But, but , but...the science is settled!

"There's a strong desire to push back the date of the oldest ice core record, to better understand what drives natural climate changes," said Laura Kehrl, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences and corresponding author of the recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters"

"A primary reason to seek such old ice is to understand one of the major puzzles of climate system history," said second author Howard Conway, a UW research professor of Earth and space sciences and UW's principal investigator of the project. The puzzle, he explained, is why Earth switched about 1 million years ago from having ice age cycles about every 41,000 years to every 100,000 years. Marine climate records show this switch occurred but they do not resolve details in the atmospheric composition 1 million years ago that might explain the cause."