Nearly 140 science papers have been identified that cast doubt on the dominant role that carbon dioxide is said to play in the global atmospheric temperature. According to the climate site No Tricks Zone, the list has grown significantly from 50 in 2016.
Much of the ongoing science debate, ignored by almost all media, concerns equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) – the increase in the global temperature that will follow a doubling of atmospheric CO2. When green activists talk of ‘settled’ science, they refer to their certainty that humans drive all or most of the changes in the climate. But this political certitude is far from settled among scientists, notably those who study physics and chemistry. Nobody actually knows what the ECS figure is, so estimates are made all the way up to 6°C. These are then used in climate models, which have spent the last 40 years producing inaccurate forecasts. In addition, a worst case prediction or ‘pathway’ called RCP8.5 assumes that temperatures will rise by 5°C in less than 80 years. This ‘pathway’ was quoted in 57% of the disaster scenarios in the recent doomsday IPCC report.
No Tricks Zone highlighted a recent paper from the German physics Professor Dieter Schildknecht from Bielefeld University. This work suggested that a further atmospheric increase of CO2 beyond 300 parts per million (it currently stands at around 418 ppm) “cannot lead to an appreciably stronger absorption of radiation, and consequently cannot affect the Earth’s climate”. This finding is one of many that suggest the ability of CO2 to radiate heat back to the Earth’s surface declines rapidly after a certain point. Professor Schildknecht finds that doubling CO2 leads to 0.5°C warming as ”absorption reaches close to 100%”. He concludes that the effect of an anthropogenic CO2 increase on the Earth’s climate is “fairly negligible”.
Some of the work on the warming properties of CO2 and other greenhouse gases such as water vapour, methane and ozone uses the HITRAN database, which helps detailed study of the infrared spectrum. It can be seen that CO2 traps heat, but only within certain bands on the spectrum. This has led many scientists, notably Professor William Happer of Princeton University (pictured), to suggest that CO2 becomes “saturated” once it reaches a certain level. Most, if not all, the heat that is going to be trapped will have already been radiated back by the CO2 molecules evenly distributed in the existing atmosphere.
The atomic physicist Dr. Boris Smirnov is another scientist who has conducted work on the radiative abilities of greenhouse gases. In 2018, he published a paper that suggested doubling CO2 would lead to a rise of only 0.4°C in global temperature. The human contribution from burning fossil fuel is put at a “negligible” 0.02°C.
At the heart of the Net Zero agenda is an assumption that burning fossil fuel is responsible for all or most of the recent rise of atmospheric CO2. However, humans contribute barely 4% of the gas that enters the atmosphere every year. Three physics professors led by Kenneth Skrable from the University of Massachusetts recently examined the three isotopes of carbon found in the atmosphere. The carbon produced by burning fossil fuel has a slightly higher proportion of carbon isotope 12C and marginally alters the balance of the other two. By examining the isotope trail, the scientists found that human-released CO2 between 1750 and 2018 “was much too low to be the cause of global warming”.
The direct link between rising, or falling, CO2 and temperature has never been conclusively proved. In the historical and geological past, few links have been shown. In the recent past, CO2 rose by 5.2% in the atmosphere from 1900 to 1940, before global industrialisation took off. From 1940 to 1980, the global temperature fell, but CO2 rose 8.9%. For almost two decades, recent warming has run out of steam and the temperature hasn’t moved for the last seven years and four months. This despite CO2 continuing to rise.
Physics Professor Peter Stallinga from the University of the Algarve states that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is “readily explained” by the outgassing of the oceans. This suggestion is certainly plausible in explaining the recent rise in atmospheric CO2. The oceans hold vast reserves of CO2 and any natural warming is likely to release some of this into the atmosphere. Some ice core evidence also suggests that CO2 rises in the atmosphere after the temperature increases.
The climate change business has largely been captured by ‘post-normal’ scientists, as the Daily Sceptic showed last Monday. This occurs when high cost decisions are at stake, but there is considerable uncertainty over the relevant scientific facts. Numerous other perspectives – social, political and economic – are sought from an extended peer base. Traditionally, scientists have looked to falsify an hypothesis by empirical data. Under this rigour, it is not possible yet to prove humans caused all or most climate change (let alone single weather events, as is sometimes claimed).
