Climate Ideology

It Must Be Climate Change

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Prager U video can be seen at this link: https://www.prageru.com/video/it-must-be-climate-change

Transcript is below in italics with my bolds and some added images.

Have you noticed that every extreme weather event is blamed on climate change formerly known as global warming?

Every. . . Single. . .One. 

Can you think of an exception?

Too hot — climate change.    Too cold – climate change. 

Previously, cold spells were termed “Weather” in contrast to “Global Warming.” Now it’s all “Climate Change.”

Drought – climate change.   Too much rainfall – climate change. 

And there’s always a climate scientist at some university who’s willing to make a statement blaming the current catastrophe on our profligate use of fossil fuel. 

Some years ago, on The Late Show with David Letterman, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow made the definitive statement on this issue. She said, “I think global warming probably means extreme weather events of all kinds.” Naturally, Dave agreed.

What’s behind all these confident assertions? 

As a PhD in geochemistry, former member of the University of Alabama Department of Geological Sciences and someone who has written and lectured widely on the subject of climate and geology, I can tell you that it comes down to two things: 

Obscure metrics and highly speculative models.

Mix these ingredients together and voila! You can get any result you want. The scarier, of course, the better. “Torrential rain” makes a much better headline than “heavy rain.” 

To show you how this works, let’s look at a recent example. 

Here’s the assertion:   Climate change is making air turbulence more volatile and thus air travel more dangerous. 

Scary, right?   But is it true?  No. Not if we look at the observable data; that is, hard data we can easily verify. 

Here’s a chart of the number of turbulence-related accidents in the US from 1989 to 2018. 

Despite the rise in annual US airline passengers from about 400 million in 1989 to nearly one billion by 2018, turbulence-related accidents have remained constant. If climate change were indeed making turbulence significantly worse, we would expect to see a corresponding increase in these accidents.

Yet, the data does not support this assertion. Instead, it suggests that the relationship between turbulence and climate change is either negligible or nonexistent.

In fact, the co-author of the original study cited in a BBC article admitted as much.

“When we add [data back to 2002] to the previous results, the statistical significance assigned to the…North Atlantic winter jet stream…disappears.”

This was conveniently left out of the BBC article.

This disconnect between obscure metrics and highly speculative models, and observable data is not limited to turbulence. 

The broader climate crisis narrative is built on similar shaky foundations. 

Let’s look at three more examples. 

No Increase in Extreme Weather: The number of hydrological, meteorological, and climatological disasters has remained relatively flat since 2000. If climate change were causing more extreme weather events, we would expect to see a clear increase in these numbers. Instead, the data, again, reflects no such increase.

No Increase in Loss of Life: Deaths from meteorological, hydrological, and climatological disasters have not increased. This is a critical metric because it directly reflects the human impact of these events. Despite frequent claims that climate change is making weather more deadly, the data does not bear this out.

No Increase in Costs: Global weather losses as a percent of global GDP have not risen significantly. This is another crucial metric because it accounts for the economic impact of climate-related disasters. If climate change were truly making these events more severe, we would expect to see a rising trend in economic losses relative to global GDP.

We are left with this conclusion:

The reliance on obscure metrics and highly speculative models
to support the climate crisis narrative often serves
to cloud the truth rather than illuminate it. 

By focusing on projections and models rather than observable data, environmental activists, climate scientists, attention-seeking politicians and click bait media make claims that are difficult to verify and easy to manipulate. 

The fear that fuels the “climate crisis” is simply not justified by the data. That’s why — over and over again — end-of-the-world predictions don’t pan out. 

This does not mean that we should ignore environmental issues. We live on the same planet. We all want clean air and water. 

However, it does mean that we should approach claims of climate catastrophe with a healthy dose of skepticism and demand that assertions be backed up by observable, measurable data. Given that politicians and government agencies are spending tens of billions of our tax dollars every year to “save the planet” that would seem to be the least they could do: give us some hard facts, rather than unproven assertions. 

And the hard facts are, turbulence-related accidents have not increased despite a massive rise in airline passengers. Extreme weather events, loss of life, and economic costs have not shown the dramatic increases that alarmists would have us believe. 

By focusing on observable data we can have a more grounded, rational discussion about our environmental challenges and how best to address them.

That’s the way to practical, real-world solutions.  The blame game — “it’s climate change” — gets us nowhere. 

I’m Matthew Wielicki for Prager University.

No, Grist, MSN, et al: CO2 Is Not Making Oceans Boil

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

The Climate Crisis media network is announcing a new claim that rising CO2 is causing recent ocean warming, proving it’s dangerous and must be curtailed.  Examples in the last few days include these:

Finally, an answer to why Earth’s oceans have been on a record hot streak Grist

Ocean warming 4 times faster than in 1980s — and likely to accelerate in coming decades MSN

News spotlight: Fossil fuels behind extreme ocean temperatures, study says. Conservation International

Ocean temperature rise accelerating as greenhouse gas levels keep rising UK Natural History Museum

The surface of our oceans is now warming four times faster than it was in the late 1980s The Independent UK

Oceans Are Warming Four Times Faster as Earth Traps More Energy Bloomberg Law News

All this hype deriving from one study,
and ignoring the facts falsifying that narrative.

Fact:  Historically, ocean natural oscillations drive observed global warming.

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

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

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate.  On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles.

Fact: Recent rise in SST was driven by ENSO and N. Atlantic Anomalies.

And now in 2024 we have seen an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through December 2024.  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.

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

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.

Now in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak.  Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 10 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 4 months from its peak in August. It’s now about 0.1C higher than the average for this period. Note that the Tropical anomaly has cooled from 1.29C in 2024/01 to 0.66C as of 2024/12.

Fact: Empirical measurements show ocean warms the air, not the other way around.

One can read convoluted explanations about how rising CO2 in the atmosphere can cause land surface heating which is then transported over the ocean and causes higher SST. But the interface between ocean and air is well described and measured. Not surprisingly it is the warmer ocean water sending heat into the atmosphere, and not the other way around.

The graph displays measures of heat flux in the sub-tropics during a 21-day period in November. Shortwave solar energy shown above in green labeled radiative is stored in the upper 200 meters of the ocean. The upper panel shows the rise in SST (Sea Surface Temperature) due to net incoming energy. The yellow shows latent heat cooling the ocean, (lowering SST) and transferring heat upward, driving convection. [From An Investigation of Turbulent Heat Exchange in the Subtropics by James B. Edson]

As we see in the graphs ocean circulations change sea surface temperatures which then cause global land and sea temperatures to change. Thus, oceans make climate by making temperature changes.

