Leszek Marks explains how warming and cooling alternated throughout the last 12,000 years and how our modern period is no different in his paper Contemporary global warming versus climate change in the Holocene. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T No Tricks Zone
Leszek Eugeniusz Marks is a Polish geologist, professor ordinarius, currently at the Warsaw University, Department of Climate Geology; and the Polish Geological Institute-National Research Institute, president of Committee for Quaternary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. At present, member of editorial boards of scientific journals Boreas, “Litosfera”, “Geography and Geology”, and Studia Quaternaria.
Abstract
Cyclical climate change is characteristic of the Holocene, with successive warmings and coolings. A solar forcing mechanism has steered Holocene climate change, expressed by 9 cooling phases known as Bond events. There is reliable geological evidence that the temperatures of most warming phases in the Holocene were globally higher or similar to that of the current warming period, Arctic sea ice was less extensive and most mountain glaciers in the northern hemisphere either disappeared or were smaller. During the African Humid Period in the Early and Middle Holocene, much stronger summer monsoons made the Sahara green with growth of savanna vegetation, huge lakes and extensive peat bogs. The modern warming is part of a climatic cycle with a progressive warming after the Little Ice Age, the last cold episode of which occurred at the beginning of the 19th century. Successive climate projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based on the assumption that the modern temperature rise is steered exclusively by the increasing content of human-induced CO2 in the atmosphere. If compared with the observational data, these projected temperatures have been highly overestimated.
Overview
This paper presents the current state of knowledge of the climate change in the Holocene. The geological record of the climate change in this epoch has been verified by the results of archaeological, historical and meteorological investigations (Marks, 2016). Determination of the steering forces of modern warming is among the current scientific priorities in the world and, therefore, geological input is an important contribution to the discussion about human impact on the climate.
The current interglacial of the Holocene started 11.7 ka cal BP (Walker et al., 2018), with progressively increasing human impact on the Earth’s environment, especially strong during the past decades (Gibbard et al., 2021). Geological examination of past climate changes is crucial to distinguish the natural and the human-induced factors of the current climate change. The most important climate-steering factor is solar radiation, subjected to cyclical changes caused by the Sun’s activity that supplies with over 99% of the energy that is responsible for the climate of the Earth. Geological reconstructions show that rises and falls in the temperature on the Earth are dependent on the sunspot cycles (Table 1; Easterbrook, 2011; Usoskin et al., 2016; Usoskin,2023), and these in turn respond to the varying magnetic activity of the Sun.
The natural input of solar energy is transformed by different external and internal factors to modulate climate on the Earth. Latitudinal insolation in the Holocene depended on the Earth’s orbital parameters (Milankovič cycles). In comparison with the present values, summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere were higher in the Early and Middle Holocene (Beer, Van Geel, 2008; Beer, Wanner, 2012). Winter temperatures in the southern hemisphere were higher in the Middle Holocene, followed by higher temperatures in the northern hemisphere in the Late Holocene. In the coming 3 ka, lower temperatures are expected everywhere, except for the intertropical zone where higher winter temperatures are expected (Marks, 2016).
The natural rhythm of climate change during the Holocene was disturbed by large volcanic eruptions. Emission of dust into the atmosphere was responsible for a couple of cold events during the Holocene (Shindell et al., 2003). Such eruptions can be detected by concentrations of SO2 in polar ice core records (Zielinski et al., 1994; Castellano et al., 2004). The extent of the vegetation cover had an important, but very complex, effect on the climate (Foley et al., 2003), because the evaporative cooling by a forest mitigated warmings and limited dust mobilisation (Bonan, 2008). The atmospheric CO2 concentration decreased in the Early Holocene and started to increase since 7 ka, being independent of temperature variations (Palacios et al., 2024a). Ocean-atmosphere interchange was the main source of CO2 until the recent decades when the anthropogenic emission of CO2 became significant (Brovkin et al., 2019).
Fig. 1. Climate change in the Holocene, adapted from Palacios et al. (2024a) and modified: warm periods are in yellow and less warm in pale yellow, and cold in blue; Bond Events are after Bond et al. (1997, 2001) and geochronology after Walker et al. (2019).
Climate change after the Holocene Thermal Maximum
The temperature deduced from the oxygen isotope curve in the Greenland ice core GISP2 shows that several warmings occurred after the Holocene Thermal Maximum (Fig. 1; Drake, 2012). These were periods during which great progress in the development of human societies occurred: Late Bronze Age, Roman Warm Period and the MWP. The separating cold Bond Events, named the Iron Age and Dark Ages Cold Periods respectively, were expressed by economic, intellectual and cultural decline. The temperature history since 900 CE was based firstly on the estimated climate history of central England (Lamb, 1977; IPCC, 1990). This showed a distinct warming of ~1.3°C when compared with the LIA (Moberg et al., 2005; D’Arrigo et al., 2006; Mann et al., 2009). This warming was a result of natural processes, because human activity could not have had any significant effect on temperature changes before 1900 CE. The Roman Warm Period (250 BC–450 CE), the MWP (950–1250 CE) and the Modern Warming Period reflect 1000-cycles with high solar radiation (Table 1; Vahrenholt, Lüning, 2014).
Discussion
The claim of the IPCC (2021) that ‘…the latest decade was warmer than any multi-century period after the Last Interglacial, around 125,000 years ago’ ignores all the knowledge about reconstructed temperatures in the Holocene, based on multi-proxy palaeoclimatic data.
Despite the extensive northern ice sheets, the increased summer insolation in the northern hemisphere caused a warming trend from the beginning of the Holocene and lasting until the Middle Holocene (Palacios et al., 2024a). This warming trend was reversed from 6–5 ka onwards, due to decreased summer insolation in the northern hemisphere. Such general warming or cooling trends in the Holocene were interrupted by short periods with opposite and abrupt temperature changes (Fig. 1).
