Anderson CO2 Lags Temperature
25 February 2013
It has long been known that over the last 400,000 years CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere broadly lagged temperature changes by hundreds of years. This made sense, since it took long periods of time to warm the oceans to considerable depth and as the oceans warmed CO2 became less soluble.
The warmed oceans emitted CO2 into the atmosphere.
More recently then, it is reasonable to suspect that the increase in atmospheric CO2 since the end of the Little Ice Age has been largely or almost entirely due to the gradual warming of the oceans since then. Catastrophic man-made global warming advocates have claimed that while this may have been the case in the past, since 1975 the warming has been caused by, and therefore preceded by, increases in atmospheric CO2 due to man's use of fossil fuels.
However, actual evidence that the general temperature increase since 1975 was actually caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 was severely wanting. So has the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 preceded or followed the recent increase in temperature?
A relatively recent paper by Humlum, Stordahl, and Solheim entitled The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature published in Global and Planetary Change, Vol. 100, January 2013, p. 51-69 answers this question.
They also found that while the correlation with changes in ocean temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations was high, ocean temperature did not explain all of the CO2 changes.
Figure 1. The upper panel plots the 12-month change in CO2 (NOAA, green) for each month minus that same month 12 months earlier compared to the same 12-month change in sea surface temperature (HadSST2, blue) and the 12-month change in global surface air temperature (HadCRUT3, red).
The lower graph plots the difference of a 12-month average with the previous 12-month average for the same CO2 concentration, sea surface temperature, and global surface air temperature series.
It is clear that the changes in CO2 come after the changes in temperatures. If atmospheric CO2 increases lag temperature increases both in the recent warming since 1982 and warming periods over the last 400,000 years, then increased CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by the warming.
Adding this observation to the failure of temperatures to increase over the last 13 years even as atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased must be very disturbing to the climate alarmists.
The settled science of catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions is becoming so unsettled that we have to conclude that the hypothesis has failed.
That it has failed comes as no surprise given the basic physics of the climate which I have recently explained here.
There is no case based on climate catastrophe for forcing man to stop using reliable and inexpensive fossil fuels in favor of unreliable and very expensive energy sources such as biomass, wind generation, and solar photovoltaic or concentration plants.
This is no excuse here for destroying the coal industry and killing coal-fired power plants, discouraging oil pipelines and drilling for oil and natural gas, and condemning commercial and residential consumers to spending much more on energy that is much less reliable.
We should revisit occasionally what the proper role of government is. As the constitution was a good sense of direction, we need a core set of principles to add in order to deal with the future.
So many want to engineer society, remove risk, assist certain groups, rather than let individuals thrive and raise communities. Why?
Is Democracy where we all "get it good and hard" or is it the best means to a free society?
Should we roll with the special interests, or make the government achieve its proper role, what is that role, and how to do this?
When do deficits and governments become too large?
Government is becoming more elitist while trying to sell corrections to problems it created, what makes this possible?
This could also be inserted into the field above, or erased
Currently as a society, we are having a most difficult time discussing political issues. What is driving this? And why a rebirth in political culture would be a good thing.
Are "markets" dead as some would conjecture? Or is free enterprise what got us here?
At the heart of economics there are several possible economic schools of thought, the essence of these schools of thought and how they relate to our lives.
