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From post # 115:

Quote:I’m not sure if this has been pointed out by others – it probably has been explained somewhere. The 800 year CO2 release lag has been explained by the fact that it takes time for oceans to warm up and to release CO2. If you think about it, the release process must be faster than the take-up process. As the ocean warms the CO2 is released from a volume of water. However, as the ocean cools the CO2 can only be taken up at the surface of the ocean. I am not certain is 5,000 years is the correct take-up lag, but you can see all across the Vostok data that CO2 take-up is slower than CO2 release.

Why is this important? It is important because all through the CO2 take-up lag period we see temperature falling even though CO2 remains high. Pretty strong evidence in my view that CO2 is not the temperature culprit.
(Graph © Jo Nova’s Skeptic’s Handbook)

Reply from post # 116:

Quote:The cause for the delay is not as you described. The way temperatures are inferred from the ice cores is effectively a measurement of the temperature of the oceans. It counts on the fact that di-hydrogen oxide evaporates differently than di-deuterium oxide and the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the ice reflects the ocean temperature (where most of the evaporation occurs).

The only mechanism that can account for the lag is biology. Any change owing to changes in the ocean temperature and relative CO2 solubility will occur concurrent with temperature changes. Life on the other hand takes time to adapt CO2 to optimum levels, which as far as biomass is concerned, is far higher than it would be in the absence of biomass.

The planet wide biomass is dependent on 4 factors. The amount of sunlight, the amount of water, the amount of CO2 and the amount of surface conducive to biomass growth. It’s crucial to recognize that all of the carbon sequestered in the biosphere was at one time part of a CO2 molecule. This even includes the carbon in plastics derived from hydrocarbons!

As CO2 levels rise, biomass will grow faster. As planet wide biomass increases, more biomass dies on an annual basis. As biomass dies, it decomposes into CO2 and CH4, which increases the steady state atmospheric CO2 and CH4 allowing biomass to grow faster. This process can occur relatively fast as temperatures are increasing, sequestering natural sources of CO2 into the biosphere as fast as it’s released. As temperatures decrease, the CO2 levels will remain relatively high as a larger proportion of biomass dies than is replaced in the following season and the accumulated CO2 must leave the atmosphere by being sequestered as fossil fuels and carbonates which is a far slower process than the build up of biomass as temperatures increase.

If you look at newer cores, the asymmetry is even more apparent. However the temporal resolution of the Vostok core is rather poor, so the 800 year lag has a lot of intrinsic error, plus this specific measurement reflects a worst case. The newer cores show a lag from rising temperatures on the order of 1-2 centuries and a lag as temperatures fall of 3-4 centuries. These measurements I quote are not the worst case lag (as is implied by this specific Vostok analysis), but the average lag over a million years as calculated using a time slewed correlation procedure. This identifies the lag which when applied to temperature variability is the most highly correlated to the CO2 variability and is a normal statistical process used to determine cause and effect from sampled data where the sample space is on the order of the relative lags.