The modern warming represents a part of the cyclical climate change after the LIA, the last cold episode of which occurred at the beginning of the 19th century. The LIA with low temperatures is named the pre industrial period by the advocates of global anthropogenic warming and such an approach helps them to promote the idea that an increased human emission of CO2 (especially in the 20th century) is the only reason for rising temperatures on Earth. They do not bother with the evidence that the mutual time relations of global temperature and contents of CO2 in the atmosphere in 1980–2019 indicate a leading role of temperature, a rise of which was followed in that time by a 6-month delay in the rise of CO2 (Humlum et al., 2012; Koutsoyiannis, Kundzewicz, 2020).
The official curve of the global mean annual temperature anomalies based on regular measurements (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/) overlaps slightly with the temperature projections in reports of the IPCC (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, 2014, 2021). These IPCC projections were created by climate models, based on the assumption that the modern temperature rise is steered exclusively by the increasing content of human-induced CO2 in the atmosphere while the role of water vapour as the main greenhouse gas is neglected (cf. Hołyst, 2020). Such an approach makes the IPCC-projected temperature highly overestimated if compared with the observational data (Fig. 3). Despite the lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, connected with large cutbacks in transport, travel, industrial production and energy generation, no reduction in atmospheric CO2 was noted. This fact suggests that the proposed reductions in global energy use would be most probably highly ineffective in limiting the level of atmospheric CO2.
Fig. 3. Global estimates of mean annual temperature anomalies (1880–2023), based on land and ocean data (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/) and temperature projections to AD 2100 in the successive IPCC reports (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, 2014, 2021)
Conclusions
The Holocene climate change was characterized by cyclical warmings (such as: Holocene Thermal Maximum, Late Bronze Age, Roman Warm Period, MWP) and coolings (Bond Events: including Iron Age Cold Period, Dark Ages Cold Period and LIA). The IPCC claims that current warming is unprecedented in the last 2000 or even the last 125,000 years; this statement is very unconvincing and it is not supported by the geological data. There is good evidence that both in the last 2000 years as well during the Holocene Thermal Maximum, temperatures were higher or broadly similar to the ones in the current warming period, the Arctic sea ice was less extensive and most mountain glaciers (especially in the northern hemisphere) either disappeared or were smaller. Much stronger summer monsoons in the Early and Middle Holocene made the Sahara green with savanna vegetation, huge lakes and extensive peat bogs. The terms ‘the Holocene Thermal Maximum’ and ‘the Holocene Climatic Optimum’ are avoided by the IPCC (2021), and its popularized statements making the current warming look ‘unprecedented’ and therefore ‘unique’ are false and flatten the climate history (cf. Marcott et al., 2013).
The climate is a product of complicated interdependence of many factors that have not been yet sufficiently recognized qualitatively and quantitatively. It is a great scientific challenge that requires an extensive interdisciplinary research. There is a crucial need to make climate science less political and climate policy more scientific.
Linnea Lueken sers the record straight on fracking in the above video from Prager U. Transcript in italics below with my added images.
It is one of the greatest innovations of the last fifty years.
It has saved consumers billions of dollars…
Prevented untold tons of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere…
And almost single-handedly rescued an economy that was in the middle of a severe downturn.
You’ve probably heard of this innovation — not as a source of pride, but as an object of scorn.
I’m talking about fracking: the process of extracting oil and natural gas from fine cracks in shale rock.
So, what gives?
Originated from treehugger.com
Why has something that has done so much good been so unappreciated — even vilified?
The answer, of course, is that the opponents of fracking — environmentalists and their political and media allies — say that the negatives of fracking outweigh its positives.
What are those negatives?
Detractors have a long list: contributing to global warming, putting local drinking water at risk, and even causing earthquakes are high among their complaints.
Those are pretty serious charges. But are they valid?
Before I answer that question, let’s cover a little history.
Fracking — whatever your current impression of it — is a great American success story.
Before the twenty-first century, fracking as we know it now barely existed. The concept — reaching pockets of oil and gas trapped in shale — had been around for decades, but wasn’t practically or financially feasible.
Technological breakthroughs and a few eureka moments — like horizontal drilling and using improved ground-penetrating radar — in the early 2000s changed everything.
In traditional oil production, a company drills a well with the goal of finding a reservoir of oil. In fracking, the goal is to liberate a vast number of small pockets of oil and gas that have been trapped in the shale rock.
A narrow shaft is drilled — first vertically, and then horizontally. Water, mixed with sand and other additives, is pumped down the shaft at extremely high pressure to create tiny fissures in the surrounding rock. The sand holds the tiny cracks open, allowing the oil and gas to escape and flow back up the well to the surface.
What makes the innovation of fracking even more remarkable is that it emerged at a time when the theory of “Peak Oil” was widely accepted. Advocates of this theory—including many prominent scientists—warned that humans would soon run out of fossil fuels.
Fracking turned the theory upside down. In a matter of a few years, the world had more oil and gas than it knew what to do with — most of it coming from the United States.
The benefits from the fracking revolution were almost immediate.
The price of natural gas fell from $9 per cubic foot to $3. Consumers saved big on their gas and electric bills.
As gas replaced coal as a cheap, reliable energy source, greenhouse gas emissions fell more than 20%.
The US economy, reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, reversed course. The fracking boom was the number one reason.
Ironically, the politician who benefited the most from this boom was a fierce foe of fossil fuels, President Barack Obama. And, while he continued to push his green agenda, he did almost nothing to stop the fracking phenomenon.
Perhaps he read the science. It emphatically endorses natural gas as a clean energy source. Even Carl Pope, then the executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the world’s largest environmental groups, came out for fracking. As Pope saw it, natural gas was the perfect transition between fossil fuels and alternative energy.
With that history in mind, let’s return to the charges made by opponents of fracking.
The EPA — hardly a friend of the oil and gas industry — has looked closely into the question of whether fracking puts aquifers, the source of much of our drinking water, at risk. One EPA study examined 110,000 fracking sites. It concluded that fracking does not pose a threat. One obvious reason is that fracking is done at depths of six to ten thousand feet. Water tables tend to be at 500 feet or higher.
What about the concern that fracking causes earthquakes? Numerous studies have concluded that related tremors are so minor they’re barely detectable and cause no damage. At its worst, it produces vibrations comparable to a passing truck.
