Thursday, February 28, 2013

Regarding gas bubbles in Antarctic ice, an alleged "blow to climate skeptics": "The gas bubbles are [allegedly] always more recent than the ice that surrounds them"

Antarctica ice may reveal clues to global warming in prehistoric past
PARIS - Levels of carbon dioxide rose hand-in-hand with warming at the end of the last Ice Age, according to a study Thursday that deals a blow to climate skeptics.
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The anomaly is this: the CO2 in the bubbles do not correspond to the level of warming indicated by the surrounding snowfall of that time.
Climate skeptics argued that this showed the CO2 rose after Earth's atmosphere warming.
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During the last deglaciation, the temperature rose by 19 degrees Celsius (34.2 degrees Fahrenheit) while at the same time CO2 levels in the atmosphere rose by about 100 parts per million, they said.
The discrepancy comes from the physical process by which CO2 bubbles are formed in successive layers of snow.
"The gas bubbles are always more recent than the ice that surrounds them," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a statement.

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