Climate Science | Science Matters

Can You Trust an AI/ML Model to Forecast?

The latest fashion in model building is adding AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) technology to numerical models for weather forecasting. No doubt soon there will be climate models also claiming improved capability by doing this. A meteorological example is called Aardvark Weather and a summary is provided at Tallbloke’s Talkshop Scientists say fully AI-driven weather prediction system delivers accurate forecasts faster with less computing power.

Like all inventions there are weaknesses along with the claimed benefits. Here’s a short list of the things that can go wrong with these new gadgets. The concerns below are listed along with some others in a paper Understanding the Weaknesses of Machine Learning: Challenges and Limitations by Oyo Jude. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Introduction

Machine learning (ML) has become a cornerstone of modern technological advancements, driving innovations in areas such as healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems. Despite its transformative potential, ML is not without its flaws. Understanding these weaknesses is crucial for developing more robust and reliable systems. This article delves into the various challenges and limitations faced by ML technologies, providing insights into areas where improvements are needed

Data Quality and Bias

Data Dependency

Machine learning models are highly dependent on the quality and quantity of data used for training. The performance of an ML model is only as good as the data it is trained on. Common issues related to data quality include:

Incomplete Data: Missing or incomplete data can lead to inaccurate models and predictions. Incomplete datasets may not represent the full spectrum of possible inputs, leading to biased or skewed outcomes.
Noisy Data: Noise in data refers to irrelevant or random information that can obscure the underlying patterns the model is supposed to learn. Noisy data can reduce the accuracy of ML models and complicate the learning process.

Data Bias

Bias in data can significantly impact the fairness and accuracy of ML systems. Key forms of data bias include:

Selection Bias: Occurs when the data collected is not representative of the target population. For example, if a model is trained on data from a specific demographic group, it may not perform well for individuals outside that group.
Label Bias: Arises when the labels or categories used in supervised learning are subjective or inconsistent. Label bias can skew the model’s understanding and lead to erroneous predictions.

Model Interpretability and Transparency

Complexity of Models

Many advanced ML models, such as deep neural networks, are often described as “black boxes” due to their complexity. The lack of transparency in these models presents several challenges:

Understanding Model Decisions: It can be difficult to understand how a model arrived at a specific decision or prediction, making it challenging to diagnose errors or biases in the system.
Trust and Accountability: The inability to interpret model decisions can undermine trust in ML systems, particularly in high-stakes applications such as healthcare or criminal justice. Ensuring accountability and fairness becomes challenging when the decision-making process is opaque.
Explainability: Efforts to improve model interpretability focus on developing techniques and tools to make complex models more understandable. Techniques such as feature importance analysis, surrogate models, and visualization tools aim to provide insights into model behavior and decisions. However, achieving a balance between model performance and interpretability remains an ongoing challenge.

Generalization and Overfitting

Overfitting

Overfitting occurs when a model learns not only the underlying patterns in the training data but also the noise, resulting in poor performance on new, unseen data. This issue can be particularly problematic with complex models and limited data. Strategies to mitigate overfitting include:

Cross-Validation: Using techniques like k-fold cross-validation helps assess model performance on different subsets of the data, reducing the risk of overfitting.
Regularization: Regularization methods, such as L1 and L2 regularization, add penalties to the model’s complexity to prevent it from fitting noise in the training data.

Generalization

Generalization refers to a model’s ability to perform well on unseen data that was not part of the training set. Achieving good generalization is crucial for the practical application of ML models. Challenges related to generalization include:

Domain Shift: When the distribution of the data changes over time or across different domains, a model trained on one dataset may not generalize well to new data. Addressing domain shift requires continuous monitoring and updating of models.
Data Scarcity: In scenarios where limited data is available, models may struggle to generalize effectively. Techniques such as data augmentation and transfer learning can help address data scarcity issues.

Comment:

Many similar issues have been raised against climate models, undermining claims their outputs are valid projections of future climate states. For example, the issue of detailed and reliable data persists. It appears that even the AI/ML weather forecasting inventions are dependent on ERA5, which has a record of only ~40 years to use for training purposes. I’m suspending belief in these things for now–new improved black boxes sound too much like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Disney’s portrayal of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in over his head.

February 2025 Oceans Keep Cool

Posted on March 20 by Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.

HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.

Note: When doing monthly updates of HadSST4, it’s typical that values for the previous month or two will appear with slight adjustments. However this time there were scores of changed values scattered throughout the set and all values since 1979. Strangely, the new values were in text format, so I needed to convert them to values in the spreadsheets. Comparing the new and old datasets showed that the changes were mostly in the third decimal, and mostly negative (i.e. the adjusted value lower than the previous one.) Overall, the global average anomaly since 1980 was lower by 0.01C. The charts and analysis below is produced from the current data.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST3 starting in 2015 through February 2025. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024.

Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. A small warming was driven by NH summer peaks in 2021-22, but offset by cooling in SH and the tropics, By January 2023 the global anomaly was again below the mean.

Then in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 10 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 4 months from its peak in August. It’s now about 0.1C higher than the average for this period. Note that the Tropical anomaly has cooled from 1.28C in 2024/01 to 0.72C as of 2025/2.

Comment:

The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures. It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around. Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:

El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years. Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on. Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds. As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century It iswell understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.

Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world. We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example. So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.

It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well. One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.

A longer view of SSTs

The graph below is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July.

To enlarge image, open in new tab.

The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.

The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.

SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.

Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.

The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.

Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year. Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, following months cooled in all regions, and the Tropics continued cooling in April, May and June along with SH dropping. After July and August NH warming again pulled the global anomaly higher, September through January 2025 resumed cooling in all regions, with a slight upward bump in February 2025.

What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.

Contemporary AMO Observations

Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future. So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has current data. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. “ERSST5 AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.” So the values represent sst anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.

The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed. As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its variability, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin. Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Then in 2023 the peak was holding at 1.4C before declining. An annual chart below is informative:

Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an extraordinary peak in July. August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C.

Then in 2024 the AMO anomaly started higher than any previous year, then leveled off for two months declining slightly into April. Remarkably, May showed an upward leap putting this on a higher track than 2023, and rising slightly higher in June. In July, August and September 2024 the anomaly declined, and despite a small rise in October, ended close to where it began. Now 2025 is starting much lower than the previous year.

The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.

The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.17. The orange line the average 1980-2024, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-2024, value 0.67. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.

Curiosity: Solar Coincidence?

The news about our current solar cycle 25 is that the solar activity is hitting peak numbers now and higher than expected 1-2 years in the future. As livescience put it: Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun’s chaotic peak be? Some charts from spaceweatherlive look familar to these sea surface temperature charts.

Summary

The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.

HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.

In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.

Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

02/2025 Update–Temperature Changes, CO2 Follows

Posted on March 17 by Ron Clutz

Previously I have demonstrated that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels follow changes in Global Mean Temperatures (GMT) as shown by satellite measurements from University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). That background post is reprinted later below.

My curiosity was piqued by the remarkable GMT spike starting in January 2023 and rising to a peak in April 2024, and then declining afterward. I also became aware that UAH has recalibrated their dataset due to a satellite drift that can no longer be corrected. The values since 2020 have shifted slightly in version 6.1, as shown in my recent report Oceans Rapidly Cooling UAH January 2025.

In this post, I test the premise that temperature changes are predictive of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The chart above shows the two monthly datasets: CO2 levels in blue reported at Mauna Loa, and Global temperature anomalies in purple reported by UAHv6.1, both through February 2025. Would such a sharp increase in temperature be reflected in rising CO2 levels, according to the successful mathematical forecasting model? Would CO2 levels decline as temperatures dropped following the peak?

The answer is yes: that temperature spike resulted
in a corresponding CO2 spike as expected.
And lower CO2 levels followed the temperature decline.

Above are UAH temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.

Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example February 2025 minus February 2024). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month. Note the recent CO2 upward spike and drop following the temperature spike and drop.

The final proof that CO2 follows temperature due to stimulation of natural CO2 reservoirs is demonstrated by the ability to calculate CO2 levels since 1979 with a simple mathematical formula:

For each subsequent year, the CO2 level for each month was generated

CO2 _{this month this year} = a + b × Temp _{this month this year} + CO2 _{this month last year}

The values for a and b are constants applied to all monthly temps, and are chosen to scale the forecasted CO2 level for comparison with the observed value. Here is the result of those calculations.

In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9987 out of 1.0000. This mathematical generation of CO2 atmospheric levels is only possible if they are driven by temperature-dependent natural sources, and not by human emissions which are small in comparison, rise steadily and monotonically. For a more detailed look at the recent fluxes, here are the results since 2015, an ENSO neutral year.

For this recent period, the calculated CO2 values match the annual lows, while some annual generated values of CO2 are slightly higher or lower than observed at other months of the year. Still the correlation for this period is 0.9932.

Key Point

Changes in CO2 follow changes in global temperatures on all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia. Since CO2 is the lagging variable, it cannot logically be the cause of temperature, the leading variable. It is folly to imagine that by reducing human emissions of CO2, we can change global temperatures, which are obviously driven by other factors.

Background Post Temperature Changes Cause CO2 Changes, Not the Reverse

This post is about proving that CO2 changes in response to temperature changes, not the other way around, as is often claimed. In order to do that we need two datasets: one for measurements of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over time and one for estimates of Global Mean Temperature changes over time.

Climate science is unsettling because past data are not fixed, but change later on. I ran into this previously and now again in 2021 and 2022 when I set out to update an analysis done in 2014 by Jeremy Shiers (discussed in a previous post reprinted at the end). Jeremy provided a spreadsheet in his essay Murray Salby Showed CO2 Follows Temperature Now You Can Too posted in January 2014. I downloaded his spreadsheet intending to bring the analysis up to the present to see if the results hold up. The two sources of data were:

Temperature anomalies from RSS here: http://www.remss.com/missions/amsu

CO2 monthly levels from NOAA (Mauna Loa): https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/data.html

Changes in CO2 (ΔCO2)

Uploading the CO2 dataset showed that many numbers had changed (why?).

The blue line shows annual observed differences in monthly values year over year, e.g. June 2020 minus June 2019 etc. The first 12 months (1979) provide the observed starting values from which differentials are calculated. The orange line shows those CO2 values changed slightly in the 2020 dataset vs. the 2014 dataset, on average +0.035 ppm. But there is no pattern or trend added, and deviations vary randomly between + and -. So last year I took the 2020 dataset to replace the older one for updating the analysis.

