Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems, peer-reviewed paper says
According to a peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in May 2024, “Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems.”
The authors, Andy May and Marcel Crok, argue that the sceptical position on dangerous man-made climate change is supported by a comprehensive literature review.
In other words, those who are disparagingly labelled by the establishment as “climate change deniers” have credible evidence on their side.
Writing an overview of their paper, May and Crok said:
The case that human greenhouse gas emissions (mainly carbon dioxide) control the climate as claimed in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) or that the resulting climate change is dangerous, is very weak.
How do we show that assertion is weak? There are many options. The AR6 WGI [Working Group I] and WGII reports define climate change as the global warming since 1750 or 1850.
The Little Ice Age, a phrase rarely used in AR6, extends from about 1300 to 1850. It was a very cold and miserable time for humanity, with a lot of well-documented extreme weather in the historical record from all over the Northern Hemisphere. It was also a time of frequent famines and pandemics. We show that arguably today’s climate is better than then, not worse.
The main argument made in May and Crok’s paper is that the evidence presented by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) to support the claim that human-caused climate change is dangerous is not convincing.
Firstly, the IPCC claims that human greenhouse gas emissions are the “main driver” of warming since 1979, but this is disputed.
Natural climate oscillations like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (“AMO”) can explain a significant portion of the 20th century warming.
The AMO is a cyclic phenomenon of sea surface temperature (“SST”) anomalies in the North Atlantic Ocean. It has a significant impact on global weather patterns. The theoretical measure of the variability of the SST of the North Atlantic Ocean is called the AMO index.
The AMO index oscillates between positive and negative phases. During the positive phase, the North Atlantic Ocean experiences warm SSTs, while during the negative phase, SSTs are cooler. The AMO index is associated with shifts in hurricane activity, rainfall patterns and intensity, as well as changes in fish populations.
In their paper, May and Crok “detrend” the AMO index, i.e. plot the raw data rather than show the data as a trend line, and compare it to the UK Met Office’s HadCRUT4 detrended records (see below).
The paper noted:
There are several key features displayed in Figure 2. First, we observe that the secular trend in the AMO of 0.3°C is about 30% of the warming observed globally in the 20th century.
Next we observe that the warming period from 1980 to 2005 coincides with an upturn in the AMO index. The AMO index has been traced to 1567AD, thus it is a natural oscillation.
These observations cast some doubt on the AR6 claim that all 20th century warming is due to human influence and there is no net natural impact. The second feature we will point out in Figure 2 is that the full AMO climate cycle is 60-70 years, and it matches the estimated global temperature changes in the 20th century.
Secondly, the IPCC’s evidence for human influence, such as the “atmospheric fingerprint,” is disputed and the statistical methods used are questioned. Climate models also have issues, overestimating tropical tropospheric warming compared to observations.
The paper raises questions about the statistical methodology used by the IPCC to justify the “anthropogenic fingerprint” and argues that the statistical underpinnings of the anthropogenic fingerprint are seriously flawed.
The paper also discusses discrepancies between climate models and observations, particularly in the tropical troposphere. It points out that most Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (“CMIP”) and IPCC climate models overestimate warming in the tropical middle troposphere by a statistically significant amount.
May and Crok argue that there is no clear evidence of unusual or dangerous weather or climate events that can be definitively attributed to human-caused climate change.
It cites trends in extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts, which are either flat or declining, as well as declining economic losses from weather disasters as a fraction of GDP. This lack of clear evidence challenges the IPCC’s conclusions about the direct impact of human activities on extreme weather events.
In conclusion, the authors note that climate change, whether natural or human-caused, has both benefits and costs, but the IPCC only examines the downside risks and ignores the potential benefits, such as increased plant growth from higher CO2 levels.
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The Atmospheric Chicken-or-Egg Question
by David Legates
The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, is an age-old question. It is a metaphor to describe situations where it isn’t clear which is the cause and which is the effect when two interrelated events are considered.
Aristotle first pondered the question in the fourth century B.C. and concluded it was an infinite sequence with no real answer. But Plutarch wrote in the first century A.D. that this question was as important as whether the world had a beginning.
But in the world of climate science, we often ask, “which comes first, the change in air temperature, or a change in greenhouse gas concentrations?”
Since the dawn of climate change alarmism, we have been told that carbon dioxide is the driver of climate change; for scientists in this camp, it is the climate control knob. Increase carbon dioxide, and consequently, air temperature increases. Decrease the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide—and methane and nitrous oxide—global warming will be abated. For the climate alarmists, it’s just that simple.
Or is it? Many climatologists have noted that carbon dioxide is not the climate change driver alarmists purport it to be. A recent article in the Epoch Times suggests that a fixation on carbon dioxide ignores the real drivers of air temperature, which include the Sun and natural variability. But the idea that carbon dioxide is somehow the climate change control knob is an integral part of the climate alarmist narrative.
And despite evidence to the contrary, this narrative always must be pushed. For example, in 2007, Laurie David and Cambria Gordon published a book entitled The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming. It was billed as “from the producer of [Al Gore’s] An Inconvenient Truth comes a powerful, kid-friendly, and engaging book that will get kids get interested in the environment!”
