Wood Romances

GMST Follows CO2 Forcings, not Solar Forcings One of the more common mantras I hear from contrarians is that "CO2 always lags temperature," and usually this is accompanied with "by hundreds of years."  This idea goes back to the late 1990s, when the Vostok ice core was drilled, and plots of CO2 and Antarctic temperature (AT) showed what appeared to be a multi-century lag between CO2 and AT proxy data. From the observation that CO2 lagged Antarctic temperature during the last four glacial cycles, contrarians predictably began to expand and modify this observation by dropping "Antarctic" and adding "always," giving us the familiar refrain, "CO2 always lags temperature." Is there any sense in which this mantra is true? Not really. Paleoclimate Evidence That mantra was never technically correct, but developments since 1999 have shed more light on what is actually going on. In 2012, Shakun et al[1] showed that while CO2 lags AT, it leads cha...