Ice Core Record Shows CO2 Rise Happens AFTER The Warming of The Air. (Part I) Ice Core Record, CO2, Anthropogenic Global Warming, temperature, science

Ice Core Record Shows CO2 Rise Happens AFTER The Warming of The Air. (Part I)
Ice Core Record, CO2, Anthropogenic Global Warming, temperature, science< p>

XOMBA Lost my complete posting for Ice Cores and CO2, so I made it smaller and broke it into 4 parts, and I am re-posting it!. This is PART ONE (Part 1)
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By Les Porter

This posting began as a response to one of www.Xomba.com('s) radical right Republican conservatives who carries the moniker of Publius. He is not a true "Publius imitator." Below are the global warming contrarian and denier questions he posted as comments to one of my other xombyte postings:

http://www.xomba.com/a_diamond_made_from_air

At the end of this Xombyte are comments between us -- some of which I am not particularly fond of having made or "proud" of making, but warts and all --there they are.

Use this link and join me at Xomba, or use it to disagree and write whatever you want.

http://www.xomba.com/referral/77777d6e

On the "warts and all" -- as author, I CAN delete this posting, a simple way to remove them "Warts and All," and then repost this Xombyte, and the comments will be gone. Granted, these comments contain chunks of my sometimes weak (puny) character, and perhaps egotistical self-righteousness and intransigence. . .somethings I am not proud of having displayed, but. . .Many people have learned something from this xombyte -- and the comments -- so, for the time being I will leave them. -- Les Porter

If you are not aboard, get aboard! This is going to be your train wreck we are talking about. Learn about it and learn about ways to avoid the upcoming, ongoing and worsening catastrophe. It is a planetary emergency, and billions of people will likely perish. It may be a subtle and unremarkable series of weather events, and starvation, but it will be a global depopulation. Worse, it is our species that will be last to be effected, millions of other species will be extinguished before our difficulties or demise.

We can change it. But do we have the will to do it?

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The question is one all the AGW deniers use, and Publius is one of those.

The Vostok Ice Core indicates air temperature rose 800 years before CO2 levels rose. Why?

Water Vapor is the largest “potential” GHG warming component, why is it not addressed in the Global Warming picture?

Below I give these two items a once over.

Publius wrote:
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#1.---- I'm not sure I am the one in need of help. I think you may be confused about cause-effect relationships of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Look at your charts very carefully. You will notice that temperature rises first, then carbon dioxide. This is true for almost all charts or graphs that display CO2 levels and temperature simultaneously. This basic misunderstanding of information is what drives most of the hysteria about man-made global warming. (See, Publius claims formal training in logic.)

#1.Q.----Why don't you explain to us why rising temperatures would cause an increase in carbon dioxide?

#2.Q.----Then explain to us why water vapor, the number one greenhouse gas (over 95%), is left out of the equation when discussing greenhouse gases. (Recent 2009 information see's water vapor contributing as much as CO2, but this posting was made in early 2007)

READERS: I have changed the layout a little. If these page links don’t work for you -- you can scroll through this page, like ususal. I have had my share of dropped bits, and some of them are a result of getting interrupted and having finished the thought but not the typing to enter it. Let me know if you see a really good one I should have fixed or gotten right and I got it wrong.

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Drilling an ice core
National Ice Core Lab
Front end: Vostok. Data above the Lake.
800-year lag (revised 9-06-07)

Drilling an Ice Core

How do you obtain an ice core? You drill out around the core you are going to capture and lift to the surface. There are lots of ice chips made by the drill around the circumference of the core you are going to collect. Where do those chips go? Right, you have to haul them up to the surface along with the ice core you are collecting and dispose of the chips.

This posting was made before many of the changes to the DISC drill were made. But the paper directly below (the link) discusses improvements. It takes considerable design effort, tempered by experience and feedback, and there are real improvements made.

http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/icds/reports/4metercores.pdf

But we start our post on Greenland in the early phase of working the bugs out. . .
This is DISC (Deep Ice Sheet Coring). DISC is a new Ice Drill. How would you drill for and recover ancient ice? The file below is a 96 page pdf that is technical, and has few pictures. This is science on the cheap, since the Bush administration actively interferred with the top end operations and funding.

http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/icds/reports/IceCoreOptions.pdf [96 page pdf]

(DON'T download it, unless you are passionate about the exercise of learning the DISC details.. Do it later if you want to read a large amount of cogent information about technical excellence and going without funds. No, it doesn't say that; you must read between the lines. )

The photo's below are of a recently designed DISC ice core drill and this set-up of the equipment was done near Summit in 2006 on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Now all this equipment has been moved to the bottom of the planet, and some drilling has occurred at the location called WAIS Divide (West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Divide)

As a contribution to IPY 2007-2008, the U.S. ice core research community,
supported by the National Science Foundation, plans to core through the
West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) at the ice-flow divide between the Ross Sea
and Amundsen Sea drainage systems ("WAIS Divide"). To accomplish the
coring the Deep Ice Sheet Coring (DISC) drill was built at the University
of Wisconsin.

