What If Adding More CO2 to the Atmosphere Won't Warm the Planet
New Research Raises Doubts About Its Influence
The cornerstone of the monolithic climate cult is CO2 emissions, but even after a century-long creep toward modernity, it remains a trace gas and (inconveniently) essential to life on Earth. Without it, plants die, and then so does everything else. But lowering CO2 is a sacred obsession that has been incorrectly cross-tabbed with (negatively connotated) “emissions” or Pollution.
CO2 is not Pollution. It is plant food. It is your natural exhaled breath, perhaps in need of a mint. It is also a by-product of many forms of combustion (needing, perhaps, an even bigger mint). And according to new research, adding more of it than we have now isn’t going to have any effect on the Earth’s climate.
This undermines decades of Climate Gospel, so I’d be surprised if the authors were not forced to retract or go into hiding. Bullying seems likely, but there are brave scientists out there—people who refuse to be bought by the political scientists running the money and numbers for the consensus laundromat and the scientists suggesting more CO2 won’t warm anything aren’t the first or the only.
Before We Go There
Thousands of academics, professors, doctors, geologists, climatologists, and other scientists have challenged the Goliath of Climate Chaos Theory. It is a very low-hanging fruit. The models don’t work, and the cataclysmic prognostications never come to pass, so the goalposts keep moving. But the chains of evidence refuting the warmists have kept pace—a few examples I’ve covered in the past.
Back in 2017, Industrial Chemist Dr Mark Imisides addressed how impossible it would be for mankind to emit enough of anything to warm the oceans or melt the icecaps (relative to the matter of a man-caused sea-level rise disaster on which we continue to wait), reminded us that what warms us is the sun, stupid.
When the clouds clear and bathe us in sunlight, we don’t take off our jumper because of ‘greenhouse heating’ of the atmosphere, but because of the direct heat caused by the sunlight on our body. The sun’s influence is direct, obvious, and instantaneous.
If the enormous influence of the sun on our climate is so obvious by what act of madness do we look at a variation of a fraction of a percent in any of these variables, and not look to the sun as the cause?
What act of madness? How about money? Power. Control. If you want more research money, memorize our conclusions and repeat them. Many do.
But even NASA - which milks the climate cult cow as much as anyone - has publicly admitted that Milutin Milankovich (1879-1958) was proved right. He theorized that the Earth's climate was driven primarily by orbital mechanics: "that as the Earth travels through space around the sun, cyclical variations in three elements of Earth-sun geometry combine to produce variations in the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth." It is not new knowledge nor is confirmation of its accuracy.
Research published in Science Magazine (1976) confirmed the Milankovitch Cycle.
Specifically, the authors were able to extract the record of temperature change going back 450,000 years and found that major variations in climate were closely associated with changes in the geometry (eccentricity, obliquity, and precession) of Earth's orbit. Indeed, ice ages had occurred when the Earth was going through different stages of orbital variation.
In 1982, “The National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences…embraced the Milankovitch Cycle model.”
...orbital variations remain the most thoroughly examined mechanism of climatic change on time scales of tens of thousands of years and are by far the clearest case of a direct effect of changing insolation on the lower atmosphere of Earth.
But that’s not interesting or scary, so after the global cooling fearmongers found out they were wrong (with a side trip to the ozone hole that ended aerosol deodorant and hair spray as we knew it), the same crowd shifted gears.
In the summer of 1988, then NASA director James Hanson, speaking to Congress in a room in which the air conditioners were deliberately disabled, told sweating members of Congress about global warming and how, unless they did something, we only had a few decades left. New fearmongering replaced the old.
A few years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving a climate of fear real estate for “climate fear” to occupy, and it did.
None of Hanson’s catastrophic prognostications have come to pass—he wasn’t even close. And none of the climate computer models has predicted anything accurately. Over the past fifty years, doomsayers have gotten nothing right. But Congress has dumped hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, into making it appear like they have. Globally, many trillions have been wasted propping up this fantasy, only to have rogue scientists continue to produce evidence that those theories and their consensus are suspect.
