Sure you can "nearly every single person on the planet plenty of room to live in Texas" but they would be devoid of infrastructure and it would be incredibly expensive to service people's homes if they're spread out across the states. It's a cop out to say 'there is plenty of land' when it requires a hell of a lot of work to bring it modern services. If you think your simplistic land argument is a good one you should revisit other beliefs as well.
I love how interested you are in this and your desire to work this out from first principles. I say the equation is not appropriate for the same reason we're having this discussion on the residence time of CO2, particularly anthropogenic. It doesn't account for multiple processes and time scales. The IPCC uses the Bern Model discussed here:
Frankly I don't care about the 97% agreement. I'm sure it is just as high if not higher in terms of biologists agreeing that evolution is occurring. It's a talking point to get people with no scientific training on board. Unfortunately it has the opposite result in many cases since it's a weak argument from authority.
Excellent point about water vapor particularly when it precipitates and release energy during the phase change. I'm on mobile so not as good at finding things, here's some information from AR4 with sources, AR5 may go into more detail:
9.5.4.2.1 Detection of external influence on precipitation
Mitchell et al. (1987) argue that global mean precipitation changes should be controlled primarily by the energy budget of the troposphere where the latent heat of condensation is balanced by radiative cooling. Warming the troposphere enhances the cooling rate, thereby increasing precipitation, but this may be partly offset by a decrease in the efficiency of radiative cooling due to an increase in atmospheric CO2 (Allen and Ingram, 2002; Yang et al., 2003; Lambert et al., 2004; Sugi and Yoshimura, 2004). This suggests that global mean precipitation should respond more to changes in shortwave forcing than CO2 forcing, since shortwave forcings, such as volcanic aerosol, alter the temperature of the troposphere without affecting the efficiency of radiative cooling. This is consistent with a simulated decrease in precipitation following large volcanic eruptions (Robock and Liu, 1994; Broccoli et al., 2003), and may explain why anthropogenic influence has not been detected in measurements of global land mean precipitation (Ziegler et al., 2003; Gillett et al., 2004b), although Lambert et al. (2004) urge caution in applying the energy budget argument to land-only data. Greenhouse-gas induced increases in global precipitation may have also been offset by decreases due to anthropogenic aerosols (Ramanathan et al., 2001).
Several studies have demonstrated that simulated land mean precipitation in climate model integrations including both natural and anthropogenic forcings is significantly correlated with that observed (Allen and Ingram, 2002; Gillett et al., 2004b; Lambert et al., 2004), thereby detecting external influence in observations of precipitation (see Section 8.3.1.2 for an evaluation of model-simulated precipitation). Lambert et al. (2005) examine precipitation changes in simulations of nine MMD 20C3M models including anthropogenic and natural forcing (Figure 9.18a), and find that the responses to combined anthropogenic and natural forcing simulated by five of the nine models are detectable in observed land mean precipitation (Figure 9.18a). Lambert et al. (2004) detect the response to shortwave forcing, but not longwave forcing, in land mean precipitation using HadCM3, and Gillett et al. (2004b) similarly detect the response to volcanic forcing using the PCM. Climate models appear to underestimate the variance of land mean precipitation compared to that observed (Gillett et al., 2004b; Lambert et al., 2004, 2005), but it is unclear whether this discrepancy results from an underestimated response to shortwave forcing (Gillett et al., 2004b), underestimated internal variability, errors in the observations, or a combination of these.
Anthropogenic CO2. I thought that was apparent. Naturally emitted CO2 emissions are relatively constant and balanced over the last several hundred years, anthropogenic CO2 is not. Therefore as we continue to produce excess CO2 which cannot be absorbed by the system it results in excess CO2 which is not removed for upwards of 1000 years. We're removing sequestered CO2 and putting it in the atmosphere. It's not that complex.
From the same article I posted and you referenced:
"Dissolution of CO2 into the oceans is fast but the problem is that the top of the ocean is “getting full” and the bottleneck is thus the transfer of carbon from surface waters to the deep ocean. This transfer largely occurs by the slow ocean basin circulation and turn over (*3). This turnover takes 500-1000ish years. Therefore a time scale for CO2 warming potential out as far as 500 years is entirely reasonable."
You stated:
"Because of that the proportion of CO2 that stays in the atmosphere for a given time follows an exponential law with a decay coefficient of -log(1-0.27)=0.19" this was not in the article. You're applying equations which are not appropriate to the system.
Within a thousand years, the remaining atmospheric fraction of the CO2 emissions (see Section 6.3.2.4) is between 15 and 40%, depending on the amount of carbon released (Archer et al., 2009b).
Again....I'd be interested to know what you're reading that brought you these arguments as they seem to be passed around circles of skeptics (not saying deniers).
"I'm not sure why you rush to dimiss me like that." Perhaps you should re-read how you dismissed what I put forward and you will understand the favor I returned with supporting evidence and perhaps too much snark.
I'd be interested to know what you're reading that brought you these arguments as they seem to be targeting them. So it is evident that they are being passed around circles of skeptics (not saying deniers).
There's a big difference between a climate model and a weather model and I believe you're familiar with the differences between long term changes (climate) and short term ones (weather). Just like we can't predict the interaction of every atom in a balloon yet we can predict how they will act as a whole when inflating one.
"In return, here's a bit of mea culpa for my facile attack that the quoted very long life of the CO2 is only the result of a change of definition: while technically I was right, the definition change is one in good faith, and my critique was not."
Thanks, I guess....but you are not technically right. You completely altered the state of my argument. I wasn't talking about the average. 15-40% (depending on the IPCC emissions projection) of CO2 remains in the atmosphere for upwards of 1,000 years. If our projections of climate change are correct we're in very big trouble as we've already locked in a significant amount of warming.
Additionally, you should be looking at AR5's physical science basis files, not AR4's if you want to be following the state of the science 4+ years ago instead of 10+.
I think you need to understand magnitudes: "For example, what happens if there is a large volcano, or something like Saddam burning thousands of oil wells in Kuwait. I read somewhere that some climate models did check their predictions against the actual outcomes, and this is good. More evidence of this type would be great."
and to my point from your other comment, this is from the link above: . Within a thousand years, the remaining atmospheric fraction of the CO2 emissions (see Section 6.3.2.4) is between 15 and 40%, depending on the amount of carbon released (Archer et al., 2009b).
No it does not. For a supposed MIT grad with a PhD I would expect excellent reading comprehension and the ability to understand scientific fields even when outside of your main one. Given your comments and misunderstandings here and elsewhere I am inclined to think you are not. Read the IPCC reports, if you don't have time, look at the summary for policy makers, particularly the physical science basis.
Do you understand the difference between average and 15-40%? How about the difference between average and median, non-normal distributions, etc.?
There's no changing of definitions from anyone except yourself in your misleading "quote".
That's not really a theory (southern warming -> release co2 -> increase northern warming), that is well-established physical and biological processes.
Why should there be a similar 800-year lag today? The past CO2 increases were due to natural processes whereby as the temperature increased more biological activity was occurring and thus emitting more CO2. The historical lag makes complete sense from that perspective.
Currently, were artificially adding sequestered CO2 (which is known to trap heat) to the atmosphere and the temperature is increasing, with a fairly strong correlation, as a result.
It's obvious you never even considered reading the article:
Barrett and Gast published a letter in Science in 1971 entitled simply 'Climate Change'. The journal 'Climatic Change' was created in 1977 (and is still published today). The IPCC was formed in 1988, and of course the 'CC' is 'climate change', not 'global warming'.
Lutz proposed this as a PR method during the Bush administration.