The modular design of the bore-hole assembly (sonde) provides a high level of flexibility to produce a 122 mm (4.803 inch) diameter ice core to depths of 4,000 m with maximum core lengths of 4 m (13.12 ft.). The DISC drill has a rotating outer barrel that can be used with or without an inner non-rotating barrel designed to improve core recovery in brittle ice. The drill utilizes separate and independent motors for the pump and drill allowing cutter speeds from
0 to 150 rpm and pump rates from 0 to 140 gpm. A high speed data acquisition system gives "real time" monitoring of 30 parameters for both operational and scientific use. Data are transmitted from the sonde to the surface through optical fibers contained in the drill cable, which also provides power to the sonde. The drill incorporates a user-friendly "expert" control system. Quick connectors help provide fast core removal and fast sonde servicing. The drill tower structure which you will see below, contains a tilting tower utilizing modular truss construction for flexibility and portability.

The drill was tested in Greenland in the summer of 2006. Sent south for
first drilling at the WAIS Divide site late in the 2006-07 austral field season (just past).

The plan is to reach the ice sheet bed in the 2009-2010 season. Beyond that, the plan is to develop means for drilling into the bed and for retrieving replicate cores in depth sections of particular interest.

IMAGES FROM GREENLAND -- Further into this Posting, there are images of Vostok and ice cores obtained there. In the future, at least from Divide you will not see productive cores handled like at Vostok. The images below capture a part of how the extraction of ice cores is accomplished. It is a very sophisticated operation, and you earn your keep working with this drill and crew.

To see all images from DISC, visit: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/icds/gallery/

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Winter Cat D-6 Low Ground Pressure Track, sled with winch drum
Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery
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Moving the winch drum. Notice this is an older Caterpillar. Greenland is warmer than Antarctica, but cold is cold.
Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery

Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery

Cutting the slot. This slot is long and skinny so that the core bearing stem and bit(sonde) can be swung from vertical to horizontal, then moved and aligned with the ice trays and the core pushed out. This Greenland exercise would point out many problems and the team would learn the solutions. Basically, this was a very good "dry run." a "proof of concept" and equipment operation.

Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery
Setting the tower base. The positioning of this equipment is coordinated with other equipment that must work together.

Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery

First Core! (Like an ice fish! And it is 'this long,' and it really fought! Look at all the ice core fishing gear! The truth is, it really did fight, but most of the fight was coordinating personnel and machines. New equipment must be debugged to be productive.)

Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery

This is the core bit and the first core break. Record keeping is absolutely essential to keep the cores in order and precisely measure their lengths to determine how far into the past their information describes. This is a major, major job as more core is lifted from the drill hole. Timing in understanding climate is everything! A new system, to minimize human handling is about to be installed this coming fall (2007) in Antarctica, where the 2006-2007 operations have already provided some cores for processing.

Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery

This is a very clean "nice" core break!

Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery

This is the U.S. National Ice Core Lab tray set up as used in Greenland. New parts, procedures and mechanisms were designed and are being incorporated and fitted together to minimize human handling damages to the cores by moving them. The new design will minimize as much as possible the damage to the core from human interaction, as well as thermal and mechanical stresses delivered to the core in moving them by hand. The new equipment and procedures are to be fully deployed this fall, include a fluid evacuation device to remove drilling fluid (lubricant) from the core as it is pushed from the core barrel, a plastic netting system specifically designed for capturing and retaining the integrity of brittle ice, use of a high speed circular saw for cutting cores and the highly rigid extruded aluminum ice core trays. To reduce the possibility of length measurement errors, the National Ice Core Laboratory Personnel have been designing a semi automated measurement system and self-checking database.

New core trays, insulated shipping containers, and core tubes sufficient for the first season of operation at WAIS Divide and other line processing components were purchased and shipped last year and are now at McMurdo to be delivered to WAIS Divide early in the coming season.

(That means the Fall of 2007 when it starts providing enough light to work safely and it warms a tad. Interesting story, since they tried to get some work done and got set up at WAIS Divide in early 2007, but the seasons caught up with them and logistics. At the beginning of fall the tray hardware was sitting at Mc Murdo and as I write this, the people involved are probably working out the logistics to get the new equipment to the WAIS Divide drilling site. It is a lot more difficult than moving your hunting camp. Mistakes and logistics can hurt or kill you. Out on the ice in Antarctica there is essentially no decay, just dessication. You could be freeze dried. It would be funny, but it isn't. It takes thorough logistical planning, and a safety margin for things you can't even imagine happening.)

Image: University of Wisconsin, icds gallery
DISC at night! (in Greenland.)

The first WAIS Divide Ice Core Project science meeting [will be held] was held in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, October 4-5, 2007.

These images are freely available for noncommercial use.
These photos are provided by Ice Coring and Drilling Services, an SSEC program supported by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs.

NOTE: See the following link for an update WAIS Divide:

http://www.xomba.com/wais_divide_antarctica_580_m_new_ice_core_work_continues_next_two_seasons

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Here is information about "small" ice drilling equipment.
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/icds/equipment/mechanical.html
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/icds/equipment/consideration.html
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National Ice Core Laboratory

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Ice Core Research
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The National Ice Core Laboratory

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Inside this part of Building 810, on the Denver Federal Center, in Lakewood, Colorado, is the National Ice Core Laboratory. This is a World Class storage facility and laboratory. The inside of this core storage facility is really a "cool" place. Really.

