What if there is no Catastrophic Risk from Man-made Global Warming ?
What if Man-made CO2 emissions are not the “Climate Control Knob” ?
What if Man-made CO2 emissions really are a non-problem ?
But what if there is a real Global Cooling Catastrophe in the offing ?
It is the propaganda of Catastrophic Global Warming / Climate Change alarmists that has illogically conflated Carbon Dioxide, the beneficial trace gas that sustains photosynthesis and thus all life on earth and which may cause some minor warming, with real and dangerous pollutants to create the “Great Global Warming Scare / Climate Change Scare / Climate Emergency / etcetera”, with their “we are all going to fry in the next few years” narrative”.
The temperature progression of Greenland Ice Cores, (during the Holocene interglacial above), shows that each high point in the past of our current benign epoch:
- Optimum
- Minoan
- Roman
- Medieval
- Modern
has been colder than its previous high point.
For the last 3 millennia, since 1000BC, cooling has been progressing at a rate considerably higher than during the earlier Holocene that encompassed the highest temperature of the Holocene Climate Optimum.
As the Holocene epoch is now some ~11,000 years old, experience of recent previous interglacials shows that, on a geological time scale, it could well be ending quite soon. It is therefore much more likely that the Holocene will continue to cool at at least its current rate, as it has done for the past 3 millennia, unless it terminates much more suddenly like earlier interglacials.
As a result of the failure to appreciate elementary arithmetic, physics and biology, the Western world has been forced to indulge in a massive guilt trip about its industrialised civilisation, with endless predictions of impending global overheating catastrophes. But instead it is likely that modern Holocene warming during the 20th century and particularly just at the end of the 20th century is:
- beneficial to the biosphere and Man-kind
- within normal limits
- sadly may be not now even be occurring at all.
The probability is that any current global warming is not primarily Man-made and in any case it could be not be influenced by any remedial action, however drastic, taken by a comparatively small part of the Global population, the developed Western democracies.
So that prospect should be greeted with unmitigated joy.
If it is so:
- all concern over CO2, as a man-made pollutant can be entirely discounted.
- it is not necessary to degrade the Western world’s successful capitalist economies to no purpose.
- if some warming were happening it would lead to a more benign and healthy climate for the biosphere and mankind.
- any extra CO2 has already increased the fertility of all plant life on the planet.
- if it is occurring at all, a warmer climate within natural variation, would provide a future of greater opportunity and prosperity for the biosphere and for human development, as has frequently been well proven to be BENEFICIAL in the past.
- a warmer climate would now be especially beneficial for the underdeveloped world.
The role of Atmospheric CO2
Apart from accepting and emphasising the the role of water vapour and clouds in the “Greenhouse Effect” these notes use conventional Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC), wisdom to calculate the temperature effect of CO2. Any realistic climate policy should be based on the following points on recognising the role of natural atmospheric CO2 and Man-made CO2 emissions:
- The warming Greenhouse effect is essential to all life on earth, without it amounting to ~+33°C planet Earth would be a very cold and inhospitable place indeed.
- The greatest part of the Greenhouse effect, (~90% – 95%) arises from water as vapour and clouds in the atmosphere.
https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
- The major role of water as vapour or clouds is fully acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.
- Nonetheless the IPCC only concentrate their alarmist views on Man-made CO2 emissions. This is hardly surprising, after all the adverse role of Man-made CO2 emissions and their supposed impact on climate is built into the IPCC mission statement and mandate.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf (page 666 of the IPCC assessment.)
- Instead atmospheric Carbon Dioxide is the very stuff of life and any higher concentrations would be beneficial.
- The world needs its atmospheric CO2 for the survival and fertilisation of all plant life.
- Atmospheric CO2 is essential for PHOTOSYNTHESIS in plants, it thus supports all life on earth
- Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide CO2 is therefore in no way pollutant.
- At about half the current atmospheric concentration of CO2, plant Photosynthesis falters and the world soon dies.
- In comparison with its Geological past the World is still in a period of CO2 starvation, because most of the CO2, once at least 10 times more abundant in the atmosphere when plants evolved, has since been sequestered by microscopic life in the oceans as limestone, Calcium Carbonate.
CO2 concentrations came close to the fatally low level, (~150 ppmv), during the last ice age, 110,000BC – 10,000BC. As Colder oceans absorb more CO2 and ocean life sequesters it as limestone. That dangerously low level of atmospheric CO2 could well be exceeded in any coming Ice Age.
