The Newsweek Magazine Article.
The Ice Core issue is a very controversial issue because some chemists have said that trying to extract CO2 information from them is not accurate at all, and in fact CO2 concentrations change over long periods of time within the ice itself. In either event, the data from the ice cores used in AIT was misleading. In actuality, CO2 has an 800 year lag after temperature rise based on the ice cores, meaning that CO2 does not drive temperature, but vice versa. This fact is cleverly covered up by Al Gore.
At the same time, at the end of the sequence, it shows a large jump in the last half of the 20th century after several hundred thousand years. The problem is, he spliced a temperature record onto a proxy record and the proxy record of just one set of ice cores. Other ice cores from around the world do not match and therefore its hard to understand why Gore chose the work of just one scientist.. and this particular scientist has gone on record and stated that Gore used the graph incorrectly.
The key point to remember about the issue of relativistic warming in recorded history is knowing what is recorded history. That recorded history is only 160 years old, and so while measuring 16 decades of warmth, the last three decades have the largest increase. That increase has been overall, .3 degrees C. Yet, there is substantial evidence that temperature increases in the climate may actually be due to urban expansion and ill placed temperature recording equipment. In fact, the temperature grid used is a set called the GISS system which is a compilation of recording stations throughout the world. In some of those locations, Brazil shows the largest increase in temperatures in South America, yet, Brazil only has six recorders in the entire country, five of them located inside urban locations. The only rural recorder shows no warming over the last four decades.
And then there is the issue of record completeness and viability. The United states had over 6000 recording stations during the 1940's through 1960's but that number has dropped to around 1200, yet the increase in temperature since 1960 is due to the fact that almost 70% of the recording equipment is located within urban settings. In 1998, NOAA spent money replacing bad thermometers that were installed back in the 1980's because they gave biases of almost 1 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit and since many were in urban settings, the temperature rise seemed dramatic. Rural locations have show little or no warming in their equipment.
In 2005, NASA released its top 10 warmest years showing that 2001 was the warmest on record and that 4 of the years after 1998 were in the top 10. When the data was reviewed by a statistician, it was shown that NASA made a math error and promptly entered a retraction. That retraction then showed that 1998 was no longer the warmest year, but 1934, and of the 10 warmest years, 6 were before 1950.
The point is really this simple. The climate is still not well understood and the processes that have been going on for millions of years are hard to explain. Observations have shown the link between CO2 and temperature are not well understood, and many in the climate community are becoming more vocal about the doomsday scenarios when in fact, it's just a lot of hot air.
If the planet has been markedly warmer in the past, and life has flourished, then why won't MAN be able to adapt? It's not as easy as saying "We know CO2 holds heat" but to the person who refuses to actually understand science, you cannot rely on the doomsday scenarios in the newsweek article to boil down science into a quick two sentence explanation.
The primary reason for the hype is that environmentalists and their anti-capitalistic means are trying to scare people back into the stone age. This is a hot button issue that has no basis in fact. The policy makers have decided that there is an issue, but if you asked them to explain how they arrived at their conclusion, you'll see that they do not understand the issue either.
There is no doubt we need a national energy policy to eliminate our dependence on oil. We need a better way to develop dependable energy sources to support our voracious demand. However, until we do, we should not be threatened by ignorance of the media and politics of a few scientists. We really need more definitive answers before we start condemning man to a life of eternal hell.
