This is an early version of a paper that was published in an academic journal in 2003, but it’s behind a paywall and one of its authors, Professor David Campbell, has given me permission to publish it here. David is a Professor of Law at Lancaster University Law School and this paper is a detailed critique of the Labour Government’s response to the foot and mouth disease epidemic in 2001. Why is that relevant? Because the Government’s response in 2001 was informed by statistical modelling done by a team at Imperial College that was led by Professor Neil Ferguson, among others. Imperial’s apocalyptic predictions led to more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs being slaughtered, with an estimated cost to the UK economy of £9 billion.
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Human emitted Co2 does not cause anything. 2000 years ago it was warmer and supposedly Co2 levels were <4 parts per million. Co2 is endothermic and exothermic – both warms and cools. Not A Space Agency (no rocket program of course, so it focuses on climate bollocks), knows this.
Gaia emits 95% of Co2. So notwithstanding the graphs above, how would human emissions of 0.2 parts per million cause anything? Can anyone give me real world observational facts and data which supports the idea that 0.2 parts per million of anything causes something?
$cientism and Fascism. Trillions of £ to chase. A society to destroy and manage as collective knaves and slaves. Rona and Virus Scamdemics and Climate (net-tard zero). Twin fascisms based on fraud and stupid. Either we end them, or they end us.
2,000 years ago, CO2 levels were well under 400 ppm. Not 4ppm. Today, the level stands at 415 ppm.
The rest is bang on!
There were times when the level was 10 and even 20 times higher though with no runaway global warming occurring. Plus despite CO2 continuing to rise global temperature (whatever that is supposed to mean) is not rising much. Or as we saw in the climategate emails “we cannot account for the lack of warming”. In science you question everything. The fact that this “climate emergency” is not to be questioned reveals only one thing. ——-It isn’t and never was about science.
Wouldn’t/couldn’t argue with that, as the first graph above amply demonstrates. I was merely pointing out a fundamental error (by two orders of magnitude) in quoted CO2 levels by the OP.
There is no need to apologise for your comment by saying “I was merely pointing out………….”. ——–I agree with what you say and am adding to the conversation
CO2 pretty much as low as it has ever been. We need more, not less…
Gaia emits vastly more CO2 than humans, but it also absorbs huge amounts. The question is whether or not it can absorb human emissions. It was indeed warmer 2,000 years ago, as well as 1,000 years ago and various other times in the last 10,000 years. However this doesn’t mean that average global temperatures would the same as they currently are if we hadn’t started burning fossil fuels. There’s some AGW sceptic scientists that slightly disagree with prof Happer and think that emitting CO2 at current rates will cause another 0.2-0.3 degrees of warming, although this would be a good thing if we’re about to see a Solar Grand Minimum and widespread cooling.
As long as we agree that there’s no climate crisis and it would be utter madness to try and end fossil fuel use the exact details of the science are pretty irrelevant.
I wonder how many down votes I can get? Well here goes. “Co2 is endothermic and exothermic – both warms and cools.” endomthermic and exothermic refer to chemical reactions, which in this case does not happen. An exothermic reaction is when something burns. Ok there are chemical reactions when CO2 is absorbed by plants etc, but not in the atmosphere. The issue is the heat capacity and the ability to absorb IR radiation, hence the third graph. All gases have this, it is just that CO2, NO2 ands MH4 absorb more.
I think the terms can be applied also to physical processes, like ice melting (which is endothermic).
I agree MM, the term simply describes the movement of heat (energy if you like). However this is not the relevant part, the science is clear, CO2 causes very little or no extra heating or cooling of the Earth. Those that somehow manage to claim that it does, are either thick or deluded. The 1850 date is a stupid one to choose anyway, the Thames used to freeze over every year, thick enough to support a huge fair on the ice! It is a bit warmer in winter than then, but in 1850 we were still at the end of the little Ice Age, a period when all of Europe was very cold. Ice ages are probably caused by solar changes, astronomical alignments, and axis tilt changes, but we don’t actually know why exactly. The 1930s in Europe and N.America were unusually hot and dry, but again exactly why is completely unknown, although there are a lot of untestable theories.There are actually less severe weather events worldwide now than 100 years ago, despite a lot of claims, the data is available and is ignored by most MSM sources. There is actually almost nothing we can do to change the climate, despite claims from the WEF and Gates etc. that the world will end if we do not give them all the wealth in the world. Strange that!
We are 40 glaciations in to the Quaternary ice age, the coldest period on earth since the Karoo ice age 255m years ago. We have the Vostok ice cores showing co2 lagging temperature for the last 800k year as predicted by Henry’s law. Anyone who is worried about slight warming (much of which is the urban heat island effect) threatening a species evolved in the tropics is an abject moron who should be in charge of nothing.