This is the way our world will eventually die of atmospheric CO2 starvation in some future glacial period.
Increasing CO2 concentration, mainly arising from slightly warmer oceans outgassing CO2, has been promoting plant growth throughout the planet and has been reducing the water needs of plants. According to NASA, ~15% extra green growth across the planet is already attributable to the relatively recent beneficial increase in CO2 concentration.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
Man-kind as a whole contributes only a small amount of the CO2 to the Carbon cycle, (~3% per annum), and any extra atmospheric CO2 is rapidly absorbed by the oceans and the biosphere, (with a half-life probably as short as ~5 years).
Atmospheric CO2, whether Man-made or mostly naturally occurring, is not a pollutant. If any extra CO2 were to have some minor warming effect, it would be all to the good.
See Patrick Moore 2016 Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
However added CO2 from Mankind’s use of fossil fuels is unlikely to be sufficient to avoid the adverse cooling effects of the coming end of Holocene interglacial.
The diminishing warming effectiveness of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
In spite of the hysterical propaganda, there is no straight-line relationship between CO2 concentration and global temperature. In spite of the UN IPCC propaganda, atmospheric CO2 concentration is not a control knob on Global temperature.
The effectiveness of CO2 as a warming Greenhouse gas rapidly diminishes logarithmically as its concentration increases. The consequence of this logarithmic diminution mean that all further CO2 induced temperature increases can now only be:
- absolutely marginal
- that there is no chance of any further Catastrophic Global warming from increased atmospheric CO2, whether Man-made or not.
In other words there cannot be “an enormous Climate Emergency” caused by further increases in Man-made emissions of CO2.
This logarithmic diminution effect is caused by the overlapping energy wavelengths between greenhouse gasses and water vapour in the atmosphere. As a result at the current level of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at ~400 ppmv, the effect of CO2 as a Greenhouse gas is close to being fully saturated.
An analogy of the CO2 diminution effect with increasing concentrations, can be pictured as if one was painting over a window with successive layers of white paint. The first layer will still be fairly translucent, but subsequent layers will progressively reduce the translucency until the window is fully obscured and thereafter any further paint layers can make no further difference to the fact that the window is already fully obscured.
A concentration of atmospheric CO2 greater than 200 ppmv, equivalent to ~77% of CO2’s Greenhouse effectiveness, is essential to maintain plant life and thus all life on earth. Plant life would be entirely extinguished with CO2 levels at ~150ppmv.
CO2 is not causing global warming
At the current CO2 level of ~400 ppmv, ~87% of the effectiveness of CO2 as a Greenhouse gas is already exhausted: only 13% of the warming effectiveness of CO2 remains even up to 1000ppmv.
There is now so little of the potential of CO2 as a greenhouse gas now remaining that there is now no possibility of ever reaching the “much feared” +2.0°C : +1.5°C temperature rise or more predicted by alarmists.
When compared with CO2, Water Vapour and Clouds play a much more significant role in the Greenhouse effect. Methane and other warming Greenhouse gasses play an even less important and only a very marginal contribution to the Greenhouse effect.
The range of published scientific views on the significance of atmospheric Water on the Greenhouse effect ranging from 98% – 75% is shown below. The further residual CO2 warming available across this range of assertions up to a concentration of 1000 ppmv or some 2.5 times the present CO2 concentration.
The further residual CO2 warming available across this range of cases up to a concentration of 1000 ppmv, some 2.5 times the present CO2 concentration. Beyond 1000ppmv the temperature increasing capability of atmospheric CO2 can be discounted.
So from now on increasing CO2 in the atmosphere can only lead to very limited further warming and certainly not to any catastrophic and any dangerous temperature increase.
These calculations therefore show that Climate Sensitivity to the doubling of CO2 concentration range from 0.17°C to 0.33°C.t ow.
Logarithmic diminution operates as follows:
- 77% of the CO2 greenhouse effect of CO2, 0 – 200 ppmv, is essential to sustain plant life and thus all life on earth.
