What if carbon dioxide didn’t cause global warming but it was the other way around?  What a fine kettle of carp that would be.  But that’s how the world has worked, to judge by one of the trusted recorders that led to our present panic-stricken state.

The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved [since the late 90s]. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 — it runs the opposite way!

Oops.  This is part of a most interesting, concise debunking by mathematician David Evans, a computer and electrical engineer, in his “I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train.”

This [late 90s] evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.

“Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.”

The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.

And thereby hangs a tale.  Follow the politics, follow the money.