Based on the the abstract, the study looks at the size of the veins in fossilized leafs and tries to determine the atmospheric content of CO2 based upon those observations. Not new, as these sorts of observations from Jurassic fossils suggest higher concentrations of CO2 during that geologic period.

Caveat 1: This is not the same as sampling the actual gasses preserved in ice cores. From those little bubbles the actual gas can be sampled: concentrations, isotopes, etc. This is a second order feature: more CO2 is found to create larger veins in leaves.

Caveat 2: This is from one location, over a short (geologically) period of time. This is one study. Do this same study in many places, well, dozens of places, average them, and maybe draw global conclusions. If I sample the ozone of the BLue Ridge Mountains from one mountain over a few years, can I really talk about ozone concentrations in the Rocky Mountains over the same time period?

This is interesting research, to be sure, but it is not enough to support the idea that we are not seeing a rapid increase in global CO2, and that this increase is no big deal.

-edit- now that I think about it, and considering the context, you made a reasonable guess what my ambiguous question was about.

So we take the power out of the hands of “states” and “politicians” and put it all in the hands of…what? I don’t know. You tell me.

Well? Be sure to include how China and India would be brought to heel, never mind the other non-Western nations that figure in this.

Asking me how libertarians would control everything is not only irrelevant, the question doesn’t even make sense.

the problem with scientific solutions is that they tend to overestimate the effect of natural disasters by half. If you take the Katrina disaster as an example, as bad as it was, it was nowhere hear the predictions of the average weather scientists in the years prior to the actual event. This must be taken into account.

Careful planning for reacting to to near term problems that can be predicted with relative accuracy, (totally absent in the Katrina event), is way more cost effective than long term preventive measures based on scientific estimates of environmental damage 50 or more years down the road.

Once again using the Katrina event, if we had spent the money preparing for an event that was nearly certain to occur, (even the overkill solutions recommended), it would have saved money and saved lives.

We know that AGW is a fact and can not be prevented. In my opinion it does not threaten our existence if we focus on meeting the threat instead of fruitlessly trying to prevent it.

If ice core studies work as they’re advertised , they give us long, continuous records of temperatures over extended periods of time. How they work is not clear to me, something to do with dissolved gases in the bubbles, isotopic variation, seasonal layering, etc. I know they use multiple techniques.

How you would go about determining ancient sea ice extent is beyond me. It may not even be possible, I can’t think of any way to go about it, although the abstract alludes to “sea ice proxies”.

Besides, the two are only indirectly related. For example, the melting of continental Antarctic ice actually ADDS to surrounding sea ice, by cooling the sea water and calving of massive bergs. In the Arctic, the only continental ice sheets are in Greenland, sea ice doesn’t flow off the glaciers, it freezes on salt water. The Titanic didn’t run into sea ice, it hit a piece of the Greenland glacier.

Every body knows Greenland’s climate used to be milder, when it changed, the Viking settlers had to evacuate.

And why did you even bother posting that abstract?

“Arctic sea ice extent is now more than two million square kilometres less than it was in the late twentieth century, with important consequences for the climate, the ocean and traditional lifestyles in the Arctic.”
…
“…both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years.”
…
“…Enhanced advection of warm Atlantic water to the Arctic seems to be the main factor driving the decline of sea ice extent on multidecadal timescales, and may result from nonlinear feedbacks between sea ice and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.”
…
“These results reinforce the assertion that sea ice is an active component of Arctic climate variability and that the recent decrease in summer Arctic sea ice is consistent with anthropogenically forced warming.”

That is exactly the same sermon I’ve been preaching. Anthropogenic warming heats the sea, which melts the ice, and the open water gets insolated, forming a feedback loop that overwhelms the other checks and balances in the system. And his remarks are perfectly consistent with direct contemporary measurements, of CO2 concenttrations in the atmosphere and satellite imagery of ice cover. No inferences from fossil data are required.

TB, you are a man who has found the Secret of the Universe; it answers all your questions and explains all your problems with one simple, clearly identifiable villain, one that just happens to fit in with your political philosophy.

So anyone who doesn’t swallow it completely must be a fool, or a villain himself. That’s the very definition of anomalism.

He should be right up your alley, too. He doesn’t trust politicians either.