Climate Factors

Javier Vinos Finds Missing Climate Puzzle Pieces

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tom Nelson interviews independent researcher Javier Vinos reporting his discoveries of facts and evidence ignored or forgotten in the rush to judgement against humanity for burning hydrocarbon fuels. When these factors are acknowledged they can be integrated into a more wholistic view of Earth’s climate activity.  For those who prefer reading, below is an excerpted transcript with my bolds along with some images and key exhibits included. TN refers to Tom Nelson and JV to Javer Vinos.

JV: For the past ten years I’ve been studying climate quite in depth with a basic focus on natural climate change, on how the climate changes naturally. I did this because I had a science blog and one day I decided I was going to talk about the science of climate and when I started to read the articles and looking for the information I became very surprised because I do molecular biology and Neuroscience that is experimental science. And climate science is not an experimental science and I was very surprised because they were claiming the evidence was there and it was not.

So I began researching it more and more until I became so involved I started writing books and telling other people what I was finding about climate.

The Scientific Method and Climate Science

One of the elementary principles of the scientific method is that establishing a theory before examining all the evidence leads to error and confirmation bias makes us stick to it.  Has the scientific method been forgotten in the postmodern age?  It seems so, at least in climate science.  Climatology is not an experimental science which is a major handicap.  It is also a very young science compared to the mainstream Sciences of physics, chemistry, geology and biology.  The consensus was reached in 1988 almost without data and wholly based on the Greenhouse Effect and The Coincidence of temperature and CO2 during the Pleistocene in Antarctic Ice cores.

Understanding Albedo and Heat Transport

There are two absolutely essential processes in determining climate that are largely unknown.  The first is albedo or the amount of sunlight reflected back into space.  It’s crucial because it determines the amount of energy the Earth receives.  We ignore why it has the value it has, why it varies so little from year to year, why it varies so much from month to month, why both hemispheres have the same albedo and how the albedo has changed in the past.

As a result of our ignorance, models are unable to adequately reproduce the Earth albedo failing to show its small inter-annual variability, its large seasonal variability and its symmetry between the two hemispheres.   Nevertheless many scientists believe that the models are capable of predicting changes in albedo otherwise they will have to admit that the models cannot predict future climates. Small changes in albedo can produce large climate changes of natural origin and this is the basis of several alternative hypotheses to CO2.

ERBE measurements of radiative imbalance.

I have focused my research on a second essential process and this is what my book is about.  The transport of heat from the equator to the poles also known as meridional heat transport because it runs in the direction of the meridians.  There is much evidence that this is the primary cause of natural climate change.  Heat transport is also an enormously neglected process, we do not know how it works and there is no established Theory to explain it.  We also do not know how it is distributed between the atmosphere and the ocean, how it is divided among the different types of ocean currents, how it changes with the seasons, how it changes from year to year, why Antarctica receives less heat than the Arctic although it should receive more or why heat is transported from the colder hemisphere to the warmer hemisphere.

The models do not understand heat transport because no one understands it,
and that is where the evidence for most natural climate change lies.

In fact we can’t even measure it properly and if we don’t know how heat transport works, it’s obvious that the models don’t either.  They fail miserably at reproducing the amount of heat being transported and reflecting transport changes in the atmosphere and ocean, they do not even correctly reproduce the distribution line, the climatic equator where the trade winds from both hemispheres converge.  Nor do they reproduce seasonal changes since the amount of heat entering and leaving the ocean throughout the year is not known.

If no one understands heat transport, then models cannot understand it either. because they are just a product of our minds with no physical connection to reality.  Even if there are other secondary causes of climate change, including increased CO2, the evidence points to changes in heat transport as the primary way in which the climate changes.  In the end it’s like the joke about the drunk who looks under a street lamp for his lost keys because the light is better there than where he thinks he lost them.

Climatologists look for the answer where the knowledge is better in the greenhouse effect. the culprits are certain gases that together make up 1% of the atmosphere.  In this graph we can see the profile of the gases that make up the atmosphere in different colors showing their abundance on the lower axis with respect to altitude on the vertical axis the gases in the squares do not absorb in the infrared.  Note that water vapor with a blue dotted line is very abundant near the surface but a thousand times less abundant in the stratosphere.  The opposite is true for ozone with a purple dust line which is almost entirely in the stratospheric ozone layer.  The thick black line is the temperature profile which in the troposphere has a positive lapse rate, that is the higher we go the colder it gets. This is fundamental to the greenhouse effect.

The Greenhouse Effect and CO2

What is the greenhouse effect?  In order to return all the energy is received from the Sun and maintain stability, the Earth must keep at a temperature of 23 degrees C below zero.

The Greenhouse Effect

Without greenhouse gases this would be the average surface temperature instead of the current 14.5 degrees. The black line in this graph represents the temperature profile of the troposphere and the lapse rate is the slope of that line in the absence of greenhouse gases.  Infrared radiation will be emitted from the surface but greenhouse gases make the atmosphere opaque to infrared radiation, so this radiation is emitted from higher altitudes as shown by The Black Arrow.  Although in reality there is emission from all Heights including the surface the average height of emission is about 6 kilometers. The emission temperature at this height is 23° below zero but the lapse rate of about 6° per kilometer makes the surface about 37° warmer.  If we were to double the CO2 as shown in red, and everything else remains the same, the average emission height would increase by about 150 meters.   As the atmosphere becomes more opaque so the temperature at that height would be 1° cooler it would be necessary for the surface and atmosphere to warm by that degree in order for the earth to return the energy it receives from the sun which is absolutely necessary.

But in the climate system everything is interconnected and when something changes everything changes and nobody knows how much the temperature would change.  So when they tell us that we have to reduce our emissions by a certain amount to avoid some amount of warming they are lying to us because nobody knows that these gases cause the greenhouse effect.  Only the first three are really important. They are trace gases but that does not diminish their importance.  Ozone is a thousand times less abundant than CO2, but its contribution to the greenhouse effect is only five times less.

Greenhouse effect is not uniform across the planet.

Look at water vapor in yellow.  Together with the clouds it forms, it is responsible for 3/4 of the greenhouse effect but it’s abundance varies greatly because it depends on temperature.  When the temperature drops it condenses and falls as water or snow.  Because of this the greenhouse effect is highly variable on the planet.  At the poles there is practically no water vapor or clouds in Winter. These are the places on Earth with the driest atmosphere and a much weaker greenhouse effect.  Not much attention is given to this, but it is very important, and I point out in the book it’s one of the pieces that must be used to solve the puzzle.

Every year has two winters, and heat transport
to the pole in winter is greater

Having such a weak greenhouse effect makes it very easy for heat to escape from the earth through the poles.  The climate works like the internal combustion engine of a car; only instead of one cooling system it has two, one at each pole.  The engine block is the tropics, the hottest part because that is where most of the sun’s energy arrives.  The tropics lose heat by radiation but not enough.  The excess must be transported to the radiators to be radiated to the outside.  And this is done by a fan which is equivalent to the atmosphere and a circuit with a cooling liquid, which is equivalent to the ocean.

Climatologists do not see it this way, but the other way around.  For them heat transport does not change the temperature of the planet but only warms the poles.  But because of this erroneous view they encounter paradoxes that they cannot resolve. in the early Eocene, at the beginning of the age of mammals, the poles were so temperate that palm trees grew in the Arctic and frogs lived in Antarctica, indicating that the average temperature of the coldest mouth was above freezing. Climatologists do not understand how this was possible because the smaller temperature difference made the heat transport much smaller which prevented the poles from warming.

Like all paradoxes it is solved by changing the frame of reference.  It was possible because the smaller heat transport made the planet lose less heat and get warmer, which warmed the poles along with the rest. When it is winter in one hemisphere, the atmosphere transports more heat to that hemisphere.  But the atmosphere also carries angular momentum or rotational inertia since it is a conserved property.  Any change in the angular momentum of the atmosphere must be compensated for by a change in the spin rate of the earth.  Just as ice skaters increases their spin rate rate by bringing their arms closer to the body,  similar to the skater the Earth’s spin rate increases by about 1 millisecond per day as atmospheric circulation and heat transport increase in Winter.  Since 1962 it has been possible to measure this to an accuracy of one microsecond.  Thanks to the invention of the atomic clock and radio astronomy, it is possible to know the exact orientation of the Earth in space, it has been well known since the 1970s.

The Earth spins faster in winter.

The Influence of Solar Activity on Climate

That solar activity affects the Earth’s rotation has been published many times.  The phenomenon is particularly pronounced during the Boreal winter as we can see in the graph above for 2015 a year of high solar activity and 2018 with low activity.  And it is measured by the variation in milliseconds of day length.  In the lower graph we can see the solar activity represented by the sunspot cycle with a red dash line.  The black solid line shows the changes in the Earth’s rotation caused by the Boreal winter.  It shows the same cycle as the sun although the Earth’s rotation is also affected by equatorial stratospheric winds and the El Nino phenomenon.  The dotted line is from a paper published in 2014.

Everyone ignores this phenomenon especially the IPCC which says that the sun does not affect climate.  But if the sun can change the Earth’s rotation speed then it can change the climate.  My research has been like that of Sherlock Holmes looking for clues that have been missed, ignored and forgotten. Studies show the effect of the sun on the rotation of the Earth has been known for 50 years but very few people in the world know about it.

