Fresh insights into the ruthless suppression of plausible alternative explanations surrounding the effect of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are contained in a new book written by former lawyer, Jeremy Nieboer, and published by the right of centre think tank, the Bruges Group. The hypothesis that CO2 ‘saturates’ after a certain level, and its warming properties fall away dramatically, has been around for many years. In recent times, and in the interests of promoting the collectivist Net Zero project, it has been ignored under ‘settled’ science requirements in favour of the rival suggestion that humans control the climate by burning fossil fuel. Nieboer highlights the crucial role of the late Professor Stephen Schneider who promoted the saturation hypothesis in the early 1970s when the global temperature was falling, but switched suddenly to the tenets of anthropogenic warming when it started to rise.
Nieboer draws attention to a remark Professor Schneider made later in life when he warned of “disastrous climate change”, and said scientists have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts they might have. “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest,” he suggested.
The saturation hypothesis holds that CO2 is a very efficient absorber of heat reflected from the Earth’s surface within narrow bands of around 15 microns on the infrared spectrum. There is some debate about the level at which peak absorption is reached, but scientists say the absorption work is mainly done around 300 parts per million (ppm) concentration, about 100 ppm below the current atmospheric level. Since greenhouses gases such as CO2 are estimated to have raised the temperature of the Earth by 33°C, the role of some saturation is in fact widely accepted. Even the wild predictions of 5-6°C of heating in the next 80 years if CO2 keeps rising are far less than a straight line projection.
The saturation hypothesis is much more in line with scientific observations. It explains why CO2 levels have been much higher in the past with no evidence of runaway temperatures. This observation alone casts serious doubt on the attempt to tie rising CO2 levels caused by humans to automatic and potentially catastrophic rises in temperature. Even the last 25 years of a barely measurable temperature rise casts doubt on the alarmist hypothesis.
Of course any acceptance of this rival saturation argument puts the tin hat on the transfer of vast amounts of wealth to those able to benefit from the enormous subsidies available to transform economies. It can be argued that Net Zero is a ‘punch down’ on a scale never witnessed before in human development. The rich, virtue-signalling elites may well benefit in the short run by picking up the cash, but it will be an unimaginable disaster for the poor in the West and, even more so, in the developing world.
In July 1971, Stephen Schneider, then Professor of Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, published a paper with S. I. Rasool, Chief Scientists for Global Change at NASA, in which they calculated that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere by a factor of eight would only increase the surface temperature by 2°C. Doubling the gas only boosts the temperature by 0.8°C. The scientists concluded that the runaway greenhouse effect does not occur because the 15 micron CO2 saturates “and the addition of more CO2 does not substantially increase the infrared capacity of the atmosphere”. The science can be complex, but a simplified illustration is to note that doubling the lagging in a house loft does not trap twice as much heat, since much of it has already been captured.
Five years later, Schneider was promoting a coming ice age with “disastrous consequences for food yields and famine in undeveloped countries”. Shortly after, he said global cooling presented humankind with some of the most important challenges it has had to deal with for 10,000 years. Alas, the short burst of global cooling didn’t last the decade, but fresh scares emerged to boost the rising green collectivist agenda. In the vanguard of mainstream opinion, Schneider switched tack and by 1989 he said man-made global warming could increase temperatures by 5°C by 2050, unless “drastic action” was taken.
Nieboer doesn’t pull any punches in describing Schneider’s about-face. He was said to be “at ease with the practice of deceit in order to persuade”. He was “indifferent” to whether he was the champion of global cooling or warming. He worked with others on each of these “falsehoods”, and used his professional position and status to “concoct an intellectual justification for extorting certainty from ambiguity”.
The fix was firmly in by the time Schneider wrote a subsequent book on global warming. In 357 pages, Nieboer notes there is no mention of saturation. The author suggests Schneider knew anthropogenic warming was falsified by the laws of spectroscopy and physics. “Never at any moment since the emergence of multi-cellular life on Earth 570 million years ago had there been runaway warming for the reason that saturation by CO2 rendered it impossible”, he added.
