Guest essay by Chris Morrison of the Daily Skeptic
The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO2 at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.
The assumed level three million years ago of CO2 was around 400 ppm, a convenient mark that has been used to explain the subsequent ice age and a drop to 250 ppm. Due to the recently published paper, this explanation has become more problematic and natural climate variation is correctly noted to have occurred with the temperature changes. Alas, similar explanations are mostly ignored in discussing today’s climate changes in the interests of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Some cling desperately to a dominant CO2 role, including one of the authors of the findings published in Nature. The co-author states that the results suggest even greater climate sensitivity to the warming effect of CO2. In short, there is a great deal of applying the laws of physics and chemistry to one era, but failing to extend the same courtesy to another.
The title of the paper, produced by 17 America-based scientists, was enough to set alarm bells ringing in the ‘settled’ science, Net Zero-obsessed community: ‘Broadly stable atmospheric CO2 and CH4 levels over the past three million years.’ A related paper examining ocean heat content derived from the ice core record was also published. Carrie Lear, Professor of Past Climates and Earth System Changes at Cardiff University, claimed that the papers “don’t rewrite the role of CO2, they underline how sensitive the climate system is… that is why today’s rapid CO2 rise is so alarming”.
Ah, yes. Even if CO2 movements are minimal, probably within a margin of potential error, they are still responsible for large variations in temperature. The laws of climate science are ‘settled’ – if the trace atmospheric gas CO2 is rising, falling or generally stable, it is almost wholly responsible for large movements in global temperature. Under this rather shaky assumption, humans must stop burning hydrocarbons and return to a neo-Malthusian pre-industrial age.
Study lead author Julia Marks-Peterson noted: “We definitely were a bit surprised. If correct, the findings may suggest that even small changes in greenhouse gas levels could trigger major shifts in climate.” That’s a little bit of a scary thought, she added, possibly with an eye on future grant funding. “May suggest” is doing a lot of the work here, and it may also be suggested that more plausible opinions are available.
Quoted in New Scientist magazine, Tim Naish, Professor of Earth Science at Victoria University in New Zealand, said it was “way too early to thrown the baby out with the bathwater”. Perish the thought that baby should be given its marching orders, ending a science-lite 40-year demonisation of CO2 and related promotion of a hard-Left Net Zero dream.
The latest Nature-published research gives a snapshot from ancient Antarctica ‘blue’ ice drilled in the Allan Hills area. It looks back further in time past the usual 800,000 ice core records. The key finding is that over the last three million years, when sea levels fell and ice periods intensified, the level of the main ‘greenhouse’ gases remained remarkably stable. For the first time, the work has pushed the direct gas measurements back into the late Pliocene era. Over the last three million years moving into the Pleistocene, global temperatures showed a long-term cooling trend of several degrees Celsius, interrupted by increasingly large interglacial oscillations. Interglacial temperature swings, as in the current Holocene, often see temperatures rise by 5°C and more.
Critics seeking to downplay ice core evidence often suggest it is too imprecise to provide a wholly accurate record of gas levels and temperature. But it is accurate enough to give a broad cyclical insight. It remains the source of some of the best data we have on the past climate. It is undoubtedly more accurate than most proxy evidence from millions of years ago. But whatever the evidence used, it is hard to detect any obvious and continuous link between CO2 and temperature across the entire geological record going back 600 million years to the start of abundant life on Earth. Certainly none to justify the political notion that humans control the climate thermostat by burning hydrocarbons.
In fact the evidence is so slim that Les Hatton, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science at Kingston University, was recently able to determine from ice core records that 100-year rises of 1.1°C in the current interglacial, which started 20,000 years ago, have occurred in one in six centuries. Going back 150,000 years, the frequency was around one in six to one in 20 centuries. None of these findings suggest that current warming is either unusual or primarily caused by human activity. Needless to say, none of these findings trouble the headline writers in narrative-addicted mainstream media.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Title: “Shock New Evidence Showing No Link Between CO2 and Temperature Over Last Three Million Years”
Quote from body: Study lead author Julia Marks-Peterson noted: “We definitely were a bit surprised. If correct, the findings may suggest that even small changes in greenhouse gas levels could trigger major shifts in climate.”
These conflicting statements should be reconciled.
Easy. The body quote is a ridiculous attempt at theory saving against contrary evidence.