According to the EPA emissions of sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, particulates, and carbon dioxide have all declined since large-scale fracking began and natural gas replaced coal for much of the nation’s electricity production.
Something else that natural gas has going for it which isn’t talked about much is land use. Per megawatt, natural gas uses about 12.4 total acres – including mining and transmission lines. By comparison, solar uses about 43.5 acres per megawatt, and wind uses more than 70.
More energy, less pollution, lower prices for consumers, small footprint.
Instead of vilifying fracking, maybe we should throw it a parade.
I’m Linnea Lueken, research fellow at the Heartland Institute, for Prager University.
The Boston Globe posted an article titled “Climate change is bringing creepy — and dangerous — bacteria, bugs, and viruses to New England,” claiming that global warming is “fueling an increase in bacteria and disease” in New England. The headline and the attached story are highly misleading. For things like mosquito-borne illness, mosquitos carrying diseases previously thrived even in New England in previous centuries, with 20th century human intervention wiping them out, not temperature changes. Also, bacteria in waterways are a seasonal phenomenon which has always existed.
The Real New England Crisis is Green Agenda Attack on Electricity Supply
Fall is here, the leaves are changing, the temperature is dropping and sadly New England families know the routine.
Every month, the electric bill arrives, and it’s larger than the month before. The region pays more for electricity than almost anyone else in America—higher than the national average and, outside of Alaska and Hawaii, higher than anywhere else in the country. This is not a coincidence. It is the inevitable result of politicians who pushed the risky and unreliable green agenda while forcing reliable power plants off the grid.
Here’s an inconvenient history lesson. When Joe Biden took office, electricity in New England cost 20.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. By the time he left, it was more than 28.2 cents. That’s a staggering spike of more than 36% in just four years. Hundreds of dollars gone from family budgets and small businesses every single year. For working households already feeling the squeeze of Biden’s inflation, it can mean the difference between savings and debt, between heating a home and keeping it uncomfortably cold.
October 2022 generation in New England, by fuel source
And the blame is clear. The forced closure of coal, oil, and natural gas plants in the name of “climate progress” is why rates are climbing. In 2022, Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey traveled to Somerset to celebrate the shutdown of traditional energy plants. They smiled for the cameras, congratulated themselves on a “victory,” and then went back to Washington while families were left to pay the tab.
First came the celebration, but now we see the deflection. Four Democratic senators, including Warren and Markey, recently wrote a letter to the Trump administration suddenly pretending to care about rising electricity bills. It is political theater and nothing more. They didn’t care when they cheered the closures in 2022, and they don’t care now. New England’s families are stuck with the consequences of the green agenda they applauded; they just want to escape the blame.
Project abandoned in 2017 after New York blocked planning and permit processes.
Let’s be clear: This cascade of closures started when Joe Biden was vice president and accelerated under his presidency. Nearly 400 fossil fuel plants have been shuttered across the country since 2010, including almost 300 coal plants. In the Northeast alone, names like Indian Point in New York, Eagle Point in New Jersey, Schiller Station in New Hampshire, and Canal Station in Massachusetts have been crossed off the map. Each closure meant fewer megawatts of reliable power and higher bills for families.
Project abandoned in April 2016
The problem is not complicated. Shutting down affordable, always-on power and replacing it with expensive, intermittent sources like wind and solar leads to higher prices. Add the surge in demand from artificial intelligence data centers, which analysts say could double electricity consumption by 2030, and the consequences are obvious: higher costs, weaker reliability, and a grid at the breaking point.
There is a way out of this crisis, but it requires real action, not pointless blaming. My organization, Power The Future, lays out the steps in our recent report.
♦ First, use the Defense Production Act to treat grid reliability as the national security issue it is, and direct resources to keep critical plants online. ♦ Second, build new fossil fuel plants—modern natural gas and coal facilities that can deliver decades of dependable, affordable power. ♦ Third, halt premature closures until replacement capacity is running, not just promised on paper. And fourth, expand the capacity of existing coal plants, many of which are running below potential thanks to political limits, to quickly add thousands of megawatts back to the grid.
These are not radical ideas. They are common sense. They put working families, not political slogans, at the center of energy policy. They recognize that you cannot run a 21st-century economy on wishful thinking, photo-ops, and subsidies for technology that fails when the wind doesn’t blow, or the sun doesn’t shine.
Too many of New England’s “leaders” in Washington have turned their states into punchlines of America’s power prices. Working families deserve leaders who care more about their constituents’ bills than their standing with environmental activists. They deserve an energy policy grounded in reality, not ideology.
If you want to know who killed affordable power in New England, it wasn’t President Trump and it wasn’t the utility companies. All you need to do is just look at who popped the champagne when the plants closed.
There have been three climate lawsuits in Montana from Our children’s Trust:
Barhaugh v Montana in 2011.
Held v Montana in 2022-2023.
Lighthiser v Trump in 2025.
There has been little change in the wording of these climate lawsuits. HvM still has AG Bullock’s name in it even though Montana elected him Governor as of 2012. The science argument in these three climate lawsuits has not changed.
They all claim the government is damaging the physical and mental health of children by allowing human CO2 emissions to continue.
But the schools and parents are damaging their children’s mental and health brainwashing them to believe human carbon emissions are destroying the planet.
The fundamental science issue in all climate lawsuits is whether these unstated hypotheses are true or false:
(1) Human CO2 causes all the CO2 increase above 280 ppm.
(2) This CO2 increase causes global warming.
(3) This global warming causes the plaintiffs claimed damages.
The plaintiffs assume these three hypotheses are true, and they will admit it in court. Otherwise, they would have no basis for their claims.
To prevail, the defense needs to prove only one of these hypotheses is false. In fact, it is easy to prove all three hypotheses are false in a court of law.
Here’s a critical point that few people understand:
The scientific method says it is impossible to prove a hypothesis is true so the alarmists cannot prove these hypotheses are true. The plaintiffs have the burden of proof.
However, we can prove these hypotheses are false by showing they make one false prediction or contradiction with data. This is the key to science.
This is what parents and teachers and media should be teaching the kids.
1. Barhaugh v. Montana
Barhaugh v. Montana: Petition for Original Jurisdiction, Montana Supreme Court, 2011, was the first climate lawsuit in Montana.
