More misleading statements, which are at best half-truths. The video entitled, "Is there any merit to the studies that show that historical carbon dioxide levels lag behind temperature, and don't lead them?", is at this link.
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/
Why do you guys struggle to miss simple points?
When we came out of the ice age, the average CO2 atmospheric levels changed from about 170 ppm to about 280 ppm. This is a natural 65% increase, in response to around a 6 degree global increase. Now keep in mind, we are still warming naturally too. A near linear response if CO2 was driven another 1 degree would be around 390 ppm, but it is far from that simple. The average temperature doesn't drive it, rather the gradient of the temperature changes from pole to pole do. More on that later. The additional 110 ppm increase is the ECS after several hundred years, as it takes several hundred of years for most the ocean to circulate. In the last hundred years, I will venture to guess that the warming has caused around 20 ppm increase, and that without our influence, we would see around 300 ppm, rising to near 400 ppm around the year 3,000.
Before mankind was emitting CO2, the oceans would source CO2 in the equatorial areas and sink it in the polar regions. This has to do with how much a gas can be dissolved into a liquid, which changes with temperature. The average 280 ppm we have seen over the last 8,000 years or so is because the sourcing and sinking were in long term equilibrium. When the oceans were colder during the ice ages, the oceans simply held more gas in its equilibrium. That's why the average was around 170 ppm in the atmosphere. We still see sourcing and sinking the same way, the balance is just different.
CO2 does not warm the oceans very much at all, and the mass imbalance between the atmosphere and ocean has the ocean controlling atmospheric heat at the contact areas rather than the atmosphere controlling ocean heat. Now added CO2 in the atmosphere does speed up the ocean sourcing and slow down the ocean sinking however, the radiant energy from CO2 is warming the first few microns of water depth, and this "skin" thickness is where the CO2 exchange happens. The radiant exchange process is faster than convection temperature mixing, and most this energy is effectively reflected back away. However, it does increase the sourcing in the equatorial areas and decrease the sinking in the polar areas. The oceans source about 90 GtC annually, and we source about 10 GtC. The numbers varies a little from paper to paper, but not by much. The oceans turn around and sink about 92 GtC, which is showing the atmosphere levels are above equilibrium state for the SST (sea surface temperate.) The biosphere also sinks some of the excess CO2, but the net result is the atmospheric levels are increasing.
The sun is the driving force behind ocean warming, and how CO2 responds, and most of its response is linear to radiant changes, not logarithmic. It is simply a matter of physics, where one calorie (4.186 joules or watt-seconds) of energy warms one gram of pure water by one degree. We see the nonlinear responses at the surface, not to the depths that sunlight penetrates the oceans. It takes time for these changes from the solar flux to be seen at the surface, and with the ocean circulation, we have water emerging from the southern hemisphere that hasn't been to the surface in around 500 years, and in the norther hemisphere, water diving deep not be be seen for another approximate 500 years. There are so many variables to this.
As the waters start out cold in the south, then likely absorbs CO2 until they travel north far enough to be in balance. This really depends on what happened chemically in the deep oceans. Then at some point, as they get warmer and warmer, they start emitting CO2, and hold the least CO2 in the equatorial areas. Then as they travel farther north and start cooling again, they start absorbing CO2 again. This is something that is likely not linear, and what I stated about 1 degree equating to a change from 280 ppm to 390 ppm is likely in error. The average temperature isn't what matters, and isn't linear to the equilibrium process. It is the changes of exchange in the warmer vs. the cooler areas that matter. Here is a quick graph to illustrate:
I'm not a good technical writer at all, so I hope this is helpful just the same.
