13

Historical Carbon Dioxide Record from the Vostok Ice Core

Posted by $ AJAshinoff 8 years ago to Science
117 comments | Share | Flag

The Vostok Revelation by Me. https://www.amazon.com/Vostok-Revelat...

General web searching my novel titles as I do fairly regularly I came across this bit of factual info about Lake Vostok in Antarctica. Unless I'm reading this incorrectly, the CO2 reading from tens of thousands of years ago are for the most part consistent with CO2 levels today.

If I'm reading this correctly, this deflates man made global warming entirely.

Please read and either confirm or correct.what I'm thinking.


All Comments


Previous comments...   You are currently on page 5.
  • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    I didn't say the oceans heated before the atmosphere. The Vostok Ice core shows a linkage between temperature and CO2 which has CO2 trailing temperature by up to 100 years.

    This argues for a heating mechanism other than CO2 that increases the temperature of the biosphere and leads to increased CO2 after a number of years.

    There is some interesting work by Svensmark that indicates that cosmic ray interaction with cloud cover is a climate driver driven by variations in the 11 year solar cycle.

    The has been recent analysis of the 11 year solar cycle to find a pattern that accurately predicts the variations. Climate does seem to follow this cycle. If this is the case,we should see a Maunder Minimum in the next cycle about 2030. The Maunder Minimum is associated with the little ice age. The previous cycle is associated with the rise of the black death at the end of a cold period.

    He has even speculated that the orbit of the solar system in the galactic plane causes periodic increase in cosmic rays which may account for the regular appearances of ice ages. I'm not sure I buy all this but it's interesting.

    The climate is far more complex than simply measuring CO2. It would be nice to have real science done rather than political science.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    I think that a 14% increase in green cover is more than a mild benefit. And is a couple inch sea rise a serious problem?

    My primary issue is that unless you are talking about both pro's and con's you are not doing rational analysis. There are pros. No one mentions them. And most discussions assume the most extreme warming projections.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by salta 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Ocean warming cannot be a mechanism which leads to warming climate. Oceans have huge thermal inertia, so will always be much slower to change temp than the atmosphere. Anyway, it is not an explanation unless there is a reason the oceans spontaneously heat up before the atmosphere.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by salta 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Yes, the sun generates ALL the heat which is relevant to climate. That is no surprise to anyone on either side of the debate, so I'm not sure how it is a useful point. The only variable we have influence over is how much of that energy is retained by variations in levels of CO2.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by salta 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    The mild benefits are slightly warmer climate and better crop yields (disagree with yields, but lets say its true here). The serious problems are sea level rise from reduced continental ice. I would choose to live without the mild benefits when facing moving coastlines.
    We all disagree with the damaging socialized political "fixes". We have no power to argue against them if we first deny that the problem exists. By denying we simply motivate the politicians who want to take charge.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by salta 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Not sure why you think oceans are responsible. We all know the land irradiates heat. Feel the pavement temerature in the afternoon, then at night. All land is heated by absorbing UV during the day, and cools by radiating IR 24hrs. (The ocean does as well, but less so because its surface temp does not increase during the day by much, as you said.)

    The important (continental) ice is not melted by warming oceans, but by warming climate. More snow evaporating to leave less to accumulate each year feeding the heads of glaciers. Ocean temps are very stable, as you said, they would change very little. In any case they would only directly effect Arctic (sea) ice, not continental (antarctic) ice, and we don't need to care as much about sea ice.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    A lot of carbon is held in the ocean, warmer temperatures cause the oceans to release it. So, warm the earth and CO2 rises, lagging after the heat.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • 11
    Posted by $ WilliamShipley 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Like all Global Warming advocates you talk about costs but not offsetting benefits. The CO2 itself is linked to increasing plant life all over the planet by 14% this is a big deal. It improves crop yields.

    Warming causes longer growing seasons. Milder winters prevent deaths from cold. Warm is good. Historically, people do well when the climate warms. There is increased food, trade, population. Warm times are the "golden days". When it gets cold, think famine, pestilence, the black plague.

    So why does no one mention benefits? Perhaps its because they want to herd the sheep in a specific direction. Amazingly, the solution to "global warming" seems to be to give the people in charge trillions of dollars so that we can't afford energy. Seriously?
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by Dobrien 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Temperature hot and cold All of these changes are directly determined by the amount of sunlight that we get. When the clouds clear and bathe us in sunlight, we don’t take off our jacket because of ‘greenhouse heating’ of the atmosphere, but because of the direct heat caused by the sunlight on our body. The sun’s influence is direct, obvious, and instantaneous.

