Following Milankovitch's theory the incoming insolation or summer energy at 65°N is typically analysed to predict the waxing or waning of land ice. We here use a model-based deconvolution of the LR04 benthic-d18O stack into land ice distribution (de Boer et al., 2014, Köhler et al., 2015) to verify if the latitudinal focal point of land ice dynamics has changed over the last 2 Myr or whether this choice of 65°N in orbital data is indeed well justified. We find that the 5°-latitudinal band which contributes most to land ice albedo radiative forcing (ΔR_[LI]) is 70-75°N between 2.0-1.5 Myr, which is then until 1.0 Myr gradually substituted by 65-70°N. During the last 1 Myr both 60-65°N and 65-70°N dominate ΔR_[LI] and contribute approximately the same amount, while the relative importance of 70-75°N is shrinking. Our analyses illustrates that the choice of 65°N seems for the last 1 Myr to be well justified, while for earlier parts of the last 2 Myr the dominant land ice changes seems to happen up to 10° further to the north. Focusing on the last 800 kyr (the time for which precise data on atmospheric CO2 concentration exists) we furthermore find that the multi-millennial land ice growth and proxy-based reconstruction of global cooling (= the glaciation) appear synchronously to each other and to decreasing obliquity, but diverge from CO2. This suggests that the global cooling associated with Earth's way into an ice age as deduced in the reconstructions has to be mainly caused by the land ice albedo feedback, and is not dominated by the CO2 greenhouse forcing. One way of perceiving this CO2-glaciation divergence in reconstructions is that the reduced incoming insolation at high latitudes causes land ice growth and cooling, while there is a coexisting process that keeps CO2 at a relatively constant level. Solid Earth modeling experiments have indicated that falling sea level might lead to enhanced magma and CO2 production at mid-ocean ridges. Hasenclever et al. (2017) suggested that the combination of marine volcanism at mid-ocean ridges and at hot spot island volcanoes might react to decreasing sea level and be a potential cause for this CO2-glaciation divergence. This CO2-glaciation divergence needs to be considered, when using paleo data to quantify paleoclimate sensitivity: periods with diverging CO2 and global temperature change should be filtered out when approximating the relationship between global temperature rise and CO2 concentrations (Köhler et al., 2018). References: de Boer et al. (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3999. Köhler et al. (2015). https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-1801-2015. Hasenclever et al. (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15867. Köhler et al. (2018). https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL077717.