- Extra atmospheric CO2 rapidly and very effectively fertilises plants, enhancing growth and reducing water demand
- Even if it is assumed that all the increase from 300ppmv – 400ppmv is Man-made, it could have only given 4.2% of the net Greenhouse effect, (aside from water and clouds), thus a likely temperature rise of between 0.07°C – 0.14°C
- A possible immediate future rise from 400ppmv – 500ppmv could only give a likely rise of between 0.05°C – 0.11°C
- A later rise of CO2 from 500ppmv – 1000ppmv, were it to occur, can only give an additional further rise of between 0.17°C – 0.33°C
- This ignores the IPCC statement that accepts that only 50% of the present CO2 increase is Man-made, which would reduce the range of Man-made temperature increase by CO2 values by half.
- This also ignores the assumption made in IPCC Climate models that there is massive positive and escalating feedback from further increasing CO2 emissions: even if such massive positive feedback were proven, any warming from continuing CO2 emissions would still remain marginal as a result of the logarithmic diminution effect.
Alarmists have stated that levels of +2.0°C – +1.5°C to be catastrophic and sadly they have convinced most of the Western world’s politicians. It was admitted, via the Climategate emails, by the alarmist scientists at the University of East Anglia that the previous worst case value of +2°C was simply “pulled from the air“.
Economically any increase up-to a further +2°C would be beneficial. Global temperatures would then approach the very abundant period of the previous Eemian interglacial epoch 110,000 years ago, when hippopotami thrived in the Rhine delta.
https://academic.oup.com/reep/article/12/1/4/4804315
It is now likely that the impact of any rise in CO2 concentrations on global temperature is not only marginally insignificant but also immeasurable, even at its greatest IPCC assessed effectiveness.
And in fact any temperature rise could well be beneficial.
The future of Man-made CO2 emissions
To bring India and the Developing world, (some 4.1 billion people, ~44% of the world population), up to the current level of development of China, as represented by its present level of Chinese CO2 emissions/head, over the coming decades their CO2 emissions are bound to escalate by a further 33 billion tonnes per annum, (in effect doubling current Man-made CO2 emissions). This progressive and inevitable increase in CO2 emissions is being promoted and supported by the Chinese “Belt and Road programme” with at least 700 new Coal-fired power stations in construction or in now the pipeline.
So faced with this inevitable escalation throughout the developing world, the political belief of Western Nations that they are able to limit Global temperature by the elimination of their relatively small proportion of CO2 emissions from their own use of fossil fuels can now only ever have marginal, immeasurable and entirely self-harming effects.
https://www.lomborg.com/press-release-research-reveals-negligible-impact-of-paris-climate-promises
Therefore, any de-carbonisation efforts by Western Nations are misguided, irrelevant and futile.
Fossil fuels are a gift of nature. They are like a battery of energy created by sunlight several million years ago. Their use has enabled all the civilised development throughout the World. They will continue to support the growth in prosperity of the Developing world.
Fossil fuels are not running out. For example there are 300 years’ worth of Coal at the maximum previous extraction rate available in the UK alone. Fracking developments can occur almost anywhere worldwide.
Nonetheless there is a true Climate Catastrophe in the offing
That coming catastrophe is the exact opposite of the Climate alarmists with their:
“we are all going to fry in twelve years narrative”.
This prospect presages a scary future for Man-kind and the biosphere and it may well arrive in the comparatively near-term:
- According to relatively recent Ice Core records the last millennium 1000 – 2000 AD was the coldest of our current Holocene interglacial.
- Since ~1000 BC, before Roman times, the world has already been cooling progressively at ~0.14°C / millennium, ~20 times the earlier rate.
- But, as can be seen, in the rapid Recovery from the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, when temperature increased at a rate of ~+2.5°C / millennium, ~20 times the present rate of temperature diminution, the World’s Climate can change suddenly and much more radically , as it did at the end of the Eemian interglacial.
- The World could meet a similar falling temperature cliff at the coming end of our present Holocene epoch, this century, next century or this millennium.
- The modern short pulse of beneficial Global warming stopped with diminishing Solar activity, some 20 years ago and recent global temperatures are now stable or declining.
- The warmth of the Holocene epoch has been responsible for all man-kind’s advances, from living in caves to microprocessors. At 11,000 years old, our present congenial, warm Holocene interglacial epoch should be coming towards its end.
- Therefor it is reasonable to think that our world is likely to revert soon, (in geological time), into another period of true glaciation, again resulting in mile high ice sheets over New York.
However there is a possibility of respite for the medium term: the planetary mechanics in this Holocene interglacial are uniquely different to the previous interglacials of the last 400,000 years. Remarkably, as the earth’s orbit currently has a very low eccentricity, this Holocene interglacial could well persist much longer than the previous norm of ~11,000 years before the world’s descent into a truly catastrophic ice age.
