Christ, read more than the tag line when you link something...

Dome C was cored by morons, that article was written by morons.  Vostok was twice as dense and had a small fraction of the error, it still showed 600-1000 years of lag.  These guys cored an even more dense section, where air wouldn't have escaped for shit, and still found a lag as high as 200.

AGW predicates CO2 driving temperature, not following it by two centuries.  If it was two decades it would still be following.  Effect before cause.

That's not lag. It's uncertainty.

If you have a 200 year difference on 100,000 years, then the error is 0,2% which is very small.

So give those people some credit ok and don't be so nitpicky about these things.

Also you should take into account that the data are "raw" and not corrected (completely) for the way the information is buried. I suppose because it's hard to model how gases and such are actually buried...

The same goes for the sediments in the geological records. Once sand, clay is buried, it will still be subject to some physical changes. This means that measurements on sediments can be subject to a biased error. It doesn't have to be a symmetrical Gaussian distribution around the center of the measured value... it could be skewed, or offset because of the lack of knowledge of the physical process of burial.

You can consider the magnitude of this offset an unknown. The offset is subject to uncertainty as well... that's why the 200 year "lag" is insignificant. 

Here's another example of the difficulties of measuring ancient temperature:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008PA001650/abstract

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe_files/Publications/ZeebePQ01.pdf

On a sidenote, here's another example of records of extreme events that happened on short timescales:

http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Our-Science/Environment-Materials/Environmental-Change/Research/Global-Change-Through-Time/Greenhouse-Climate-Archives

This should indicate that the earth has a limited capacity to absorb sudden climate events.

Epica got 750,000 years out of an ice core.  No one was using it for a CO2 corollary on the last interglacial unless they were a moron.  The article was dishonest, equating the extreme inaccuracy of a core I've never even seen anyone bother to reference for such a thing, to the massive lag of several centuries in the denser cores like Vostok.

True, but they don't.  They have a 200 year difference ten thousand years back.  That would require a 2% error to explain an alternative to an already known mechanic.

It's not an uncertainty, it's a lag.  Everyone but you knows it's a lag.  It's accepted science, by the AGW twits themselves.

You don't even have your side of the fence on this.  Well, Al Gore is, but he's never really had much of a relationship with the truth...

The people actually drilling and studying the ice cores have known all along that CO2 changes after temperatures.

Here, you guys worship this site.  Take them at their word.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=33

It's part of the theory after all.  The Milankovitch cycle is this magic on off button in space that jumps the solar output up real fast, spurring a warming trend that becomes self sustaining as it triggers the release of CO2 from the oceans.

The lag is fact.  Period.  It might even account for some of the actual warming.  We'd already be dead by now if it were the primary driver like they pretend it is, but before it reaches such a high saturation rate it should have a marginal but measurable impact on the greenhouse effect when it jumps 50ppm.

Of course, the reality is that the interglacial continues to warm because the ice melts and the Milankovitch cycle isn't an on off switch but a change over thousands of years.  But hey who wants to think about solar variance and how massive the albedo change is when there's ice down to Kansas.  We'd rather blame it on cars.

And no, it's not even over the entire core.  By the third interglacial, the resolution is crap in Vostok, several thousand years.  The lag isn't even the same going into the interglacial as it is leaving.  CO2 falls thousands of years after the temperature does, despite rising only hundreds after.  The oceans take a lot longer to reabsorb than they do to puke it out.

Accident.  Disregard.

One thing I'm certain of is that the whole climate change debate has reached the "angels on the head of a pin" moment - that is a matter of faith.

Look at this thread! Its monumental! 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ice-core-data-help-solve

If this looks familiar, it's because you already linked it...

They measured the age of the ice and the age of the air and what do you know, they got a couple hundred years of lag!  Funny how it's the same range as the more dependable but shorter range cores from areas that get more snowpack each year and create glacial ice layers in just a few decades, ain't it?

This is how science actually works.  Two independent methods of getting a more accurate result come up with comparable answers and they both happen to fit what is known fact about the capacity of water to hold and absorb CO2 at a given temperature and saturation level.

Where the science stops and opinionated political bullshit begins is when they start prevaricating on what it actually means.

Well sure, we've got a guaranteed century plus between the time the surface starts warming rapidly and the time the CO2 levels rise apace....

Yeah, I know, the Milankovitch cycles are a sine wave and not abrupt changes and just happen to follow the trends in and out of ice ages with near perfection...