What I have learned about climate science is because I have stood on the shoulder of giants giants like the Canadian atmospheric physicist Colin Hines who explained in a 1974 paper that the sun’s effect on climate could be due to planetary waves.  It was ignored and his theory was forgotten.  Art lovers will recognize the Great Wave print by Hokusai.  Atmospheric waves are like ocean waves except that they move in three directions,  planetary waves are the largest.  Many of you will remember the tsunami that occurred in Indonesia at Christmas 2014.  It reached the coast of Africa 6,000 km away in 8 hours traveling at the speed of an airplane.  Obviously water does not travel, energy travels, and when it is released upon reaching the coast it still causes damage.

Planetary waves are atmospheric tsunamis that hit the wind walls of the polar vortex and weaken them. It worries us when cold air escapes from the interior because it produces very cold waves and storms.  But the climate is more affected by the heat that is exchanged with that cold, because the planet loses it and cannot compensate for it.  Another Giant on Whose shoulders I stood is Karin Labitzke who in 1987 found a correlation between the temperature of the Polar Stratosphere in Winter and the solar cycle. it is an extraordinary finding because in Winter the sun does not shine on the pole, it is a relationship in the dark not based on solar energy.  It is also extraordinary because it is the first proof of a solar effect on the climate after 190 years of a search began in 1800 by William Herschel the discoverer of Uranus and infrared radiation. Instead of giving her the Nobel Prize she deserved for such a fantastic discovery, her finding was ignored and she’s not even mentioned in climate books.

First evidence of the Sun’s effect on climate

Here I show only the data for years of low solar activity 30 Hectopascals is about 20 km in the stratosphere when the tropical Wind Blows from the West as shown by the blue circles.  The polar stratosphere is very cold, but when it blows from the East as shown by the red circles, the polar Stratosphere warms by about 15°.  In years of high solar activity the effect is reversed as I show in the book The El Nino phenomenon also strongly influences this effect.

For many scientists a solar effect that occurs in the dark, reverses depending on equatorial winds and depend on other phenomena is too complicated to understand and they prefer to ignore it.  But not to me because I have studied Hines.  The propagation of planetary waves into the stratosphere depends on several factors that affect the Dynamics of stratospheric circulation.

How does the Sun influence these Dynamics?

We know that solar activity affects the Earth’s rotation, heat transport and Atmospheric circulation. We also know from Labitzke for the last 35 years that it affects the temperature of the Polar Stratosphere.  And it does so as Hines said 50 years ago by affecting the propagation of planetary waves into the stratosphere.  These waves strike the polar vortex.  This is a gigantic tornado that circles the polar regions in winter with sustained wind speeds of 180 km/ hour.

Planetary waves affect climate through the Polar Vortex

Since heat is carried by the wind, the Warm Winds from the South have a hard time getting through this wall of wind creating a strong temperature gradient as shown in the second image. The black line in the graph shows the profile of this gradient which is a real wall that creates a 30° difference between its two sides as shown by the red dash line.  By weakening the vortex planetary waves allow heat to enter and cold to leave, changing the temperature of the polar region.  As we saw at the beginning, the greenhouse effect inside the vortex is very weak causing the planet to lose unrecoverable energy.

This is how the Sun affects the climate as explained by Hines and Labitzke and I am not just alone saying this, It has been shown.  The study of planetary waves in the stratosphere is extremely difficult because they are invisible and the stratosphere is little known but there is already a study based on measurements that proves it. And the intensity of the planetary waves depends on the solar cycle as its authors defend. The sawtooth appearance of the amplitude of the planetary waves is due to the effect of the tropical winds which change direction every one or two years and to the El Nino effect.

Intensity of planetary waves depends on the solar cycle

My contribution to these studies is to put all the pieces together:  the low polar greenhouse effect, and the effect of the sun on the Earth’s rotation heat transport atmospheric circulation, polar temperatures and planetary waves, and to show the effect that all this has not only on climate but also on climate change.

When solar activity is low, the Arctic warms

When there is low solar activity the Arctic warms as is shown in Blue by the temperature of the central Arctic according to data from the Danish meteorological Institute.  Today global warming and Arctic warming are linked in our minds.  We have forgotten that between 1976 and 1997, despite intense global warming, the Arctic not only did not warm but actually experienced a slight Cooling in its central zone.  Just as we have forgotten that the Arctic warmed in a similar way 100 years ago. It was reported at the time and there are scientific studies that support Antarctic warming a century ago similar to today’s in its effect on Greenland’s melting.

When solar activity is high, the rest of the planet warms

Why did this happen.  It is because solar activity has a cycle of about 100 years this graph shows the level of activity of each solar cycle relative to the average and we can appreciate the Centennial solar cycle shortly after 1700 1800 1900 and 2000 solar activity was below average and the Arctic warmed.  When solar activity is high the opposite happens and the Arctic cools but the rest of the planet warms because it becomes more efficient at conserving energy.

Glaciers and proxies show modern warming before CO2 emissions

The IPCC acknowledges that solar activity in the 20th century was in the top 10% of the last 9,000 years.  In the graph we can see the trend line indicating that solar activity has been increasing for the past 300 years and global warming is 200 years old.  we can see it in the behavior of glaciers which began to shrink worldwide in 1820 as shown by the line in the graph. The photos are from the Rome Glacier in Switzerland which melted enormously between 1850 and 1900.  People didn’t care, on the contrary they built hotels for tourists where the glacier used to be.

Climate proxies show the same thing.  The green line is from tree rings and the orange line is from other proxies, both showing a 30-year oscillation on a long-term warming trend.  In stark contrast, our emissions in Gray were nonexistent until 1900 and low until 1950,  the curves clearly do not match.  A much better match is obtained for solar activity shown in annual data with a thin line and a decade long smoothing that shows in red when it was above average and in blue when it was below average.

Global Warming is largely due to the Modern Solar Maximum

The modern solar maximum is the long 70-year period in the 20th century when it was above average, something that has happened only 10% of the time in the last 9,000 years.  We can therefore conclude that a reduction in the transport of heat to the polls during most of the 20th century is responsible for the planet conserving more energy and warming up contributing greatly to global warming.

And as Sherlock Holmes would say the IPCC has made a capital mistake by establishing a consensus Theory without properly examining all the evidence.  A this and much more is explained in my latest book solving the climate puzzle I want to thank three other scientists for reading my book before its publication and providing positive feedback.  They are William Happer professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University who also wrote the forward to the book,  Judith Curry professor emerita of atmospheric physics at Georgia Institute of Technology and Willie Soon research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian center for astrophysics.  I also want to thank Andy May, a writer I have collaborated with on many climate science web articles over the years.  The book has been written at several reading levels and divided into a large number of short chapters to make it more accessible to a general audience despite the inherent complexity of the subject.  It has been translated into five languages of which two have been published and three are in the process of being published.  There are plans to publish it in three more languages including Greta Thunberg’s.

My main interest for the past nine years has been to find out why and how the climate changes on our planet.  It is clear from the evidence that we are missing some essential processes because we don’t understand the majority of past climate changes. There are more scientists who agree on this than is usually acknowledge.  Several new theories have been developed including mine and they should be seriously considered by the IPCC because the CO2 Theory lacks sufficient evidence.  I defend my theory as having more support from evidence than the consensus one, but what is important to everybody is that on top of the IPCC’s Capital mistake of reaching a premature consensus, we don’t make the capital mistake of embarking the global economy on a planned experiment of unforeseeable consequences.

TN: You argue that climate change is largely due to natural causes and in particular you attribute a key role to high solar activity in the 20th century.  How does your theory differ from others who also argue for such a role?

JV: Well the mechanism is different. There is a lot of debate about the role of the sun in climate and over the last 30 years there has been a lot of advances in understanding how solar variability affects the stratosphere and how this effect is transmitted to the surface.  What I add is how these effects change the energy content of the climate system and thus produce climate change.  In my book I present evidence that climate is changing due to changes in the amount of heat that is being transported to the poles and the amount of solar energy that changes is not that important.  So in essence I refute the IPCC’s arguments that dismisses a solar effect on climate based on small changes in solar energy and in the trends in solar activity not being the same as temperature Trends

TN: Okay so how does your work fit with other theories like there’s the role of geothermal heat by Viterito and Kamis and the role of cosmic rays by Svensmark and Shaviv.

JV: It is good that there are all these theories because in science we should always discuss several explanations.  The important point is that the climate is always changing and it is a very complex process, so there is not a single cause for for climate change.  Many of these processes may be contributing to climate change including the the increase in CO2 and it is important to determine which ones are the most important in driving climate change.

We should continue researching and debating these processes.  Any viable Theory should provide a mechanism for changing the energy balance at the top of the atmosphere because this is what changes the energy content of the climate system.  And it should be supported by the more evidence the better.  The theory that I propose meets both requirements, while the theory that it is all due to CO2 lacks evidence.

The Role of Water Vapor and Volcanic Eruptions

TN: What do you think of Joe Bastardi’s views about the importance of water vapor in the climate?

JV: I think it is fundamental because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas and what really defines the Earth is that it is a planet that has a lot of water in its three states,  And I believe that the role of water is to provide stability to The Climate system through its thermal inertia.  This is what explains that for the last 540 million years when everything has happened the temperature of planet has remain compatible with Life.  So I think none of the IPCC’s predictions is going to come true because I think the role of the water is misunderstood and it doesn’t behave the way it is expected to.  I don’t think water increases climate change,  I think it actually decreases it

TN: What do you think about the eruption of the hunga Tonga volcano in 2022.  Is that a major reason for the recent temperature Spike?