Fact: On all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia, temperature changes first and CO2 changes follow.

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

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

I tested the premise that temperature changes are predictive of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  The chart above shows the two monthly datasets: CO2 levels in blue reported at Mauna Loa, and Global temperature anomalies in purple reported by UAHv6.1, both through December 2024. Would such a sharp increase in temperature be reflected in rising CO2 levels, according to the successful mathematical forecasting model? Would CO2 levels decline as temperatures dropped following the peak?

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

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

Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example December 2024 minus December 2023).  Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month. Note the recent CO2 upward spike and drop following the temperature spike and drop.

Summary

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

12/2024 Update–As Temperature Changes, CO2 Follows

 

 

 

 

 

 

Koonin: Reckless Claim of Climate Emergency

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Transcript

Hubris is a Greek word that means dangerously overconfident. Based on my research, hubris fairly describes our current response to the issue of climate change.

Here’s what many people believe:

One: The planet is warming catastrophically because of certain human behaviors.
Two: Thanks to powerful computers we can project what the climate will be like
20, 40, or even 100 years from now.
Three: That if we eliminate just one behavior, the burning of fossil fuels,
we can prevent the climate from changing for as long we like.

Each of these presumptions—together, the basis of our hubris regarding the changing climate—is either untrue or so far off the mark as to be useless.

Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that, to paraphrase a line from the classic movie The Princess Bride, “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”

For example, government reports state clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900.

Hurricane activity is no different than it was a century ago.

Floods have not increased across the globe over more than seventy years.

Source: Voice of International Affairs

Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago.

Why aren’t these reassuring facts better known?

Because the public gets its climate information almost exclusively from the media.

And from a media perspective, fear sells.

“Things aren’t that bad” doesn’t sell.

Very few people, and that includes journalists who report on climate news, read the actual science. I have. And what the data—the hard science—from the US government and UN Climate reports say is that… “things aren’t that bad.”

Nor does the public understand the questionable basis of all catastrophic climate change projections: computer modeling.

Projecting future climate is excruciatingly difficult. Yes, there are human influences, but the climate is complex. Anyone who says that climate models are “just physics” either doesn’t understand them or is being deliberately misleading. I should know: I wrote one of the first textbooks on computer modeling.

While modelers base their assumptions upon both fundamental physical laws and observations of the climate, there is still considerable judgment involved. And since different modelers will make different assumptions, results vary widely among different models.

Let’s just take one simple, but significant assumption modelers must make: the impact of clouds on the climate.

Natural fluctuations in the height and coverage of clouds have at least as much of an impact on the flows of sunlight and heat as do human influences. But how can we possibly know global cloud coverage say 10, let alone 50 years from now? Obviously, we can’t. But to create a climate model, we have to make assumptions. That’s a pretty shaky foundation on which to transform the world’s economy.

By the way, creating more accurate models isn’t getting any easier. In fact, the more we learn about the climate system, the more we realize how complex it is.

Rather than admit this complexity, the media, the politicians, and a good portion of the climate science community attribute every terrible storm, every flood, every major fire to “climate change.” Yes, we’ve always had these weather events in the past, the narrative goes, but somehow “climate change” is making everything “worse.”

Even if that were true, isn’t the relevant question, how much worse? Not to mention that “worse” is not exactly a scientific term.  And how would we make it better?  For the alarmists, that’s easy: we get rid of fossil fuels.

Not only is this impractical—we get over 80% of the world’s energy from fossil fuels—it’s not scientifically possible. That’s because CO2 doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere in a few days like, say, smog. It hangs around for a really long time.

About 60 percent of any CO2 that we emit today will remain in the atmosphere 20 years from now, between 30 and 55 percent will still be there after a century, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain after one thousand years.

In other words, it takes centuries for the excess carbon dioxide to vanish from the atmosphere. So, any partial reductions in CO2 emissions would only slow the increase in human influences—not prevent it, let alone reverse it.

CO2 is not a knob that we can just turn down to fix everything. We don’t have that ability. To think that we do is… hubris.

Hubris leads to bad decisions.  A little humility and
a little knowledge would lead to better ones.

I’m Steve Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science in the Obama Administration, and author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, for Prager University.

Addendum  Fossil Fuels and Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) Climate Science

Professors Lindzen, Happer and Koonin CO2 Coalition Paper April 2024

Table of Contents

I. THERE WILL BE DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE POOR, PEOPLE WORLDWIDE, FUTURE GENERATIONS AND THE WEST IF FOSSIL FUELS, CO2 AND OTHER GHG EMISSIONS ARE REDUCED TO “NET ZERO”

A. CO2 is Essential to Our Food, and Thus to Life on Earth
B. More CO2, Including CO2 from Fossil Fuels, Produces More Food.
C. More CO2 Increases Food in Drought-Stricken Areas.
D. Greenhouse Gases Prevent Us from Freezing to Death
E. Enormous Social Benefits of Fossil Fuels
F. “Net Zeroing” Fossil Fuels Will Cause Massive Human Starvation by Eliminating Nitrogen Fertilizer

II. THE IPCC IS GOVERNMENT CONTROLLED AND THUS ONLY ISSUES GOVERNMENT OPINIONS, NOT SCIENCE

III. SCIENCE DEMONSTRATES FOSSIL FUELS, CO2 AND OTHER GHGs WILL NOT CAUSE CATASTROPHIC GLOBAL WARMING AND EXTREME WEATHER

A. Reliable Science is Based on Validating Theoretical Predictions With Observations, Not Consensus, Peer Review, Government Opinion or Cherry-Picked or Falsified Data
B. The Models Predicting Catastrophic Warming and Extreme Weather Fail the Key Scientific Test: They Do Not Work, and Would Never Be Used in Science.
C. 600 Million Years of CO2 and Temperature Data Contradict the Theory That High Levels of CO2 Will Cause Catastrophic Global Warming.
D. Atmospheric CO2 Is Now “Heavily Saturated,” Which in Physics Means More CO2 Will Have Little Warming Effect.
E. The Theory Extreme Weather is Caused by Fossil Fuels, CO2 and Other GHGs is Contradicted by the Scientific Method and Thus is Scientifically Invalid

 

 

 

 

 

Good Reasons to Distrust Climatists

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The most recent case of climatists’ bad behavior is the retraction of a peer-reviewed paper analyzing the properties of CO2 as an IR active gas, concluding that additional levels of atmospheric CO2 will have negligible effect on temperatures.  From the Daily Sceptic:

Another important paper taking issue with the ‘settled’ climate narrative has been cancelled following a report in the Daily Sceptic and subsequent reposts that went viral across social media. The paper discussed the atmospheric ‘saturation’ of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and argued that higher levels will not cause temperatures to rise. The work was led by the widely-published Polish scientist Dr. Jan Kubicki and appeared on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect website in December 2023. The paper has been widely discussed on social media since April 2024 when the Daily Sceptic reported on the findings. Interest is growing in the saturation hypothesis not least because it provides a coherent explanation for why life and the biosphere grew and often thrived for 600 million years despite much higher atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. Alas for control freaks, it also destroys the science backing for the Net Zero fantasy.

