Mozart ripped off my song

So here we go. My long awaited thoughts on the global warming debate.

I must state at the outset that I think there is nothing more important than looking after our planet and it's inhabitants; human and otherwise. This includes things like reducing pollution, wise use of our resources, and the elimination of poverty, hunger, war . . . all the things that make this a better world for all to live in.

To help us in our quest, we can use our knowledge of the universe - our ever increasing knowledge of science, to guide our decisions.

On the subject of global warming, I think it is very important to get the science right and I want to enlist Mozart to help me with this discussion . . .

Suppose I write a song and then someone discovers that it's a rip off of something Mozart wrote.

Is there any possible way that I could convince you that I'm the original artist and that Mozart plagiarized me? (By the way, Mozart died 163 years before I was born.)

Of course the answer is no. Unless, of course, I could get in a time machine, travel back, and somehow put the tune in his head.

In fact, there's a general rule we can use for all such questions. When event A occurs before event B, there is no way event B can cause event A.

What does this have to do with global warming?

There is a field of study that you may have heard about. It's the analysis of ice core samples. They find a very old and deep deposit of ice; popular sites include the Antarctic and Greenland, and they drill out a core and analyse it. They can determine all kinds of things dating back hundred's of thousands of years. In particular, as it relates to this article, they can determine earth's temperature in relation to atmospheric concentrations of CO₂.

Over the last several years I have tracked down as many scientific ice core studies as I can find. The abstracts are freely available on the Internet and, in some cases, so is the entire study. In other cases, to read the entire study, you have to pay a subscription to the scientific journal that published the study. Since these are scientific papers, they are quite technical and I don't claim to understand all the science being discussed but it's not hard to get the drift, especially from the abstract.

One of the more famous studies on the subject was conducted in 2003 by Caillon et al. It's only three pages long and, as scientific papers go, comparatively easy to understand. I encourage you to read it. Caillon et al concluded that changes in global temperatures occur 600 years before changes in CO₂ concentrations (with a statistical accuracy of plus or minus 200 years).

All of the other studies I have found have come to the same general conclusion although the study periods vary as do the time between atmospheric changes and CO₂ concentrations. The shortest time lag is 800 years plus or minus 200 years (the study mentioned above). Others list a longer time lag, some as much as 5000 years.

Simply stated, they all found that changes in temperature occur before changes in CO₂!

Until someone proves that there has been a systematic mistake in all these studies, which could happen, the case for CO₂ being the driving factor for changes in global temperatures is not possible.

It's not possible for the same reason that Mozart could not have ripped off a song that wasn't written till at least a century and a half after his death.

Obviously there's lots more to say about all of this. But I'm going to just let what I've raised sit with you for a while.

Check out the studies. See if you can find anyone who has successfully disputed them. As I said, I've been looking for a while now and haven't found anybody that's successfully challenged them.
There was one study, which I can't seem to lay my fingers on right now, that was actually initiated to disprove the notion that CO₂ changes occur after temperature changes. But once the scientific team had done their own analysis of the data, they came to the same conclusion as everyone else. Their final report actually supported and endorsed the other studies. They ended up converts! I gotta see if I can find that study, it was quite interesting.

As always, please feel free to provide your comments or ask questions. I'll try to answer them.