Over the last 5 years a significant body of scientific research has concluded that atmospheric carbon dioxide is not the climate criminal it is made out to be by self-proclaimed 'environmentalist' groups and opportunist politicians.
 
Below is a summary of this research evidence, with links to a review of each, demonstrating clearly that hysterical demands for carbon dioxide emissions reductions — together with the fuel duty hikes and climate change levy introduced supposedly to further these demands — are an environmentally pointless 'King Canute' exercise designed purely to restrict individual mobility, and exercise corporate energy control, through extortionate levels of taxation.
 

• Petit et al. (1999) reconstructed surface air temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration profiles from Vostok ice core samples covering 420,000 years, concluding that during glaciation "the CO₂ decrease lags the temperature decrease by several thousand years" and "the same sequence of climate forcing operated during each termination." Using sections of ice core records from the last three inter-glacial transitions, Fischer et al. (1999) decided that "the time lag of the rise in CO₂ concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions." In other words, an increase in carbon dioxide levels, the much hyped 'cause' of global warming, actually happens long after the warming has started, demonstrating clearly that it cannot possibly be the cause.
   
  
• On the basis of atmospheric carbon dioxide data obtained from Antarctic Taylor Dome ice core samples, and temperature data obtained from the Vostok ice core, Indermuhle et al. (2000) looked at the relationship between these two variables over the period 60,000-20,000 years BP (Before Present). A statistical test on the data showed that movement in the air's CO₂ content lagged behind shifts in air temperature by approximately 900 years, while a second statistical test yielded a mean lag-time of 1200 years. Similarly, in a study of air temperature and CO₂ data obtained from high time resolution samples at the Antarctic Concordia Dome site, for the period 22,000-9,000 BP (which covers the last glacial-to-interglacial transition) Monnin et al. (2001) found that the start of the CO₂ increase lagged the start of the temperature increase by 800 years. In yet another study of the 420,000-year Vostok ice-cores, Mudelsee (2001) concluded that variations in atmospheric CO₂ concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years. Proving once again that the greens have put effect before cause.
   
  
• In a study using different methodology, Yokoyama et al. (2000) analyzed sediments in the tectonically stable Bonaparte Gulf of Australia to determine the timing of the initial melting phase of the last great ice age. Commenting on the results of that study, Clark and Mix (2000) note that the rapid rise in sea level caused by the melting of land-based ice that began approximately 19,000 years ago preceded the post-glacial rise in atmospheric CO₂ concentration by about 3,000 years. Once more the order of events confounds the greens: a shift in carbon dioxide levels cannot 'cause' a temperature rise that happened 3,000 years earlier.
   
  
• The most recent study available covering this theme is that of Caillon et al. (2003)†, who focused on an isotope of argon (40Ar) that can be taken as a climate proxy, thus providing constraints about the relative timing of CO₂ shifts and climate change. Air bubbles in the Vostok ice core over the period that comprises what is called Glacial Termination III - which occurred 240,000 years BP - were studied. The result of their painstaking analysis was that "the CO₂ increase lagged behind Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years." This finding, in the words of Caillon et al., confirms that CO₂ is not the forcing that drives the climatic system. Anthropogenic climate change (man-made global warming theory), based on the claimed impact of CO₂ emissions from transport and industry, is stone cold dead.