Now I find the NOAA dataset starting in 2021 has almost completely new values due to a method shift in February 2021, requiring a recalibration of all previous measurements. The new picture of ΔCO2 is graphed below.

The method shift is reported at a NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory webpage, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) WMO Scale, with a justification for the difference between X2007 results and the new results from X2019 now in force. The orange line shows that the shift has resulted in higher values, especially early on and a general slightly increasing trend over time. However, these are small variations at the decimal level on values 340 and above. Further, the graph shows that yearly differentials month by month are virtually the same as before. Thus I redid the analysis with the new values.

Global Temperature Anomalies (ΔTemp)

The other time series was the record of global temperature anomalies according to RSS. The current RSS dataset is not at all the same as the past.

Here we see some seriously unsettling science at work. The purple line is RSS in 2014, and the blue is RSS as of 2020. Some further increases appear in the gold 2022 rss dataset. The red line shows alterations from the old to the new. There is a slight cooling of the data in the beginning years, then the three versions mostly match until 1997, when systematic warming enters the record. From 1997/5 to 2003/12 the average anomaly increases by 0.04C. After 2004/1 to 2012/8 the average increase is 0.15C. At the end from 2012/9 to 2013/12, the average anomaly was higher by 0.21. The 2022 version added slight warming over 2020 values.

RSS continues that accelerated warming to the present, but it cannot be trusted. And who knows what the numbers will be a few years down the line? As Dr. Ole Humlum said some years ago (regarding Gistemp): “It should however be noted, that a temperature record which keeps on changing the past hardly can qualify as being correct.”

Given the above manipulations, I went instead to the other satellite dataset UAH version 6. UAH has also made a shift by changing its baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020. This resulted in systematically reducing the anomaly values, but did not alter the pattern of variation over time. For comparison, here are the two records with measurements through December 2023.

Comparing UAH temperature anomalies to NOAA CO2 changes.

Here are UAH temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.

Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. As stated above, CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example June 2022 minus June 2021). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month.

The final proof that CO2 follows temperature due to stimulation of natural CO2 reservoirs is demonstrated by the ability to calculate CO2 levels since 1979 with a simple mathematical formula:

For each subsequent year, the co2 level for each month was generated

CO2 _{this month this year} = a + b × Temp _{this month this year} + CO2 _{this month last year}

Jeremy used Python to estimate a and b, but I used his spreadsheet to guess values that place for comparison the observed and calculated CO2 levels on top of each other.

In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9986 out of 1.0000. This mathematical generation of CO2 atmospheric levels is only possible if they are driven by temperature-dependent natural sources, and not by human emissions which are small in comparison, rise steadily and monotonically.

Comment: UAH dataset reported a sharp warming spike starting mid year, with causes speculated but not proven. In any case, that surprising peak has not yet driven CO2 higher, though it might, but only if it persists despite the likely cooling already under way.

Previous Post: What Causes Rising Atmospheric CO2?

nasa_carbon_cycle_2008-1

This post is prompted by a recent exchange with those reasserting the “consensus” view attributing all additional atmospheric CO2 to humans burning fossil fuels.

The IPCC doctrine which has long been promoted goes as follows. We have a number over here for monthly fossil fuel CO2 emissions, and a number over there for monthly atmospheric CO2. We don’t have good numbers for the rest of it-oceans, soils, biosphere–though rough estimates are orders of magnitude higher, dwarfing human CO2. So we ignore nature and assume it is always a sink, explaining the difference between the two numbers we do have. Easy peasy, science settled.

What about the fact that nature continues to absorb about half of human emissions, even while FF CO2 increased by 60% over the last 2 decades? What about the fact that in 2020 FF CO2 declined significantly with no discernable impact on rising atmospheric CO2?

These and other issues are raised by Murray Salby and others who conclude that it is not that simple, and the science is not settled. And so these dissenters must be cancelled lest the narrative be weakened.

The non-IPCC paradigm is that atmospheric CO2 levels are a function of two very different fluxes. FF CO2 changes rapidly and increases steadily, while Natural CO2 changes slowly over time, and fluctuates up and down from temperature changes. The implications are that human CO2 is a simple addition, while natural CO2 comes from the integral of previous fluctuations. Jeremy Shiers has a series of posts at his blog clarifying this paradigm. See Increasing CO2 Raises Global Temperature Or Does Increasing Temperature Raise CO2 Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The following graph which shows the change in CO2 levels (rather than the levels directly) makes this much clearer.

Note the vertical scale refers to the first differential of the CO2 level not the level itself. The graph depicts that change rate in ppm per year.

There are big swings in the amount of CO2 emitted. Taking the mean as 1.6 ppmv/year (at a guess) there are +/- swings of around 1.2 nearly +/- 100%.

And, surprise surprise, the change in net emissions of CO2 is very strongly correlated with changes in global temperature.

This clearly indicates the net amount of CO2 emitted in any one year is directly linked to global mean temperature in that year.

For any given year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the sum of

all the net annual emissions of CO2
in all previous years.

For each year the net annual emission of CO2 is proportional to the annual global mean temperature.

This means the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be related to the sum of temperatures in previous years.

So CO2 levels are not directly related to the current temperature but the integral of temperature over previous years.

The following graph again shows observed levels of CO2 and global temperatures but also has calculated levels of CO2 based on sum of previous years temperatures (dotted blue line).

Summary:

The massive fluxes from natural sources dominate the flow of CO2 through the atmosphere. Human CO2 from burning fossil fuels is around 4% of the annual addition from all sources. Even if rising CO2 could cause rising temperatures (no evidence, only claims), reducing our emissions would have little impact.

Atmospheric CO2 Math

Ins: 4% human, 96% natural
Outs: 0% human, 98% natural.
Atmospheric storage difference: +2%
(so that: Ins = Outs + Atmospheric storage difference)

Balance = Atmospheric storage difference: 2%, of which,
Humans: 2% X 4% = 0.08%
Nature: 2% X 96 % = 1.92%

Ratio Natural : Human =1.92% : 0.08% = 24 : 1

Resources

For a possible explanation of natural warming and CO2 emissions see Little Ice Age Warming Recovery May be Over

Resources:

CO2 Fluxes, Sources and Sinks

Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

Fearless Physics from Dr. Salby

Minefield to Defuse EPA GHG Endangerment Finding

Posted on March 14 by Ron Clutz

When first using this image, I was noting how naive were politicians (the Brits, for example) to legislate future CO2 emissions reductions, opening themselves up to lawsuits and legal constraints on policy decisions. Now the same advice applies to the Trump administration targeting the root of the poisonous tree of climate alarmism. First the lay of the land from EPA Director Zeldin, in italics with my bolds:

Trump EPA Kicks Off Formal Reconsideration of Endangerment Finding with Agency Partners

March 12, 2025

EPA Press Office (press@epa.gov)

WASHINGTON – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency will be kicking off a formal reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding in collaboration with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other relevant agencies. EPA also intends to reconsider all of its prior regulations and actions that rely on the Endangerment Finding.

Administrator Zeldin: “After 16 years, EPA will formally reconsider the Endangerment Finding.” “The Trump Administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas. We will follow the science, the law, and common sense wherever it leads, and we will do so while advancing our commitment towards helping to deliver cleaner, healthier, and safer air, land, and water.”

White House OMB Director Russ Vought: “EPA’s regulation of the climate affects the entire national economy—jobs, wages, and family budgets. It’s long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama endangerment finding.”

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum: “The United States produces energy smarter, cleaner, and safer than anywhere else in the world. To achieve President Trump’s vision for energy dominance, we are prioritizing innovation over regulation to attain an affordable, reliable, clean, and secure energy future for all Americans.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright: “The 2009 Endangerment finding has had an enormously negative impact on the lives of the American people. For more than 15 years, the U.S. government used the finding to pursue an onslaught of costly regulations – raising prices and reducing reliability and choice on everything from vehicles to electricity and more. It’s past time the United States ensures the basis for issuing environmental regulations follows the science and betters human lives.”

Transportation Secretary Duffy: “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and the hard work of Administrator Zeldin, we are taking another important step toward ushering in a golden age of transportation. The American people voted for a government that prioritizes affordable, safe travel and lets them choose the vehicles they drive. Today we are delivering on that promise, and this will allow the DOT to accelerate its work on new vehicle fuel economy standards that will lower car prices and no longer force Americans to purchase electric vehicles they don’t want.”

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Jeff Clark: “Since 2009, I’ve consistently argued that the endangerment finding required a consideration of downstream costs imposed on both mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like factories. Under the enlightened leadership of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin, the time for fresh thought has finally arrived.”

In President Trump’s Day One Executive Order, “Unleashing American Energy,” he gave the EPA Administrator a 30-day deadline to submit recommendations on the legality and continuing applicability of the 2009 Endangerment Finding. After submitting these recommendations, EPA can now announce its intent to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding.

When EPA made the Endangerment Finding in 2009, the agency did not consider any aspect of the regulations that would flow from it. EPA’s view then was that the Finding itself did not impose any costs, and that EPA could not consider future costs when making the Finding. EPA has subsequently relied on the Endangerment Finding as part of its justification for seven vehicle regulations with an aggregate cost of more than one trillion dollars, according to figures in EPA’s own regulatory impact analyses. The Endangerment Finding has also played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks.

Congress tasked EPA under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act with regulating new motor vehicles when the Administrator determines that emissions of an air pollutant endanger public health and welfare. But the Endangerment Finding went about this task in what appears to be a flawed and unorthodox way. Contrary to popular belief, the Endangerment Finding did not directly find that carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. cars endanger public welfare. Instead, the Finding looks at a combination of emissions of six different gases—and cars don’t even emit all six. It then creatively added multiple leaps, arguing that the combined six gases contribute some mysterious amount above zero to climate change and that climate change creates some mysterious amount of endangerment above zero to public health. These mental leaps were the only way the Obama-Biden Administration could come to its preferred conclusion, even if it did not stick to the letter of the Clean Air Act.

The Endangerment Finding acknowledges and identifies significant uncertainties in the science and assumptions used to justify the decision. In the 16 years since EPA issued the Endangerment Finding, the world has seen major developments in innovative technologies, science, economics, and mitigation. EPA has never before asked for public comment on the implications these developments have had on the Endangerment Finding, but now it will as part of the reconsideration process it intends to undertake. Additionally, major Supreme Court decisions in the intervening years, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, West Virginia v. EPA, Michigan v. EPA, and Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, have provided new guidance on how the agency should interpret statutes to discern Congressional intent and ensure that its regulations follow the law.

As part of this reconsideration process, EPA will leverage the expertise of the White House Budget Office, including the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other relevant agencies.

