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We do not know how much carbon dioxide was in Earth's atmosphere prior to the 1930s. Devices to measure carbon dioxide went through a difficult, slow, irregular development. Reliable devices to measure carbon dioxide were available around 1930. "The measurement of carbon dioxide (CO2) was first developed in the early 1900s; however, it was complex and of limited clinical use. " See: Thomas Nowicki; Shawn London, "Carbon Dioxide Detector," National Center for Biotechnology Information. The technology was slowly developed and produced a useable machine only around the year 1930. Guy Stewart Callendar -- who dreamed up the global warming scare...

New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago. A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report. The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people. The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate. Rapid climate change occurred 12,900 years ago, and it is proposed that this is associated with the extinction of large mammals...

Ice cores reveal that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds of years after temperatures changeIn 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years. Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point—the “greenhouse effect” captured attention. But in 1999 it became clear carbon rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003 we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.AGW replies: There is roughly an 800-year lag. But even if CO2 doesn’t start the warming trend, it amplifies it.Skeptics say: If CO2...

A thought about ice cores just occurred to me, and I need someone in the know to verify or refute this argument. Scientists claim to know what the temperature was in past years primarily by drilling ice core samples. They measure levels of specific gasses, like carbon dioxide, that are trapped within the layers of the ice, and somehow they calculate the temperature for that time based off of "certain assumptions" (none of which are mentioned in the wikipedia article). That is rather dubious inandof itself, but I want to take that thought in a different direction. We all know...

WHITEHORSE, Yukon Territory - Yukon technology could be headed to Mars. NASA has contracted Erik Blake of Whitehorse's Icefield Instruments Inc. to design an ice core drill to be tested in May and, perhaps eventually on Mars, if Houston finds no problems. Blake sells ice drill assemblies now for about $130,000 each but wouldn't discuss what the contract with NASA was worth. "It works much like an auger for drilling holes in the lake for ice fishing, but it is actually cutting a doughnut shape and leaving the inside core," he said. The prototype will be built with regular steel...