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Meanwhile, in an editorial, the sages of the Roanoke(VA) Times intone:

Two-mile long nail in the warming debate

Ice core analysis proves that industrial activities increase greenhouse gases and the temperature.

The Roanoke Times

The debate over global warming must move beyond whether science confirms that human activities are contributing to a change in the atmosphere and a rise in global temperature.

Analysis of a two-mile long ice core from the Antarctic should be the final nail in that debate.

Study of tiny air bubbles in the ice confirm that current levels of CO2 are higher than anything experienced at least in the last 650,000 years.

There can be no serious, reasonable doubt that this unprecedented increase is due to industrial activity that dumps billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.

With the start Monday of a 12-day global warming summit in Montreal, the debate must shift to real steps the nations of the world can take to reduce greenhouse emissions before it is too late.

The consequences of continuing to ignore the planet's slow-motion catastrophe are more grave than most can imagine.

"The impacts of global warming are many and serious: sea-level rise ... changes in availability of fresh water ... and the increasing incidence of extreme events -- floods, droughts, and hurricanes -- the serious consequences of which are rising to levels which invite comparison with weapons of mass destruction," said Britain's top scientist, Royal Society President Robert May.

Data from the Antarctic ice core sample, which provided an additional 210,000 years of data to that previously available, should add urgency to the Montreal gathering.

"This [data] is saying, 'Yeah, we had it right.' We can pound on the table harder and say, 'This is real,'" Richard Alley, a Penn State University expert on ice cores, told the Los Angeles Times.

Someone needs to pound on the table, loudly. The meeting in Montreal should advance the community of nations -- including Congress and the Oval Office -- beyond the weak efforts of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Global warming is real. The world should face that reality and act accordingly.

Global warming is real. The world should face that reality and act accordingly.

The issue is not whether or not climate changes, but whether mankind has a substantive role in it.

Global warming and cooling is a function of one's time frame and little else beyond natural effects and certainly not a factor of CO2 concentration as is implied by the current crop of global warming alarmists.

Global Surface Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time

Late Carboniferous to Early Permian time (315 mya -- 270 mya) is the only time period in the last 600 million years when both atmospheric CO2 and temperatures were as low as they are today (Quaternary Period ).

Temperature after C.R. Scotese
CO2 after R.A. Berner, 1994

There has historically been much more CO2 in our atmosphere than exists today. For example, during the Jurassic Period (200 mya), average CO2 concentrations were about 900 ppm or about 2.5 times higher than today. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Ordovician Period, exceeding 6000 ppm -- more than 16 times higher than today.

The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today.

To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age, with CO2 concentrations nearly 15 times higher than today-- 5500 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.

CO2-Temperature Correlations

"(1) correlation does not prove causation, (2) cause must precede effect, and (3) when attempting to evaluate claims of causal relationships between different parameters, it is important to have as much data as possible in order to weed out spurious correlations.

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Consider, for example, the study of Fischer et al. (1999), who examined trends of atmospheric CO2 and air temperature derived from Antarctic ice core data that extended back in time a quarter of a million years. Over this extended period, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each of these climatic transitions, earth's air temperature rose well in advance of any increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, the air's CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm. Such findings have been corroborated by Mudelsee (2001), who examined the leads/lags of atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature over an even longer time period, finding that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years over the past 420,000 years."

[ see also: Indermuhle et al. (2000), Monnin et al. (2001), Yokoyama et al. (2000), Clark and Mix (2000) ]

"Other studies periodically demonstrate a complete uncoupling of CO2 and temperature "

[see: Petit et al. (1999), Staufer et al. (1998), Cheddadi et al., (1998), Raymo et al., 1998, Pagani et al. (1999), Pearson and Palmer (1999), Pearson and Palmer, (2000) ]

"Considered in their entirety, these several results present a truly chaotic picture with respect to any possible effect that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have on global temperature. Clearly, atmospheric CO2 is not the all-important driver of global climate change the climate alarmists make it out to be."

Global warming and global dioxide emission and concentration:
a Granger causality analysis
http://isi-eh.usc.es/trabajos/122_41_fullpaper.pdf

"We find, in opposition to previous studies, that there is no evidence of Granger causality from global carbon dioxide emission to global surface temperature. Further, we could not find robust empirical evidence for the causal nexus from global carbon dioxide concentration to global surface temperature."

Here Comes the Sun

"Carbon dioxide, the main culprit in the alleged greenhouse-gas warming, is not a "driver" of climate change at all. Indeed, in earlier research Jan Veizer, of the University of Ottawa and one of the co-authors of the GSA Today article, established that rather than forcing climate change, CO2 levels actually lag behind climatic temperatures, suggesting that global warming may cause carbon dioxide rather than the other way around."
***
"Veizer and Shaviv's greatest contribution is their time scale. They have examined the relationship of cosmic rays, solar activity and CO2, and climate change going back through thousands of major and minor coolings and warmings. They found a strong -- very strong -- correlation between cosmic rays, solar activity and climate change, but almost none between carbon dioxide and global temperature increases."

Climatic temperature is predominantly driven by Solar heating/cooling arising from variation of solar radiance, due to variations in distance from the Sun, and Solar radiance,

Red Planet Warming;

Global Warming on Triton (Neptune's moon)

plus variations in Earth's orbital alignment with mean solar system plane and geophysical events affecting planetary albedo.

Ice Ages & Astronomical Causes
Brief Introduction to the History of Climate
by Richard A. Muller

Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle

Figure 1-1 Global warming

Figure 1-2 Climate of the last 2400 years

Figure 1-3 Climate of the last 12,000 years

Figure 1-4 Climate of the last 100,000 years

Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice