By Jim Steele
Guy Callendar was a British engineer and amateur meteorologist whose research demonstrated how rising CO2 could warm the planet. In his 1938 paper The Artificial Production Of Carbon Dioxide And Its Influence On Temperature, he challenged the consensus when most scientists believed water vapor’s greenhouse effect was so overwhelming it rendered any contributions from CO2 insignificant. According to the Guardian and other media outlets, “He was the first scientist to discover that the planet had warmed by collating temperature measurements from around the globe, and suggested that this warming was partly related to man-made carbon dioxide emissions.”
I confess, I admire much of Callendar’s scientific research. He calculated from what altitude downward infrared (his non-solar “sky radiation”) originated. He showed with CO2 at 300 ppm, 82% of the redirected infrared, that slows the cooling our surface, originates from the first 1000 meters of our atmosphere. Unfortunately, he did not discuss how rising convection releases most heat at higher altitudes, as seen by cloud formation. He also calculated that over dry Antarctica only 40% of the surface’s emitted infrared is redirected back towards the surface by CO2 and water, while in the moist tropics 73.5% is redirected explaining why tropical nights remain warm.
However, politics has now perverted the early climate science research. Selectively focusing on Callendar’s examination of CO2’s effect, today’s climate scientists and alarmist bloggers elevate Callendar to hero status. But they downplay his conclusions that such warming would be a good thing.
Callendar concluded, “it may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel, whether it be peat from the surface or oil from 10,000 feet below, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. For instance, the above mentioned small increases of mean temperature would be important at the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favourably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure. In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.”
To push their political agenda seeking global control of the world’s economies, and to suppress scientific skepticism, alarmist scientists flipped many of Callendar’s beneficial conclusions on its head. Now the “above mentioned small increases in mean temperature” is causing a fabricated climate crisis, despite people migrating to warmer climates for their health. Cold is indeed the greatest killer. But alarmists try to brainwash a gullible public that just 1.5C rise in temperature, mostly during the deadly winters, will cause ecosystems to collapse and human extinction.
While early scientist welcomed warmth and hoped it will prevent the “return of the deadly glaciers”, alarmists try to convince us retreating glaciers are a catastrophe. And as Callendar predicted, rising CO2 has caused a greening of the planet, but alarmists treat such a benefit as an irrelevant talking point only pushed by climate deniers.
While today’s alarmists push a bogus narrative that their current conclusions stand on the shoulders of the giants of early climate research, today’s alarmist have only perverted the giants’ work to manipulate the public and forward their political ambitions for control of the world’s economies.
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Mania*, by any other name is still mania …
*manic syndrome; mental and behavioral disorder defined as a state of abnormally elevated arousal, affect, and energy level, or “a state of heightened overall activation with enhanced affective expression together with lability of affect.” During a manic episode, an individual will experience rapidly changing emotions and moods, highly influenced by surrounding stimuli.
Yeah, schizophrenia is not then right analogy for the Green Blob’s mental disturbance. Withdrawal from reality, yes, but they are closer to a Freudian version of paranoia. An organized persecution complex that fits together rather too well.
The irony is that with their persecution complex, they are the persecutors.
Excellent article
My first interest in climate was plant growth – CO2 enrichment scientific studies in 1997. I have since read about 200 studies. There were about 3000 of them in 1997.
The obvious conclusion was a doubling of CO2 would be good news, not bad news. And the side effect of warming would be mainly good news winter warming in colder nations, not summer warming in the tropics. More TMIN warming than TMAX warming too.
ClimateMovie fact check: Different warming rates – Climate Discussion Nexus
In the old days science was discussed in science papers rather than in newspapers.
Almost no one made 100 year climate predictions until the 1970s.
Then, a few scientists decided there was going to be a global cooling crisis in the future.
They got a huge amount of mass media attention even though almost all scientists expected warming from CO2 emissions.
Uncertainty disappeared and the mass media loved predictions of climate doom.
It was downhill from there. Globa warming began in 1975, just after global cooling predictions peaked in 1974.
Scientists learned scary predictions got attention and government funding. Governments get the scary junk science they paid for.
