Weather Banter - View Single Post - Greenhouse Gas Level Not 'Natural Cycle' and Highly Correlated With Warm Climates.

Steve Schulin

In article ,
(Eric Swanson) wrote:

says...
(Eric Swanson) wrote, in part:
says...

I'm sorry that you're so discombobulated about who's said what on the
issue of the implications of the 800-year lag of CO2 rise behind
temperature rise in ice core. I appreciate the plausibility of your
theory given your assumptions. Even sharing some of those assumptions,
however, is not reason to embrace your theory about the particulars of
the lag.

What theory of mine? ...

Your theory as to why the ice core analyses show CO2 rise lagging
800-1,000 years behind temperature rise.

I don't claim my notion to be even a
hypothesis, as I haven't taken the time to
study the question. It's certainly no my
"theory" as I have no data to provide
any sort of support, other than the
"warm coke" model of outgassing, which, as
I recall, does not give the proper description
of the cycle of CO2 into and out of the oceans.

Well, I was just using "theory" in the same sense as you seemed to use
it in the previous post.

... Wasn't you that wrote this??

A lag of 800-1,000 years might mean that recent rise in CO2
is
a response to Medieval Warm Period.

It's this "theory" of yours that I find not even remotely plausible and
prompted my reply to this thread. What happened during the so-called WMP
has
nothing to do with today's ongoing increase in CO2, AIUI. ...

The fact is we don't know why the CO2 lags temperature. Your notion that
it's due to melting ice is a reasonable one. It could also have been
some other reason, such as upwelling and downwelling changes long after
the warming of surface waters, due to mixing. When you say "AIUI" here
and "the recent well documented increase in atmospheric CO2, which is
rather solidly linked to mankind's emissions", I question the scientific
basis for these comments.

Uh, Nuke, ever heard of isotopes? As in 13C vs. 12C? The source of the
recent increase in atmospheric CO2 is rather obvious from a scientific point
of view, unless you aren't interested in the science. ...

The isotopic evidence reflects the increased emissions, but it doesn't
tell us why the natural processes vary. The throughput of the processes
dwarf the anthropogenic emissions in magnitude. I think its reasonable
to say that small changes in the processes can obviously be more
important than large changes in anthropogenic emissions.

... But we already know
that you think the Earth is less than 15,000 years old, so your use of data
from the ice cores is quite two faced. ...

Actually, it was my way of showing disgust with the alarmist spin which
dominated the publicity related to the recent ice core paper. You are
correct in recalling that I do not take it as proven that the ice cores
are properly dated. It is not in the least two-faced, however, to pose
the "if, then" type of reasoning which I have done.

... The ice cores provide a record said
to represent of changes over more than 500,000 years. Since you have
suggested that the Earth is much younger than that, why are you relying on
data from the ice cores to support any conclusion? ...

It's an "if, then", conditional argument.

... Afterall, that the date
model is correct is central to your argument that the warming preceeded the
CO2 increase. Have you now decided to accept the date model(s) for the
ice cores?

Accept? It depends. Embrace? No.

...If the warming in the distant past resulted in
increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations after 800-1,000 years, perhaps
the same thing is happening now due to what happened, temperature-wise,
800-1,000 years ago.

No, Nuke, there is no physical reason to connect the two episodes of CO2
changes, as has been pointed out to you before. ...

The first IPCC pointed to the CO2-temperature correlation from the
then-extant ice core record as policy relevant. Live and learn, eh? The
alarmist icons drop like flies, and many appear wont to forget. What
will be the next icon? Perhaps a narrowing down of the best guess on
climate sensitivity value will be portrayed as a kind of bullseye?

... The Earth was different
back then, compared to the present, because of the ice sheets. The major
alteration of the Earth as the ice sheets melted has no analog in today's
world, AIUI. If you think you can show that there is some similarity,
you are free to publish your theory of cause and effect.

That's a fair argument, and if the articles about the recent ice core
findings had a bottom line like yours, I probably wouldn't even have
brought up the issue of the observed lag of CO2 rise after temperature
rise.

Very truly,

Steve Schulin
http://www.nuclear.com