Study Shows "Greenhouse Gas"
Trails Warming, Not Leads It

WASHINGTON — It looks like the "global warming" alarmists may have things exactly backward.

For the last several years they have constructed a veritable industry around claims that human activity — mostly in the bad old capitalist world — is on the verge of overheating the earth, melting polar ice caps and causing all sorts of other horrors.

They base their alarms on computer models and guesswork, and support it with claims that methane, carbon dioxide and other so-called "greenhouse gases" are accumulating in the atmosphere. The heart of their theory is that these gases trap solar heat like a blanket; if carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, they insist, the planet will heat up.

New evidence now suggests the real chronology is just the opposite.

Scientists studying gasses trapped in Antarctic ice over the last 250,000 years have found that the earth tended to warm up first and only later experience an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography researchers say a study of gas extracted from polar ice cores shows that carbon dioxide levels did not rise until hundreds of years after the planet entered a period of warming following an ice age.

``We found that at these periods when the climate is transitioning from a glacial to an interglacial period, the atmospheric C02 concentrations lag behind the rise in temperature by about 600 years,'' said Martin Wahlen, a co-author of the study.

The study by Wahlen suggests that the rise in CO2 earlier in the earth's history followed a global warming trend instead of preceding the temperature change.

The ice cores studied were drilled from deep beneath the surface of ice covering Antarctica. The ice dated back thousands of years, and each level contained bubbles of carbon dioxide that were trapped from the atmosphere at the time the ice formed. Thus, gas content of the cores reflects the chemical mix of the atmosphere in those ancient times.

The studies included three ice ages that started 18,000, 135,000 and 240,000 years ago. Each ice age lasted about 10,000 years.

Wahlen said warming between the ice ages probably caused a global boom in plants. This created decaying organic matter that put out CO2, which is gradually concentrated in the atmosphere, he said.

By way of perspective, it should be noted that the last lengthy global cooling period, the so-called "Mini-Ice Age," was documented by observers in the Middle Ages — and drew to a close about 600 years ago.

An additional irony is that some of "global warming's" staunchest proponents as recently as 20 years ago were sounding alarms about an impending ice age. When that scare story failed to inflame the populace — as attested to by their dwindling book sales and speaking engagements — they launched the equally fervent if entirely opposite "warming" crusade.

Now it looks like they might have been right in the first place, though their alarms were several centuries premature.