Cancel Culture. Another Science Paper Credits CO2 With Calling Off the Next Ice Age

Charles Rotter Add one more charge to carbon dioxide’s record. A recent paper published in Science by Nicolás Young of Lamont-Doherty and nine co-authors says it stopped the next ice age, the kind that once put millions of square miles of North America under ice. The authors do not appear to mean this as a compliment. From the abstract:

Abstract During interglaciations, the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS), which is the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, retreats to Arctic Canada, where it achiev...

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12 Comments
Sweet Old Bob
October 24, 2026 2:26 pm

Gotta work hard to keep the trough filled ….

😉

antigtiff
October 24, 2026 3:30 pm

Just recall the words of former President of France….President Chirac….”the earth is on fire!”…..24 years ago.

October 24, 2026 3:59 pm

The Earth would likely support no more than two billion humans, perhaps a lot less, if we reached another glacial maximum. Maybe that’s what these Malthusians want. If CO2 saved us from that, we should all get on our knees and thank God for CO2.

October 24, 2026 4:29 pm

It’s quite amazing that the “recent paper published in Science by Nicolás Young of Lamont-Doherty and nine co-authors says it {CO2} stopped the next ice age.”

That would be . . . ummmm, a major publisher and at least ten “scientist poseurs” that choose to outright ignore paleoclimatology evidence. Namely, the last eight glacial intervals (not the more properly capitalized four past Ice Ages that last an average of more than 100 million years) have an average duration of about 75,000 years, each separated by a relatively warm interglacial averaging about 25,000 years*.

Since Earth exited the last glacial interval some 12,000-13,000 years ago— and since Earth hasn’t experienced any major climate cycle disruptor over the last 800,000 or so years—scientific evidence strongly supports that there is NOTHING that will disrupt the calculated 12,000–13,000 years still remaining in the current interglacial period (aka, the Holocene).

*Note: sometime between 1 million to 800,000 years ago, Earth’s climate shifted from a 41,000-year average cycle to a dominant 100,000-year average cycle between successive glacial periods. The specific cause of this change in periodicity of glacial-interglacial cycles has not been resolved but is generally believed to be due to changes in Earth’s orbital eccentricity based on Milankovitch cycles. See the “100,000 year problem” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000-year_problem .

Beside this well-documented cycle pattern, there is this separate evidence that atmospheric CO2 concentration has little to do with atmospheric temperature that would be the first thing to be associated logically with “stopping” an oncoming glacial interval:
Marine Isotope Stage 11 (MIS 11, ~400,000 years ago) was an exceptionally long and warm interglacial period, where proxy data from regions like the Arctic indicated local summer temperatures were 4°C to 5°C warmer than present-day interglacial highs, and yet the maximum atmospheric CO₂ levels during this time peaked at between 265 and 280 parts per million (ppm), or at most about 66% of today’s concentration.

Would any WUWT reader be surprised if the referenced article published by the “scientific” periodical Science was not peer-reviewed?

Or, even more, would any WUWT reader be surprised if Science claimed the article WAS peer-reviewed?

October 24, 2026 4:36 pm

The increase in summer temperatures is mirrored by the increase in net effective radiative forcing associated with the measured increase in well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs) since ~1750 CE [CO2, CH4, and N2O; (36–39)]. 

The “increase in net effective radiative forciing”, is a mouthful. Exactly where has this net radiative forcing been physically measured? Have the components that the net radiative forcing is derived from been measured? How?