The researchers also found a correlation between melting Antarctic sea ice and increasing springtime solar radiation over Antarctica suggesting a possible energy source because of sea-ice albedo feedbacks.

OMG - Antarctic sea ice now at an all-time record maximum. We must be headed into another ice age. I'll make sure the kids dress warmly for school today and watch out for Saber Toothed Tigers and Neanderthals in the parking lot.

I have agreed all along that historically, ice ages are driven by slight changes in the earths orbit which affect the amount of snow and ice and thus the albedo of the planet. The slight warming then results in the release of CO2 which provides additional warming.

In other words, CO2 amplifies the warming or cooling from the changes in the amount of solar radiation near the polar regions where there is potentially a lot of snow and ice. It is a feedback mechanism.

A lot of people wonder how the CO2 increased in the past, since humans were not the cause. What this research is showing is that it came from a slight warming of the oceans over a thousand years. What is sobering for our current situation, is that the oceans are warming too. This warming has only been going on for the last century. So, we may be in for additionals CO2 increases over the next millenium from the oceans themselves.

Currently, the oceans are removing almost half of the human CO2 emissions. If the oceans turn on us and start to release CO2 instead, then this could make for some extremely high CO2 levels.

Please note that according to the author of the study.

I don't want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn't affect climate, Stott cautioned. It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change.

"You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages."

Who makes this argument?

I don't want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn't affect climate, Stott cautioned. It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change.

Andrew,

This is the mandatory disclaimer to get the work published.

Whoa! Hold on there.
Obviously this pseudo study was funded by Exxon and is therefore just disinformation.
This science is settled. Has been for years.
There is nothing new to learn.
U of SC needs to be taxed into silence before any more damage is done to the AGW movement.
I heard that Lowell Stott once owned an SUV as well. Obvious credibility issue there.

Brett, can you offer a cite to a peer-reviewed paper that asserts that CO2 was a "prime suspect in ending last ice age"?

My read of the literature is that CO2 has been identified as an additive factor to global warming, and the anthropogenic CO2 is the driving force for the current warming we observe and predict.

Let me get this straight:
1. You admit that the CO2 rose AFTER the temperature began to rise when man could have absolutely no affect on any of this process?
2. This warming took place around 1600 years before the CO2 levels rose!

• Result: So CO2 follows temperature not the other way around!

However:
Since the invention of the internal combustion engine and the SUV you now believe:

1. The natural law of CO2 following temperature (which you have already historically acknowledged) has now been reversed.

The logic is inescapable and so clear……
Oh you would have been fun as an opponent on a debating team.

Let me get this straight:
1. You admit that the CO2 rose AFTER the temperature began to rise when man could have absolutely no affect on any of this process?
2. This warming took place around 1600 years before the CO2 levels rose!

• Result: So CO2 follows temperature not the other way around!

However:
Since the invention of the internal combustion engine and the SUV you now believe:

1. The natural law of CO2 following temperature (which you have already historically acknowledged) has now been reversed.

The logic is inescapable and so clear……
Oh you would have been fun as an opponent on a debating team.

Ahhh, the AGW Law, no wait, it's still just a theory....a theory that is everchanging.

Can we just agree as a "sophisticated" society that we should CONSERVE as much energy as is conveniently possible. As an "evil" but rational CONSERVATIVE, I'm all for CONSERVING and using efficient energy. Why? It will save me money. OK, BrooklineTom.

Most of us "yahoos" are energy efficient. CONSERVING, in every aspect, is our fundamental belief. Get it right.

Note that Stott's result appear to contradict the standard interpretation of ice-core data.

It is likely that in a few years it will be recognized that ice cores are almost impossibly hard to interpret for investigating past climates, as gases (and liquid water) keep mixing vertically throughout a glacier

Ted,

1. CO2 has historically lagged temperature.

2. It has been posited, that based on physical and mathematical models, that increased atmospheric CO2 will generally tend to increase surface temperatures.

