Co2, Balanced Feedbacks Or Step Changes To 'new' Balance Point?

[Gray-Wolf]

Yes 'J' , I suppose we should have a dedicated thread!

First to say I'm a bit 'Lovelockian' in my appreciation of the way mother nature manages climate within differing CO2 regimes. I see things as a series of 'step changes' to the next point of balance. Be this reductions in CO2 and a move towards the ice age balance point or increases leading to the 'Tropical world' of ice free pole and reduction in ice sheets with associated sea level alterations.

If I keep it simple and just have the three states of Glacial, Interglacial and Tropical we can throw ideas around about how differing 'balance points' are arrived at by in -built 'natural' mechanisms that avoid us entering 'snowball Earth or Runaway warming.

As I see things we are at a point today where the planet is about to 'step change' into a different regime due to our impacts on the planet ,one of those being the GHG's we have put into our atmosphere.

This is all very different to the 'natural' mechanisms that have dictated change before but I find it useful to look to the paleo to see how differing atmospheric mixes force differing climates (we never find a tropical world with depleted CO2 levels nor ice ages with continuous elevated CO2 levels.

As C-Bob says there must be a natural limiting factor at the top end of things or else we would have encountered runaway warming in our past phases of high CO2.

So how does the carbon cycle respond to forced changes in the atmospheric CO2 levels?

[VillagePlank]

Yup - good idea.

Here's my effort at producing something quantitative to start from:

Here, the basic processes (as I understand them) are modelled as a graph (actually a digraph) such that the vertices represent some class of process that is linearly seperable and thus represent a degree of freedom. Of course, there are sub-classes of processes; for instance, that GhG would contain CO₂ amongst others. The edges represent some function of the processes of which it joins that modifies the 'effective' W/m² that passes from process to process. This is modelled on the premise that, for instance A=f(Solar) - so the function which defines the edge represents some relationship from the incident vertices going in the direction of the edge.

Below the graph is the adjacency matrix representing the structure of the graph and also the order of the functions, such that if you read down the rows, you can read that B=f(Clouds), or, D=f(Earth) where the specific alteration by the process is hidden in the function such that it can be modelled in a linear way such that if y=f(x), then f(x) is always of the form ax+bx=c

Now in English - what's the relationship between the circles? Should we add anything, remove anything, and can we specify each edge (A,B,C etc) precisely from peer reviewed literature?

A good starting point is to find A.

(EDIT: There's a mistake in the matrix - Ghg->Loss should read 'F' and not 'G' Sorry I typed this out in a hurry)

Edited March 23, 2010 by VillagePlank

[VillagePlank]

No takers?

[Gray-Wolf]

Well I wonder at our 'recent' settled carbon cycle which appears to have been at the beck and call of our position in relation to the sun.

What happens when you add a shed load of GHG's just after an optimum positioning. i.e. when you are on the 'downslope' and the carbon cycle should be winding down towards a minimum? Does it 'pep' temps back up straight away or is there a period whilst the 'drops in temp' are overcome and reversed?

Just how much does the less favourable position (in relation to the sun) impact upon the added ghg load? My simple head sees a slowing of the warming but the same end result as the energy still becomes ensnared on the planet up until the saturation point is reached. How daft am I?

[Yorkshiresnows]

Well I wonder at our 'recent' settled carbon cycle which appears to have been at the beck and call of our position in relation to the sun.

What happens when you add a shed load of GHG's just after an optimum positioning. i.e. when you are on the 'downslope' and the carbon cycle should be winding down towards a minimum? Does it 'pep' temps back up straight away or is there a period whilst the 'drops in temp' are overcome and reversed?

Just how much does the less favourable position (in relation to the sun) impact upon the added ghg load? My simple head sees a slowing of the warming but the same end result as the energy still becomes ensnared on the planet up until the saturation point is reached. How daft am I?

Co2 really is not that potent (in relation to global warming). Water vapour visible (cloud - reflective) and non visible refractive are and always will be .... I've added a post in the general discussion thread that goes into more detail.

Ocean cycles / solar cycles and cloud (clearly cloud and ocean cycles are linked) = impact on Earths temperature. There is good recent literature to be viewed discussing this. More importantly, there is clear evidence of a synergy of cyclic events and changes in cloud cover (globally) that tie in with the warming phase from the last 1980's to 1998. With a further cyclic change thereafter.

Don't forget, added warmth has to be distributed via the ocean currents, and this will always favour greater heat distribution to the poles, as this is bled from the system ice loss will result, greatest in the arctic for obvious reasons, ..... looks like we may be at the end of this process as the new negative PDO begins to exert its natural cooling effect.

Y.S

[VillagePlank]

Moving on, then - any takers for a simple model as described above?

[Admiral_Bobski]

VP has given us a pretty good starting point there, I think. Is it possible to attribute some figures to each factor? (I think that was GW's original point on the "consensus" thread - to identify forcings and feedbacks and apply figures to them.) So where do we start?

CB