Cause and Effect

 We have this great world atlas book published by the National Geographical Society, which by the way, we bought at the local library used book sale for $2. Probably this low price of the book pains the Society but it sure makes my reference to maps an easy task without having to wake up my computer.

The book occupies a permanent spot on a book stand in our breakfast room, standing ready to supply map information on request.

The book happened to be open to the page showing the whole of Antarctica featuring all the outposts and even some commentary of scientific significance. One such comment was on ice coring data of historic temperatures and carbon dioxide content.  I can understand how the CO2 content of the ice can be preserved over many centuries at varying depths, but I am unsure how the prevailing temperature of some thousand years ago can be preserved in the ice cores--but that's another issue that we will not get into here.

So here is the comment on the data of the ice cores, courtesy of the National Geographical Society:

Okay, what this entry says is that over the past 160,000 years, the temperature of Earth's atmosphere varied and so did the CO2 content of the ice.  High CO2 occurred when Earth's atmospheric temperature was high.  Voila, the theory of global warming due to man-made CO2 in the atmosphere is confirmed.

But wait for a minute, these data may be fooling us.  I can recall many times in my engineering career when we had a theory that "A" caused "B" when in fact the reverse turned out to be true.   Our only proof that our theory that "A" caused "B" was correct was that A and B correlated.  Then the theory changed, and we concluded that B caused A, again, proof because the two correlated. Then, when we had no theory at all about the relationship of A with B, we still found that the two attributes correlated when there is no connection between the two at all.  This happens all the time in scientific work.  Mere correlation proves nothing.

So, now comes the worry of CO2 increase in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel burning. And from these ice corings noted above, we know that at high Earth temperatures the CO2 is higher (A correlates with B).   We also know that Earth's temperature has varied considerably over those times before fossil fuels were discovered, let alone burned for energy production. These long-term temperature variations are apparently a natural phenomenon. (this means we don't fully understand the cause of the variation)

So, I might put forth the theory that CO2 increases in the atmosphere because of the rise in Earth's temperature as it has for the past many thousands of years because when Earth does get warmer, there is more CO2 produced merely because Earth has a lot of carbon in plant materials and plenty of oxygen both of which react more vigorously at higher temperatures.  

Now we have a situation where Earth is warming and CO2 is increasing, but the cause of Earth warming is the natural cycle and not caused by fossil fuel burning.

So, the lesson may be to realize that many theories are proven to be incorrect and this one about the current cause of global warming may be one of them.  One should not only question the data but the theory as well.  We'll know the truth of this in about ten thousand years.