This is the history of that, but today, we see CO2 leading temperature.
CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean?
The combined effect of these orbital cycles cause long term changes in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth at different seasons, particularly at high latitudes. For example, around 18,000 years ago, there was an increase in the amount of sunlight hitting the Southern Hemisphere during the southern spring. This lead to retreating Antarctic sea ice and melting glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere.(Shemesh 2002). The ice loss had a positive feedback effect with less ice reflecting sunlight back into space (decreased albedo). This enhanced the warming.
As the Southern Ocean warms, the solubility of CO2 in water falls (Martin 2005). This causes the oceans to give up more CO2, emitting it into the atmosphere. The exact mechanism of how the deep ocean gives up its CO2 is not fully understood but believed to be related to vertical ocean mixing (Toggweiler 1999). The process takes around 800 to 1000 years, so CO2 levels are observed to rise around 1000 years after the initial warming (Monnin 2001, Mudelsee 2001).
The outgassing of CO2 from the ocean has several effects. The increased CO2 in the atmosphere amplifies the original warming. The relatively weak forcing from Milankovitch cycles is insufficient to cause the dramatic temperature change taking our climate out of an ice age (this period is called a deglaciation). However, the amplifying effect of CO2 is consistent with the observed warming.
I used to think that this topic was worth debating, until I realized that it was actually religion...i.e. the lay minister above.
But, for any that aren't acolytes,
a.
new findings, suggest that changes in the output of the sun have caused most recent climate change. By comparison, variations in carbon dioxide, the gas most targeted by national climate change campaigns, have shown poor correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales. ICSC Chair Professor Tim Patterson, a leading paleoclimatolgist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada
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b. Global warming theorists believe that rising CO2 levels drive up the atmospheric temperature. But the rate and amount of warming at the beginning of the 20th century was greater than now, despite lower CO2 emissions, or why Greenland has cooled since the 1940s, or why the Arctic was warmer in the 1920s and 1930s than now. (Ian Plimer, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, The Missing Science, p. 438