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Does high levels of CO2 in the past contradict the warming effect of CO2?

The skeptic argument...

CO2 was higher in the past

"The killer proof that CO2 does not drive climate is to be found during the Ordovician- Silurian and the Jurassic-Cretaceous periods when CO2 levels were greater than 4000 ppmv (parts per million by volume) and about 2000 ppmv respectively. If the IPCC theory is correct there should have been runaway greenhouse induced global warming during these periods but instead there was glaciation."
(The Lavoisier Group)

What the science says...

When CO2 levels were higher in the past, solar levels were also lower. The combined effect of sun and CO2 matches well with climate.

Over the Earth's history, there are times where atmospheric CO2 is higher than current levels. Intriguingly, the planet experienced widespread regions of glaciation during some of those periods. Does this contradict the warming effect of CO2? No, for one simple reason. CO2 is not the only driver of climate. To understand past climate, we need to include other forcings that drive climate. To do this, one study pieced together 490 proxy records to reconstruct CO2 levels over the last 540 million years (Royer 2006). This period is known as the Phanerozoic eon.


Figure 1: Atmospheric CO2 through the Phanerozoic. Dashed line shows predictions of the GEOCARB carbon cycle model with grey shading representing uncertainty range. Solid line shows smoothed representation of the proxy record (Royer 2006).

Atmospheric CO2 levels have reached spectacular values in the deep past, possibly topping over 5000 ppm in the late Ordovician around 440 million years ago. However, solar activity also falls as you go further back. In the early Phanerozoic, solar output was about 4% less than current levels. The combined net effect from CO2 and solar variations are shown in Figure 2. Periods of geographically widespread ice are indicated by shaded areas.


Figure 2: Combined radiative forcing from CO2 and sun through the Phanerozoic. Values are expressed relative to pre-industrial conditions (CO2 = 280 ppm; solar luminosity = 342 W/m2). The dark shaded bands correspond to periods with strong evidence for geographically widespread ice.

Periods of low CO2 coincide with periods of geographically widespread ice (with one notable exception, discussed below). This leads to the concept of the CO2-ice threshold - the CO2 level required to initiate a glaciation. When the sun is less active, the CO2-ice threshold is much higher. For example, while the CO2-ice threshold for present-day Earth is estimated to be 500 ppm, the equivalent threshold during the Late Ordovician (450 million years ago) is 3000 ppm.

However, until recently, CO2 levels during the late Ordovician were thought to be much greater than 3000 ppm which was problematic as the Earth experienced glacial conditions at this time. The CO2 data covering the late Ordovician is sparse with one data point in the CO2 proxy record close to this period - it has a value of 5600 ppm. Given that solar output was around 4% lower than current levels, CO2 would need to fall to 3000 ppm to permit glacial conditions. Could CO2 levels have fallen this far? Given the low temporal resolution of the CO2 record, the data was not conclusive.

Research examining strontium isotopes in the sediment record shed more light on this question (Young 2009). Rock weathering removes CO2 from the atmosphere. The process also produces a particular isotope of strontium, washed down to the oceans via rivers. The ratio of strontium isotopes in sediment layers can be used to construct a proxy record of continental weathering activity. The strontium record shows that around the middle Ordovician, weatherability increased leading to an increased consumption of CO2. However, this was balanced by increased volcanic outgassing adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Around 446 million years ago, volcanic activity dropped while rock weathering remained high. This caused CO2 levels to fall below 3000 ppm, initiating cooling. It turns out falling CO2 levels was the cause of late Ordovician glaciation.

So we see that comparisons of present day climate to periods 500 million years ago need to take into account that the sun was less active than now. What about times closer to home? The most recent period when CO2 levels were as high as today (around 400 ppm) was around 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene. What was climate like at the time? Global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today. Sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher. There was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland. The close coupling between CO2 and climate led the author to conclude that "geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history".  (Tripati 2009).

If climate scientists were claiming CO2 was the only driver of climate, then high CO2 during glacial periods would be problematic. But any climate scientist will tell you CO2 is not the only driver of climate. Climatologist Dana Royer says it best: "the geologic record contains a treasure trove of 'alternative Earths' that allow scientists to study how the various components of the Earth system respond to a range of climatic forcings." Past periods of higher CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 warms global temperatures. On the contrary, they confirm the close coupling between CO2 and climate.

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Further reading

Science magazine have published The Mountains That Froze the World by Phil Berardelli. It explains the work of Seth Young, explaining how the world fell into glacial conditions during the Late Ordovician.

This outstanding lecture by geologist Richard Alley is IMHO considered must-viewing for anyone seeking to understand the role of carbon dioxide throughout Earth's history. The lecture is The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History

Comments

Comments 1 to 20:

  1. Marcel Bökstedt at 09:13 AM on 18 March, 2010
    The lecture by Richard Alley is good! Very convincing piece of work.

