Could someone explain...?

Question

how the common skeptic arguement that CO2 lags temperature rather than leads can be answered in laymans terms?

Answer 1

its a 'vicious circle' (positive feedback).

extra heat causes extra co2 emissions to the atmosphere, as cliff says.

extra co2 in the atmosphere causes extra heat, by the physical process known as the greenhouse effect.

this is how such rapid warming occurs when an ice age ends.

Answer 2

Not only has CO2 lagged temperature, but the Earth has gone from warm phases into cooling phases when CO2 levels were at record highs and from cold phases to warming phases when CO2 was near record lows.

Historical climate reconstructions don't prove CO2 causes warming.  They are more consistant with CO2 causing cooling.

Answer 3

FARTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

Answer 4

When the ocean warms (by whatever cause), it loses it's ability to store as much CO2. So it slowly starts to emit the stored CO2 into the atmosphere. This causes the amount of CO2 in the air to increase. The increased CO2, then causes additional warming.  The warming of the ocean to this point takes centuries, which is why the CO2 lags the initial warming.

This is a well understood process among climate scientists.  It's only the scientifically uniformed (like many around here) who think it proves global warming theory is wrong.

Answer 5

Quickly review the chart "CO2 & avg temp vs. time, for the last several 100,000 years." That might help.

Answer 6

It means that higher temperatures lead to higher CO2 levels, not higher CO2 leading to higher temps.

In other words there is more CO2 in the atmosphere because temperatures have gone up. (The temps went up first and CO2 is the result, not the cause.)

Answer 7

Warming causes increased CO2 release but only on time scales way larger than what we are observing. The argument makes the common skeptic error of confusing vast time scales in the past with short time scales in the present.

Answer 8

It is actually quite simple.

CO2 is much more readily dissolved in colder water than warm.

Most of the earth's surface is covered by water.

This becomes a vast sink(the ability to absorb) this gas.

As temperature of the water increases, it can no longer sink the gas.

If the water temperature increases sufficiently, the sink can eventually become a source(producer) of the CO2.

The same thing happens with a carbonated drink such as Coca Cola.

If you open a warm can of a carbonated drink it will rapidly spill over because the CO2 is only in solution due to the increased pressure inside the container, once the container is at atmospheric pressure, the CO2 gas is rapidly released, causing the contents to spill out.

Answer 9

Ice samples were drilled in Vostok Antarctica.  These ice cores were analyzed for layer thickness and gas composition in the ice.  The data can be extracted back 450,000 years.

What was discovered is that temperatures trends lead co2 trends by about 800 years.  That is, as temperatures start to increase, co2 is still falling in quantity.  After that, both temperature and co2 increase.  Then for some reason, temperatures decline while co2 levels continue to increase.  After about 800 years both co2 and temperatures decline.

This cycle was observed several times in the ice.

Clearly there is no relation between co2 and temperatures, but there is a relationship between temperatures and co2.  Increased temperatures is what cause increased co2.

Answer 10

It can't. The AGW advocates claim it's only a measuring error due to the time scale involved. But the data is still there, after fine tuning and correction, CO2 goes up after temperature. As the oceans warm, they release some of the massive amounts of CO2 they have stored, when they cool they absorb more CO2.

We'll have to see what happens to CO2 levels now that it looks like we're in for at least a decade of cooling instead of warming. If the CO2 level continues to climb despite ongoing cooling, some theories will need to be reconsidered.

Answer 11

Ahh Yes.  

It seems like you have caught on to one of the biggest part of the scams of global warming.  Saying Carbon Dioxide causes global warming is like saying the rooster's crowing causes the sun to rise!

Answer 12

unsure.

Answer 13

Anything that stores CO2 is called a carbon sink.  The oceans are the largest carbon sink on the planet.  As the oceans warm, the CO2 that is trapped is volatilized (becomes a gas) and released into the atmosphere.  So its the warming (first) that releases the CO2 (second).

Most of the graphs that you see show you that CO2 and temperature are very similar graphs, but they're also usually showing you huge time scales like 10,000 years or something like that.

If you look at the graph of the 20th century you see that the two data sets are still similar, but the resolution is great enough that you can look at the dates and see that the CO2 level for 1998 is directly in line with the temperature for 1938 (the hottest year in the 20th century).  The lag betwen CO2 level and temperature can be anywhere from 50 - 1000 years depending on the amount of warming.

Hope this helps.

Remember, there are three types of lies; Lies, d**n Lies, and Statistics

Answer 14

The explanation is actually quite simple. CO2 levels historically lagged behind temperature increases because CO2 wasn't the initial cause of those warmings. This is much different than today because increasing CO2 levels are the primary cause of the warming.

The reason for the lag can be explained fairly easily as well. Some other forcing, say variations in Earth's orbit, initially caused the planet to warm. Since carbon dioxide is less soluble (it doesn't dissolve as easily) in warm water, the warming oceans began to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This added CO2 resulted in an enhanced greenhouse effect, which further exacerbated the warming.

Here's a slightly more in depth and perhaps better written explanation:

http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/0...