It is in the best interest of the American people for EPA to ensure that any finding and regulations are based on the strongest scientific and legal foundation. The reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding and EPA’s regulations that have relied on it furthers this interest. The agency cannot prejudge the outcome of this reconsideration or of any future rulemaking. EPA will follow the Administrative Procedure Act and Clean Air Act, as applicable, in a transparent way for the betterment of the American people and the fulfillment of the rule of law.

This was announced in conjunction with a number of historic actions to advance President Trump’s Day One executive orders and Power the Great American Comeback. Combined, these announcements represent the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in the history of the United States. The overhaul of the Endangerment Finding along with other massive rules represents the death of the Green New Scam and drives a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion. While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment, the agency is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.

Objections from the usual suspects

“This decision ignores science and the law,” David Doniger, senior strategist and attorney for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Abdicating EPA’s clear legal duty to curb climate-changing pollution only makes sense if you consider who would benefit: the oil, coal, and gas magnates who handed the president millions of dollars in campaign contributions.”

Vickie Patton, the Environmental Defense Fund’s general counsel, said any move to undo the finding “would be reckless, unlawful, and ignore EPA’s fundamental responsibility to protect Americans from destructive climate pollution. We will vigorously oppose it.”

“They don’t have a winning hand. Having the power to do this doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not what they’re doing makes sense on the merits,” said Joseph Goffman, who ran EPA’s air office during the Biden administration. “They’ve got nothing on the merits.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania dismissed the EPA’s action as “just the latest form of Republican climate denial. They can no longer deny climate change is happening, so instead they’re pretending it’s not a threat, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is, perhaps, the greatest threat that we face today.”

The Pathways and the Risks

Shuting Pomerleau gives insight into activists worries and the possibilities: Is EPA’s Endangerment Finding at Risk?

If EPA’s endangerment finding is rescinded, it may not have any material impact on the agency’s legal basis for issuing future climate regulations on GHG emissions, since the IRA amended the CAA to grant explicit authority to the agency. Nevertheless, repealing the endangerment finding would likely create chaos and uncertainty for U.S. climate policy.

First, rescinding the endangerment finding would make it much easier for the Trump Administration to repeal the existing EPA GHG emissions regulations because the original legal basis for this authority would no longer exist. Under the Obama and Biden Administrations, EPA has issued several sector-based GHG emissions regulations using the endangerment finding as a legal basis.

Second, repealing the endangerment finding would immediately subject EPA to legal challenges that could last years. Before the dispute could be adjudicated by the courts, there would be considerable confusion and uncertainty over compliance with the existing regulations. This would negatively impact the regulatory environment for businesses, as they need durable and consistent policies to make long-term investment decisions.

From the perspective of policymaking, rescinding EPA’s endangerment finding puts a big question mark on the outlook of U.S. climate policies. Currently, at the federal level, the United States uses a patchwork of policies to mitigate GHG emissions, such as handing out massive clean energy tax subsidies under the IRA and relying on command-and-control EPA regulations. The IRA energy tax provisions will likely be subject to at least partial repeal in an upcoming 2025 reconciliation bill. Even if a future administration seeks to regulate GHG emissions via EPA rulemaking, it would take a long time, and generally such regulations are costly, inflexible, and vulnerable to legal challenges.

What to Expect Next

EPA to Accept Nominations for Science Boards

March 12, 2025

EPA Press Office (press@epa.gov)

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that a notice will be published in the Federal Register seeking nominations for the Science Advisory Board (SAB) and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). Nominations will be accepted for 30 days following publication of the Federal Register notice.

“Reconstituting the Science Advisory Board and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee are critical to ensuring that the agency receives scientific advice consistent with its legal obligations to advance our core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” said EPA Administrator Zeldin. “I look forward to receiving nominations to build an independent group of advisors to aid the agency’s rulemaking.”

In January, EPA announced its decision to reset these federal advisory committees
to reverse the politicization of SAB and CASAC under the Biden-Harris Administration.

Ocean Warms, Land Cools UAH February 2025

Posted on March 13 by Ron Clutz

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots. It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition. Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.

As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016). The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022 At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Now we have had an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2 and now dropping steadily.

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa. While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~60 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

gmt-warming-events

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And now in 2024 we have seen an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.

Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT

mc_wh_gas_web20210423124932

February 2025 Ocean Warms, Land Cools

With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in. The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995. Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into 2024 peaking in April, then cooling off to the present.

UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for February 2025. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data. Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead of the update from HadSST4. I posted recently on SSTs January 2025 Oceans Still Cool. These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.

Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere. September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. This month has contrasting warming in ocean air anomalies, especially in SH, somewhat offset by land air cooling especially in NH.

Note: UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021. v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. Thus cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4. For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for February 2025. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.

The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.

In 2021-22, SH and NH showed spikes up and down while the Tropics cooled dramatically, with some ups and downs, but hitting a new low in January 2023. At that point all regions were more or less in negative territory.

After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024. The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.86C in April. Since then all regions have cooled down sharply. In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global ocean air anomaly up from 0.3C to 0.5C.

Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern

We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for February is below.

Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land. The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in August 2024, with a large drop in between. In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. February showed a sharp drop in NH land air temps from 1.07C down to 0.56C, pulling the Global land anomaly downward from 0.9C to 0.6C.

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present. The average monthly anomaly is -0.03, for this period of more than four decades. The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20. An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022. March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed

With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C. The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, and in June a further decline to 0.8C. October went down to 0.7C, November and December dropped to 0.6C. February is down to 0.5C.

The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.

TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak. Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4, but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.

R.I.P. Climate Back Radiation

Posted on March 8 by Ron Clutz

Beware false and misleading Cartoons.

A brief recent video by Markus Ott explains why the notion of “back radiation” in Earth’s climate should be laid to rest. I provide a transcript text in italics with my bolds and key exhibits.

Ott/Shula: The second law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect

This is the first of a short series of physics videos. This series is intended to be a follow up to Tom Shula’s presentation in which we can take more time to go into the fundamentals and derivations of our results. Since Tom and I are attacking the foundations of modern climate science, it makes sense to start with the thermodynamic aspects of the greenhouse effect.

In this video I will not talk about greenhouse gas molecules. I will look at the Green House Effect from the perspective of classical thermodynamics. Classical thermodynamics describes matter as a continuum and does not care about the atomic or molecular structure of matter. The laws of thermodynamics have proven to be universally valid hypotheses, and theories that contradict the laws of thermodynamics have always proved to be wrong

In connection with the greenhouse effect, the second law of Thermodynamics is particularly interesting. There are various equivalent formulations for the the second law of thermodynamics which states that thermal energy cannot be completely converted into other forms of energy. Rudolf Clausius was the first to formulate the second law in the form that heat does not flow spontaneously from cold to hot bodies. Later in 1865 he developed on that basis the concept of entropy.

Those who believe in thermodynamics categorize this statement as an eternal truth and therefore find it very difficult to understand how the greenhouse effect is supposed to work. How can the atmosphere which is mostly colder than the Earth’s surface heat the Surface by means of back radiation, and by as much as 33°C? Greenhouse effect believers like to refer to Carl Schwarzschild’s 1906 paper About the equilibrium of the solar atmosphere to answer this question.

In order to clarify this question of faith we will take a closer look at this much cited and probably rarely read article which was written in a German adequate to a highly educated man. I posted a manual translation of the text on my substack page. Without going into the details of his calculations we will look at how Schwarzschild comes to the conclusion that the sun’s atmosphere not only radiates outwards into space but that a significant proportion of radiation is also directed inwards towards the base of the sun’s atmosphere.

Such an inward or downward back radiation can also be measured at the bottom of the Earth’s atmosphere. This observation is taken as a reason to postulate a similar radiation equilibrium in the Earth’s atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is said to be the result of that back radiation.

The starting point for Schwarzschild’s article is the observation that the brightness of the visible solar disc is not evenly distributed. The brightness decreases towards the edge. The diagram shows the observed brightness distribution as a blue line. Schwarzschild compares two conceivable mechanisms of heat transport through the solar atmosphere in order to determine the cause of this brightness distribution. Heat transport through radiative transfer which requires a radiative equilibrium in the Solar atmosphere, and heat transport by convection with an adiabatic equilibrium in the Solar atmosphere.

He calculates how the brightness distribution on the solar disc should be for these two cases. Because his results for the radiative equilibrium Orange Line in the diagram matched the observed brightness distribution Blue Line better than his results for the adiabatic equilibrium Gray Line, he assumes that a radiative equilibrium prevails in the Solar atmosphere. We will disregard his description of the adiabatic equilibrium here, and restrict ourselves to his description of the radiative equilibrium.

Kirchhoff’s law of radiation plays a central role in Schwarzschild’s model. Kirchhoff’s law of radiation describes the relationship between absorption and emission of a real body in thermal equilibrium. It states that radiation absorption and emission correspond to each other for a given wavelength. A body that absorbs well also radiates well. This can be visualized as follows: We consider a body 2 that is located in a cavity of another body 1. Vacuum prevails in the intermediate space. If both bodies have the same temperature the radiant power absorbed by Body 2 must be the same as the radiant power emitted by it because otherwise the temperature of body 2 would change. This means that in thermal equilibrium Kirchhoff’s law of radiation represents a kind of radiation energy conservation law for body 2.

The layout of Schwarzschild’s radiative transfer model of the solar atmosphere is quite simple. An unknown heat source in the core of the Sun generates heat; a possible liquid outer core transports this heat by convection to the bottom of the solar atmosphere; the heat is then transported outwards into space solely by radiative transfer. He does not go any further into the properties of the sun’s core. He only assumes that the core heats the solar atmosphere evenly at its boundary surface. It is very important that this heating occurs so evenly that convection currents do not form in the Solar atmosphere.

In Schwarzschild’s model the solar atmosphere is assumed to have the following properties:

♦ the solar atmosphere is stably stratified without convection;
♦ temperature and density increase continuously from the top of the atmosphere to the ground
♦ the vertical profile of temperature is smaller than the adiabatic vertical profile;
♦ each layer of the sun’s atmosphere absorbs and emits radiation without loss;
♦ the energy flow which flows from an unknown source inside the Sun through the solar atmosphere into the outer space is in a steady state.

Since a downwelling radiation is also measurable on the ground of Earth’s atmosphere, modern climate science assumes that Schwarzschild’s radiation transfer model is also applicable to our atmosphere. Now let’s take a look at the applicability of Schwarzschild’s model to the Earth’s atmosphere.