JV: I think it is very likely.  The volcanic eruption of 2022 was very unusual in that it was underwater so it placed 146,000 tons of water vapor into the stratosphere and the stratosphere is very dry so in a single day the water vapor in the stratosphere increased by 10% and the greenhouse effect is very sensitive to changes in the stratosphere  because it is a lot less opaque to infrared radiation than the troposphere.  So the expected effect from this change as was published in January in natural climate change is a substantial increase in the warming rate so and this is what has been observed. The fact that the onset of this warming has such a delay is normal for volcanic eruptions for example the eruption of the Mount Tambora in April of 1815 produced the year without the summer more than a year later in 1816.   If this explanation is correct we should expect over the next months the warming rate should decrease substantially,  and this increased warming should disappear over the course of four to five years as the extra water vapor leaves the stratosphere.

Concluding Remarks and Future Implications

TN: So if your theory is correct what are the economic implications?

JV: Well if humans are are not primarily responsible for climate change this will have huge implications for the global economy.  We should question the energy transition in the form of urgency that is being made because it is not exempt of risk.  Even if the theory is correct, we should be aware that a lot of people will not be willing to accept it regardless of the evidence.

TN: Other than the economic implications, what are the other consequences if your theory is right?

JV: Well I think people should be very calm.  We are very lucky to be living through a warming period because cooling periods are much worse, usually accompanied by famine and epidemics. Being in a warming period is a lot better. So we should not fear climate and only be concerned when the warming period turns into a cooling period.   That will happen eventually, but we don’t expect it during the 21st century.   So essentially I think we are uh very lucky with respect to climate and as long as the cooling period doesn’t doesn’t start I think the climate is our Ally not our Enemy.

 

 

How Sun and Cosmic Rays Make Our Climate Change

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Dr. Henrik Svensmark: Sun and Cosmic Rays Drive Climate, Not CO₂

Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark explains how the changes in solar activity and cosmic rays can influence cloud formation and therefore our climate on Earth. Title above is link to podcast video at Freedom Research.  Below is the transcript lightly edited with my bolds and added images. FR refers to Freedom Research interviewer Hannes Sarv, and HS refers to Henrik Svensmark.

Hello, welcome. This is the Freedom Research Podcast and my name is Hannes Sarv. My guest today is a researcher from Denmark, an astrophysicist, Henrik Svensmark. He’s well known for his research on the relationship between cosmic rays and Earth’s climate. He has proposed that the variations in cosmic radiation influence cloud formation and consequently global temperature and biodiversity. Of course, we’re going to talk about climate change, cosmic rays and supernovas and how they affect Earth’s climate and biodiversity well here on Earth. So first of all, thank you, Henrik, for taking the time for this interview.

Firstly, I would actually like to ask a question. Simple, simple question, which can be puzzling, at least to a lot of people. I mean, if you’re being told that you’re living in a constant climate crisis, then probably most of the people probably fear it or they might get afraid. So if someone says to you that today there is a climate crisis. What is your answer to that?

HS: Well, it’s a very political subject and the idea that the climate is in a crisis, I don’t think that that’s actually the case. It’s much less I mean, the climate disasters and so on, I mean, they’re not really increasing at all. And, of course, the temperature has gone up a little bit, but it has not, you know, made a serious crisis that we cannot handle. So, I actually think the idea that we are in a crisis is actually not correct.

FR: So you think, probably It depends on where you live, right? If the temperature goes up, it gets warmer and well, as I have understood most of the places or the larger part of the population actually benefits from higher temperatures.  What is your take?

HS: Certainly, there are places where you actually benefit from it. And in many cases, it’s not because it actually gets warmer. It’s more like it’s climate’s getting milder, meaning that it’s the colder temperatures, you know, at night and in the winter that goes slightly up, which is actually a good thing.  I mean, here in Denmark, we haven’t had very severe winters for a long time. which is also good. It’s good for the economy. It’s good for many things because a cold climate is much, much worse than a warmer climate. I think that, I mean, you also know that You also talk about people, you can have people dying from warm weather, but we know that it’s mainly cold weather that is the real killer of people. I think there’s almost a factor of 10 in difference. So slightly milder weather is not a problem. I mean, it’s certainly not a disaster.

FR:This is kind of puzzling also to many people, if they’re being told that the planet is going to be inhabitable.  Then there’s talk of sea level rise and all those other apocalyptic things that make good movies. But the actual truth there is at least a bit more complex, would you say?

HS: Yes, there’s been so many claims. I think also people should get tired of all the predictions that are wrong. I mean, that there would be no ice in the Arctic and Greenland is melting and so on. And, you know, the islands in the Pacific should be subsiding because of the rising sea levels.  And it’s not really happening, any of these things. And all these predictions, which I mean, it gets everybody’s attention, of course, because we are sort of prone to react when we hear about disasters, or coming disasters. They are not really happening fortunately. I mean, it’s actually a good thing that it’s actually not occurring.

FR: So when we look at a longer time frame, it should be brought out that there have been many such crises that have threatened all life and human life. So can you just maybe make a comparison here to today’s climate?

HS: When we talk about global warming, we say that the temperature might have got up by one degree or something like that. But if we look at geological time scales, the climate changes are much, much more severe. I mean, you have periods where you have glaciations, that is, ice almost down to the equator, and perhaps even most of the Earth is covered by ice, and you have periods where there’s no ice caps at all, and the temperature is much, much higher.  I mean, you have had… Beobab trees in Antarctica, and you had alligators at the latitude of Greenland.

So you have had much, much warmer, at least 10 degrees warmer climate back in time. So if we look at geological timescales, we have had enormous changes in climate. And of course, all of this is completely natural. And the question is, why did we have such big climate changes? And this is some of my work trying to understand why we have such large climate changes even back in time.

FR: So let’s talk about that. This is interesting that we’ve been told that the climate change today is anthropogenic. So let’s talk about your perspective on that and what does your research show?

HS: There’s no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it has some effect on the temperature.The issue has to do with climate sensitivity. How big is the climate sensitivity? And it turns out that it’s probably around one degree if you double CO2.  So it’s a relatively benign effect of CO2. So, I’ve been working trying to understand why there are climate changes. When you look at climate changes, for instance, over the last 10,000 years, you can actually see that if you compare the climate changes with changes in solar activity, you actually find a very nice correlation.

Fig. (3). (Color online) Upper panel: Global record G7 (grey), running 31 year average of G7 (blue), sine representation of G7 with three sine functions of the periods 1003, 463, and 188 years (green), with four sine functions including the period ~60 years (red), continued to AD 2200. The parameters of the sine functions are given in Table 3. The Pearson correlation between the 31 year running average of G7 and the three-sine representation (green) is 0.84, for the four-sine representation (red) 0.85. Lower panel: G7 (grey) together with the sine functions of 1003, 463, and 188 – year periods continued until AD 2200 (equal sine amplitudes for clarity) Source: Ludecke & Weiss 2019

There are so many studies that show that you had, for instance, the Little Ice Age And you have the medieval warm period. And the medieval warm period is when you had a high solar activity. The little ice age is when the solar activity was low. And the question is, why should there be such a correlation?
How can the solar activity actually affect climate? And the simplest idea that has been put forward was that the output from the sun in the form of radiation, I mean the sunlight, that is changing. But it turns out that these changes are probably too small to explain what the climate changes you’re seeing.

So something else is going on, something is amplifying the solar activity and the idea that I came up with this now, actually 30 years ago, was that maybe solar activity is somehow regulating the Earth’s cloud cover. And initially, I took data from satellites that looked at the Earth’s cloud cover and I looked at it over a solar cycle that’s about 11 years and compared the changes in the solar cycle with changes in the Earth’s cloud cover. There seems to be a correlation between the two. So one can say that the idea, I mean, it looked as if it was something worth pursuing. But of course, it was just a correlation at that time.

Cosmic rays interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere producing ions that helps turn small aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei — seeds on which liquid water droplets form to make clouds. A proton with energy of 100 GeV interact at the top of the atmosphere and produces a cascade of secondary particles who ionize molecules when traveling through the air. One 100 GeV proton hits every m2 at the top of the atmosphere every second.

And I couldn’t say why there should be such a connection. So the general idea has to do with the formation of clouds. How are you actually forming clouds? And it turns out it’s the ionization that is happening in the atmosphere.  There’s typically about a thousand ions per cubic centimeter. So if you have a small cubic centimeter, you might have on the order of a thousand ions per cubic centimeter. And these ions are in general mainly produced because of very energetic particles that come from the Milky Way that is outside our solar system.

And they move in through the solar wind and then enter into the top of the atmosphere, where they then ionize the atmosphere. And the story is these small ions help stabilizing small molecular clusters. So you get what we call aerosols. These very small aerosols, which then grow up to a certain size. In order to make a cloud droplet, you have to have some kind of surface on which water vapor can condense. These small aerosols are actually providing these surfaces.

Cosmic Ray, Aerosol, Cloud Link

The idea is that if you have more cosmic rays coming into the atmosphere, you’re producing more of the small aerosols. They grow to become what we call cloud condensation nuclei, so they can affect the clouds, so water waves can condense and become cloud droplets. So if you have more cloud droplets, you have a more white cloud. And a more white cloud actually reflects the sunlight out to space again.
That is, of course, extremely important for the Earth’s energy balance. So that is the main idea behind the theory that I have been working on.

FR: Okay. And so if there is more clouds and reflect the sunlight back to space, I’m just gonna ask, I’m a lay person, not a scientist. Maybe I’m not, you know, a bit stupid question in that sense. But if it reflects more sunlight out, then well, logically, we get the cooler climate, right?