It was rare before Roger Revelle in the late 1950s for scientists to believe more CO2 was bad news. Even Revelle, an oceanographer, had plenty of uncertainty through 1991, when he died (Not from climate change).
Uncertainty does not sell newspapers.
Predictions of doom are very popular, and even after 48 years of pleasant global warming since 1975, many people still fear the future climate.
1975 was the climate alarmist turning point.
Don’t you look out your window to see all the destruction of climate change? Everyone else can get a first hand view that way, they said so.
Well, if one claims that every single negative outcome on Earth is due to climate change, then look outside your window, and look inside your window, and all the evidence is right there before you.
“Globa warming began in 1975”
Current warming began at the end of the Little Ice Age
As they would call it: amelioration
Forestry haters are now pitching the idea that we must cut much lighter and much less often to ameliorate the climate emergency! They really use that word. I use a different 4 letter word when I respond to them. 🙂
The green wackos seem to be unaware that from trees comes an abundance of toilet paper and tissue, one the greatest invention of mankind.
A water spray does a much better job and uses little water.
It used to be that washable handkerchiefs were widely used and worked very well, as my first 15 years, with apparently a severe hay fever like allergy, illustrated.
The late great Eric Hoffer said it best:
In his 2007 paper in Energy and Environment Volume 18 No.2 ” 180 Years of Atmospheric CO2 Gas Analysis by Chemical Methods” Ernst-Gerog Beck discusses CO2 findings that predate the Keeling work at Mauna Loa.
Callendar is accused of rejecting the many chemical analyses that disagree with his hypothesis of human caused rise in CO2 content and arbitrarily accepting only those that agreed with it. So, as much of work Callendar did was very good, he can be seen as an early example of the perversion that persists today and is used by the alarmist community.
Measurement of Pre-Industrial CO 2 Levels
By Dr Timothy Ball11/2008
A major part of the focus on human produced CO 2 as the cause of global warmingis the claimed increase in atmospheric levels from pre-industrial CO2 to the present. Ice cores provide the historic record and data collected at Mauna Loa the recent record. Both records are drastically modified to produce a smooth apparently continuous curve. This was apparently necessary to confirm the evidence from many 19 th century measures that pre-industrial levels were approximately 270 ppm. These records were adjusted and selected, but a rigorous study of the data confirms that CO2 levels are generally higher and vary considerably both daily and annually.
Look at page 3
I like the last bit.
https://www.mdpi.com/2413-4155/6/1/17
https://rclutz.com/2024/03/20/humans-add-little-to-rising-co2-march-2024/
Again, words and conclusions, say it as it is. 🙂
“These findings confirm the major role of the biosphere in the carbon cycle
and a non-discernible signature of humans.”
Indeed that is a major conclusion of the study. What needs investigation is the validity of the analysis by people competent to deal with the methods and statistics.
The study provides methods and data and statistical calculations, so it can be followed without a solid background but is it error free and unbiased? Can it be replicated? If so, it surely changes the argument but unfortunately not the ideology behind the argument.
The accusations against Calendar made by Beck are completely, egregiously wrong. Calendar quite clearly detailed his selection criteria in his 1958 paper:
It’s rather abhorrent that Beck would even teeter so close to suggesting that Callendar engaged in fraudulent data manipulation. The rest of Beck’s shoddy work was utterly demolished by thoughtful rebuttals from Harro Meijer and Ralph Keeling.
I’ll say again that it never ceases to amaze me that falsehoods seem to rule the day here in WUWT contrarian land. Never any pushback, everyone lapping up the bilge uncritically.
Beck-2010-Reconstruction-of-Atmospheric-CO2.pdf (scienceofclimatechange.org)
forgot graph..
Beck’s reconstruction contains the same egregious issue Keeling points out in his comment, and Beck offers no explanation in this manuscript:
It is quite obvious that Beck’s interpretation is an artifact. The historic measurements he relies on contain a multitude of estimates that were not made in free atmosphere and do not reflect background CO2. The fact that his reconstruction conflicts with the CO2 levels reflected in ice cores is further proof of this.
Two AGW stall-warts whose whole income depends totally on furthering the AGW-cultism.