The saturation work of earlier scientists such as Schneider was confirmed recently by two distinguished atmospheric scientists, Emeritus Professor William Happer and Professor William van Wijngaarden. They completed highly complex work on the spectrum to calculate per greenhouse gas molecule ‘forcing”. Their calculations provided results similar to earlier work. The two scientists worked on the assumption of a clear sky but if the effect of water vapour is taken into account, the warming results are lower still. Happer and Wijngaarden’s research is backed by other recent calculations. The German physics professor Dieter Schildknecht notes that atmospheric increases of CO2 past 300 ppm “cannot lead to an appreciably stronger absorption of radiation, and consequently cannot affect the Earth’s climate”.
The story of the ever-adaptable Schneider gives an insight into the way climate science has been captured and then debauched in the interests of political masters controlling the purse strings. Towards the end of his life, Schneider was promoting a new form called “system science”, explaining: “Climate science is not like test tube science … we do not falsify by single experiments. We falsify on the basis of accumulated numbers of papers and numbers of bits of information.” And so we witness the birth of ‘consensus’ to promote the unproven idea that humans control the climate thermostat – consensus, plus cancellation and defunding of unbelievers, fact check attacks, trusted messenger journalism, the emergence of mass death cult movements, etc etc.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Wouldn’t the saturation effect show in a fairly simple lab experiment?
Chris Morrison’s explanation of the CO2 saturation effect caused me to remember using infra-red spectroscopy in my early career as a lab technician. If the sample was physically too thick I couldn’t measure the relative strength of the absorption at the various different frequencies. The only way to take a meaningful IR spectrograph was to make the sample thin enough for the available energy from the source to make it through.
Basically, we’ve got so much CO2 in the atmosphere (the article implies 400ppm) that it absorbs all the available IR energy from the source (the Sun) at the relevant frequency of CO2. More CO2 can’t absorb more IR as it’s already absorbing all the energy at that frequency.
Yes, a simple lab experiment will show this effect but…
And “system science” may well be the best way of modelling climatic changes, since it involves a huge number of variables. If that is the case then the question should be: has this “system science” yet been put into effect, and if the answer is yes, then why does the public face of the “settled science” surrounding humans’ impact on climate change, and consequent green policymaking, been only about one single element (CO2)?
The IR energy comes from the earth, not the sun.
It seems to me that net-zero is now a religious apocalyptic death cult and is impervious to any rational arguments or experimental data.
”And the perverted fear of violence chokes a smile on every face
And common sense is ringing out the bells
This ain’t no technological breakdown, oh no, this is the road to hell”
Every time I play Chris Rea’s ‘Road to Hell’ those words strike me as being not just a forecast but alarmingly accurate.
Thanks for the reminder.
95% of Co2 is emitted by Gaia.
98% is reused.
It is a trace chemical of 0.04% weight. Ergo, heretofore it does not trap a f*ing thing.
Co2 falls out of convection climactic systems.
It is part of the process to make oxygen.
It is a benefit not a threat or toxin.
There. Science closed.
(Now please grant me my pretty happy dude degree and lots of money.)
Haha..I would love to get a ‘Happy Dude Degree too, Ferd! Yes, I completely agree with you. Down here in sleepy Dorset we are planning a public debate with a group who claim to be all about sustainability (and Net Zero). The good thing is that they are willing to at least engage and encourage it in fact. I don’t wish to use the term ‘useful idiot’ (although I just did!) but many of these people who are helping to construct the prison around us seem to be ignorant of any science or rational arguments that counters their view, such has been the success of people like Attenborough, Thunberg, Gore etc. They do not delve any further nor do they join up any dots because that would be a ‘conspiracy’! Anyway, the more we can have open discussions, the more we can begin to understand where we’re all coming from and the more hope we have of averting the social suicide of Net Zero.