On page 18, a flap instructs children to “lift to see how well carbon dioxide and temperature go together.” The graph that becomes exposed shows that as time passes over the last 650,000 years, “the more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed…the less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell…by connecting rising carbon dioxide to rising temperature[,] scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution and global warming.”
The figure hidden by the flap is from an article in Science by Fischer and colleagues in 1999. The problem is that the axes are mislabeled in The Down-to-Earth Guide—the air temperature axis is labelled “Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere” while the carbon dioxide axis is labelled “climate temperature”. As the article in Science noted, “High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased…six hundred plus-or-minus four hundred years after the warming of the last three deglaciations.” As Fischer and colleagues noted, air temperature leads; carbon dioxide follows.
After this mislabeling of axes was disclosed, Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University weighed in on the issue. He wrote,
“I have reviewed the figure on page 18 of The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming. It appears that the labeling of the axes has been reversed. As a result, the curve labeled ‘carbon dioxide concentration’ should be labeled ‘climate temperature’, and vice versa. However, the description of the figure in the accompanying text is accurate, and it fairly represents the current state of scientific knowledge, in terms that would be comprehensible to children 8-years of age or older.”
Remember that the description of the figure is that “the more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed…the less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell…by connecting rising carbon dioxide to rising temperature[,] scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution and global warming.” This is patently false and children aged 8 and older would easily be able to understand that.
In the intervening quarter-of-a-decade since Fischer and colleagues’ article in Science, research has confirmed that carbon dioxide follows and does not lead atmospheric air temperature. A subsequent article in Science showed that carbon dioxide concentrations followed air temperature by a period of less than a thousand years while another article in Science concluded that “the carbon dioxide increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years”. Both are consistent with the original estimates by Fischer and colleagues.
In 2007, a review paper concluded that little evidence exists that greenhouse gases “have accounted for even as much as half of the reconstructed glacial-interglacial temperature changes.” Yet another paper in Science that year wrote that the East Antarctica ice core “shows no indication that greenhouse gases have played a key role in such a coupling [with air temperature].”
A more recent study concluded that “changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration did not cause temperature change in the ancient climate”. In 2017, geochemist Euan Mearns commented that “It is quite clear from the data that carbon dioxide follows temperature with highly variable time lags depending on whether the climate is warming or cooling” and “carbon dioxide in the past played a negligible role [in determining temperature] … it simply responded to bio-geochemical processes caused by changing temperature and ice cover.”
Mearns’ comment is especially important when understanding why carbon dioxide responds to changes in air temperature. During colder periods, oceans absorb more carbon dioxide due to the high solubility of carbon dioxide in cold ocean water at higher latitudes where sinking cold sea-water sequesters it in the deep ocean. When the planet warms, oceans outgas this absorbed carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Although plants grow faster in a warmer and more carbon-dioxide-rich environment, and thereby use more carbon dioxide, the ocean reservoir is about sixty-five times larger than that of the biosphere.
But what about changes in carbon dioxide on shorter time scales? If changes in global air temperature drives changes in carbon dioxide on the century-to-millennial scale, could a change in carbon dioxide on a decadal-to-century scale affect global air temperatures?
To answer this question, I would encourage you to read my chapter, Chapter 8, in Cal Beisner’s and my new book, Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism by Regnery Publishing. In that chapter, I outline that the first two-hundred-eighty parts per million of carbon dioxide, as well as all other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, accounts for the absorption of about ninety percent of the thermal infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface. A doubling of carbon dioxide with no increase in the other greenhouse gases could at most absorb only an additional ten percent or only one-nineth of the amount currently absorbed by atmospheric gases. But through numerical simulations, a doubling of carbon dioxide will cause the absorption of only about one-ninetieth of the amount absorbed by the first two-hundred-eighty parts per million. That amounts to less than about one degree Celsius.
For more than a decade now, I and others have been arguing that carbon dioxide is not a magic climate change control knob. Rather than being a pollutant in the planetary system, carbon dioxide is food for plants—simply put, they grow better and faster under enhanced carbon dioxide concentrations. Thriving vegetation is good news for animal life and humans as well. We must stop the demonization of carbon dioxide and embrace its effects as the whole biosphere benefits from the additional carbon dioxide.
https://cornwallalliance.org/the-atmospheric-chicken-or-egg-question/
*********************************************************Net Zero Is a Zero
Our government, and a number of other Western governments, are committed to a goal of “net zero.” That is, our countries will add nothing further to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Any emissions of CO2 (e.g., breathing) will be balanced by absorption of CO2 by, e.g., plants. Various dates are specified in these aspirational statements, none of them realistic. And of course, the world’s main sources of atmospheric CO2 (China and India now account for most of the world’s CO2 emissions) have no intention of cutting their CO2 emissions, let alone cutting them to net zero.
