ice cores

It's beginning to feel a bit like piling on to highlight the latest scientific study reinforcing the notion that byproducts of the industrialization are causing our atmosphere to warm unnaturally.

But today's news is noteworthy in that a) it comes from the National Science Foundation, not exactly a loony left-wing tree-hugging group, if you know what we mean, and b) is able to use glacial ice cores, tree rings and sediments from lakes, along with computer simulations, to look back at the Arctic's past climate, down to a decade-by-decade scale, going back 2,000 years. Previously, a climate simulation this fine-grained only went back about 400 years.

[caption id="attachment_3515" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Scientists take sediment core in Alaska. Photo courtesy Darrell Kaufman, Arizona State University"][/caption]

Now, Dateline Earthers were reporting as early as 2003 on how global warming already was affecting the Pacific Northwest. But there are still today those who want to discount the notion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are playing a role in enhancing the greenhouse effect.

The NSF study, though, traces temperatures in the Arctic, showing temps there had actually been growing steadily colder for 19 centuries until the last century -- and why they should have kept getting colder, but for greenhouse gases emitted by modern machinery, farming methods, yadda yadda.

You see, the earth's rotation around the sun is not a perfectly spherical thing.