An Inconvenient Truth

[swansont]

Swansont

A question. When you say 8 C increase equals 80 ppm CO2 increase, are you talking about air or ocean temperature? This is significant since the ocean has warmed over the past few decades to a level that is a small fraction of the air temperature increase.

 

I was trying to give the most lenient, worst-case estimate to jryans point about how much of our recent CO2 increase could be attributed to CO2 coming out of solution. Based on the historical data, we see rather large changes in temperature over thousands of years, presumably causing these increases. Based on that, the 100 ppm increase in CO2 we've seen probably has less than a 10 ppm contribution from dissolved gas coming out of solution.

 

If someone wants to do an actual solubility calculation, please go ahead and do so.

 

 

I affirm the exponential nature of the relationship between CO2 and warming. It does not mean warming is linear, of course, since linearity results from one specific CO2 increase curve, and it is unlikely we would get exactly this curve.

 

The last few decades have seen an exponential increase in CO2 and the average warming has been close, but not exactly, linear. Predictions are dangerous and usually wrong, but I have always dived in where angels fear, etc. I predict the next few decades will see further exponential CO2 increase, coming from the explosive growth in the economies of China and other nations. Warming should be once more close to linear.

 

One should note that predicting what happens to the CO2 is different than predicting what happens to temperature given a certain increase in CO2.