Net Zero relies on the ‘settled’ science lie, a lie that after three decades of constant green activism is widely accepted. The command-and-control Net Zero political agenda needs science debate to be stifled, and therein lies the current danger of a suggested referendum on the matter. Writing in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, Madeline Grant called Net Zero a “fantasy” and a ”worthy ambition” in the course of the same paragraph. Net Zero is an impractical fantasy, and is likely to collapse of its own accord, with or without the immediate help of the Red Army. But Net Zero has some validity if the world is going to end in a climate fireball, and there is something humans can do about it. For a full, reasoned, educated debate to occur, the lie that is ‘settled’ science must first be nailed.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Excellent and well researched first lead article of the day, “West morally V. The Rest”, only been given an hour before most readers have even got out of bed.
In this case by an unoriginal piece that is entirely off our main subject of interest, doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know and could easily have waited.
Exit rapidly Stage Left.
This just in. You can scroll down. Even if you slept in.
Actually that was after an all nighter awake and online.
What on earth are you talking about? “only been given”? “In this case by”? Nonsensical.
Yes, an excellent start to my day. Though it is a little warmer than it should be for this time of year.



Gosh!
Please advise what the temperature “should be for this time of year”.
And, says who exactly?
I’ve become convinced that all is lost. The world is full of useful idiots and we are in a small minority. The meek shall inherit the earth
When I was young, I looked at all the smart people and knew I could never be as good as them … and then the woke and their stupid ideas set the bar so low, that I (and many others) simply fell over it.
They might inherit strictly limited use of it, but they won’t own any of it.
The Slog call us the 1in8 (https://therealslog.com/)
He is rather good.
But, science says (check yourself though) that even a smaller number, 1>3% of a population is only required to cause a failure of a much larger narrative. See COVID….
Thanks for the link – wasn’t aware of that site. Unfortunately – and I hope my experience is an outlier – I just don’t see the 1-3% making much of a difference. Most people just seem too far gone, completely incapable of individual thought, and will just follow the crowd. The digital age has ushered in a new malevolent form of the need for peer approval and I think this has been part of a well formed plan that allows the elites to manipulate and, crucially, monitor behaviour. When the people are ripe for the picking (now) then a new era can be brought in. Social separation and technology are the evils that have got us to where we are. That is my belief anyway.
The ice-core record shows that despite very high feedbacks coming out of the ice-age which would suggest ECS of 6, when you get to the inter-glacial period like now, the ECS comes crashing down so that it is practically impossible to get more warming. In effect, the climate “hits the buffers” and the very fast warming that occurred coming out of the ice-age comes to a grinding halt.
So, does that mean we have nothing to worry about? No.It means we don’t have to worry about warming, but if we start cooling, then we could well see an ECS of something like 6 so that even a small amount of warming (caused by a big volcanic explosion or nuclear war), could topple us into an ice-age.
And, how would we try to stop that happening? We’d pump out as much CO2 as we could afford to do. So, perversely, all the CO2 we are pumping out … it’s the right thing to be doing.
Point of order: we are in an ice age, just, as you say, in an inter-glacial period.
The earth is colder than usual, and the biosphere is desperately denuded.
We should be aiming to get CO2 levels above 1000ppm.
No we are not in an ice-age. An ice-age is defined as an age different from the present period when ice covers much of Europe.
Yes I know some idiot geologist used the term in geology to make it mean the opposite of what it actually means … but they got it wrong. The present period is by the original usage and as normally used in in all other subjects BUT ONE, not an ice age.
cooling wouldn’t be a problem – we know alot about really aggressive greenhouse gases
SF6 is a cheap and safe gas which is 17,500 times as warming as CO2
Anthropomorphic climate change… One side of the “great reset” Tetrahedron, Convid 19 and Ukraine being the others. Time for the globally comatose to awaken too the plan that started in 1913 with the creation of the FED (Amongst other multilateral organisations).
