What do you say about the data that concludes that co2 concentrations only increase after warming.?

Question

Can this be accepted among bloggers as fact? A simple experiment at home, can verify this principle. Take two carbonated drinks and set one on the kitchen counter for an hour at room temperature. Put the other one in the oven for the same amount of time at a warm temperature. Taste each sample to see which has become more flat. The one that is flat will have yielded the most co2. This proves only that a heated liquid will lose more co2 than a cool one representing what the earth's oceans must also do. The idea in it's simplest form seems to help make the data credible. With this in mind, how could researchers expect to make a correlation between co2 and warming that reflects the exact opposite of what can be readily verified by the ametuer at home?

Answer 1

I'd say that this conclusion is correct only part of the time.

It is incorrect to assume that CO2 must ALWAYS follow or ALWAYS lead temperature change. Global warming deniers like to argue that CO2 sometimes lags temperature change, such as when the climate “flops” from a glacial period to an interglacial period. OK -- this is true; but, CO2 is NOT the cause of these changes; the cause of this climate “flop” is changes in Earth’s orbit (Milankovitch cycles).

I know that this is very difficult, but greenhouse gases work as a forcing agent and as a feedback agent.

Also, there are instances in the past in which the relationship was the other way around, such as tens of millions of years ago when Earth was more volcanically active. The cause of a warmer earth was probably the result of CO2 from a large number of sub-marine volcanoes.

Another instance in which CO2 concentration leads temperature change is our current global warming. Since the time of industrialization, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by over 35%. It’s been well established that this increase in CO2 concentrations is almost entirely due to human activities and not to some natural source.

This fact is established because 1) humans have burn enough fossil fuels to raise the atmospheric CO2 level to above 500 ppm. The only reason why the concentration is not as high as this is because the ocean acts as a buffer, or a sink, that swallows up some of the atmospheric greenhouse gasses. As the oceans become warmer, they will absorb less gas and will begin to release more of their stored greenhouse gasses.

And 2) Burning fossil fuels changes the ratio of naturally occurring carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels were formed millions of years ago. They therefore contain virtually no carbon-14, because this is an unstable carbon isotope. Carbon-14 is usually formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, and has a half-life of around 6000 years. So a dropping concentration of carbon-14 can be explained by the burning of fossil fuels. Studies of tree rings have shown that the proportion of carbon-14 in the atmosphere dropped by about 2% between 1850 and 1954. After this time, atmospheric nuclear bomb tests wrecked this method by releasing large amounts of carbon-14.

Fossil fuels also contain less carbon-13 than carbon-12, when compared with the atmosphere. This is because fossil fuels are derived from plant matter. Plants preferentially take up the more common carbon-12. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere and ocean surface waters is steadily falling, showing that more carbon-12 is entering the atmosphere.[1]

So to conclude, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are currently increasing because of mankind, and the data proves this. As Dana said above, your simple experiment only shows that a gas is less soluble in a warmer liquid than in a colder liquid.

Answer 2

Carbon dioxide gas is transparent to radiation in the shortwave spectra, and opaque to radiation in the long wave spectra. So it necessarily acts as a greenhouse gas. Regardless of the fact that CO2 is less soluble in warm water. In short, CO2 acts as both a climatic feedback and a forcing.

Also, all the "mights" and "likely's " you see us AGW theory proponents tossing around are not the language of skepticism, they are the language of science. Nothing is science is absolutely certain. Only fools and GW denialists state otherwise.

Answer 3

Because they get payed millions and make Gore millions by saying that it is not natural. And yet there was supposedly an ice age? Nope change over the globe is not natural. But it is there is a extreme cooling after an extreme warming, and an extreme warming after cooling. Watch this video, it proves more of what your saying

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=...

And I have to add my favorite quote just to p**s liberals off even more... “The temperature of the planet has increased about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century. So imagine a summer afternoon when it’s 63 degrees and the next thing you know it’s . . . 64 degrees. Ahhhh!!!! Run for your lives, everybody! Women and children first!” ~ Ann Coulter

Answer 4

If in the past, the Earth has gone through warming periods which has caused the CO2 to rise, it stands to reason that there are natural causes for warming other than CO2 and that the current warming may be caused by predominately natural causes.  

Believers tend to find all the proof that they need for AGW in their hearts.  They intuitively know that humans have been poisoning the environment, and destroying nature since the begining of civilisation.  They also intuitavely know we are changing the climate.  No amount of objective science is going to change this belief.

Answer 5

I say you haven't shown the data.

If you had, the data that you're referring to would show that most of the warming occurred only after the CO2 levels were elevated, implicating CO2 in most of the warming (Caillon et al., 2003, Science magazine):

Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III

http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/...

"...at low accumulation sites such as Vostok, ice may be 6000 years old. The gas age–ice age difference ( age) may be uncertain by 1000 years or more and thus obscures the phasing of gas variations with climate signals borne by the ice."

"First, the 800-year time lag is short in comparison with the total duration of the temperature and CO2 increases ( 5000 years). Second, the CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation (Fig. 3)."

"The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter  4200 years of the warming.  The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks that are also at work for the present day and future climate."

So CO2 is still associated with most of the rise in temperatures, over 4200 years.  The ice core data also has a resolution issue due to the way it forms over hundreds of years, and uncertainty in the data is greater than the theoretized time lag, so who knows if it the timing portion of the theory represents the way the warming actually occured.

We do know that CO2 has lagged temperature rise for the first 1/5 of the rise time in some cases, but that's not true for all cases.  In some past cases of warming, the CO2 rise seemed to directly cause the warming and the associated species extinctions:

Climate Model Links Warmer Temperatures to Permian Extinction

http://www.physorg.com/news6003.html

"The CCSM indicated that ocean temperatures warmed significantly at higher latitudes because of rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The warmer temperatures reached a depth of about 10,000 feet (4,000 meters), interfering with the normal circulation process in which colder surface water descends, taking oxygen and nutrients deep into the ocean.

As a result, ocean waters became stratified with little oxygen, proving deadly to marine life. Because marine organisms were no longer removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that, in turn, accelerated warming temperatures.

"The implication of our study is that elevated [carbon dioxide] is sufficient to lead to inhospitable conditions for marine life and excessively high temperatures over land would contribute to the demise of terrestrial life," the authors conclude.

But what can we learn from your point that warm liquid holds less gas than cold liquid?  That shows that the oceans make a less efficient carbon sink as they warm, so they'll contribute net carbon as we heat the overall system.

Answer 6

So you're suggesting that humans can't cause atmospheric CO2 concentrations to increase no matter how much CO2 we emit?

That doesn't really make much sense, does it?  Especially since we know from isotopic ratios that humans are responsible for essentially all of the atmospheric CO2 increase (from 280 ppm to over 380 ppm) over the past 150 years, as discussed here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=8...

Your 'simple experiment' has simply shown that CO2 is less soluble in warmer water.  We already knew that.  However,  it certainly doesn't prove that CO2 concentrations *only* increase after warming.  In fact, we know that's wrong.

Answer 7

The data says that about past warmings, but NOT this one.  Which is actually proof that this warming is not natural, like those in the past.

CO2 works TWO ways.  It causes warming by the greenhouse effect, and it is released from ocean waters as they warm.  This is the most simple, basic science, undisputed by any scientific "skeptic".

In the past warming started for natural reasons.  The rise in CO2 came hundreds of years later, as it was released from ocean waters.  The process takes time.

This time the data is very different.  CO2 and temperature are going up simultaneously.  That has NEVER happened before.  It's obviously because this time, CO2 is causing most of the warming.

More about it here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=1...