According to Clive Best’s analysis, our Holocene epoch is unique coinciding with low orbital eccentricity. As a result our beneficial warm Holocene epoch could well continue for a further 12,000 years, prior to the serious descent into true glaciation
http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=7344
To give some context about Ice Ages this video provides an animation of the Northern Hemisphere ice ages for the past 400,000 years.Video Player00:0000:0001:07Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
This was the state of Western Europe’s coastline can be seen below with much lower sea levels only 16,000 years ago and this gives an idea of how a coming new glacial age will look in due course.
Nonetheless in the immediate term, it seems likely that a relatively minor reduction in Solar output could still radically influence World Climate with periodic, quite devastating Little Ice Ages like periods, similar to the period 1300-1850. That Little Ice Age ending only 150 years ago, following the prolific Medieval Warm Period caused enormous suffering and the deaths of millions.
https://electroverse.net/category/crop-loss/
The prospect of even moving in a cooling direction is something truly concerning, both for the biosphere and most certainly for the well-being of Man-kind’s population approaching 8 billion.
Even if our beneficial Holocene epoch does persist beyond 12,000 years, some immediate cooling now seems probable in the near term, (this century), as a result of the state of the current Solar cycle.
- The weather gets worse and more violent in colder times, simply because of the greater energy differential that arises between the poles and the tropics.
- Cold fatally reduces agricultural productivity.
- Such short term Cooling is already becoming evident and affecting agricultural productivity.
The Real Climate Crisis Is Not Global Warming, It Is Cooling, And It May Have Already Started
Historic Midwest Blizzard Has Farmers “Expecting Massive Crop Losses”
And so trying to limit the “warming effect” of Man-made CO2 emissions in the Western world will do nothing to ameliorate a coming immediate minor Cold Climate Catastrophe nor the later inevitable descent into full glaciation. Any “Climate Action”, if it were effective at all, could only enhance the cooling effect that has already been evident for the last 3 millennia.
Conclusion
There is no Man-made Global Warming Climate Emergency.
Spending any effort to avert Global Warming, for solely emotional and childish reasons, without:
- rigorous scientific debate
- true financial due diligence and realistic cost benefit analyses
- full engineering due diligence for any proposed technical solutions
- let alone at WORLD GDP scale costs, (measured in trillions),
trying to stop the UK’s 1% or the EU’s 10% or the capitalistic West’s <30% of something that has not been happening for 3,000 years has to be monumentally ill-advised.
It should be understood that the real reason for “Green” thinking is to bring Energy and Economic catastrophe to the capitalist Western world.
Green thinking and its induced policies should be regarded as a continuation of the “Cold War”.
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-2019/the-plot-against-fracking/
“Unlike most conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in Western politics, this one is out there in plain sight. The head of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the Russians, as part of a sophisticated disinformation operation, “engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas”.
The Centre for European Studies found that the Russian government has invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. ….. The US Director of National Intelligence stated that “RT runs anti-fracking programming … reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.”
Russia, China and India are indeed mocking the way Western governments have been induced by their “Green thinking and their Virtue Signalling” to promote their policies of abject self-harm at great national cost and to unlikely perceptible benefit, only perhaps in the far future. Such actions are supported by Western “useful idiots”, (Lenin’s term). Lenin rightly held them in utter contempt.
The developing and Eastern worlds are certainly not going to be meekly following the deranged example of the “virtue signalling” West.
The context in Spring 2020
In spite of all the noisy Climate Propaganda of the past 30 years, in Spring 2020 the world is faced with a different but very real economic emergency from the reactions to the COVID-19 virus pandemic.
That Emergency, with the world facing global economic breakdown and the immediate death of many citizens, should put the futile, self-harming and costly Government mandated attempts to control future climate into stark perspective. This real pandemic Emergency clearly shows how irrelevant concerns over probably inconsequential “Climate Change” in a distant future truly are.
I am curious where the graph showing the “effectiveness of CO2 as a warming Greenhouse gas” comes from. Does it just measure CO2 as if it existed by itself in the atmosphere? If so, it doesn’t really tell us much. As indicated elsewhere water vapor is by far the most effective greenhouse gas. It must be considered in defining the effectiveness of CO2. If water vapor provides 95% right off the top, then CO2 can at most provide an additional 5%.
