Skeptic vs Warmist, page-11

OK, treating this with far more respect than it deserves, because you seem to think it's an accurate representation of reality. Here's where your imaginary conversation runs off the rails:

"Skeptic: Why do you say today’s disasters from weather events attributed to AGW.

Warmist: Because Co2 is going through the roof.

Skeptic: I am confused. You just implied from that today’s weather events are a result of Co2 gathered from 800 years ago. As the ocean warms the Co2 is released. Is what you just said."

No. The "Warmist" did not say that - even within the bounds of your conversation. What he said is that historically temperature and dissolved CO2 are interrelated. Colder water holds more CO2 - that's trivial. All else being equal, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will drive more to dissolve in the ocean - that's also trivial. They're both part of the same phenomenon - what's known as the equilibrium partial pressure of CO2 over water is directly related to temperature and the dissolved CO2 concentration. So there's a feedback effect there: higher temperatures drive more CO2 out of the water and into the air, which traps more heat, which drives more CO2 out, until the system hits a new equilibrium.

But that in no way implies that the current situation is driven by this natural feedback system. In fact, we know it's not. How? Well, for one thing, we know how much CO2 is needed to raise the atmospheric concentration by a given amount, and we know that we're easily emitting enough to account for the current increase in the atmosphere. More importantly, though, the carbon in natural circulation is in constant dynamic equilibrium with the atmosphere, which importantly is constantly having carbon-14 added to it by nuclear interactions between solar wind particles and nitrogen-15 in the upper atmosphere. The thing is, carbon-14 is unstable with a half-life of 5,750 years (this is the basis of radiocarbon dating, of course), so that any carbon which has been out of circulation for more than about 50,000 years will have no remaining carbon-14 in it. The bulk of the carbon in the carbon cycle is never out of the atmosphere for more than a few thousand years (the slowest deep-ocean currents take about that long, while some soil carbon can stay for longer). The carbon we're adding has been out of circulation for hundreds of millions of years.

Why's this important? Well, for quite some time now we've been able to easily measure the concentration of different isotopes in atmospheric air - and funnily enough, the ratio of carbon isotopes in the air is changing in exactly the way one would expect if the extra CO2 was in fact coming from carbon 14-free fossil fuel combustion.

Similar measurements can be made of the carbon-13 to carbon-12 ratio. Plant life has a slight selectivity against incorporating carbon-13 (which, unlike carbon-14, is a stable isotope) compared to carbon 12, so any carbon coming from burning plant-derived material will have a low carbon-13/carbon-12 ratio. Fossil fuels, being the remains of ancient plants, are low in carbon-13. If the extra CO2 added to the atmosphere were coming from fossil fuel combustion, we'd therefore expect to see a drop in atmospheric 13-C/12-C. Sure enough, we do.

So the reason your imaginary conversation is being derided as a *** is that your "warmist" answers are wrong. There is no question that the CO2 is coming from us. It's been measured in multiple ways. At present, the atmosphere-ocean equilibrium is working mostly in our favour - the ocean is absorbing a lot of the excess CO2 we've emitted and slowing down the rate of increase, leading to a measurable (and worrying in its own right) decrease in oceanic pH.



This, too, is simply wrong:

"Skeptic: So why then are we experiencing pause in temperature rise if the if the earth’s atmosphere is already saturated.

Warmist: Look our algorithmic models anticipated these pauses. We knew these pause were going to happen."

No climate scientist is claiming this. What the climate scientists are saying is that the atmosphere is only a small part of the climate system, and that the interaction of atmosphere and ocean leads to substantial year- and decade-scale noise overlaid on the long-term trend - and that a lot of this short term noise is inherently unpredictable - just as the individual ripples on the surface of a river are unpredictable while the bulk flow of the river itself is fairly constant. Sometimes those unpredictable events all coincide in phases which shift more heat from atmosphere to ocean (causing short-term cooling of the surface; the best known of these is of course La Nina); sometimes they coincide in phases which shift heat back to the surface. That's why qualified climatologists will tell you again, and again, and again, that focusing on short-term statistical behaviour rather than trying to understand the underlying principles is horribly misleading. That's why Skeptical Science came up with their escalator illustration - not that that seems to have helped matters much.