To justify its petition to the Montana Supreme Court, BvM says on page 5:
“Through the normal litigation and appeals process, this issue would likely take a minimum of two to three years just to reach this Court, in contrast to the average 60 days needed to resolve original proceedings.
“Considering the scientific evidence cited by the Respondent, there is not enough time to effectively arrest the effect of human-caused climate change unless immediate action is taken.”
“Climatological “tipping points” lie directly ahead and drive the urgency of taking action:
“The further we look into the future, the worse the costs of inaction will become. The longer we do nothing, the greater the risks of an irreversible climate catastrophe, such as a massive rise in sea levels, which could make the world unable to support anything like the current levels of population and economic activity. The costs and risks of inaction are overwhelmingly worse than the moderate and manageable costs of an immediate effort to reduce carbon emissions.”
Barhaugh v. Montana justified its petition to the Montana Supreme Court by predicting an irreversible climatological “tipping point” would occur in the next three years.
The Petition is based upon its assumption that the three unstated climate hypotheses are true. Assuming these hypotheses are true, the plaintiffs claimed certain damages. But all their claims are based on their assumption that their three hypotheses above are true.
The Intervention led by Dr. Edwin X Berry of Bigfork, Montana, prevented the Montana Supreme Court from ruling in favor of the Petition.
Berry’s Intervenors presented evidence that contradicted the Petition’s assumptions.
Their evidence constrained Montana Attorney General Bullock’s reply to the Court because he could not go on record disputing the Intervenors’ evidence that the Petitioners’ claims about climate science may not be true.
Montana AG Bullock wrote:
This disputed record is just one example of the factual determinations this Court would need to make to rule for Petitioners.
In addition, it would need to address, among other issues, the current state of climate change science; the role of Montana in the global problem of climate change; how emissions created in Montana ultimately affect Montana’s climate; whether the benefits of energy production must be balanced against the potential harm of climate change; and the concrete limits, if any, of the alleged “affirmative duty.”
The Montana Supreme Court ruled:
As the State points out, the petition incorporates factual claims such as that the State “has been prevented by the Legislature from taking any action to regulate [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
The State posits that the relief requested by Petitioners would require numerous other factual determinations, such as the role of Montana in the global problem of climate change and how emissions created in Montana ultimately affect Montana’s climate.
This Court is ill-equipped to resolve the factual assertions presented by Petitioners. We further conclude that Petitioners have not established urgency or emergency factors that would preclude litigation in a trial court followed by the normal appeal process.
The court could not determine whether the Petitioners or the Intervenors were correct about climate because, in the court’s view, there is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to decide the case as a matter of law.
The Court rejected the Barhaugh v. Montana Petition.
Quentin Rhoades, Attorney for the Intervenors, wrote that the Montana Supreme Court ruled against the Petitioners because,
“There is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to allow a court to decide the case purely as a matter of law.
Rhoades concluded,
“This establishes once and for all, at least as far as Montana law is concerned, climate science is decidedly not settled.
“And not only is it the highest court of a sovereign state, but it ruled that there is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to allow for them to decide the case purely as a matter of law.”
2. Held v Montana
Montana AG Knudsen should have dismissed Held v Montana based on the now-proven-false climate prediction of Barhaugh v. Montana and the Montana Supreme Court ruling.
The Montana Supreme Court ruled in 2011,
“There is no scientific consensus that is sufficiently well-settled to allow a court to decide the case purely as a matter of law.”
Consensus has no bearing on scientific truth. Montana’s AG Knudsen should have known this because all trial lawyers learn it.
Republican AG Knudson should have argued that consensus proves nothing in science. The only relevant proof in science is proof that a hypothesis is false.
Yet AG Knudsen stipulated “consensus” was valid at the beginning of the HvM trial:
“for the purposes of trial, there is a scientific consensus that earth is warming as a direct result of human GHG emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.”
AG Knudsen’s “consensus” stipulation contradicted the Montana Supreme Court.
AG Knudsen’s climate stipulation put him to the left of former Democrat AG Bullock.
On 9/16/2025, Matthew Brown, of the lying Associated Press, wrote about HvM:
Young climate activists and their attorneys who won a landmark global warming trial against the state of Montana are trying to convince a federal judge to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels.
No, they did not “win.” Montana AG Knudsen purposely LOST Held v Montana as Montana WEF man ordered him to do.
Knudsen produced NO defense, NO relevant expert witness, and NO challenge to the plaintiffs’ expert witness claims. He laid on the grass and let the opposition trample on Montana.
Knudsen’s purposeful loss of HvM is the worst betrayal by an elected official of the people who voted for him that I have ever witnessed.
3. Lighthiser v Trump
Lighthiser v. Trump uses the same bad science as Barhaugh v. Montana and Held v Montana.
On September 17, 2025, I traveled to Missoula and sat in on part of the Lighthiser v Trump trial. In my view, Trump’s attorney made good arguments to dismiss LvT. Now, we wait for the judge to decide whether to dismiss LvT.
If LvT continues, I encourage Trump’s attorney to use the arguments that I describe in my other articles to prove hypotheses (1), (2), and (3) are false. They are easy proofs to make in court.
If the LvT trial continues, Trump’s attorney should plan to prove hypotheses (1) and (2) are false and as a bonus prove that (3) is also false. This defeat would remove the influence of the climate fraud on politics.
Comment:
September 17 and 18, 2025, was a two-day injunction hearing in the case of Lighthiser v. Trump, in the Federal District of Montana Butte Division. While federal Judge Dana Christensen listened to a few more of the plaintiffs’ witnesses and closing arguments, he was mulling over a few difficult legal questions regarding the plaintiffs’ injunction request. [Source: Missoula Current]
“In your motion, it says you want a preliminary injunction from me prohibiting the defendants from implementing these three orders. What exactly does that look like? I enjoin them, and what else do I do?” Christensen asked plaintiffs’ attorney Julia Olson during her closing statement. “Let’s assume these defendants elect to continue to implement policy favoring fossil fuels regardless of what I say. What will I do then?”
Olson said the defense attorneys hadn’t contested the statement that the central purpose of the executive orders is unleashing fossil fuels. But in his closing statement for the defense, DOJ attorney Michael Sawyer said that wasn’t the only thing the plaintiffs had to show. They have to prove they have standing by showing how they’re harmed by the executive orders and how that harm might be relieved by an injunction and eventually a ruling. That last part, known as redressability, was perplexing Christensen, and Sawyer weighed in, saying such an “unprecedented” injunction would be too difficult to police.
“If there were to be a preliminary injunction, there would be numerous requests back here. Every time an agency action is issued that plaintiffs didn’t like, that they thought was too friendly to fossil fuels, they’d be back here again,” Sawyer said. “What we have here is hundreds of lawsuits packed into one.”
The Defendants Brief in Opposition to Plantiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction is here.
In addition to the AG Montana and US DOJ, the submission was joined by AGs from:
Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Guam
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.
Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. I’ve grown weary of waiting each month for HadSST4 updates, so this report is based on data from OISST2.1. This dataset uses the same in situ sources as HadSST along with satellite indicators. Importantly, it produces daily anomalies from baseline period 1991-2020. The data is available at Climate Reanalyzer (here). Product guide is (here). The charts and analysis below is produced from the current data.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in OISST2.1 starting in 2015 through August 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 and cooling in 2025.
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 0.6°C in 2023, ~0.2° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. During 2 years of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by Tropics cooling the last 12 months from its 0.9°C peak last August, down to 0.3C in August this year. Small changes in NH and SH offset each other, leaving the global anomaly the same.
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
To enlarge, open image 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, continuing February through April 2025, with little change in May,June and July despite upward bumps in NH.
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 reached 1.4C before declining to 0.9 last month. 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. Note 2025 started much lower than the previous year and headed sharply downward, well below the previous two years, then since April through August aligning with 2010.
The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.
The rose line is the average anomaly 1982-1996 inclusive, value -0.25. The orange line the average 1982-2025, value -0.014 also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2015-2025, value 0.32. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.
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?
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
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). Then there was an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2, and now dropping steadily back toward normal values.
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 ~65 ppm, an 18% 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.
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 in 2024 we saw 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
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 August 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 the update from HadSST4 or OISST2.1. I posted recently on SSTs July 2025 Ocean SSTs: NH Warms Slightly. 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. 2025 has shown a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February. Then land air temps, especially NH, dropped in February and recovered in March. Now in July SH ocean dropped markedly, pulling down the Global ocean anomaly despite a rise in the Tropics. SH land also cooled by half, driving Global land temps down despite Tropics land warming.
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 August 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 to a low of 0.27C in January. In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global ocean air anomaly up to 0.47C, where it stayed in March and April. In May drops in NH and Tropics pulled the air temps over oceans down despite an uptick in SH. At 0.43C, ocean air temps were similar to May 2020, albeit with higher SH anomalies. Now in August Global ocean temps are little changed since SH rose, offsetting NH cooling and Tropics plummenting down to 0.16C from its peak of 1.24C March 2024.
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 August 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. In March that drop reversed with both NH and Global land back to January values, holding there in April. In May sharp drops in NH and Tropics land air temps pulled the Global land air temps back down close to February value. In August Tropics land air dropped sharply, down from 0.58C to 0.26C, and NH land also cooled by 0.1C, offset by SH rising, resulting in no change of Global land air temps.
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 -0.0, 2for 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. Now in August Global Land and Ocean is down to 0.39C
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.
Previously I have demonstrated that temperature changes are predictive of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. That includes the remarkable GMT spike starting in January 2023 and rising to a peak in April 2024. The most recent study was June 2025 Update–Temperature Falls, CO2 Follows employing Mauna Loa CO2 data and UAH GMT data.
More recently another researcher, Bernard Robbins, found similar causation between ML CO2 and SST fluctuations reported by NOAA Global SST dataset. See More Evidence Temperatures Drive CO2 Levels, Not the Reverse. Along with some comments on my blog, I wondered whether the entire ML record of CO2 levels could be predicted from global temperature changes, which would require a GMT dataset covering 1959 to the present. This post shows that HADCRUT5 qualifies and indeed confirms other studies by researchers. I was particularly interested in the lack of warming in the 1960s and 70s, before the satellite temperature data became available.
The answer is yes: Just as temperature spikes result
in a corresponding CO2 spike as expected. Cooler temperatures are predictive of lower CO2 levels.
Above are HadCRUT5 temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.
Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for HadCRUT5 are anomalies referenced to the 1961-1990 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 1959 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. The values for scaling HADCRUT5 and MLCO2 were “a” = 1.12 and “b” = 1.65 Here is the result of those calculations.
In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9992 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 well 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 0.98
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:
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?
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.
When Americans hear about carbon dioxide (CO2), it’s often shown as a harmful pollutant that threatens the planet. Politicians, activists, and media outlets warn that if we don’t reduce emissions right away, disaster will happen.
Preeminent “climate scientist” Al Gore told Congress in 2007, “The science is settled. Carbon dioxide emissions – from cars, power plants, buildings, and other sources – are heating the Earth’s atmosphere.” He continued warning, “The planet has a fever.”
What if the fever is instead a cold plunge? As CNN reminded us earlier this year, “Record-breaking cold: Temperatures to plunge to as much as 50 degrees below normal.”
The Weather Channel posted on Facebook last week, “Record-breaking cold temperatures for the month of August provide many their first taste of fall.” What happened to global warming?
Let’s not focus on the last year or the last fifty years. Instead, let’s look at the past 600 million years. From this perspective, the story looks very different.
Dr. Patrick Moore, cofounder of Greenpeace, authored a policy paper in 2016 titled, “The positive impact of CO2 emissions on the survival of life on earth.” Note the organization he cofounded. This is not some far-right, anti-science, fascist, Nazi, white supremacist organization, as the left would characterize anyone questioning “settled” climate science. Since its founding in 1971, Greenpeace has promoted environmental activism.