Photo Credits:Kendrick Taylor DRI, University of Nevada-Reno.

Refrigerated vans transported the core boxes from the runway to the GISP2 headquarters at the University of New Hampshire. Eventually, the entire GISP2 core was placed in reflective cardboard canisters like these and stored at the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL), a state-of-the-art cold storage facility jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the United States Geological Survey, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Scientists from all over the world can come here to work or arrange for ice to be checked out and transported to their labs. Most of the ice has already been divided and sent as per plans, made for it usually long before the cores are even drilled, but ice for additional research is made available and cut for examination in this lab, or shipped worldwide.

Core Map for Antarctica and Greenland

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Images USGS-NICL

What "good" is an Ice Core? What do we learn?

http://nicl.usgs.gov/

The following text is from the USGS-NICL website. (From the beautifully clear way this below is written, I think I know who authored it, but can't dare post that! since it is a government site. My rendition of it includes MY italics and bolding.- Les Porter)

Ice cores contain an abundance of climate information --more so than any other natural recorder of climate such as tree rings or sediment layers. Although their record is short (in geologic terms), it can be highly detailed.

An ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years. This record can include temperature, precipitation , chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity and a variety of other climate indicators. It is the simultaneity of these properties recorded in the ice that makes ice cores such a powerful tool in paleoclimate research.

Climatology, the study of how the Earth's climate system works, operates under a distinct handicap in comparison to other phenomenological sciences. Other fields of study permit the formation of hypotheses and subsequent testing of these hypotheses by direct experimentation in the laboratory. This is not feasible in climatology, for we live in the only laboratory possible. It is called the Earth.

Because we would be ill-advised to experiment on our only laboratory, we are left to construct computer models of how we believe the climate system of our planet works.

If we understand the climate system correctly and have constructed our model appropriately, then the behavior of our model climate system should mimic the behavior of the Earth's climate system. One of the best ways to test our model is to see if it can reproduce the changes in climate which have happened throughout the long history of the Earth.

Thus, acquiring detailed climate records extending back many hundreds of thousands of years has become a research priority in the study of global change.

The study of ice cores is an indispensible part of this process. Over the past decade, research on the climate record frozen in ice cores from the polar regions has changed our basic understanding of how the climate system works.

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Changes in temperature and precipitation which previously we believed would require many thousands of years to happen were revealed, through the study of ice cores, to have happened in fewer than twenty years. These discoveries have challenged our beliefs about how the climate system works. We have been required to search for new, faster mechanisms for climate change and we have begun to consider the interaction between industrial man and climate in light of these newly revealed mechanisms.

Sunset Coring in Greenland == === ==== ===Getting Ice ready to fly in East Antarctica.
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Much Ice in an Ice Core Begins as a Snowflake.

Visit the site below. If you bookmark no other site on climate, bookmark this one, the links are an exploration.

http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/

Below is an image from one of the sites linked to at the above website.

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Find your snowflake here!
http://library.ssec.wisc.edu/bentley/
http://library.ssec.wisc.edu/bentley/list.php?job=browse

This image is from the collection of Wilson A. Bentley

Copyright information.

Wilson A. Bentley did not copyright his images because he wanted them to be freely used. They are in the public domain.
This digital version of Bentley's photomicrographs is published by The Schwerdtfeger Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002.

Much of the ice trapped with its information about climate inside the ice cores "began its existence" as ice as a snowflake looking like this or some other shape of the possible shapes that a snowflake can take when its molecules become self-arranged into a typical snowflake as water becomes a solid. We have all certainly read that no two snow flakes are identical. That is an obvious and factual statement; since if there are "two" of anything, they occupy two different positions in space-time, and can't be identical.(One is here, and the other One is over there.)

But beyond the obvious, it has been stated that no two snowflakes have ever been observed to be built exactly alike -- and from that, in all of earthtime, not enough time has passed to expect two snowflakes shaped exactly alike to have been formed yet.

There are thought to be far fewer than 1081 distinct unique fundamental elementary particles in the entire known universe. How many ways and shapes these distinct individual particles can assume as a part of the overall 'shape' of the universe is a number on the order of 1081! (factorial) a number of such magnitude we are not able to describe. The number of water molecules in a snowflake depends on a number of factors; most important combinatorially is its physical size. That said, crystals that are very tiny (electron microscope size) can look alike. But not much bigger.

Pop up your scientific calculator and determine the number 10,000! (factorial). Give it time to produce this number: 2.8462596809170545189064132121199e+35659 (If you have time, you can enter 200000! and get an answer that says something like "This will take a long time to compute do you want to stop . . ?" Depending on how old your are, stop or not. I've never let it complete, so I do not know what limits our windows calculator.

See this site, where Kenneth G Libbrecht at Caltech tells all!

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/alike/alike.htm

HERE is how to build "better" snowflakes:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/designer1/designer1.htm

This site is excellent for the properties of water.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/ice/ice.htm

Mass of a water molecule:

mOrdinary water =2.992 x 10-26 kg
mHeavy water =3.326 x 10-26 kg
Density of ice near 0o C = 917kg/m3

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The Front End: Vostok. Data gathered above the Lake!

