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Carbon Dioxide: Our Salvation from a Future Ice Age? [Stoat]
Well no, of course not. But since its popped up on wiki I suppose it needs discussion (which is, astonishingly, what is currently happening on wiki, rather than a flame war; how novel).
“We are probably entering a new ice age right now. However, we’re not noticing it due to the effects of carbon dioxide,” says researcher Professor Lars Franzén.
That is rubbish. How do I know? Because there is quite a long history of papers about the “end of the current interglacial” and they reach very different conclusions. Quite how Prof Lars has managed to miss them I don’t know. He has a paper out, though, The potential peatland extent and carbon sink in Sweden, as related to the Peatland /Ice Age Hypothesis in the journal “Mires and Peat”, not hitherto noted as a top-notch climate journal. The sane bit of the paper is some estimates of how much uptake Swedish peat bogs might be making. The insane bits are a massive extrapolation in a desperate attempt to be globally relevant. But even that, to me, doesn’t justify his quote above (well, his quote above is incoherent. I assume that he meant to say something like “we would be entering a new ice age were it not for the effects of anthropogenic CO2″. That is coherent, but wrong).
Anyway, enough nonsense, what about the misc refs that make me so sure its nonsense? Determining the natural length of the current interglacial is one:
No glacial inception is projected to occur at the currentatmospheric CO2 concentrations of 390 ppmv (ref. 1). Indeed, model experiments suggest that in the current orbital configuration—which is characterized by a weak minimum in summer insolation—glacial inception would require CO2 concentrations below preindustrial levels of 280 ppmv (refs 2, 3, 4). However, the precise CO2 threshold4, 5, 6 as well as the timing of the hypothetical next glaciation7 remain unclear.
Or if you’d like something older, wiki quotes Berger and Loutre, 2002: with or without human perturbations, the current warm climate may last another 50,000 years. The reason is a minimum in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
For extra fun value, WUWT noticed it but can’t seem to decide if the correct response is “ha ha, we told you, CO2 is good” or “but we know that CO2 doesn’t affect the temperature”.
2012-11-09 15:44:35
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2012/11/09/carbon-dioxide-our-salvation-from-a-future-ice-age/
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