You have to be careful with the term stronger - water vapour is the GHG with the strongest effect on temperature but it is very short lived compared to other GHG and the planet can self-correct high levels more easily via the water cycle. CO2 lasts from 50-200 years in the atmosphere and we've imbalanced the carbon cycle (including changes to the land and oceans) that normally removes it as part of regulating planetary temperatures.

I don't believe it's correct to believe or assume that the planet has some sort of thermostat and that there is a way to 'set' it.  The Earth is always approaching equilibrium but that's not the same as homeostasis.

@Turchany - it's the duration it lasts in the atmosphere that is the important part.

Let's hope it stays that way - for obvious reasons major changes would be much more catastrophic than the Arctic ice melting.

I've taken a closer look at the ice-core data (I downloaded it and placed it in openoffice).

I only looked at the data between 8,000 and 22,000 years old; there was a huge temperature jump of +8 degrees during that period.

There seems to be a small lag of CO2 of about 200 years in that data set.

But is that really significant considering the migration of CO2 over a time period of 2,000 years?

It might be an artifact of the averaging of CO2 levels over a time-window of say 200 years,...

Or it might be real... since the Antarctic is slow to warm up anyway, it's already lagging the rest of the world by almost a century. So who knows... it might be a regional effect...

But let's get things straight: there's most certainly no lag of thousands of years.

Simple.

Humans [and other life] are allegedly 'intelligent' and react to outside stimulus.....you get cold...you shiver....you get warm you sweat.

Planet earth is a 'rock'  it just sits there....if it gets warmer it gets warmer...end of.

It circles a heat source....if it was getting warmer [and COULD balance things out] it could just pop out to a wider orbit for a bit...to cool off.   That ain't going to happen...

There's also something wrong with plotting CO2 directly with Temperature.

Namely, CO2 levels do not map 1:1 to temperature, the relation is a more like a Log function: T = log(C/C0). (Not exactly like this of course, but it comes closer).

The reason this is important is: you are interested in small time differences, but the graphs are usually fitted as a whole. Therefore you have to fit the Log(CO2) data as accurately to the T data as you can, not the CO2 data themselves, that gives you the wrong fit.

(Although to be fair I don't think it'll make much of a difference)

The smoothing problem of the CO2 data is nastier. You're really trying to determine a "point" in time at which CO2 rises. However such a point cannot be inferred from the data, because it takes time for CO2 to diffuse down to 100 m depth in the ice. I don't know how this averaging works of course - if the diffusion is very efficient than the averaging will be of the order of 1 year or so and then the match with temperature should be fairly accurate. If it's not efficient, then the averaging will be over longer periods of time and then this smoothing will introduce a time lag.

That reminds me, temperature also depends on CH4. If CH4 is released from the oceans (for example due to a sea level drop or a temperature change), it will lead to a fairly quick rise in temperature. On the longer run it will lead to a rise in CO2.

http://www.geotimes.org/nov04/feature_climate.html

It's only true to the extent that plant-life will always try to bond as much CO2 as it can.

It will help remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Under hot-greenhouse conditions, when oceans are anoxic, this can be quite an efficient process because plants sink to the bottom and don't decay.

But it's not a smart process: CO2 can drop to the point that it causes mass-die-offs of plants because temperatures drop too much.

(Assuming of course that CO2 is important for the temperature ^^ )

And a little more on the smoothing problem in ice-cores: the problem with this is from the fact that the smoothing window is not symmetrical around a certain time. At time T, you'll have mixture of gases of different "younger" ages but never "older" ages. The radiometric dating will also be sensitive to averaging, but not necessarily the same averaging, because diffusion of CO2 depends on the partial pressure of the CO2 (which varies in time), while the partial pressure of the gases used for the dating may vary differently in time so their diffusion rate may differ from CO2. In addition to this, transporting excess amounts of CO2 may be fairly efficient, while the actual mixing of gases in/out of the ice may be a much slower process, and that's what affects the radiometric dating.

No, it's true to every extent.

You mean I've been wasting all my time writing down links onto golden tablets

Good luck with that.

Yes, I think for Sweden it will be a good deal.

Here's 2 interesting articles I found.

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Happens-When-the-Oil-Runs-Out.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/06/05/dangerous-times-as-energy-sources-get-costlier-to-extract/

What it tells you is this: there is plenty of oil, but it takes more and more energy to extract this oil. This is bad news for global warming, because producing and pre-processing the oil itself is becoming an energy intensive and polluting process (in terms of CO2 production).

To produce 4 barrels of oil from tar sands, you need the energy equivalent 1 barrel of oil. This increases CO2 production by about 20% (assuming a 5% cost at this moment), even if the oil demand from the economy stays the same.

A similar story goes for coal. Pakistan has large coal reserves, but they are of poorer quality than what's usually mined. But the need for energy is so high, that they and India will exploit it anyways. What this means is, that more and more coal has to be burned to produce the same amount of energy.

So what's relevant for predictions of CO2 production: not only population growth, increase in wealth and energy demand, but also how much coal/oil has to be burned to supply the world with that energy. And this cost is also increasing.

The opposing trend is production of gas (and oil) from CO2 from the atmosphere, using excess energy from e.g. wind-power, solar power, or even geothermal power. That's only done on a tiny scale, but maybe this will become more important in the future and maybe that'll save us in the end.