Below are some comments responding to a Quora question, text in italics with my bolds and added images:

What are some reasons why some people do not believe in climate change or global warming despite scientific evidence? Is there any additional information that could help us understand their perspective?

Answer from Mike Jonas,  M.A. in Mathematics, Oxford University, UK, 

Good scientists do not lie and cheat to protect their science, they are happy to discuss their evidence and their findings, and they always understand that everything needs to be replicable and verifiable.

When Climategate erupted on the scene, and the climate scientists behind the man-made global warming narrative were found to have lied and cheated, all honest scientists thought that would be the end of it. Instead, what happened was that those climate scientists closed ranks and carried on, supported by a massive amount of government (ie, the public’s) money. One of the first things they did was to deflect Climategate by saying the emails involved had been hacked so should be ignored, but some of the people involved confirmed that all of the emails really were genuine.

It has been about 15 years since Climategate, and study after study has shown virtually all of the components of the man-made global warming narrative to be incorrect, even that none of the computer models used by the IPCC are fit for purpose,

And yet they maintained their closed ranks,
and the government money kept pouring in.

Did you know that the IPCC does not do any research (please do check that, on their web page About – IPCC they state “The IPCC does not conduct its own research”). It is, as its name says, an inter-governmental organisation, and it is run by and for governments. They say lots of persuasive sciency things, but the simple fact is that they cherry-pick and corrupt the science to achieve their ends. Regrettably, almost all the scientific societies are on the gravy train too. This is part of what the highly respected physicist Professor Hal Lewis said in his resignation letter to the American Physical Society (APS):

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare.

I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge?
It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

If you want to find out more about this “greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud”, the website Watts Up With That? is a good place to start (the fraudsters absolutely hate it), and it links to many other good websites. It has the full text of Hal Lewis’ resignation letter at:

Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society – an important moment in science history

Answer from Susannah Moyer

It’s curious that climate science is the rare scientific field where dissenting scientists, those with contrarian views, are unwelcome and even ostracized.

There are some well known climate scientists that have doubts about the role of CO2 and man made global warming as it pertains to global temperature. They have raised the issue that computer generated prediction models have been inaccurate in predicting temperature patterns because the modeling requires assumptions that have not been shown to be accurate.

Here is a contrarian view from climate scientists who have published climate research results in Nature, which is no small feat:

McNider and Christy are professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological Society. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

It is not a known fact by how much the Earth’s atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.

We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.

For instance, in 1994 we published an article in the journal Nature showing that the actual global temperature trend was “one-quarter of the magnitude of climate model results.” As the nearby graph shows, the disparity between the predicted temperature increases and real-world evidence has only grown in the past 20 years.

“Consensus” science that ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.

Another questioner, Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.

Firstly, even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

Climate Science Is Not Settled

Another group questioning what some consider “settled science”:

  • Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris;
  • J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting;
  • Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University;
  • Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society;
  • Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences;
  • William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton;
  • Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.;
  • William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology;
  • Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT;
  • James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University;
  • Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences;
  • Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne;
  • Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator;
  • Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem;
  • Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service;
  • Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society (APS), from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue?

There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question
“cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

 

 

 

 

World Institutions Pushing Pseudoscience

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Since 1660, Nullius in verba was the Royal Society’s motto.  “Don’t take anyone’s word for it.”

Yesterday’s post showed how American science societies have taken to parroting climatist suppositions rather than applying critical intelligence to claims of a “climate crisis.” That unquestioning attitude betrays the science method expressed in the Royal Society’s motto.  Today presents Tilak Doshi describing how the same pattern appears in international institutions supposed to be objective reporters of natural conditions. His Daily Signal article is The Climate Agenda’s March Through the Institutions: Can It Be Stopped? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A spate of stories in the media recently provides a remarkable illustration of how the globalist policy agenda of the climate-industrial complex has captured key international institutions and perverted their original organizational aims. From initially serving broad, laudable objectives for the welfare of their constituents, these institutions have been subverted over the years to serve the insistent pseudoscientific claims of climate alarmists.

The corruption of global institutions has, in turn, led to significant opposition that is becoming apparent. There is the prospect of an incoming Trump administration that is avowedly skeptical of the claims of an alleged climate crisis and is intent on exiting the U.N.’s Paris Agreement and its “net zero by 2050” policy target for a second time. This presents a welcome challenge to these corrupt institutions.

Will President Donald Trump and some of the populist parties in Europe
be capable of countering the entrenched globalist climate agenda?

The World Bank

On Oct. 17, Oxfam published a report that shockingly found that up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance—nearly 40% of all climate funds disbursed by the World Bank over the past seven years—is “unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed.” In other words, no one knows how the money was used. There is no paper trail revealing where the money went or what the accomplished results were.

Green cronyism, ranging from the Solyndra debacle—the waste of almost half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on a failed solar farm project under President Barack Obama’s watch—to President Joe Biden’s duplicitously-named Inflation Reduction Act, which will unleash an estimated $1 trillion deluge of subsidies on favored “green” industries, is nothing new. But it is instructive to trace the World Bank’s decline from its honorable founding objectives to its current status as yet another institution advocating green causes.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, reflecting the progressive virtues of Obama, who appointed him as president of the World Bank in 2012, imposed a ban on the financing of coal-fired power stations in 2013. This was followed by a ban on investments in all new upstream oil and gas resource development projects.

The distinguished economist Deepak Lal, a former research administrator of the World Bank, remarked that Kim incredulously “over-ruled the cost-benefit estimates of coal-based power over solar and wind-based power generation produced by his own economic staff, justifying this by reference to a wish to cut global emissions of greenhouse gases.”

The World Bank’s objections to the use of fossil fuels despite their importance to economic growth and poverty alleviation—which constitute its foundational institutional objectives—can be traced to the intellectual evolution of its management under James Wolfensohn during his decade as president (1995-2005).

Wolfensohn traced the arc from the old regime to the new. The old was represented by the “Washington consensus” of free markets, liberal trading regimes, sound money, and entrepreneurship associated with the classical liberalism of Adam Smith.

The new intellectual environment of the World Bank’s management—personified by Joseph Stiglitz, chief economist of the World Bank (1997-2000)—was defined by the theoretical failures of the free market, especially in accounting for the alleged negative climate impacts of fossil fuel use.

Stiglitz, a climate alarmist, wrote in a 2015 court brief for a failed climate lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of children against the U.S. federal government that “fossil fuel-based economies imposed ‘incalculable’ costs on society and shifting to clean energy will pay off.” [See Climatists Make Their Case by Omitting Facts]

Rupert Darwall, a former adviser to the United Kingdom’s chancellor of the exchequer and author of “Green Tyranny,” encapsulates the betrayal of the World Bank to its founding objectives as follows:

The World Bank’s mission has been subverted by green ideologues who assert that a low-carbon world benefits the world’s poor but fail to acknowledge that making energy much more costly increases poverty. The World Bank tags itself as ‘working for a world free of poverty’ … In making its choice between development and sustainability, the World Bank has decided it is going to try and ‘save the planet’ on the backs of the poor.

Yes, those are trillions of US$ they want to spend on an imaginary crisis.

By abdicating its founding principles for alleviating global poverty, the World Bank has taken a lead role among multilateral financial institutions in denying vast financial resources to poorer countries. It has hypocritically vetoed the right of developing countries to adopt the path of economic growth and environmental improvement that the now-rich countries had taken up successfully since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. The World Bank’s obsessive support for intermittent, low-yield renewable energy such as solar and wind power comes at the cost of its central charter to help the poor, an outcome that can only be described as egregiously unjust.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The U.N. IPCC issued a news release on Dec. 6 prior to the start of a “scoping” meeting in Kuala Lumpur of over 230 experts from 70 countries to draft outlines of working group contributions to the U.N. IPCC’s seventh Assessment Report (to be completed in 2029).

In the press release, the IPCC claimed that human combustion of fossil fuels “has resulted in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world.” This is contrary to the IPCC’s position hitherto, which is that almost all types of extreme weather events cannot be attributed with confidence to human activity.

The position of the IPCC regarding the lack of any link between climate change and extreme weather events is contrary to the almost daily headlines in the mainstream media attributing specific adverse weather events to “climate change.”

The work of eminent climate policy analysts Steve Koonin and Roger Pielke Jr. has done much to expose the pseudoscientific nature of what has been called “attribution studies.” These typically involve researchers who apply their climate models and historical observations to conclude that any particular weather event (say a hurricane or a drought) was made “more likely” or “more severe” by some magnitude in percentage units due to “human influence” (referring to the combustion of fossil fuels).

Based on the dubious claims of “attribution science,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a climate law last week that will require companies operating in New York state responsible for large amounts of planet-warming pollution to contribute to climate damage repair efforts. Under the new state law, companies responsible for the bulk of emissions from 2000 to 2018 will be on the hook for some $3 billion a year over the next 25 years.

Koonin cites the World Meteorological Organization that states that “any single event, such as tropical cyclone cannot be attributed to human-induced climate change, given the state of scientific understanding.” The IPCC’s “Special Report on Extreme Events” states that “Many weather and climate extremes are the result of natural climate variability … Even if there were no anthropogenic changes in climate, a wide variety of natural weather and climate extremes would still occur.”

Nonetheless, international organizations such as the World Bank and the IPCC have been increasingly politicized to serve climate hysteria. In this context, Chris Morrison of The Daily Sceptic finds that “[f]ears are growing that the IPCC could water down or even ditch its current finding that almost all types of extreme weather events have little or no sign of past human involvement, or any going forward to 2100.”

International Energy Agency

On Dec. 23, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, released a report documenting how the International Energy Agency “has moved away from its energy security mission to become an “energy transition” cheerleader.”

The report finds that “French President [Emmanuel] Macron’s observation that IEA has become the ‘armed wing for implementing the Paris Agreement’ is regrettably true. With the many serious energy security challenges facing the world, however, IEA should not be a partisan cheerleader. What the world needs from IEA—and what it is not receiving now—is sober and unbiased analyses and projections that educate and inform policymakers and investors. IEA needs to remember why it was established and return to its energy security mission.”

The divergence of the IEA away from its original mission to advise policymakers in its member countries with sound analysis of trends in global energy supply and demand to becoming a “cheerleader” for radical net-zero emission policy targets has not gone unnoticed over recent years. I have written on the ideological approach adopted by the IEA in its advocacy for green causes here, here, and here.

When ideological advocacy becomes the measure of achievement for the IEA, the loss of credibility and soundness of its policy advice is only to be expected. The IEA’s messianic fervour for green technologies such as solar and wind power, “green” hydrogen, batteries, and electric vehicles prevents it from asking basic questions.

If it is true that drastically cutting back on fossil fuels is consistent with higher economic growth and increased productive employment, why does the IEA recommend policymakers force countries along “net-zero” pathways? Surely, if replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar energy and electric vehicles promotes growth and employment, then wouldn’t countries such as China and India naturally race toward this best of all possible worlds without expensive green subsidies and punitive anti-fossil fuel policies?

The Trumpian Revolution Looms

Nonprofit organizations reflect the needs of their funding members, and organizations such as the World Bank, IPCC, and IEA are no different. As their funding is primarily from the U.S. and the EU, it is not surprising that they manifest the “climate emergency” predilections of the Biden administration and the largely left-socialist West European governments that see climate change as an existential threat and a national security priority. In taking up the mantle of green advocacy on behalf of their paymasters, these organizations have lost all credibility as independent and objective advisors for their member countries.

The climate-industrial complex fears the prospect of the Trump administration’s pullout of the Paris Agreement for the second time. Politico, a reliable mouthpiece for the climate establishment, expressed these fears soon after Trump’s election victory: “The world is bracing for President-elect Donald Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time—only this time, he could move faster and with less restraint.” In Europe, the emergence of populist parties has been partly propelled by the widespread rejection by EU citizens of the onerous fiscal burdens imposed by green policies.

The seismic change in policy direction that a second term “drill, baby, drill” Trump administration promises for the global climate juggernaut—represented by the three leading international agencies covered here—can only be seen as hopeful as we look forward to positive developments in energy policy in 2025.

 

 

 

Sorting (Again) Climate and Weather Changes

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Brian C. Joondeph asks in his American Thinker Article When Did Changing Weather Become Climate Change? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

What’s the difference between weather and climate? Let’s ask the expert class, the governmental National Weather Service.

Weather is defined as the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, with respect to variables such as temperature, moisture, wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure.

Climate is defined as the expected frequency of specific states of the atmosphere, ocean, and land, including variables such as temperature, salinity, soil moisture, wind speed and direction, and current strength and direction. It encompasses the weather over different periods of time and also relates to mutual interactions between the components of the earth system (e.g., atmospheric composition, volcanic eruptions, changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, and changes in the energy from the sun itself).

That’s a mouthful, a typical governmental explanation. Simply put, weather is short-term, meaning days or a few weeks, while climate is long-term, meaning years, centuries, or longer. [Comment: I prefer a baseball analogy: Weather is like the batter swinging in the box, and climate is the batting statistics, hits, walks, RBIs etc.]

It’s sunny and unseasonably warm where I am today, but a week ago, it was snowy and unseasonably cold. A climate warrior might label the former as global warming, the latter as global cooling, or the composite as climate change. A rational person would call it weather.

The United Nations (UN) defines climate change,

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, due to changes in the sun’s activity or large volcanic eruptions. But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

The first sentence is undeniably true. The Great Lakes were once covered by mile-thick ice sheets that disappeared when the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago. This is not long ago, considering the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year age.

Somehow, the climate cooled and warmed long before any significant human activity existed. And how many additional times did this happen in the past 4.5 billion years?

But the UN believes humans are the “main driver of climate change” since the 1800s, not explaining how climate changed so drastically 10,000 years ago to melt a mile-thick ice sheet during a time of minuscule human activity.

The UN relies on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that reports in a scary fashion,

Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.

Is today’s climate “unprecedented”? Do they know the temperatures hundreds of thousands of years ago? They should, as this data is readily available, published in the prestigious journal Science.

Researchers reconstructed global mean surface temperature using data assimilation, integrating geological data with climate model simulations. They discovered that “the Earth’s temperature has varied more dynamically than previously thought.”

PhanDA global mean surface temperature across the last 485 million years. The gray shading corresponds to different confidence levels, and the black line shows the average solution. The colored bands along the top reflect the climate state, with cooler colors indicating icehouse (coolhouse and coldhouse) climates, warmer colors indicating greenhouse (warmhouse and hothouse) climates, and the gray representing a transitional state. Source: Judd et al 2024

Today’s global temperature is low. It was last this cold 300 million years ago. According to the chart, Planet Earth has been cooling for the past 50 million years. Any man-made warming would be helpful now.

Scientists should know better, as should corporate media.
But obviously, they don’t.

I reference a few articles from this year in The Guardian, a two-hundred-year-old British newspaper considered a “newspaper of record in the UK” (along with the London Times), much like The New York Times in America. As a British newspaper, the Guardian has observed climate change firsthand, reporting on it cooling, then warming, then cooling again.

Another record is the recent (in geological terms) history of the Thames River. Between 1309 and 1814, it froze at least 23 times. There was a “frost fair” in 1608 when the river froze for over six weeks.

What caused this freeze? London’s activity in the 1600s was mainly overcrowding, disease, and crime, not air conditioners, internal combustion engines, and backyard grills.

More recently, the river froze over in 1963 and again partially in 2021. This seems to be normal cyclic climate change, far from the “man-made global warming” the UN and IPCC warn about.

The Guardian ran two stories this year without a bit of irony. In February of this year, their headline was “What will Spain look like when it runs out of water? Barcelona is giving us a glimpse.” In October, the new headline was “Spain floods: number killed passes 150 as scientists say climate change ‘most likely explanation’ – as it happened.”

From running out of water to flooding, all within a few months. It’s dry, then it’s wet. It’s cold, then it’s warm. And vice versa. It’s also normal. But The Guardian wants it both ways. It’s all climate change, in their view.

A month ago, the paper wrote, “Spain’s deadly floods and droughts are two faces of the climate crisis coin.” In other words, all forms of weather are climate change.

CNN wants it both ways, too. In December 2023, it ran a headline, “Winter is here, but it’s losing its cool.” One year later, without a bit of irony or introspection, it reversed itself with this headline, “It’s about to get dangerously cold, even for winter.”

Much like racism, when everything is considered racist, then nothing is. The same is true for climate change. Psychologists call this confirmation bias,

People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

It is also hubris to believe that we can predict, much less control, the climate. The IPCC readily admits, “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore, the long-term prediction of future climate states is impossible.”

Yet Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, and other “climate experts” claim to know exactly how many years it will be until the Earth is uninhabitable.

Speaking of Al Gore, I recommend Joel Gilbert’s new film, “The Climate According to AI Al Gore,” where Joel interviews an AI Gore, debunking Gore’s conviction, expertise, and the entire climate emergency of the left.

To the fearmongering, climate-catastrophizing left, it’s all humans’ fault, and with ever-increasing command-and-control diktats, rules, regulations, and taxes, we can affect forces beyond our comprehension and control.

The climate is indeed changing—it always has and always will. Temperatures will likely rise from their current 500 million-year low regardless of what the so-called experts, activists, or any world government agencies say or do.

In their attempts to regulate and tinker with Mother Nature, they may inadvertently destroy everything they are attempting to save—unless that’s the plan.

Previous Post: Corrupting Climate and Weather

An article at The Spectator raises the question Do alarmists know the difference between weather and climate?  The author Charles Moore may also be a man for all seasons like Sir Thomas More.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

A lot of clever people are putting the ‘green’ into ‘greenbacks’

Until recently, those expressing skepticism about climate change catastrophe have been hauled over the coals (or the renewables equivalent) for not understanding the difference between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’. The lack of global warming at the beginning of the 21st century was not to be taken, chided the warmists, as evidence that climate change was not happening. Weather was the passing phenomenon of each day: climate was the real, deep thing.

Now, however, the alarmists themselves have elided the two concepts, using the Australian bush fires as their cue. As Sir David Attenborough puts it: ‘The moment of crisis has come’. They could be right, of course, but how could they really know? In this sense, President Trump is surely justified in warning, at Davos, against the ‘Prophets of Doom’. Prophecy is a different skill from an exact understanding of the here and now.

