Global Warming

I just read an article covering some of the anti-Kyoto protocol scientists out there. Thier leader seems to be this guy called Tim Patterson who claims that "over [the past 135 million years], the geologic record shows essentially no correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature." He instead believes that it's "galactic cosmic ray intensity [which] correlates quite well with the Earth's temperature variations." (Veizer and Shaviv)

While the comsic ray correlation might be real (I haven't read the paper), I doubt it's mutally exclusive with a carbon dioxide correlation. Most importantly though, I'm having serious trouble corroborating Tim Patterson's belief that global temperature and carbon dioxide levels have not been correlated over the last 135 million years with this data from NOAA:



For the past 650 thousand years, that seems like a pretty strong correlation to me, but I'm no climatologist. I'd like to see the carbon dioxide data for the same time frame Tim Patterson discusses. I just read the wikipedia article.

Ah, here we go, here's someone who has critiqued the Veizer study far better than I could.