I look forward to reading your report on the encounter Aethelred.
Give em hell!
Perhaps you could get the attached junior school poster printed up and put on a wall as a simple visual to help with the ‘debate’.
Yor are one big happy dude mate! Well said
Yep.
https://madhavasetty.substack.com/p/a-convenient-lie
Excellent example
Trillions of dollars, many years and uncountable populations dragged into poverty, we get from this:
To this: (spot the difference)
Well put. It’s not just that it’s a trace element that makes up a miniscule percentage of atmospheric composition, It’s also the fact that all we’ve done is tweaked one single variable! In the formidably complex dynamic system that is the climate, we’re being led to believe that we can just dial down the CO2 a bit and it’ll all be fixed!
If someone (government) pays me money to find purple horses I might not be in a big hurry to say I cannot find any. I might string the search out month after month and year after year and issue occasional reports on my “findings”.—– I might report that “my studies are not inconsistent with the likelihood of there being purple horses”. I might insist that ” Purple horses are highly likely (80% probability) etc etc etc. ———Ofcourse it could be that I am simply taking advantage of the political desire to find these horses. I after all have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. ——-In the real world scientists also have families to feed and mortgages to pay, and if government are going to make that easy for them by dishing out taxpayers money to any and all scientists (climate modellers) who will come up with reports and studies that arrive at the desired conclusion that humans are warming the planet and causing dangerous changes to climate then why would those scientists not take advantage of that? Infact before all the climate change science scooting up to number on in the science charts in around 1990, not many of those scientists were interested in this issue, but once government started chucking money around they became like wasps at the jam jar.———- But at the end of the day we can all argue about the science day and night and never get to the bottom of it. The alarmists can speak of runaway global warming and increasing extreme weather events (that are not happening). They can rant on about “saving the planet” and millions of climate refugees That is not happening) etc etc etc. Sceptics will talk of there being no Hotspot in the troposphere which would indicate that any warming isn’t likely to be because of greenhouse gasses. They can speak of the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere being logarithmic rather than linear, etc etc —–We can all have a punch and Judy show about it all day. ————-But CO2 apart from being a greenhouse gas that might cause a little bit of warming, is also something else. It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism, and that is what this issue is really about. It is about the world’s wealth and resources in a world where there are now 8 billion people all wanting to use the finite fossil fuel resources in the ground. We in the wealthy western world are to stop using those fuels because the UN and it’s IPCC say we have used up more than our fair share —(Climate Justice). To get away with fobbing western populations off with heat pumps instead of gas central heating and taking away their perfectly good petrol and diesel cars, stopping us from flying and eating beef and lamb etc etc you need a very plausible excuse, and that excuse is CLIMATE CHANGE. You don’t need any evidence for it. All you need is AUTHORITY. On the issue of climate we now live in a scientific dictatorship.
Well said, varmint! The blinkers are slowly coming off a lot of the population but probably not fast enough. I am encouraging debate with those who have us all swapping our cars for EVs and shutting down town centres as they are trying to do here in Dorset. Once an idea has been introduced that it is the ‘good thing’ to do to eliminate emissions to ‘save the planet’ – all the worthy virtue signallers jump on it, aided and encouraged by a corrupt MSM and all the MPs. It also becomes an unstoppable train because anyone who goes against it is seen as ‘unreasonable’, ‘a bit of nuisance’, ‘a conspiracy theorist, or, alarmingly, ‘an extremist’. Whenever I’ve seen footage of XR or JSO (bought and paid for) activists being interviewed, they do not have an argument. It is mainly headline stats they’ve not bothered to really research plus a lot of emotional content. In fact, I would venture to say it is mainly emotional. No substance. People even view these people being arrested as draconian or fascist leanings by the state – even when they’ve blocked the road for days or spoiled people’s enjoyment in some way. The Guardian (that bastion of Woke) loves this type of stuff. All in all, it is a shrill, vain attempt, in my view, to appear relevant and emulate the radical student movements of the 1960s, but not be aware of how it is all part of a bigger agenda in play. It’s this lack of awareness by these young people that is worrying. They seem to be unable to really focus on what is going on and to join up all the dots.