It may sound strange, but both statements “can” be true…
What is observed, is that temperatures did fell, but there was little change in CO2 and no in CH4.
If CO2 is the driver of temperature (in the thoughts of the catastrophists), then CO2 has a stronger effect than already assumed.
If temperature was the driver of CO2 in ancient times, then it simply means that CO2 has little effect on temperature, as the new data tell us.
The problem in many ice cores is that there is an overlap in both increasing and reducing of T and CO2 over the past 800,000 years, thus hard to tell which one drives the other, with one interesting exception: the end of the previous warm period, the Eemian, some 115,000 years ago, where temperatures were fallen already to a new low, but CO2 levels remained high.
When CO2 did drop some 40 ppmv, there was no clear effect on temperature…
https://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/eemian.html
‘The problem in many ice cores is that there is an overlap in both increasing and reducing of T and CO2 over the past 800,000 years, thus hard to tell which one drives the other…’
Really? My understanding is that whenever anyone actually looked into the actual data behind Al Gore’s scissor lift parlor trick, it was fairly obvious that changes in temperature always lead changes in CO2 concentration. Is that not the case?
Correct. There are (just) a few periods where CO2 leads temperature… alarmists love to drag that up.
In that case, maybe neither drives the other? Or multiple other things drive both?
If there is an overlap of about 4,000 years over a period of 5,000 years, as is the case in near all transitions between an ice age and an interglacial, it is difficult to see which one leads the other and/or both can have a (limited) influence on the other….
Anyway, it is clear that the influence of CO2 on temperature is very small. much smaller than the climate models us want to believe…
Even over the past decades, the measured influence of back-radiation of the increase in CO2 2000-2010 was only 0.2 W/m2, while other factors (solar, water vapor?) provided 2 W/m2 extra. or ten times more…
https://escholarship.org/content/qt3428v1r6/qt3428v1r6.pdf article of Feldman in Nature: 22 ppmv CO2 gives ~0.2 W/m2 extra, 2000-2010
Total downwelling (~2 W/m2/decade increase):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01431160802036508 LW, 1.7 W/m2/decade 1964-1990
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL034842 SW + LW, 2 W/m2/decade 1986-2000
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009JD011800 LW, 2.2 W/m2/decade 1973-2008
Some blame “cleaner” air for that increase (less SO2 emissions, thus less white aerosols an thus less scattering of sunlight), but that is very questionable, as black aerosols (sooth) also declined, and these have a warming effect…
Still a lot of work to do to convince people of the fact that CO2 is a minor player, because of the continuous brainwashing by the MSM…
The common logical rule is temp rise leads CO2 rise, and temp fall leads CO2 fall, with some exceptions confirming the rule. The same is likely true with Methane.
They fixate on the few occasions where small changes in CO2 preceeded big changes in temperature, but ignore the times when big changes in CO2 levels has little to no impact on temperature.
As is typical for climate alarmists, they throw out all data that doesn’t fit the narrative.
Yes, with adroit cherry picking, one can claim a correlation and causation with any time-series.
J M-P’s conclusion is silly because it assumes that the only thing that cause climate to change is CO2 which is typical of a lot of alarmist deduction.
What we need is the correlation data between CO2 levels and temperature. I suggest this is not provided because there is no significant correlation! Another ridiculous attempt to continue the CO2 deception.
Henry’s Law shows that. over the long term, CO2 appears driven by sea surface temperature.
But as Englebeen has pointed out, out-gassing alone does not account for all the CO2. That is where biology comes in. Chemical reactions induced by bacteria and fungi that decompose organic materials proceed more rapidly with higher temperatures. That is especially true where it is frequently below freezing. Related to that, CO2 respiration from boreal tree roots in the Winter should be greater if the Winters are shorter or less cold, because the trees can’t photosynthesize in the absence of sunlight, regardless what the temperature is.
The time resolution of the data in that paper is no more than 10k years. Biological processes tend to smear out.
The time resolution of the data in that paper is no more than 10k years. Biological processes tend to smear out.
Like I just said, now they will be clamoring to throw out all ice core data, since it pretty much puts the lie to all their chicken-little-ing in media and academia the last 50 years.
So Earth, if we look at the last 200 million years, used to be a lot warmer than today. The recent 2.6 million years have been unusually cold and now we are horrified that it could go back to what it used to be. It would be a problem if the climate would go to much colder and unstable again, what was normal for most of the recent 2.6 million years.