YAWN !
https://climatecite.com/wp-content/uploads/E-G-Beck-CO2.pdf
Chemical CO2 analysis was done in urban areas with high CO2 emissions and have no use as a proxy for global average CO2.
Why is carbon monoxide shown as the molecule in the quote given and not CO2 carbon dioxide?
Because I copy-pasted from a pdf document and my clipboard didn’t capture the ‘2’ subscript.
Speak for yourself.
Good article, Jim. Thank you! Glad to see this reference to Callendar’s 1938 paper, especially his expectation that warming would be a good thing.
But as you point out, Callendar did not take full account of how the atmosphere responds dynamically to absorbed energy. Please see this comment from a year ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/04/02/open-thread-52/#comment-3703255
Brunt and Simpson, commenting in 1938 on the Callendar paper, knew the fundamentals of what Lorenz later described more fully as numerical weather prediction models were being developed. Please consider this video and its description text, which follow from what Lorenz understood about the energy cycle of the general circulation, including energy transformations.
https://youtu.be/hDurP-4gVrY
“did not take full account of how the atmosphere responds dynamically to absorbed energy.”
This also applies to all CO2 warming calculations based on radiative theory only.
“This also applies to all CO2 warming calculations based on radiative theory only.”
Agreed. And for that matter, it applies to any expectation of warming down here from any non-condensing GHG (CH4, N2O, etc.)
Did Callendar know and account for the fact that, in the troposphere, the collisional decay of radiatively excited CO₂ is orders of magnitude faster than radiative decay?
“Re-directed infrared” is negligible in the troposphere.
Schizophrenia is the wrong word. The popular understanding of schizophrenia is wrong and you can thank decades of popular media for that.
We can thank popular media for a lot of misunderstandings.
My daughter, studying psychology, clarified this for me.
Too bad the proper interpretation messes with ‘Quadrophenia’. 🙂
Actually, schizophrenia is exactly the correct word.
The symptoms of schizophrenia are pretty much the same as those caused by right hemisphere damage. McGilchrist
The other thing that harms the correct relationship between the left and right hemispheres is too much higher education.
For another take on the problem there’s this: Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things
Arhenius, too, was convinced that increasing CO2 would be beneficial. Yes today’s consensus Cli Sci are standing on the throats of the greats!
Charles Mackay 1812–89
Scottish poet and writer
I think that’s the situation we have now with climate alarmists. They are suffering from a mass delusion.
With the Internet and cell phones, spreading misinformation is the easiest it has been in human history.
In Canada we have recently had a mass mania over “graves” at residential schools. Without evidence, the mania spread throughout the press and government resulting in Canadian flags flying at halfmast for 6 months.
Only now are we discovering it to be a mania, and the official press and government remain silent to hide their part in this grave error.
In fact, with new hate speach laws due to come into effect in Canada, it may become illegal to expose the truth once government decides what their version of the “truth” is.
https://archive.ph/BiXUv
National Healing Can’t Happen Until the Kamloops Residential School Site Is Excavated
Where excavations have taken place, no burials related to residential schools have been found.
Exactly.
Surprise, surprise.
The Madness of Crowds!
Fun Callendar factoid. The curve in his 1938 paper gives an ECS of 1.68.The various EBM observational papers 80 years later give about 1.65.
The 1938 prediction turns out to have been correct. $100 billion dollars of research and trillion$ wasted on boondoggles trying to move the needle have only increased the error and uncertainty.
The warming that Callendar measured was produced by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) not by CO2. Callendar’s period of record included the 1910 to 1935 portion of the positive or warming phase of the AMO that peaked in about 1940.
For further discussion see the recent WUWT post by Andy May and Marcel Croc Carbon Dioxide and a Warming Climate are not problems and the paper Time Dependent Climate Energy Transfer: The Forgotten Legacy of Joseph Fourier.
“While early scientist welcomed warmth and hoped it will prevent the “return of the deadly glaciers”, alarmists try to convince us retreating glaciers are a catastrophe.”
Now that, intellectually, “God is dead”- society can’t blame all problems on Satan- so it was inevitable that a new Satan had to arise- fossil fuels. And the new climate cult- with its preachers breathing fire and brimstone.
