Please note a few things. First the SciAm article you link is by no means definitive, but may prove to be useful, which remains to be seen. It is not a scientific paper, but a descriptive article. Second, you are totally off base regarding age of data. It is not about how far back the data goes, but what it tells us about the effects of CO2 on temperature, or vice versa, so we can predict future climate. Third, even this article shows that temp change precedes CO2 increases, but by 200 years instead of 800. But all warming models assume the opposite, that CO2 increase precedes temp increase! Thus the push to limit CO2. But if temp is increasing first by other means, causing CO2 release naturally, then what course of action will halt it? This is one reason the models have failed to predict temps over the last two decades, or explain temp increases in the first half of the last century when human CO2 production was a tiny fraction compared to now.