3. Obviously, (1) calls (2), into question.

4. This discrepancy requires explanation if we are to accept (1).

5. An explanation has been offered, which as far as I understand (I'm no climatologist), goes like this:

Increased CO2 levels are not the cause of
paleoclimatic warming (at least the
end-of-ice age warming we're talking
about.) However, once the warming begins
atmospheric levels of CO2 increase as a
side effect, and then act as a positive
feedback element.

6. Thus the increased CO2 levels will still cause warming.

Now, there shoudl be serious discussion about that explanation, because it may be wrong. But it just because CO2 lags temp, does not necessarily mean that CO2 cannot also force warming.

looks like Antarctic sea ice is about to set another all time record - the greatest anomaly ever recorded.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg

Remember, Antarctic ice extent is the largest it has ever been, during the entire and lengthy history which mankind has been watching it - all of 30 years.

I keep thinking about those poor penguin chicks. The extra ice is going to force them to wait an extra day or two for their first real meal from mom. We need to warm things up to save the baby penguins.

Drive your SUV this weekend and save a penguin chick!

As is pointed out by Boris and Andrew, it is long-settled science that orbital (Milankovitch) changes initiated the deglacial warmings, but that a CO2 feedback is necessary to account for the heat needed to complete the transition. While it is clear that much if not most of the CO2 would have come from the oceans, the details of that process are murky. An exact solution to this puzzle is one of the big prizes in climate science, and it's getting a lot of attention.

In fact, just a few months ago, another team seems to have beaten Stott et al to the punch, although for some reason their press release lacks the odd claims about CO2. See also this related paper from last year, which links CO2 to the mid-Pleistocene transition, which is the other major ice age climate mystery.

Hi Steve Bloom,

Using the term "settled-science" always fills me with awe. Makes me think about a bunch of insecure geniuses in white lab coats, who are afraid to have anyone question them.

Remember that ice ages end and warming begins when CO2 is at a minimum. That should give you a clue that CO2 is of minimal importance to ebb and flow of ice ages.

Once the sun starts melting the edges of the glaciers, dark, bare land gets exposed which causes more warming and melting. This continues until the eccentricity and tilt of the earth is no longer favorable for melting, and the process reverses causing the glaciers to increase.

There is no need for CO2 involvement. The cart does not pull the horse.

Conversely, ice ages begin when CO2 is at a maximum. Look at the Vostok graphs and this will become obvious. CO2 seems to be affecting people's brains more than the snow.

Hi Steve Bloom,

it is long-settled science that orbital (Milankovitch) changes initiated the deglacial warmings

Could you please send the following letter off to Laurie David? I filled in the whole thing so you can just cut and paste.

----------------------------

Dear Laurie,

I am a strong proponent of global warming, but your books telling children that CO2 drives the cycles seen in the Vostok ice cores is incorrect. The science is long settled that orbital changes in the earth are the drivers.

Please stop polluting children's minds with junk science, and profiting from their fear.

Thank You,
Steve Bloom

This paragraph is a classic in junk science.

Cooling due to the greenhouse effect The second effect is more complicated. Greenhouse gases (CO2, O3, CFC) absorb infra-red radiation from the surface of the Earth and trap the heat in the troposphere. If this absorption is really strong, the greenhouse gas blocks most of the outgoing infra-red radiation close to the Earth's surface. This means that only a small amount of outgoing infra-red radiation reaches carbon dioxide in the upper troposphere and the lower stratosphere. On the other hand, carbon dioxide emits heat radiation, which is lost from the stratosphere into space. In the stratosphere, this emission of heat becomes larger than the energy received from below by absorption and, as a result, there is a net energy loss from the stratosphere and a resulting cooling.

http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html

So the lower atmosphere is absorbing more heat than it is releasing, and the upper atmosphere is releasing more heat than it is absorbing. And there is a mysterious new radiative energy form in the stratosphere called "heat" which is somehow different from infra-red.

And these are the people driving policy.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
Albert Einstein

Why does CO2 always have to be brought into any warming discussion? Did it not occur to anyone that all of that post ice-age warming was exclusively from the sun? And that rising CO2 levels from the oceans were just a byproduct of the warming and didn't provide any real positive feedback?
Isn't this a real possibility?

