Atmospheric carbon dioxide,
or CO2, is a greenhouse gas.
It has the ability to retard the
cooling rate of our planet,
which involves infrared
radiation rising toward space.
The strength of the CO2
greenhouse effect is unknown
-- lab experiments suggest
mild, harmless warming
in the atmosphere.
Over the past two centuries,
the CO2 level increased from
0.028%, to 0.041% today.
Global temperatures
have been gradually
and intermittently rising
since the late 1600s.
Historic temperature
and CO2 reconstructions
from the Vostok
ice core in Antarctica,
for the past four hundred
thousand years, show that
higher levels of atmospheric
CO2 coincide with warmer
temperatures.
Correlation among these
two variables does not
prove causation.
If carbon dioxide is the
"control knob" of temperature,
as climate alarmists claim,
then changes in CO2 should
always precede changes
in temperature.
But multiple peer-reviewed
scientific studies demonstrated
that air temperatures have always
increased well in advance of the
CO2 increase.
During glacial terminations,
the most dramatic warming
events experienced on Earth
over the past million years,
the air's CO2 content does not
even begin to rise until at least
400 years after warming starts.
This leading rise
in temperature and
lag in CO2 increase,
is the opposite of
climate alarmist
beliefs.
Scientists also report
that temperatures
always drop first
at the start of glacial
periods, well before
the CO2 level declines.
CO2 is not
the "control knob"
that drives the
global temperature.
Not if you care
about real science
-- reconstructions
of past climates
on our planet.
The historical record
defines CO2 as the
dependent variable,
following changes
in temperature,
with a lag-time
that varies from
hundreds to
thousands
of years.