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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Great news, but witll the PTB like the Gore’s of this World let the science of the saturation hypothesis get in the way of their money making con? I very much doubt it.
This is well known absorption of infra red by co2 is logarithmic and on a tiny spectrum anyway. It cannot possibly be the driver of earth’s climate, if the relationship between co2 and wv was as volatile as modellers claim life on earth would never have evolved. This is why climate models are never applied to the paleo record as they produce silly answers.
NASA (not a space agency but a film agency) has confirmed that Co2 in the higher atmosphere is a cooling agent. Co2 is endothermic and exothermic (retains, gives off heat and cools). At 400 parts per million, 95% emitted by Gaia, a real scientist would conclude that it largely falls out of natural processes and can never be a uni-directional heat blanket given it is a rounding error. Human emissions are thus next to nothing x next to nothing.
And if there wasn’t enough of it, we would not be here. No plants, no animals.
True, at 0.04% we could actually do with a little more of it, around 0.25 would be optimal
My bad, ill correct myself there, apparently, 0.1 to 0.13 is optimal for plant growth
Climate models never produce correct outputs when applied retrospectively, even in near timeframes.
If the models were correct, then applying the correct parameters at say 10 years ago should obviously result in the exact results we experienced, but they don’t, they are only consistently wrong.
If they can’t replicate the measurable past, then they are useless and pointless.
Which is why agencies responsible for the surface temperature records are busy trying to retrospectively erase the 20th Century swings in temperatures. A steady, monotonic increase more closely matches the averaged runs of nonsense climate model hindcasting, allowing them to claim them as ‘validated’.
William Happer explains the limitations of CO2 heating in this video. His atmospheric model is backed up by satellite observations i.e. how science should be conducted. He concludes that CO2 just isn’t an issue and really we would be better off with more as it encourages strong and drought resistant plant growth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2nhssPW77I
Let’s refer to co2 as plant food henceforth.
Is this the science that Chris Packham tells us to listen to? I am listening Chris. Are you?
He makes me want to puke, a scientific fraud.
Chris Packup
Eyes closed, hands over ears,hum loudly!
“It must be true because I say it is!”
“and I should know because I work for the bbc”
Steam is the new co2, sorry Chris, its not us humans after all!
Steam radio and TV?
Another good analolgy for the saturation thingy is putting Windolene on your living room window. The first lot you put on stops a certain amount of light coming in, the next lot might blot out a little more, but as you add more there is less of an effect because you are already blocking out the light than can be blocked. ——-In other words the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere is logarithmic, not Linear. ———–So ok it is possible to disagree about this, but you know that since mainstream media and the government funded scientists and modellers never want to discuss anything that interferes with their tidy little hypothesis that humans are causing dangerous climate change that we are not really dealing with science here. ——If it were really about science all of these things would get discussed. When did you ever hear on the Climate Activist BBC anything at all that might indicate there might not be a climate crisis? —–The answer is NEVER. Because they are promoting a world view in support of politics, not science.
I thought you were supposed to wipe it off? 🙂
You only wipe it off after you have shown by experiment that CO2 causing global warming is politicised bollocks
Great analogy. However I can’t get the original pink Windowlene anywhere now. I wonder if it was cancelled ..
Eh I think you get it on Amazon. Why do you want to do your own global warming experiment? Don’t you realise that in climate change you don’t do experiments you just put guesses into a computer model till you come up with the desired answer, that humans are causing a climate crisis.
It is a gay thing! You will never guess what they were using it for.
OK, I give in, what were they using it for?
I think there are better things to do with oil, gas and coal than just burning them. That said they’re a well understood technology which are within the capabilities of less ‘developed’ nations and it is immoral to deny those nations access to fossil fuel power to improve their citizens’ lives.
The more developed nations should move away from fossil fuels to nuclear. Not because of ‘saving the planet from CO2’ but because of saving the oil, gas and coal for better uses – such as making ammonia and fertiliser so we can grow more crops or making steel. Yes, and why not a small electric car for doing the shopping or the school run – if you can afford a second car?
I hate waste. Throwing stuff out after single use grates. Wasting energy that we’ve paid for due to poor insulation is nuts. We in the ‘developed’ world should deal with our own plastic waste and not ship it off to third world countries where some crook will dump it in the rivers. Plastic waste should at least be useful as fuel – with the right technology to avoid pollution.
I’ve no objections to communities wishing to go ‘off grid’. Energy independence is a damn fine idea and should be encouraged – especially at national level. Being in a position to help out a neighbour in need is a Good Thing but not to the extent of encouraging the neighbour to abandon their responsibility to provide for themselves.
‘Development’ agencies which seek to deny other countries the opportunity to develop their own reliable energy infrastructure are hypocrites. Christian Aid, Water Aid, CAFOD – are you listening?
Hear hear. I can’t stand the way people like us are accused of being profligate, wasteful, selfish people. I hate waste. I especially hate litter and have been known to dump rubbish back through the car window from where it was thrown.
And I also know the idea of man made climate change is a crock of sh*t.
Now they want us to have disposable cars, have them for 3 years (or 3 hrs if you prang them and their written off) then get a new one!
Like you, I was brought up to make do and mend and not to waste anything if it could be reused or repurposed.
