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Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation

Nature volume 484, pages 49–54 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

The covariation of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration and temperature in Antarctic ice-core records suggests a close link between CO2 and climate during the Pleistocene ice ages. The role and relative importance of CO2 in producing these climate changes remains unclear, however, in part because the ice-core deuterium record reflects local rather than global temperature. Here we construct a record of global surface temperature from 80 proxy records and show that temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation. Differences between the respective temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere parallel variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation recorded in marine sediments. These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.

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Figure 1: Proxy temperature records.
Figure 2: CO 2 concentration and temperature.
Figure 3: Global temperature and climate forcings.
Figure 4: Hemispheric temperatures.
Figure 5: Temperature change before increase in CO 2 concentration.

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Acknowledgements

Discussions with numerous people, including E. J. Brook, A. E. Carlson, N. G. Pisias and J. Shaman, contributed to this research. We acknowledge the palaeoclimate community for generating the proxy data sets used here. In particular, we thank S. Barker, T. Barrows, E. Calvo, J. Kaiser, A. Koutavas, Y. Kubota, V. Peck, C. Pelejero, J.-R. Petit, J. Sachs, E. Schefuß, J. Tierney and G. Wei for providing proxy data, and R. Gyllencreutz and J. Mangerud for providing unpublished results of the DATED Project on the retreat history of the Eurasian ice sheets. The NOAA NGDC and PANGAEA databases were also essential to this work. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, located in the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725. NCAR is sponsored by the NSF. J.D.S. is supported by a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship. This research was supported by the NSF Paleoclimate Program for the Paleovar Project through grant AGS-0602395.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy D. Shakun

  2. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, 10964, New York, USA

    Jeremy D. Shakun

  3. College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331, Oregon, USA

    Peter U. Clark, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix & Andreas Schmittner

  4. Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    Feng He & Zhengyu Liu

  5. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    Zhengyu Liu

  6. Laboratory for Ocean-Atmosphere Studies, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Zhengyu Liu

  7. Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, 80307-3000, Colorado, USA

    Bette Otto-Bliesner

  8. CEREGE, Collège de France, CNRS-Université Aix-Marseille, Europole de l’Arbois, 13545 Aix-en-Provence, France,

    Edouard Bard

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Contributions

J.D.S. designed the study, synthesized and analysed data, and wrote the manuscript with P.U.C. F.H., Z.L. and B.O.-B. did the transient modelling. S.A.M. and A.C.M. contributed to data analysis. A.S. helped interpret AMOC–CO2 linkages. E.B. provided data and discussion on the radiocarbon calibration. All authors discussed the results and provided input on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jeremy D. Shakun.

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Shakun, J., Clark, P., He, F. et al. Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation. Nature 484, 49–54 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10915

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  1. Arno Arrak

    When I read about "... potential physical explanations for the correlations between temperature, CO2 concentration and AMOC variability in three transient simulations of the last deglaciation..." I started wondering about the purpose of all this verbiage. Climate simulations as far as I go have been losers and I certainly can't check any of this stuff myself. After more unnecessary verbiage about "Uncertainty analysis" and "Robustnes of results" I realized it was meant to ease us into a belief that they have discovered something big: carbon dioxide did not follow but preceded end-Pleistocene warming. I never would have guessed it from their graphs. It is clear that this paper, as all others emanating from the climate establishment, takes it for granted that any observed warming is caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and attempts to prove it. There is just this one problem with this assumption: the chief greenhouse gas on earth is not carbon dioxide but water vapor. They both absorb outgoing infrared (long-wave) radiation and it is their combined absorption of radiant energy that causes the atmosphere to get warm. But now consider this: when we don't change the amount of carbon dioxide in the air we have a stable climate. There are local temperature and humidity variations, to be sure, but long-term drift is absent. What guarantees this? To prevent a long term temperature drift the IR absorption by greenhouse gas concentration that determines IR transmittance of the atmosphere must respond to any such temperature drift. And water vapor is the only greenhouse gas that can easily do that. Starting from this qualitative picture Ferenc Miskolczi brought in radiation theory and showed that for a stable climate to exist the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared had to have a value of 1.86 (15% transmittance). This transmittance is determined by the combined absorption of infrared radiation by all the greenhouse gases present, but the adjustment is maintained by water vapor, the only adjustable greenhouse gas in the lot. The blogosphere was hostile to the idea because it wiped out the sacrosanct Arrhenius law. But Miskolczi went on to test it using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948. He found that the IR transmittance of the atmosphere had been constant for the previous 61 years as his theory predicted (E&E 21(4):243-262, 2010). During that same period of time the amount of carbon dioxide in air increased by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of all this carbon dioxide to air had no effect whatsoever upon the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. This is an empirical observation, not derived from any theory, and it overrides any theoretical calculations that do not agree with it. Specifically, it overrides any calculations based on climate models that use the greenhouse effect to predict warming. In accord with this, a close examination of the temperature history of the last 100 years reveals that there has been no greenhouse warming at all during this entire period. Starting with the twentieth century, the first part of the twentieth century warming started in 1910 and stopped in 1940. There was no corresponding increase of carbon dioxide at the beginning of this warming which means that according to the laws of physics it cannot be greenhouse warming. Bjorn Lomborg attributes this warming to solar influence and I agree with him. There was no warming in the fifties, sixties, and seventies while carbon dioxide relentlessly increased. There is no satisfactory explanation for this lack of warming, only various contorted excuses to explain it away. The true reason for this lack of warming is clear from Miskolczi's work. There was no warming in the eighties and nineties either according to the satellite temperature measurements. There was only a short spurt of warming between 1998 and 2002 caused by the warm water that the super El Nino of 1998 had carried across the ocean. And there was no warming from that point on to the present while carbon dioxide just kept on going up on its merry way. And if you still think Arctic warming proves the existence of greenhouse warming think again: Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming either and is caused by Atlantic Ocean currents carrying warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic (E&E 22(8):1067-1083, 2011). Taking all this history and Miskolczi's theory into account the attempt of this Nature article to explain the end-Pleistocene warming as greenhouse warming is nothing more than hopelessly misguided global warming doctrine.

  2. truc muche Replied to Arno Arrak

    We are waiting for your publication ...

  3. Pat Frank

    Where is the physical theory that converts a proxy metric into a physical temperature? Statistics is not a substitute for physics. For more detail, see the extended discussion in Negligence, Non-science and Consensus Climatology.

    Absent a valid and predictively falsifiable physical theory, all the temperature numbers in Shakun, et al., have no discrete physical meaning.

    And absent any discrete physical meaning in the temperature numbers, there is no discrete physical meaning in the paper.

    Regarding the climate model part of the paper,

    Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections ... https://www.frontiersin.org...

    ... shows that climate models cannot detect, attribute, or predict the effect of small changes in CO2 forcing on the climate.

    The message of this paper rests entirely on false precision.

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