Mr Trump might usefully have talked about the Profits of Doom too. If the movement can persuade western society that the climate emergency is upon us, there are enormous sums to be made by people who claim to be able to remedy it. Hence the patter now coming out of companies such as Blackrock, BP or Microsoft, fanned by Mammon’s public intellectuals, such as Mark Carney. A lot of clever people are putting the ‘green’ into ‘greenbacks’. A lot of less clever investors are going to get their fingers burnt.

See Also Stoking Big Climate Business

Footnote:  Case in Point:  Green Fraudsters Plead Guilty

Jeff Carpoff, 49, of Martinez, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. His wife, Paulette Carpoff, 46, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States and money laundering. According to court documents, between 2011 and 2018, DC Solar manufactured mobile solar generator units (MSG), solar generators that were mounted on trailers that were promoted as able to provide emergency power to cellphone towers and lighting at sporting events. A significant incentive for investors were generous federal tax credits due to the solar nature of the MSGs.

The conspirators pulled off their scheme by selling solar generators that did not exist to investors, making it appear that solar generators existed in locations that they did not, creating false financial statements, and obtaining false lease contracts, among other efforts to conceal the fraud. In reality, at least half of the approximately 17,000 solar generators claimed to have been manufactured by DC Solar did not exist.

“By all outer appearances this was a legitimate and successful company,” said Kareem Carter, Special Agent in Charge IRS Criminal Investigation. “But in reality it was all just smoke and mirrors — a Ponzi scheme touting tax benefits to the tune of over $900 million. IRS CI is committed to investigating those who take advantage and impact the financial well-being of others for their own personal gain.”

“The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of Inspector General (FDIC-OIG) is pleased to join our law enforcement colleagues in announcing these guilty pleas,” stated Special Agent in Charge Wade Walters for the FDIC OIG San Francisco Regional Office. “The defendants conspired with others to create a fraudulent business venture that duped unsuspecting entities, including banks, to invest approximately $1 billion, which the two later used to support a lavish lifestyle.

Source:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/27/dc-solar-owners-plead-guilty-to-largest-ponzi-scheme-in-eastern-california-history/

Simpleton’s Guide to Climate Alarmist Protests

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Rex Murphy wrote a National Post article in 2023 The simpleton’s guide to climate alarmist protest.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Glue yourself to a masterpiece or throw paint on a building.
If that doesn’t hold off climate Armageddon, what will?

The quality of truth in an existential cause may be measured by the quality of the intellects of its most committed followers. Allow me to illustrate.

Imagine the fumings of a climate alarmist. Here, a representation of what goes on in the alarmist mind.

The world is in deep imminent threat.

It may end.

Our beautiful, blue, penguin-marching-David Attenborough-marble may be no more.

All life will disappear. Farewell soy milk. Farewell shocking pink hair dye. Farewell all.

Climate activists in front of police officers during the Extinction Rebellion protest in London [Henry Nicholls/Reuters]

What can I do?

Why, I can call out from every hollow my comrade eco-warriors. Come in a black mask, or strip to your unsightly nudity when you get there, will be the summons.

And what is the plan that I and my fellow eco-doomsters have to avert planetary extinction?

We are, above all, strategists and tacticians. We know what earns quality
and never-challenged coverage on NPR and festivals of authentication from CBC.

Protesters march on Russell Street in Melbourne, Australia [Darrian Traynor/Getty Images]

That is why we organize the type of protests that we do. Direct actions and exhibitionist displays — stripping down at awards shows — that speak to the farmer, the logger, the fisherman, the movie star falling from favour, or the sad professor who does not have Jordan Peterson’s reach and fame.

Our protests are aimed at persuasion, credibility, their appeal to Steven Guilbeault. Before Steven became our environment minister, he once climbed atop then-premier Ralph Klein’s home in Calgary to “install” solar panels. Even though it terrified Klein’s wife, who thought it was a home invasion, it was a great moment in the history of climate protest and an example for us even today. Steven, you are a hero, and you looked so good in those orange overalls. Greenpeace forever!

So when we want to avert the gravest challenge humanity has ever had to face, that is why we select actions that will — in the words of a very great writer — “strike home to every bosom.”

Is there a Monet or a Goya or a Munch or a Botticelli or a van Gogh in your city’s art gallery? Well, off to the hardware store and the supermarket. There is glue to be bought and cans of tomato soup to drop into the backpack.

Glue yourselves to the painting or throw the tomato soup over it. Doesn’t matter which.

When the world, on TV and the internet, sees these brave assaults on western art at its highest, you know everyone, just everyone, will park their cars, turn off the heat, refuse to buy anything with a petroleum base and insist that all the heads of oil companies and plastic manufacturers be put on trial for genocide, and Hollywood liberals will forsake their mansions and move to caves.

One of our very keenest moves happened over the weekend in Ottawa. An eco-warrior threw a bucket of pink paint on the Prime Minister’s Office and padlocked herself to a rail after the ritual half-undressing. A whole bucket of pink paint — if that doesn’t hold off climate Armageddon, what will?

A climate activist from On2Ottawa threw a bucket of pink paint on the entrance to the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa before chaining herself topless to the office door on April 18, 2023. Photo by On2Ottawa / Twitter

All on camera. So bold.

She did not — it is most necessary to add — honk! End of musing.

California-funded eco-activists sprayed orange paint on Christmas trees in seven German cities in a protest against government inaction on climate change. (2023)

We should measure the value of high-order environmental activism — IPCC stuff, Davos effluvia, anything Al Gore or David Suzuki so stridently say — by the quality of the minds and actions of their most intense supporters.

Climate protesters block traffic on the FDR during the morning commute Oct. 25, 2021 (Credit: Extinction Rebellion NYC)

By which I mean the “gluers” on paintings, the neuron-challenged street-blockaders, simpletons who smear soup on masterpieces, and — a great example — the dimwit(s) who think throwing paint on the PM’s office amounts to a persuasive, consciousness-raising tactic.

Instead of what everyone else knows it to be: a display of desperate intellectual incapacity, delusionary arrogance, and the “Hey-I’m-saving-the-world-so-I-can-be-as-stupid-and-supremely-annoying-to-anyone-as-I-f—-ing-well-choose” attitude of such world saviours.

Climate change protesters block downtown D.C. streets in hours-long protest (2019)

That’s the level of non-thought that supports most energetically and egregiously the high priests and savants of the net-zero fantasy. Measured by the standard of its pathetic protests, environmental alarmism is the religion of children, a sandbox for narcissists — regardless of how old they are.

CO2 Not a Threat, But Greatly Benefits

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Beware false and misleading Cartoons.

First, a plain language scientific explanation is in this article: THE BENEFITS OF CO2 – PART 2: CO2 does not cause global warming.  By Teri Ciccone.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

THE BENEFITS OF CO2 – PART 2: CO2 does not cause global warming

Abstract: Climate alarmists, the press/media, and politicians say we must achieve net zero CO2 by 2050 to avoid catastrophic global warming. In reality, all humanity and all life on Earth benefit from the increased atmospheric CO2 and the slight temperature increase. In Part 1, we presented scientific arguments to show how increased CO2 and warmer temperatures benefit humanity and all life on Earth. In Part 2, we discuss why a growing number of independent scientists and engineers argue that CO2 does not cause any measurable global warming. Part 3 will present how and why increased CO2 does not cause extreme climate/weather conditions. in the concluding Part 4 we present recommendations for policymakers.

Introduction: In this study, we set out facts and scientific principles consistent with established laws of physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics to state that greenhouse gases (GHGs) and the greenhouse effect (GHE) do not measurably warm the Earth. The concept that it does is at best a 100-year-old myth. The absorption and re-emission of longwave infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface does not cause any measurable warming of the Earth.It also raises the particular concern that the UN IPCC and NASA/NOAA do not address all of the sources of heat that warm the Earth. Nor consider the many natural forces and cycles that cause weather and climate variations that operate at the Astronomical, Endo-Earth, and Bio-Earth levels. Their well-published and promoted Earth Energy Budget needs serious revisions or to be discarded. Two main concepts describe atmospheric physics and thermodynamics, and each plays a vital role in understanding how the Sun warms the Earth and how the Earth cools. The first is the Radiative Transfer Concept (RTC) and the second is the Heat Transport Concept (HTC). They are both important and both need to be studied to fully understand our weather and climate systems. RTC needs an understanding of quantum physics, radiation, photons, absorption/emissions, etc. HTC needs an understanding of the more mundane science of atmospheric thermodynamics, convection, latent heat, conduction, evaporation-condensation, air and ocean circulations, etc.
Radiation Transfer Concept-RTC. The Sun provides most of the energyneeded to warm the Earth to a comfortable and sustainable level for all life. Solar radiation (photons) readily crosses the vacuum of space and arrives at Earth’s Top Of Atmosphere (TOA) at the speed of light. We see a simplified conceptual model of this radiation in Figure 1, showing the wavelength/ frequency, amplitude, and direction of propagation. These electromagnetic energy rays are emitted over a broad set of vibrational frequencies, spanning 20 orders of magnitude, called the spectrum. This radiant energy arrives at TOA at 1,366 W/m 2 with an average of 340 Watts per square meter (W/m 2 ) when averaged over the spherical world.About 30% of the 340 W/m 2 is reflected to space leaving 240 W/m 2 for the Earth. There one-third is absorbed by the atmosphere and two-thirds by the surface (oceans + lands). The high-energy UV radiation warms the air mostly by photodissociation and photoionization. In this process, the solar radian electromagnetic energy is converted to kinetic energy, and then to physical heat through collisions with air molecules. At the surface, about 67% warms and then cools by local physical heat processes like conduction, convection, and latent heat and 33% by radiation. Most of this radiation exits directly to space through an “atmospheric window” at frequencies that are not absorbable by GHGs. It’s estimated that only about 0.09 W of the solar energy absorbed by the surface is radiated through CO2 the non-water vapor greenhouse gasses (GHGs), a trivially small amount.
In essence, the IPCC claims that these greenhouse gasses already contribute about 33 degrees C of temperature to the average global temperature, and it will continue to increase with increased quantities of human-made CO2 /GHGs. In Summary, the IPCC claim is based on three false assumptions:
1) When a photon’s electromagnetic energy is absorbed by CO2 it warms the CO2 molecule with physical heat. This heat is then shared with other air molecules and the atmosphere warms. The energized CO2 molecule will then re-emit a comparable photon, and the process is repeated hundreds/thousands of times before its heat/energy finally exits into space.
2) Half of all the re-emitted photons go upward as described in 1). But half are radiated downward and are re-absorbed by the surface and warm it.
3) The Sun provides Earth with only enough energy to give the planet an average global temperature of -18°C. But measurements tell us that the average global temperature is about 15°C, therefore they claim that CO2 and the GHE provide the missing 33°C heat.
Together these concepts allegedly warm the Earth by first converting the photon’s Electromagnetic Energy (EMI) into physical heat, and secondly, this process delays the release of the original photon energy into space allowing heat to accumulate and delaying its exit to space. The details of their false science and the errors in their explanation are provided in this article Revised Why all the fuss with CO2 and the Greenhouse effect
Heat Transport Concept, or HTC is the second step towards what happens to the EMI energy of these photons as they approach the surface. Some will be reflected to space, for example, in Antarctica, nearly 100% is reflected to space by the ice and snow. Some will be scattered in the atmosphere and cause no measurable warming of anything. Most of these photons are visible light and Infrared and are not readily absorbed by the air. Nearly all of these photons are absorbed by the surface, the dense solid matter and liquid part, and warms it. This process of photon absorption by the surface and warming is called thermalization and we now discuss the Heat Transport Concept, or HTC. In general, the atmosphere does not warm the surface because the air is normally cooler than the surface. We know this based on the established atmospheric Temperature Lapse Rates. For example, the dry air lapse rate is 9.8°C per Km of altitude. This means that the atmospheric temperature cools by 9.8°C for each kilometre of altitude up to the top of the troposphere. According to the Second Law of thermodynamics heat can only flow from a warmer object to a colder object, never the other way around. The RTC espoused by the UN IPCC violates this Second Law, thereby falsifying their point 2) above. Nitrogen, Oxygen, argon, and water vapor make up more than 99% of the atmosphere. The optical depth, or transparency of the air close to the surface is very opaque. This ensures that almost 100% of resonant Longwave Infrared Radiation (LWIR) photons emitted by the surface will be absorbed by GHGs and immediately thermalized within the first several millimetres of altitude. This means that the resonant photon will be immediately absorbed by a CO2 molecule and become energized. An energized CO2 molecule could spontaneously re-emit the absorbed photon in about half a second as described by the UN IPCC theory. In reality, however, within a millionth/billionth of a second that energised CO2 molecule will physically collide with a non-GHG molecule. The impact of the collision will heat the non-GHG molecule and de-energize the CO2 molecule. So that initial photon has disappeared, and its electromagnetic energy is changed to physical heat and is dispersed throughout the atmosphere adding a tiny bit of warmth to the air. The detailed process is described in Part 2, pages 5-6 of the paper linked above. 
Conclusion. This CO2 photon absorption and immediate collision-thermalization process dominates throughout the troposphere. This means that the CO2 resonant LWIR radiation energy radiating from the surface is saturated to extinction by an overabundance of CO2/GHG molecules. There are no resonant photons left in the troposphere for the CO2 molecule to absorb. This is readily visible in Figure 2 by the presence of the CO2 notch, the top red arrow. In the stratosphere and mesosphere where the molecules are few and far apart, we see an increase in the CO2 spontaneous re-emissions implying a reverse- thermalization and the re-emitted photons exit to space. The UN IPCC claim that CO2/GHGs is the major cause of global warming is thus falsified by the above explanation that is consistent with established laws of science, combined with the absence of any scientific test data.
This makes two powerful cases: First, we can safely abandon the goal and costs of Net Zero and Carbon Capture and Sequestration. Even in the extreme case that atmospheric CO2 doubles or quadruples there is no risk of a catastrophic, run-away global warming threat. Second, the press/media, politicians, and compromised scientists will also say that we should reduce and remove CO2 from the air just to be sure. But, there’s a fact, that there is about 50 times more CO2 dissolved in the oceans than in the air. Henry’s Law tells us nature apportions how much CO2 goes into the air and how much goes into the oceans based only on the temperature of the water’s surface. During a hot sunny day, more CO 2 flows from the oceans to the air. And in cold winters more CO 2 will flow from the air into the oceans and all water on Earth. Imagine the silliness of spending $ billions/trillions to remove CO2 from the air and then have the oceans immediately replace it.
In summary, we find out that CO2/GHG absorption of LWIR energy emitted by the surface provides a negligible amount of physical heat in the troposphere. Consequently, the GHG/GHE provides near zero of the missing heat that the IPCC attributes to the GHGs and the GHE.