Read Professor Carroll Quigley’s book “Tragedy and Hope” from 1966, it’s all in there. He was Clintons Yoda btw!
O/T But is anyone else suffering a power cut?
Seems to be across the south east and east anglia.
Clear S/W, all overnight thurs/fri.
It turns out it was very local. Skip lorry had pulled down an overhead power line.
Just as well I’m not paranoid!
08.30 Friday
Switched on my hospital room telly for the first time in weeks all BBC Breakfast is talking about is
“Will
RussiaPutin use chemical weapons”and the repercussions if he does everything from rising cost of UK mortgage to WW3
Where did this idea of chemical weapons come from apart from some idle mutterings from bozo touched here on Dailysceptic briefly last week?
The studio guests have clearly been briefed to delve as deeply as possible into the most obscure, obscurantist, details but up to and including Western and Russian soldiers shooting at each other = WW3.
The inanity of the phone callers (why do I need to know when they originated on Twitter or Facebook?) simply confirms their level of ignorance in the minds of the Great British public.
“Russia targetedca hospital childrens ward . . ”
Taking their cue from you Toby, first post Roundup article this morning
“Oh no, Ukraine using it as an active army base.”
Creme de la Creme
“2/3 of Russians get their news from State Dominate Television “.
That from the BBC, lol and with Kiev said in ever more strangulated accent that I can’t begin to emulate in text.
preemptive psyops because it’s now confirmed that the USA is running chemical/biological installations in Ukraine.
The Americans are accusing Russia of doing what they themselves have been doing for decades.
Yep, it’s their first tool in the box to accuse the other side if their own crimes just as they are being unveiled. Whenever they do something like this it is a useful confirmation to the awake, that what sounded like a possible conspiracy theory (bio warfare labs) has some truth.
I stumbled across what I think is called BBC2 this morning.
A rather good female interviewer (mid forties, dark brown hair, very unflappy) who put that point to Studio Expert
“You say that Russian accusations that the USA is dealing in chemical weapons in Ukrain is ‘laughable’; what do you mean by ‘laughable’ ?”.
He was completely dumbfounded, could not come back with a single word, just a blank 45 degree stare.
Most enjoyable
Pot calling the kettle ‘water boiling utensil of color’.
Whose chemical weapons do they mean?
Those from their own stock piles or those manufactured in Ukraine on behalf of Uncle Sam?
I have no idea, for at least an hour every BBC bod just said
‘Russia . . .use chemical weapons’
at every opportunity to make sure it sunk in over breakfast.
Studio Experts (who clearly don’t know) “Can Japan make a significant military contribution in our favour WW3 “(List of major armaments).
. . .Anxiety
Studio Expertv. “Two Ukrainian soldiers
’reported’ killed
in Kharkhov”. (K thinks ‘Its a f*cking War, soldiers kill each other’)
STRESS. . .
Phone “my ant nadia stuck
in her flat
in Kieyreeiv,
what johnson do about it?”
Studio Expert talking up the Fuel Price Crisis
“we depend on Russia for 18% (eighteen, really ?) of our deisel . . .”
MENTAL HEALTH
Live outdoor interview with weepy Doreen
I really love my care job
when will this war ever end .
?”
“I can’t afford to drive to my care job
my struggle . . .
Studio Expert “
How Cruise
missiles work
” with year old graphics.
pics of stress induced face acne YUK
Nothing positive came out of this is in over an hour. Bollox I’m off to the shopping channel.
But he is old and qualified, how could he possibly know more than a teenage Swedish school dropout?
I’m inclined to agree with Dr. Boris Smirnov.
This is the calculation, using internationally recognised data, nothing fancy, no hidden agenda, just something we can all do by taking our socks and shoes off.
Assuming increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing the planet to warm:
Atmospheric CO2 levels in 1850 (beginning of the Industrial Revolution): ~280ppm (parts per million atmospheric content) (Vostok Ice Core).
Atmospheric CO2 level in 2021: ~410ppm. (Mauna Loa)
410ppm minus 280ppm = 130ppm ÷ 171 years (2021 minus 1850) = 0.76ppm of which man is responsible for ~3% = ~0.02ppm.