Dr. Moore, in his paper, presented this graph. The graph caption indicates that temperature and atmospheric CO2 are only loosely correlated, if at all. It’s a graph of global temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration over the past 600 million years. Note both temperature and CO2 are lower today than they have been during most of the era of modern life on Earth since the Cambrian Period. Also, note that this does not indicate a lockstep cause-effect relationship between the two parameters.
The main point from the graph is that current CO2 levels are not dangerously high. In fact, they are quite the opposite, being some of the lowest in history. For most of Earth’s history, CO2 concentrations were many times higher than today’s 420 ppm. Even during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed, levels were about four times higher than today.
From a geological view, our current CO2 levels are among the lowest in history. Yet climate advocates focus on a tiny rise in CO2 in recent years, ignoring the previous half billion years.
Alarmists scream that 420 ppm is unprecedented and endangers the planet’s survival. However, the reality is nearly the opposite: we could be experiencing a CO2 drought.
To my knowledge, dinosaurs didn’t drive gas-guzzling SUVs, run the air conditioner, or cook on gas stoves. Yet, miraculously, the Earth neither burned up nor became uninhabitable, as Al Gore and other climate alarmists currently predict. Instead, life thrived, diversified, and expanded to the point that I can write this article on my laptop, in the comfort of my air-conditioned home, before I fire up the grill for dinner.
What stands out is not correlation but complexity. Temperature and CO2 did not move in lockstep. Sometimes, CO2 was high during cooling periods, and other times, CO2 decreased while temperatures rose. The “lockstep causation” story falls apart when viewed over millions of years. Earth’s climate is influenced by many factors, such as solar cycles, orbital changes, volcanic activity, and ocean currents, not just a single trace gas.
CO2 makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere, less than one part per thousand. The complexity is summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
If CO2 has in the past reached ten times current levels without causing a runaway greenhouse effect, how can today’s modest increase be seen as an existential threat? The Earth system is more resilient than many activists admit. That resilience, demonstrated over hundreds of millions of years of survival, should humble today’s doom prophets.
Fortunately, policymakers are beginning to see that climate alarmism is based on shaky ground. As ZeroHedge reported, Trump’s EPA plans to remove greenhouse gases from the list of regulated pollutants, recognizing that treating CO₂ like sulfur dioxide or mercury isn’t scientifically justified. They summarized the rationale well.
Trump’s reversal of EPA standards and deregulation will help the U.S. economy. More importantly, it starts the much-needed process of removing climate change brainwashing from the federal government’s vernacular. It’s time for Western civilization to abandon the climate hoax and move on.
Published February, 2025
More recently, the New York Times reported a more significant development: The EPA is now revoking its Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases. That 2009 decision served as the legal, though not scientific, foundation for the federal government’s climate policy.
By rescinding it, the agency admits what skeptics have claimed all along. CO2 is not a poison but a natural part of the biosphere, essential for plant life, agriculture, and human survival. Simply put, CO2 is plant food and vital for life on Earth.
When even the EPA admits that the case against CO2 isn’t as strong as claimed, why should the rest of us accept the narrative of “settled science,” whether it’s about CO2 or COVID-era masks, vaccines, distancing, and lockdowns?
Perhaps the most troubling result of climate panic isn’t faulty science but poor policymaking. Fear opens the door to authoritarian control. We saw this during COVID lockdowns when extreme restrictions were justified in the name of “public health.” Climate alarmists now use the same tactics, claiming that global warming is “an existential threat.”
As HotAir recently reported, three Canadian provinces have implemented sweeping bans on entering woodland areas, citing wildfire risks and climate change. Violators face heavy fines or jail time. Critics quickly pointed out the striking similarity to so-called “climate lockdowns,” once dismissed as conspiracy theories. Yet here they are, with citizens barred from a common outdoor activity in the name of climate policy.
This isn’t environmental stewardship; it’s authoritarian social control. A government willing to close forests today will be willing to restrict cars, air travel, or even personal diets tomorrow, all justified as part of a “climate emergency.”
Once rights are limited in the name of carbon, what boundaries remain? After all, humans exhale CO2, making all human activity a threat to the species, activities that should be restricted or stopped at any cost. In other words, population control by any means necessary.
None of this is to deny that climate science involves uncertainty. Proxy data are imperfect, and today’s industrial society introduces variables that weren’t present millions of years ago. Climate sensitivity to CO2, although debated, may not be zero, but is probably negligible and not worth imposing overwhelming socioeconomic regulations and burdens on working families and developing nations.
But uncertainty cuts both ways. If the science is uncertain, then the justification for strict, top-down rules collapses. Policy should demonstrate humility, not arrogance. Instead of harsh restrictions, we should focus on balanced adaptation, resilient infrastructure, responsible energy choices, and innovation, all while maintaining freedom and prosperity.
The real irony is that the more you zoom out, the less CO2 seems to be the “control knob” of climate. Over 600 million years, CO2 levels were much higher than today’s, yet Earth stayed habitable and life flourished. If anything, our current levels could be too low, raising worries about agricultural productivity and plant growth in a CO2-deficient atmosphere, which might cause starvation and desolation.
We are told to fear things that could actually be helpful. Higher CO2 levels increase crop yields, support reforestation, and restore dry lands. Calling it “pollution” goes against biology itself. CO2 is plant food, and without it, humans might face extinction like the dinosaurs.
It’s time to replace fear with perspective. Instead of shutting down people, destroying industries, or labeling farmers as villains, we should understand that CO2 is not our enemy. Climate alarmism is. Believing otherwise isn’t science; it’s superstition.
They shoot, they miss, we score. David Wojick reports on the laughable failure of alarmists in his CFACT article Attack on DOE Climate Report is a comedy of criticism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The DOE science report saying the impact of CO2 on climate is exaggerated was quickly followed by a massive alarmist report. The alarmist report claimed to refute the DOE report, and the press dutifully reported it doing that.
On close inspection, I find this claim to be not even close to true. In fact, it looks laughable. Mind you, this is a preliminary finding, as the two reports together run about 600 pages. I just took what is arguably the key DOE chapter and compared the two reports on that.
This is the chapter on CO2 sensitivity, which is how much warming will occur (in theory) if the atmospheric concentration doubled. It is a convenient metric that is widely used to assess the potential adverse impact, if any, of increasing CO2.
I first looked at the DOE report, then at the alarmist report, anxious to see how they claimed to falsify the DOE version. What I found instead was that they did not disagree with a single thing the DOE report said. No falsification, no refutation, not even a simple disagreement. Nothing! I could not stop laughing.
On reflection, this is not surprising, because what the DOE report says is simple and well known. They point out that:
♦ the range of sensitivity estimates is getting bigger, not smaller; ♦ some of the modelshave gotten so hot that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) no longer accepts their results; that ♦ observation-based estimates are a lot lower than the model estimates; and that ♦ sensitivity could be lower than the IPCC suggests.
Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models. Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa.
There is lots of criticism in the alarmist report to be sure, but it is all editorial, not scientific. Basically, the alarmists wish the DOE report said something else — which is no surprise. They say the report “misrepresents” the science (because it is not alarmist), even though everything it says is true.
They list six specific criticisms. These six are scientifically irrelevant, but some are actually wrong. For example, they say the DOE report ignores that there are multiple lines of evidence, when in fact the chapter begins with a discussion of that very fact.
More deeply, they say the report ignores Transient Sensitivity (decades) in favor of Equilibrium Sensitivity (centuries). This is astoundingly wrong, because the chapter finishes with a section making the point that Transient Sensitivity is both better and much lower than Equilibrium Sensitivity. It is a primary point of the chapter.
In both cases, “ignores” is their word, not mine, and clearly wrong. Conversely, they also attribute claims to the DOE report that are not made. Assuming things not stated is a common tendency among those who disagree.
The alarmist report is grandly titled “Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report” and is available here
The DOE report – “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” – to be found here.
The alarmist site proudly lists some of the ridiculous press coverage it received. For example:
in this video, John Robson deconstructs the recent attempt to indict hydrocarbon fuel producers and deprive the world of 80% of the primary energy it needs. The transcript is in italics with my bolds and added images.
This just in. Canadian companies convicted of burning up planet after show trial. Hydrocarbon bureaucrats sentenced to economic death. As you see, this breaking news caught me on the road here in this hotel. But somebody has to say something. So for the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is our quick reaction response to the pseudoscientific claim that Canadian companies are destroying the earth a bit.
And that response is that this court has no legitimacy at all. What it’s doing is no more science than what Lysenko did. It’s politics in a wig and ugly politics at that. According to a media friendly study in Nature, complete with its own lurid press release, sorry, news article:
The weather attribution wizards have nailed not just human CO2, but yes, individual firms for causing bad weather, and they shall be sued into extinction. After all, this new weather attribution was invented to bypass the tedious necessity of detecting trends in weather before explaining them, for the very purpose not to facilitate understanding, but to facilitate lawsuits.
As Roger Pielke Jr. recently growled while examining a hatchet job on the US Department of Energy skeptical red team climate report, he said, quote, “In my areas of expertise, he had found numerous statements that were simply false. among them that world weather attribution was not created with litigation in mind.”And how does he know that that claim is false? Because he did actual research, including finding a quotation from WWA’s chief scientist, Fredericke Otto:
Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.”
Of course, it was. And here we go. As the Nature propaganda said:
Legal experts say it’s a line of evidence that could feed into climate litigation that focuses on specific events such as the 2021 heatwave that hammered the US Pacific Northwest in 2021. Already, a county government in Oregon has filed a 52 billion US civil lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for contributing to that event.
So, it’s revealing, and not in a good way, that the Nature Study itself credits upfront “approaches promoted by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative and other Methods.”
Alarmists don’t love Weather Attribution because it conducts fair trials. They love it because it convicts everybody with roughly the subtlety of Andrey Vyshinsky or Lavrentiy Beria. But it is not science. As Patrick Brown pointed out this January, their tricks for stacking the jury box include, in this case, in order to attribute droughts to human evil and folly, they overwhelmingly studied places where drought had increased, even though globally there were more places where it decreased. You know, just in case their models let them down, but they’re not likely to. [See Beware Claims Attributing Extreme Events to Hydrocarbons]
As we noted in June, dizzy with success, the fellow travelers at CNN touted a study where:
“Using a combination of scientific theory, modern observations, and multiple sophisticated computer models, researchers found a clear signal of human-caused climate change was likely discernable with high confidence as early as 1885.”
That is before the invention of the internal combustion automobile. Now, the obvious implication here, and the correct one, is that these models would find such a signal anywhere because we’re told that in 1885, atmospheric CO2 was around 293 parts per million, just a whisker above the 280 parts per million that alarmists wrongly believe was constant in pre-industrial times. That very small change couldn’t possibly have measurably affected the weather. Such a fluctuation is very obviously noise, not signal. Especially when it’s coming from ice cores whose bubbles take decades or even centuries to seal.
Yet the source here tells us that in 1885 it was 293.3 parts per million. And this mathiness looks impressive, but it’s actually another key warning sign that something that is not science is lurching about in a stolen lab code. Real science deals in uncertainties. It shows error bars. Fake science bludgeons the public with spurious decimal places. According to the CBC’s credulous take:
“I was surprised that even the smallest carbon majors were actually very substantially contributing to the probability of the heat waves, said Yan Quilkai, a climate scientist at ETHZurich, who led the study.”
Oh, come now. Surely you suspected your rigged models would convict the defendant of a serious crime. After all, it’s what they’re for. And here we go. The study allegedly found that major oil companies alone caused more than half the supposed 1.3° C warming since pre-industrial times. And that of that share, Canadian companies caused 0.01°C.
I mean, one might retort, De minimis non curat lex ( The law does not concern itself about trifles.) if not educated in a government school, but instead in Latin or in sound constitutional and legal principles. Or you might say, get the heck out of my lab if you’ve been educated in science because there is no way, no way at all that 0.01 out of 1.30 is signal and not noise here.
Now to his credit or that of the shattered remains of his conscience, nature’s Jeff Tollefson does admit that:
“despite the eyepopping estimates for responsibilities allocated to individual carbon majors, the uncertainties remain high in many instances in large part because the most extreme heat waves are statistically rare.”