It is striking that Schwarzschild has practically constructed his model around Kirchhoff’s law of radiation. He has to make a number of not particularly plausible assumptions in order to create a local thermal equilibrium between the layers of his solar atmosphere. As mentioned before most of these assumptions serve to prevent convection in his model. This is critically important because as soon as convection comes into play, the condition of local thermal equilibrium is no longer fulfilled. The vertical convection currents and the associated turbulence destroy Schwarzschild’s homogeneous stratification of the atmosphere. Large local temperature jumps occur Kirchhoff’s law of radiation is therefore no longer applicable.

To summarize and formulate this somewhat more abstractly: In order to create the conditions for Pure radiation transport through the solar atmosphere Schwarzschild must construct an atmosphere with a very high degree of order. In liquid or gaseous systems even minor disturbances will cause such a state to change into a disordered convective State. Under convective conditions Kirchhoff’s law of radiation and thus the radiative transfer equation are not valid.

This transition to the convective state takes place with a large entropy gain. It is therefore spontaneous and irreversible. Accordingly, there should be no radiative transfer and no greenhouse effect in our troposphere since it is dominated by convection currents.

Look at a volume element under convective conditions such as those that prevail in our troposphere. The volume element absorbs radiation and converts the radiation energy into heat. Before it can convert the heat back into radiation it is caught by a convection current and lifted. This causes it to move into areas with lower ambient pressure. It expands and performs volume work in the process. It draws the energy for this volume work from its heat content and therefore cools down. The amount of heat that the volume element has converted into volume work can no longer be converted back into radiation. The conservation of radiation energy is therefore no longer given.

Kirchhoff’s law of radiation can no longer be applied to the volume element. The entropy of the volume element increases, the process is irreversible lifting and acceleration. Work performed by the volume element derives their energy from the heat content of the volume element and also contribute to the irreversibility of radiation absorption under convective conditions. Global circulations also affect these processes but that will be discussed in another video.

I would like to point out that radiation absorption and emission are irreversible processes. In themselves the reemission of radiation from an excited molecule occurs randomly in any direction. This means that the information about the direction of the previously absorbed radiation is lost during emission The emitted Photon transfers part of its momentum to the emitting molecule. Its energy and therefore also its frequency are therefore different from that of the previously absorbed Photon. Schwarzschild also excludes these effects through his choice of boundary conditions: steady state radiation flux and frequency independence of absorptivity and emission.

In one of my previous videos I made fun about the fact that the 33° greenhouse effect is calculated by assuming that the solar Radiance is homogeneously distributed over the Earth’s surface with 240 W per square meter. Now with a deeper understanding of Schwarzschild’s model we get an idea about the origin of this rather strange assumption. In his radiation transfer model the base of the solar atmosphere is heated internally and homogenously by the solar core. This homogeneous heating is very important since an inhomogeneous heating would cause convection which is incompatible with Kirchhoff’s law of radiation and would spoil his model. In a rather hapless attempt to apply Schwarzschild’s radiation transfer model, the same is done to the externally and unevenly heated surface of the Earth.

To summarize briefly the irreversibility of radiation absorption in air under convective conditions makes back radiation and thus the greenhouse effect impossible. This statement seems to be in direct contradiction to the observation that a downwelling atmospheric radiation can be measured at the bottom of the Earth’s atmosphere. The diagram here shows the measured values from a measuring station near Munich. In the next video I will show that back radiation is not what most people think of it to be, and how it is compatible with the laws of thermodynamics.

The most important takeaway from this video is that Kirchhoff’s law of radiation presents a kind of radiation energy conservation law, and that this radiation energy conservation is not given under convective conditions. As far as I know all radiation transfer models assume a universal validity of Kirchhoff’s law of radiation. The only exception is at very high altitudes where the air molecules only very rarely collide with each other. Since the results of the radiation transfer models are based on this false basic assumptions, they are wrong.

That is not to say that Carl Schwarzschild’s work is nonsense. His original idea is very applicable to transparent systems without convection; for example in the production of large telescope mirrors. The cooling behavior after the glass mass has solidified can be described very well using radiation transfer methods.

Footnote Regarding Observation of Downwelling IR near Earth Surface

Figure 1. This is a plot of the outgoing radiation spectrum from Earth. Within the normal IR thermometer and scanner range of 7.5 to 14 micrometers, only ozone (O3), which is mostly above cloud level absorbs and emits significant radiation. Within the 15 μm CO2 “divot” nearly all surface emissions are absorbed within 1.5 meters of the surface, at the edges of the divot, emissions are absorbed within 690 meters. There is very little absorption and emission by GHGs in the IR thermometer range in the troposphere, aka the atmospheric window.

From Andy May Beyond CO₂: Unraveling the Roles of Energy, Water Vapor, and Convection in Earth’s Atmosphere

Because the humid lower atmosphere is nearly opaque to most surface emitted radiation that is outside the atmospheric windows, surface emissions are absorbed by GHGs very close to the surface. According to Heinz Hug, at sea level, with a CO₂ concentration of 357 PPM and 2.6% water vapor, 99.94% of all surface radiation in the main CO₂ frequency band at about 15 μm is normally absorbed in the lower 10 meters of the atmosphere (Hug, 2012). Even at the edges of the deep CO₂ frequency band (see figure 1, as well as figures 4 & 5 here) where any increase in the CO₂ effect would be observed, 99.9% of the surface radiation is absorbed in the first 690 meters (Hug, 2000).

Heinz Hug goes on to say that is why climate change caused by CO2 cannot be measured directly in the laboratory and can only be modeled. In our opinion, the effect of CO2 is so small it will likely never be measured. In a similar fashion, any “back radiation” that makes it to the surface, outside atmospheric windows, is from the lower 10 meters of the atmosphere, the remaining emissions from the lower 10 meters of the atmosphere are captured by other greenhouse gases, almost always water vapor molecules.

Surface emissions in the frequencies that cannot be absorbed or emitted by GHGs, those in the so-called “atmospheric windows” are not captured, these are the frequencies utilized by IR thermometers and scanners, typically 7.5 to 14 micrometers as shown in figure 1. Water vapor is often a very weak absorber and emitter in portions of these windows. Carbon dioxide strongly absorbs and re-emits IR at two key frequencies: around 4.26 μm (microns) and 14.99 μm. The common vanadium oxide (VOx) based microbolometer long-wave infrared detectors cover wavelengths from 8-14 µm range. So, both CO2 absorption bands are outside the range of the common hand-held infrared thermometer/bolometer.

The radiation seen when IR thermometers and scanners are pointed at the sky is surface radiation scattered by atmospheric particles and clouds. The radiation seen by IR thermometers and scanners cannot be emitted by greenhouse gases or clouds because neither GHGs nor clouds emit in frequencies that can be detected by the devices. As noted in van Wijngaarden and Happer (2025) scattered longwave IR originates only in water droplets or ice or other particulates, there is negligible scattering of IR by molecules, especially in the atmospheric windows.

Background Paper with complete discussion

Missing Link in the GHE, Greenhouse Effect, by Thomas Shula – Markus Ott, USA – Germany
2024.

SEC Climate Risk Rule is Entrapment

Posted on March 6 by Ron Clutz

Stone Washington and William Happer explain the nefarious and ill-advised decree in their article SEC’s Climate Risk Disclosure Rule Would Compel Companies to Make Scientifically False and Misleading Disclosures. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In March last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued its climate risk disclosure rule, called “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors.”

It requires companies to report enormously costly and voluminous data on their carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With this rule, the SEC seeks “to achieve the primary benefits of GHG emissions disclosure” for investors, including disclosure of “risks associated” with regulations such as President Biden’s “commitments to reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions … to reach net zero emissions by 2050.”

It will flood investors with pages upon pages of information. As to costs, the SEC’s own numbers found that the proposed rule would increase annual compliance costs from $3.8 billion to $10.2 billion, a $6.4 billion rise — more than all the accumulated SEC disclosure rules’ costs from SEC’s initiation in the 1930s to date – combined. Even though the final rule’s cost is less, the numbers indicate the order of magnitude. It may signal what the ultimate cost of future environmental disclosures would be, in addition to the ensuing fossil fuel divestment.

The SEC assumes, like many, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claim the “evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the main driver of climate change,” including, the SEC asserts, “higher temperatures, sea level rise, and drought”, as well as “hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and wildfires.”

However, the little-known accurate science is totally contrary to the SEC’s and IPCC’s premise. Co-author William Happer, an emeritus physics professor at Princeton, explains below how carbon dioxide and other GHGs do not cause any increased climate related risks. The SEC’s and IPCC’s claim is scientifically false.

Thus, the SEC rule would compel companies to disclose scientifically false and misleading information about carbon dioxide and other GHG’s role in climate-related risks to investors. Accordingly, the SEC rule must be rescinded by the Trump Administration or ruled invalid by the courts, whichever is sooner.

Co-author Happer explains the accurate science in detail in a 28 page comment on the proposed SEC rule with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus physics professor at MIT. The comment explains why there are no added climate related risks caused by carbon dioxide. (The other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are too small to have any significant effect on the environment).

The SEC totally ignored and did not respond to the comment. Three of the many scientific reasons elaborated in the comment are:

First, Carbon Dioxide Now and at Higher Levels is a Weak Greenhouse Gas, So Reducing It to Net Zero Will Have a Negligible Effect on Temperatures

As a GHG, carbon dioxide’s ability to raise Earth’s temperature decreases rapidly as the atmospheric concentration increase. The science is complex, but the scientific conclusion is simple. At today’s level of about 400 parts per million (ppm) and higher, large increases of carbon dioxide will cause negligible warming of the Earth.

The well-established theory of atmospheric heat transfer allows computing what happens when carbon dioxide’s concentration in the atmosphere increases, for example, doubling from today’s approximately 400 ppm to 800 ppm. As to temperature, the result would be only a minuscule effect on temperature because carbon dioxide is now, and at higher levels, a weak greenhouse gas. Lindzen and Happer state:

“From now on … we could emit as much CO₂ as we like, with little warming effect.” This also means that “our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little impact on global warming. There is no climate emergency. No threat at all.”

As to food, carbon dioxide creates more food when its level in the atmosphere increases. Doubling carbon dioxide from 400 ppm to 800 ppm would increase the amount of food available to people worldwide by roughly 40%, with a negligible effect on temperature.

Further, never mentioned, is that reducing carbon dioxide to Net Zero will reduce the amount of food available worldwide.

Second. The EPA’s MAGICC Model Confirms Carbon Dioxide Now and at Higher Levels is a Weak Greenhouse Gas, So Reducing It to Net Zero Will Have a Negligible Effect on Temperatures

The Environmental Protection Agency often uses a model for predicting temperature effects called the Model for Assessment of Greenhouse Gas-Induced Climate Change (MAGICC). Our comment explains the MAGICC model confirms our conclusion:

“Reducing the current 40 Gigaton CO₂ annual emissions worldwide and the 6 Gigaton annual U.S. CO₂ emissions to ‘net zero’ would cause only tiny changes of … Earth’s surface temperature.”

Third. 600 Million Years of Carbon Dioxide Data Also Confirms Carbon Dioxide Now and at Higher Levels is a Weak Greenhouse Gas, So Reducing It to Net Zero Will Have a Negligible Effect on Temperatures

Our comment presents 600 million years of data on temperature and carbon dioxide levels that shows an inverse relationship most of the time. “For hundreds of millions of years, temperatures were low when CO₂ levels were high, and temperatures were high when CO₂ levels were low.”

“When CO₂ was record high of about 7,000 ppm, temperatures were at a record low.”

Thus 600 million years of data also confirms carbon dioxide is now a weak greenhouse gas that cannot and does not drive climate change.

Finally, our comment details why the rule if adopted would help cause disastrous consequences for the poor, people worldwide, and future generations of Americans because it would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the use of fossil fuels.

Therefore, science contradicts the SEC and IPCC’s premise that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases introduce climate-related risks. Such assumptions are scientifically false. Thus requiring companies to report their GHG data to investors interested in climate change would require them to report false and misleading information.

Accordingly, the new SEC leadership should immediately rescind its climate-related risks disclosure rule, or the courts should rule it invalid, whichever is sooner.

Finally, there are, of course, nature caused climate-related risks. For nature, the SEC explained, “it has required disclosure of certain environmental matters for the past 50 years,” including “disclosure of climate-related risks and their impacts on a registrant’s business or financial condition.”

Thus, the SEC has already taken care of them. Nothing else need be done.

January 2025 Oceans Still Cool

Posted on March 5 by Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST3 starting in 2015 through January 2025. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024.

Now in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 10 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 4 months from its peak in August. It’s now about 0.1C higher than the average for this period. Note that the Tropical anomaly has cooled from 1.28C in 2024/01 to 0.63C as of 2025/1.

Comment:

A longer view of SSTs

Open image in new tab to enlarge.

Contemporary AMO Observations

The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.

Curiosity: Solar Coincidence?

Summary

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

IR-Active Gases: H2O Potent, CO2 Feeble

Posted on March 4 by Ron Clutz

Demetris Koutsoyiannis published this paper in November 2024 Relative importance of carbon dioxide and water in the greenhouse effect: Does the tail wag the dog? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Using a detailed atmospheric radiative transfer model, we derive macroscopic relationships of downwelling and outgoing longwave radiation which enable determining the partial derivatives thereof with respect to the explanatory variables that represent the greenhouse gases. We validate these macroscopic relationships using empirical formulae based on downwelling radiation data, commonly used in hydrology, and satellite data for the outgoing radiation. We use the relationships and their partial derivatives to infer the relative importance of carbon dioxide and water vapour in the greenhouse effect.

The results show that the contribution of CO₂ is 4% – 5%, while water and clouds dominate with a contribution of 87% – 95%. The minor effect of carbon dioxide is confirmed by the small, non-discernible effect of the recent escalation of atmospheric CO₂ concentration from 300 to 420 ppm. This effect is quantified at 0.5% for both downwelling and outgoing radiation. Water and clouds also perform other important functions in climate, such as regulating heat storage and albedo, as well as cooling the Earth’s surface through latent heat transfer, contributing 50%. By confirming the major role of water on climate, these results suggest that hydrology should have a more prominent and more active role in climate research.

Robin Horsley draws the implications from this and other recent papers. Transcript in italics with my bolds and added images.

For decades, we’ve been told that human generated CO2 emissions are the single most dangerous threat to our planet. Politicians, celebrities, and the mainstream media have united to amplify this alarm, warning of an impending climate catastrophe unless we act now.

But what if the story’s wrong? What if the very foundation of the theory, the idea that CO2 is the principal driver of global warming, Is flawed? What if the science we’ve been told is settled is actually far from settled?

This week I’ve been digging into this very provocative question looking at an extremely interesting recent report on the subject. And what I found might make you rethink a lot of what you thought you knew about climate change.

What If Everything You Thought About CO2 Was Wrong

For years we’ve been fed a simple story: Humans burn fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide – CO2 – Into the atmosphere. CO2 traps heat causing the planet to warm. The Greenhouse Effect as it’s known. The solution? Reduce CO2 to save the planet. But what if this narrative is overly simplistic or even fundamentally wrong?

At the recent international Clintel science conference in Prague leading climate experts gathered to scrutinise the dominant narratives around climate change. One of the most striking contributions came from Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis, a highly regarded climate scientist from the University of Athens. His research challenges the very core of our understanding of CO2’s role in the climate system. Professor Koutsoyiannis presented groundbreaking findings that question the long held belief that rising CO2 levels cause global temperatures to increase.

► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. ► Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. ► Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.

Instead, his research suggests it’s the other way around. Global temperature increases drive higher atmospheric CO2 levels. This isn’t an entirely new idea. For decades, scientists like Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace have pointed to evidence showing that historically rises in CO2 levels have followed, not preceeded, global temperature increases. Ice core data, spanning millions of years, apparently supports this claim.

If true, this challenges the foundation of the mainstream climate narrative.

Why would rising temperatures cause an increase in CO2

But why would rising temperatures cause an increase in CO2 levels? Professor Koutsoyiannis explains that when temperatures rise, the natural world responds. Plants and oceans release more CO2 than they otherwise would. Warmer temperatures lead to a thriving environment.

Now, I think this needs some explanation, because plants absorb CO2 and produce oxygen. Not release CO2, don’t they? Well, yes, plants sustain themselves and grow through the process of photosynthesis, which turns sunlight, water and CO2, which plants absorb, into glucose which enables plants to grow and which produces oxygen as a by-product which we and animals need to breathe.

Figure 22. Annual carbon balance in the Earth’s atmosphere, in Gt C/year, based on the IPCC estimates (Figure 5.12 of [30]). The balance of 5.1 Gt C/year is the annual accumulation of carbon (in the form of CO2) in the atmosphere (reproduced from [5].).

However Plants also release CO2 as part of a process known as cellular respiration during the day, and particularly at night, when due to a lack of sunlight, photosynthesis cannot occur. On balance photosynthesis typically outweighs respiration. So living plants typically absorb more CO2 than they release. But when that increasing number of plants die and decompose, micro-organisms break down the organic matter releasing retained CO2.

Oceans also release CO2 into the atmosphere when the water is warmer than the surrounding air. Warmer water holds less dissolved CO2. These natural processes account for the majority of CO2 emissions.
In fact, Koutsoyiannis argues that Nature contributes 96% of CO2 emissions leaving just 4% attributable to human activity.

Nature contributes 96% of CO2 emissions

Yes, burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere. However, the professor’s research suggests that human contributions are a mere drop in the ocean compared to natural emissions. Crucially, his data shows that the dominant greenhouse gases aren’t CO2. But water vapour and clouds. CO2, it seems, plays a much smaller role than we’ve been led to believe.

Additionally, the study challenges the claim that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Instead, it finds that CO2 is rapidly cycled through the atmosphere oceans and land with an average cycle of just 4 years.

Figure 26: Contribution of (left) the three mechanisms responsible for the cooling of Earth’s surface and (right) the four mechanisms responsible for the warming of Earth’s atmosphere, based on the global energy balance by Trenberth et al. (2009). Koutsoyiannis (2024)

The paper also concludes based on the data gathered over the last hundred years, when the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere increased from around 300 parts per million to just over 400 parts per million, that this increase has had no discernible effect on the greenhouse effect. It’s that small a factor.

If this research is accurate It doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real. But it does suggest we need a better understanding of what drives it.

The professor asks a number of pertinent unanswered questions at the end of his paper. The earth is currently, when viewed over hundreds of millions of years, going through a relatively cool period. What caused the huge increases in earth’s temperature in the past? The professor asks.

It wasn’t industrialisation, was it? These are crucial questions especially as Governments implement sweeping policies in the name of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Policies that impact everything from energy prices to housing and transportation. Even the food that we eat.

The global cost of the Net Zero 2050 agenda is projected to be between $100 and $150 trillion dollars by 2050. Meanwhile, the world bank estimates that eradicating extreme poverty globally would cost just three to four trillion. Universal health care and education, defeating diseases such as malaria on a global basis would cost less.

What if we’re funding trillions into solving something that isn’t actually the main source of the problem? What if we should be spending more on other things that can limit global warming? What if we should instead be spending more money on mitigating the effects rather than trying to prevent it?

Shouldn’t we demand more scrutiny of the science driving these decisions? Could it be that the climate crisis narrative isn’t just about science but also about power, control and profit? Entire industries are heavily invested in the CO2 narrative. And millions of people, and much of the mainstream media are emotionally invested in the quest to reduce CO2 to save the planet.

But is that what we’re actually doing? Science thrives on debate and scrutiny. Science is never settled as such. It’s constantly evolving, particularly in complex areas such as global climate. Yet the CO2 science on which we’re proceeding is decades old, and many of the models on which it is based have failed to make accurate predictions.

Yet those who challenge the mainstream climate narrative are often dismissed as ‘deniers’ or attacked personally. But shouldn’t the truth welcome scrutiny? Shouldn’t we demand transparency and evidence that can stand up to rigorous examination?

This isn’t about denying climate change. It’s about questioning whether we’re focusing on the right solutions. As more scientists speak out, surely it’s time to demand open debate. And consider whether the trillions we’re spending on Net Zero might be better used elsewhere.

Now, I’m not a climate scientist. Perhaps this report is flawed. Perhaps it is complete nonsense even. But the professor who wrote it is not the only one who’s pointing out the first fundamental point that the mainstream narrative is fundamentally wrong, that by burning fossil fuels we’re producing CO2 that is warming the planet.

An increasing number of others are breaking ranks and saying exactly the same thing. That increasing CO2 is largely a consequence of increasing global temperatures not the cause. Yet we’re told that we’re facing a climate emergency. We must cast aside all caution. We must listen to Greta Thunberg, the climate change messiah.

To ask questions is heresy! Really? What do you think? Should we blindly follow the mainstream narrative, or should we dig deeper and ask tougher questions? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you for watching.

Climate Scare Based on Lies

Posted on March 3 by Ron Clutz

link to video: Prof. William Happer – Climate Scare Is Based on Lies

Transcript in italics with my bolds and added images (HS is interviewer Hannes Sarv, WH is William Happer)

HS: If you read about climate in the newspapers or some talk about climate on television, it will be very, very far from the truth. We’re told that climate change is a direct consequence of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. Year after year, you are seeing the dramatic reality of a boiling planet.

And for scientists, it is unequivocal. Humans are to blame, we’re led to believe the climate is boiling. And the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding. That’s what’s boiling the oceans. Which will have disastrous effects.

But is there really a scientific consensus on man-made climate change? Over a thousand scientists dispute the so-called climate crisis. Many of them are high-ranking experts in their fields. Among them, Dr. William Happer, a respected physicist with decades of groundbreaking research, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, and a leading expert in atomic and molecular physics. He has deep expertise in the greenhouse effect and the role of CO2 in climate change. Dr. Happer argues that the role of human activity and CO2 in global warming is based on flawed science and misinterpretations.

“You know, it’s dangerous to make policy on the basis of lies.”

In this interview, we’ll explore the evidence he believes has been overlooked and why it could transform our understanding of climate change.

HS: As we can see, Professor, you are still working daily in your university office. So what is it? Are you consulting younger colleagues or still involved in some research projects?

WH: Well, yes, I try to stay busy and I’m working now with a former student from Canada who’s a professor there now, William van Wijngaarden. And we’re working now on how water vapor and clouds affect the Earth’s climate, the radiation transfer details of those.

HS:So still very much involved in climate science.

WH: Well, you know, climate is very important. It’s always been important to humanity. It’s not going to change. I think it’s been having hard times the last 50 years because of this manic focus on demonization of greenhouse gases, which have some effect on climate but not very much.

HS: We’re going to absolutely get to that. But I wanted to start from actually, I was listening to one of your speeches and presentations you held back in 2023 at the Institute of Public Affairs. And what really I think resonated with me was that you started from the notion that freedom is important. And every generation has their own struggle for freedom and freedom is not free. So I actually wanted to start by asking you what is the state, the current state of freedom in your opinion in the world today?

WH: I think it’s really true that every generation has to struggle to maintain freedom, you know, because every generation has lots of people who don’t like freedom, you know. They would like to be little dictators, you know, and that’s always been true if you read history. And it’s not going to change.

And so I think it’s important that we educate our children to recognize that humans are imperfect and there will always be attempts to get dictatorial control over society. And, you know, our founding fathers in America represented recognize that. They just assumed that their fellow Americans would be not very perfect people, you know, with lots of flawed people, and they tried to design a system of government that would work even with flawed people. Some German philosopher put it right, you know, out of the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made. So that’s the problem that we will always face.

HS: What about academic freedom in today’s world? I’m not only speaking about climate science, but in general.

WH: Well, you know, I think academia has always had a problem with groupthink, you know, because you’re typically all together in one small community, and your children and wives interact with each other. And so the temptations, the pressures to all think the same are very great. You know, if you don’t think the same, your kids suffer, your wife suffers, and that’s nothing new. It’s always been like that. You know, there’s a famous… American play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But it’s about this topic and it goes back many, many decades, you know, long before the current woke problems that we’re having in America.

HS: So as we all know currently, there is a new administration in the United States. So what will happen now? Will the situation, in your opinion, improve or is it just, you know, the challenges are going to remain?

WH: Well, you know, we’ve just elected a new president, and he’s very vigorous and has lots of ideas, and I think that’s a good thing. We’ll see how successful he is. But, you know, our society and our government is designed to be cumbersome and unwieldy. That’s to prevent crazy things from happening too quickly. And so the president will have to deal with that. And if the Americans support him, if the Congress supports him, he’ll be successful.

HS: Let’s move to climate science. Is there any honest discussion left? It has become so political, in my opinion, that it is really hard to have an open, a normal discussion about it.

WH: Well, I think if you go to a seminar, for example, at Princeton on climate, It’s often pretty good science. It’s not alarmist. But this is professors and students talking to each other. The further you get away from the actual research, the more alarmist and crazy it becomes.

So if you read about climate in the newspapers or listen to some talk about climate on television, it will be very, very far from the truth. And it won’t be the same thing that the professors at universities normally are talking about. But that said, you know, I think there’s been a lot of corruption because of all of the money available. You know, there are huge funds if you do research that supports the idea that there is a climate emergency which requires lots of government intervention. And if you don’t do that, you’re less likely to be funded, you know, you can’t pay your graduate students. So it’s a bad situation. It’s been very corrupting to this branch of science.

HS: Exactly how long has it been going on, this kind of situation?

WH: Well, I think it really got started in the early 90s. I was in Washington at the time as a government bureaucrat, and I could see it getting started. It was being pushed by Senator Al Gore and his allies. There were, at that time, still lots of honest scientists in academia who didn’t go along with all of the alarmism, but they’ve gradually died off and they’ve been replaced by younger people who’ve never known anything except, you know, pleasing your government sponsor with the politically correct research results that they expect.

HS: So basically they are not in a position, if they want to achieve anything in academia or make a career for themselves, they are kind of unable to stay honest even?

WH: They try to be honest, but it’s very difficult because you have to plan to educate your children. You have to maintain your family, and so that means you need money. And the only way to get money is to agree to this alarmist meme that has dominated climate scientists now for several decades.

HS: Of course it affects climate research. So what is the current state, let’s say, the current state of climate research? What’s the quality of it in your opinion?

WH: Well, I think many of the observational programs in climate science are very good. For example, satellite measurements of Earth’s properties, radiation, cloudiness, temperatures, and ground-based observations. They’re often very high-quality work, very useful, and we’re lucky to have them. There are good programs in both Europe and the United States and Japan, and China is becoming quite important nowadays, too.

I think where there’s still huge problems is in computer modeling. I don’t think most computer models mean anything. It’s a complete waste of money, but that’s what’s driving the public perception. So the public is unable to look at model results, which are not alarming at all. But instead what they see is graphic displays from computer computations which are not tied into observations. So I think the money that’s been spent on computers, and lots of it has been spent, has been mostly wasted.

HS: Let me just understand it correctly because I’ve come to understand that these computer models are something that our current debate or the climate alarm is all based on: That there’s going to be a warming of how many degrees and then the earth is going to be uninhabitable. And you’re saying that those models are not things that something like that should be based on.

WH: The Earth is always either warming or cooling. It’s a rare time when it’s got stable temperature. We’re in a warming phase now. But most of the warming is probably a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age when it was much, much colder all over the world. And it began to warm up in the early 1800s.

And it continued to warm, not very fast. No one knows how long this will last. If you look over the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last glacial period, there have been many warmings and coolings similar to the one that we’re in now.

And I think understanding that is quite important, but that understanding has been put back by many, many years because of the sort of crazed focus on greenhouse gases. It’s pretty clear that greenhouse gases don’t have very much to do with these warmings. Nobody was burning fossil fuels in the year 1200-1300 when the poor Greenlanders were frozen out.

They did some pretty good farming in the southern parts of Greenland in the year 1000, the year 1100. Before long, it became just too cold to continue to do that. The same thing happened in parts of my ancestral country of Scotland. You know, you used to be able to farm the uplands of Scotland, which you can’t farm now, it’s too cold. But they’re warming up at some point, maybe you can farm them again. So anyway, the climate is just famous for being unstable.

HS: Let’s talk about those greenhouse gases. Mainly climate change today in mainstream media or by those alarmist politicians, for example, is attributed to carbon dioxide. If someone has not looked into it, this gas might seem to have something even poisonous. What is carbon dioxide? Do we need it?

WH: Well, first of all, carbon dioxide is at the basis of life on Earth. We live because plants are able to chemically transform carbon dioxide and water into sugar. And a byproduct is the oxygen that we breathe. And so we should all be very grateful that we have carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You know, life would die without carbon dioxide. If you look over the history of… Life on Earth, carbon dioxide has never been very stable in the atmosphere. There have been times in the past when it’s been much, much higher than today. Life flourished with five times more carbon dioxide than we have today.

And there have been times when it’s been much lower, one-half, one-third, and those were actually quite unpleasant times for life. They were the depths of the last ice ages when carbon dioxide levels dropped to below 200 parts per million, quite low compared to today. We’re at around 400. So at the depth of the last ice age, it was about half what it is today. In some of the more verdant periods of geological history, it’s been four times, five times what it is today. So the climate is not terribly sensitive to carbon dioxide. It has some sensitivity to it.

More carbon dioxide will make it a little bit warmer. But carbon dioxide is heavily saturated, to use a technical term. You know, there’s so much in the atmosphere today that if you, for example, could double carbon dioxide, that’s 100% increase, you would only decrease the cooling radiation to space by 1%. So 100% change in carbon dioxide only makes a 1% change in flux. And that’s because of the saturation that I mentioned. And there’s not much you can debate about that. It’s very, very basic physics. It’s the same physics that produces the dark lines of the sun and the stars. So it’s quite well understood.

And so the question is, what temperature change will a 1% change of radiation to space cause? You know, that’s radiation flux, not temperature. And the answer is it will cause an even smaller percentage change of temperature. There’s really no threat from increasing carbon dioxide or any of the other more minor greenhouse gases like methane or nitrous oxide or artificial gases like anesthetic gases. It’s all a made-up scare story.

HS: Where did this scare story come from? Why this fixation on greenhouse gases? If you explain it this way, it seems a bit even absurd to be fixated on these gases all the time.

WH: Well, you know, I’m really good with instruments and differential equations, but I’m not so good at people’s motives. And so I don’t really understand myself exactly how this has happened. I think… There are various motives, some of them fundamentally good. For example, one of the motives has been it’s hard to keep people from fighting with each other, so if we could have a common enemy like a danger to the climate, we could all join forces and defeat climate change, and then we wouldn’t be killing each other off.

So there’s nothing wrong with a motive like that, except that you have to lie.
And so, you know, it’s dangerous to make policy on the basis of lies.

So I don’t know what drives it. It’s a perfect storm of different motives. Lust for power, good motives, lust for peace. All for that. Lust for money. But I’m much more comfortable talking about, as I say, the physics of greenhouse gases and the physics of climate than what drives people.

HS: Yeah, yeah. Well, you have said that this climate change or climate alarmism today is, what was it, you prefer scam, but you are willing to settle with a hoax, is it correct?

