How CO2 Causes Climate Change

A Greek-Australian researcher is one of the scientists penning a new article describing just how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affects the formation of glaciers and its crucial role in climate change.

The research was undertaken by Vera Korasidis, a palynologist, or scientist who studies pollen and pollen fossils, and her colleague Peter Buck, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who co-authored the paper.

They believe that a drop in greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, caused a great global cooling event some 34 million years ago.

This unfortunately means that, conversely, a rise in such gases would inevitably mean an equal-sized global warming event, as has long been thought by climate scientists.

The ultimate manifestations of global warming are disputed by some, who see them as the normal fluctuations in climate as we have seen throughout the history of the planet.

But there is no disputing that the more carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, the warmer that atmosphere will become.

This is the first time that researchers have shown in a study that global cooling, as a result of less available carbon dioxide, created the massive glaciers that formed 34 million years ago.

Korasidis notes that “Before then, vast regions of the world, including Antarctica, were covered in lush rainforests. There were no permanent ice sheets” on Earth.

During these many years, known as the “Eocene Oligocene transition,” the average average temperature across the entire globe decreased by more than 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) in approximately 300,000 years.

Vittoria Lauretano, the lead author of the paper, works as an organic geochemist in the realm of the paleoclimate at the University of Bristol’s Organic Geochemistry Unit. She states “This geologically quick change shows how atmospheric carbon dioxide drives major shifts in climate.”

Evidence from marine sediments shows unequivocally that the globe indeed was a very temperate place prior to that era, with not even a glacier anywhere on Earth.

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