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This reprint of a rebuttal to an article in "The Industrial Physicist" is authorized by the author. It is presented here because of its interest to the general membership of the Denver Mining Club.

Your recent article "Millennia of global warming" (June/July, p. 13) states that it is an anomaly that solar radiation levels decline while temperature rises, alleging further a correlation of CO₂ levels and temperature over geological time periods. Both are flatly wrong.

Changes in the carbon dioxide level over millions of years do not correlate with temperature increases, even though CO₂ levels in the past have been 20 times as high as today's. "On the time scale of hundreds of millions of years, carbon dioxide has sharply declined; its concentration was as much as 20 times the present value at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 600 million years ago (Berner, 1997). Yet the climate has not varied all that much, and glaciations have occurred throughout geologic time even when CO₂ concentrations were high"[1].

Only recently has it been possible to obtain sufficient resolution to demonstrate that the increase in CO₂ lags about 600 years behind the rapid warming that signals deglaciation, the end of an ice age [2]. Citing Fischer's study [2], CO₂ Science magazine (http://www.co2science.org/edit/v2_edit/v2n7edit.htm) noted: "Over this immense time span, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on Earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each and every one of these tremendous global warmings, Earth's air temperature rose well before there was 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" [3].

In summary, "Major past climate changes either were uncorrelated with changes in CO₂ or were characterized by temperatures changes that preceded changes in CO₂ by hundreds to thousands of years" [4]. You should be looking beyond the "pop culture" on global warming into real science.