Here is a great review...
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/11414-co2-follows-temperature-rises.html
In a study recently published in Global and Planetary Change, Humlum et al. (2013) introduce their analysis of the phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and mean global air temperature by noting that over the last 420 thousand years, "variations in atmospheric CO2 broadly followed temperature according to ice cores, with a typical delay of several centuries to more than a millennium," citing Lorius et al. (1990), Mudelsee (2001) and Caillon et al. (2003).
And they explain this relationship by stating it "is thought to be caused by the slow vertical mixing that occurs in the oceans, in association with the decrease in the solubility of CO2 in ocean water, as its temperature slowly increases at the end of glacial periods (Martin et al., 2005), leading to subsequent net out-gassing of CO2 from the oceans (Togweiler, 1999)."
So if this be true for glacial cycles, should it not also be true for seasonal cycles?
Feeling that such might indeed be the case, the three Norwegian researchers intensively studied the phase relations (leads/lags) between atmospheric CO2 concentration data and several global temperature data series - including HadCRUT, GISS and NCDC surface air data, as well as UAH lower troposphere data and HadSST2 sea surface data - for the period January 1980 to December 2011. And what did they find?
Humlum et al. report that annual cycles were present in all of the several data sets they studied and that there was "a high degree of co-variation between all data series ... but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature." More specifically, they state that "the maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11-12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5-10 months [in relation] to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months [in relation] to global lower troposphere temperature," so that "the overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from the ocean surface to the land surface to the lower troposphere."
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