    I'm wondering a little about why the "skeptic argument" above claims that there was glaciation in the "Jurassic-Cretaceous period". It would indeed be bad for the connection to CO2 if there was widespread glaciation during this period, but I can't find anything about that.
  2. This article seems to acknowledge that the skeptics are completely right. Skeptics do not say that CO2 has no effect, but that it is not the driving force. It is acknowledged in this article that there have been other driving forces in the past that far outweighed the influence of CO2, and it is not a large leap to conclude that there are driving forces today that outweigh CO2.
    Response: The best way to determine whether other driving forces outweigh CO2 forcing is to actually examine all the forcings that drive climate today. This analysis has been done and it's found that CO2 is the greatest forcing and also the fastest rising.
  3. Sorry, but you need to keep in mind the timescales involved. Total solar irradiance has been slowly increasing for a very long time. So it has a large effect on the overall long-term temperature trend of the planet, meaning hundreds of millions of years. That's not really relevant to the timescale of the 21st century. Likewise, the glacial/interglacial cycle plays out on a 26000 - 100000 year timescale.

    In contrast, we're doubling CO2 on a timescale of a century or so. We're also pumping out CH4, N2O, halocarbons, and other greenhouse gases. Thus, if you look at the actual magnitude of the radiative forcings, over the course of the 21st century the increase in greenhouse gases has a much larger forcing than any changes in TSI, Milankovich, etc.
  4. More a question than a comment. What is the science behind the statement "solar output was about 4% less than current levels"? Is the sun's output increasing over time?
  5. Marcel Bökstedt at 08:10 AM on 25 March, 2010
    thatnumber5> Yes, the radiation from the sun is increasing. But as Ned says, it increases very slowly. I don't have a good reference for this right now, but try this wiki article on the faint young sun paradox.

    The general idea is that astronomers think that they have good models for the evolution of stars like the sun, so in particular, they can compute solar output from the age of the sun.
  6. Wow. This topic just came up in the current Greenland melting discussion (#52) so I spent a few minutes looking at denial sites. Widespread indeed is the notion that very high CO2 in geologic past coincided with glaciation and that somehow negates today's relatively paltry 370 ppm CO2. Graphs like this abound:
    -- from the "Frontiers of Freedom" website.

    There are a couple of very straight-forward holes in these denialist arguments.

    1. Ordovician CO2 over 4000 ppm and glaciation proves CO2 doesn't matter! Nope: Look at the distribution of continental landmasses of the Ordovician (~450 MY). Those "glaciers" were the south-polar ice cap. There wasn't much in the way of land in the northern hemisphere.

    2. Warming and cooling is purely cyclical! CO2 variation is natural! Sure, there are natural cycles. But something very important and very obvious changed over the geologic time scales involved that makes such simple comparison irrelevant: Plants. Lots of plants. Gymnosperms (conifers etc) originated in the late Devonian-early Carboniferous (380-300 Mya) and angiosperms (flowering plants) in the Cretaceous (100 Mya). All that carbon in the Carboniferous coalbeds? Dead plants that took CO2 out of the atmosphere. The downward trend apparent in the graph above from the Cretaceous forward? More plants. And now we've turned the downward CO2 trend around despite a world rich in plants... maybe we can hope that a whole new class of plant life comes to our rescue... but that would require evolution and the science is still uncertain on that too.
  7. muoncounter, we have a continent at the south pole now, but I suspect that if CO2 were to go over 2000 ppm today most of that ice would (eventually) be gone.

    As a rough calculation, an increase in solar irradiance by 4% over the past 400 million years would yield something like +9 w/m2 forcing. Compare that to the anthropogenic CO2 forcing of something like +1.5 w/m2 ...
  8. Ned,
    "if CO2 were to go over 2000 ppm today most of that ice would (eventually) be gone."
    Agreed. And I certainly am not questioning the role of solar irradiance.

    But the geological proof that ice once existed at our South Pole -- striated bedrock among other unmistakable features -- would still be there. So any future scientific inquiry -- if there is such an enlightened future -- would say "see, they had 'glaciers' in a time of high CO2!" and conclude that CO2 is unimportant.

    "increase in solar irradiance by 4% over the past 400 million years" ... "Compare that to the anthropogenic CO2 forcing" 400MY is time enough for evolutionary changes on the grand scale. Isn't anthropogenic forcing is on a time scale of 100s of years? Not enough time for many organisms to get ready for a warmer environment.
  9. Oh, yes, you're quite right .... I'm not at all minimizing the problems resulting from doubling CO2 on short timescales. Just pointing out that when people refer to the very high CO2 in the Paleozoic, 400 million years ago, they need to realize that it was countered by what was a much lower solar irradiance. If CO2 hadn't dropped over time, the world would be more or less uninhabitable today.

