For the first time Antarctic ice core teams have got hold of ice that is 3 million years old and the results have confounded them.
The way CO2 responds in ice cores is canon to "the faith" so this is more important than it seems at first glance. Believers are really struggling.
Three million years ago the world was warmer, and about to cool into the violent ice age cycles. The ice core experts were expecting to confirm that CO2 levels were about 400ppm, as other proxies had shown, and they thought that greenhouse gases might fall and lead the cooling shift. But instead of CO2 being at 400 parts per million, and then leading the cooling, the bubbles trapped in ice were only 250 parts per million to start with and they stayed constant through important temperature swings. Sacre Bleu! CO2 did not appear to have any role in causing the warmth that was, or the cooling that followed. And nor did methane. O' the dilemma?
Some sacred cows have to be sacrificed. Either CO2 is not a major driver of climate change, or the ice cores are wrong (or both!).
Watch the last few addicts coping with this news. Follow the 'reasoning' — it still "might" be worse than we thought, you know! I mean, it's
possible, that tiny changes in CO2 that are too small to measure
could be affecting the Earth...
It's like the homeopathy of climate science, except homeopathy has more data to support it.
Comment: Update March 17
MLive.com reports: