From the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK)
New study documents the natural relationship between CO2 concentrations and sea level
By comparing reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and sea level over the past 40 million years, researchers based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton have found that greenhouse gas concentrations similar to the present (almost 400 parts per million) were systematically associated with sea levels at least nine metres above current levels.
The study determined the ‘natural equilibrium’ sea level for CO2 concentrations ranging between ice-age values of 180 parts per million and ice-free values of more than 1,000 parts per million.
It takes many centuries for such an equilibrium to be reached, therefore whilst the study does not predict any sea level value for the coming century, it does illustrate what sea level might be expected if climate were stabilized at a certain CO2 level for several centuries.
Lead author Dr Gavin Foster, from Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton which is based at the centre, said, “A specific case of interest is one in which CO2 levels are kept at 400 to 450 parts per million, because that is the requirement for the often mentioned target of a maximum of two degrees global warming.”
The researchers compiled more than two thousand pairs of CO2 and sea level data points, spanning critical periods within the last 40 million years. Some of these had climates warmer than present, some similar, and some colder. They also included periods during which global temperatures were increasing, as well as periods during which temperatures were decreasing.
“This way, we cover a wide variety of climate states, which puts us in the best position to detect systematic relationships and to have the potential for looking at future climate developments,” said co-author Professor Eelco Rohling, also from Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton.
The researchers found that the natural relationship displays a strong rise in sea level for CO2 increase from 180 to 400 parts per million, peaking at CO2 levels close to present-day values, with sea level at 24 +7/-15 metres above the present, at 68 per cent confidence limits.
“This strong relationship reflects the climatic sensitivity of the great ice sheets of the ice ages,” said Dr Foster. “It continues above the present level because of the apparently similar sensitivity of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, plus possibly some coastal parts of East Antarctica.”
According to the study, sea level stays more or less constant for CO2 changes between 400 and 650 parts per million and it is only for CO2 levels above 650 parts per million that the researchers again saw a strong sea level response for a given CO2 change.
“This trend reflects the behaviour of the large East Antarctic ice sheet in response to climate changes at these very high CO2 levels. An ice-free planet, with sea level 65 metres above the present, occurred in the past when CO2 levels were around 1200 parts per million.”
Professor Rohling said, “Sea level rises to these high values will take many centuries, or even millennia, but the implications from the geological record are clear – for a future climate with maximum warming of about two degrees Centigrade, that is with CO2 stabilized at 400 to 450 parts per million, sea level is set to steadily rise for many centuries, towards its natural equilibrium position at around 24 +7/-15 metres, at 68 per cent confidence. In Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change terms, this is a likely rise of at least nine metres above the present. Previous research indicates that such rises above present sea level may occur at rates of roughly one metre per century.”
Based on these results, which document how the Earth system has operated in the past, future stabilization of CO2 at 400-450 parts per million is unlikely to be sufficient to avoid a significant steady long-term sea level rise.
The study is published this week online ahead of print in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS manuscript # 2012-16073R).
Manfred says: January 3, 2013 at 12:17 am
“And they did not even think about the possibility, that increased CO2 was the effect and not the cause of ocean temperature increase.”
So why can’t the over educated folks at National Oceanography Centre, Southampton understand what should be obvious to anyone who studied science in high school? When Sea Surface Temperatures rise CO2 solubility falls:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Images/CO2/Glassman-CO2sol.gif
There is a far more perfect correlation between the rise in sea levels and interglacials.
Graph #1 Post Glacial Sea Level Rise
Graph #2 Western Pacific Post Glacial Sea Level History
Graph #3 Holocene temperature and snow accumulation GISP2 Ice Core
Graph #4 Temperature and CO2 over the Past 400 Thousand years
In the commentary under the last graph note:
It would seem they are using the axiom
““If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” ~ Joseph Goebbels
One does get really sick of hearing more versions of the “BIG LIE”
The chemistry behind CO2 and ocean out-gassing link If you have not visited CO2web recently, do so it is greatly expanded.
At the end of the day this seems to be yet another piece of propaganda. If there was any scientific support for the alarmist cause then propaganda would never be required. In fact it would be actively weeded out as it would tarnish and weaken the argument.
As it is, propaganda is all they have to offer.
Does anyone have a copy of the actual study?
w.
I’ve noticed that whenever trees wiggle their branches, there’s a windstorm. [Some trees do so so enthusiastically that branches break off.] The correlation between wiggling trees and wind is 100%. Such a strong correlation makes it evident that windstorms are caused by trees, and thus to prevent windstorms, all we need to is cut down the trees.
/sarc
[snip. Invalid email address. — mod.]
I’m extremely skeptical that either their CO2 data or their sea level data can be sufficiently accurate/reliable to form any assessment at all about relationships back much more than a few centuries, much less 40 million years. I doubt that they took tectonics into account either because they probably don’t have good data on that either. What’s the point of peer review if this sort of stuff isn’t filtered out?
Maybe the study is better than the press release. I’ll check back in a day or so and see if anyone has found a link to it.
George J
If rising CO2 causes oceans to rise, and rising oceans also cause warming of the planet, and warming of the planet causes CO2 to rise, then how would the oceans ever recede once all the ice was gone?
====================================
I think the answer your question is that we don’t have the slightest idea what causes either glaciations or interglacial warming.
Juraj V. says:
January 3, 2013 at 5:05 am
Wearing short sleeves causes summer to come. Proofed.
———-
My finding, in England, is that wearing short sleeves causes winter to come. Again – proofed.
Guess this is one of those three-state probabilty questions.
67% that summer won’t come.
67% hat winter won’t come.
And 67% that you [or I] won’t die.
Or am I misunderstanding the work of Foster et al.; does it truly reach insignificant – or merely alarmist?
At least this write up points to a scenario where warmer oceans and more atmospheric carbon dioxide go hand-in-hand and also to the other scenario where colder oceans exist with lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
The question remains: Where are the horse and cart in relation to each other? The ability of the ocean to dissolve and out gas CO2 at various temperatures is the answer.
Has anyone found a link to this actual work? I went to PNAS, and searched under the manuscript number and the lead author’s name and got no results.
REPLY: I did also, apparently PNAS allows you to make PR before the early edition with this manuscript comes out . They have a disclaimer about it on the web page – Anthony
I am greatly concerned with the slowing of sea level rise. Plotting the rise since the Great Melt, is to reveal a lagging indicator of where we are in the interglacial. To me, a slowing of the rise, as the rise become asymptotic to some maximum level, is a lagging indicator that our time in the integlacial is up.
I have not read the paper yet, but before I do it may be useful to point out some constraints. The first one being resolution. Some of the better proxies include Greenland ice, which gets us back something in the range of ~130kya (~130,000 years ago), and speleothem (stalactite/stalagmite) and flowstone deposits, which arguably can get us back a few million years or so. Beyond that are various isotopes isolated from ostracods etc. in deep sea sediment cores. Some studies for Greenland ice core studies lay fairly credible claim to be able to attain as good as decadal resolution, but more towards the upper cores, not so much the lower sections, where slip planes and other things can complicate matters considerably. There are others, I just decided not to go into them.
From the Greenland cores there are two really important considerations; (1) ~130k DOES NOT get us back to the start of the last interglacial, from which one can infer that the Greenland sheet may have completely melted away during the inception and early millenia of the Eemian, and (2) the better resolution of Greenland ice (as opposed to Antarctic ice) has repeatedly shown that temperature changes precede CO2 changes.
According to Mudelsee (2001) (http://manfredmudelsee.com/publ/pdf/The_phase_relations_among_atmospheric_CO2_content_temperature_and_global_ice_volume_over_the_past_420_ka.pdf) from the abstract:
“Over the full 420 ka of the Vostok record, CO2 variations lag behind atmospheric temperature changes in the Southern Hemisphere by 1.3 +/- 1.0 ka, and lead over global ice-volume variations by 2.7 +/- 1.3 ka.”
