Ancient Antarctic ice holds the proof that human activity is causing global warming.
Data gleaned from the ice also show that dramatic climate change can happen in as little as 50 years, according to a leading scientist.
Antarctic specialist, Dr Julian Paren, yesterday delivered an intriguing Science Today lecture describing research carried out in the world's deep freezer. Retired after 25 years in the British Antarctic Survey and currently lecturing at Cambridge and the Open University, he revealed how ice cores from the South Pole and Greenland provide a detailed picture of world climate dating back 400,000 years.
Modern meteorological records provide little more than a 150-year view, making it impossible to draw firm conclusions from recent global temperature rises, he said. He and colleagues developed ways to read the ice cores, however, resulting in data that showed human activity was driving climate change.
"The only way you can account for the climate change in train from the 1950s is greenhouse gases," he said. Chief amongst these was the rapid increase in carbon dioxide output from human activity. "That is the only way that data seen in the last 1,000 years can be understood."
Dr Paren's visit to Dublin was organised jointly by The Irish Times and the RDS, with special assistance from Sustainable Energy Ireland. The Science Today lectures are an effort by the two companies to promote a better public understanding of science.
"Antarctica is the ultimate icy continent," Dr Paren said, buried as it is under 30 million years of snowfalls. This has compacted over time into an ice cover-up to 5,000 metres thick in places. Cataclysmic climate change delivering Ice Age conditions can occur very quickly, sometimes in as little as 50 years.