And without global warming and glacier retreat, we would not have the beautiful valleys of Switzerland. The Swiss and many other countries should be thankful.
https://www.jungfrau.ch/en-gb/lauterbrunnen-valley-made-by-glaciers/
Hysteria in Australia?
Too Hot to Handle: The Scorching Reality of Australia’s Climate-Security Failure.”
I have lived in Australia for over 6 decades.
Yes it gets warm at times… history shows that.
But there is no evidence that anything “different” from the usual Australian climate variability is happening.
Climate alarmists want us to think there was no extreme weather before CO2’s appearance.
Extreme weather has always been with us.
There is no evidence that CO2 is making our extreme weather even more extreme. No evidence whatsoever.
Evidence of catastrophic warming should be a change in traditional climate designations. I have yet to see any major climate zone changes. Likewise, the traditional biome classifications are pretty constant. They may vary slightly at the edges where boundaries change over long periods of time but no drastic changes.
80 years ago, only the cream of the cream went on to become scientists. They truly were giants.
Now, just about anyone that can afford the price of admission can graduate as a climate scientist.
Instead of 100 scientists globally, there are now hundreds of thousands all needing to put bread on the table.
And where will the money come from to feed these hungry climate scientists? From governments via taxation, to the trained scientists that can jump the highest and sing the loudest.
“jump the highest and sing the loudest”
It’s turning into bad opera!
Even worse Rap.
““jump the highest and
singshriek the loudest”They also claim that increasing taxes while lowering your standard of living are the solutions to the brainwashing that they have promoted.
Whenever anyone says “but don’t wait, you must send money now” it’s a scam, guaranteed.
That last graph alone is worth a 5.0 rating for the whole article. I’m surprised it is only 4.7.
I didn’t see the reference, but found it here:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
Very nice Jim, I would be interested in the cut off point between moderate cold and severe cold for purposes of the graph.
Thepaper is :Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study
We further separated these components into moderate and extreme contributions by defining extreme cold and heat as temperatures lower than the 2·5th location-specific percentile (extreme cold) and higher than the 97·5th location-specific percentile (extreme heat). These cutoffs are consistent with previous definitions of extreme weather, such as heatwaves.7, 14, 18, 19 We defined moderate temperatures as the ranges between the optimum temperature and these cutoffs. We defined other ranges using cutoffs at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles.
Thank you.
Has there been any real studies that confirm much of what Callendar claimed, however incomplete his work was? One doesn’t have to read very much to find competing views of how and where CO2 works to accomplish whatever net effects it may have.
AT the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 is 427 ppm by volume. This is 0.839 grams of CO2 per cubic meter of air. At 15 deg. C, the mass of a cubic meter of air is 1.22 kg. Thus, this small amount of CO2 can only heat up this large amount of air by a very small amount.
We really don’t have to worry about this small amount of CO2 in the air.
The article is about corruption of certain earlier research. My question is about one of those earlier works: does it stand up to scientific scrutiny? or more specifically, has anyone tried to find out if it does? It is not about alternate hypothesis.
Sorry but if this Callendar chap concluded CO2’s influence was not insignificant compared with that of water vapor, his conclusion is wrong. It has an influence, but is overwhelmed by that of water vapor. Water vapor accounts for somewhere between 80-120 W/m² while CO2 is said to be around 1.8 W/m². And while CO2 concentration is somewhere around 420 ppm, water vapor ranges from 5,000 to 35,000 ppm in deserts to tropics respectively. And water vapor is roughly twice as potent as CO2 regards IR absorption/emission.
His conclusion that some warming is beneficial is laudable, but CO2 is not the thermostat compound, water vapor is. By analogy the alternator in your car does contribute heat output, but it is dwarfed by the heat output of the engine. Saying CO2 is going to overheat the planet is like saying your alternator generating ~600 watts more heat output is going to swamp the engine putting out it’s normal 30-50 kW of heat is simply ridiculous!
“His conclusion that some warming is beneficial is laudable, but CO2 is not the thermostat compound, water vapor is”
Humans have no direct control over atmospheric water vapor. Any troposphere warming by CO2 is amplified by a feedback.