For reference, this was one of the definitive papers establishing which came first, and it was published some 4 years before Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” inversion. Cause and effect unraveled 12 years ago, why this is even an issue now is really quite beyond me.
Beyond the onset of northern hemisphere glaciations, some ~2.8Mya, which is some 2 or so million years older than we can really guess which came first, it becomes sort of a ‘silly-buggers’ game.
Others here have already pointed out that coincidence is not causation. Still others have expanded on the degree to which CO2 is better absorbed by cold water than warm. It is somewhat difficult to imagine a world in which sea levels were much higher than today if it was not indeed warmer. What may not have been considered is the increased areal extent of littorals resultant from a sea level increase of +65m (~213 feet). Plot the areas covered up to +65m on coastlines worldwide and see what percent sea surface is increased over present. I know I have seen several papers which have considered this, but I am just not going to take the time this evening to look that up. But it’s big.
So more surface area to degas, if that means anything here.
As so often is the case, seemingly especially in this lopsided debate, is a phenomena best illustrated by Ziggy. One of my all time favorite cartoons is of Ziggy standing before three vending machines, scratching his head. The first vending machine says “The Truth – 25c”. The middle vending machine says “The Whole Truth – 50c”. and the last machine is entitled “The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth – $1.00”. The numbers might be memory faded, but you get the point (I hope).
In terms of “The Truth” this “debate” is about AGW. But “The Whole Truth” might skew closer to that it is about GW, AGW and GC (global cooling), in other words what is our attribution “signal” relative to normal climate “noise”, or signal to noise ratio.
But what would a buck get us from the climate vending machine? What is “The Truth, The Whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth?” That would include the univers of what we do know and what remains to be known about climate. At a minimum it would necessarily include the miserable state the 4 global data sets are in, the various methods and means of which this record consists, loss of ~70% of reporting stations (predominately high latitude, high altitude and rural) post 1990, and what resides in my mind at least as pure horror at the state of the surface stations Anthony et al have and are documenting. To this we must necessarily add when we live, about half a precession cycle since the more or less agreed beginning of the Holocene (termination of the YD event). Five of the past six such interglacials have each lasted about half a precession cycle……
And the ends of the “extreme” interglacials (those that have achieved at least our sea level, the highstands of which continue to be documented), provide a chilling and robust record of the climate extremes which appear to occasion their ends. An analysis of some of this may be found here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/16/the-end-holocene-or-how-to-make-out-like-a-madoff-climate-change-insurer/
My initial impression is that this paper, only having read what is here, may fall at the “blue light special” (heavily discounted) end of the 25c The Truth. Meaning to me that I may learn a thing or two by reading it and vetting the cited papers critically. With so much end extreme interglacial normal climate “noise” it is seems like such a LEAP to matheMANNically manufacture CO2 numerical/Nutticelli attribution anywhere near close enough to allow calculation of the ideal gas law concentration.
I am just not so sure that any correlation drawn prior to the closing of the Panama Seaway (some ~5Mya) is oceanic circulation comparable to the present except in the grossest terms.
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decade, demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416Wm-2, which is the 65N July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428Wm-2. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.”
http://einstein.iec.cat/jellebot/documents/articles/Phis.Lett.A_2007.pdf
Repeating myself:
So be ever thoughtful of both facts and predictions before leaping to a conclusion. It was in fact a LEAP that terminated the last interglacial, the cold Late Eemian Aridity Pulse which lasted 468 years and ended with a precipitous drop into the Wisconsin ice age. And yes, we were indeed there. We had been on the stage as our stone-age selves about the same length of time during that interglacial that our civilizations have been during this one.
Is it possible to keep a list of individuals who secured degrees with out learning anything? They should be required to defend theories and assertions such as these and either move science ahead or suffer requisite humiliation.
