Carbon Dioxide and Earth Essay

Submitted By abm199
Words: 666
Pages: 3

News Clipping
Summary of “Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link” A study done in Antarctica suggests that the high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, contributed to the last Ice Age. About 20, 000 years ago the world started “recuperating” from the Ice Age, ultimately changed the global levels of carbon dioxide. The author of this article, Justin Gillis, states “to assert that rising carbon dioxide levels were essentially irrelevant to the earth’s temperature — a side effect of planetary warming, perhaps, but not the cause.” Scientists say that although that the rising levels of carbon dioxide did not start the “end of the Ice Age” it did play a big role on global warming.
Time has allowed creating new precise technology to help understand our environment more. Frédéric Parrenin of the University of Grenoble, in France used new techniques to better narrow down the exact timing of occurrences that finalized the Ice Age.
The science field knows that ice ages are caused by how where the earth is in the orbit and its closeness to the sun. Also, “they believe, carbon dioxide is somehow flushed out of the ocean, causing a big amplification of the initial warming.” For the last 33 years, scientists have been observing changes of ice and glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. In the ice they have studied, they have found air bubbles that indicate the temperature when the ice was formed. The air gets “trapped” with time when snow covers it and compresses it. Therefore, the air bubbles and ice are not the same “age” making it difficult to narrow down and reconstruct the events of the ice age.
With the studies and research Dr. Parrenin’s team “their work suggests that the lag as the ice age started to end was less than 200 years, and possibly there was no lag at all.” Many politicians have tried to delay the action of global warming, like former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “The Inconvenient Truth”.
Climate scientist, Richard B. Alley, reconfirmed “What this does, again and more clearly than ever, is to show that the large temperature changes are tightly coupled to the large CO2 changes,” Also, Jeremy Shakun a Harvard student found out that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere came first and high temperatures came second.
The relationship between high carbon dioxide and the temperature rising are reasons why the scientific community warns society about “producing” fossil fuels. They fear that the level of carbon dioxide could triple or double if we