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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I think this article is called damming with faint praise.
The praise seems to me real, and to have admiration in it. If anything, I felt it was the criticism that failed to go home
The British constitution will not matter a jot because Britain will cease to exist once white British people are in a minority.
But would it matter if changes to it had helped to make that possible?
Yes, that’s a good point.
I am not sure when the rot really set in.
My impression is that people in former times were generally happy to make observations about race that would now be considered “racist”. At some point that started to change and now people are afraid, even to admit to themselves, that they might hold “racist” views. Certainly since non-white immigration into the UK started in earnest, “anti-racism” has been drummed into us. Maybe it started with the drive to abolish the slave trade. I am not saying that the slave trade was right or that we should not have abolished it or that we should go back to it – but we seem to confuse quite rightly not treating people as property with the perfectly natural preference for your own tribe.
Yes, terrible confusion,
Both the author and David Starkey seem to take the view that the post-Restoration constitutional settlement was a universally good thing, only to be broken later by the likes of Blair and co.
This is a fairly conventional view, and carries with it a whiff of the Whig interpretation of history, which holds that the political evolution of this country has been one of progress whereby power has been gradually transferred from an abolutist monarchy to our present representative democracy.
If only.
This view also informs much of what’s taught in schools as history, from what I can gather.
It was only when I read Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) that I started to see things a bit differently.
Although it’s a novel rather than a political tract, it does mark the origin of One Nation Conservatism, which is still a view much in play even today.
Put simply, Disraeli’s view was that the post-Restoration political settlement had put too much power in the hands of Parliament, and by sidelining the role of the monarch, had left no voice to defend the interests of the common people of this country.
Then as now, Parliament was stuffed with vested interests.
The results at the time had become very evident. The common people, pushed off the land by parliamentary acts of enclosure, had in many cases become desperate wage slaves often living in shockingly bad conditions.
Disraeli correctly identified this, and tried to re-invent the Conservatives into the party which would balance the interests of the common people and the capitalists who had brought about such material and technological progress, thereby assuming the role which in previous times had been enshrined in the monarch.
With the rise of the Labour movement to power or a share of it in the early 20th century, maybe it was considered that Parliament had finally reached a balanced and fair representation of interests, and that at last the common people had proper advocacy in the seat of power.
In retrospect, we can now see that this was probably a high point and that things have gone downhill very badly since, with vested interests very much back in charge.
The Labour Party has morphed into a bizarre embodiment of bad ideas who only cultivate their client class of state functionaries and poorly-educated graduates. They certainly don’t represent what we might call the traditional Working Class. The Conservatives reject any kind of ideology so just go along with the drift, becoming the Socialism Lite party, continuation One-Nationers, whose aspirations never rise above a bit of managerialist tinkering.
Once again, the interests of the common people have been sidelined.
This vacuum is what has allowed our rulers to impose mass immigration on our society, something that the people were never consulted on and which had damaged and undermined our shared cultural identity.
We know who the beneficiaries of this are, and it’s not the common people.
The summer riots were a manifestation of this. Others may follow.
To counterbalance parliament as representation of the factional interest of society, something representing its shared interests is needed. This used to be (at least in Germany) a monarchial government existing above and besides parliamentary strife of the parties. This suggests that the problem we’re facing is how to strip parliament of its status as dictatorial institution of power with no regard for anything but itself to put it back into its bottle, force it to accept the existence of legitimate, extraparliamentrial institution of power it didn’t create itself, ie, not His Most Toniest Blairness’ quango straightjacket supposed to guarantee New Labour government even in absence of a New Labour government.
Even the US model of an elected head of government with real power who’s not part of the parliamentary machinery might be suitable for that. OTOH, the traditional model worked fine. It took the parliamentarists to major European landwars to abolish it.
Maybe the only answer is Swiss-style direct government through regular referenda.
Whether that would work in the UK is moot, given that we’re a bigger and more diverse country with a very different history.
It would also require a vigorous and free press and media, something under continual attack.
This essay is puzzling. Professor Alexander very obviously admires Starkey; his essay is full of praise of him. But the title promises, also, to tell us where he is wrong. As someone who also admires Starkey, I was keen to learn where he is wrong but, search as I may, I can’t find it, not much anyway, and nothing developed. It might be expected to follow the heading, “Now for the criticisms”. But it doesn’t, not distinctly.
To begin with, it contains more praise: “[I am] someone who agrees with Starkey that we should read more history … Starkey’s remarkable history of England, and the Union … About the modern time, I, again, find most of the picture persuasive … a great deal to be said for Starkey’s particular history … to say something about the past that enables him to make a copious criticism of the present … almost no sound voices from history [apart from his] … the only historian who has managed to turn history into prophecy in a powerful way. Everyone has something to learn from his recent lectures.”
Alexander is plainly struggling to find anything much wrong. He begins by lighting a damp squib: “His suggestion that we should study history for the sake of the present is [not wrong but] badly formulated” and not all that badly either evidently, for, although “most historical comparisons are naive. In fact Starkey mostly avoids this naive sort of comparison … What he does instead is something subtler … to use the past to explain the present (not to explain what to do in the present, but to explain how we got where we are.”)
He does go on, “But there is a problem even with this. For we cannot restore anything by studying history.” But he has already admitted that Starkey doesn’t offer to use history to explain what to do in the present only to explain how we got where we are. So Alexander not only has not yet shown anything wrong, he hasn’t even shown us what the ‘problem’ is in what Starkey has to say.
There is, in fact, only one place where Alexander finds something wrong with Starkey that he doesn’t qualify out of existence and, even then, he introduces and closes it in a muted sort of a way: “Starkey is rather too admiring of Thatcher. As I said in an earlier piece, Thatcher only understood one of Enoch Powell’s concerns: the managed economy. She did not understand the problem of Europe until very late on, and never understood the problem of immigration, which remains a taboo subject. Starkey, as a humorous atheist, is unwilling to extend his political and constitutional analysis to include religion.”
And then this: “I suppose I dislike some of the cartoonish, or naïve, analogies, such as the comparison of Christian Europe to the European Union. … [The former] appealed to belief, and depended on faith or truth. No one has ever claimed the EU depends on truth or belief. Indeed, it entirely lacks either. … It is a confection, an arbitrary construction, a sort of Heath Robinson conspiracy whereby secular rational universalists – who are influenced by, alas, those English or Scottish habits of universal trade and profit-arousing and rent-seeking as well as by French and German habits of control and planning – attempt to break down all national significance, and, worse, all independent political significance.” And, even that he sums up as, “The story is a bit more dialectical than I think Starkey could admit without damaging his story.”
I don’t think Alexander has himself got a story about Starkey. Except for Starkey’s blankness about religion (which, filled up, might show an unintelligent hostility), Alexander is (not unreasonably) a straightforward admirer. And the title of his essay is seriously misleading.