Gail Combs says:
January 3, 2013 at 9:11 am
Graph #1 Post Glacial Sea Level Rise
Graph #2 Western Pacific Post Glacial Sea Level History
Graph #3 Holocene temperature and snow accumulation GISP2 Ice Core
Graph #4 Temperature and CO2 over the Past 400 Thousand years
In the commentary under the last graph note:
Changes in temperature precede changes in CO2, with a lag of around 800 years….
Finally, Caillon et al 2003 sought to reduce the potential for error by using argon isotopes to measure temperature, rather than water ice (which gets around the problem of reconciling gas age and ice age). They found a good correlation between CO2 and temperature over Termination II, again with CO2 lagging temperature by around 800 years.
[And then the BIG LIE gc]
These results fit well with the standard explanation for the Ice Ages, which is that an initial temperature trigger (for example, changes in the earth’s orbit), result in release of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (for example, release of CO2 from the ocean as it warms). As the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere builds up, it results in more warming and further release of greenhouse gases (i.e. a feedback cycle).
It would seem they are using the axiom
““If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” ~ Joseph Goebbels
One does get really sick of hearing more versions of the “BIG LIE”
The chemistry behind CO2 and ocean out-gassing link If you have not visited CO2web recently, do so it is greatly expanded.
Climate papers are a bit like a lot of movies, they begin differently and might seem at the start to be new and interesting but they all end the same. It is indeed astonishing that the same mantra of CO2 causality keeps getting recited in the face of evidence for the long lag between temperatures and CO2.
In an oscillatory system like climate, if the positive temp-CO2 feedback they are proposing really did exist, it would cause the oscillation to be a monotonic sine wave. The human heart beat is an example of a nonlinear oscillator dominated by strong positive feedbacks linking myocardial muscle cells. Thus it is (hopefully) a regular beat. By contrast introducing negative feedbacks into the system (damping or friction) adds more complexity to the oscillation. From the well-known dynamics of oscillatory systems it is easy to demonstrate that this hoped-for positive temp-CO2 feedback by which (as Willis Eschenbach puts it) “the effect of the cause affects the cause” – cannot exist.
DesertYote says:
January 3, 2013 at 8:38 am
Elevated sea levels result in large shallow seas. Shallow seas are great for life. The concentration of atmospheric CO2 is governed by the rate of eukaryote metabolism. Why does everyone forget in discussions regarding CO2, that the composition of the atmosphere is dynamically controlled by life, swamping out physical factors?
Generally I agree with you that the climate temperature-CO2 issue is at least as much about biology as it is physics.
But scientists are profoundly territorial creatures and this is a major obstacle to advance in understanding.
This is excellent work. Current CO2 levels are at 400ppm, but the sea level is lower than at other times in the past when according to the writer. Conclusion anthropogenic CO2 does not cause sea level to rise. This conclusion would make more commonsense based on the data presented.
Back in the old days, once the polls closed on election day, it took time for ballot boxes to arrive at the county courthouse for tabulation. The “early boxes” were always urban, and so were liberal. The later boxes were always suburban, and more conservative. So, election after election, the results from early boxes would make it look like we were doing better than expected.
Then, the suburban boxes would temper the emerging results.
No one was ever foolish enough to make any sort of press announcement based on early boxes.
By a web-browser quirk, this comment for another post ended up here. Sorry about that, everyone.
It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good.
Ridley, Matt. “How Fossil Fuels Have Greened the Planet.” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2013, sec. Life & Culture. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323374504578217621593679506.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
I suppose water content of the earth is constant. If the quantity of water that has to be in and on the land surface of the earth is reduced and drained to the sea, then sea level rises. We are draining water from land part of the earth which used to be inside and on land. 400 million years year before land may not have been saturated with water. So how is it possible to correlate with CO¬2? I don’t see any relationship whatsoever.
And, four walls of a green house can be formed by solid transparent materials like plastics and glasses but HOW they can be made out of any gases? No gases can be GH gases, so no green house effect due to gases. Click my name for details. With regards from me.