| CrazyHorse said: I think most of the concern about global warming comes from data which goes back a lot longer than those 15 years. Climate records from the past ~500,000 years show that there is a clear correlation between CO2 increases and temperature increases. Most current climate research is focussed on how the Earth will respond IF the temperature does increase (i.e sea level rise, ocean circulation and heat distribution ect). It's clear from the graph (below) that temperature and CO2 are related and according to the data, CO2 increases precede temperature increase. However, the error in the measurements is more than large enough for the opposite to be true. So for me the biggest question we need to solve right now is which of the two cases is true. I'm inclined to lead towards temerature being the driving force behind CO2 increases as there is a clear mechanism we know off that allows for this (orbital variations which correspond to the cycles seen in the graph raise the Earth's temp which in turns causes the oceans to release more CO2 into the atmosphere). As far as I know there is no mechanism which could account for CO2 increasing before temperature. If that is the case the only issue left to be resolved is how large an impact the CO2 had as a feedback role in further rasing the temperature. If the CO2 did act as a feedback mechanic then that presents problems for us as our CO2 levels are currently far higher than they have ever been over the past 500,000 years.
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@the bolded red comment,
Is that a typo on your part? The red line rises on the right side of the blue line and appears to fall on the right side as well (this is clearly seen if you look at the peaks and troughs of each line relation to one another).
Second, to my knowledge both sides of the climate debate agree that there is an 800 year lag between when temperatures begin to rise and when C02 outgassing occurs as a result. Warmists believe that C02 acts in the natural system as purely a feedback mechanism but that in the case of AGW is becoming an initiator of that warming. This has been my experience reading warmist opinions like that of Gavin Schmidt of realclimate, but it is possible I assumed too broadly.
For now I'll add that until recently I thought the claim about C02 as a natural feedback for glacial to interglacial temperature transitions seemed logical and reasonable, but a recent mathematic assessment of C02 in Nature asserts that it has second-order stationarity, and that has me questioning the natural feedback concept. The paper is a recent one though so there hasn't been a lot of reaction to it yet that I've seen, for now it's a bit of a question mark both ways to me, but from my (relatively) limited mathematical skills the paper appears to be solid.
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