WH: Well, this is not too serious, but you know, when someone says hoax, I think of hoax as, to some extent, a practical joke. There’s a certain amount of humor in it. For example, the Piltdown Man was a famous hoax where some brilliant Englishman doctored up a I think it was a chimpanzee skull to make it look like a human skull. And this was not too serious, but lots of learned professors wrote papers about it, you know, and it was all nonsense. But this had no aim to make a lot of money, you know, or to gain power.

It was simply, you know, a great practical joke. That’s a hoax. A scam is different. A scam is where you are deceiving people to enrich yourself, to gain power, you know, and so I think that’s a better description of what’s happening with climate than a hoax. But it’s a small detail, I don’t mind calling it a hoax.

HS: Basically, Professor, there is a lot of money involved in climate change or climate alarmism. Would it be that money is driving this as well or what is your take on that?

Yes, those are trillions of dollars they are projecting.

WH: Well, I think it’s really true that the love of money has been the root of evil as long as humanity has existed. And here we’re talking about trillions of dollars. If you really went to net zero, the economic implications would just be enormous. People would have to lower their standard of living greatly. It would cause enormous damage to the environment. You cover the world with windmills and solar panels. So… And it’s driven by money. Lots of people are making lots of money. So it’s driven by money. It’s driven by power.

And then it’s driven by poor people who fundamentally believe, you know, and that they really have been misled into thinking that there is an emergency. And you have to be sympathetic to them, you know, who wouldn’t want to save the world if the world was in danger? It is not really in danger, but many people are convinced that it’s in danger. But, you know, there’s this old saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we’re on the road to hell with net zero.

HS: Yes. Well, like you already mentioned, this crisis is often said to be linked with, for example, extreme weather events. But I don’t know, is it even clear today that we have more extreme weather events because of the warming that is happening? Or is it so?

WH: Well, if you look at the data, there’s not the slightest evidence that there’s more extreme weather today than there was 50 years ago. Even the IPCC, you know, the UN body does not claim that there is an increase in extreme weather. They say there’s really no hard evidence for that. And in fact, the evidence is that it’s about the same as the weather has always been. In my country, for example, the worst weather we had was back in the 1930s when we had the Dust Bowl and, you know… people migrating from Oklahoma to California, you know, it was a terrible time. We’ve not had anything like that since.

HS: Of course, always to talk about floods, always to talk about hurricanes. And as I understand as well, the IPCC is not actually in their scientific reports. They are not actually saying that there are more. But they are saying something, right? So the question here is, what do you think? You have probably looked into them a bit more than I am. So is it solid science what’s in there? Or is it also motivated the IPCC scientific reports, politically motivated, for example?

WH: You know, there’s this saying in the communications business, if it bleeds, it leads. So if you’ve got a newspaper or a television business, you have to look for disasters because that’s what people pay attention to. And so part of the problem has been the mass media, which has to have emergencies, has to have extreme events. And the fact is usually hidden that there’s nothing unusual about an event. They try to deceive you into thinking that this has never happened.

For example, just yesterday they had four or five inches of snow in Corpus Christi, Texas. That’s a lot of snow for Corpus Christi. But, you know, if you look at the records of Corpus Christi, it’s not unusual every 20, 30 years as it happens. It’s been happening for thousands of years. But most people, you know, they’re not even 20 or 30 years of age, and so they’ve never seen this before. So it seems like the world is changing rapidly in front of their eyes, but it’s not changing really at all.

HS: Yes, they can look at it on the television, then it must be true when they are saying that it’s because of climate change, right? So this is the thing. One particular graph that is always talked about when climate is the issue is the famous Michael Mann hockey stick.

The first graph appeared in the IPCC 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) credited to H.H.Lamb, first director of CRU-UEA. The second graph was featured in 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) the famous hockey stick credited to M. Mann.

WH: The graph is phony, and that’s been demonstrated by many, many people. It’s even different from the first IPCC graphs. It’s a graph of temperature versus time since about the year 2000. you know, about the year zero, you know, from the time of Christ to today. And what it shows is absolutely no change of temperature until the 20th century when it shoots up like the blade of a hockey stick. So that’s why it’s called the hockey stick curve. So the long, flat… Part of the hockey stick is the unchanging temperature. But that was not in the first IPCC report.

Climate reconstructions of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ 1000-1200 AD. Legend: MWP was warm (red), cold (blue), dry (yellow), wet

The first IPCC report showed that it was much warmer in Northern Europe and United States, North America, in the year 1000 than it is today. There really was a medieval warm period, which was what allowed the Norse to settle in Greenland. and have a century or two of successful agriculture there. It’s never gotten that warm again since. It may happen, but the hockey stick curve basically erased that, so it was… It’s like these Orwellian novels. 1984, there was this… They continued to rewrite history, you know, so what was history yesterday was not history today, you know. So it was rewriting the past. There clearly was a warm period.There is evidence from all around the globe that it was much warmer in the year 1000 than today. We still have not gotten as warm as it was then.

HS: Yes, yes, and the warm period, as I understand, was followed by the Little Ice Age. So 19th century, the warming that started then is actually, it started at the end of this Little Ice Age.

Earth is still recovering from the Little Ice Age, which was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years, that ended about 150 years ago.

WH: That’s right, that’s right. For example, that’s very clear if you come to Alaska, And look at the Alaska glaciers. In particular, there’s a famous glacier bay in Alaska which was filled with glaciers in the year 1790 when it was first mapped by the British captain Vancouver. the ice came right out to the Pacific.

And already by 1800, it had receded up into the bay. Some of it was melting by 1800. And by 1850, most of the ice was gone. I’m talking about the 1800s, not the 1900s, not the present time. So it’s pretty clear from Glacier Bay that the warming began around the year 1800. And it’s just been steadily warming since then.

HS: I have been shown another graph many times which shows a correlation between the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature rise during the last, let’s say, 150-200 years. Yeah, it’s a correlation, of course, but is there any causation as well? Because you pointed it out as well that there is a warming effect. Carbon dioxide has a warming effect in the atmosphere, but it’s not leading as I understand.

WH: Yeah, that’s correct. You know, you can estimate past CO2 levels by looking at bubbles in ice cores from Antarctica or from Greenland. And you can also estimate past temperatures by looking at the ratios of oxygen isotopes in the ice and the other proxies. So there are these proxy estimates of past CO2 levels and past temperature.

And they are indeed tightly correlated. When their temperature is high, CO2 levels are high, and temperature is low, CO2 levels are low. But if you look at the time dependence, in every case, first the temperature changes and then the CO2 changes. Temperature goes up, a little bit later CO2 goes up.

Temperature goes down, a little bit later CO2 goes down. So they are indeed correlated, but the cause is not CO2, the cause is temperature. So something makes the temperature change and the CO2 is forced to follow. That’s easy to understand. It’s mostly due to CO2 dissolving in the ocean. The solubility of CO2 is very temperature dependent.

So if the world ocean’s cool, they suck more CO2 out of the atmosphere. And if they warm, more CO2 can come back into the atmosphere. So there’s nothing surprising about that. The only surprise is nobody really knows why the temperature changes, but it’s certainly not CO2 causing it to change because the CO2 follows the change.

HS: It doesn’t precede it. Causes have to precede their effects. from the same 2023 presentation that I already mentioned, that I listened. And as a member of Jason in 1982, you were one of the authors of a scientific paper that aimed to measure the effects of CO2 to global warming. The first number you got was too small. Then you just arbitrarily increased it.

WH: You’re asking, the key question is how much warming would be caused if you double carbon dioxide. That’s sometimes called the climate sensitivity or the doubling sensitivity. And the first person to seriously try to calculate that theoretically was your neighbor across the Baltic, Svante Arrhenius. He was a Swede and a very good chemist, and he was interested in this problem. He was the first one to really work on it, and his first paper was written in 1896. So the first climate warming paper was 1896 by Arrhenius, and he estimated that doubling CO2 at that time would warm the earth by around six degrees.

It was a big number. He didn’t know very much, so it was not a bad number given what he knew at the time. As he learned more, he kept bringing that number down, so the last number he published was about four degrees, and it was still going down. So the number that we published was three degrees, this little Jason study. So it was only a little bit smaller than Arrhenius’ number. But that was because neither he nor we really knew enough about how the climate works to get a reliable answer.

And I think the only way to really get a reliable answer is from good observations over long periods of time. And we simply don’t have good enough empirical data right now to know what that is. But I’m pretty sure that doubling CO2 by itself is unlikely to cause warming of more than about one degree Celsius. You know, if you do the simplest calculation, you find that answer, it’s a bit less than one degree for doubling CO2.

And so three degrees, four degrees, the only way to get that is with enormous positive feedbacks. And so that’s what these computer models do that we’ve been talking about. They inject feedbacks in a very obscure way so you can’t figure out what they’ve done. But it’s a supercomputer, so how could it be wrong? It must be right, it’s a computer after all. But nevertheless, it’s giving these absurd positive feedbacks. And most feedbacks in nature are not positive, they’re negative.

There’s even a law called Le Chatelier’s Principle, which is that if you perturb some chemical system or physical system, it has feedbacks. And they try to reduce the perturbation. They don’t try to make it bigger. They try to make it smaller. So climate has turned that completely on its head. It says all feedbacks in climate are positive, and if it’s negative, forget about it. You won’t get your research grant renewed next year if you put that in your proposal. So it’s a mess, and it’s going to take a long time to clean this up.

Of course, if someone is not on the right side of this net zero debate, people are starting calling him names. He’s a climate denier or climate skeptic and so on. But those ad hominem arguments are what are used in the media to shut down the arguments of even scientists. One of them is that if you’re not a climate scientist, you’re not allowed to talk about climate. Well, of course, that’s nonsense. Climate is really all physics and chemistry. And so anyone with a good grounding in physics and chemistry can know as much about climate as a climate scientist.

In general, climate scientists are not well educated. When I look at American universities, maybe it’s better in Estonia, but you go to a class and your education consists on how do you organize a petition to your local legislator. So that’s your knowledge as a climate scientist. You don’t have to learn physics, you don’t have to learn chemistry, you don’t have to learn electromagnetics and radiation transfer. You have to learn how to work the political process. So it’s true that most physicists aren’t very good at that. You know, they’re quite good at physics, but they’re not very good at talking to the Congress or to the president.

HS: Yeah, yeah. So basically, climate science has become something more like a social science in that sense.

