The major development in climate science in the last year or two is something almost no one talks about–strong evidence that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have no significant effect on global temperatures in the real world over recent decades. The studies involved conclude that the minor increases in global temperatures during this period can be entirely explained using natural factors.
The evidence for this conclusion appeared in studies done over a year ago, but neither side is saying much about them. Skeptic researchers seem to be currently concentrating on the case for lower equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), arguing that it is lower than the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has hypothesized. I agree that the ECS is nowhere near as high as the IPCC claims, but believe that the emphasis needs to be on the larger issue of whether CO2 has a significant effect on temperatures in the real world.
The Major Question Is Why CO2 Has No Significant Effect
Now that the evidence shows that CO2 has no significant effect in the real world over recent decades, the major research question is why–not how small the ECS may be in the idealized world of climate researchers. Insignificant effects will still be insignificant regardless of who may be correct as to the ECS. Perhaps the major question is why CO2 has no significant effect on temperatures in the real world, in which case CO2 and ECS are largely irrelevant.
The climate alarmists continue to put their heads in the sand and pretend that their oft-repeated catastrophic CO2 hypothesis is somehow correct, even though it has been disproved, and the world should continue to spend more than a trillion dollars each year trying to reduce human-caused CO2 emissions. But if changes in CO2 levels have no significant effect on temperatures, their proposed reductions in human-caused emissions will not either.
Alarmists have made a major change in the last year. Instead of concentrating on EPA and national level decisions on using their favorite “renewables,” the alarmists have now switched to promoting their scientifically invalid efforts to reduce human-caused CO2 emissions reductions to the state and local levels. This is largely the result of the Democrats’ loss of the White House, not any new research.
All this strikes me as highly irrational. Now there is always the possibility that the Wallace et al. reports are wrong in their major conclusion. The techniques used are new to climate science but widely accepted in other fields. No one has demonstrated that the new research is wrong in over a year despite the authors’ offer to make available all of the data used to reach this important conclusion. And reproducing the results does not require a costly supercomputer like the IPCC’s meaningless climate models do. It seems to me that a rational agenda on the part of climate alarmists should either be to disprove the Wallace et al. studies or to implement actions that would carry out the conclusions suggested by the research (most importantly, abandoning efforts to reduce human-caused emissions of CO2). But neither is being done to my knowledge.
So what are possible physical hypotheses for the no significant effect finding? Econometric studies such as Wallace at al. can say whether there is a significant effect, but cannot provide the physical explanations for it. One interesting idea is that it results from Earth’s formidable system of natural temperature-regulating emergent phenomena, particularly near the oceanic tropics, where much of the sun’s energy enters the climate system. These phenomena include immediate increases in clouds and thunderstorms when temperatures rise, particularly when temperatures exceed 26-29oC. Other emergent phenomena that operate elsewhere, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, also redistribute heat and keep down temperatures. These emergent phenomena prevent significant increases in global temperatures regardless of their cause.
If indeed this is the explanation, concerns about catastrophic increases in temperatures are groundless and the relevant question becomes whether Earth’s de facto temperature control system overcomes the minor alleged theoretical temperature effects of CO2 increases, not whether human-caused CO2 emissions increase temperatures.
So I argue that climate alarmists are not being rational unless they think that they can continue to smother the opposition using their lock hold on the mainstream media even though they no longer have control of the Federal environmental bureaucracy.
Donald Kasper said: “On a dry planet, it may cause warming, but on a water planet, the chemical reaction that results produces bicarbonate with has no radiance effect.”
It makes no matter if it is a dry planet or not, as the climate models leave out one massive effect, night-time. During the day in sunlight, CO2 and water vapor are saturated with IR, emitting and absorbing IR, and are effectively a wash, no effect.
It is at night, which is in none of the models, that these “radiative gases” convert heat energy in the atmosphere to IR, which is lost to space. That is why the air cools down so rapidly after sunset and little breezes kick up so quickly in the shadows of skidding clouds on a sunny day. This one way loss of energy is why these mis-named “greenhouse gases” help to cool the planet, not heat it.
The only way CO2 could warm a body of air would be if convection was prevented (in the case of junk scientists, ignored). With convection an active part of our atmospheric behavior, there is patently no greenhouse effect nor “trapping” of heat in the atmosphere.
CO2 radiance operates on one 2cm band, which is not enough to have any detectable effect on any planet, wet or not. Radiance of 100% CO2 in a sealed glass tube is not the radiance in an atmosphere.
There has been no credible empirical scientific study which concluded that a rise in atmospheric temperature was caused by a rise in atmospheric CO2. none. Without that conclusive evidence, any and all efforts to adjust atmospheric CO2 is utterly wasted.
[…] development in climate science in the last year or two is something almost no one talks about, says Alan Carlin – strong evidence that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have no significant effect on […]
‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzpPXuASY8
My website is
“Human Caused Global Warming”, ‘The Biggest Deception in History’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzpPXuASY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO08Hhjes_0
http://www.drtimball.com
I am not a scientist but housewife, cook and a gardener with a greenhouse. I have never accepted the “so-called green house effect”. Why? Because a greenhouse is made of glass allowing sun/heat to enter and the plants to photosynthesize with available nutrients and water and if you pump CO2 in you will increase the amount of photosynthesis. The glass traps all the gases inside and they atmosphere inside gets warmer. In the earth’s atmosphere there is no glass barrier and the gasses expand and rise until they cool. CO2 can’t form an enclosed barrier. Can someone explain why am wrong?
Having a greenhouse seems like a terrific practical advantage for thinking about the global warming narrative. Warmed air Is trapped and maintained by the glass ceiling. Al Gore would need to encase the planet with glass to create the effect he so fears.
The problem may be that nobody asked the question:
“What is the GHE mechanism that must contain either an input of work or a source at a higher temperature to cause the spontaneous rise in the Earth’s surface temperature from -18C to +14C?”
The fact is the GHE does not contain any such mechanism – so therefore it must be a new branch of physics, or it may be imaginary.
My bet is that it is imaginary.
The myth of CO2 induced warming can be attacked at its foundations. The magnitude of the Greenhouse Effect (more accurately the Radiative Delay , RDE) has from the start been an assumption. The temperature of the Earth’s surface is, quite reasonably thought to be higher than that of a comparable rocky planet with no atmosphere by about 30C. The difference was assumed to be caused by radiative(greenhouse) gasses, since no other mechanism was apparent.
Up till a decade ago that seemed to be a reasonable assumption, but the NASA moon mission of 2009 with its DIVINER measurements of the moon’s surface temperatures showed clearly that the mean surface temperature was raised by the process of diurnal smoothing from the surface rock absorbing heat during the day and releasing it at night. The this should be the case is not intuitively obvious. It involves the T^4 power relationship of radiative emission.
For the Earth, our atmosphere has a greater effect. This is readily quantified, at least roughly enough, using undergraduate level physics and a simple spreadsheet, and shown to be a strong enough effect to account for all the temperature increase. The calculations have been performed by many scientists, with results and discussion in peer reviewed journals. So we now have a quantified alternative to radiative gasses.
That, in a rational scientific debate, should have placed the onus on the alarmists to quantify their candidate process. The challenge was ignored. As far back as far as 2011, Nasif Nahle and I independently used laboratory measurements of H2O and CO2 emissivities to calculate a value for RDE. His results were published, albiet obscurely, and ignored.
In 2016 I had another attempt using actual atmospheric emissivity measurements. The result was a value of 0.14C for both water vapour and carbon dioxide. This result has been in the public domain for about ten months and widely read. No refutation has been produced. A full description can be seen in RadiativeDelayInContext170828.pdf at my site: brindabella.id.au/BrindabellaArchives.
dai
Great comments, thanks DK and pochas.
Things are looking good for Trump, Pruitt, and Carlin. Trump met the three guys liberated from North Korea in the early hours of a long day that culminated in a nifty rally in Elkhart. it’s not looking good for Democrats running for the Senate. Why would voters reelect Joe manchin, sleepy Joe Donnelley, Claire mckaskill, or sharrod brown?
The Boss is going to flog dems for favoring illegals over Americans. Democrats have nothing useful to offer. They are bereft of good ideas. They want to raise Taxes, raise energy prices, defund national defense, kneel for the flag, replace you with illegals free to commit crimes, outsource US jobs or replace Main Street with the Web. If anyone complains, they get pilloried by the Fake News, celebrities and academics, and investigated by the FBI.
This is a remarkably ugly agenda by the Democrats. It’s hard to see a Blue Wave arising from this. Pruitt seems safe and can convene a red blue climate debate next year,
Don’t know if it is quite fair to suggest both sides are ignoring important evidence that CO2 does not influence temperatures.
This is highly inconvenient evidence for the alarmists so yes they will ignore it.
The administration seems not to be devoting much attention to rebutting Alarmism these days. There seems an intentional hiatus. The President is focusing on Real problems like North Korea and may not want the public distracted by Fake News.
thus it remains to be seen what impact the wonderful new evidence will have within the administration.
Hot air rises, and expands, and cools, until its temperature matches its surroundings. This is the major engine for heat transport throughout the troposphere. To have any effect CO2 must significantly influence the heat capacity of the atmosphere (change the lapse rate), and a trivial calculation shows it cannot.
There are a couple of problems with CO2. 1. The radiance effect with higher concentration is a log function and almost all radiance effect has played out. 2. On a dry planet, it may cause warming, but on a water planet, the chemical reaction that results produces bicarbonate with has no radiance effect. 3. The infrared window of CO2 is 1 cm wide out of mid-infrared of 7000 cm so CO2 does not have enough bandwidth to ever play a major role in warming and is why its radiance effect peaks at 50-100 ppm. 4. CO2 is active in biological and chemical reactions. 5. Satellites show peak CO2 over tropical rainforests, not the industrial north due to plant physiology. 6. Temperatures in many instances change with no change in atmospheric CO2 such as temp change with altitude, with latitude, with cloud cover, with ground cover, with proximity to the ocean, with time of day, and with time of year. Almost everything trumps CO2 for temperature variation. Just the fact we have seasons when the CO2 is constant over a year shows the CO2 role is smaller than at least a dozen other atmospheric factors.