History is your teacher

I wanted to write about this since October 10, when I read Richard Black's BBC article
'Scary' climate message from past, then for some reason it slipped away. My interest came back after looking at Vitezslav' hilarious post 5000 ppm: What happens when CO₂ levels are 20 times higher?. I say hilarious not a disrespectful way, but in true meaning: some of the phrases pronounced really made me laugh out loud.

How about the CO₂ is green advertising-like catch-up spot?

Save the plants! Support more CO₂ emissions! Maybe instead the 350.org campaign we should start some 3500.org campaign.

Or the even better false syllogisms (please forgive him, Aristotle), such as:

Life is based on carbon. Declaring carbon as a "pollutant" is the greatest insanity in history. It is like declaring life a pollutant.

I could not help but reading again Adela's excellent post on the subject Flashnews: CO₂ is green and noticing how we seem to take a direction and follow that path without considering other people's work. Adela's made some very sensitive social remarks and presented unequivocal facts, which were mainly ignored and the questions remained unanswered.

So, what can we learn from the past? In the last few million years CO₂ concentration cycled between 180ppm and 280ppm in rhythm with the sequence of ice ages and warmer interglacial periods.

Scientists have been able to map relatively well the last 800,000 years from ice cores drilled in Antarctica, but now a new research allows us to look back in time 20 million years, to the Miocene period.

Data came from samples brought up by
the drilling ship Joides Resolution (BBC)

At the start of the period, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere stood at about 400 parts per million (ppm) before beginning to decline about 14 million years ago - a trend that eventually led to formation of the Antarctic icecap and perennial sea ice cover in the Arctic.

"What we have shown is that in the last period when CO₂ levels were sustained at levels close to where they are today, there was no icecap on Antarctica and sea levels were 25-40m higher," said research leader Aradhna Tripati from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

"At CO₂ levels that are sustained at or near modern day values, you don't need to have a major change in CO₂ levels to get major changes in ice sheets," she told BBC News.

This amount of CO₂ on the air and sea levels were associated with temperatures about 3-6^o C higher than today.

"This is yet another paper that makes the future look more scary than previously thought by many," said Jonathan Overpeck, who co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) work on ancient climates for the organisation's last major report in 2007.

"If anyone still doubts the link between CO₂ and climate, they should read this paper." I think they are referring to "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis". It's 996 pages long, and some of the best scientists in the World contributed to it. Before posting any more pro-CO₂ propaganda, maybe you should take a look at it.

"We can say that we've identified past tipping points for ice sheet stability; the basic physics governing ice sheets that we've known from ice cores are extended further back, and... I think we should use our knowledge of the physics of climate change in the past to prepare for the future."

"But what this new work suggests is that... efforts to stabilise at 450ppm should avoid going up above that level prior to stabilisation - that is, some sort of 'overshoot' above 450ppm on the way to stabilisation could be playing with fire."

This concern is shared by other people and organisations alike. Low-lying countries such as The Maldives, Palau and Grenada, and of course 350.org, are pushing for adoption of the much lower figure of 350ppm.

Let's hope this position will be shared at the COP15 by the big five as well: China, India, US, Japan and Europe.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.