Yeah, indeed they’re so rare that there’s no statistically sound way of determining how likely they are. As we pointed out in our turning down the heat waves fact check video with regard to that 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome that the alarmists so love:
“The heatwave could be viewed as virtually impossible without global warming. But it was virtually impossible with it as well. Sometimes weird things happen.”
What’s more, World Weather Attribution’s gleeful attribution of it to humans and our carbon original sin was eventually submitted to a serious journal and so rubbished by one of the reviewers that they had to add a bunch of disclaimers saying that of course they couldn’t really know. But did it dent their popularity or their self-confidence? Hooha. This study in Nature says, “The median estimate indicates that climate change has also increased the probability of heat waves by more than 10,000.” 10,000 what? we ask. Percent? Times?
But it gets worse because this kind of talk suggests that they know how common and intense heat waves were around 1850, and how common and intense they are now. But they don’t. They have no idea. There weren’t systematic measurements of daily temperature in most of the world even into the mid 20th century. And the proxies when you go further back certainly give no idea how common or intense they were even a century ago, let alone 500 years.
So they’re making it up, then hiding it with decimals, saying in a spreadsheet attached to the study that, for instance, Cenovus Energy alone increased the probability of an early 2009 heatwave in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania’s northern provinces by 1.01% and its intensity by, get this, 0.0003°C. Four decimal places. As the Duke of Wellington once said, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”
It’s also anti-scientific to claim to give a change in global temperature to two decimal places over the last 175 years when nobody knows the temperature anywhere to within one decimal place a century ago. And another thing we actually do know that during the Holocene era the earth has cycled regularly between warmer and cooler periods including down from the medieval warm period into the little ice age and back up after 1850.
So at least some of the warming since must by any logical standard have been natural. In which case they’re blaming oil companies alone for more than the entire human contribution. But the attributors duck this absurdity by absurdly assuming that it’s basically all on us. The chutzpah here is astounding. But it’s exactly the kind of thing they do.
And if you use the same warped modeling to assess the shares of some other human activity, you’d dependably get a searing indictment. And in fact, if you used it on all of them, I’ll bet you you’d get over a 100% of that 1.3 degrees C, never mind if whatever smaller share actually wasn’t natural. But they don’t run that kind of test because what they’re doing isn’t science. They’re not seeking truth and testing theories ruthlessly. They’re zealots shrieking about enemies of the people.
They also write:
“with reference to 1850 to 1900, climate change has increased the median intensity of heat waves by 1.36°C over 2000 to 2009, of which 0.44°C is traced back to the 14 top carbon majors and 0.22°C to the 166 others. These contributions correspond respectively to 32% and 16% of the overall effect of climate change.”
And again, it sounds precise, all right, but climate change is a statistical description of changes in long-term weather. It isn’t a causal force. So, they don’t even know what climate change is. And all those double decimals swirling around trying to hypnotize you are a dead giveaway that they’re in over their heads or worse. And it is worse because they also don’t know what science is. They don’t do counterfactuals and consider what extreme events might have been prevented by warming as well as caused by it.
And they’re certainly not comparing known extreme events today with known extreme events in the past.Instead, they take what did happen and sometimes what didn’t, match it against invented scenarios to prove that we caused bad weather. And then they say, “Gotcha.” when the computer Julie says, “Yes, we caused bad weather.” And then they speed dial their lawyer.
That CBC item included the usual guff from the usual suspects, including Naomi Oreskes. It said,
“referring to previous research from her and other experts showing major oil companies knew about the impacts of carbon emissions and the dangers of global warming decades before countries started enacting climate policies.”
Right? Trotsky was a conscious agent of fascism and imperial oil has been trying to incinerate the earth for half a century and now it’s been proved to two decimal places to the satisfaction of people in the media who barely survived grade 10 math. So, while speaking of people not doing science when it is their job, let us also mention people not doing journalism when it is their job.
CTV, for instance, pounced on the supposed study and shrieked, “These Canadian companies among humanity’s biggest carbon emitters study says.” But the study says nothing of the kind. And in fact, nor really does the story, which includes this bit:
“The 14 largest carbon emitters were led by fossil fuel and coal producers from the former Soviet Union and China, followed by oil companies Saudi Aramco, Gasprom, and Exxon Mobile. Together, they made the same contribution to climate change as the remaining 166 entities, according to the study.”
So, Canada’s eight enemies of humanity actually ranked between 70th and 163rd. And together, they supposedly warmed the planet by 0.01°C over nearly two centuries. Which means if they kept at it for another 1750 years, they might warm the place by 0.1° C. And anyone who tells you they can calculate the impact on the weather of such a trivial change is a charlatan and a rogue. And journalists who parrot such claims without any attempt to do basic math, let alone probe how the authors think they know these things, or what other views exist, belong at Pravda, not in free world newspapers.
Now, before concluding, your honor, we wish to say one thing directly to the prisoners currently slumped in the dock or on the lam. The CBC reported that it: “reached out to several carbon majors mentioned in the story, but they either declined to comment or didn’t respond by publication time.” Likewise: “Nature also reached out to the following companies for comment on the study’s findings, but did not receive a response. BP, Shell, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, and Coal India.”
And what indeed could they say? The hydrocarbon energy companies have for too long and with too few exceptions followed a strategy of appeasement, confessing on the science and groveling on the policy, endorsing net zero in the hope of being the last one shot. But since everybody gets shot, it was always a terrible plan. And with the execution fast approaching, it’s time to abandon it.
Of course, if you honestly believe that your product is destroying the Earth, you should say so and get the heck out of that line of work. But if you don’t believe it, stand up for yourselves and not just by saying that the other companies are worse. Because these climate fanatics are not going to stop. They plan to destroy you using pseudoscience to win lawfare. They intend to sue you into oblivion. You, the companies that the rest of us rely on to avoid starving and freezing, and then they’re going to wonder why it got dark all of a sudden. And darkness at noon in the lab definitely has something to do with it.
So, please don’t just stand there. Say something.
Plead not guilty because you’re not and they are.
For the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson and that’s our quick response to this Nature study indicting oil companies for setting the planet on fire.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
Science Matters 