Ice Cores, Temperature and CO2 – Such a power increase?

Guest posts by Willis Eschenbach

I have to think about ice cores. It’s amazing to realize that the air trapped in the tiny bubbles in the ice is the air that has been trapped there since the ice formed. And that air could be hundreds of thousands of years old. Not only that, we can also analyze the trapped air to see the change of CO₂ overtime.

How accurate are the results? Well, different ice cores drilled and analyzed by different groups of scientists gave very similar results. Here are some recent ice core COs₂ measurement, along with the orange Mauna Loa measurement.

Figure 1. CO₂ measurements from a variety of ice cores, along with the orange Mauna Loa measurement.

As you can see, there is a very good agreement between all the different ice cores, ice core analysis groups and ice core CO₂ Measurement method. And the tape core measurements are consistent with Mauna Loa CO₂ pretty good observation.

Another thing that can be calculated from the airborne isotopes trapped in the ice core bubbles is the return temperature of the day. The Vostok ice core data, one of the longest, recorded four glaciation periods and five “interglacials” including our current interglacial, the Holocene.

Figure 2. Vostok global temperature reconstruction, together with modern HadCRUT temperature measurements (1850-2022).

Now, there are some very interesting things about this graphic. First, people keep saying that a little bit of global warming is an “existential crisis”. But in both past interglacials, temperatures were up to 2°C warmer than today. That’s 3.6°C warmer than the “pre-industrial temperature”, much higher than the impending terror temperature of 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial times they were still scares us.

There are modern humans around both of those hot spells, along with most modern life forms. It is not an “existential crisis”. It’s not a crisis at all. It was a warm time.

And humans also survived the ice ages. In total, humans have seen temperatures range from +2°C warmer than today to -9°C cooler than modern times… a very wide range.

Next, the orange/black line on the right is warming after 1850. As you can see, the Vostok data indicates that the world was warmer than it is today, even earlier during the interglacial period. this galaxy as well as in all previous interglacial periods on record.

Call me crazy, but I don’t see any reason to panic or destroy the fossil fuel economy in any of that…

Continuing, what about Vostok CO₂ data? Here is a chart comparing Vostok CO₂ data (scale on the right) and temperature (scale on the left).

Figure 3. Vostok . ice core CO₂ and temperature.

So… is CO₂ related to temperature? is CO₂ secret temperature control?

The two are definitely related. And given the length of the data set, which is almost half a million years, we can see that there is a clear physical relationship for the whole time. or CO₂ causes temperature change, or temperature causes CO₂ change or both affect each other. As you can imagine, in nature, the latter situation is the most common.

But whatever the cause, Figure 3 clearly shows the long-run equilibrium relationship of the two. So we can investigate different conditions.

First, assume that CO2 is controlling the temperature. The data analysis in Figure 3 yields:

Change in temperature (∆T) = 13.4°C for each CO . doubling₂ (“climate sensitive”)

Hmmm, sez I… the accepted value for climate sensitivity is not 13.4°C / 2xCO₂. It’s somewhere around 2°C to 4°C / 2xCO₂Much lower.

So consider the opposite possibility, that the temperature is changing the CO₂. The analysis revealed the following relationship:

Change CO2₂ (ppmv) = 9 ppmv per °C

Hmmm, sez me… seems possible. As the oceans warm, they dry up. However, that is not enough to explain modern CO₂ increase.

Ultimately, they are certainly influencing each other. CO2 can add a bit of warming or cooling to the changes of whatever is driving the variations seen in Figure 2. Unfortunately, there’s no way to calculate that.

What else can we learn from the Vostok data? People keep talking about the current warming rate. Their claim is that the world cannot evolve or adapt fast enough to cover the current rate of warming.

However, the Vostok data suggest other times during the Holocene that it warmed (or cooled) just as quickly.

Figure 4. Holocene warming rate, from Vostok ice core data.

Finally, here’s a look at the ice core data overlaid with modern changes in both CO₂ and temperature.

Figure 5. Temperature and CO₂ level. As shown in Figure 3, but with both ice cores and modern observational data shown.

Hmmm, sez me, again…

So that’s what I learned from the Vostok data—that humans have experienced warmer periods many times in the past without being an “existential crisis,” that emissions into the oceans yang is not the cause of modern CO₂ increase, and the rate of modern warming is not unprecedented.

A rare day of gentle May rain in California. At the end of last year, all climate models and climatologists predicted another very dry year… instead, it was one of the wetter years on record. The world’s best predictors were not wrong at all. They were 100% wrong, top to bottom and side to side.

And these are the same models and people who claim that they can tell us what the average global temperature will be in 2100 AD… yes, that makes perfect sense.

My best for all,

w.

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