Okay, so the lag going back into the ice ages is thousands of years and the CO2 doesn't stop us from cooling off even though it supposedly got us that warm to begin with starting with lower solar forcing...

Yes, we know the oceans puke it out faster than they reabsorb it, everyone knows that...  It takes a long time for the water in the ocean to cycle all that CO2 off the surface as it's absorbed after all!

I know it all fits, but damnit!  We still think the CO2 caused the rest of the warming, because that means we can tell our boss what he wants to hear.  He'd cut our funding for not giving him a green light on running a third of the economy between his fingers.  Just look at what happened to NASA!

They knew all along that the snowpack was forming solid ice inside the lag times anyway.  It's why they never disputed the fact that CO2 lags temperatures in the first place.  It's hilariously obvious if you'd bother to think about it.  But that is the crux of your problem.  You assume that scientists are honest and you simply don't know enough.  You ignore the massive numbers of obvious inconsistencies in the little political blurbs put out and take self contradicting articles at their word.

What do they cut through to get to the ice?  Years of snow pack that haven't become ice yet.  How many?  How many years it takes for the conditions to create that solid ice...

Near perfect accuracy to the year on any strata that match the mechanics of the top layers.  Because they dug through the process that creates them.  Simple logic, no scientific background needed at all.  The odd kid that plays in snow might have figured it out just by considering how the consistency of the snow forms different layers depending on how warm it was between snows.

The air is mixed with fresher air before it gets finally trapped in the ice which means that you measure an "average" property of the air ... so of course you get a "lag". "Old" air is really a mixture of different ages of air. The ice crystals on the other hand are solids, they stay in place. So you got "old" ice crystals and relatively "fresh" air. Why don't you use your imagination for a change to try to understand WHAT is measured, instead of insisting on some fictional "lag" which could just as well be an artifact of the burial process... you're really something.

Also, get a clue - the graphs are usually offset but similar. That means, that a temperature decline would have a period of carbon increase and after that a carbon decline. There is no way that you can explain all of that by common physical process. You've to make up some really complex process that can accomplish this, and that in itself is very unlikely.

You can compare this problem to a a medieval religious society, which declared that the earth is the center of the universe and that the planets around us made some really complicated dance. It was really hard to understand and to model. Once it was established that all planets orbited the sun, everything became a lot simpler and clearer.

Perhaps we should send you to Tibet, maybe you can get into contact with Gaia or mother nature, and maybe you can convince her that climate change is all in her imagination too. She is very patient and her head is as hard as rock but so are you ... I wonder who will win the debate.

Science doesn't work that way. Scientists use their common sense and if they see something that doesn't jive with what they know, they'll try to understand it. Either their physical models are completely wrong, but those are the result of many years of fundamental research, so do they really want to invalidate all that research just because their measurements are off? Or they can try to understand their measurements in more details and try to understand if maybe there's something that they've overlooked. Or they can simply say... we don't know and we don't know why... and add an error bar to show their own uncertainties. You don't do any of that. You're just a lazy guy who thinks a few noisy measurements prove his point and doesn't care think about the reason and the consequences of what he's saying.

This is complete and utter bullshit.

The act of pressurizing a gas will indeed heat up a gas. That's because you have to make an effort to pressurize it.

Once the gas is pressurized and left on its own, it will cool down.

They don't. A running average like that introduces a time lag.

Anyway read something like this.

http://robertkernodle.hubpages.com/hub/ICE-Core-CO2-Records-Ancient-Atmospheres-Or-Geophysical-Artifacts

You're oh so sure about a time lag, but maybe there is none.

I'd be really suprised if a time lag holds up, even if it's only 200 years, and even if it only holds true for the polar regions.

It makes no sense. Oceans mitigate temperature fluctuations, they don't speed them up (at most it'll seem the oceans slow them down, which would require that temperature lags CO2 buildup).

Here's a simple calculation I did, to show that on a geological timescale, human production of CO2 is pretty significant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

"The total mass of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 3.16×1015 kg (about 3,000 gigatonnes)."

We humans produce about 10 gigatonnes of C every year, or about 30 Gigatonnes of CO2 every year.

So every year we add about 1% more CO2 into the atmosphere than was present.

On geological timescales, where changes are usually measured on timescales of thousands or even millions of years, this 1% / year is an extreme amount.

I don't think any of you "deniers" appreciate this enough.

If a typical geological timescale is 1000 years then our geologically relevant influence is about 1000%.

Perhaps that'll put things in better perspective for you.