Time lag between changes in global temperature and atmospheric CO2 content under anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere

Abstract

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. Previously, it was shown that the time lag between changes in global temperature T and atmospheric CO2 content q CO2 generally does not characterize cause-and-effect relationships in the Earth system. In particular, in the case of non-greenhouse radiative forcing the sign of this lag depends on the time scale of the forcing. In this paper, the time lag between changes in T and q CO2 under the external emissions of CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere is studied. It was found that if the time scale of external emissions is large enough changes in q CO2 are lagging the corresponding changes in T, though the former is the main cause of the latter.