    Or, another way of putting it is that a much smaller increase in CO2 today will produce a climate that would have required much higher CO2 to achieve in the Paleozoic.
  10. Ned,
    "a much smaller increase in CO2 today will produce a climate that would have required much higher CO2 to achieve in the Paleozoic."
    That's an excellent way of putting it.

    The Ordovician's big dropoff in CO2 is usually explained by the massive, continent-wide carbonate banks (Trenton, Knox, Arbuckle, Delaware Basin, etc in the US) deposited in warm, restricted shallow seas.

    "These carbonate rocks constitute part of the “Great American Bank” (Ginsburg, 1982) that extended more than 3,000 km (1,864 mi) along nearly the entire length of what was the southern seaboard of the Laurentian continental mass" -- Pennsyvania Geological Survey

    The deposition of carbonates (Ca0+CO2->CaCO3, calcite) is linked to climatic change in this paper:
    "The accumulation of great volumes of carbonates during pre-Hirnantian late Ordovician, in regions where these deposits were previously absent, is suggested as a major sink of atmospheric CO2. This would have caused an important lowering of the average temperature". We don't see such massive carbonates deposited today.

  11. muoncounter:

    Thanks for the link to that Villas et al. 2002 paper. That's really neat. They claim that marine carbonate deposition sequestered a mass of carbon equivalent to 350 times the current quantity of atmospheric CO2! I like their explanation of the mechanisms for both the onset and termination of glaciation.
  12. Ned,
    Those mechanisms are critical to the argument over "high CO2 and glaciation=No". It is certainly clear that widespread carbonate deposition takes up lots of atmospheric CO2, but whether that alone causes an ice age isn't clearly established. It is also clear that the graph of CO2 levels taken from a denialist website, posted above (#6), doesn't take a short-term drop in CO2 due to perfectly valid geological mechanism into account.

    I have some difficulty with the mechanisms in the "Mountains that froze the world" article John references at the top of this thread. For one thing, the Appalachians weren't all done in the late Ordovician -- it took another 100 MY or so until the Alleghenian Orogeny was complete. The image below is the mid-Ordovician southern ocean:
    -- from http://www.jamestown-ri.info/acadian.htm
    All that light blue is shallow sea -- mostly between 10N and 30S latitude -- perfect environment for carbonate deposition from marine organisms.
    For another, the idea that Sr86 in Nevada is runoff from the proto-Appalachians just doesn't seem right -- on the map above, Nevada is on the 'north coast' of Laurentia, while the emerging Appalachians are on the 'south coast'.
    Other mechanisms abound in the literature, from a mega-volcano to a gamma-ray burst.

    From another key paper on this subject, "the waxing and waning of ice sheets during the Late Ordovician were very sensitive to changes in atmospheric pCO2 and orbital forcing at the obliquity time scale (30–40 k.y.)" I've even seen one author who suggests that the concentration of continental land masses at the south pole would perturb the earth's orbit -- but that's a much longer-time scale event.

    Please note that I accidentally italicized the last sentence ("We don't see...") in #10. That was my statement and not part of the referenced article.
  13. Thanks, muoncounter.

    Also, re: Please note that I accidentally italicized the last sentence ("We don't see...") in #10. That was my statement and not part of the referenced article.

    Yes ... and I solved that by inserting a "/i" tag (in brackets) at the beginning of my comment.

    :-)
  14. How is solar heat output determined for periods before direct measurement? I ask because the article says solar output was 4% lower during the Ordovician but I can't tell how the number was arrived at.
  15. doug_bostrom at 10:18 AM on 11 August, 2010
    Here's an excellent writeup on main sequence stars rcglinksi.
  16. Watts has just posted a new article

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/10/study-climate-460-mya-was-like-today-but-thought-to-have-co2-levels-20-times-as-high/

    It refers to a new study in PNAS
    http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/02/1003220107.abstract?sid=08063fb7-c9e9-48d7-a515-b3db8907505c

    Hope you can comment on this soon.
  17. doug_bostrom at 11:39 AM on 11 August, 2010
    Robert I don't see anything unusual there. WUWT folks are angry because some poor scientist found out something boxing them in a little bit more.
  18. Thanks Doug.
  19. I think the argument about CO2 levels in the deep past is a bit of a red herring. Yes, CO2 levels were FAR higher in the Ordovician but, correct me if I'm wrong, there were also no land based life forms. Not even land based plant life.

    Doesn't that make it a little pointless what the CO2 levels were 500 mya?
  20. Just reading through the posts and I noticed your comment. There were land based life forms during the Ordovician. Plant and animal life. I don't know where you heard that there weren't. There was a major extinction event but this just led to a reduction of biodiversity.

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