The ANDRILL discovery. 400 parts per million.

I've been watching the ANDRILL project, a multi-national collaborative effort to to recover stratigraphic records from the Antarctic.

It is a complex process but reduced to simple terms, the chief objective is to drill back in time to recover a history of paleoenvironmental changes that will guide our understanding of how fast, how large, and how frequent were glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctica region.

And they have a significant finding published on the cover of peer-reviewed Nature. (Membership required to read the complete paper.) From the Chicago Tribune: (Emphasis mine)

[R]esearchers found that during the Pliocene epoch 3 to 5 million years ago--a time when conditions in Antarctica are similar to today's--the ice in Antarctica collapsed and melted on a regular basis, raising world sea levels.

Polar ice began melting on a massive scale when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were up to around 400 parts per million in the Pliocene, said Northern Illinois University geologist Ross Powell, one of the chief ANDRILL scientists. "Today and we are now at 386 parts per million and rising," he said, and it grows by one part per million every year, thanks to carbon dioxide that human activity is putting into the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the Trib led the article with a grossly misinterpreted line suggesting that the earth was thousands of years away from a meltdown similar to what has been discovered from the Pliocene events evidenced in the core. That isn't what the scientists involved said.

Two climate modelers, David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University and Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, say the ANDRILL data suggest it probably would take 1,000 or more years from the beginning of a warm-up until the ice sheet would melt away.

Given the Milankovitch Cycle the earth will warm naturally and the Antarctic Ice shelves will eventually shrink anyway. That could be predicted.

"If something is an external cycle," Scherer said. "It should be predictable. But it is much more complicated than that, and we seem to be throwing the pattern off balance now. It used to be that carbon dioxide rises were driven by the cycle. Now atmospheric carbon dioxide is driving the system."

Now, I'll make a prediction of my own.

The Rex Murphys and Michael Steeles of this world who, along with misappropriating the word "skeptic", don't have even a high-school level of appreciation for basic physics, (and in Steele's case, a mind devoid of any significant knowledge of history), will cherry-pick this report to feed their constituencies, ignoring the actual thrust of the published findings.