The delusion that CO2 is an important driver of climate change is turning out to be an extremely costly and destructive one. There continues to be a trickle of scientific papers pointing out just how weak CO2 is as a driver, and therein lies some hope that the CO2/climate panic will eventually be over. These papers will surely receive more attention as the harm of policies such as 'Net Zero' becomes more keenly felt, and thanks to the efforts of such as Net Zero Watch, the harm is being documented, and blame apportioned. And 'blame' is appropriate since there is no scientific case to be made for the panic today. It is people with political or personal career agendas who are promoting the panic, and they have been astonishingly successful so far.
Two of our most distinguished atmospheric physicists, Richard Lindzen and William Happer, have patiently argued for decades that we should be taking a calmer and more considerd view of climate variation and the role, in particular, of trace gases such as CO2 and methane. An article they published in 2021 provides a very accessible introduction to their work:
Climate ‘Emergency’? Not So Fast
Here are a couple of extracts:
'We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.'
'Neither contemporary observations nor the geological record support computer-based claims that CO2 is the “control knob” for the earth’s climate. Warmings, similar to or larger than the current one, have been observed many times in the past few millennia when there has been negligible use of fossil fuels. A thousand years ago Greenland really was warmer than today and supported Norse farmers who grew crops such as barley, which cannot be grown there now because of the cold.'
A Google search will readily provide links to their scientific papers on climate. The next section of this post looks at recent papers from other scientists.
In Praise of No Tricks Zone and Their Contributor Kenneth Richard
Kenneth Richard clearly keeps a close eye on scientific papers linked to climate, and frequently provides summaries of them and links to their sources. Here are some of his posts I have pulled out from the past year or so that are about the unimportance of CO2 in the climate system:
(1) 2025. Ph.D physicists detail just how insignificant CO2 is as a factor in climate change, revealing that doubling the CO2 concentration from 400 ppm to 800 ppm – a 100% increase – hypothetically reduces radiative heat loss to space by just 1%.
(2) 2024. A new study by Bierman et al titled: Plant, insect, and fungi fossils under the center of Greenland’s ice sheet are evidence of ice-free times, shows that “in the middle of Greenland, where a three-kilometer-thick ice sheet now sits, plants and insects once flourished and at CO2 levels well below today’s levels.”
(3) 2024. The 2013-2022 warming trend and the extreme warmth in 2023 were “not associated with” declining outgoing longwave radiation induced by rising greenhouse gases.
(4) 2024. The evidence that rising CO2 concentrations lead to inconsequential warming keeps piling up. In a new study, seven Viennese researchers provide more evidence the CO2 absorption band is already saturated at today’s concentrations (over 400 ppm). Rising CO2 levels thus cannot drive significant global warming.
(5) 2024. A new analysis indicates tripling the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 100 to 400 ppm only produces a 0.3°C surface warming effect.
(6) 2024. German researcher concludes CO2 warming immensely exaggerated…. IR radiation of clouds considerably reduces the greenhouse effect of CO2.”
(7) 2024. “[T]he contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is 4% – 5%. Human CO2 emissions represent 4% of the total, which means that the total human contribution to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect is 0.16% to 0.20% – a negligible effect.” – Dr. Demetris Koutsoyiannis (2024)
(8) 2024. “The heat retention in the greenhouse Earth is caused by all gas components…mainly by nitrogen and oxygen. It is not permissible to exclusively assign the GH effect of 33° to water vapour, CO2, and the other trace gases.” – Ullmann and Bülow, 2024
(9) 2024. Yet another scientific study concludes CO2 is an insignificant contributor to Earth’s recent temperature changes. New research involving a comparative analysis of satellite (CERES) observations of absorbed solar radiation (ASR) and CO2 radiative forcing modeling finds CO2 may have contributed just 0.09°C to the 0.52°C temperature increase from 2000 to 2023.
(10) 2024. “…sea surface temperature has been the primary determinant of baseline atmospheric P(CO2) across the entire Cenozoic” – Frank, 2024. A new study analyzes paleo atmospheric CO2 levels using the modern-day observation that oceans release more CO2 as they warm and less CO2 as they cool – a reference to Henry’s Law.
(11) 2024. “Our analysis revealed that the observed decrease of planetary albedo along with reported variations of the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) explain 100% of the global warming trend and 83% of the GSAT interannual variability as documented by six satellite- and ground-based monitoring systems over the past 24 years.” – Nikolov and Zeller, 2024
(12) 2024. Scientists do not even mention CO2 concentration changes as a factor in ocean warming. A new study reveals the limit of the greenhouse gas-induced longwave radiative impact extends only to the ~10 μm (0.01 mm) skin layer – the ocean-air interface – and no deeper.
(13) 2024. A new study comprehensively eviscerates a 57-year-old modeling paper upon which nearly the entirety of the IPCC’s CO2-drives-climate paradigm is based. Dr. Roy Clark has published a new 73-page study that rips apart the Manabe and Wetherald (1967) paper (MW67) that effectively hatched the IPCC-popularized concepts of CO2 climate sensitivity, radiative forcing, and positive/negative feedbacks so as to portray humans as predominantly responsible for climate changes.
(14) 2024. “CO2 is only present in the atmosphere in trace amounts (0.04%) and lacks sufficient enthalpy to have any measurable effect on the atmosphere’s temperature.” – Nelson and Nelson, 2024 New research (Nelson and Nelson, 2024) further documents the inconsequential role that CO2 plays in climate.
(15) 2024. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere can have no significant climatic effect when rising above the threshold of about 300 ppm. Due to saturation, higher and higher concentrations do not lead to any further absorption of radiation.
(16) 2019. The shallowest sea surface temperature measurement limit is 10,000 times deeper than the extent of CO2’s radiative influence. When sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are measured, the depth range of the measurement typically extends from 10 cm to 10 m, or 100 mm to 10,000 mm (Merchant et al., 2019). This measurement limitation is an insurmountable problem for those who wish to link increases in SSTs to increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Why? Because CO2’s radiative influence can only extend to ocean depths of 0.01 mm, or 1/100ths of a millimeter (Wong and Minnett, 2018).
(17) 2023. “There can be no climate equilibrium state that can be perturbed by an increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2…” – Clark, 2023 The anthropogenic global warming paradigm has a magnitude problem – especially when it comes to the assumption that we humans can warm the ocean with our CO2 emissions.
(18) 2008. Doubling the 2005 CO2 concentration (380 ppm) to 760 ppm only produces a globally-averaged 2.26 W/m² perturbation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). This doubled-CO2 forcing is close to 0 W/m² for large portions of the globe – including below 0 W/m² for Antarctica.
In January last year, Kenneth Richard provided this list on No Tricks Zone:
FootNote: All Hope is Not Yet Lost
The original hope for this Climate Lessons blog was to hamper climate alarmism in schools. This has clearly not been done - there are extensive reports of climate anxiety in most schoolchildren now. The new hope is that some of the blog's hundreds of posts may yet help these children, and young adults, get over the propaganda-induced fears they have acquired. The work reported on above will help underpin such efforts.