That’s every human on the planet and every industrial process adding ~0.02ppm CO2 to the atmosphere per year on average. At that rate mankind’s CO2 contribution would take ~25,000 years to double which, the IPCC states, would cause around 2°C of temperature rise. That’s ~0.0001°C increase per year for ~25,000 years.
One hundred (100) generations from now (assuming ~25 years per generation) would experience warming of ~0.25°C more than we have today. ‘The children’ are not threatened!
Furthermore, the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory (and others) can identify and illustrate Natures small seasonal variations in atmospheric CO2 but cannot distinguish between natural and manmade atmospheric CO2.
Hardly surprising. Mankind’s CO2 emissions are so inconsequential this ‘vital component’ of Global Warming can’t be illustrated on the regularly updated Mauna Loa graph.
Mankind’s emissions are independent of seasonal variation and would reveal itself as a straight line, so should be obvious.
Not even the global fall in manmade CO2 over the early Covid-19 pandemic, estimated at ~14% (14% of ~0.02ppm CO2 = 0.0028ppm), registers anywhere on the Mauna Loa data. Unsurprisingly.
In which case, the warming the planet has experienced is down to naturally occurring atmospheric CO2, all 97% of it.
That’s entirely ignoring the effect of the most powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas, water vapour which is ~96% of all greenhouse gases.
CO2 has very little to do with the atmospheric ability to hold heat, it’s all water vapour all the time.
CO2 would cool the day and warm the night, which wouldn’t be a problem, although would move the average, as the daily low would not fall so much).
I am surprised that we are still allowed to read what Boris Smirnov thinks; surely with those two words as his name he must be Rooshian, so must be banned or cancelled by his university?
Always worth reminding us of this Red.
I know, it’s boring. Sorry, but most people get it.
That horse has bolted long ago. The dimwits at ER with their fingers in their ears going lalalalalalala don’t want to have to get down in the dirt and grapple with the nuances of ECS. Much easier just to let people’s tyres down, block the roads with yoga workshops and be complete fuckwits. Sorry Toby, can you let that one through?
“We have always been at war with Climate Change”
What time is the 2 minutes of Hate today?
Will it be “Fauci bad!” or “Fracking bad!” ?
If you read the Bbc, the hate starts at 0001 gmt and finishes at 2359 gmt. The 2 minutes in between is for religious programming.
flying carpet cleaning with the nose and forehead
Plenty of religious hatred possible if you put your mind to it, isn’t there?
Net Zero is in the interests of the Politicians, NGO’s, and even the Energy Companies themselves. As Covid showed us, you can argue about ‘the science’ all day long. You can publish papers, attend seminar’s, do research etc..
But even if skeptical scientists somehow proved that this is all al ie, until you remove those who have a financial interest from the levers of power, we will not change any policy or influence any decisions.
That is the sad reality. We have to remove the politicians before we can fix this.
Russophobia.
There was a post yesterday suggesting that the Cardiff Symphony Orchestra had pulled because, you know, Tchaikovsky, sounds a bit Russian.
There were some expressions of doubt at such petty mindedness but hey, see Alison in the Telegraph
Someone please shoot me……
Money, politics and power … climate change has always been and will always be complete and utter bollox.
Farage and Tice, both of whom I respect, get this wrong, always ceding the myth big lie that man made CO2 causes climate change.
Will someone out there please put them straight.
If, as Will Happer believes, CO2 does cause warming but is limited in doing so, climate change is a natural consequence of that. But no one knows if that change is good or bad.
From history, mankind flourished when the planet warmed and societies failed when it cooled (Minoan, Roman, Medieval etc.).
So Tice and Farage are correct in agreeing that increased atmospheric CO2 causes climate change. There are undoubtedly many other things that cause the climate to fluctuate as well, which itself is nonsense as there is no such thing as a ‘global climate’. And it’s entirely likely that at a given moment in time, not one single place on earth conforms to the ‘average global temperature’.
What they are objecting to is the cost of the inappropriate NetZero response to something no one understands.
I’ll go further: I don’t think we should have a referendum on this because it leaves too much to chance, whim and the idle ignorance of the mass of the people. It should simply be proven wrong and thrown out.
Absolutely bang on.
Net Zero is 100% political and 0% scientific.
There. That’s a shorter post for you. Could have saved the author 10 paragraphs.
COVID is 100% political and 0% about health.
Even the BBC debunked RCP8.5 two years ago.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51281986
‘ It can be seen that CO2 traps heat…’
Are you sure? My understanding is outgoing long wave infra-red is attenuated by CO2 atoms. Attenuation means the incident photon gives up some or all its energy to the atom and can cause scattering of the incident photon or a pulse of secondary radiation of different/same energy and wavelength, but not necessarily the same path of travel.
In the case of the CO2 atom the whole photon-energy is absorbed but destabilises the atom which to retain stability instantaneously emits a photon of the same energy and wavelength but in any direction within 360°. The CO2 does not ‘trap’ heat but delays its emission into space. It also means the re-emitted i/r photon can collide with water molecules which do retain heat.
The attenuating effect of C02 is logarithmic so that with a doubling of concentration the maximum temperature increase it could cause, leaving all other factors aside, is 1.1C.
It is the supposed effect of CO2 attenuation on water molecules in the atmosphere which is at the heart of Climatism, but Climatists never mention the rôle of water vapour – Net Zero Water would not play well.
Water vapour is the greatest ‘greenhouse gas’ contributor. Without the 2% to 4% in the atmosphere, Earth would not be warm enough to sustain life (as we know it). By comparison, Mars with an atmosphere 93% CO2 and no water vapour is freezing at the surface.
Supposedly, the minor, incremental warming effect of CO2 causes more water vapour which causes more warming, which causes more water vapour which causes more warming, etc Yikes! Tipping point! So CO2 is a multiplier not a direct agent.
This is how they get their numbers. If CO2 on its own produces 1C of warming, this translates into 2C, and then another 1C of CO2 will translate into 6C of warming.
It is childish stuff as it leaves out myriad other factors in the dynamic, chaotic, non-linear climate system. Never has any evidence to show how much if past warming can be attributed to CO2 – natural or fossil fuel emission – and what would happen anyway. That is because CO2 caused warming is so slight it us unmeasurable, inseparable from background noise. The tiny fragment that is Manmade can only have an effect approaching zero.
Climate science = prognostication using everybody’s favourite ‘computer modelling’. A crystal ball works just as well. They NEVER produce their evidence.
To my mind one of the most telling things is that their models can’t hindcast let alone forecast.
If your models can’t get the provable past right then the models are guff, have the climatists been getting lessons from Ferguson?
The hypothesis that “CO2 controls temperature” is very simple.
It has never been proved.
Real scientists know that this means the hypothesis is WRONG
I’ll pass you over to the late great Prof. Feynman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
All of this has been known for years. But good luck trying to get the zealots to listen.
Man made climate change is settled science in the same sense that lockdowns are helpful and warp speed vaccines are safe.
It is settled in that you are censored and/or cancelled if you don’t vocally support both as being true.
Great site, notricks.zone that I have followed for years.
Whilst they may have 50 or 60 papers on “deffo not CO2”, Paul links to HUNDREDS if not thousands of sceptical papers. See the column on the right. And image below
Good search…
e.g. https://notrickszone.com/?s=SOLAR+ACTIVITY will list articles on such, usually with papers on the subject.
Climate is just another manufactured crisis for nefarious ends. I was really concerned for a while. Now I’m more worried about simple pollution.
The current Ukraine situation was manufactured. If it wasn’t we’d all be round a negotiating table with the West playing it down not up. I just hope the plan or accident doesn’t end with nuclear devastation. Maybe it’s WEF plot, maybe Putin went rogue on them.
Whatever they do it seems ordinary people suffer and die while billionaires get wealthier and more powerful.
Concerning climate sensitivity the following chart of historical estimates from 2000 to 2020 are informative.
https://postlmg.cc/47w6x3Cg
It is interesting to project the ECS and TCR trend lines out to 2025 – 2030.