[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
That is why warming causes increased CO2, and why CO2 increase lags (occur after) temperature increase rather than the other way around.
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Climate science is incredibly complex, and has many factors. One recent interesting study (that may or may not be true, time will tell} is Ice Age took just SIX months to arrive... not 10 years | Daily Mail Online
Basically (from the article):
"The subsequent mini Ice Age [the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago] lasted for 1,300 years and was probably caused by the sudden emptying of Lake Agassiz in Canada, which burst its banks and poured freezing freshwater into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.
That would have disrupted the Gulf Stream - the flows of which depend on variations in saline levels and temperature - and allowed the ice to take hold [It took just six months for a warm and sunny Europe to be engulfed in ice, instead of the ~10 years they previously thought]."
There’s a lot of factors affecting climate, greenhouse gases are just one.
That in the past CO2 rise was subsequent to temperature rise (assuming this is true, I haven’t checked the data, and I’m kinda skeptical of this blanket statement as volcanoes can spew a lot of CO2 and the ash may mask any effect on temp from the CO2, etc. etc. etc., but that’s a different argument) would not be surprising, as increased temps affect the rate of chemical reactions and can lead to a net CO2 increase. However, that does not mean that a rapid increase in CO2 would not result in a corresponding increase in temps.
Thus I can’t see your argument as being “proof” that the ‘climate changers’ are wrong about the current situation. It’s also not proof they’re right.
Any proof has to be a combination of a lot of factors, analyzed by folks who haven’t drunk the kool-aid of either side.
And there are undoubtably cycles within cycles – it’s entirely reasonable to expect cooling trends within warming trends, and the reverse. With something as complicated as climate science, a steady and unvarying change in temps would be suspicious (…that the data has been ‘cooked’).
Many natural systems have built-in ‘sinks’ that maintain the status quo as things change, only reaching a ‘tipping point’ after some time (similar to titration in chem – where you can add a titrator and see no change until the endpoint is reached). If something like this exists then a large increase in CO2 won’t have much effect on temps until the endpoint is reached. I’m not arguing this is the case – we don’t know enough to say – but it’s possible that something like this does exist (say, melting much of the polar ice caps and subsequent change in albedo and/or cold water added to the seas changing the gulf stream as mentioned in the above study, or a slight rise in temps causing tundra to melt releasing methane, or…).
One thing that generally isn’t arguable is that relatively small increases in temp (<10 degrees or so) can have huge effects – ice ages or rising seas. Someone here mentioned Iowa winters – during the last glaciation 14,000BP Des Moines was the terminus of a lobe that was a couple of hundred feet thick, and took ~2000 years to retreat out of Iowa.
Messing with Mother Nature is not something lightly considered.