Thanks——-Young people are always the easiest to brainwash, but you see a lot of easily manipulated older people sitting in the road as well. There is always a section of society that will fall for the propaganda hook line and sinker. But what I find amazing is that today government are trusted less than they have ever been apparently. No one believes what they say on Foreign Policy, on Immigration, on Education on Crime etc etc etc, and yet on climate people somehow believe it all, manly because they think it is all about science. They don’t realise that all the climate science is actually funded by the same governments that they don’t trust on every other issue. So what you see is people gluing themselves to the street because they think a climate apocalypse is about to occur all based on the bought and paid for “official science”.
Well ,would you believe it?
That looks to me like a virtual horse. But then that is what climate change science really is isn’t it? ——-Computer models are Virtual Science.
It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism
That’s not really true. Humans are (and have been for a while) using fire as source of energy and fire is an exothermic reaction turning carbon contained in a suitable material into (gaseous) carbon oxides. This more general focus is reflected in the Cooking on wood fires kills peoples! stories targetted at the so-called developping wolrd. The other exothermic reaction humans have so far managed to utilize is nuclear fission. Unsurprisingly, so-called environmentalists hate that, too, and should we ever manage to use controlled nuclear fusion for anything, the anti-life preaching of these people will reach a whole new level.
But the UN is not in the business of retrospectively taxing stonage people with a carbon tax. CO2 can be directly tied to industrial capitalism because, the wealthiest emit the most CO2, and the poorest emit the least for obvious reasons. Wealthier people have bigger houses, use more energy, drive more, fly more etc etc. When Edenhoffer of the IPCC said “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore, we redistribute the worlds wealth via climate policy” what do you think he actually meant? —–Climate Change policy is eco Socialism. That is why it is the left and the One World Government people at the UN who embrace climate policies. It has little to do with climate. But actually I am pretty sure you already know that.
“Professor Stephen Schneider who promoted the saturation hypothesis in the early 1970s when the global temperature was falling, but switched suddenly to the tenets of anthropogenic warming when it started to rise.”
First earth day, 53 years ago and the sea comes up to same level in skegness that it did when I was just a nipper! Shock horror! Headline news! Nothings f-ing changed!
Another paper offering support for this theory of Saturation appeared in Junk Science and was led by Dr David Coe , a British atmospheric research bod.
It would be really helpful to get rid of all of these scientifically meaningless titles and degrees like professor of global change. The proper term for this kind of change is politics, hence, political activist on university payroll would be a much better professional occupation description.
Schneider is proof that you can become a revered and famous scientist by predicting catastrophe from cold, or catastrophe from heat, but not by saying nothing particularly catastrophic is on the cards.
“ Since greenhouses gases such as CO2 are estimated to have raised the temperature of the Earth by 33°…”
?
Do I detect a missing decimal point, like it should be 3.3?
Schneider died from hypothermia. Did you know 5 out of 3 scientists struggle with fractions.
And what is the going rate required by a scientific institution to switch from forecasting an ice age to catastrophic global warming?
Like many on here my awakening to the modern state and its manipulation of evidence came through Lockdown. I was completing a masters degree in behavioural economics. I expected the academics teaching us about evidence and rigour to poke holes in the pandemic response. Surely we could do a CBA of the economic damage. Not a bit if it because the funding spigot was turned on and they were allowed to work from home. When i asked one at a re-union why they didn’t he said because we are not natural scientists. When i explained that we were supposed to explore and explain decision making his response was chilling. ‘I am not about to deny this department opportunities because some people don’t trust governments’ .