Also curious that the planet had a geomagnetic reversal 2.59 million years ago.
We have been, and still are, in a 2 to 3 million year long ice age
And probably will remain so as long as the isthmus of Panama remains closed.
On all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia, temperature changes precede CO2 changes. An example is the recovery from the LIttle Ice Age.
In fact, the evidence is so slim that Les Hatton, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science at Kingston University, was recently able to determine from ice core records that 100-year rises of 1.1 C in the current interglacial, (meaning warm period between glaciation periods), which started about 20,000 years ago, have occurred in one in six centuries (20,000/6 = 33.3 such events), without any burning of fossil fuels.
Going back 150,000 years, the frequency varied from one in six to one in twenty centuries.
These findings suggest, during the past 2000 years, the minor warming of the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Present Warm period are entirely natural.
These warm periods were separated by the cold Dark Age Period and cold Little Ice Age Period.
The low point of the LIA was about 1700, well before the widespread use of fossil fuel starting in 1900.
Also note, the RWP was warmer than the MWP, which was warmer than the PWP
All these periods have nothing to do with burning fossil fuels.
Also note, the CO2 rise lagged the temp rise by more than 200 years. See below image by Ron Clutz
Speaking of film at 11 here is a big new skeptical movie coming:
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/climate-unsettled-real-story/2026/03/27/id/1251014/
From that story:
Do climate(s) ever not change? That is, aren’t they always fluctuating to some degree? It seems nothing in nature is static. So the fact that there is change, by itself, is nothing to fear. Yet, the alarmists express horror that there is any change to any climate. That seems similar to the antediluvian idea that mankind originated in some perfect paradise.
In a nutshell. Climate changes constantly, humans are not causing it to change and CANNOT stop it from changing.
Climate was changing before and after humans
I’m interested in how the data for “after humans” was gathered.
Meaning ‘after’ the evolution of humans, or in other words, ‘present day.’ We have been around far longer than a few thousand years.
In this case, since the discussion is about humans impacting the climate, the phrase is short for before humans existed and will continue after we are gone.
Er, the film is at 9:00. (JK)
Ask any younger person the origins of “film at 11.” They have no clue.
Obviously it’s from Kentucky Fried Movie.
“…no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period.”
_________________________________________________
So what?
Well Methane is a producer of CO2 and H2O (both GHGs) as it oxidizes. So no increase in Methane eliminates the potential for increased CO2/H2O AND Methane is in and of itself another GHG.
Methane itself is a GHG in the standard dry laboratory atmosphere. But not in the real world. Its two small amplitude and narrow spectrum absorption bands are completely overwhelmed by two of the much stronger and wider overlapping water vapor absorption bands.
The whole methane/climate change thing is just wrong. Eliminate meat and dairy is just vegans hitching their wagon to ‘climate science’ that isn’t.
The idiot woke crowd was studying psychology and now cannot get a job, so they have become NGO-paid demonstrators to spread climate lies, to create chaos and dysfunction
By the end of the current century methane is on course to
produce less than a tenth of a degree of global warming..
If you think it’s any more than that, you should pipe up
and show your source and work
And exactly where has BryanA said that?
No methane is “on course” to do nothing to temperature, since its absorption bands are completely overlapped by water vapor.
“Global Warming Potential” is just more propaganda to justify regulation of more aspects of human endeavor, nothing more.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/06/the-misguided-crusade-to-reduce-anthropogenic-methane-emissions/
Depending on who you talk to, Methane is somewhere between 2 and 600 million times more power a green house gas compared to CO2.
In the UK, that’s referred to as a bazillion bajillion.
Well, methane is the backup super extra greenhouse gas for Climate Alarmists (Settled Division) to pick out from under the clown’s hat when CO2 is too stable at the time in question of the event being discussed.
You know, it pours out of melting permafrost surfaces and gushes out of animal burps and farts.
Three facts make it irrelevant, in agreement with your “so what?”
It gets oxidized to CO2, which is another very weak GHG, having near-zero impact on temps
Please please educate Bill Gates on this. He has gone completely looney about CH4 from cows. Totally irrational and very destructive
It seems to me that more skeptic evidence and opinions are getting print and air time now. It appears that the worm has turned.
Newbies are floating test ideas: What if we print the obvious truth once in a while? I assume that it sneaks through to press on their editor’s “work from home” days.