HS: Yes, exactly. Observations are one of the ways we can verify that it works. So on relatively rare occasions, there are some explosions at the sun. They’re called coronal mass ejections. It’s when the magnetic field lines sort of open up and the sun is throwing out a large magnetic plasma. And this magnetic plasma works more or less like an umbrella or a shield against the cosmic rays. So within a week, the cosmic rays are dropping, and they can drop maybe up to 30% or something like that. And that is like a natural experiment with the whole Earth.

And so you can actually then see if anything is happening with the Earth’s cloud cover. And this is something that we have investigated. So, for instance, we can also look at the aerosols that are produced after these events, and we can see that there is a big drop in the aerosols. And then we see a drop in the clouds following these events. And it’s not just the cloud fraction, it’s also the optical properties of clouds. So we can actually see changes in the cloud’s microphysics under these events.

So in some sense, we see the whole chain from the explosive events and the sun to changes in the cosmic rays to changes in the aerosols and then changes in the clouds. And there is a slight delay on a few days in the reaction. That’s simply because it takes about five days for the small aerosols to grow to become cloud condensation nuclei. So everything seems to be fitting very beautifully with respect to this idea.

FR: Okay. But, well, how frequently does it happen, what’s the correlation here? I mean, how frequently it happens to change the climate in that sense?

HS: I talked about this event with the explosions at the sun, which is something that happens during a week. So it’s too much too short to affect climate. But the solar activity modulates the cosmic rays. And that’s simply because the solar activity translates into changes in the solar wind. And the solar wind is covering the whole solar system and all the planets. That works like it’s a magnetic shield that screens against the cosmic rays.

So when the solar activity is high, you can say that it’s screening better against the cosmic rays. That means you get fewer cosmic rays in to the atmosphere. So solar activity can regulate the amount of cosmic rays that comes into the atmosphere. So that regulates in the cloud cover. And we can then estimate, I mean, how much it changes the cloud cover during an 11-year cycle.

And from that, we can calculate what would be the effect on the temperature in the oceans. And there you actually see that we get about on the order of one to one and a half watt per square meter more energy in when you have a solar maximum than when you have a solar minimum.

And you can actually observe that in the ocean’s temperatures. You can see that in the heat content of the ocean. And you can even see it in the volume, because the heat goes in and out of the ocean. So when you get heat into the ocean, it expands a little bit.  So in the sea level, you can actually see an 11-year cycle in the sea level. And all of this, you can quantify how much energy goes in and out of the ocean.

And it fits very beautifully with what you expect from changes in the cloud cover over a solar cycle. And it’s interesting that the solar irradiance is almost a factor of 10 too small to explain it. So there is some kind of amplification mechanism. And the idea is that it’s clouds that are responsible for this. And this is something that you should takeway with respect to the ocean temperatures and the energy that goes in and out of the ocean he has been looking at.

FR: Okay. But how does it fit this idea? How does it fit the historical records?

Figure 4. The millennial solar-climate cycle over the past 2000 years. The anomaly in 14C production levels (black curve), a proxy for solar activity, is compared to iceberg activity in the North Atlantic (dashed blue curve), a climate proxy. The pink sine curve shows the millennial frequency. It defines two warm and two cold periods, supported by a large amount of evidence, some of which are represented by red and blue bars (see main text). Source: Javier Vinos

HS: Well,If you look at solar activity going back in time, we talked about the Little Ice Age, which is from around 1300 to 1850. And then you had the medieval warm period for 900 until maybe 1200. that these changes, they fit very beautifully with changes in cosmic rays. So when it’s cold, you have more cosmic rays coming in. And when it’s warm, you have less cosmic rays entering into the atmosphere. And we know these changes in cosmic rays because when cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, They are actually producing new elements like carbon-14, which is a radioactive form of carbon. It’s slightly heavier than carbon-12.

I guess many people know that you can use carbon-14 for dating things. But this carbon becomes CO2, the heavy form from carbon, and it goes into trees. And then you can look at the annual rings of the tree rings and measure how much carbon-14 you have relative to carbon-12.  And you can then measure that for all the tree rings going back in time and you can actually reproduce solar activity almost 20,000 years back in time. And if you look at these changes and you compare with how climate has been changing over that period, there is beautiful correlations again.

So it is near certain that there is a connection between solar activity and climate. And you can also quantify some of these changes and they are relatively big and it seems as if that, you know, changes in clouds is a very good candidate for explaining this. And when we look about the last 10,000 years, then the modulation of the cosmic rays, it’s caused by solar activity.

FR: Okay. Let me just ask you about those cosmic rays again. You did say, but again, I’m not that bright in your field. You did say it comes from Milky Way. Okay. Why does it come from there? Or what is it? What sends it here?

HS: Cosmic rays are very energetic particles. It’s mainly atomic nuclear, 90% is protons. So that’s the core of the hydrogen atom. So the energetic particles that we are interested in are mainly produced in what we call supernova. And a supernova, the case that we are interested in, is when you have a massive star that is maybe eight times or more massive than the sun. It only lives a relatively short period of time, you know, from maybe three million years to 40 million years.

So it’s a large star and it’s very heavy, and then in the process of burning, it burns so fast and it ends its life in a very, very violent explosion, which is called a supernova. And this supernova, when it explodes, it produces a shock front that is moving out from where the star was located. And this shock front, it works as, you can call it, a cosmic accelerator.

So it accelerates particles that move back and forth over this shock front and move them to extremely high energies. And the energies that you can obtain by this process is much higher than we can produce in any accelerator here on Earth artificially. And these particles, they are then moving in the interstellar space in the Milky Way.

And they are moving in the magnetic fields that are in between stars. So they are sort of moving like what we call diffusion. They are sort of randomly moving around, being bent by the magnetic fields. And then some of them will be outside, you know, arrive outside our solar system.

We have the heliosphere and then they move in and they feel the magnetic field from the sun. And some of them will then enter into the top of the atmosphere. And then you have maybe one proton that comes in with extremely high energy. And then it works a little bit like billiard ball where you have one particle hitting the molecules or the atoms in the atmosphere and it makes a shower, sort of a cascade of particles that goes down through the atmosphere. And these particles are called secondary particles. And so you can have one particle coming in that becomes millions and even billions of particles that move down through the atmosphere.

These particles are completely invisible to our naked eye.  While we are sitting here, we are penetrated by these secondary particles that go through my body and your body all the time. And so every 24 hours, maybe 20 million particles will go through your body and you don’t really experience this.  This is something that has happened since the formation of our galaxy. And of course, here on Earth, we have been showered with these particles for four and a half million years.

FR: Well, since you can explain past events with solar activity and how many cosmic rays are coming towards Earth, probably you can basically model what will happen as well, right? So, I mean, the question is, where are we now in terms of changing climate? Because I’ve also talked, for example, to Professor Zharkova. She said to me that we are entering another ice age soon.

HS: There’s no doubt that we will get an ice age. We have had a number of ice ages back in time. I don’t know if you’re talking about a real ice age or you’re talking about a little ice age, which is just a colder period.

FR: She was talking about the little ice age. I understood.

HS: So a little ice age. I know there are some predictions that the solar activity will go down and we might get a slightly colder period. I’m not sure it will be a little ice age, but it’s not something that I have looked at in any details. At the same time, of course we have had some heating from the CO2 increase in CO2. And then solar activity would then go the opposite way if the solar activity goes down. The problem with these predictions is that it’s extremely difficult to predict solar activity in the future.

Source: spaceweatherlive

We can’t even predict the next solar cycle, whether it’s going to be high or low. There are some really amazing examples where this last solar cycle was predicted and the predictions were sort of all over the place. So it is really difficult to know because we don’t understand solar activity in a detail where we can predict what the next solar cycle will be. But that might come at some point. So something special has to happen. I think if we’re going to have a real cold period where the temperature drops by one or two degrees, that would be very special. I’m not sure that we’re going to see that, but I know that Zharkova is predicting that.

FR: Okay, yes. Anyhow, the thing is that still almost, well, all of it indicates that climate change is, there are some other factors than humans leading the climate change. But what is your opinion? What is the role of us on climate?

HS:  Oh, the anthropogenic CO2? Yeah. So as I said, it is a greenhouse gas. So you can see if you look at the outgoing long-wave spectrum, you can actually see there is a drop in the outgoing long-wave spectrum, which has to do with CO2, which means that it is a greenhouse gas.  The question is, how important is it? Is it so important that it’s changing temperature, you know, in a dramatic way? And I think there’s so much research now that seems to indicate that the climate sensitivity is on the order of, you know, one, maybe a little more than one degree for a doubling of CO2.

And that is much smaller than what you get from these climate models, which gives you between three and four degrees of that order, but at least a few times larger than what you get just from CO2 alone. Because in the climate models, the reason they get between three and four degrees is because they assume that it would be less cloudy, for instance, in the future climate. So you might have one degree from CO2, but then you get on the order of one or two degrees extra from what we call positive feedbacks. And that is something like more water vapour in the atmosphere or less clouds in a future climate.

And the problem is that water vapour and clouds are really the most uncertain thing about any prediction of climate. Clouds and aerosols are really what makes climate predictions so extremely difficult. And it’s because it’s all happening at length scales that are much, much smaller than what you can resolve in climate models.  You have to remember that you have maybe, you know, 50 to 100 kilometers between two grid points in a global numerical model.

And that means that, you know, if we just take Denmark, you have maybe one or two grid points over Denmark. And in each of these grid points, you have to determine, you know, what are the clouds actually just from temperature, humidity and pressure. So you have to do some kind of a parameterization of all the physics. So you’re not resolving clouds at all, but you are trying to use, you know, temperature and pressure to say what will the cloud look like for these variables. And this is basically impossible. I mean, it’s pure guesswork.

