Science Quote by Piers Corbyn

A neat bit of rhetorical aikido: take a real, messy paleoclimate record and flip it into a clean, contrarian slogan. Corbyn’s line is engineered to sound like a panoramic, commonsense correction to climate science, not a partisan argument. “4,000 years” is doing heavy lifting here: it’s long enough to feel grand and authoritative, short enough to dodge the deeper ice-core timescales where CO2 and temperature often travel together, and conveniently placed within the Holocene’s comparatively stable climate regime.

The phrase “moving against each other” is the hook. It trades on a familiar statistical sleight-of-hand: correlation becomes causation, and selective correlation becomes a verdict on mechanism. Yes, there are periods when temperature and CO2 don’t move in lockstep, especially when other drivers dominate (orbital changes, volcanic aerosols, solar variability, ocean circulation). But that doesn’t “disprove” greenhouse physics; it illustrates a system with multiple forcings and lags. In paleoclimate, CO2 can follow temperature as a feedback and still amplify warming. That nuance is precisely what the quote edits out.

Intent-wise, it’s a framing device aimed at undermining the intuitive story the public has absorbed: more CO2 equals more heat. The subtext is epistemic distrust: climate scientists are either missing something obvious or ignoring it. Context matters: this kind of line thrives in media environments that reward the appearance of a single, devastating counterexample. It’s not a scientific claim as much as a viral one: compact, confident, and allergic to caveats.