The Vostok record is the one singled out, but the general trend of the (CO2) 'Lag' is now well established with other South Polar sites and cores. This part discusses a little of what is involved and known since the ice cores were drilled at Vostok, some is process. Others are a part of the entire approach. The possible explanation of the Lag follows below this section.
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Image: WIKIPEDIA, This is Vostok station and a joint drilling team from several nations. This was a rare day, one with little wind.

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Photo Credits: Todd Sowers; Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), Columbia University, Palisades, New York.

Average annual temperature -56o C. Rough topographic rendition of Anarctica. The thickest ice, 15,670 feet thick, is in Wilkes Land.

Somewhere I read that the Russians at Vostok were a solid, plain-spoken group of rugged individuals merged as a team, with an undeniable "sense of humor." What do they do for recreation or fun at Vostok to keep their minds from ossification? "Well, every two weeks we get a bath,"one of the men said. That must be a real treat.

Photo Credits: Todd Sowers LDEO, Columbia University, Palisades, New York.

The Vostok core illustrated for the first time, the strong correlation between paleotemperature and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This figure shows how concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) have moved in tandem with paleotemperatures derived from the stable isotope record.

Initially, the timing of these relationship at the end of the ice and the rise of the GHG's was poorly understood, but now the timing and precedence of the events are known with relative certainty. The precise timing of the rise in (CO2) need not be known exactly, but the fact that the warming preceded the great leap in ppmv of (CO2) is known unequivocally. The timing of the 800+/-200 years has occured at every termination for which we have data.

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A touch of temperature.

Much of the work done in climate science involves the use of "proxies." It is like when you assign your vote to someone else -- and they vote it for you. They aren't you, but they vote as you would and in climate science there are quantities, ratios and stand-ins for various items of interest, some occurring or not occuring unless the ambient energy, the "temperature" is considered. Early in modern and classical physics, Temperature even the term Absolute Temperature arose as improved grasp of energy and matter developed. How do you stick a thermometer into the past? It is not easy, but it is doable, kind of. . .

Several proxies having to do with climate exist and are used to infer such things as solar irradiance, via beryllium 10; accurate temperature from isotopic variations in the water contained in ice cores, rate of temperature and precipitation changes from tree ring widths, and formation of calcites and carbonates and all sorts of stand-ins we have found give us accurate representations of such things as climate or temperature.

One of the proxies, a relatively definitive and easy one to assess, involves the isotopes of oxygen. The oxygen in water, the O in H2O, is made with any of the three stable isotopes of oxygen. In an Ice Core, the water that formed the ice has been isolated, "trapped" and is representative of its physical molecular characteristics from the time at which it condensed to form water and ice, and captures those conditions. Harold C Urey demonstrated how to measure the ambient sea temperature at the time of formation by comparing the ratios of 16O / 18O, and a whole lot more, which is why he won a Nobel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen-18 (See this site for a better explanation.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleothermometry (This Wikipedia sited discusses several of the proxy thermometries used to extract temperatures in the distant past. All bits of information are hard-won items and tributes to human grasp and knowledge of chemical and physical properties.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_fractionation

The processes of past temperature measurements involve the kinetic energy of isotopes, and take advantage of the small mass differences among isotopes. These differences are quite useful and easy with the lighter elements.

Isotope- - excitation -- ------- range ---- ---- Average
Stable -- mass-energy ----variation--- -----composition
16O- 15.99491461956-- 0.99738-0.99776 -- 0.99757% 8-protons, 8-neutrons
17O- -16.99913170-- 0.00037-0.00040 -- 0.00038% 8-protons, 9-neutrons
18O- - 17.9991610-- 0.00188-0.00222 -- 0.00205% 8-protons, 10-neutrons

The characteristics of the molecule, water, as indicated above, allow a very good assessment of past temperatures. In the Ice Core record we discover that temperatures oscillated over time and when there were warm periods, there were changes in the atmosphere's composition. One of our current interests --and it is about our survival -- is the effect of the GHGs on climate and temperature.

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To what extent did these increased temperatures bring about higher greenhouse gas concentrations? To paleoclimatologists hoping to provide answers about global climate change (anthropogenic global warming), this has sparked intriguing scientific debate. But the main finding is that Orbital Forcing of the warming apparently begins the end of the Ice, the Termination event, and the (CO2) rise occurs 800 years later.

Where does the carbon dioxide come from? How does it get from where ever it has been, into the air?

Okay. Hinged with this is the molecule water, which basically is the moderatoror life, the medium by which living processes occur, and its range of characteristics related to the ambient temperature, plays into and onto our world's future.

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Photo Credits: Thomas Andrews; NOAA Paleoclimatology Program

Measurements of Greenhouse Gases

The most alarming finding from the initial wave of Vostok research is presented here: Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations (as measured atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa) are currently at their highest levels of the past 160,000 years. As shown earlier,CO2 levels are generally high during warm interglacial periods such as the last interglacial from ~110,000 to ~130,000 yr B. P. At the end of the last ice age (~15,000 yr B. P.), CO2 levels increased dramatically, reaching a level of ~280 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in the present millennium. Another Antarctic record, the Siple core, documents a rapid increase in CO2 levels since the early 1800s due to anthropogenic (man-made) impacts, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.

Direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 have been made at Mauna Loa, Hawaii since the late 1950s. Vostok, Siple, and Mauna Loa create a composite picture of the enormous impact human activities have had on the natural environment, documenting a two-fold increase in CO2 in the last 15 kyr. Climatologists and policy-makers alike are struggling to understand and prevent the rapid climate change that future increases (anthropogenic or otherwise) inCO2 levels may cause. When the amount of CO2 in the air is more than 100 ppmv than ever in the last couple of dozen million years, there should be concern. (And there is.)

Photo Credits: Thomas Andrews; NOAA Paleoclimatology Program
Not much snow falls in Antartica, so the Greenland data shows higher resolution. GRIP was the European Counterpart to GISP2. What looks smooth at Antarctica shows with a lot more snow to be a real up and downer, suggesting much instability.

Photo Credits: Kendrick Taylor; DRI, University of Nevada-Reno

Core Processing Line!The temperature of the ice cores is never allowed to rise above -15 degrees C, partly to prevent microcracks from forming and allowing present-day air to contaminate the fossil air trapped in the ice fabric, and partly to inhibit recrystallization of the ice structure. Since summer temperatures in central Greenland are often higher than this, the core is moved immediately from the drill dome to a network of trenches beneath the snow surface known as the core processing line (CPL). The first stop in the CPL are these wooden trays where cores are stored before measurements are performed. This ice is from 1500 m and is clear with the exception of a few subtle seasonal dust bands.

Photo Credits: Thomas Andrews from a map drawn by Sherry Palmer
GISP2 Science Management Office (GISP2 SMO), University of New Hampshire.

More of these kind of images are located here:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/slides/slideset/15/15_302_slide.html

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Image: EPA

Epica Data

Epica Data
Two Images above: realclimate.org

The Front End. The 800-year lag, an explanation.

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Nearly a quarter-million years after the occurrence, a spoke-like rod, a short sliver from the past, is extracted from a hole in the ice and called to speak. This core, this thin sliver of ancient ice tells its story.

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1. The air warmed; the ice melted.
2. CO2 ppm concentrations in air rose -- 800 years later!
3. There was a lag.

And all this happened 240,000 years ago. Climate deniers and contrarians attempt to use this strawman as an indication that there is no anthropogenic climate forcing, saying the CO2 is a result of the warming, not the other way around. Hey. All this happened before the automobile -- even in the latest interglacial warming! The scientific difficulty is in a more precise scaling of the time! Not the fact that the CO2 in the air rose as a result of the initial Ice Terminating warming of the air. But read on carefully. Think a bit and actually look at the various graphics.

This is the definitive work:

http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/CaillonTermIII.pdf
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Authors:
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Nicolas Caillon, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Jean Jouzel,
Jean-Marc Barnola, Jiancheng Kang, Volodya Y. Lipenkov
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Abstract:
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The analysis of air bubbles from ice cores has yielded a precise record of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, but the timing of changes in these gases with respect to temperature is not accurately known because of uncertainty in the gas age–ice age difference. We have measured the isotopic composition of argon in air bubbles in the Vostok core during Termination III (~240,000 years before the present). This record most likely reflects the temperature and accumulation change, although the mechanism remains unclear. The sequence of events during Termination III suggests that the CO2increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 (+/-200) years and preceded the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation.[/]
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Carbon, Carbon, wherefore art thou?. (And why?)

Image: Wikipedia, from USGS

Elemental composition of Earth's ocean water (by mass)

Element-----------Percent
Oxygen------------ 85.84
Hydrogen----------10.82
Chlorine------------1.94
Sodium ------------1.08
Magnesium--------0.1292
Sulfur----------------0.091
Calcium------------0.04
Potassium---------0.04
Bromine------------0.0067
Carbon--------------0.0028 (note this, 0.0028% is 28 ppm, parts per million)

Table Adapted from Wikipedia.

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see also:http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/enviro/soil/rocktbl2.htm#carbon
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/first_billion_years/first_billion_years.html

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So how much Carbon is in the ocean? By mass? If we take the mass of the oceans we are looking at a lot of mass. 1 cubic km is 1 billion metric tons of water. So how many cubic kilometers of water do the oceans contain?

If you use a search engine, to determine what some specialists and students of the oceans have determined is the ocean's volume -- one of the values you may obtain is 1.3 × 109 km3, or 1.3 billion cubic kilometers. Everyone of those cubic kilometers weighs in at 1 billion metric tons! (Actually, they weigh a bit more than that since a lot of things, other heavy things, are dissolved in the ocean's waters.)

However, taking 1,300,000,000 cubic kms x 1,000,000,000 metric tons/ cubic kilometer = 1,300,000,000,000,000,000 tons (that is 1.3 quintillion tons, or 1300 quadrillion tons, or 1,300,000 trillion metric tons.