FR: So what do you think about those climate models? I mean, are they useful then at all?

HS: Of course, they’re useful for some things, but they’re not useful to say if the climate is going up by some fractions of degrees. And I don’t think you can use them for predicting future climate.

FR: But this is what they are used for, isn’t it?

HS: Yes, but I think also that there are some kind of a consensus that climate models are not doing well, I mean, that they have real problems in predicting and saying what is going to happen in the future. So they are not a crystal ball that can tell us about the future with very much accuracy.  Well, it depends on how you ask the questions, of course, but I think just recently there were some statements from people who are doing these models saying that they were running too warm.

So they are, you know, exaggerating the warmth. And I think in one of them, there was because they updated their cloud scheme. So they changed the perameters of clouds. And all of a sudden, it was running slightly warmer than before. So again, it just points to the severe problem of clouds.  I should also say that if you take out clouds of the models, then the model results start agreeing with each other. Whereas when you have all the clouds in the models, then you get very different results from various models. I mean, it’s not like in particle physics where you have a standard model that you can use.

I mean, here you have a whole ensemble of the different models and they all give slightly different results. And then you make an ensemble average of all these models and try to say that that is the future. It’s, of course, not really satisfying.

FR: Of course. So what do you think about the reports that the UN IPCC puts forward, the scientific reports? Are they something that are, you know, accurate?

HS: I looked at it with respect to the things that I’m doing. One of the things that, you know, struck me was that if you look at the effect of the sun over the last hundred years, there is no effect whatsoever. I mean, it is so small that, I mean, they’re saying essentially that there’s no effect of changes in solar activity. really a shame in the sense that I mean, for instance, we see in the present climate that we’ve had over the last 50 years, you can see solar cycle variations in the ocean heat content and so on, which we talked about just before.

So the solar activity seems to be 10 times larger than what you get from solar irradiance. And in The reason that they get such a small effect of the sun is because they are only considering changes in solar irradiance, which has to do with the solar constant. The solar constant is changing, you know, about one tenth of one percent.  So that is so, so small that it does not have any effect on climate. However, the changes in… In clouds, if we take the ideas that I have been working with Nir Shaviv we will get that over the last century, over 120 years, I think at least one watt per square meter has entered because of solar activity.

Solar activity does not seem to have been completely negative as well. over the last 10 years.
So when we think about how the issue is approached, the issue of climate change in society now, well now there’s the new administration in the United States that actually approaches it somewhat different, but in the EU, for example, Mrs. von der Leyen said that she’s still determined to go to net zero and so on.

So what I mean here is the somewhat hysterical tone that this issue is approached with and also the predictions of doom. So my question is if it’s the same in the academia or not. I mean scientists are in my opinion, at least, they seem very rational and fact-based.  So, is it somewhat different in the inside, I mean, if you talk to your peers?

HS:  I usually say that climate science is not normal science. There’s so much politics involved, even in academia. There is a sort of self-censorship. It’s a bad career move to go against the idea that CO2 is the main driver or to say what i’m saying right now so it’s not good for your career to to do that it has implications, I mean first of all it’s the only research that is being financed that can be done, if you don’t get a grant or anything, you cannot do any research.

And that’s also why I think many people will not rock the boat, because it’s a good way of getting financing for the research that you want to do. However, if you try to do things which I have done, which is perceived as controversial and not according to the general ideas, it becomes very, very difficult to obtain funding and to survive in this system. And people are very emotional about this because some people think that they are trying to save the world from a disaster. And, you know they think everybody else has really bad motives, maybe hidden motives, your multinational oil companies or something like that.

So it’s really difficult to be in opposition to these ideas. So that it’s very, very difficult for me to obtain any funding. Some people are very upset, you know, if you have been invited for giving a talk and some people find out who you are. and so on. So there’s many, many strange things happening.

FR: It’s really happening, right? I mean, it has happened to you that you’re invited to give a talk to talk about your research and there are activists who are coming to cancel you. Did I understand correctly?

Antifa thugs outside Munich Conference Center at 2019 Climate Meeting.

HS: Yes. I’ve also given talks in Germany, where the whole conference had to have police protection because of the demonstrators that tried to storm the place. Another time, on the building, they printed that we were Nazis and they put glue in the locks and so on.  Yes, so one couldn’t get in. I mean, it’s just sometimes it’s very, very, very strange how emotional it is. And there’s nothing rational about it because it’s not something that you can have a discussion about. I mean, you also heard people saying that, you know, the science has been done. Now it’s only action that is needed.

FR: Yes, yes. Well, it’s being parroted all the time. I don’t know, is it 100% already or last time I checked it was 99% of climate scientists agree on something.

HS: But all of these things are simply propaganda of some kind. It has no sort of basis in reality. It’s just some talking points that are being spread out. And some people believe them and other people know that they’re not entirely correct. And that’s how it is.

But the good thing is that I tried to survive in this system. Then I started to look at very, very long timescales. And I think, I mean, maybe we should I should tell you just a few words about that, because I think it’s a completely fascinating result that has come out. Absolutely.

So we talked about these supernovas that goes off, and they are producing the cosmic rays. So you can say supernovas are the source of cosmic rays. And the interesting thing is that our solar system it is actually moving around the Milky Way galaxy. So we are in a spiral galaxy, so it’s like a flat thing.
And we are moving around the center of the galaxy, the whole solar system, within 240 million years or 230 million years it takes. Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. And in these spiral arms, that’s actually where you have a lot of star formation. And star formation is where you also produce the large, heavy stars that explode.

Cosmic radiation and temperature through Phanerozoic according to Nir Shaviv and Jan Veizer. Blue columns refer to Milky Way Spiral arms.

So that means that when the solar system goes through a spiral arm, it actually in an area with much higher cosmic rays, Whereas when you are in between spiral arms, you have much lower. And the changes are not 10, 20% like we have from solar activity.

Now we are talking about several hundred percent of changes in the cosmic rays. So you can say that this is a completely independent way of testing the cosmic ray climate mechanism. Because if these changes in cosmic rays are important for climate, as we see in the present time, maybe they should also be important when we go back in time. It’s something that Nir Shviv actually looked at around 2001.

And what you find is that when you are in a spiral arm, it tends to be extremely cold on Earth. So the glaciations that we have had on Earth on cold periods fit beautifully when we were in spiral arms. And when we were in between the spiral arms, it was extremely warm. The temperature changes and the climate changes we are talking about are now, you know, from what we call an ice house, that is the glaciation, very severe glaciations, that is the large ice sheets on the Earth, to where they are completely melted and, you know, the sea level has gone up maybe by 100 meters or something like that. So it’s enormous changes.

What I looked for was to see if it has implications for life on Earth. And it turns out that you can actually indirectly look at how big the biomass has been at certain times in the ocean. And that is because you can look at organic material. So when you have the ocean and you have organic material, some of the dead material falls down at the bottom. And you can actually say something about the fraction of organic carbon relative to inorganic carbon in sediments.

So when you have sedimented mountains, you can go and measure this ratio of organic carbon to inorganic carbon. And it says something about the fraction of organic material that has been buried in sediments. And it turns out when you look at this fraction as a function of time, It fits beautifully with changes in reconstructed changes in supernovae.

And you can actually see it in fairly high details over the last 500 million years. And it turns out that you can actually extend it. So from geology, you have this fraction of organic material almost four and a half billion years back in time. And even here, it fits beautifully with the changes in the cosmic rays that have happened over the whole history of the Earth. It’s completely astounding that you have this correlation over four and a half billion years. So it says that the biomass seems to have been following things which are thousands of light years away from our solar system.

So this star formation has actually influenced the conditions for life. And it’s even more interesting because when you bury organic material, the organic material is made because of photosynthesis. And photosynthesis, that is, you know, the algaes, the green algaes produce oxygen.  So you have CO2 and water and sunlight that becomes, you know, sugar and oxygen. But in order for the reaction not to go back again, so the oxygen becomes CO2, you actually have to take the organic material and then have the oxygen and you bury the organic material in the sediments.

That’s the way you get the oxygen. So these variations in the organic material, these variations, they are actually also the production of oxygen that we have had over the whole history of the Earth. So supernovas have therefore indirectly produced or been responsible for changing the oxygen at Earth and all complex life.  I mean, in order to get complex life, we need oxygen. So it’s really been a very important part. So it seems to say that the Earth is really a part of an ecosystem, you know, where it really involves most of the galaxy. So here we see that it fits beautifully with the changes in cosmic rays or supernova frequency over most of the history of the Earth.

Source: Phanerozoic_Biodiversity.png Author: SVG version by Albert Mestre

I did another thing where I looked at the diversity of life, and just to cut the thing relatively short, it turns out that there’s a beautiful signal of the supernova frequency, even in the frequency, in the diversity of life, where you can see a very, very beautiful correlation over the last 500 million years. So it suggests that somehow the changes in the supernova  change the climate. And by changing the climate, if it’s colder, you have a larger temperature difference between equator and polar regions.

That means you have stronger winds. And if the wind is stronger, then you have more mixing in the oceans. And what it is mixing is the nutrients that life actually needs. I mean, a lot of the nutrients, they run out from rivers because of rain. And you have, you know, phosphorus and iron and oxygen. and other important elements for life. But they are then transported so life can uptake these nutrients. And the idea is that when you have more nutrients, then you can also have a higher diversity and you also get the higher biomass and you get more sediments. So everything seems to be connected in that way. I hope this was not too complicated.

