How Accurate are Our CO2 Ice Core Data?
The Keeling Curve I sometimes hear claims that our measurements of CO2 concentrations, especially as recovered in ice core data, are unreliable indicators of variability in CO2 concentrations, often stating that CO2 may have varied by far more than scientists are letting us know about. The implication is that scientists are covering up evidence for the variability of atmospheric CO2 concentrations to sell a narrative that humans are responsible for the increase in CO2. There are at least two forms of lines of argument here, one arguing that ice core data is unreliable and the other arguing that other measurements of CO2 contradict the ice core record. 1. Zbigniew Jaworowski It appears that even in the 1990s there were attempts by contrarian scientists to undermine the reliability of the empirical data extracted from ice cores to reconstruct background CO2 concentrations over the last several hundred thousand years. One such paper, Jaworowski 1994[1], argued that the CO2 data was unreli...