Further scientific evidence has emerged to suggest that the Earth’s atmosphere is ‘saturated’ with carbon dioxide, meaning that at higher levels the ‘greenhouse’ gas will not cause temperatures to rise. A group of Polish scientists led by Dr. Jan Kubicki have published three papers recently, and according to the science site No Tricks Zone they summarise their evidence by noting that as a result of saturation, “emitted CO2 does not directly cause an increase in global temperature”. Current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are around 418 parts per million (ppm) but the scientists state that past 400 ppm, “the CO2 concentration can no longer cause any increase in temperature”.
As regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware, the saturation of CO2 in the atmosphere is the hypothesis that dares not speak its name in mainstream media, politics and across much of climate science. The Net Zero collectivisation project is dead in the water without the constant fearmongering that humans control the ever-warming climate by burning hydrocarbons and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
The saturation hypothesis is complex, but in simple terms it can be described by the example of loft insulation in a house. After a certain point, doubling the lagging will have little effect since most of the heat trying to escape through the roof has already been trapped. Carbon dioxide traps heat only within narrow bands of the infrared spectrum, and levels of the gas have been up to 20 times higher in the past without any sign of runaway global warming. At current levels, the Polish scientists suggest that there is “currently a multiple exceedance of the saturation mass for carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere”. The latest work is featured on Elsevier’s Science Direct peer-reviewed online platform.
Many other scientists are attracted to the saturation hypothesis because it provides more plausible explanations to fit past changes in the climate. Last year, three scientists led by Atmospheric Professor Yi Huang of McGill University stated that: “Transmission in the CO2 band centre is unchanged by increased CO2 as the absorption is already saturated.” Despite over 50 years of trying, climate modellers and scientists in the anthropogenic camp are no nearer putting a temperature rise on a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Estimates from 0.5°C up to around 6°C, with some outliers as high as 10°C, are little more than guesses, yet they form the ‘scientific’ bedrock for promoting global fear of human-caused climate change. The figures are too wild and imprecise to make any reasonable scientific predictions, yet the claim is constantly repeated that the science is ‘settled’, the ‘consensus’ proof is in and it is all beyond debate. For their part, the Polish scientists quote the author of Idso 1998 that “currently used models do not yet provide a suitable basis for the development of rational policies related to potential climate changes”.
No Tricks Zone notes that the Polish authors are concerned about the recent push to rely on modelling and assumptions about CO2’s capacity to drive changes in global temperatures rather than observational evidence. “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.”
The online science site also reports on other recent scientific work that backs up the saturation hypothesis. In Chen et al. 2023 it was reported that CO2 had severely reduced warming effect past pre-industrial concentrations. It was also noted that water vapour and cloud influences overlap and thus dominate absorption in the CO2 infrared band. In 2022, the German Physics Professor Dieter Schildknecht set the saturation level of CO2 at just 300 ppm and concluded that beyond this, further increases cannot affect the Earth’s climate. At this low level, absorption is said to reach levels close to 100% ,so further human-caused CO2 emissions cannot lead to appreciable stronger absorption of radiation.
Emeritus Professor William Happer of Princeton is another leading proponent of the saturation hypothesis, and he recently featured in Martin Durkin’s Climate: The Movie. On this occasion he was a tad more popularist in explaining much of the current science enforcing Net Zero. He said he could live with the descriptive suggestion “hoax”, although he preferred the word “scam”. Modern science giant and 2022 Nobel physics laureate Dr. John Clauser also expressed himself in terms that all can understand: “I assert there is no connection whatsoever between climate change and CO2 – it’s all a crock of crap, in my opinion.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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