Arguments
Do high levels of CO2 in the past contradict the warming effect of CO2?
What the science says...
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Basic
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Intermediate
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Climate and CO2 levels have always varied together. During past ice ages CO2 levels were low, and during warm periods CO2 was higher. |
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Climate Myth...
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)
Climate and CO2 levels have always varied together. During ice ages CO2 levels were low, and during warm periods CO2 was higher. In the Eocene (56-34 million years ago) there were no polar ice caps, temperatures were about 10ºC hotter than the 20th Century, and CO2 was about 1,500ppm (Westerhold et al. 2020, Rae et al. 2021). During the last Ice Age, CO2 varied between about 180 and 300ppm as ice sheets waxed and waned with orbital wobbles (Rae et al. 2021). CO2 was also about that level during the Paleozoic Ice Age, 340-290 million years ago (Foster et al. 2017).
Early attempts to estimate CO2 for that long ago in Earth’s past were broad-brush and very uncertain (eg Royer 2006), leading to the high CO2 estimates referred to in the myth. New data and refined techniques have since clarified the picture considerably. The 2006 estimates, for example, averaged data across 10-million-year timesteps, the 2017 data in the figure below used 0.5-million-year timesteps, and newer compilations don’t average across timesteps. At the same time, CO2 and temperature uncertainties have reduced considerably so that climates from the geological past are now a useful reality check for climate models (Tierney et al. 2020, IPCC 2021, see the intermediate version for more detail).
Data for the Ordovician are still quite uncertain, but they indicate CO2 was about 2,400ppm and falling before the end-Ordovician glaciation (Pancost et al. 2013). Glaciation at higher CO2 levels than today was possible at that time for a variety of reasons including a less-bright Sun back then (see the intermediate version). The Jurassic and Cretaceous span 134 million years with several hothouse episodes and several cooler episodes, with CO2 varying from about 600ppm to about 1500ppm accordingly (Witkowski et al. 2018), but there was no glaciation in that time.
Earth’s long-term climate (over millions of years) is governed by the balance between CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by volcanoes and CO2 removed from the atmosphere by weathering of rocks (Joel 2017). This has prevented runaway climates and kept Earth’s climate generally habitable for about 4 billion years, but it can be outpaced by abrupt greenhouse gas releases (e.g. at the end-Permian mass extinction), or removals (e.g. “Snowball Earth” periods).
CO2 levels for the last 420 million years, showing periods with ice ages. Note this curve is smoothed and too low resolution to show spikes in CO2, eg at the end-Permian, end-Cretaceous, PETM, etc. Data from Foster et al. nature communications 2017. Late Paleozoic Ice Age per Rolland et al. EPSL 2019. Preindustrial CO2 278 ppm, 2021 CO2 420ppm (CO2.Earth). Newer data zooming in on the last 66 million years can be found on the intermediate tab.
Last updated on 1 September 2021 by howardlee. View Archives
Thank you michael sweet and nyood for your enlightening thoughts;
I knew I was off topic, but I'm new to the forum and I didn't understand how vast the forum is. I also realize my question was more philosophical in nature and does not merit discussion on this forum...so thank you for responding. The forum seems filled with intelligent people presenting good data and I shall greatly enjoy delving through its contents.
[DB] Your question and statements were on-topic and such are always welcome here. As you note, the site is quite vast (thousands of discussion threads exist, on all of the near-several-hundred most-popular denier mantras and years of blog posts and re-posts). You can either use the Search function to find threads to review or look at the Taxonomy of denial (or sorted by Popularity).
Livinginawe @98,
You pose an interesting thought (which I think can be addressed on-topic).
In essence, I don't think mankind's could ever become saviour of a living world by boosting atmospheric CO2 levels.
If we look tens-of-thousands of years into the future, there is talk (eg see this Wikithing page, although the reference it makes Berger & Loutre (2002) is not as defininte) that in 50,000 years time the world will face an ice age that will not be dodged by our emissions. By that time the impact of our emissions on the atmosphere would be much diminished. But an ice age does not of itself reduce the amount of carbon about. Rather it sucks it out of the atmosphere into oceans and frozen soils.
While these dips in CO2 could soon make life for C3 plants very difficult, C4 plants can survive at atmospheric CO2 levels well below 100ppm. And there are also aquatic plants which maybe even benefit from colder waters enriched by CO2.
Over the longer term, hundreds-of-millions of years, the increase in solar strength will increase rainfall and thus increase rock weathering drawing down carbon into the geology via the slow carbon cycle(as this NASA web-page terms it) while the release of carbon back from geology via volcanic activity is presumably fixed and will not respond enough to compensate. Thus the 60,000Gt(C) on the planet will more-&-more become trapped in the geology (currently about 10,000Gt(C) is in trapped in rocks) and atmospheric CO2 levels will drop.
The works of man so-far have release ~700Gt(C) from FF with perhaps 1,500Gt(C) of FF reserves and so they don't amount to anything significant in the grand scheme of things.
Mind, as the sun warms the planet creating a wetter world which draws down more CO2 into the rocks, that loss of CO2 will cool the world and act as a brake on the process. The loss of CO2 would be something like 500My of the strenghening sun, so after that sort of time period the wetter climate would have no CO2 'brake'.
Over the last 50My we have seen atmospheric CO2 levels drop but that atmospherc loss of perhaps ~5,000Gt(C) was probably driven by the Himalayas being weathered down in the wet climate of the tropics with a feedback of lost CO2 cooling the climate and drawing further CO2 into the oceans (where most of the planet's carbon resides today). So the rate of loss of atmospheric CO2 over the Cenozoic era probably shouldn't be projected into the future with any confidence.
Dear all,
Life was built here during bilions of years. To preserve life for Human we need specific enviroment /forest+fields + rivers + clean water and air for health/. Increasing temperature and changed water distributions is threat for this human positive enviroment. find Reason for negative trend is not highest need , Highest need is to keep human friendly enviroment.
Like:
Plant a trees
Built artificial lakes and water dam.
Avoid water and air pollutions.
Do not concentrate populations to cities only.
Do we need fear as only motivations to do this ?
Robert Murphy#46
"And that is true, except it says nothing at all about CO2 levels." From: 'The Undesigned Universe' - Peter Ward
“ . . . it>
62:26 is these ocean state changes that are
62:28 correlated with the great disasters of
62:30 the past impact can cause extinction but
62:35 it did so in our past only once that we
62:38 can tell whereas this has happened over
62:40 and over and over again we have
62:42 fifteen evidences times of mass
62:45 extinction in the past 500 million years
62:48 so the implications for the implications
62:51 the implications of the carbon dioxide
62:52 is really dangerous if you heat your
62:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic
62:58 to melt if you cause the temperature
63:01 gradient between your tropics and your
63:03 Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
63:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen
63:11 sulfide pulses “ www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ako03Bjxv70
[BL] You have been warned before about posting comments that consist of little more than quoted material. You are skating on thin ice, approaching violation of the comments policy.
The comment you claim to be responding to (#46) was posted in 2011. Do you really expect to be engaging in discussion with that participant?
Please note that we published new versions written by Howard Lee of both the basic and the intermediate rebuttal versions today (August 31/September 1 2021 depending on where you are). Comments above this one therefore refer to what are now the archived basic and archived intermediate rebuttal versions respectively.
Please check the new versions and the many references linked in them!