On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 07:29:54 +1100, "Trevor Wilson"
wrote:

You can't have it both ways.

**Of course you can. High CO2 levels lead to rising temperatures.
High temperatures drive CO2 out of solution from the oceans. When
one rises, the other follows.

Maybe. If each factor causes an increase in the other, then their
respective values will increase until some other limit is reached.

**Maybe. Maybe not. We are entering uncharted territory. This giant
experiment has no definitively known outcome.

I do wish you would cease trivializing this point. It's not uncharted
territory, the great unknown, or magic. It's simple logic. If either
factor causes the other to increase, then both will increase until
some other limit is reached. From the historical data, it appears
that both temperature and CO2 are cyclic rather than constantly
increasing. Therefore, something is causing both CO2 and temperature
to drop. Since nobody seems to know what might be causing this
decrease, Occam's Razor suggests that it might be far simpler to
assume that bother factors do NOT cause each other to increase
endlessly, and that temperature and CO2 are not as tightly coupled as
you suggest. Even better, the Vostok-Petit graphs clearly show CO2
following temperature, not the other way around.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/Vostok_Petit_data_03.jpg

Agreed. The problem is in the numbers, or rather the models. My
confidence level in the models that demonstrate causality and
significance are not quite a certain as yours.

**Fair enough. However, I should rmind you at this point that neither of us
is a climatologist. I place my faith in the climatologists to tell me about
the climate.

I don't place my faith in experts. I've been screwed by alleged
experts and have seen from the inside how they operate in a different
industry. In this case, the problem is funding. It's almost
impossible to get funding for AGW research intended to disprove the
IPCC consensus. Well, not impossible if you don't mind taking money
from big oil. If someone does manage to produce an unfavorable
report, their funding magically goes away.

How soon we forget Global Cooling:
http://archive.glennbeck.com/2006news/newsweek-coolingworld.pdf

Incidentally, experts are often wrong.
"Vindicated: Ridiculed Israeli scientist wins Nobel"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/10/05/international/i041311D61.DTL

**Clearly, you have not read IPCC AR4.

As I indicated previously, I read one part out of four. The physical
science basis report is what I found interesting. The rest are
summaries, guesswork, conclusions, extrapolations, predictions, and
some politics. I wasn't interested.

The IPCC very clearly states that
rising CO2 levels increase temperature and that increasing temperatures
causes higher levels of CO2.

Ummm... reading the report doesn't mean that I'm instantly converted.
I tend to be very suspicious of methodology. For example, ice cores
older than about 150,000 years are dated largely by guesswork. The
glacial creep that far back causes the distinctive annual ice layers
to blurr into mush. They also tend to form angular layers, which are
difficult to see on a vertical ice core sample. The best they can do
is correlate volcanic dust events with corresponding land based
dating.

If CO2 concentration were an important determining factor in producing
global warming, then the historical high temperatures at high
temperatures should have been maintained.

**Not necessarily. You are ignoring the possibility of some other influence
on the system. Massive volcanoes, asteriod strikes, etc. These events can
cause massive climate shifts.

Lasting how long? Looking at the graphs, it appears that CO2 and
temperature were decoupled at least 1-2 million years. I can see such
isolated events causing climate changes, but not for extended periods.
Also, the Vostok-Petit graph shows atmospheric dust concentration,
which should be an indication of volcanism and asteroid hits. No
connection with temperature or CO2.

Reminder, others agree with me. Read the comments:
http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/VOSTOKICECoreObservations_Stewart2009.pdf
http://www.denverclimatestudygroup.com

In other words, when CO2
stayed high, temperature should also have stayed high. That didn't
happen, as CO2 stayed high for thousands of years while the
temperatures dropped.

**In SOME cases, yes.

It was true in 3 out of 4 peaks as shown on the Vostok-Petit graph.
The 4th was admittedly difficult to determine because the temperature
did not drop as rapidly as the other peaks.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558