WH: Yeah, that’s right. It’s been very heavily politicized. There was something very similar to this in the Soviet Union in the field of biology. There was this Ukrainian agronomist, Lysenko, who… got the ear of the Communist Party and was supported for many decades with just crazy theories about biology, you know, you could grow peaches on the Arctic Circle if you just listen to him. All sorts of nutty things and that there was no such thing as genes, but he had a lot of political support and so he essentially destroyed biology for a generation in the Soviet Union. You know if you taught your class about genes, you know, Mendel’s wrinkled peas and smooth peas, you were lucky if you were only fired, you know, you could have been sent to a concentration camp and several people were condemned to death for teaching about genes. And so I think climate science is a lot more like Lysenkoism than it is normal science.

HS: Yes, well, yes, this is something that we should be able to learn from because this was the Stalin era, this was the craziest time period, absolutely. In Eastern Europe we also know a lot about that and it does seem to me as well that Löschenkism is something that is like gaslighting the public and ostracizing renowned scientists, for example, like yourself. This is something that has been done related to climate science. Or how do you feel that? Do you feel that you have been targeted by those activists, activist politicians or not?

WH: I don’t feel any pain. I don’t pay much attention to them because I have very little respect for them. The people that I respect, most of them agree with me. I’ve personally not suffered from it, perhaps just because I don’t pay attention to it. I’m older, I’m retired, so I’m not dependent on government grants. Younger people could not do this. So people in the middle of their career have a very serious problem because they’ll lose their research funding and they won’t be able to continue their career if they don’t sign up to the alarmist Dogma.

HS: And one of the things how they shut down criticism is simply by stating that 97% of climate scientists are saying that our climate change or global warming, it is anthropogenic and you cannot argue with 97%, can you? What do you think? Is science democracy?

WH: There are some small anthropogenic effects on climate. Any big city, for example, is quite a bit warmer than the countryside. If you go 30 kilometers outside of New York City, it’s cooler. Or any other big city. So those are called urban heat island effects. So it’s clearly caused by people.

But if you look at undisturbed areas far from urban centers, there the climate is doing what it has always done. It’s warmed, it’s cooled, it’s done that many, many times over history. And there’s not the slightest sign of anything different resulting from our generation burning fossil fuels.

My own guess is that fossil fuels may have caused about close to a degree, maybe three-quarters of a degree of warming, but that’s not very much. When I got up this morning, it was minus 10 Celsius. Here in my office, it’s quite a bit warmer. One degree, you can hardly feel it. My air conditioner doesn’t trip on and off at one degree, so it’s not a dangerous increase in temperature. Saving the planet from one and a half degree of warming is just crazy. Who cares about one and a half degree of warming? It won’t be that much anyway. But if it were, it wouldn’t matter.

HS: If the planet warms a bit, is it actually bad to us?

WH: No, of course it’s not bad. For example, I have a backyard garden, and I would welcome another week or two of frost-free growing season in the fall and in the spring. I could have a better garden, and that’s true over much of the world. And if you look at the warming, most of the warming is in high latitudes where it’s cold. It’s where you live in Estonia, where I live in New Jersey. It doesn’t warm in India. It doesn’t warm in the Congo or in the Amazon. Even, you know, the climate models don’t predict that. They predict the warming, when it comes, will be mostly at high latitudes near the poles. And that’s where actually the warming will be good, not bad.

HS: One more question about climate science. It is being told to us that there is a consensus on anthropogenic climate change. And my question actually here is that in science, can there be a consensus? What is a consensus in science even?

WH: Well, I think you know very well that science has nothing to do with consensus. Michael Crichton was very eloquent about this. And if you don’t know about his work, you should read it. But he says when someone uses the word consensus, they’re really talking about politics, not science.

Science is determined by how well your understanding agrees with observations. If you have a theory and it agrees with observations, then the theory is probably right. But it’s right not because everybody, all your friends agree with it, it’s because it agrees with observation. You make a prediction and you do an experiment to see whether the prediction is right. If the experiment confirms it, then the theory is probably okay. It’s not okay because everybody agrees with you that your theory is right. And so that’s what the climate scientists are trying to claim, that science is made by consensus. It’s not made by consensus. There really is a science that is independent of people. There is a reality that could care less what the consensus is. It’s just the way the world works. And that’s real science.

HS: What are your views on energy transition? Should we, you know, stop burning fossil fuels? And why, if so?

WH: Well, of course, we shouldn’t stop burning fossil fuels. We can’t stop, you know. It’s suicide. It’s economic suicide. And more than economic, it’s real suicide. People will die. You know, they tried something like that in Sri Lanka, you know, 15, 20 years ago when the extremist government came in and stopped the use of chemical fertilizer, you know, because it was unnatural. So everyone was supposed to go back to organic farming and the result was that, you know, the rice crop failed, the tea crop failed, you know, the price of food went up, people were starving in the streets. The same thing will happen if we go to net zero.

You can’t run the world without fossil fuels. We’re completely dependent on them, especially for agriculture, but transportation and many other things. There’s nothing bad about them. If you burn them in a responsible way, they cause no harm. They release beneficial carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide really benefits the world. It’s not a pollutant at all.

HS: There is the question of how much longer will fossil fuels last. There is a finite number and for years people have wondered when will they run out and what will we do when we run out of fossil fuels. And so that’s an interesting question that’s worth talking about.

WH: It’s not an immediate problem, but sooner or later it will be a problem. My own guess, we’re talking about a century or two, not decades. But I think our descendants will have to replace fossil fuels, and my guess is that they will make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. No one has ever discovered a better fuel than a hydrocarbon, you know. We ourselves, you know, store energy as hydrocarbons. You know, the fat on our belly, you know, that’s a hydrocarbon. You know, so it’s really good, you know. So we can make hydrocarbons ourselves from limestone and water if you have enough energy.

There are ways to do that chemically. And so my guess is that in 200 years, that’s the way energy will be… handled. We’ll make it from inorganic carbon, limestone probably, and we’ll burn it the same way we do today. You know, we’ll make synthetic diesel, we’ll make synthetic gasoline, and continue to use internal combustion engines. No one’s invented a better engine than an internal combustion engine.

HS: But what about nuclear energy? What are your thoughts on that?

WH: Well, nuclear energy clearly works. It makes electricity, so you can’t run your automobile on nuclear energy unless you’re stupid enough to buy an electric car. So nuclear has had some of the same problems as fossil fuels. There are these ideological foes of nuclear energy And they have two main arguments. The first argument, and one that does worry me, is that it’s not that difficult to change a nuclear commercial enterprise into a weapon. And nuclear weapons really are very, very dangerous.

So that’s one of the oppositions. But the other is completely phony, is that we can’t handle the waste. That’s not a difficult problem, actually. It’s technically quite easy to handle the waste. For example, at a typical nuclear plant in the United States, there’s a dry cask storage yard, which is not as big as the parking lot. And it’s got a century worth of fuel. It’s perfectly safe. And you could leave it there for several centuries and nothing would happen to it. So there’s no need to process it. You can let it sit there and, you know, in a hundred years, maybe people will regard it as a useful mine for various materials. So nuclear is fine, and I think it will play an important role for a long time in human affairs.

You know, the big dream has always been fusion, nuclear fusion energy, where you combine deuterium and tritium, you know, and make power. That’s turned out to be much, much harder than we ever thought it would be. But my guess is it’s a problem that will eventually be solved.

Someone will have a really good new idea about how to do it. If we keep smart people working on it, someone will figure out how to do it. So I’m optimistic about the future for energy. I think humanity is going to do fine if they don’t self-destruct.

HS: Well, Professor, to kind of sum up, I would like to ask you about what is, in your opinion, what are the real problems? As I understand, and I tend to agree with you, climate change currently at least is not a real problem for humanity. But probably there are some. And what is your feeling? What are they?

Well, the problem has always been living together. How do you keep humanity from self-destructing? And that’s why I have some sympathy for the climate alarmists. They thought that having climate as a common enemy would be one way to prevent this. So you have to admit that that’s not such a bad motive.

I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think it will work. I think it’s worse than nothing. But I guess the question is how do we keep people in a civilized society indefinitely? And As I said, I’m a lot better with differential equations and instruments than I am with this sort of a question. But just speaking personally, I think everybody should have a feeling that they’re doing something significant with their lives. So I think anything we can do in society is to let young people feel like they’re significant and they’re doing something worthwhile and useful it would be good for the whole world.

	David A on UAH Cooling Everywhere Decembe…
	UAH Cooling Everywhe… on July 2025 Ocean SSTs: NH Warms…
	UAH Cooling Everywhe… on Worst Threat: Greenhouse Gas o…
	Michael Lewis on Yearend 2025, Cooling Temperat…
	Ron Clutz on Yearend 2025, Cooling Temperat…

Introduction

Data Quality and Bias

Model Interpretability and Transparency

Generalization and Overfitting

Comment:

Contemporary AMO Observations

Curiosity: Solar Coincidence?

Key Point

Background Post Temperature Changes Cause CO2 Changes, Not the Reverse

Changes in CO2 (ΔCO2)

Global Temperature Anomalies (ΔTemp)

Comparing UAH temperature anomalies to NOAA CO2 changes.

Previous Post: What Causes Rising Atmospheric CO2?

Summary:

Atmospheric CO2 Math

Resources

For a possible explanation of natural warming and CO2 emissions see Little Ice Age Warming Recovery May be Over

Resources:

Trump EPA Kicks Off Formal Reconsideration of Endangerment Finding with Agency Partners

Objections from the usual suspects

The Pathways and the Risks

What to Expect Next

February 2025 Ocean Warms, Land Cools

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

Ott/Shula: The second law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect

Footnote Regarding Observation of Downwelling IR near Earth Surface

Background Paper with complete discussion

First, Carbon Dioxide Now and at Higher Levels is a Weak Greenhouse Gas, So Reducing It to Net Zero Will Have a Negligible Effect on Temperatures

Second. The EPA’s MAGICC Model Confirms Carbon Dioxide Now and at Higher Levels is a Weak Greenhouse Gas, So Reducing It to Net Zero Will Have a Negligible Effect on Temperatures

Third. 600 Million Years of Carbon Dioxide Data Also Confirms Carbon Dioxide Now and at Higher Levels is a Weak Greenhouse Gas, So Reducing It to Net Zero Will Have a Negligible Effect on Temperatures

Finally, our comment details why the rule if adopted would help cause disastrous consequences for the poor, people worldwide, and future generations of Americans because it would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the use of fossil fuels.

Contemporary AMO Observations

Curiosity: Solar Coincidence?

Abstract

What If Everything You Thought About CO2 Was Wrong

Why would rising temperatures cause an increase in CO2

Nature contributes 96% of CO2 emissions

See Also: