What More Proof Do We Need About Carbon and Climate Change

I'm reading a book, When the Ice is Gone (2024) that goes into minute details about the famous ice cores exacted in Greenland. Ice cores have also been taken from other glaciers such as Antarctica. Greenland's are the one's the professor author knows most about so that is the subject of the book.

A decade ago when I discussed climate change there was a band of commenters on this blog who said climate change and the information from the poles was nonsense. While I knew the carbon pollution was the cause of climate change I never understood how the conclusions were reached. This book lays the case out in detail.

There is a lot of information about sawing ice cores I did not know. I thought taking out the cores was a relatively new idea with a new technology. Drilling down into glaciers has been going on at least from the 1950's. The glaciers were seen as assets during the cold war. The Defense Department wonder what kind of defense against Russia could be placed on the glaciers and wanted to know what was underneath. Defense began investigating the glaciers by simply drilling and harvesting the ground up ice to see how it changed as if went deeper. 

As the decades went by, better machines were developed that could saw a round core of ice and exact it and save it for analysis. Eventually the bottom of the glacier was reached. It was about 3/4 of a mile deep. Each annual layer of compressed snow and ice was counted. The glacier contained ice for about 600 years.

We know from history when the "industrial revolution" happened. This was accompanied by coal and petroleum air pollution. The presence of pollution in the ice cores appeared exactly at the time our history recorded the smokestacks.

Even more important, tiny bubbles of air remain in the ice cores. Scientists harvested this air and analyzed it looking for carbon. They then compared the carbon in these ice core bubbles century after century until recent times. The presence of carbon increased. Experiments have demonstrated this carbon affects light passing through.  

It is this information that forms the basis for the case that our increased production of carbon is the cause of climate change. There is no other theory or explanation. This doesn't prevent doubters with no information from shrugging the shoulders and says, "I don't believe it" but leaves the only explanation firmly in place.