Ice cores are interesting. I've given that a bit of thought and what I can't get past is the possibility that the cores show stored CO2 but not CO2 in the air

Ice cores are interesting. I've given that a bit of thought and what I can't get past is the possibility that the cores show stored CO2 but not CO2 in the air at the time. This was also brought up in a couple PBS space time episodes and a documentary I can't recall the name of. Basically the storage of CO2 is not always related to the CO2 in the atmosphere and there are so many contributing and confounding factors that it is really hard to correlate with certainty. It is entirely possible that there have been brief periods (sub 1k years) that had large spikes of C02 that are not represented by the ice core and sea floor samples. I am not suggesting that core samples are invalid, rather that we may be missing some variables. I am certainly no expert on this topic.