Things which catch my eye or make me think - looking for aquamarinegreen, the evidence and the truth of it all.....

Tuesday 17 July 2007

Global warming - hot air?

Like most people I guess, I was somewhat shocked after watching Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" - what struck me was the amazing correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere ( trapped gas bubbles in the Vostok ice core record the history of atmospheric CO2 concentrations for over 400,000 years ), and temperature variation (the same ice cores also reveal the fraction of heavy oxygen and hydrogen in snowfall which is an indicator of annual mean temperature).

The next surprise is when you look in detail at the graphs - the correlation is unarguable, but it is clearly the change in temperature which precedes the change in CO2 levels- by about 800 years. It seems that this is well known and well documented, yet the graphs are still being used as "proof" that CO2 levels drive temperature variation! If there is cause and effect, how can the cause be after the effect? Models of climate change have an inbuilt assumption that increasing CO2 levels cause global warming..... The evidence is not convincing. The oceans in fact are the biggest reservoirs of CO2 - which they release as the temperature warms up......

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

1 comment:

Backbeat said...

Yes, Al Gores programme and DVD got a lot of publicity and the message was very convincing. As result many people believe this is the whole picture. As stated above we must we must be careful and not instantly believe everyting which is well produced and very glossy. What sticks in my mind is the clip of him flying around the world while working on his laptop - contributing to his own 'inconvenient truth'.