A very silly argument

I have finally found a scientist willing to confront the fact that over historical time, the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is 800 years BEHIND the temperature increase. That is, everytime a warming cycle begins, CO2 does not increase before that, or even simultaneously, but so much later that the Roman Empire could have risen and fallen in the interim.

His argument is, basically, that CO2 does increase global temps, and adds to the strength and length of a heating cycle in a sort of feedback loop. He points out that a heating cycle is about 5000 years, and about 4200 years of a typical cycle could be attributed to CO2 increase, at least in part.

He says it doesn't CAUSE global warming but it greatly contributes to it.

Two Points--

One, what DOES start it? No attempt to answer. ("some currently unknown process").

Two, if CO2 does NOT cause the warming cycle to begin, is it not also possible that it does not contribute to it (or only minimally)? That is, isn't it possible that the actual cause of the heating cycle is what drives the entire cycle, and that CO2 is simply following along just as it did for the first 800 years? After all, if it was feedback, what process STOPS the feedback? Try the feedback loop in your guitar amp, and if you don't pull the guitar away the amp will melt down. What pulls the guitar away in nature? He doesn't say.

For as long as solar activity has been plotted, admittedly only a few hundred years, the sun has charted contemporaneously with temperatures, not 800 years behind them. When solar activity increases, the globe's temperature does too, and vice versa. It is well known that 'the little ice age' of 1650-1715 featured a very low level of solar activity, almost no sunspots, a "Maunder minimum" named for an astronomer of the 19th century who studied records and discovered this dearth of solar activity during that time period.

This article's assertion (Jeff Severinghouse, 2004) is the exact same speculation that the global warming types offered in the beginning, with the exact same questionable proof and outlandish conclusions. It is simply adapted to confront the CO2 lag issue.

More of the same weak arguments. That's what you get when you ask them real questions.