The planet doesn’t need saving but it does need respecting
Yes you are little bit utopian in some of your views. Remember there are 21 million gas boilers in the UK. ——-Your idea that we “move away” from that is a bit fanciful. We have been trying to put a little smart meter in houses now for about 10 years and still haven’t achieved it yet. How long do you think it would take to be rid of 21 million boilers and all of the clutter of removing pipes, radiators, lifting carpets, redecorating, etc etc and then coercing us all into having an expensive heat pump, which is not as good a heater as a gas boiler and isn’t even suitable for all properties—-blocks of flats eg. ——Our energy policy is a dog’s breakfast of ideology that panders to the phony climate change politics masquerading as science, and this will not change anytime soon. —-PS You will have a very hard job persuading radical environmentalists that Nuclear with its zero emissions is the way forward, because it isn’t really the climate they are worried about. It is reliable affordable energy they don’t want us to have, because that is the driver of Industrial Capitalism and climate change politics is essentially anti-capitalist.
This has been discussed for many years so it isn’t new, but the other thing which never gets spoken about in global warming circles (The IPCC, bought and paid for media, and UN lackey governments) is “feedbacks”. —–Most feedbacks in nature are NEGATIVE, but the idea that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming requires feedbacks to be POSITIVE that amplify the effect of CO2 which cannot warm the planet on it’s own. I am sure Chris Morrison has written about this many times before.
The Royal Society says no.
8. Is there a point at which adding more CO2 will not cause further warming? | Royal Society
Not quite. What it says is
Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will cause surface temperatures to continue to increase. As the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 increase, the addition of extra CO2 becomes progressively less effective at trapping Earth’s energy
and this means that the increase in temperature will asymptotically approach zero, ie, become ever smaller as more CO₂ is added to the atmosphere. For all practical purposes, this means that further warming will not occur beyond a certain point. Adding another 0.0001⁰ C and then another 0.00001⁰ and then another 0.000001⁰ and so on is technically ever increasing warming. It just doesn’t make a difference.
Skeptical Science says no.
How do we know more CO2 is causing warming? (skepticalscience.com)
Skeptical Science?
Is that the blog set up by John Kook?
‘The first red flag is the fact that Science (by definition) is skeptical, so why the repetition in the name? It’s something like naming a site “The attractive fashion model”.
Of more concern is the fact that (contrary to what one might be led to believe by the title) the site is actually focused against skeptical scientists — specifically those who have the temerity to question anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Hmmm.’
John Droz, Physicist
I’m not in the mood making the same argument against a differenly worded version of the same bullshit again. Royal society agrees with saturation hypothesis is good enough.
The Royal Society seem to be saying that the weaker outer bands will still cause additional warming even though the central band is saturated. Ofcourse it says nothing about the amount of warming, or about whether that will really be dangerous, or about the fact that we have had way more CO2 than this in the atmosphere in the past with no apparent runaway global warming. We also know that in recent times the Royal Society’s own members had to complain about their blatant bias and activism. Despite their motto being “Nullius un Verba” ——Upon no ones word. ———It is hard to take the word of biased and unreliable witnesses though. In a court of law their testimony would likely be discounted..
These so-called weaker bands will saturate as well.
In the real world, it might be impossible to accurately measure the effect at all, if it is swamped by other factors simultaneously. If the usual suspects are honest, that is.
The alarmist view relies on an assumption of massive but somehow constrained positive feedback from increased atmospheric water vapour: more CO2 = more water vapour = enhanced warming. A tiny increase at the already saturated margins in CO2 is supposed to disproportionately amplify the signal, just as the tail wags the dog. It’s another one of those assumptions largely derived from computer modelling, which is largely derived from the assumptions.
How long has CO2 been contributing to increased warming? According to NASA, “Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975”. Is there a reliable way to identify CO2’s influence on temperatures over that period?
There is: we can measure the wavelengths of long-wave radiation leaving the Earth (upward radiation). Satellites have recorded the Earth’s outgoing radiation. We can examine the spectrum of upward long-wave radiation in 1970 and 1997 to see if there are changes.
This time, we see that during the period when temperatures increased the most, emissions of upward radiation have decreased through radiative trapping at exactly the same wavenumbers as they increased for downward radiation. The same greenhouse gases are identified: CO2, methane, ozone.
How do we know more CO2 is causing warming? (skepticalscience.com)
There is: we can measure the wavelengths of long-wave radiation leaving the Earth (upward radiation). Satellites have recorded the Earth’s outgoing radiation. We can examine the spectrum of upward long-wave radiation in 1970 and 1997 to see if there are changes.
Satellites have not recorded that because they cannot. To record radiation from earth into space, one would need to construct a sphere larger than earth around it an cover it with measurement instruments. Even when leaving this obvious trap for fools aside, the number and types of satellites orbiting earth has vastly changed between 1970 and 1997 and hence, the data sets are not comparable.
“A crock of crap.” Yup …. I’m now a convert to following the science.
You can tell that it is a con, the idea of a “tipping point”, ie a severely non-linear effect at one concentration, is present virtually nowhere in science. No one has ever explained how a tipping point would operate, but it is part of the mantra! All lies!
I welcome and appreciate Chtis Morrisons posts. I have though long thought that the impact was diminished by the potitically based add-ons re collectivism. Recently that had declined but it has reactivated. It’s not that I disagree or that it is not plausible but I feel it distracts from the core ‘science’ elements and therefore dilutes the impact.
Surely these eminent boffins could design an experiment that proves beyond doubt the saturation point of CO2 in terms of absorbing and re-emitting the infrared bandwidths in question? That would be the silver bullet that puts Greta & co to death once and for all.