Using the roughly measured 0.0028% for carbon as a percentage of that mass since it is a percentage, . . . 0.000028 x 1,300,000,000,000,000,000 = 36,400,000,000,000

(Note:in the ocean's water, 28 ppm is Carbon)

Roughly 36,400 billion tons ( tons) Yes, I know DOE writes 38,000 billion tons -- and I am not sure how they get there -- since obviously they are not using either the percentage above or the volume-- and If I find out where this is different (or wrong) I will correct my figures or explain and leave it here.

(Note where most of the Carbon is? Yes, in the rocks! And it may be more than 70 million billion tons. But when the oceans of Earth are (become, for a while) Steam in the far future, most of the crustal rock's Carbon will be added to the air. As Venus is, (Earth will become.)

--- Carbon and the Carbon dioxide in the ocean -- come out of the ocean as the ocean warms--
When an Ice Age terminates -- ended by the warming of the air and the land and the sea. . . --

What I will offer is an as yet scientifically unproveable but a reasonable explanation of the 800(+/-200) year lag in CO2 build-up in the atmosphere in the southern hemisphere. What this explanation offers, however is not "good" for us or good for the planet. . .

Okay. The air warmed; the ice melted; and CO2 ppm concentrations in air rose -- 800 years later! There was a lag. The 800 (+/- 200) year lag between the air warming and the increase in atmospheric CO2 at Termination III, the end of an Ice Age ~240,000 years ago, is a natural phenomena. It is repeated at the terminus of all ice ages for which we have ice core evidence from Antarctica, and is also reflected in the Greenland records, which because of the wetness of Greenland compared to Antarctica, does not extend as far into the past. (Yes. Greenland is wetter than Antarctica, and snow can only pile so high into ice before said ice pile slides off toward the oceans with the current continental configurations, gravitation, Earth's internal heat production, and the Earth's orbital characteristics. So, wet northern hemisphere Greenland Ice Core Records do not reach as far back in time as Antarctica's ice records do.)

I want to call your attention to compare the heights of the temperature timings with the heights of CO2 timing, you will note that as the air cools there is also at least an 800 to several thousand years lag before the CO2 in the air starts 'dropping'.

To return to the cold depths of the ice age temperatures requires or at least presents the fact that the CO2 in the air be removed, invested somewhere. Where?

Where do you suppose the CO2 is going? 800 years, or more -- (actually it appears to be as much as a thousand to 5000 years and more), for the ocean's surface to cool enough to begin to absorb the vast quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the surface and transport the C in the CO2 to depth.)

So, to re-summarize:

Scientists found that the gases in an ice core from Antarctica, from the Russian's Vostok Station, show that at Termination III, the rising air temperature in the Antarctic occurred before the concentration of CO2 increased. Why?

It looks like the rise in air temperature is causing the rise in CO2. And the answer is: YES it clearly seems to be the warming of atmosphere that is causing CO2 concentrations in the air to rise. That is absolutely true! That is absolutely correct. The warming of the air seems to have "caused" a release of the CO2. From where. . .?

Where do you think some or all of this CO2 it might be hiding?

Let's instill this thought as deeply as possible!

 

 

1. the air warmed and then:
2. after the passage of roughly 800 (+/- 200) years,
3. the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere became greater .

No one is denying these facts, and they are facts. But it is an important piece of educational knowledge to understand that when you have a warming atmosphere -- a bunch of CO2 shows up and warms things further.

Keep that in mind.

More recently, during and subsequent to the Last Glacial Maximum: Via Proxies--Comparing Greenland and Antarctica. It even happened here, recently, about 10,000 years ago.

Image: Wikipedia

From where cometh all that CO2? That 80+ ppmv? And when it cools again, the CO2 withdrawn from the air, where doth it go? Keep those questions in mind. . .

The possibility of a thousand-year to ten-thousand-year disruption by man's consumption of fossil fuel looms, and -- the "lag" needs to be understood, simply to see if the "lag" applies NOW to CO2 sequestered and still held in the deep ocean -- but soon (400-1000 years) to be released.

Others have asked this as well -- but how much more CO2 is going to be released over the next 600 to 1000 years from the deep ocean as the cold upwelling waters circulate to the surface? How much cold storage CO2 WILL rise to the surface and its carrier water warm and release the CO2 to the atmosphere from whence it came? No one knows, but it might soon get to the point that the warmth of the ocean's surface will not absorb as much the CO2. Of course as long as it does not get really too hot, living plants will respirate the Carbon into the ocean as part of their bodies. But the the CO2 it self may not be able to be absorbed at the warmer temperature of the water. (No one has discussed a means of "supersaturating" a salty ocean with atmospheric the CO2.)

When you examine the amount of CO2 released for a number of ice age terminations, you see very similar quantities of CO2 either released from delayed plant decay or from the oceans. Delayed plant decay? Yes, think of the dead plants that did not decay because their bacterial component was frozen and its activity diminished. At the termination of the ice age, the resumption of decay and bacterial growth to release much of the C into the atmosphere occurs.

Okay, the ice age periods of time probably diminished the plant growth area on land as well as ocean surface phytoplankton production by sea ice area increase, and therefore life/death and decomposition of that carbon sequestered in plants is slowed or even stopped by the ice age. Plants not affected directly by the ice age still grow, die, and decay. Those plants that live pull a lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere, and sequester it for short periods(seasons, decades, or even centuries and millenia) before it is decayed into the air. Those 90 and 100 thousand year long cold periods have reasonably stable amounts of CO2 in the air as evidenced by both sedimentology and ice core analysis.