CO2 is Not the ‘Driver’ You’re Looking For
The Earth’s climate is complex, while its primary drivers are pretty simple and well beyond anyone’s ability to influence. That might be why they choose instead to influence how research on one or the other is perceived.
A few years back, Valentina Zharkova published research with co-authors titled “Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale.” Its conclusions aligned with historical evidence regarding orbital mechanics, solar influence, and warming and cooling on Earth. The Climate Cult immediately trashed it, and under pressure, Nature pulled the paper for what one author claims amounted to word choice. "We said that the Sun-Earth distance would change UP to 0.02 au, not that it would change BY 0.02 au."
Perception control matters, but let us not forget that the Milankovitch theory has been more or less left unmolested for nearly 50 years. Orbital mechanics and the sun are the primary drivers, and while the new research I’ve alluded to doesn’t look at the sun, it does undermine the Climate Cult’s foundations in the best possible way.
It suggests that CO2 can’t do what they said it does.
Three Polish physicists, Jan Kubicki, Krzysztof Kopczyński, and Jarosław Młyńczak, who are by no means anti-green energy or pro-fossil fuel, have published research questioning the unbalanced focus of climate change advocates on carbon dioxide as the evil we need to end. They posit that it is impossible for CO2 to be the bugbear they are looking for because - by their calculation - after 300 ppm - CO2 has achieved saturation, and adding more will not result in additional absorption of radiation. In other words, "As a result of saturation processes, emitted CO2 does not directly cause an increase in global temperature.”
Adding more makes no difference.
The presented material shows that despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in CO2 and its impact on Earth's climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence. ...
Therefore, it is not surprising that the results in various significant works such as Schildknecht (2020) and Harde (2013), differ greatly from those presented by the IPCC, which is widely regarded as the sole reliable authority. This unequivocally suggests that the officially presented impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on Earth's climate is merely a hypothesis rather than a substantiated fact.
Lots of words if you want to read it, and I don't get all the formulas, figures, and explanations regarding the research that leads to these conclusions, but (again!) the idea is not new. Even before the elites decided they could use fear and weather to undermine free markets, there was plenty of proof that orbital mechanics and solar radiation (as well as its effect on water vapor in the atmosphere) played more critical roles. It's the sun, and neither EVs nor wind, solar, nor driving the West into poverty will move stars and planets or change the solar cycles.
Oh, and look at this. CO2 may play no role at all, so we need to put on the brakes and do more detailed research and actual science (consensus is for cults, not serious inquiry). What we see suggests CO2 can’t be the droid you’re looking for—and if you were thinking about questioning the motives of the paper's authors, here are their closing remarks.
[T]he intention of the authors of this article is not to encourage anyone to degrade the natural environment. Coal and petroleum are valuable chemical resources, and due to their finite reserves, they should be utilized sparingly to ensure they last for future generations. Furthermore, intensive coal mining directly contributes to environmental degradation (land drainage, landscape alteration, tectonic movements). It should also be considered that frequently used outdated heating systems burning coal and outdated internal combustion engines fueled by petroleum products emit many toxic substances (which have nothing to do with CO2). Therefore, it seems that efforts towards renewable energy sources should be intensified, but unsubstantiated arguments, especially those that hinder economic development, should not be used for this purpose.
In science, especially in the natural sciences, we should strive to present a true picture of reality, primarily through empirical knowledge.
Are these fossil fuel reserves finite? Perhaps, but not yet. Does mining damage the Earth and environment? It does, but do alternatives cause more or less damage?
Are fossil fuels a more significant threat to people and the environment than rare earth metal mining when you look at the pollution life cycles of extraction, transportation processing, solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, and lithium batteries?
Even if you still believe in the CO2 lie, that work needs to be done if we are to strive to present a true picture of reality.
Hiding the truth is good for something, but it is not good for the people or the planet.