Background Paper with complete discussion

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

Man-Made Climate Change A Good Thing?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Selwyn Duke writes at American Thinker Let’s say man is changing the climate. So what? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The temperature is rising!” “The temperature is dropping.” “The temperature is staying the same.”

We argue the “facts” of climate change (even as parts of New Jersey were just buried under 11 inches of global warming). One side wants the facts to show that man is disrupting the climate, while the other wants them to show that he’s not. But an almost never posed question should be asked:

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that our industry
is causing global warming. So what?

No, I’m not a guy who “just wants to see the world burn” (and that would be literally). Rather, if anthropogenic climate change were occurring, why should we assume it wouldn’t be beneficial?

Greening of the earth from CO2 and warming.

Oh, it’s not just that the Earth is greener and crop yields are higher when CO2 levels are greater; it’s not just that relative warmth breeds life. It’s also this:

Some scientists have said the Earth will soon enter, or has already entered, a significant cooling phase. Others even contend that another ice age is nigh. And if this is so, any man-caused temperature increase would merely mitigate this naturally induced but deadly phenomenon.

One of these scientists was the late Professor S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric and space physics expert who had been a founding director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. “I have recently become quite concerned about ice ages and the dangers they pose to humans on our planet,” he wrote in 2015 — “and indeed to most of terrestrial ecology.”

Singer explained later in his article that there “are two kinds of ice ages”:

(i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically. (ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1000-1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun.

The scientist then warned that the “current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent….”

Now, this is a frightening prospect. Even the liberal New York Times admitted in 2017, reporting on a Lancet study, that “cold weather is responsible, directly or indirectly, for 17 times as many deaths as hot weather.” That’s in our relatively warm time, too. What would happen during a major ice age?

Well, “The coolings are quite severe,” informed Singer. “[T]he most recent one, ending only about 12,000 years ago, covered much of North America and Europe with miles-thick continental ice sheets and led to the disappearance of (barely) surviving bands of Neanderthalers; they were displaced by the more adaptable Homo Sapiens.”

In other words, another major ice age would likely be a Hollywood-like, apocalyptic disaster. In fact, Singer insisted that we should be prepared to use scientific interventions to mitigate such an eventuality (while Bill Gates wants to do the same to cool down the Earth). To be clear, though, while Singer said that another ice age could begin tomorrow, it could also be tens of thousands of years away. And my article isn’t about hashing out the details, assessing probability, or recommending mitigation measures. (you can read Singer’s work for that). It is about this: prejudice.

Again, accepting for argument that man is significantly warming
the planet (not my belief), why assume this is bad?

In reality, moderns’ thinking so often reflects a kind of misanthropism or, at least, a bias against Western-triumph-born modernity. People believing that extraterrestrials furtively visit our planet never assume the aliens’ matter-of-course environmental impact could be malign; they’re too advanced. People pondering a hunter-gatherer tribe (e.g., the North Sentinelese) generally assume they just must live “in harmony with nature” and be innocuous; they’re too primitive. Never mind that American Indians deforested stretches along, and caused the sedimentation of, the Delaware River long before Europeans’ New World arrival (to provide just one perspective-lending example). The activities of man, or modern man or Western man, depending on the precise prejudice, just must be harmful for the simple reason that he engaged in them. So, yes, racial profiling is a problem — against the human race.

In fairness, we can do and have done much to damage the environment. In fairness again, though, forested area in the U.S. is greater than it was a century back and our water and air are cleaner than they were 60 years ago. And in recent times the Great Barrier Reef has actually increased in size (this isn’t necessarily due to man’s activities). So we can also be good shepherds of the Earth.

See more at Barrier Reef Great Again.

The odd thing, though, about the misanthropic prejudice is that implicit in it is an idea that man is akin to some unnatural, artificial presence. This, coming from people who generally also believe man is himself only an animal, a mere product of evolution; in other words, just another part of nature. And, of course, whether the result of divine creation or evolutionary happenstance, part of nature (or Creation) is precisely what man is.

As for the world’s fortunes, 99.9 percent of the species of life that have ever existed are extinct, partially due to ice ages. So ironically, if man’s activities — either accidentally, intentionally or both — mitigate the coming ice age, we humans may be responsible for counteracting the next great extinction.

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