However the skeptical opinions on this article seem to belong to author Morrison’s evaluation of the data and not the data gatherer’s evaluation of same. The hyphenated data gatherer took the party line, possibly to prolong her career at OSU.
Did you read the publications cited in the article? I ask because they are not even remotely close to what most of the WUWT audience would categorize as “skeptical”. Quite the opposite actually…most of the audience here would categorize the evidence presented in the article as “alarmist”.
Or maybe a whole barrel of them have turned.
Trump cures cancer – headlines next day in trad media “Trump relegates thousands of Oncologists to the unemployment line”. The hyperbole among these climate grifters knows no bounds…CO2 is purely something that can be measured. This measurement cannot be correlated to anything (other than a greener \ leafier \ grassier planet. The cognitive dissonance among these grifters is ponderous. CO2 at 400ppm at the same time the planet was in ice age conditions vs today CO2 at 400ppm and supposedly the planet is in pizza oven conditions…wtf. When your livelihood depends on something being the culprit for imminent disaster, you’re always going to contort this something is the culprit for disaster.
I think you missed a zero the first time.
And you should use the correct terminology, it was GLACIATION at 4,000ppm vs. today’s hyperbolic “hottest eva” at ~400ppm.
The fact is the Earth IS IN AN ICE AGE right now. The Holocene is an INTERGLACIAL period DURING AN ICE AGE, not a “hot house” period.
And warming during an interglacial period is something to celebrate, not panic about. Cooling would be an actual “climate crisis.”
Protesters in the streets:
“Hands off Cancer!”
“We heart Cancer!”
“No Cancer Kings!”
“Cancer rights are human rights!”
Jeff
They already went there with obesity, so I can certainly imagine that, too.
The frozen rhinos of the Canadian arctic will be glad to know.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/03/260324024245.htm
One must not ever underestimate the power of
The ForceI mean,The Carbon.Carbon is Black so it must be “The Dark Side of the Force”.
Besides black, carbon can be crystal clear, pink, yellow, brown or blue. I like black hard coal which is used to smelt iron ore. The iron metal can be cast to form Ford 5 liter V-8 engines.
Interestingly, the modern Ford 5.0L “Coyote” V-8 engines (2011–present) consists of aluminum cylinder blocks with plasma arc spray cylinder liners, aluminum cylinder heads, forged steel crankshafts, and powdered metal connecting rods. They utilize Dual Overhead Camshafts (DOHC) with four valves per cylinder and variable timing (VCT).
Do the colored versions have metal ion inclusions, or is the color perhaps due to trapped radicals?
or crystal clear diamond sparklers!
When I was about 12 years old I read about the chemistry of common table sugar. I was curious what would happen if I burned some. So I put some in a table soon and burned it over the kitchen gas stove. It quickly resulted in a spoonful of black carbon. I was amazed that the black carbon had been in that pure white sugar.
Yep, if you remove the carbon from sugar you’re left with … water … Hs and Os
Perhaps it should be added to The Holy Trinity. /s
The title here is strikingly contradictory to what the “shock new evidence” says. Like…as in the evidence is the exact opposite of the thesis presented in the title.
And since when did WUWT start publishing content that most of its audience would categorize as “alarmist”?
See, there’s the difference between this site and the ideology-based “agw narrative” publications and media.
To paraphrase Forest Gump’s mom –
“Climates are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
The title grossly misrepresents the cited evidence. I’ll let you decide if that was a mistake, oversight, or a move to defend some ideology-based narrative.
Actually it doesn’t. But to see that you have to review the evidence with an open mind.
If WUWT didn’t publish Alarmist Articles the Gentle Readers here would have nothing to poke holes in.
Nothing to point fingers at and exclaim “The Emperor has no Clothes”.
Nothing to use to shine a Search light on the Hypocrisy of the Liberal Left.
.
It’s the action of the Leftist Liberal Media to Not Publish the Conservative Viewpoint and to actively seek to silence them.
.
Why should WUWT mirror the hypocrisy of the Liberal Leftist Media?
I don’t know if the article is “alarmist” or not. My point is that the “shocking new evidence” cited in the article leans into the “alarmist” side of the spectrum despite the title insinuating the opposite.
A better title would have been “Shocking New Evidence Shows That Even Small Changes in GHGs Can Cause Major Shifts in Climate”.