Chris, that would require a revision of some rather basic physics. No doubt Patrick will be sending a treatise on that along just as soon as he wraps up his refutation of relativity.

Chris:
" Why does CO2 always have to be brought into any warming discussion? "
That answer is simple.
Nothing other than CO2 can be used to advance the Socialist agenda.
Man causes some release of CO2. We can show through some clever junk science that CO2 could affect temperatures. We can therefore convince the stupid masses that they are responsible for a global climate crises.
With that done, we can then easily implement taxes and controls that are the hallmark of Scocialism.
It is all about power and control.
For many of us, it is really obvious.
If you are part of the massses, it is not.

Chris,

Why does CO2 always have to be brought into any warming discussion?

If you look at the Vostok data, you can see that ice ages start when atmospheric CO2 is at a peak, and they end when atmospheric CO2 is at a minimum.

Any intelligent person would recognize that pattern is completely incompatible with the AGW theory, so I guess that answers your question ;^)

If AGW was the driver of the climate, temperatures could only go one direction - up or down. They could never reverse because feedback would drive them to a "tipping point."

Personally I think the tipping point has to do with something these guys are drinking or were smoking in the 1960s.

ted,

There is no "natural law" of CO2 rises following temperature. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It warms the Earth. It doesn't matter if the CO2 rise happens on the front-end or the back-end.

Without humans present, a CO2 rise is more likely to occur on the back-end of a warming trend. However, the Earth is at a unique period in history where there is an external force -- humans -- that is unearthing billions of tons of sequestered CO2. This is unprecedented in the planet's history. Ergo, the outcome of this grand experiment will likely be unprecedented.

One good thing seems to be beginning to happen... both serious skeptics and AGW believers seem to be talking.. at least a bit to each other at realclimate.org and even at climateaudit.org. Howover, the scales seem to be tipping towards the skeptics a bit lately re: no more global rises in temps, solar activity papers, hurricane inactivity, antarctica cooling/increasing, lack of accurate surface temps, even J Hansen seems to be conceding somewhat re aerosols?
My father was a WMO meteorologist (set up stations in Bolivia and Paraguay 60-70's) and I distinctly remember him saying that you cannot judge any significant changes in weather patterns for at least 200 year records?

Patrick Henry, those Vostok samples were contaminated by meltwater as I've linked to in past thread and now grow tired of digging up the link refutation.

I wonder what this research suggests initiated the end of the last Ice Age...deep ocean clathrates being released into the atmosphere over a millenium?

It just seems to me that WAY too much importance is given to the role CO2 plays in all this, given what PH pointed out about where those levels were at the beginning and end of ice ages. If the earth today was proven to be warming by entirely natural causes, which way would we expect CO2 levels to go? Why up of course! Isn't this what is currently happening? This would be entirely within scientific reasoning given we have been warming since the last ice age. I fail to see any discrepency that things aren't going as they should be.
The cart is indeed being put in front of the horse.

Patrick,

AGW is clearly not the only driver of climate change. Volcanic eruptions with high levels of sulfate aerosols and can result in major disruptions over the short term as can sunspots. Also, changes in the amount of solar radiation received in the polar regions can also impact the climate, although on much longer time scales.

What scientist have realized after studying all the data for many years is that human induced changes have become strong enough that they have overwhelmed all the other causes.

There has been well over a billion of us for quite a while. Individually, our actions do not amount to much, but as a team the difference has become significant.

Chris,

What Mr. Bloom failed to mention is that this revision in basic physics has already taken place sometime in the last 150 years, but most likely within the last 30 years. Prior to that, normal, or ancient physics in which CO2 concentrations lagged behind temperatures was one of the basic law of physics. Very recently, in geologic terms, this law has been replaced by the new law in which CO2 concentrations drive temperature change. I would like to add that only anthropomorphic CO2 can increase temperatures. This law was written by Al Gore with the help of Drs. Hansen and Mann (and funded by George Soros).