Souther Hemisphere temp rise causes GHG rise, which leads to Greenland temp rise and global sea ice volume decline. The new paper confirms Petit et al.
So here is what has happened. Skeptics have been fed the line that CO2 lags temperature in ice age terminations. And this is true. But because the people spinning the yarn for skeptic audiences are more interested in soundbytes than illuminating the subject, they simply omit the inconvenient parts of the understanding, like CO2 leading temps and deglaciation in the
Northern Hemisphere.
Of course, it’s more complicated than I’ve laid out here as well, but you’ll never know the truth if you rely on soundbytes, and you’ll always be surprised and cynical when something that is merely a confirmation of knowledge appears to be a turnaround.
Read the science
Put the following link in your browser bookmarks;
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/index/
It is an index to lists of scientific studies on given topics in climate science. Next time you feel you’d like to comment on a topic in climate science, at least read the abstracts, which are copied there at the website for your ease and convenience.
(I left Fisher out – someone else can do the work. It is cited in the Petit paper if you want to search for it by title)
Mervyn says:
April 5, 2012 at 5:24 am:
Let me get this right. In every 85,000 molecules of air, 33 molecules are CO2 molecules. The IPCC AR4 indicated 3% of CO2 entering the atmosphere each year is from human activity, and the overwhelming 97% is natural. This mean of the 33 molecules of CO2, only 1 of these CO2 molecules comes from human activity.
They want us to believe it is this one CO2 molecule in every 85,000 molecules of air that represents the key driver of atmospheric temperature, creating catastrophic global warming?????
This suggestion is scientific insanity!!!!!!!!!!!!
The new study suggesting CO2 drives temperature is simply a desperate but poor attempt at producing the world’s first peer reviewed scientific paper proposing such nonsense, nonsense which the IPCC can then use to support its greenhouse gas effect supposition, which has underpinned its mantra since the IPCC was created, and for which the IPCC has, to date, failed to support with empirical evidence.
Correct, and reposted for effect. After many years of unrefuted evidence showing that CO2 follows temperature, suddenly a wet-behind-the-ears nobody gets his ticket punched on the grant gravy train by claiming Down is Up, Evil is Good, Ignorance is Strength, and CO2 Precedes Temperature. Mr. Shakun has learned well from the devious Michael Mann: Say Anything, as long as it supports the Narrative. Tenure is now assured.
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And this Bill Illis chart effectively deconstructs the Shakun et al. claims:
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/6066/transliashakun2012.png
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And now James Hansen realizes what scientific skeptics have known for some time:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/9192494/Climate-scientists-are-losing-the-public-debate-on-global-warming.html