Does global warming cause carbon dioxide levels to increase in the atmosphere?

Global warming does, in fact, cause increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. But increased atmospheric carbon dioxide also causes global warming. This feedback is believed to be a good part of how relatively small changes in solar input could cause comparatively large changes in actual temperatures.

Unlike the water vapor feedback (which is also a significant source of warming), the CO2 feedback can also drive change. Water vapor will fall out of the sky as rain/snow/hail/dew/etc, if it gets too cold. So, it can't actually force warming, if you sprayed water vapor in the air in quantity, you'd just temporarily saturate the air. But CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for quite some time (even if individual CO2 molecules are removed fairly rapidly, the carbon cycle means that they will be replaced by others being newly created through respiration, burning, or rot). So, since we are releasing CO2 directly, increasing its atmospheric concentration, we're getting the CO2 "feedback" without other warming initiating it.

edit:

The terms "global warming" and "climate change" have been used more or less interchangeably all along. Technically, they're slightly different things. Global warming is the temperature increase, climate change is all the things *caused* by the temperature increase (sea levels, current changes, glacial melt, and so on). It's not some sort of gotcha.

Not sure about the Little Ice Age, as I'm not a paleoclimatologist. Or, indeed, any sort of climatologist.

>>>Does global warming cause carbon dioxide levels to increase in the atmosphere?

Yes, it certainly can. Natural CO2 emissions are an important feedback to initial forcings and have been integral in past interglacial periods. The forcing due to Milankovitch cycles is strong enough to initiate feedbacks, but far too weak to drive the glacial/interglacial cycle itself. CO2 is needed, along with other feedbacks like albedo.

>>>Thus giving the impression that carbon dioxide is the cause of the increase in warmth when in fact it is more likely the effect?

Hm, no. The lag between temperature rise and atmospheric CO2 rise from that warming is on the order of several hundred years, and even then the lag is likely not a global phenomenon. This would strongly suggest that the global warming we are seeing, accompanied very closely by CO2 rise, is not the cause of the CO2 rise. Even considering that, you must take into account the fact that CO2 levels have risen some 40% while global temperatures have risen not a degree celsius - it's not chemically possible for that amount of warming to cause such an increase, and even during the large interglacial swings there was no such increase in CO2.

The chance that the CO2 is also mainly due to natural yet non-climatically induced emissions is also very low, as volcanic activity would be the main contributor in that case but volcanic emissions only comprise about 100-200 megatonnes of CO2. Human emissions are on the order of 30.6 gigatonnes, over 100 times that amount.

One other factor to consider that was already brought up was that the oceans, which would normally be a major source of natural CO2 emissions as they warm, have been acidifying, indicating that they are absorbing CO2, not emitting it, on a net basis.

>>>Do we really know enough about the long term climate of the earth to think that we have any control over it at all?

Why yes, we do. Of course, it is the short term climate we are worried about: the glacial/interglacial cycle will very likely continue as it has, for instance, but we don't expect another glacial period for several thousand years. And what will happen in the meantime? The vast consensus of evidence points toward rapid warming due to human greenhouse gas emissions.

>>>Isn't the entire planet subject to thermal decomposition?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that statement, I don't recall hearing that phrase before.

1) Why was Global Warming renamed Climate Change?

It wasn't, that is a lie. Both are very commonly used still, and both actually mean separate things anyways. Global warming is quite obvious - the increase in the average temperature of the Earth, usually over a climatically relevant time scale, such as a few decades. Climate change in the alteration in long term climate patterns (temperature could be one of them; precipitation, wind patterns, storm frequency, so on are other examples of variables), perhaps due to global warming. One is a cause of the other, they are not interchangeable.

If you want a prime example though of an actually documented case of an attempt to change the name, Frank Luntz, a language advisor to the Republican Party, had recommended the switch because "climate change" is more appealing to listeners that "global warming."

2) What caused Little Ice Age (LIA) ?

A combination of high volcanic activity (aerosol emittance) and low solar activity. There were a couple grand solar minimums during the LIA, the Maunder being the most well known.

A period of global warming causes atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to rise for two reasons.

1. Warming reduces the solubility of carbon dioxide in sea water, causing it to come out of solution and into the atmosphere.

2. Warming causes permafrost to thaw. This triggers fermentation, which produces hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which are used by methanogens to produce methane. This methane enters the stratosphere, where it undergoes photo-oxidation to carbon dioxide.

<Thus giving the impression that carbon dioxide is the cause of the increase in warmth.>

That is not an impression. Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation from the Earth. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics say that warming must be the result.