    If the enormous influence of the sun on our climate is so obvious, then, by what act of madness do we look at a variation of a fraction of a percent in any of these variables, and not look to the sun as the cause?
    Reply | Permalink  
  • 10
    Posted by Dobrien 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Carbon dioxide, we are told, traps heat that has been irradiated by the oceans, and this warms the oceans and melts the polar ice caps. While this seems a plausible proposition at first glance, when one actually examines it closely a major flaw emerges.

    In a nutshell, water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much. In fact, on a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is about 3300 to 1. This means that to heat 1 litre of water by 1˚C it would take 3300 litres of air that was 2˚C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300˚C hotter!

    This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you ran a cold bath and then tried to heat it by putting a dozen heaters in the room, does anyone believe that the water would ever get hot?

    The problem gets even stickier when you consider the size of the ocean. Basically, there is too much water and not enough air.

    The ocean contains a colossal 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water! To heat it, even by a small amount, takes a staggering amount of energy. To heat it by a mere 1˚C, for example, an astonishing 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy are required.

    Let’s put this amount of energy in perspective. If we all turned off all our appliances and went and lived in caves, and then devoted every coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind and solar power plant to just heating the ocean, it would take a breathtaking 32,000 years to heat the ocean by just this 1˚C!

    In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is miniscule!
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by Dobrien 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Yes no mechanism has been put forward .I will put one forward for you the SUN.
    “[V]ariations in solar energy output have far more effect on Earth’s climate than soccer moms driving SUVs,” Southwestern Law School professor Joerg Knipprath, writes in his ‘Token Conservative’ blog. “A rational thinker would understand that, especially if he or she has some understanding of the limits of human influence. But the global warming boosters have this unbounded hubris that it is humans who control nature, and that human activity can terminally despoil the planet as well as cause its salvation.”
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by salta 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    In all reports of CO2 lagging temperature, the quoted error margin is always much larger than the estimated lag. Also, no mechanism has been put forward for the cause of any "leading" temperature change, or what would cause the CO2 to lag.
    I conclude the lag does not exist in reality. It is just wishful thinking by those who want to think fossil fuels don't contribute.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by salta 8 years ago
    The core shows that the "present-day levels of CO2 are unprecedented during the past 420 kyr", and the article references the "close correlation" between temperature and atmospheric CO2.

    We know how much CO2 we add from fossil fuels each year. We continually measure CO2 levels in the atmosphere, so we know that roughly 2/3 of the CO2 we add is absorbed by some process, and about 1/3 is retained each year in the atmosphere. In other words, there no reason to think that the CO2 would be increasing if not for human fossil fuel activity. I don't see any doubt.

    As far as how high it can go before seeing expensive problems (sea level), that is debatable.
    We pay politicians to have pointless debates, so we don't have to :)
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by CircuitGuy 8 years ago
    Modern CO2 concentrations are in the 450ppm range. (I only know that because I design medical equipment that measures CO2.) These in the data run half of that. I happen to modern CO2 from working on medical products.

    This in itself does not tell me anything about about human-made global warming. It's not something someone outside the field (like me) is going to work out with one set of data. People study it for years just to understand the models. I am confident those models will change as scientists in this field make new discoveries.

    Based on what we know now, CO2 released from burning things caused the doubling, and that increase is going to have huge net costs to people. There really isn't a good solution to prevent those costs. I question if cutting emissions could have enough impact to be worthwhile. So people look for an easy way out: maybe we'll discover one simple shocking piece of evidence upending the current understanding and showing there are no costs to to carbon emissions. This is an insane leap of wishful thinking IMHO.

    At least with this, unlike things like homeopath not working and GMOs being, I do understand the motivation to deny reality when it comes comes to global warming.

    In any case, I am fascinated by remote places like Antarctica. I like the idea of going to space, but there are remote places on earth humans can't go to personally.
    Reply | Permalink  
  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 8 years ago
    Well, according to recent reports and liberal screaming, C02 is 400 something. But the article says it's unprecedented. I've read ice core reports that have shown 3000 ppb...don't remember the dates but they were further back than 400K years.

    I have a theory, just prior to the onset of colder climate the CO2 rises to combat the anticipated influx of cosmic radiation. Carbon is an electrical dispersent. This is due to less hardy plant life dying off and not using the carbon to produce Ox. When the ice age is full blown, the carbon gets locked up and then released gradually as the ice and snow thaws.
    I therefore predict that the carbon level will stay close to where it is until we have more sustained ice and snow on the ground for longer periods of time; hastening colder and colder temperatures.

    The confounding issues we face this Grand Solar Minimum is the rapid movements of the magnetic poles and a 25% and weakening magnetic shielding; making us more and more vulnerable to cosmic radiation, increased cloud cover and, which as many are now predicting, a much worse and elongated cold spell.
    In short...The future doesn't look all that bright on any front.
    https://soundcloud.com/adapt-2030/19-...
    Reply | Permalink  

  • Comment hidden. Undo