FR: Well, I mean, yes, I think it wasn’t too complicated, but it’s really interesting to actually hear about the research, yes, and to think about the connections that you pointed out there. So, the only thing I would like to ask here is that, so it’s a hypothesis, of course, and again, how… how it is welcomed in your circles? I mean, is there any discussion about it or how it is approached?

HS: I think in geology and geologists, there’s a lot of geologists that really like it because many of them, they have seen how climate is changing over these long timescales and, you know, some of them, they know that CO2 does not appear to be the driver of climate changes on these long timescales. But I should also say that even in geology, there are people who are promoting that everything should be CO2, that CO2 is also driving climate on these very long timescales. But there are many places where it simply does not fit. So I don’t think that… I don’t think it’s a good theory.

I mean, you typically hear about, for instance, having extremely high CO2 levels at the same time that you had an ice age. And there are some problems also within the last 30 million years where CO2 actually dropped a lot. There are periods where temperature actually goes up and so you don’t have this correlation over many million years and some of it is called a climate paradox. There are some problems.

FR: Yes, of course, of course. Yes. So, I mean, it has been really nice talking to you, but I can see that our time for today is almost running out. I mean, thank you really for this interesting conversations and for the insights and for talking about your research in detail.  I hope my audience also listens and can hear some, well, good ideas, but they’re not only ideas because, well, this is what science actually must look like, ask questions and try to find answers, correct?

HS: Yes, I agree, that’s what we try to do.

 

 

 

 

Advance Briefing for COP30 Belém 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Overview from E Co. A summit at the crossroads

When the world gathers in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025 for COP30, it won’t be just another climate conference. It will be the first major summit after the Paris Agreement’s initial Global Stocktake at COP28, and the moment where climate ambition must decisively shift from words to delivery.

As many observers have begun to remark in the run-up to COP30, “Belém is where the climate community will be asked to prove that promises can become practice.”

What’s at stake at COP30

The Brazilian presidency has laid out a clear mandate: COP30 must focus on implementation, inclusion, and innovation. In practical terms, that means:

♦  A ‘Belém Package’ of outcomes across forests, finance, adaptation, just transition, and gender.
♦  The formal launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a proposed $125 billion results-based finance mechanism to incentivise forest conservation.
♦  Progress on a roadmap to mobilize $1.3 trillion annually in climate finance by 2035, building on the ‘Baku to Belém’ finance commitments made at COP29.
♦  New modalities for inclusive governance, such as Brazil’s proposed ‘Global Mutirão’, bringing Indigenous peoples, local governments, and civil society closer to the heart of climate decision-making .

COP30 will not be judged by the number of new pledges it produces. As several analysts have argued, it will be remembered “for whether the world found the tools to finally deliver on them.”

The main challenges Brazil faces

While Brazil has bold ambitions for COP30, turning them into concrete outcomes will not be easy. The presidency faces several challenges:

  1. Domestic contradictions: Despite progress under President Lula, agribusiness and mining interests remain powerful drivers of deforestation. Balancing economic pressures with climate leadership will test political resolve.
  2. Financing the transition: Brazil is pushing for massive climate finance scaling, but securing commitments for the $1.3 trillion annual target will be politically contentious, especially given donor fatigue and fiscal constraints in developed economies.
  3. Geopolitical polarisation: COP30 is the first climate summit taking place without strong U.S. engagement, given Washington’s announced withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2026 . This leaves Brazil trying to mediate between the EU, China, BRICS, and vulnerable countries, all with diverging agendas.
  4. Institutional fragility: While Brazil champions new governance ideas like a UN Climate Change Council, consensus on reforming multilateral processes is difficult. Many countries remain wary of ceding more authority to new structures.
  5. Logistics and credibility: Hosting COP30 in Belém is symbolically powerful but practically challenging. The Amazonian city faces infrastructure constraints, raising concerns about logistics, inclusivity, and whether Brazil can deliver an event of this scale smoothly.

“Brazil has set the bar high. But if expectations outpace deliverables, COP30 risks being remembered as another missed opportunity.”

My Comments

Since there is a big push on climate funding, maybe they could get to the bottom of this.

Maybe donors are put off by no one knowing who gets the money and for what it is spent.  And while they are investigating, how about understanding Energy Return on Investment (EROI): you know, the notion that an energy project is worth doing if the energy produced is greater than energy spent.  The poster at the top reminds of people dreaming of a world free of fossil fuels.

Why a COP Briefing?

Actually, climate hysteria is like a seasonal sickness.  Each year a contagion of anxiety and fear is created by disinformation going viral in both legacy and social media in the run up to the annual autumnal COP.  Since the climatists are especially desperate with the US outspokenly against the climate movement, we can expect the public will be hugely hosed with alarms over the next few weeks.  Before the distress signals go full tilt, individuals need to inoculate themselves against the false claims, in order to build some herd immunity against the nonsense the media will promulgate. This post is offered as a means to that end.

Media Climate Hype is a Cover Up

Back in 2015 in the run up to Paris COP, French mathematicians published a thorough critique of the raison d’etre of the whole crusade. They said:

Fighting Global Warming is Absurd, Costly and Pointless.

  • Absurd because of no reliable evidence that anything unusual is happening in our climate.
  • Costly because trillions of dollars are wasted on immature, inefficient technologies that serve only to make cheap, reliable energy expensive and intermittent.
  • Pointless because we do not control the weather anyway.

The prestigious Société de Calcul Mathématique (Society for Mathematical Calculation) issued a detailed 195-page White Paper presenting a blistering point-by-point critique of the key dogmas of global warming. The synopsis with links to the entire document is at COP Briefing for Realists

Even without attending to their documentation, you can tell they are right because all the media climate hype is concentrated against those three points.

Finding: Nothing unusual is happening with our weather and climate.
Hype: Every metric or weather event is “unprecedented,” or “worse than we thought.”

Finding: Proposed solutions will cost many trillions of dollars for little effect or benefit.
Hype: Zero carbon will lead the world to do the right thing.  Anyway, the planet must be saved at any cost.

Finding: Nature operates without caring what humans do or think.
Hype: Any destructive natural event is blamed on humans burning fossil fuels.

How the Media Throws Up Flak to Defend False Suppositions

The Absurd Media:  Climate is Dangerous Today, Yesterday It was Ideal.

Billions of dollars have been spent researching any and all negative effects from a warming world: Everything from Acne to Zika virus.  A recent Climate Report repeats the usual litany of calamities to be feared and avoided by submitting to IPCC demands. The evidence does not support these claims. An example:

 It is scientifically established that human activities produce GHG emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere and the oceans, resulting in warming of Earth’s surface and the oceans, acidification of the oceans, increased variability of climate, with a higher incidence of extreme weather events, and other changes in the climate.

Moreover, leading experts believe that there is already more than enough excess heat in the climate system to do severe damage and that 2C of warming would have very significant adverse effects, including resulting in multi-meter sea level rise.

Experts have observed an increased incidence of climate-related extreme weather events, including increased frequency and intensity of extreme heat and heavy precipitation events and more severe droughts and associated heatwaves. Experts have also observed an increased incidence of large forest fires; and reduced snowpack affecting water resources in the western U.S. The most recent National Climate Assessment projects these climate impacts will continue to worsen in the future as global temperatures increase.

Alarming Weather and Wildfires

But: Weather is not more extreme.


And Wildfires were worse in the past.
But: Sea Level Rise is not accelerating.

post-glacial_sea_level

Litany of Changes

Seven of the ten hottest years on record have occurred within the last decade; wildfires are at an all-time high, while Arctic Sea ice is rapidly diminishing.

We are seeing one-in-a-thousand-year floods with astonishing frequency.

When it rains really hard, it’s harder than ever.

We’re seeing glaciers melting, sea level rising.

The length and the intensity of heatwaves has gone up dramatically.

Plants and trees are flowering earlier in the year. Birds are moving polewards.

We’re seeing more intense storms.

But: Arctic Ice has not declined since 2007.

But: All of these are within the range of past variability.In fact our climate is remarkably stable, compared to the range of daily temperatures during a year where I live.

And many aspects follow quasi-60 year cycles.

The Impractical Media:  Money is No Object in Saving the Planet.

Here it is blithely assumed that the UN can rule the seas to stop rising, heat waves to cease, and Arctic ice to grow (though why we would want that is debatable).  All this will be achieved by leaving fossil fuels in the ground and powering civilization with windmills and solar panels.  While admitting that our way of life depends on fossil fuels, they ignore the inadequacy of renewable energy sources at their present immaturity.

An Example:
The choice between incurring manageable costs now and the incalculable, perhaps even irreparable, burden Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children will face if Defendants fail to rapidly transition to a non-fossil fuel economy is clear. While the full costs of the climate damages that would result from maintaining a fossil fuel-based economy may be incalculable, there is already ample evidence concerning the lower bound of such costs, and with these minimum estimates, it is already clear that the cost of transitioning to a low/no carbon economy are far less than the benefits of such a transition. No rational calculus could come to an alternative conclusion. Defendants must act with all deliberate speed and immediately cease the subsidization of fossil fuels and any new fossil fuel projects, and implement policies to rapidly transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels.

But CO2 relation to Temperature is Inconsistent.

But: The planet is greener because of rising CO2.

But: Modern nations (G20) depend on fossil fuels for nearly 90% of their energy.

But: Renewables are not ready for prime time.