CO2 can not be accurately claimed to be harmless in the long run (hundreds of years) without knowing ALL the feedback effects.
Not having enough CO2 in the air may kill us all come the next glacial period which may happen at any time.
In the ice age the Earth is in, named the Quaternary, cold interglacial periods like the Earth is in now usually last around 10,000 years and alternate with very cold glacial periods that last around 90,000 years.
https://www.britannica.com/science/Quaternary
In the last glacial period, around 12,000 years ago, the CO2 level dropped to 180 ppm as the oceans cooled and more CO2 could dissolve in them.
At 150 ppm photosynthesis stops stops in 80 percent of the land plants and when they die the land animals die as well. The CO2 level was only 30 ppm above the level that would cause a mass extinction of land plants and animals.
https://pioga.org/just-the-facts-more-co2-is-good-less-is-bad
Delusional to believe the tiny effect of CO2 could somehow, magically provide a positive feedback to the massive effect of water in all 3 states, in the oceans and atmosphere – and cause harm. There have been shown to be both positive and negative feedbacks of the effects of CO2, depending on altitude, latitude and other factors. But they are minor. Again the IC engine analogy applies. Engine cooling system is dealing with 30,000 to 50,000 watts of heat removal to keep the engine in a manageable temperature range. This is akin to the water vapor. The alternator akin to CO2 is producing typically 2-300 watts of heat into the engine bay and engine block. If you doubled this waste heat from the alternator, it is not going to overwhelm the cooling system which can handle 2 orders of magnitude higher heat.
https://notrickszone.com/50-papers-low-sensitivity/
The above link is actually now 160 papers refuting this chicken little alarmism. Furthermore, CO2 is the essence of life without which, or more correctly below 150 ppm all life dies because all plants die. To believe CO2 is somehow a problem, is to be aligned against life itself, which in my book is supporting an evil doctrine of wanting to eliminate life! We are still in an ice age, albeit in a warm period so any small increase in temps is welcome, and humans and most life thrives with increased temps, as they did in the distant past. But CO2 is not the thermostat, nor is some small warming going to bring about climate catastrophe.
Not saying it is particularly dangerous but the 20+ degrees F above the optimum temperature here most summer days is more than enough to be uncomfortable and easily dangerous. However, it obviously isn’t going to change the planet in any way.
If any CO2 warming were amplified by a positive water vapor feedback, than ANY warming for whatever reason would be also amplified by the same feedback. Since there is a virtually unlimited amount of water in the oceans, water itself would cause runaway warming, making climate fundamentally unstable. Since this is not the case, we can conclude that any hypothetical warming from CO2 is not amplified by water vapor feedback, and that, quite the opposite, the water vapor feedback is negative.
“Sorry but if this Callendar chap concluded CO2’s influence was not insignificant compared with that of water vapor, his conclusion is wrong. It has an influence, but is overwhelmed by that of water vapor.”
A more elaborate argument, if I recall it correctly, goes as follows. There are a number of GHE gases in the atmosphere at various altitudes. GHE potential of each of them in isolation (for example CO2 only in dry air) is a hypothetical value never realized outside laboratory setting, while the real world GHE potential in the presence of each other is totally different. It follows that once GHE effect is saturated by a combination of absorbers, adding any more of them to the mix does not increase overall absorption. The atmosphere with all of its positive and negative feedbacks reaches a radiative quasi-equilibrium resisting forcing (similar to Le Chatelier), but because the Earth is an open system, it is a quasi-equilibrium, not a true equilibrium. Still, the net result is that if we add CO2 and get a little more GHE from CO2, we get a little less GHE from other gases, negating the changes.
If the idea of a GHG absorbing IR, then shortly re-emitting it in a random direction is true, then there is no such thing as saturation. The more of that molecule, no matter how much more, means additional absorptions will happen, further delaying radiating of that energy beyond the atmosphere.
I know there are alternate hypothesis, such as bleeding the energy out of the GHG molecule by collision with non-GHG molecules before the energy can be re-emitted (obviously not universally accepted). Until definitive evidence of just what happens can be provided, the question is up in the air, along with the additional CO2.