The evidence doesn’t show that at all, not when you review all of the evidence.
The fact that there are other areas where there are little to no temperature changes while large changes are taking place in CO2 levels shows that CO2 has very little impact on temperatures.
The paper provide zero actual evidence that CO2 causes warming…
And that correlations with temperature are very poor and highly suspect..
I can live with that. ! 🙂
bdgwx:
I only read the Abstract: it says there were multiple millennia where wide temperature changes occurred with only minimal CO2 changes (+/- 10 ppm; and no change in CH4). This does seem inconvenient for those who think CO2 is the control knob for the climate. If only 10 ppm CO2 alteration could cause these temperature changes then the Earth should be truly scorched now after our 40% rise in CO2. This also correlates with the other Antarctic ice cores that clearly show temperatures rising before the CO2 rises, but takes us further back to 3.1 M ybp.
As to your question: WUWT has been publishing “alarmist” content for years. How else will its readers know what the the other side is thinking? I for one would not subscribe to a site that censored information, or commenters.
This is the exact crux of the problem with the main stream scientific philosophy of the climate science and the left leaning media. To them, criticism of the current CO2 is the driver of temperature is not only wrong, but heretical. Of course heretics, should be burned at stake.
When was the last time the warmists on here used an agronomy paper that showed CO2 has benefits?
How about papers analyzing the reduction in clouds being caused by more CO2? Heaven forbid papers dissing back radiation as the cause of warming.
When was the last time warmists here showed papers on how insolation produces effects on soil and water? Can’t have information that shows actual thermodynamic processes at the surface can we?
Something that I may write an article on is that there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that fugitive antibiotics may be contributing to a decline in condensation, resulting in less cloud cover.
In a “glass half full/half empty” world you are a “glass smashed on floor and contents splashed everywhere” kinda fella, ain’t ya?
No. It would be better to say that in a X world I’m the guy that describes as X. In other words if the evidence presented says that there is a “glass smashed on the floor and contents splashed everywhere” then the title of a hypothetical article I publish describing it would be consistent that evidence. The point I’m making is that the cited literature supports position X yet the title of this article says it is the opposite of X.
Yet when evidence is presented showing that CO2 is a best a bit player in the climate, you completely ignore it.
Your comment has literally nothing to do with anything I said.
And for the record…I don’t ignore any evidence. All evidence should be evaluated for reproducibility and repeatability. It then gets incorporated into the broader pool of evidence where the consilience approach drives model development.
Nah.
It’s the agw narrative that drives models developments.
Read up on the Climategate emails.
My comment describes you perfectly, and you are ignoring the parts of the record where large changes in CO2 levels occurred with little change in temperature.
The problem is that in the case of the findings of the CO2/T relation, one can explain it both ways: either CO2 has little effect and simply follows temperature at about 8 ppmv/°C for Antarctic temperatures (~16 ppmv/°C for global temperatures), or a small change in CO2 has more effect on temperature than is implemented in climate models.
As we know for sure, climate models show much more warming than real, even if CO2 was the only controller of temperature, than satellite measurements show.
Even Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate admits that (without saying it):
Have a look at:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/comparing-models-to-the-satellite-datasets/
Besides the completely irrelevant quibble about the start date / period, at the end he shows the histograms, comparing the increase speed, according to satellites and by the climate models: more that 2/3 of all climate models are way too fast increasing…
Simply said: the influence of CO2 on temperature is way smaller than implemented in climate models, not higher as the new ice core data are “interpretated” by some “experts”…
The problem is that [Marks-Peterson et al. 2026] and [Shackleton et al. 2026] does NOT suggest there is no link between CO2 and temperate as the title says. It’s the opposite. Not only does the “shocking new evidence” show that there is a link, but that even small amounts of it can trigger major shifts in climate.
The evidence can be dismissed, challenged, ignored, etc. That doesn’t change the fact that the title grossly misrepresents that evidence.
Sorry, but as I said before, the interpretation of the findings can be both ways: either CO2 simply follows temperature and has little effect on temperature, or small changes in CO2 have a large effect on temperature. Depending of which is cause and effect.
As it is clear from the end of the last interglacial, a drop of 40 ppmv CO2 change has no clear effect on temperature: a cooling of near 2°C followed by a warming of about 6°C, over a period of some 5,000 years, thus the effect of CO2 on temperature is no doubt small.
