Carbon dioxide caused global warming at Ice Age's end, pioneering simulation shows
Thursday, April 5, 2012 - 08:30
in Earth & Climate
(PhysOrg.com) -- Climate science has an equivalent to the "what came first—the chicken or the egg?" question: What came first, greenhouse gases or global warming? A multi-institutional team led by researchers at Harvard, Oregon State University, and the University of Wisconsin used a global dataset of paleoclimate records and the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to find the answer (spoiler alert: carbon dioxide drives warming). The results, published in the April 5 issue of Nature, analyze 15,000 years of climate history. Scientists hope amassing knowledge of the causes of natural global climate change will aid understanding of human-caused climate change.