Free Republic

During the past 2.6 million years, Earth’s climate has alternated between warm periods known as interglacials, when conditions were similar to those of today, and cold glacials, when ice sheets spread across North America and northern Europe. Before about 1 million years ago, the warm periods recurred every 40,000 years, but after that, the return period lengthened to an average of about 100,000 years. It has often been suggested that a decline in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was responsible for this fundamental change. Writing in Nature, Yan et al.1 report the first direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentrations...

We actually do not know how much carbon dioxide was in Earth’s atmosphere prior to the 1930s. Devices to reliably measure carbon dioxide in the air went through painstaking, slow, bumpy development. Instruments did not really come into their own until around 1930. Because we don’t know the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, climate change proponents depend upon unreliable “proxies.” They substitute gas pockets retrieved from ice core samples from deep within ancient glaciers. They hope this will tell us Earth’s ancient atmosphere and the concentration of CO2 in the air. Speculation that air pockets remain exactly the same...

An intense blast of high-energy protons from the Sun pummelled the Earth in about 660 BC and left a distinct record of cosmogenic nuclei in the Greenland ice sheet. The discovery was made by an international team of scientists who say the event was one most powerful solar storms known to have struck Earth. The team calculates that the storm was about ten times more intense than any event that has occurred in the past 70 years. “If that solar storm had occurred today, it could have had severe effects on our hi-tech society”, says Raimund Muscheler of Sweden’s University...

What radical climate change zealots don't want you to know...After man learns to control earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters can he even begin to think about controlling our climate. Climate change has been going on ever since the earth was formed and will continue until the sun cools or planet earth is destroyed. Forces outside of our control (e.g. the sun, solar wind, etc.) are the drivers and, at this time, there is nothing anyone can do about it. In lieu of instrumentation, ice cores provide one of the best methods for determining past climatic conditions. Even if the...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

CO2Science and 68 signatories To the Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate: February 8, 2011 In reply to “The Importance of Science in Addressing Climate Change” On 28 January 2011, eighteen scientists sent a letter to members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate urging them to “take a fresh look at climate change.” Their intent, apparently, was to disparage the views of scientists who disagree with their contention that continued business-as-usual increases in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced from the burning of coal, gas, and oil will lead to a host...

The work of Danish paleoclimatologist Willi Dansgaard helped revolutionize scientific understanding of the mechanisms of climate change.Danish paleoclimatologist Willi Dansgaard established ice core science as a cornerstone in the study of climate history. (Centre for Ice and ClimateWilli Dansgaard, a Danish paleoclimatologist who was the first to recognize that the Earth's climatic history was stored in the Greenland ice cap, died Jan. 8 in Copenhagen, according to the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He was 88. His research, together with that of Claude Lorius of France and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland, revolutionized scientific knowledge of how the...

YouTube video.

Climate record highlights extent of man-made change. Current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years, say researchers who have finished cataloguing air bubbles trapped for millennia inside Antarctic ice. The record, which extends back over the past eight ice ages, shows that today's concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane far outstrip those in the past. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen 200 times faster over the past 50 years than at any other time during this period, says Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern, Switzerland, who led the...

Ancient air bubbles shed light on greenhouse gases By LAURAN NEERGAARD Thursday, November 24, 2005 Posted at 2:45 PM EST Associated Press Washington — There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any point during the past 650,000 years, says a major new study that let scientists peer back in time at “greenhouse gases” that can help fuel global warming. By analyzing tiny air bubbles preserved in Antarctic ice for millenniums, a team of European researchers highlights how people are dramatically influencing the buildup of these gases. The remarkable research promises to spur “dramatically improved understanding” of...