Neo, you have misunderstood my point and going into intricate detail about the summer/winter CO2 cycle is irrelevant. My point was that the rate at which plants gobble CO2 when they are in growth mode is shown in the annual drop in CO2.
When you have got rates like that on the loose, even if there are countervailing equally rapid increases during the other half of the year, you have got potential for rapid changes.
For example, if plants died off and the land turned to desert, as has happened in many places, such as the Sahara desert, you get reduced CO2 absorption and increased reflection of light. Similarly, if an ice age arrives, and the desert goes green, you get rapid absorption of CO2 and a feedback loop of cooling meaning more snow nearer the poles, meaning more reflection and more cooling. Note the new plants absorb light better than do deserts so there are counter pressures.
The outcome is oscillations of plant life and animal life associated with it towards and away from the poles, and glaciation and retreat of glaciation.
As CO2 has been stripped from the atmosphere by Suicidal Gaia over a billion years [check the graph to see the long decline with sudden up and downs here and there such as the carboniferous period], the ice age got under way. We are now at the tail end of it with very low CO2 levels, with risk of the end-game of Snowball Earth having been avoided by human CO2 production [maybe].
You had said that CO2 from humans would still be there in 100 years. That's silly. Some of the actual molecules still would be, but the level of CO2 would fall as the balance which existed before the human effort came back into play. It would fall fairly quickly, meaning over 10 and 20 years, as is shown by the fact that of all the emissions humans have put out, only a small portion is still in the atmosphere. We have put out enough CO2 to make levels much higher than they are.
We are in a situation of filling a leaky bucket - the faster we fill it, the quicker it drains out.
I don't need to get equations to see what scientists think. We have actual real-world data which shows it drains out of the atmosphere very quickly. Which doesn't mean increased levels will have exactly the same result. Equations based on scientific guesswork would be useful, but the real-world data is near enough for my purposes and shows you are wrong about how long CO2 levels would stay high if humans stopped producing it. |