With this in mind you are really closer to 98% at 200 ppm and 99% at 400 ppm. There is almost no room for any more warming effect. Keep in mind that the numbers should be even lower when clouds are factored in.
I realize that the overall effect did take water vapor into the computations, however, I think it becomes clearer to look at all the “heat trapping” gases together to make the better point.
As I read the above, yet another collection of logical and rational violations of BOTH common sense and scientific knowledge, I fear for the way this world is going. Just two examples: 1. the author’s digging through the holocene is OK I suppose, but doesn’t find anything “relevant” like the well known spike chart which shows the direct, and I mean direct correlation between Co2 tremendous spike from the last 20 years. This indicates not an anomaly, but the scientifically predicted multiplier effect, where exponential rise in heat can be and has been predicted, and is simply, well….true. I hear the term “climate change denier” and I have to think that denial is the operational term. It is mere psychological denial of such a clear threat. They are not confined to the scientific journals, or the newspress. You all have een with your own eyes, the disappearance of the winter snow you played in; the increasing heat, shortened seasons, (or lengthened) . You’ve see the evidence because you have felt it. And if they did not affect you, nobody can hide from the way huge heat bubbles are blocking the normal weather systems in the North East. People will go into simple denial when facing frightening news. Its a defense mechanism that is so common. I am a little guilt of it too, for the opposite reason. I am in a little bit of denial that there are so many people reading and believing, and supporting a movement which is threatening ANY common effort to use our ingenuity to solve this problem, the way we have for other efforts.
The ingenuity we have at our disposal to “solve this ?problem?” (and many other ‘problems’) is nuclear power generation.
Made safe as houses by our ingenuity.
But what are we doing? – kidding ourselves that unreliable solar & wind generation (coupled with no sort of viable energy storage technology) will serve our present & future needs.
As I said yesterday – we are living in an age of unreason.
Guy you really need to do some research.
I don’t know where you live but they’ve had quite a long snow season in Canada and the Northern parts of the US. I believe it was longer than usual last year too.
I live in Australia, which is a similar size to the US not including Alaska. Most places in Australia have never seen snow, we do have some ski runs in the alpine regions of NSW and Victoria. We were told in the 1990’s that by the year 2000 our children would never see snow again. It hasn’t happened, our snow season is longer now! It’s even snowing more in places that rarely saw snow!
Despite the rhetoric about Australia’s droughts and bushfires, they are not new! I migrated to Australia in 1961, I remember the heatwaves and long periods without rain, and the flooding that followed. We have always had bushfires too, and in the early 1970’s Darwin was completely destroyed by Cyclone Tracy. There are poems and bush ballads about the droughts, floods and bushfires that date back to the 1880’s. Because of our size there is always going to be a weather event happening somewhere, and sometimes it will be extreme. It’s just weather and it’s not new, in this modern era news travels the globe in a nanosecond. In years gone by Australia was pretty much considered a tinpot town and most people didn’t even know where it was let alone how big it is. These days, we are spotlighted whenever an extreme weather event occurs!
CO2 is not a problem, you exhale it with every breath, it is not a poisonous gas. Yes it is rising, do you even know the percentage of CO2 that is created by humans? Look it up it’s very small. Or the percentage of that amount that is supposed to be raising CO2 to catastrophic levels? Humans, in the scheme of things have not been around for very long at all. CO2 levels have been much higher than now at different times in the past, if humans weren’t around then, what caused it? Another issue you need to consider is that rising levels of CO2 does not correlate with rising temperatures, it’s not an automatic thing.
We don’t ‘need’ to do anything, CO2 is not going to kill us. The biggest environmental problem we face today is the introduction of wind and solar. If you have thought through how they come about and where they are going at the end of their useful life (that’s an oxymoron) then you are simply happy to believe all the leftist lies you are being fed.
They feed you fearful stories because they want you to be afraid. You want to do all that you can to help save a world that isn’t in any need of being saved because you believe it is the right thing to do. You have been duped, renewables are a scam that is making very rich people even more rich. Science has been bought out by politicians to a point that it is no longer true science, it’s called ‘consensus science’. If a scientists dares to present a view that is contrary to the agenda they will loose their funding and potentially their reputation too. So those ‘scientists’ you so believe in are delivering the ‘facts’ that the politicians and environmentalists want you to hear. Figures have been fudged and remodeled so many times that they no longer resemble the truth. There are in fact very many scientists who still practice the scientific method and who have integrity, but like free speech they have been shut down. If proper scientific practices were still in place this CAGW nonsense would have been disproved long ago, but it just doesn’t fit the true agenda.
In fact it’s not even about climate in reality Guy, it’s about fear and control. It’s about a socialist push and if you don’t question what you are being force fed you will be miserable for the rest of your life. If humans ceased to exist tomorrow, CO2 would continue to rise and the world would be fine. The world is not static, it changes, with or without us.
Have a look at the movie/documentary by Michael Moore, Planet of the Apes. Now he considers himself an environmentalist and he is definitely a leftist but even he knew there was something about renewables that just didn’t fit and he’s put the truth out there. Here’s the link.
https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE
“You all have seen with your own eyes, … the increasing heat. You’ve see the evidence because you have felt it.”
Right now I’m feeling the record cold temperatures for May in Brisbane.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-23/queensland-weather-cold-and-rain-bom/12278602
My own experience in Brisbane is that it feels colder every year. This may be because I moved back to Australia after many years in the Northern Hemisphere and am getting re-acclimatised, but if you are appealing to personal experience, mine certainly doesn’t fit the warming model.
And I’m an old lefty with solar panels!
And I’m an old-fashioned lefty with solar panels!
“The warming Greenhouse effect is essential to all life on earth, without it amounting to ~+33°C planet Earth would be a very cold and inhospitable place indeed”.
I keep reading this claim and it makes me angry because it is utter rubbish. The atmosphere converts some of the received solar energy into mechanical work (wind falling rain). That makes it a classic heat engine obeying Carnot’s laws. These laws dictate that a heat engine must have a hot junction where thermal energy is input (earth’s surface mainly at the equator in this case) and a separate cold junction where heat energy leaves the system. Maximum efficiency is (Thot-Tcold)/Thot. The working fluid (in this case the atmosphere) cycles between the hot and cold junction doing mechanical work in the process. So where is Earth’s cold junction? You might be tempted to say the poles but that is not possible because due to Earth’s rotation the atmosphere cannot travel from equator to pole (which is why we have 3 circulations Hadley, Ferrel and Polar instead of one). The cold junction is in fact the tropopause (the coldest part of the atmosphere) where energy is lost to space via radiation. But this radiation only happens because of green house gases. After all, the very definition of a green house gas is one that can absorb and radiate in the thermal infrared portion of the spectrum. So if there was no greenhouse effect there would be no energy loss from the tropopause thus no cold junction. Warm rising air could not cool down and thus could not descend again so convection would stop. In short there would be no atmospheric heat engine and that means no weather, no rain( falling rain represents mechanical work) hence no water evaporation from the surface no clouds, no wind. Actually there could be some slight evaporation as the surface warms during the day balanced by some dew at night but a very minor effect since at night there would be a temperature inversion so no convection. Thus only conductive heat transfer which is extremely slow in still air. Without clouds and atmospheric dust (no convection to keep it suspended) the equator would be absorbing about 437 watts/sqM average over 24 hours and 1370 watts/sqM peak. Average temperature in the tropics would be 296K (23C) but for low thermal mass surfaces (think of the sand at the beach on a hot day) the peak surface temperature could get to 394k (120C). The entire atmosphere at least at the tropics would eventually rise to the highest surface temperature. The atmosphere at least in the tropics would be far far hotter than it is today and without rain there would be no rivers or lakes and no life on land.
The 33C claim is based on an absurd extrapolation of one equation while ignoring virtually every effect of not having greenhouse gases. So now something to think about. With NO greenhouse gases the above shows the atmosphere (at least in the tropics/temperate regions) would be far hotter than today. So some atmospheric greenhouse gasses actually lowers temperatures and makes life on land possible. If the total impact of increasing CO2 raises temperatures then the plot of GHG concentration vs temperature must have a point of inflexion (which is possible). So the question is, what is the ghg concentration at the point of inflexion and which side of this point are we currently on?
I liken what the sun does for earth’s temperature as ‘rotisserie earth’. The sun is always shining, and earth is always rotating at the same speed. Heating takes place faster than cooling, because at night only radiation is present to lose heat, while in the day convection and radiation work together.
We are on a rotisserie, folks, and the reason it is 33 degrees warmer than the black body temperature is simply because we can’t cool off that fast at night. It would take some LONG nights, like seen at the poles in their winters. THEY get WELL BELOW the black body temperature of the earth. The rotisserie is OFF during that time. At some point, common sense should overtake this whole Co2 thing!! It is NOT ABOUT GASES, it is about being on the rotisserie.
You can’t use GISP2 as a measure of global temperature, the three coldest periods at 6,200 BC, 2700 BC, and 775 AD were among the warmest periods in the mid latitudes. The warmer spikes in GISP2 are the centennial solar minima, the big one around 1250-1190 BC was what finished the Minoans off along with several other civilisations, and the one from around 1000 AD which is often seen as evidence for the Medieval Warm Period, was the Oort solar minimum. Increased negative North Atlantic Oscillation states brings colder weather into Europe during a solar minimum, but makes Greenland warmer, and drives a warm North Atlantic ocean phase, and increases El Nino conditions. Which is the ultimate reason for why there can never be a climate emergency, ocean phases are cooler when the solar wind is stronger, and warmer when the solar wind is weaker.
That academia has failed to see the beauty of the natural means of climatic stability and through ignorance promotes an apocalypse of irrational and impossible tipping points, is a great scientific travesty, and has huge implications for the sanity of the population at large. In part directly through fear, and also by confounding their own intuitive senses of how the natural world functions, then they may be prey and prone to any manner of fake news.
There is a climate emergency: Planet Earth is cooling into another glacial stadial. As the Earth cools plant and animal species will be stressed and many driven into extinction. Agriculture will fail in many places in many years. Long term droughts will ensue. Human cultures will collapse. There will be mass migration to Equatorial regions.
The IPCC has it bassackwards. They should be alarmed at the coming cold. I doubt Clive Best’s prognostication (cited by the author) that we have another 12,000 years of Holocene warmth. That denies the much-researched climate history of the Pleistocene. Glacial stadials are the norm. Inter-glacials have been short-lived. There is no rational scientific reason to deny neoglaciation: all reputable evidence supports it.
CO2 alone cannot stave off neo-glaciation. Humanity can and must take radical steps to forestall cooling such as albedo reduction and mass transfer of polar ice to warm waters. To the extent that CO2 can aid this effort (very little IMHO) we should pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can.
Warmer is undeniably Better. Anti-Warmists threaten the very existence of Life Itself. Anti-Warmists should be censored and de-platformed immediately and without regrets. So-called scientists who are Anti-Warmists should be fired and silenced. There should be no debates on this subject — the real science is settled.
We’re all gonna freeze!
We’re doomed!
Here is an idea so that we won’t freeze up. The problem is the ice and snow. The more ice and snow, the more light is deflected off from earth. All we have to do is cover the (extra) snow and ice with…… you guessed it: carbon dust!!!
In fact, looking at Moore’s movie, I noticed all these boats with trees passing through the atlantic from USA to EU. I suspect that they use the dirtiest oil possible, for fuel, which actually puts a lot of same carbon dust in the air. Where does it settle? Mostly in Greenland and the arctic….. Hence the ice melt there……whole villages erected by the Vikingers in Greenland have now become visible after being covered for centuries
with snow and ice.
Makes you think, does it not?
Those interested in the climate conditions for the decade: you can click on my name and read my report there. [The dry spell in EU has already started]
Michael Hammer
I think you are right. I also doubt this nonsense of GH gases making the atmosphere warmer. I think the net effect of [more] GH gases in the atmosphere is [more]cooling during the day and [more] warming during the night. Is that also what you say?
Mosher
Note that the warming of the oceans has been identical to the warming of the atmosphere
https://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1979/to:2021/trend/plot/uah6/from:1979/to:2021/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/to:2020/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1958/to:1977/trend
After all these years here, do you honestly still believe it was the 100 ppms CO2 in the air that did it?
The increase in CO2 over the past 60 years was 0.01% by volume and this represents ca. 8 x 10^13 kg. Compare this to the total of the mass of the oceans of 1.4 x 10^21 kg + the mass of the atmosphere of 5.1 x 10 ^18 kg. Do you see that it is simply physically impossible for such an amount of CO2 to ‘heat’ the oceans and the atmosphere to the extent that they did warm up?