The CO2 quantities, the ppm in air, at least in the period of times thus far examined in the ice cores indicate that the warming causes the release of from 80 to 100 ppm CO2 into the atmosphere.

Just thinking about the quantity, the mass of CO2, where do you get 80 ppmv CO2? That is a lot of CO2 and a lot of Carbon.

Note that 1 ppm CO2 =7,803,961,445 tons and 80 ppm = 624,316,915,600 tons of CO2, and 100 ppm is 780,396,144,500 tons.

So we have from 624 to 780 billion tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere at the end of an Ice Age.

The Carbon equivalent is ~12/44.01 of the 624 to 780 billion tons, so the pure C to produce that much CO2 is from 170 to 212 billion tons.

If this were graphite or carbon "soot", we would have a density of about 2, and the cubic volume of such a mass of pure carbon would be a cube from 4399 meters (14,433 feet) --to-- 4738.5 meters (15,546 feet) high wide and deep. It happens the highest peak in Colorado, second highest in the lower 48 is as high as the lower amount.
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Colorado's Mount Elbert is 14,433 feet above sea level as measured by high precision Spirit Level and by Electronic Distance & Vertical Angle closed traverse (EDVA) with numerous multiple direct observation measuring courses. But now, with the "new" orbitally established NAVD North American Vertical Datum, Mount Elbert has risen to 14,440 feet. (For a while FAA and the 1:500,000-scale Sectional Aeronautical Chart showed Mount Massive as taller than Mount Elbert. But that is typical of FAA screwups since NOAA released with trepidation, the NOAA operated Aeronautical Charting Division to FAA in the 1990's. Embarrassing too.) Many mountain climbers who climb the highest peak in each of the 50 states contacted the Federal Government asking if they had to go back and climb Mount Massive because the FAA non-scientifically changed the elevation because they hired a "new cartographer" to head FAA's version of the former NOAA operation, which was a science based operation while under NOAA; but became under FAA a non-science (a nonsensical FAA thing when handed off to the FAA). Just another example of the FAA Bureaucratic hardheadedness. (See if they have corrected the DENVER 500K SAC) You all heard the 911 tapes of the FAA, so it is not surprising for that era and the present one. . .please note the new North American datum raised Elbert to 14440 so FAA did not have to change the margin elevation of the Denver 500K SAC, so, yeah they stumbled into it, but what happened to Mount Massive's FAA elevation?

IMAGE: en.Wikipedia org. from Flickr, and photographed by Rick Kimpel on June 1, 2006
Realize, this photo Rick Kimpel took of Mount Elbert, below, is taken from an elevation of over 9000 feet along US Hwy 24, Sorth of Leadville, CO and north of Buena Vista, CO.

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Instead of a cube of Carbon soot or pure Carbon graphite, suppose the cube of pure Carbon is in the form of diamond. . .

1 ppm pure carbon in the air equals 2,128,353,121.577 billion tons

But 80 to 100 ppm =170,268,249,726.16 --to-- 212,835,312,157.7 billion tons of pure C.

Dividing these numbers by 3.52 yields from 48,371,661,854 cubic meters --to-- 60,464,577,317.5 cubic meters so to construct the size of a pure diamond carbon cube, we calculate the cube root of these volumes.

The values describes a diamond cube from 3643.597 meters (11954.034 feet) to 3924.946 meters ( 12877.093 feet) high wide and deep.

So where is this Carbon stashed during the cold of the Ice Ages?

We know there is no trace in the ice record of "huge fires" converting plants and trees to CO2. It would be as though an area of trees 6 times as large as the Amazon basin had its plants cured and burned. That 170 billion tons to 212 billion tons of Carbon pops into the air combined with O and helps maintain the warmth of the interglacials.

It isn't realistically reasonable to suggest all of this C was in the Tundra, in methane, in woody plants, ice borne or sea borne, that lay frozen during the ice age, or froze to death, locked with their cellulose bound in a skim of ice and couldn't decay until it warmed. Nope, that is not reasonable.

Certainly, some percentage of the C could claim that route, but how much? Six times as much as are in the current Rainforests of the world?

The best explanation and perhaps the one most difficult to prove for a scientific audience would be that the 'lag' is the result of the time it takes to circulate deep water with its higher concentrations of CO2 from the ocean depths to the surface, where the warming atmosphere warms the deep water where most of the CO2 is stored and releases this CO2 into the air.

I can report no definitive studies at this point on complete circulation times for the ocean to bring up to the surface for release the CO2 we see clearly rising in the air, nor a sufficient proof of where the CO2 does come from some 800-years lag-time later. Except the Oceans. But the study is difficult to characterize, even with the recent Ice Age termination and our present interglacial. As noted below, this is a lot of CO2. 80-some parts per million is like taking most of the Earth's forests and burning them.

Has the warming of this current interglacial, the one in which we exist, already released all the CO2 that can be released from the deeper ocean?

I would suggest and clearly believe the deep reservoir of CO2 that contributes to the 80-to-100ppm CO2 increase was pretty much complete after the (Younger Dryas) and essentially totally complete by 10,000 years or so ago.