People need to know that adding renewables to an electrical grid presents both technical and economic challenges.  Experience shows that adding intermittent power more than 10% of the baseload makes precarious the reliability of the supply.  South Australia is demonstrating this with a series of blackouts when the grid cannot be balanced.  Germany got to a higher % by dumping its excess renewable generation onto neighboring countries until the EU finally woke up and stopped them. Texas got up to 29% by dumping onto neighboring states, and some like Georgia are having problems.

But more dangerous is the way renewables destroy the economics of electrical power.  Seasoned energy analyst Gail Tverberg writes:

In fact, I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today. There are too many costs outside building the devices themselves. It is these secondary costs that are problematic. Also, the presence of intermittent electricity disrupts competitive prices, leading to electricity prices that are far too low for other electricity providers, including those providing electricity using nuclear or natural gas. The tiny contribution of wind and solar to grid electricity cannot make up for the loss of more traditional electricity sources due to low prices.

These issues are discussed in more detail in the post Climateers Tilting at Windmills

The Irrational Media:  Whatever Happens in Nature is Our Fault.

An Example:

Other potential examples include agricultural losses. Whether or not insurance
reimburses farmers for their crops, there can be food shortages that lead to higher food
prices (that will be borne by consumers, that is, Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children).
There is a further risk that as our climate and land use pattern changes, disease vectors
may also move (e.g., diseases formerly only in tropical climates move northward).36 This
could lead to material increases in public health costs

But: Actual climate zones are local and regional in scope, and they show little boundary change.

But: Ice cores show that it was warmer in the past, not due to humans.

The hype is produced by computer programs designed to frighten and distract children and the uninformed.  For example, there was mention above of “multi-meter” sea level rise.  It is all done with computer models.  For example, below is San Francisco.  More at USCS Warnings of Coastal Floodings

In addition, there is no mention that GCMs projections are running about twice as hot as observations.

Omitted is the fact GCMs correctly replicate tropospheric temperature observations only when CO2 warming is turned off.

Figure 5. Simplification of IPCC AR5 shown above in Fig. 4. The colored lines represent the range of results for the models and observations. The trends here represent trends at different levels of the tropical atmosphere from the surface up to 50,000 ft. The gray lines are the bounds for the range of observations, the blue for the range of IPCC model results without extra GHGs and the red for IPCC model results with extra GHGs.The key point displayed is the lack of overlap between the GHG model results (red) and the observations (gray). The nonGHG model runs (blue) overlap the observations almost completely.

In the effort to proclaim scientific certainty, neither the media nor IPCC discuss the lack of warming since the 1998 El Nino, despite two additional El Ninos in 2010 and 2016, plus an unexplained spike in 2023-24, now cooling off.

Further they exclude comparisons between fossil fuel consumption and temperature changes. The legal methodology for discerning causation regarding work environments or medicine side effects insists that the correlation be strong and consistent over time, and there be no confounding additional factors. As long as there is another equally or more likely explanation for a set of facts, the claimed causation is unproven. Such is the null hypothesis in legal terms: Things happen for many reasons unless you can prove one reason is dominant.

Finally, advocates and IPCC are picking on the wrong molecule. The climate is controlled not by CO2 but by H20. Oceans make climate through the massive movement of energy involved in water’s phase changes from solid to liquid to gas and back again. From those heat transfers come all that we call weather and climate: Clouds, Snow, Rain, Winds, and Storms.

Esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen ended a very fine recent presentation with this description of the climate system:

I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

Summary:  From this we learn three things:

Climate warms and cools without any help from humans.
Warming is good and cooling is bad.
The hypothetical warming from CO2 would be a good thing.

 

 

Climate Medical Quackery Exposed

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The following 65 page report was Submitted September 19, 2025 by physicians Dr. D. Weston Allen, Dr. Jan Breslow, and Dr. Daniel Nebert CO2 Coalition Comment on Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Table of Contents
Climate Change and Health …………………………………………………………………………………… 3
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 3
Warmth, Wealth and Health……………………………………………………………………………….. 3
Temperature, Morbidity and Mortality ………………………………………………………………….. 6
Future Warming ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 10
Temperature Extremes…………………………………………………………………………………….. 12
Temperature and Disease Vectors………………………………………………………………………. 15
Extreme Weather Events………………………………………………………………………………….. 24
Food, Famine, Climate and CO2 ………………………………………………………………………….. 33
Mental Health……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 37
Energy Sources and Health……………………………………………………………………………….. 39
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 44
References……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 45

Some examples of Climate Medical Mischief

Introduction

Human health, morbidity, mortality and longevity are significantly impacted by climate. This review examines the evidence for past, present and possible future human health impacts of climate change and its ramifications. It will also examine the health impacts of different energy sources and climate actions. It will not examine every link in the literature to a range of conditions where attribution is implausible or tenuous, or where association assumes causation.

Warmth, Wealth and Health

Davis et al (2003)23 found a 74.4% decline in heat-related mortality in 28 of the largest U.S. cities from 1964 to 1998 and estimated that another 1⁰C increase would further reduce the net mortality rate.24 Analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries, Gasparrini et al (2015)25 found that cold weather was over 17 times more lethal than hot weather: 7.3% of all deaths due to cold and 0.42% from heat. Masselot et al (2023) found cold weather to be ten times more lethal than hot weather across Europe and forty times more so in northern Europe.26 Their visual display of this difference (Fig. 1) was camouflaged by making the X-axis for heat-related deaths 5.6 times greater than the X-axis for cold-related deaths!

Figure 1: Temperature-related mortality in European cities from Masselot et al. 2023 (A) As depicted in the Lancet (B) Identical X-axis for heat and cold, corrected by the CO2 Coalition

Temperature and Diseases

Cholera, which afflicts 3-5 million people and kills about 100,000 annually,76 is now confined to developing countries in the tropics and subtropics (Fig. 5). When an epidemic broke out in London in 1848, Dr. John Snow performed the world’s first epidemiological studies in linking itto contaminated water. Nearly a century and a half later, a paper in the prestigious journal Science77 linked a 1991 outbreak in South America to climate change. The real cause, however, was a failure of the Peruvian authorities to properly chlorinate water supplies.78 Climate change can be a convenient scapegoat for government failure!

Temperature Extremes

Deadly heatwaves such as the European one in 2003 are often attributed to climate change.93
Temperatures elsewhere across the globe at the time, however, were normal or below normal (Fig.
7).94

Figure 7: Global tropospheric temperature anomalies, June-August 2003. Source: Chase et al. (2006)

The 1936 North American heatwave during the Dust Bowl decade set record temperatures across 14 states, reaching 49⁰C in Steele, North Dakota, and killed at least 5,000 people.99 The 1954 summer-long heatwave across the Midwest, reaching 117⁰F (47.2⁰C) in East St Louis, ranks as the hottest in 11 states (Fig. 8) based on an analysis of Midwest temperature records from 1845 to 2009.100 Nancy Westcott (2011) also found a reducing trend of heatwaves over the 20th century.

Figure 8: Rank of the June–September 1954 heat wave based on National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) climate division temperature data for the years 1895–2009. Source: Westcott (2011)

Temperature and Disease Vectors

West Nile Virus (WNV) was first identified in a West Nile district of Uganda in 1937. It is asymptomatic in 80% of infected people but can cause severe encephalitis or meningitis in about 1 in 150 infected persons, especially the elderly or immunocompromised. It is transmitted by a Culex species of mosquito that has bitten an infected bird (not human). Appearing in New York in 1999 and spreading across the states taking hundreds of lives, it was soon linked to climate change. 173 174 But its rapid spread from northeast to the south and west (Fig. 12) and its decline despite warming (Figs. 13 and 14) indicates that the vector was already there and climate change had nothing to do with that.

Figure 12: Progress of WNV in the U.S. 1999-2003. White 0, Blue <1%, Green1-5%, Yellow 5-10%, Red >10%

Food, Famine, Climate and CO2

In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted widespread famine with hundreds of millions starving to death in the 1970s, but the death toll declined as the population grew
(Fig. 27).

The U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research matched satellite-based observations of outdoor CO2 levels across the U.S. with county-level agricultural output data and other economic variables and concluded that CO2 emissions had boosted U.S. crop production since 1940 by 50 to 80%, much larger than previous estimations using FACE experiments, and found that every ppm of increase in CO2 boosts corn yields by 0.5%, soybeans by 0.6%, and wheat by 0.8 % (Fig. 29).305

Figure 29: U.S. average CO2 levels and yields of corn, soy and wheat all normalized so 1940=100. Source: Taylor and Schlenker (2023)

Mental Health

Dire predictions are often based on flawed models, exaggerations, wild imaginations and a failure to factor in human ingenuity.335 Predictions made in the 1970s of an impending ice age, falling crop yields, increasing global famine, advancing deserts, a pesticide-induced cancer epidemic, of oil, gas and other resources rapidly running out, were not only wrong but the very opposite has happened.

More recent predictions of malaria spreading across the globe, Arctic ice disappearing by 2013, increasing droughts and tropical cyclones have all failed to materialize. Indeed, the world has never been safer than now (Fig. 30).

The academic left first quarreled with science339 before capturing, corrupting and politicizing it. They then ignored quantitative uncertainties343 to contrive a catastrophic climate change consensus, calling sceptics deniers and inventing a climate crisis and global boiling to foster fear, funding and a rush to renewables. Anthropocentric purists prohibit alternative diagnoses, prognoses, priorities or remedies and suspect fossil fuel funding behind anyone challenging “The Science”. Climate change does impact the poorest the most but, as we shall see in the next section, a lucrative climate industry makes them even poorer and more vulnerable.