That graph with the long delay of CO2 after cooling of Antarctica (as the temperature proxy mainly is). is not an artifact of bad timing between ice and gas ages, as the reduction of CH4 in the gas phase simply parallels the temperature drop.
Moreover, the drop in temperature of the NH was extremely rapid: less than two centuries from warm to near a new Ice Age, as can be seen in stalagmites from caves in Belgium:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379118302300
In the same period of rapid cooling, CO2 still was stable around 270 ppmv…
What does that have to do with the title misrepresenting the evidence?
It shows that the title did not misrepesent the evidence.
I’m going to ask you the same question. Did you even read the citations provided in this article?
That’s only true when you completely ignore those portions of the climate record where CO2 levels are changing without any changes in temperature.
The misrepresentation of the evidence by the title of this article has nothing to with me ignoring paleoclimate history even if I did (I don’t).
Got it, glass smashed/water splattered kinda guy.
In your mind, the fact that there were huge swings in temperature along with little to no change in CO2 levels has no impact on your belief that CO2 controls temperature?
You question has literally nothing to do with anything I said.
And for the record…I’ve never said that CO2 is the one and only thing that controls temperature. In fact, I go to great lengths to explain this to commenters here on WUWT. And to answer your question…I don’t affirm disjuncts or get trapped by the reduction fallacy like some people on here do. The fact that temperature can and does change without corresponding changes in CO2 does not falsify the hypothesis that CO2 can cause temperature changes. It’s not unlike solar insolation. Just because temperatures change without changes in solar insolation does not mean that solar insolation changes cannot lead to temperature changes.
So you’ve decided net-zero is a waste of time and money?
BTW, if temps can change without changes in CO2, then a causal relationship is impossible to prove.
No. I’ve decided that affirming a disjunct and casual reductionism are concepts that skeptics should not ignore because they are, in fact, fallacies.
Ridiculous. This is literally the epitome of affirming a disjunct. Just because temperatures can change sans the influence of X does not mean that X cannot cause temperature changes.
If the climate sensitivity to CO2 is as large as you argue, then it would not be possible for a large change in CO2 levels to have no impact on temperatures.
You nailed it.
“The fact that temperature can and does change without corresponding changes in CO2 does not falsify the hypothesis that CO2 can cause temperature changes”
No, what falsifies the hypothesis that CO2 can cause temperature changes is the fact that changing CO2 doesn’t cause temperature change.
And what climate sensitivity is it that you think I defend?
And what does this have to do with the title of this article?
That is NOT what I said. I said:
I did NOT say that CO2 can not cause temperature changes. I said it could not be proven to do so.
My comment deals with the portion of the record that you are working so hard to ignore.
I think you have me confused with someone else. I’m not ignoring the last 3 million years of paleoclimate history nor have I ever.
When new facts don’t match what you anticipated, do you change what you now know or do you change the facts? Science does one, politics does the other.
Went and read the abstract. ‘Broadly stable’ across glacials and interglacials means very significant natural variability on very long time scales.
But one doesn’t need a newly extended ice core record to already know that. Vikings in Greenland prove it. The multi-centennial MWP and the LIA are well documented.
On multi-decadal timeframes the Arctic ‘stadium wave proves it.
Even the IPCC AR4 SPM figure 4 actually said that the warming from ~1920-1945 (indistinguishable from the warming ~1975-2000) had to be mostly natural variation s there was not much change on atmospheric CO2.
And yet the ‘climate science’ CO2 ‘control knob’ myth lives on after 4 decades. Too many vested interests to be easily dismantled.
Much like the geocentric model (Earth-centered universe). Some would rather fight to the death than accept new facts.
And those geocentric folks thought it fine to burn people at the stake who disagreed.
The scientific bias is so plain to see, they retrieve an antarctic ice core expecting it to confirm their believe that CO2 is the driver of climate change. When it shows little modulation in CO2 levels over 3 million years, yet the climate went through significant changes in both direction, they come to the conclusion that minor changes in CO2 can effect climate change. IKt appears not for a single moment do they consider their past conclusion may be wrong, that other natural factors, such as the Sun, orbital changes etc., could be the drivers of climate change. I guess money is a very powerful motivator.
Geology Prof. Deffies of Princton published that he thought the tectonic closing of the Panama Isthmus triggered the present ice ages by fundamentally altering ocean circulation.