The oceans have been the driver of the warming of the atmosphere. It cannot be the other way around? Now, the tougher question. What has been warming the oceans? That is the question you must answer, Mosher
Hi Henry; Thanks for your comment. No I do not believe more GHG means more cooling during the day. From my knowledge of spectroscopy I know that the action of GHG’s is to transfer emission at the GHG wavelengths from the surface to the top of the GHG gas column – essentially the tropopause. Since the tropopause is colder than the surface, net emission to space is reduced so that will reduce earths energy loss to space. As the GHG concentration increases this transfer will occur over a slightly greater range of wavelengths (that’s where the logarithmic response comes from-each doubling gives about he same increase in wavelength range) so the direct impact of more CO2 will be to slightly reduce earths energy loss to space. My calculations suggest a direct impact of about 1C per doubling of CO2 (from 280 to 560 ppm) which is very much in line with all the estimates I have seen on the web. However I am convinced the feedbacks are negative not positive so that after feedback the total impact is well under 1C per doubling.
More specifically, my analysis suggests that water vapour feedback is logarithmically warming while clouds are linearly cooling. The action of the two together is to create a setpoint for earths climate which is maintained by very strong negative feedback. This is a quite classical situation in control theory .
Michael Hammer
In winter here, we have few clouds. If they do come, I notice that Tmin can go up by 4 or 5K, on the day, easily. Similarly, in summer, I notice Tmax going down by about 4 or 5K if clouds make their appearance….
That is just clouds. I also notice that H2O g and CO2 g have absorption in the sun’s spectrum, which also deflects light & energy to space. We can actually measure this coming back to us via the moon…
All of this has never formally been allocated correctly in any ‘calculation’ of warming or cooling caused by GHG’s – that I have seen.
In fact, if what you are saying is true, could you please answer the question that I asked S. Mosher? It looks like he left us with his tail between his legs.
How did same extra warming of the atmosphere get into the oceans? Note that the slope of the red line (oceans) is exactly the same as that of the green line (atmosphere).
The oceans have been the driver of the warming of the atmosphere. It cannot be the other way around? Now, the tougher question. What has been warming the oceans? That is the question….
Henry; your observation that clouds reduce maximum temperature on hot days and increase minimums on cold days is accurate but hardly novel. I suspect most observant people would have found this. Clouds increase albedo so reduce incoming solar energy cooling hot days. They also block outgoing long wave radiation so reducing energy loss on cold days. CO2 does not have any significant absorption bands in the solar spectrum. The first band is at 2.7 microns and there is little solar energy at that wavelength. Solar energy peaks at about 550 nm and has fallen to very low levels by 2.7 microns. Water vapour does have some near infrared absorption and will absorb some of the incoming solar energy but not a lot.
I am not sure why you think that what I said implies energy transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans. Some of the back radiation from the atmospheric GHG’s would obviously be absorbed by the oceans but I cant see why that would be any different from what happens on land. To the extent that the oceans are warming my opinion would be that they are absorbing more solar energy. Why? Because if you look at historical measurements of cloud cover it has been slightly falling in recent decades so albedo is reducing and that means more received solar energy. Of course that begs the question of why cloud cover is reducing. One possible answer of course is Svensmarks theory that it is being modulated by cosmic rays (high solar activity= high solar magnetic field = less cosmic rays = less cloud seeding). But its still just a theory. Sorry I dont have a definitive answer for you on this and I suspect no one else does either.
You say “the oceans have been the driver of warming of the atmosphere”. Why? I suspect both are warming from the same underlying cause not that one is causing the other. Dont know if it helps but its the best I have to offer.
Michael
Sorry. I did read your comment and I want to get back to you but did not get time today. Hopefully tomorrow.
Hi Michael
Back in 2018, I analysed the results of 10 weather stations here n South Africa going back by 40 year.
Here are the results:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h7944heslj7gg7q/summary%20of%20climate%20change%20south%20africa.xlsx?dl=0
Note that essentially temperatures remained the same where as minimum temperatures dropped. We had a dry spell for the last 5 years or so,
so it makes sense to believe that minimum temperatures dropped due to to less clouds. However, since Tmin is increasing in the arctic areas, one could also be inclined to believe that Tmin dropped here due to the movement of the magnetic south- or north pole.
Either way, do you agree that my observations are not consistent with AGW (by CO2)?
Michael you say:
CO2 does not have any significant absorption bands in the solar spectrum
That is not consistent with the Turnbull report, who also report absorption between 1 and 2 um. See green line fig 6 bottom. In fact, as far as I remember there is also absorption by CO2 in the UV which is why we can measure it quantitatively on other planets.
This means that CO2 also causes cooling. My results suggest that there is no significant warming caused by CO2. (Click on my name to read my report)