Geological discovery upends politically correct climate science

The instruments we use to analyze stable isotopes are called gas source mass spectrometers. When you take a shell, that's not a gas so we have to convert our material to a gas. So what we do is take the shelly material, and make sure it's very pristine, unaltered and we grind it up and then we dissolve it with acid under vacuum conditions and that produces CO₂. The carbon dioxide is the gas that we use [in the gas source mass spectrometers] and it has now preserved the O-18 record from the shell. And remembering the shell had preserved the O-18 record from the ocean water that the animal built its shell from. So we're now measuring CO₂ which has a record of the oxygen-18 in that ocean way back in geological time.

This method reveals when there was more or less land glaciation, a proxy for temperature, over the approximately 600 million years that there has been hard shelled sea creatures. And what Veizer found was astonishing: there was a nearly sinusoidal variation of and so the implied temperature over this time frame, as shown below, Figure 1 from the blockbuster 2003 paper, Celestial Driver of Phanerozoic Climate. The black nearly sinusoidal line in the figure shows the variation in, a direct indicator of temperature. The other colored lines around the black line are simply curves showing different averaging and resolution computations of the same data. Note that the vertical axis on the left is inverted, so high , approaching 2 units below the x-axis at about 450 million years ago, indicates an "icehouse" period, highlighted by the dark blue bar at the top of the graph, a time frame far colder and of greater duration than recent ice ages.

The top three curves of Figure 1, which are different determinations of CO₂ in the past, GEOCARB III-in purple, Berner & Streif-in dark green and Rothman-in red, also illustrates that there is no meaningful, consistent correlation between temperature and CO₂ levels in the past 500 million years. Note that CO₂ levels are plotted as a logarithm, base 10, of the ratio of the level of CO₂ at some time t in the past to its level today (t = 0), meaning that the curve goes to zero in the present as the logarithm of one is zero. Also note that, when we were at the coldest period in the past half billion years about 450 million years ago, CO₂ levels were considerably higher than today, thereby refuting the assumption that CO₂ concentration has been the dominant driver of temperature over all time frames. See the caption below figure 1 for more information about this graph.

So, if it was not variations in CO₂ concentration, what could have caused such temperature changes over time frames of tens of millions of years, detective professor Jan Veiser wondered. In next week's article, I will show how Veiser answered this mystery and demonstrate why this discovery has helped revolutionize our understanding of what really drives climate change on all time scales. Stay tuned!