For about the first 1.7 million years, the frequency of glacial/interglacials means natural was about 41k years, plausibly dominated by Milankovitch obliquity.
About a a million years ago, frequency switched to about 100k years, plausibly dominated by Milankovitch eccentricity.
I have found no plausible explanations for why the Milankovitch switch.
do you reject the significant contribution of the solar magnetic field oscillations opening and closing cosmic ray input into cloud enucleation and therefore altering the albido of the planet?
Al Gore photo-shopped the clouds out of the intro of Inconvenient Truth for a reason.
“they come to the conclusion that minor changes in CO2 can effect climate change”
that really is a bizarre conclusion- that’s certainly not proper science
Publication is ruled by the reviewers.
If the authors had been candid about their results calling the CO2 -> temperature narrative into question, their work would not have passed review. That’s rigorously true at Nature (and Science) but is generally true at all the mainstream climate journals.
Journal editors seem to universally lack the courage to overrule their reviewers.
“even small changes in greenhouse gas levels could trigger major shifts”
Did anyone even consider an alternative interpretation?
See my comment just above. Alternative very plausible explanations certainly do exist, but not for these Nature authors. Their logical fallacy—thinking their result ‘means’ small changes in CO2 can have massive climate consequences— was noted above by others. The past 50 years have seen much larger CO2 changes than over their entire study, yet not much has happened as they expressly feared concerning implied sensitivity.
Should have been clear I was referring to the study folk, Rud. They seem just a touch biased…
They start with the assumption that CO2 and “the climate” are linked. Based on that, their conclusion makes sense. But try telling them that they can’t make that original assumption and you will be canceled.
For there assumption to be true, it would necessarily be true that the climate sensitivity to CO2 changes would have to vary greatly over time, based on factors not yet determined.
Indeed, from extremely sensitive a few million years ago to near insensitive today…
Why are there not lots of subsidies to investigate that (natural) cause?
Sounds like good news.
I’ve got some news. Go to the website of CO2Coalition, and check out the graph of CO2 and temperature, as has been developed through geological studies. You will see that temperature and CO2, for the most part, have been unrelated for the last 500 million years. Also that CO2 has been in a linear decline over most of the period, with one small up click about 100 million years ago. In other words, since life has been on Earth, CO2 has been in a steady decline. When it gets low enough, all life on Earth ends. That level is believed to be around 180ppm. We’re at 400 ppm right now, and only have moved the needle upward through the burning of fossil fuels. You could say it is not only your right to burn fossil fuels, but it is your obligation to do so, to offset the natural decline and allow life to continue on Earth severl million more years. Why the decline? Clams and other organisms take CO2 out of the air and turn it into stone. Other organisms get buried and turn it into fossil fuels. Only the fossil fuels can be returned to the atmosphere. The stones are pretty much. locked in. So inevitably it will all be gone someday.
This is an infantile level of argument. No one said CO2 was the only forcing on climate.
But today it’s solely that same Magic Molecule that gets 97.7% of the
creditblame.climate fundamentalism
Climate Fundamentalism
Or
Climate Fund Da Mentalism?
The more they’re funded the more Mental they become.
That is true, however the current party line is that CO2 is the primary driver, providing well over half of the forcing.
All of it.
“Only forcing”? No but its the only one that matters according to Lacis, Schmidt et al
Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature
Abstract
Ample physical evidence shows that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the single most important climate-relevant greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere.
Turning Up the Heat
[…]The findings clearly show that carbon dioxide exerts the most control on Earth’s climate[…]
That’s great. If temperatures have changed with little or no corresponding change in CO2, there is no need to consider the latter as a cause. Occam’s Razor applies.
This fallacy is referred to as Affirming a Disjunct.
If A is believed to cause B, but there are instances where B occurs without A, then a few important conclusions follow:
1. A is not necessary for BA necessary cause means B cannot happen without A.
But since B sometimes occurs without A, A cannot be necessary.
2. A might still be sufficient (but not proven)If every time A occurs, B follows, then A could still be a sufficient cause.
However, your statement doesn’t confirm this—so we can’t assume it.
3. The relationship is likely contributory or probabilisticMore realistically, A:
This is common in real-world systems (medicine, climate, economics, etc.), where:
4. There may be alternative causes of BSince B occurs without A, there must be:
In summary
Yea, no. That is exactly what greentards have been screeching since the 1970s. Just ask Little Mikee Mann, he will ‘splain it to you, for a substantial fee up front of course.