<1) Why was Global Warming renamed Climate Change?>

It wasn't. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988.

<2) What caused Little Ice Age (LIA) ?>

It was caused mostly by an increase if volcanic activity, particularly after 1325 and 1440.

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/ONL...

● Does global warming cause carbon dioxide levels to increase in the atmosphere?

Yes it does – see the excellent answers already provided for an explanation as to how and why.

● Thus giving the impression that carbon dioxide is the cause of the increase in warmth when in fact it is more likely the effect?

Quite understandable why you would think that, seems to make sense. Levels of greenhouse gases and the average global temperature are inexorably linked, change one and the other changes, and it doesn’t matter which one you change first, the other will follow. The reason being is that the greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere have a physical property that enables them to inhibit the flow of heat energy from Earth into space. The more of these gases there are, the more heat is trapped.

For all intents and purposes the only source of heat we have on this planet is the Sun, and the amount of energy we receive from the Sun does fluctuate. Not by much, less than one thousandth from the mean, but over periods of decades, centuries and millennia the effect can be noticeable.

Given that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that there is now 42% more of it in the atmosphere than at any toime for millions of years then it’s inevitable that warming will occur.

More CO2 = More Warming. More Warming = More CO2.

● The earth has had many ice ages, some just 10k years ago.

Many indeed, and at the warmest point between the peaks of the greater ice-ages the Earth becomes so hot that tropical plants grow at the poles. These are the ice-ages that occur at c125 million year intervals, they correlate with the orbit of the solar system around the galactic centre and aren’t something we need concern ourselves with.

The ice-ages you’re referring to are more correctly known as glacials or glacial maxima and these have a 100,000 year cycle. 19,000 years ago Earth began warming up and continued to do so for some 10,000 years, since then we’ve been on the gradual downward slope toward the next glacial maxumum.

● Do we really know enough about the long term climate of the earth to think that we have any control over it at all?

There is far more that we don’t know about the climate than we do but that’s not to say that we know nothing about it. In fact, we know rather a lot. We know for example why we have glacials. The warming and cooling that causes the advance and retreat of the glaciers is caused by changes in the shape of Earth’s orbital path around the Sun.

I’m sure you know that our orbit is an elliptical one. But the shape of that orbit is constantly changing, it tends toward circularity and then away from it again. If it were possible to see a million years of time-lapse photography in just a few seconds, you’d see the Earth orbiting the Sun in a circle that gradually got more and more elliptical in shape before bouncing back to a circular orbit and repeating the process over and over.

This cycle, known as orbital obliquity, takes 100,000 years to complete. The increase / decrease in heat energy received from the Sun is what leads to the warming and cooling.

Think of climate science as an infinitely complex jigsaw. At the moment many of the pieces are still to be put in place, some pieces are missing and there’s some errant pieces that belong in other jigsaws. What we have got at present are enough pieces in place to see what the overall picture is and to see how the major components relate to one another; much of the smaller detail has yet to be filled in – this won’t change the overall picture, it just adds more clarity.

● Isn't the entire planet subject to thermal decomposition?

Yes, if you go by the second law of thermodynamics. Not just the entire planet but the entire universe. Strictly speaking it’s perhaps better considered as entropic decomposition (which is consequent to the 2nd law of TD). However, this is a mechanism for the decline into universal dissonance and ultimate destruction rather than an explanation for global warming.

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● Why was Global Warming renamed Climate Change

It wasn’t. The term CC predates GW by several decades and was first used in the 1920’s, or at least variants of it were (inadvertent climatic disruption for example). It was the media and not the scientific community who used the term GW – usually out of contact. The two are actually different things, GW is the cause and CC is the effect.

● What caused Little Ice Age (LIA) ?

A 700 year decline in total solar irradiance (less heat from the Sun) which led to temperatures in some parts of the world falling by about 0.5 °C, most notably in Europe. During the period c1000AD to c1700AD TSI fell from 1363W/m²/yr to 1362W/m²/yr – not much but over time enough to cool the planet slightly.

Commercial records show how much fossil carbon has been removed from long-term storage underground and put into the atmosphere as CO2. It's about twice as much as remains there. The rest is absorbed primarily by the ocean. We can see, from nuclear chemistry, that this old carbon is showing up in both the atmosphere and the ocean. It's far more than the amount of carbon that would be released from the ocean by the warming we have seen, and it is going the other way. Saying that the CO2 is natural is a little like noticing packrats in the town dump and concluding that they are the cause.

