New Paper Confirms CO2 Lagged Global Temperature – Models Get It All Wrong Again

Today website Die kalte Sonne tells us there’s a new paper appearing in the Geophysical Research Letters on the relationship of CO2 and temperature.

Al Gore teaching science to a gullible audience. (Image from film: An Inconvenient Truth)

Let’s recall how Al Gore in his Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth proudly stood before the CO2-temperature curve of the last several hundred thousand years and fooled his gullible audience into thinking that CO2 drove global temperature in the past, and not vice versa.

Too bad Gore didn’t take a closer look at the curves. If he had, he would have noticed that temperature rose first with CO2 following, and so CO2 could not possibly have been the main driver. What really happened is that a warming Earth warmed the oceans, which in turn released CO2 into the atmosphere. That’s the real inconvenient truth.

Now there’s a new study by Jinho Ahn et al of Seoul National University. His team has taken another look at the temperature fluctuations 39,000 years ago. What did they find? Did CO2 lead temperature, or was it the other way around.

The data don’t lie, but obviously Gore does.  The results were clear: In the abstract the authors write (emphasis added):

This rise in CO₂ was synchronous with, or slightly later than, a rapid increase of Antarctic temperature inferred from stable isotopes.”

Morover, it was thought that atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature in Antarctica varied on millennial time scales and that these changes were gradual. But the authors of the paper write:

In a detailed analysis of one event we now find that approximately half of the CO₂ increase that occurred during the 1500-year cold period between Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events 8 and 9 happened rapidly, over less than two centuries.”

Lüning and Vahrenholt at Die kalte Sonne find this interesting. They write:

…about half of the total CO2 increase took place within just 200 years. This brings up important questions. The authors point out that the models based on the CO2 cycle are unable to to reproduce the rapid changes in CO2 condentrations.”

Back to the drawing board for climate modellers. But this time they really ought to put the horse before the cart.