Really? Have you ever heard of net-zero? What is its purpose?
Perhaps you should explain that to the study authors quoted here – it doesn’t appear that they considered other possibilities.
Then why the push for Net Zero and a general clamor to end fossil fuel use with no mention of anything else?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Htfj_OvcK0 The Iran conflict has green energy propagandists salivating—pushing claims that wind and solar are now the cheapest electricity and the answer to energy security. The data says otherwise.
In this episode, Ben Deniston of Promethean Action cuts through the coordinated green messaging with hard evidence: real-world data from California and 30+ European countries showing electricity prices rise as wind and solar scale up. He exposes the “levelized cost of electricity” as a deliberate accounting trick that hides the massive overhead costs of intermittency—backup generation, storage, transmission, curtailment, and grid balancing. When those costs are included, 100% wind or solar in Texas costs 6 to 10 times more than natural gas.
But cost is only half the problem. Wind and solar are fundamentally low power density—requiring 10 to 25x the materials of reliable systems for the same energy output. And that’s not a solvable engineering problem—it’s the physics.
The episode closes with the deeper principle: increasing power density isn’t just good economics—it’s a universal law of progress, from the first ocean predators 530 million years ago to the nuclear frontier ahead. Green energy doesn’t just raise costs—it pushes civilization against the current of natural law.
“the massive overhead costs of intermittency—backup generation, storage, transmission, curtailment, and grid balancing”
And of course the short life span of ruinables. Any competent accountant would point that out. Or is that covered by the term “curtailment”?
It’s widely accepted that correlation does not prove causation, but the opposite can also be true, that lack of correlation is strong evidence that there is no cause-and-effect relation. It’s easy to compare the Mona Loa CO2 data with the UAH temperature data to demonstrate lack of correlation on a timescale covering half a century. So, adding this article to make book ends we show the lack of correlation at geologic time scales and also at decal time scales. It’s difficult to imagine that there’s a “sweet spot” in between that requires an immediate catastrophic response so no more CO2 is added.
We don’t have much data on CO2 levels on geologic time scales, but there’s a piece of a petrified log in my basement that proves there was likely well over150 ppm at some time in geologic history. It wouldn’t take too much data to make that sweet spot go to zero.
The core assumption of both this piece and the paper however is that ice was laid down gradually over millions of years. If the ice built up very fast over a very short period of time, then the lack of change is entirely reasonable – there was no change because nothing changed. Such a viewpoint doesn’t play well with gradualism however.
Deniers lie about scientific studies. Good god are deniers dumb
Please elaborate.
You are expecting a lot from someone who hasn’t shown any skill at articulation.
Imagine that, actually examining the data. How stupid is that.
Yes, those deniers who think CO2 is almighty. They truly are dumb.
Federal Scientists Resort to Code Words as Climate Research Faces Political Pressure
https://www.envirolink.org/2026/03/28/federal-scientists-resort-to-code-words-as-climate-research-faces-political-pressure/
Some may call this adaptation. Others would call this opportunism. Me? I call it venality. All the IPCC is about…
A switch from the previous code words like “climate emergency”, “fossil fuels causing worsening storms, floods, fires”, etc.
The only thing that troubles the headline writers in narrative-addicted mainstream media is the possibility of a discussion.
Well, environistas will be clamoring to throw out all ice core data now.
So if temperature goes up the result will be bad. And if temperature goes down the result will be bad. And if temperature is unchanged? Well that is bad as well.
But only if it is being caused by CO2.
Of course climate is changing. 100 years storms are more common if you look at 100 years instead of 10. The longer we look, the more change we will see.
a 100 year storm doesnt exist. Its a probability of 1% EVERY YEAR.. So you could get 2 inside 50 years even though records werent always taken 150 years back
Have a 1% probability storm last year doesnt reduce the probability next year.
Because of the way weather works inside decadal/century long climate changes that period around150 years might have been drier or wetter anyway
There’s no obvious evidence over the last 66 million years that CO2 drives surface temperature.
After finding that, it’s become my view that CO2 doesn’t now have, and has never had, any significant impact on tropospheric sensible heat.
Convection and water phase changes (the hydrological cycle) just funnel the CO2 contribution to K.E. right off into space.
CO2 has no impact on however the climate loops around in its attractor.