But suppose we did it. Suppose we spent countless trillions, destroyed our electric grid and reduced our standard of living to a pre-industrial level. How much would an American “net zero” affect global temperatures?
This paper by three of the world’s leading scientists, Richard Lindzen, William Happer and W. A. van Wijngaarden, of MIT, Princeton and York University respectively, undertakes a mathematical calculation to answer that question:
Using feedback-free estimates of the warming by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and observed rates of increase, we estimate that if the United States (U.S.) eliminated net CO2 emissions by the year 2050, this would avert a warming of 0.0084 ◦C (0.015 ◦F), which is below our ability to accurately measure. If the entire world forced net zero CO2 emissions by the year 2050, a warming of only 0.070 ◦C (0.13 ◦F) would be averted. If one assumes that the warming is a factor of 4 larger because of positive feedbacks, as asserted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the warming averted by a net zero U.S. policy would still be very small, 0.034 ◦C (0.061 ◦F). For worldwide net zero emissions by 2050 and the 4-times larger IPCC climate sensitivity, the averted warming would be 0.28 ◦C (0.50 ◦F).
See the link for the mathematics. One important factor is that CO2 is relatively saturated in the atmosphere. Each incremental addition of CO2 adds less and less warming:
The proportionality of the temperature increment ∆T to the logarithm of the concentration ratio C/C0 means that the warming from increased CO2 concentrations C is “saturated.” That is, each increment dC of CO2 concentration causes less warming than the previous equal increment. Greenhouse warming from CO2 is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
Dr. Happer has commented on the paper:
“This is something anybody with a calculator can figure out,” said [Dr. Happer], who may be best known for his contribution to a laser-based technology for destroying incoming ballistic missiles as part of the so-called Star Wars program of the 1980s.
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Noting that others using different approaches have come to conclusions similar to the paper’s, Dr. Happer said he and his coauthors wanted to show that the controversial subject of climate change need not be complicated.
“More members of the public should understand that they are being victimized by false information disseminated by those whose interests have more to do with money and power than with environmental concerns,” he said. “Answers found in relatively simple mathematics strongly suggest this to be the case.”
I think that is right. “Green” forces are trying to engineer the biggest transfer of wealth since the Industrial Revolution, shifting trillions of dollars out of some industries (and out of the pockets of taxpayers and ratepayers) and into their favored industries. There is nothing noble about this effort. On the contrary, it is a contemptible attempt to stop the progress of history and condemn billions to permanent poverty. It also will have no perceptible effect on the Earth’s climate, as real scientists–not the “climate scientists” who so often have their fingers in the till–have been arguing for a long time.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/08/net-zero-is-a-zero.php
****************************************************So About Those Oceans That Were Just About to Boil Away...
Stephen Green
It seems like only last year [it was only last year, Steve —Editor] that we were all going to die because the oceans were literally figuratively boiling away. I'm not sure whether it was the massive amounts of steam that were supposed to kill us or the resulting Sharknado. I just know that whatever the oceans are doing, it's a VERY BAD THING, even though the Great Barrier Reef seems to love it. Seriously, the GBR is in better shape than it's been in for years.
But now, "surface ocean temperatures are plunging rapidly around the world with scientists reported to be puzzled at the speed of the recent decline, according to Chris Morrison at The Daily Sceptic this week. "Less puzzlement was to be found when the oceans were ‘boiling’ during the last two years," Morrison dryly noted.
When things are getting worse, climate scientists enjoy the certainty of knowing exactly what's going on and why. When the trend lines improve, it's a much less newsworthy mystery.
"Until recently, the surface sea temperature (SST) graph below showing measurements up the Arctic and down to Antarctica was rarely out of the public prints... This year the temperature shown by the black line flatlined until April compared with the substantial rise in orange for 2023. It then fell more sharply than last year and is now 0.2°C lower."
You can play with the interactive chart here if you like.
For whatever reason, ocean temps are up a full degree Celsius or so since the mid-'80s but 2024 is showing cooling like we've never seen before. Then again, if our data only goes back to the mid-'80s, how much do we really know about oceans that are billions of years old, and surround continents that slowly drift around?
As I wrote way back in 2014, before we start panicking, a few questions need to be answered in this order:
Is whatever is going on detrimental or beneficial to the human habitat?
Do we understand the how and the why?
Do we have the technical means and know-how to make things better instead of worse?
We're still iffy on big parts of the first question, but we have a lot of people in Washington and other places telling us that we need to tax and regulate as though we have perfect answers to all three.
Let's go back to the Great Barrier Reef for a moment. In 2016 the GBR was pronounced dead at the ripe old age of 25 million, but by 2022 parts of it showed the highest coral cover in 36 years. Last year the panicmongers had to admit that "the truth is complex." This would be a great time for climate scientists to admit that on the Rumsfeld Epistemological Scale when it comes to how our planet works, we still have a great many unknown unknowns. But don't hold your breath.
The only certain thing for sure, as Lyle Lovett once sang, is that whatever is going on, it's the worst thing ever and it's because of something you did, comrade.
You can also be sure that the freezing oceans will be what kills us next.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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