Carbon Dioxide Known Only Since 1930
Thousands of children skipped school last week to march in the streets and demand government action about the hypothetical threat that human industrial activity will change the Earth's climate...
Scientists working under government grants tell us that we have to take action by 1999 or runaway global warming will be irreversible. See: Peter James Spielmann, "U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked," Associated Press, June 29, 1989. Oh, wait. That didn't happen... In any other area of life, would we keep listening to these people?
We do not know how much carbon dioxide was in Earth's atmosphere prior to the 1930s...
Guy Stewart Callendar -- who dreamed up the global warming scare -- rejected nearly all CO2 measurements before 1870 because of “relatively crude instrumentation” and recognized only twelve suitable data sets in the 20th century. Callendar, G.P. “On the Amount of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere,” Tellus 10: 243-48. (1958)...
The existence of carbon dioxide was not confirmed until 1777 when chemist Antoine Lavoisier thought the gas was a compound of coal and discovered that it was produced by respiration (breathing) as well as by burning coal.
We cannot measure carbon dioxide content of the Earth's past from air pockets in ice core samples. First, gases can diffuse through solid walls. Buy a helium balloon. A week later the balloon will no longer be floating but on the ground. The helium gas diffuses out through the walls. We know that gas does not stay unchanged even in a closed container.
Testimony before the U.S. Senate made this clear in 2004:
Third, real science requires careful protocols. A measuring instrument must be validated, calibrated, using a meaningful scale, and manufactured with consistency. That's why the U.S. Government from its earliest days including various agencies to establish "weights and measures."
So, to use trapped gases from ice core samples, we would -- if we were doing real science -- have to put a known composition of gas into an ice air pocket, then come back thousands of years later, and re-test the gas composition. That would be the kind of real science that the protesting students could have learned had they stayed in school.
