I keep running into people who claim that atmospheric CO2 levels lag atmospheric temperature rises rather than lead them. That is, higher CO2 levels are a result of global temperature increases rather than a cause. I’m not a researcher in this area, so my opinion is approximately meaningless. But on basic principles, it would seem that the partial pressure (or mole fraction, really) of CO2 might be expected to increase in the atmosphere over a warming ocean containing carbonate.
Aqueous CO2 equilibria is complicated by its reaction with water, but one should still expect that the decrease in solubility of CO2 in surface waters might have some bearing on the present atmospheric CO2 levels. For a given dT of an aqueous system with dissolved CO2, how does the mole fraction of CO2 in the gas phase change? The last time I worked a problem like this Ronald Reagan was president. Sigh.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
The primary greenhouse gas is non-linear, permanent dipole molecule H2O at about 3% of air. The primary trace greenhouse gases are Enviro-whiner hydrochlorofluorocarbons, the “safe” carcinogenic and massively stratosphere chlorine-shedding alternatives to freons. They are extraordinarily potent IR absorbers in otherwise clear spectral regions. CO2 absorption bands are already deeply saturated. Adding 10% more absorber makes no difference.
The uncertainty in natural CO2 sources and sinks significantly exceeds exquisitely catalogued anthropogenic releases. An average year of global wildfires releases more than 300 times the CO2 of one year’s total petroleum recovery combusted. Hire more firefighters.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/arith.htm
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/tuned.htm
California media are inundating us with exhortations to CONSERVE!!!! Conserve this, conserve that, conserve everything! – and pay more for each and all. How much “conservation” balances 1.5 million more Mexicans smuggled across the California border each year?
An engineer’s first task in solving a problem is identifying its true cause.
I have to wonder how unbiased the “studies” claiming CO2 is or is not the cause of global warming are. Seems to me that there is big money to fund struggling research groups no matter which way you go.
I understand that the rising temperatures up north are accelerating methane formation from the tundra in the warm season. Methane is another potent greenhouse gas.
Uncle Al,
The concentration of H2O in the atmosphere stays pretty much constant. Water is consatntly evaporated into and precipitated out of the atmosphere, while the residence time of water in the atmosphere is about 10 days. But, when temperature increases, more water can be held in the atmosphere! (it’s one of those “positive feedback loops”)
Emissions of CO2 from fires have been accounted for. When forest material burns or rots (which is 100% inevitable), the carbon dioxide released is taken up by photosynthesizing organisms relatively quickly and the resulting atmospheric concentrations stay quite constant. Humans are, however, intentionally burning forests and not replanting them or allowing them to do so naturally. The system is remarkably balanced right now, the only imbalances are man-made activities. It has not always been this way, but those changes took place over massive time scales – thousands and millions of years, not decades and centuries (which are “human time scales”).
Fossil Fuel combustion on the other hand is taking millions of years worth of carbon deposition and suddenly (a blink of an eye in geologic time) releasing it to the atmosphere.
Well, if you have studied the ice core data from Vostok and Dome Concordia (both are ice staqtions in the Antarctic), you would know that at Vostok (420k year atmosphere record) and Dome C (800k year long record) you would know that temperature changes, and from between 800 to 3,200 years later CO2 levels change.
In general the last half of the Pleistocene, we have been on a 100k year long ice age clock with eight ice ages recorded at Dome C and 4 at Vostok. Each ice age can easily be seen as a long slow slide into the deep freeze, the drop in lasting about 85-90k years. We rocket out of each one astonishingly quickly with some research indicating tens to only hundreds of years to reach the peak of an interglacial. Interglacials lasting, on average, about 10-15k years. Sea level changes during the Pleistocene averaged 400 feet for each couple of ice age/interglacial. We presently sit about 100 feet below where we have ended up many times before.
Now, you have to ask yourself what would be alive at the bottom of each of those 85-90k year long deep freezes to even generate CO2. And if anthropogenic sources are progged to result in a 2 (IPCC) or 20 (Gore) foot rise, what would be able to do a 400 foot rise every 100k years, in the most regular clock we have in the geologic record?
Volcanoes? Only if they are of the ashless type, as we don’t find ash at these junctures.
All of human civilization has occurred in the last 11,500 years, which just happens to be the time we geologists call the Holocene, or the time since the Wisconsin ice age ended. According to the latest research on Arctic sedimentology, the trigger event for the start of one of those long slow slides into an ice age is the complete melting away of the Arctic ice cap. This event is currently progged to occur around the year 2070……………..
Hi Bill, Thanks for the great comment! Can you cite a reference for those of us who may want to look into this a bit further? Something a chemist or other non-geologist might understand?
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