Yes, it is indicated from the study of archeologic records as well as the laws of chemistry that with increased natural temperatures there is an increased level of CO2 production. With increased temperatures there is a natural acceleration of organic activity (plant, animal, ocean), which tends to accelerates the carbon cycle. This causes more CO2 going into the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere is a huge tank for carbon, and also has a somewhat delayed response in getting the carbon back to the organic cycle (depends on vegetation growth, oceanic activity, and many others), there then tends to be in upswing of CO2 in the atmosphere after a spike in global temperatures. This cycle has been repeated almost countless times since Earth's biologic origins, and at times with carbon far higher than what we have now or what has been predicted due to AGW. The idea that added CO2 from fossil burning will cause significant irreparable temperature increase is just a hypothesis. We really do not know, but the history of the Earth indicates it will be insignificant and potentially just intertwined with the natural cycles of the Earth's heating and cooling. There is no significant evidence to suggest that the Earth cannot account for the added carbon content in the atmosphere, without some of the cataclysmic changes that have been proposed.

Yes, it is a feedback system, it doesn't matter how it starts, carbon dioxide --> heating > release of CO2 -> heating -> .... round it goes until something stops. The Ice Ages are tied to the Milankovitch cycles, orbital changes of the earth. When the cycles cause the northern hemisphere with the most land mass to get more sunlight, the ice melts and so the ice doesn't reflect back as much sunlight. So the interglacial begins and goes until the sunlight in the Northern hemisphere is less.

The "Little Ice Age" affected only northern Europe. It wasn't a true ice age, just a dip in local temperatures.

I never heard of a planet subject to "thermal decomposition".

Your two questions reflect the obsessions of climate denying trolls.

As others have answered, naturally warming climate does cause the oceans to throw off CO2 to the atmosphere; this is one of the feedbacks that amplified past waming climates. The difference now is the acidifying of the oceans; the oceans are absorbing CO2 as they warm. If the CO2 were now coming first, where would it be coming from? Carbon does not magically arise from the ground and into the air. This is one of the important ways that we know that the current build up of CO2 is not natural.

The media renamed Climate Change to Global Warming. The very first published paper that associated human's output of CO2 to warming climate refered to the process as Climate Change. It was also the first use of the term Climate Change and it occured 20 years before the term Global Warming was coined, by Gilbert Plass in 1955.

In 2003, the Bush Adminstration was advised by GOP spin consultant Frank Luntz to avoid using the term Global Warming because it sounded too scary. That famous memo was leaked and is available to read if you are interested. That may have been one of the causes of Global Waming becoming less popular in popular use, but another may be just the availability of the science journals online. Climate researchers have always preferred the term Climate Change, and as more people were able to read their writing directly rather than through the news media, the scientific term seems to have better caught on.

Yes global warming does cause CO2 increase in the atmosphere via a process known as CO2 outgassing from the oceans. However as oceanic pH levels are falling indicating an increasing uptake of CO2 and atmospheric CO2 continues to rise (roughly 15.6 billion tons or 2ppm) at rates smaller than total human emissions (roughly 30.8 billion tons) per year one generally comes to the conclusion that the oceans are absorbing some of the excess CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere.

Edit: Global warming did not get renamed climate change. Global warming causes climate change. The IPCC, established in 1988, is called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change not the Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming.

The little ice age was caused by a number of factors. It coincided with a period of declining solar output known as the Maunder Minimum. However there were other factors also in play such as a increase in volcanic aerosols as well as oscillatory patterns.

http://www.college-de-france.fr/media/evo_cli/UPL1...

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Shindell_...

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Man...

There are certainly those who believe Warming leads CO2.

This is a good overview of AGW Skepticism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtevF4B4RtQ

The chief argument against AGW is that CO2 is such a small percentage of our atmosphere. About 0.04%. The post-industrial increase measures in at a breathtakingly small 0.01% or 100ppm. Now this IS 40% more CO2 - so what we debate is whether a sizable increase in a profoundly tiny amount means anything.

Clearly ANYTHING we do the atmosphere or Earth HAS an effect, the question is HOW MUCH. There is a fair argument that aerosols can affect the climate, since Global temperature drops are often observed after major volcanic eruptions.

Warmists LOVE to say Global Warming has NOT been renamed Climate Change, after all the term Climate Change has been around for some time. But the frequency of use has CLEARLY altered & suspiciously right around the time researchers were noticing a LACK of warming. So how do Liberals handle such indications of duplicity? They blame it on Bush of course! ;-)

The Little Ice Age has been largely attributed to Solar Minimums & Volcanic Aerosols.

It is problematic for Warmists because.

A) It's a Large Rapid temperature swing in a basically pre industrial world.

B) It highlights that Global Cooling is a much bigger problem than Global Warming.