Here is a little about the period from 20,000 years ago almost to the present.

http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/harders/geo390/chapter15.pdf

And for last 1000 years.

Image NOAA

For other comparable ice age termination events, this 10,000+ years would early contain the increase in CO2 so the atmosphere "has had time" to bring CO2 from the deep and release it from its ocean storage place into the air.

And that is reflected in the last 11,000 to 13,000 years with rising CO2 to bring the climate out of the the last ice age, at least to some point, or some level of concentration possibly topping out near where we humans began our population explosion with the industrial revolution.

We are now doing the warming.

That event shows in the recent fossil records, and we do have a very good idea of what has happened since the CO2 we have poured into the atmosphere began on an industrial scale. Basically -- we are warming the climate.
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That changes things. Since 1850, we have been causing the CO2 to rise much faster than Earth's equilibrium and recovery system can remove it from the air. In addition, the temperature will continue to rise -- and quite possibly with the few degrees rise, we will see additional huge amounts of CO2 released as the deeper waters reach the warmer top waters. Is there a limit to how much CO2 the air can hold?
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Of course not. But there is a limit to how much O2 human and other animal life can survive being locked up as the oxygen part of carbon dioxide. The limits toCO2 growth are ultimately in how much the natural systems can absorb.

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(UNLESS we as the source of this problem also and quickly are able to extract the CO2 from the air and sequester it.)

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In staggered equilibriums or delayed balances we can expect some delays and system adjustments. Exactly how much, how delayed, and when the curtain falls -- we are getting a good handle on that, and it is becoming increasingly clear we have far exceeded the equilibrium system's current limit.

Now, what about the 800-year Vostok core lag?

To bury this point into the head of the reader. The lag appears in all the Antarctic cores.

EPICA cores, for example. It is reasonable to suggest the ocean relationship. There is a lag in the rise of CO2 and a lag in the fall of CO2 as the warm period (interglacial) ends. It appears to take more time to begin reabsorption than the time it takes to release it from the ocean.

This is like a dead horse you can continue to beat, but lets get real here: When we see the CO2 concentration rise from say 220 ppmv to 300 ppmv, where did this CO2come from?

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I have repeatedly stated that these prehistoric changes were all natural processes, since there were no Fords or Chevys, or Volvos driven around, and no electrical production and industrial scale production and distribution of energy. (Yeah. American kids think you just plug it in and turn it on and it makes music. Or get batteries and carry it around with you. That is some kind of "natural" ignorance, isn't it?)

Then when the next Ice Age occurs, 5000 years may be what it takes to get all the C absorbed back into the ocean, ready to be released when it warms once again. It takes a long time for even the ocean's surface to cool and absorb CO2 to transport into the deep.

SO! How much more CO2 is coming out of the ocean? As we warm it?

The real problem this asks is: Have we already gotten from the oceans all the CO2 due to us as a result of the last glacial termination 13,500 years ago? (or whenever). (I suggest that CO2 has been released from the oceans by 12,000 some years ago. But more oceanic sequestered CO2 is coming.)

As the ocean warms to the CO2 released by anthropogenic activity, can we expect another 80 ppm soon coming from the oceans -- on account of the additional warming of the atmosphere from our burning of old Carbon, old fossil fuel Carbon, old tailpipe Carbon?

A few dozen generations from now -- the answer to this "how much question" will be very clear.

The precise answer depends on the overall increase in the temperature of the atmosphere. It is not a good experiment to conduct -- but we are way into the experiment now. If global temperature rises several degrees or as much as the average rose between Ice Ages -- yes, we can expect another 80 ppm -- without burning another gallon of gas. The IPCC won't tell you the drastic truth of this, and all science is grounded in "after the fact" measurements and observations. But good science leads to good predictions. Folks We and You, and even the Deniers and Contrarians, and schmucks in political office for personal gain -- We have a problem. There should be a lot of hangings scheduled -- and re-distribution of the means to combat the release of CO2 and the vast resources needed to sequester it from the air.

(See my semi-whimsical http://www.xomba.com/a_diamond_made_from_air)

In all fairness, the lag of ocean circulation will delay the release of deeper CO2. Right now the ocean "is absorbing" CO2 to the tune of about 2.4 Billion tons of CO2 a year. Fossil fuel burning is producing roughly 8 billion tons a year.

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As a minor comment I want to simply note here that the oceans have absorbed 105. ± 8 billion tons of Carbon since the beginning of the industrial era (~1850) and that Carbon would be 44.01 x 105 / 12 = 385 billion tons of CO2 removed from the air, which represents directly 49 ppm of CO2 removed.

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Use these links to reach Parts 2, 3, and 4.

Part 2
http://www.xomba.com/ice_cores_part_ii_co2_rises_after_warming_water_vapor_not_ignored

Part 3
http://www.xomba.com/ice_cores_co2_and_water_vapor_part_iii

There are comments on the original posting at the original Posting Site

Original
http://www.xomba.com/ice_cores_air_temp_rises_before_co2_rises_explain_that_h2o_ignored_as_greenhouse_gas_contributing_to_rising_temperature_why