The natural CO2/temperature balance

Probably the most important piece of climate research for years.

For some 25 years scientists have argued that there must be an entirely natural mechanism that regulates the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and the planet's temperature. It is this assumed natural mechanism that is the basic evidence that skeptics use as a primary argument against mankind having anything to do with climate change.

Well, according to new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience and reported by Reuters, there is evidence that there IS indeed a natural mechanism in operation.

So, there IS a natural CO2/temperature cycle. Should all the climate change 'deniers' start celebrating?

Well, errrmmm, no. Why? Because the evidence from Antarctic ice indicates that the natural cycle prior to the industrial revolution shows that "The average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume, Zeebe said, which means that 22 molecules of carbon dioxide were added to, or removed from, every million molecules of air." I.e. All of the pre-industrial warming (vineyards in Greenland and Northern England) and cooling periods (mini ice age etc.) have occurred naturally over long periods of time with a variation in CO2 levels of only 22 ppm!

But, since the industrial revolution, "the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 100 parts per million". "That means human activities are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about 14,000 times as fast as natural processes do"

And the rate of increase in CO2 levels appears to be speeding up.

The natural mechanism will eventually remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, but we are talking about something that would take several hundred thousand years. As we appear to be accelerating the natural mechanism by some 14,000 times the norm, I rather suspect that mankind does not have that sort of time frame in which to address the problem!

It will be interesting to see how widely this gets reported. My guess is that as it is pretty bad news, it will generally get ignored. Let's see.

Addendum 29/4/08:
As I suspected, nothing really mainstream at all - the only coverage I can spot so far is from News.Com.AU, TreeHugger (the first to state what this research actually means - global warming IS man-made) and RedOrbit. I'll keep checking though.