The 500 Pound Frozen Gorilla

Jack R. Noel
February 7, 2023

Anyone who’s taken the time to search for articles on how CO2 (carbon dioxide) is warming our climate may have noticed as I have that almost without exception even the legitimate scientific articles omit some of the information (aka, “data”).

The most typical omission is a complete history of Earth’s climate and the ways scientists determine what past levels of CO2 actually were. I had to search for an article that even comes close. It’s titled “A Graphical History of Atmospheric CO2 Levels Over Time” on EARTH.ORG. The article is from August 2020, it’s by Data Visualisation Specialist Owen Mulhern.

If you are not familiar with Earth Science maybe you’d do better to stop here and stay away from discussions of this topic. This is where politicians always find themselves but they lack the modesty to stay away from topics they know little or nothing about. But you know better than to do that, don’t you?

But back to data visualisationist Owen Mulhern and his article. He does a good job of describing Earth’s atmosphere and its history, explaining how our atmosphere developed in three stages over a period of 4.5 billion years. The third stage (and only breathable version) being when, “… oxygen eventually accumulated until the atmospheric composition changed enough to…