Conclusion

Warmth is good for human health and prosperity. Fossil fuels have played a vital role in providing the wealth essential for health and environmental protection. They have also boosted atmospheric CO2 and added a little warmth, both being hitherto beneficial overall for plants and people. The ingenuity of Homo sapiens at adapting to climate has permitted people to populate almost the entire globe from the freezing Arctic to the steamy tropics. If we stick to doing what we do best – adaptation – we will continue to thrive.

We must be prepared not only for global warming, but also for global cooling,
which will surely occur as our present warm Holocene draws to its inevitable end.

Human health and that of the planet depends on balancing productivity and development with conservation and environmental protection. Only developed countries with people lifted out of poverty can afford to produce clean energy, protect the environment, put power lines underground, construct buildings with 5-star energy ratings and use efficient lighting/appliances to minimize energy and water use, provide adequate safe water supplies and effective public health measures to control communicable diseases. It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones, and that they avoid using climate change as a scapegoat for failure to implement sound public health policies and proven preventive measures. Misguided climate action can be worse than unmitigated climate change.

The 2014 IPCC Summary for Policymakers nicely summed it up:

“The most effective vulnerability reduction measures for health in the near term are programs that implement and improve basic public health measures such as provision of clean water and sanitation, secure essential health care including vaccination and child health services, increase capacity for disaster preparedness and response, and alleviate poverty (very high confidence).”

 

 

 

 

No Right to Stable Climate in Our Holocene Epoch

Posted on by Ron Clutz

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.

 

August 2025 Ocean SSTs: NH Warms Slightly

Posted on 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.

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.

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?

uss-pearl-harbor-deploys-global-drifter-buoys-in-pacific-ocean

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

Tropics UAH Temps Cooler August 2025

Posted on 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). 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.

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 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

image-8

See Also Worst Threat: Greenhouse Gas or Quiet Sun?

August 2025 Lower Tropics UAH Temps  banner-blog

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.

Climate Alarmism: Not Science, But Superstition

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Brian C. Joondeph writes at American Thinker, CO2 Alarmism: Science or Superstition? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

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.

 

 

Nature Study Rigged to Shakedown Big and Little Oil

Posted on by Ron Clutz

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.

More Evidence Temperatures Drive CO2 Levels, Not the Reverse

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Robbins, 2025 Figure 2: Global tropic SSTs overlaid onto monthly atmospheric CO2 increases (Mauna Loa)

Kenneth Richard posted a No Tricks Zone article: Another New Study Suggests Most – 80% – Of The Modern CO2 Increase Has Been Natural.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

CO2 concentration increases are not the cause of rising temperature,
but an effect of rising temperature.

The 2025 paper by Bernard Robbins is Atmospheric CO2: Exploring the Role of Sea Surface Temperatures and the Influence of Anthropogenic CO2.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Close examination of the small perturbations within the atmospheric CO2 trend, as measured at Mauna Loa, reveals a strong correlation with variations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs), most notably with those in the tropics. The temperature-dependent process of CO2 degassing and absorption via sea surfaces is well-documented, and changes in SSTs will also coincide with changes in terrestrial temperatures, and temperature-dependent changes in the marine and terrestrial biospheres with their associated carbon cycles.

Using SST and Mauna Loa datasets, three methods of analysis are presented that seek to identify and estimate the anthropogenic and, by default, natural components of recent increases in atmospheric CO2, an assumption being that changes in SSTs coincide with changes in nature’s influence, as a whole, on atmospheric CO2 levels. The findings of the analyses suggest that an anthropogenic component is likely to be around 20 %, or less, of the total increase since the start of the industrial revolution.

The inference is that around 80 % or more of those increases are of natural origin, and indeed the findings suggest that nature is continually working to maintain an atmospheric/surface CO2 balance, which is itself dependent on temperature. A further pointer to this balance may come from chemical measurements that indicate a brief peak in atmospheric CO2 levels centred around the 1940s, and that coincided with a peak in global SSTs.

Source: The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature OleHumlum, KjellStordahl, Jan-ErikSolheim.

Introduction

Research into the influence SSTs have on changes in atmospheric CO2 includes the work by Humlum et al. (2013). When examining phase relationships, they found a maximum correlation for changes in atmospheric CO2 lagging 11-12 months behind those of global SSTs [1]. A paper by the late Fred Goldberg (2008) noted their correlation by examining El Niño events [2]. He also considered Henry’s law [3] in relation to SSTs, i.e. a temperature-dependent equilibrium between atmospheric CO2 and its solubility in seawater. Spencer (2008) also noted similarities between surface temperature variations with changes in atmospheric CO2 [4].

For the oceans specifically, areas of surface CO2 absorption and degassing are shown in maps provided by NOAA [5] and ESA [6] for example. These maps show that colder sea surfaces towards the poles are net absorbers of CO2 whilst the warmer surface waters of the tropics are net emitters. An analogy often cited is the greater ability of carbonated drinks to retain CO2 at cooler temperatures; this ability drops as the drinks get warmer.

Figure 1: Deseasonalised atmospheric CO2 data (Mauna Loa).

A strong correlation between changes in atmospheric CO2 and SSTs can be readily discerned from the relevant datasets. To illustrate, the upper graph in Fig. 1 plots atmospheric CO2 in parts per million (ppm) as measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1982. The data [7] has been ‘deseason-alised’ by NOAA to remove natural annual CO2 cycles.

The similarity between the two traces is striking: short-term fluctuations in CO2 readings at Mauna Loa appear particularly sensitive to tropic conditions (if tropic SSTs are substituted for global SSTs in Fig. 2, the correlation is less strong). Warm tropical seas, with surface temperatures typically around 25-30 oC, cover almost one third of the earth’s surface. The most prominent peaks in the figure coincide with strong El Niño events. Taken at face value, and ignoring any influence from anthropogenic emissions, Fig. 2  suggests that if the tropic SST anomaly dropped to around -1 oC (with related drops globally) then the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, as measured at Mauna Loa, would level off.

Robbins, 2025 Figure 2: Global tropic SSTs overlaid onto monthly atmospheric CO2 increases (Mauna Loa)

An important point is that changes in SSTs will coincide with those of terrestrial temperatures, temperature-dependent changes to both terrestrial and marine carbon cycles and, taking into consideration the research by Humlum et al. (2013) who found that changes in atmospheric CO2 followed changes in SSTs, an assumption in the work presented here is that nature’s influence on atmospheric CO2 levels, as a whole, follows on from changes in SSTs.

Discussion

The techniques used in Analyses 1 and 2, aimed at discerning and estimating the human contribution to recent increases in atmospheric CO2, are based on processing of monthly data from both SST and atmospheric CO2 datasets. Using the technique described in Analysis 1, no contribution from human emissions to the measured increases in atmospheric CO2, since 1995, was discerned. Given an approximate 60 % increase in annual human emissions since 1995 this suggests, by itself, that any human contribution to the measured increases is likely to be relatively small compared to nature’s contribution.

For the technique described in Analysis 2, a figure of ~27 ppm was estimated for a possible human contribution out of a total increase of 143 ppm since 1850, equating to around 19 % of the total increase in atmospheric CO2 since the start of the industrial revolution. Thus the results of these two analyses, taken together, suggest that nature appears to account for around 80 % or more of increases in atmospheric CO2 since 1995.

The technique described in Analysis 3 examines the relationship between longer-term trends in SST datasets and atmospheric CO2 measurements. This data analysis goes as far back as the late 1950s, when the ongoing acquisition of atmospheric CO2 measurements began at Mauna Loa. The resulting three graphs show an apparent almost-linear long-term relationship between SSTs and atmospheric CO2. Linear trend lines fitted to these graphs produce gradients of between ~120 and ~145 ppm/ 0C for the three SST datasets examined.

Figure 15: Atmospheric CO2 as a function of global SST trend since 1958

As for anthropogenic CO2, published figures (e.g. GCB data) suggest a roughly linear relationship between cumulative anthropogenic emissions as a function of time, and atmospheric CO2 measurements from Mauna Loa. If it’s reasoned that this mostly accounts for the linear trends as calculated in Analysis 3, this reasoning would not fit with the findings of the first two analysis methods that suggest 80 % or more of recent atmospheric CO2 increases are of natural origin.

Conclusions

Analyses of SST and atmospheric CO2 data, acquired since 1995, produce an estimated atmospheric CO2 increase, possibly attributed to human emissions, of around 20 %, or less, of the total increase since the industrial revolution, thus inferring that around 80 % or more of the increase is of natural origin.

Further data examination points to an almost linear longer-term relationship between SSTs and atmospheric CO2 since at least the late 1950s, and is suggestive of nature working to maintain a temperature-dependent atmosphere/surface CO2 balance. Recent historical evidence of such a balance may come from chemical measurements that indicate a brief peak in atmospheric CO2 levels centred around the 1940s, and that coincided with a peak in global SSTs.

Human emissions of CO2 are about 1/20-th of the natural turnover, and the findings of the analyses presented here suggest that this relatively-small human contribution is being readily incorporated into nature’s carbon cycles as they continually adjust to our constantly-changing climate.

As for surface temperatures, the research by Humlum et al. concluded that changes in atmospheric temperature are an ‘effect’ of changes in SSTs and not a ‘cause’ as some might advocate. And Humlum’s ‘take home’ message from a recent presentation was:

‘What controls the ocean surface temperature, controls the global climate’ [33]. He suggests the sun would be a good candidate, modulated with the cloud cover.

See Also

June 2025 Update–Temperature Falls, CO2 Follows