A paper I wrote that briefly describes the history of why we used to believe that carbon emissions caused global warming, and how we got to where we are now in the debate:
First crucial point, 2003. We've all seen Al Gore’s movie. It was the early, low resolution ice core data first gathered from 1985 to 2000 that convinced the world that CO2 was the culprit: CO2 levels and temperature rose and fell in lockstep over the last half a million years, to the resolution of the old ice core data (data points over a thousand years apart). We assumed that CO2 levels controlled the world’s temperature.
After further research, in 2000 – 2003 new high resolution ice core results (data points only a few hundred years apart) allowed us to distinguish which came first—rising temperature or rising CO2? We found that temperature changes preceded CO2 changes by an average of 800 years. So temperature rises caused the CO2 rises, and not the other way around as previously assumed. The world should have started backpedalling away from blaming carbon emissions in 2003...
