Another Carbon Sink?

[Joanne Byers]

I have moved your recent discussion to this thread because I think it was getting off topic for the "Forests Expanding!" thread.

[nickrr]

I fail to see what ozone has to do with climate change.

I thought that the point was clear but obviously I'm going to have to spell it out. You were using the fact that CO2 has a low concentration in the atmosphere as a reason that it can't be important in climate change. I was pointing out that ozone has a much lower concentration yet is vital to life on earth as an illustration that your argument that something is not important just because there isn't much of it is bogus. I never claimed that ozone has anything to do with climate change.

But then I'm only a scientist

Not with the kind of reasoning referred to above.

The supposed "power" of CO2 as a greenhouse gas does not correlate with its very limited infrared spectrum compared with that of water. But who knows, perhaps the laws of physics have changed since I studied IR spectroscopy.

No, you just don't understand them very well. I provided you with a link showing the relative contributions of gases in the atmosphere to the greenhouse effect. If you disagree with them please provide some actual evidence. A link showing that anyone but yourself holds this view would be a good start.

I note that some of the approved A level textbooks now show water as a linear molecule, so clearly the AGW consensus has banned the hydrogen bond and is well on the way to changing the IR spectrum of water to fit the hypothesis.

What's this got to do with the discussion? Please explain.

Not that I want to challenge anyone's faith, but perhaps a believer can tell me why the ice cores show cyclic sharp rises in CO2 concentration followed by millennia of slow decline.

Please provide a link to this ice core data so we know what you are on about. Note that I have already provided an explanation for the CO2 lag so I presume that this is something different.

[nickrr]

I agree Nickrr's estimates seem a bit wild, as far as my reading goes.

I would point out that they are not my estimates. You can find the original source from the link I provided. If anyone has different estimates I'd be happy to see them.

[alancalverd]

I noticed the discrepancy shortly after the first publication of the Vostok data but I can't find the original reference. However there are plenty of published versions of the Vostok ice core data. I think this one shows the CO2 lag most clearly.

rubyelephant.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/you-dont-have-to-be-a-scientist-part-1/

[principled]

Alan

However there are plenty of published versions of the Vostok ice core data. I think this one shows the CO2 lag most clearly.

I'm sorry to say Alan, that the overlapped graphs don't seem to be that clear concerning lead and lag. Indeed, the blue (temp line) seems to be to the right of the CO2 line (best seen at 300k), which in my book is temp lag given that the x axis is time back from today.

If I'm wrong, please advise.
P

[alancalverd]

I think you have confused yourself! The lag is small (about 200 - 500 years) but the blue line clearly leads the red one at each large excursion upwards. A difficulty arises when you try to superimpose the graphs because the scales are incompatible. As you say, the blue line at 300kybp appears to be to the right of the red one, but elsewhere (e.g. 220,000) it is to the left. The key is to look at the turning points, where you can see that overall it starts to rise or fall before the red line changes direction.

The second problem that the "CO2-driven" alarmists have, is to explain why CO2 levels changed in the way that they did. Volcanic activity can produce a narrow spike that rises in days and dissipates in a few decades, but fourier analysis of the observed 100,000 year repetitive sawtooth is not consistent with sporadic volcanic behaviour - it requires a bounded (for neither temperature nor CO2 varies over a particularly big range, and the maxima and minima are remarkably consistent from one cycle to the next) nonlinear feedback mechanism, which cannot be mediated by CO2. If vulcanism really produced the CO2, what imposed such a consistent upper bound?