Antrhopogenic Global Warming III

CO2 and Temperature: When the Earth is Cooling and Heating Up

First a correction …

In Anthropogenic Global Warming II, someone mis-wrote that the sea levels are still rising at about 1 inch per year. It was supposed to say 0.1 inches per year. I’ll blame it on the Editor. Or Substack. Or the Computer. Or Google.

NO ! Wait ! Just In ! An anonymous source who has spoken to an un-named government official who has information from a High-Level Intelligence Source is reporting that all 47 U.S. Intelligence Agencies believe this to be consistent with a typical Russian Mis-Information Campaign ! The Russians have apparently hacked not only my computer, but also my microwave, my toaster, my COFFEE GRINDER (that’s what really got me), and even my WOOD STOVE !

So, back to work — The last posting in a nutshell (the Cliff Notes Version):

• The world is, and always has been, on a long time scale, cooling.

• About 3 million years ago we entered into a period of Glaciation and had our first Ice Age. Our climate now is about 90% Ice Ages with short Inter-Glacial periods, about 12,000 years long, about every 100,000 years (see Figure 1, far below following these very important Bullets). Ice Ages are now the rule, not the exception. We are fortunate to be living in one of the brief Inter-Glacial periods ! And we may have another few thousand years to enjoy it, and then real estate prices where I live will plummet. I should have bought property in Mexico as did one of my brothers. Now might be a very good time to read the poem Hamatreya by Emmerson (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52341/hamatreya).

• Temperature changes alone can account for 80% of CO2 changes in the atmosphere. Temperature changes cause CO2 changes — that’s what the DATA say, regardless of what Al Gore says.

• And, most importantly, the next time you’re standing in a Subway Station and someone comes up to you with a gun and asks, “On average how many years does it take for the Earth’s Atmospheric CO2 concentration to adjust AFTER the Earth’s Temperature has changed?” you can raise your hand and say “I know, I know” and tell them that the Canonical number is 800 years.

Figure 1. Length of the last 8 or 10 Inter-Glacial Periods. Does each one have a fancy name (e.g., Holocene, Eemian, etc. ) ?

That last bullet point, saying CO2 lags Temperature by 800 years is really too simplistic. Let’s go back to the Vostok Ice Core DATA and look at the present (Holocene [and really, that won’t be on the test]) and penultimate (next-to-last) Inter-Glacial Period.

I submit that “penultimate” is a completely useless word in the English Language because hardly anyone except Bridge Players seem to know what it means, and Bridge Players are going extinct at about the same rate as nuns in the Catholic Church. Instead of saying the “Penultimate Inter-Glacial Period”, I might as well have said the “Eemian Inter-Glacial Period”; both would have been similarly UN-meaningful to just about everyone in the world. On the other-other hand, just to prove me wrong (I’m pretty sure you can find anything on the Inter-Web today, well, except a real wolf pup) I found this website:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/penultimate-interglacial-period

where they told me the name of the penultimate Inter-Glacial is the Eemian, though they didn’t tell me how to pronounce it. So, maybe I’ll just stick with “last one before this one” or “the previous one about 125,000 years ago”.

Anyway, shown below in Figure 2 are the last two Inter-Glacial Periods. As opposed to my previous graphs, time now goes backwards not forwards (hey, I’m a Physicist and know how to do such trivial things such as make time go backwards): going to the right you are going backwards in time, moving to the left you see what happened as it happened.

Figure 2. Temperature and CO2 Data from the Vostok Ice Core for the current and previous Inter-Glacial Periods. It is 10,000 years per major division on the horizonal axis.

For both these Inter-Glacial Periods, as the Earth heats up (moving right to left on the graph) we observe that there is just a small-almost-hard-to-see-even-if-you-squint-imperceptible delay of CO2 with Temperature (the Blue and Pink lines are almost right on top of each other). However, when the Earth cools off, (at the end, or left-hand side, of the previous Inter-Glacial Period, about 120,000 years ago) it takes a very long time for CO2 to decrease, like way more than 10,000 years. This feature is not unique to the last Inter-Glacial Period about 125,000 years ago — it can be see at the end of all the 8 or 10 (depending on how you count them) previous Inter-Glacial periods over the last 800,000 years. CO2 will not stop the coming of the next Ice Age, so buy your Chinese Ductless DC Inverter Heat Pumps today while you still can (see my post https://timellison.substack.com/p/why-in-2020-do-people-still-heat).

It turns out that pretty much everyone, except perhaps Al Gore, has known this all along (See Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Common (but maybe forgotten ancient) knowledge.

The vast majority of CO2 (which is plant food, not a pollutant) is stored NOT in the atmosphere but rather in the oceans. The gas in the oceans can be released very quickly when the Earth heats up (I conjecture that this is due to very small microscopic bubbles rising to the surface when the oceans are releasing CO2), but it takes 10’s of thousands of years for CO2 be re-absorbed into the oceans via diffusion as the Earth cools.

You could perhaps do a fun experiment for some Extra Credit if you are a Skeptic, which is a good thing, not a bad thing, except if you’re an Anthropogenic Global Warming Skeptic, then it’s a VERY BAD thing. Set 10 cans of your favorite soft-drink someplace and leave them there for a day or so to equilibrate. Then, pick up one can very gently, point the opening towards your face, and pop it open. This is the control. Then shake all the other 9 cans for lets say 5 - 10 seconds [record how long in your logbook along with the date and time and the instrument used for timing and it’s record of calibration of course use a pen], just putting a wee bit of energy into them. Then pick up one of the shaken cans, again point it at your face so you can get a clear look, and pop it open. I’d recommend doing this standing naked in the shower wearing some safety goggles. There are still 8 more cans left, so the fun has just started ! How long does it take the CO2 gas to get re-absorbed into the water ? I’ll bet a nickel, or a million [Zimbabwe] dollars, it will certainly be longer than it took the for the CO2 gas to come out of the water.

Inquiring minds want to know !

If you do this experiment, please make a video and post it onto YouTube for sure — perhaps one of those funniest-home-video channels. You might get lots of followers and I’d sure like to include it in any future Colloquiums or Seminars I might (yeah, right) give. You could even make a pretty graph: plot the weight of each can afterwards vs. the time you let it stand before opening (or measure the volume of the remaining liquid). And, of course, repeat this experiment several times: we’ll want to put some error bars on that plot which will make the plot look so much more professional !

Hey, we got these totally ridiculous “Shut-Down” and “Social-Distancing” things going on that are not at all based on any DATA (just Stories and Narratives repeated endlessly by our “free press” and “leaders”), and the bars are closed, and there’s no dancing or singing allowed, and I can’t remember the last time I got (censored), so, what the hell, wouldn’t it be fun to do a cool Science Experiment with your SO in the shower ? You could even light some candles. Just don’t splash any water onto your Logbook.

As you can see, this Shut-Down stuff is driving some people CRAZY !