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Patrick Kelly wrote:
> One of the things about long term trends that comes out in both The
> Weather Makers and An Inconvenient Truth is that we are now well
> outside the historical range of temperatures. If you look at the
> Wikipedia entry on "global warming" there are number of graphs of
> temperatures and CO2 concentrations that now go back hundreds of
> thousands of years. This one illustrates the close correlation between
> temperature and CO2 concentrations.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
>
Hi Patrick & All, Nov 24, 2006
Your e-mail opens many topics but, to avoid discussing an armload of
questions at once, I will respond selectively.
I tend to avoid Wikipedia and most internet sources because so much
content is intentional trash, but taking the contents on this site at
face value-- I see good indications that high temperatures leads to high
CO2, precisely what one would expect from soil science and horse sense
considerations but nothing that would show elevated CO2 to be a 'cause'
of high temperature.
The opening figure (these figures are unfortunately not numbered so
far as I noticed) has displayed in the left panel Vostoc temperature and
Vostoc CO2 with present on the left, so time runs from right to left.
Looking first at the right hand side of the peaks, both CO2 and
temperature rise at about the same time. This could mean EITHER (1) that
high CO2 leads to high temperature OR (2) it could mean that high
temperature leads to high CO2.
The left side of these peaks allows one to chose between these
alternative conclusions because temperature almost always falls before
CO2, in some cases by as much as 10,000 years later. If high CO2 were
the cause of high temperature then temperature would tend not to fall
until CO2 had decreased. A lag in CO2 decrease, after a decrease in
temperature, is on the other hand exactly what one would expect if the
elevated CO2 were a product of elevated temperature, because the onset
and rate of decrease of CO2 (net carbon capture if you wish) will be
conditioned by all factors that influence photosyntheses and not only by
factors the influence release of fixed carbon.
Therefore, based on the opening figure, one must conclude that the
tendency for positive association between CO2 and temperature reflects
greater release of fixed carbon at high temperatures and does not
reflect an effect of CO2 on temperature.
Moving on to a second figure, positioned on the lower right I think,
one has a chart of Standard Deviations from Mean of Vostoc CO2 data for
the last 400,000 years
along with EPICA Dome C temperature (whatever that is). In agreement
with the opening figure, decrease in CO2 lags decrease in temperature by
up to 10,000 years (at about 330,000 BP), leading to the same
conclusions as above.
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