The best explanation for why the Earth has this periodic ice ages is because as it rotates round the centre of the galaxy and passes through the spiral arms that have a relatively high density of stars the number of galactic cosmic rays entering the atmosphere increases. This leads to an increase in cloud cover which cools the Earth.
The number of galactic cosmic rays arriving in the solar system has almost certainly been constant for the last 10,000 years. As the strength of the sun’s magnetic field changes, the amount of galactic cosmic rays that reach the Earth changes hence the periodical warming and cooling since the end of the last glaciation.
Clouds are the main driver of climate on lots of different timescales.
https://notrickszone.com/2019/08/29/nasa-we-cant-model-clouds-so-climate-models-are-100-times-less-accurate-than-needed-for-projections/
I’ve been around long enough to have discerned any significant change in climate and I haven’t seen any. I’m not panicked.
“Sure, all things being equal, CO2 may cause a little bit of warming, but all things in earths climate are not equal”—-Judith Curry (Climatologist), who has recently written a book showing the huge uncertainties that exist on this issue. ———“Climate Emergency” politics does not want to hear any of that. Because if there is no “crisis” then the policies to avert the “crisis” will be undermined, and may be aborted. So there must always be an “emergency” and it must be kept in the public eye on a daily basis. It suits government just fine that activists glue themselves to everything and disrupt everybody and they are clearly happy that these brainwashed dreamers do the dirty work for them. They are regularly let off for their disruptions and public disorder, when it is certain that if I had a T shirt with JUST START OIL on it I would not be getting the same courtesy. ——-But as in all public policy, those who would provide information that is contrary to current orthodoxy are the trouble makers who must be silenced. Or as Mark Twain put it —–“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It is what you know for sure just ain’t so” ——–The Climate emergency just ain’t so.—– How inconvenient.
Why not test your theory, get a JUST START OIL T-shirt from moonpig and start spraying paint over Greenpeace’s headquarters.
I prefer the more pithy version of Twain’s aphorism – “what gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so”.
And climate change catastrophe politics is the biggest “ain’t so” of all time
This graph shows the warming effect of co2 is front loaded and declines logarithmically. Doubling from here would add about 1 degree centigrade and still leave us cooler than Roman or Minoan times.
So we don’t need to decarbonise.
The science behind when CO2 becomes saturated is far from settled. The graph says that if CO2 reaches 800ppm they’ll be about 1 degree of warming. This seems to contradict graph 3 in the article. I don’t know which is correct, but I think it’s more likely to be graph 3.
You are right, of course, in that precision is bogus. The error bars in the IPCC reports are bigger than the change they claim to be able to predict. But the general point is valid. Steve Koonin likened it to brushing paint over a window. First coat – some streaks of light get through. Second, not much. Third, none. Subsequent coats – no difference. We don’t have to put up with this “co2 is a pollutant” lie.
I’ll take one degree of warming. Yes please. And the response of the climate community to this to say “Ah yes, but ECS….”. Sadly, estimates of ECS make it lower and lower…
Have another graph…
But while we are all arguing about graphs the eco socialists are busy getting on with reorganising the global economy and controlling the worlds wealth and resources. ———We need to STOP arguing about science. It isn’t about science.
My sister, an idiot LibDem, made a rare visit this week. We, inevitably, ended up talking about “climate change” and I told her that nothing we did in the UK would make a scrap of difference to the global climate ….. we’d eliminate our 1% of global emissions, bankrupt the country, and it would achieve nothing.
She didn’t disagree, but said “we have to start somewhere.” So there you have it …. bankrupting the country to achieve SFA is “a start.”
And there are millions of equally idiotic voters in the UK.
Bankrupting a country is such an effective strategy that China and India are not adopting it.
I sympathise and wonder if there is not a good business opportunity to develop Net Zero holidays homes to rent out to these people. At least it would be cheap to run with no energy supply and very little contents to maintain.
I expect most of them would go mad after the first few days.
My sister, an idiot LibDem, made a rare visit this week. We, inevitably, ended up talking about “climate change” and I told her that nothing we did in the UK would make a scrap of difference to the global climate ….. we’d eliminate our 1% of global emissions, bankrupt the country, and it would achieve nothing.
She didn’t disagree, but said “we have to start somewhere.”
Assuming CO₂ will cause catastrophic climate change in the not-too-distant future, ie, in less than 100 years, we absolutely cannot afford to start somewhere and waste decades of effort and gigantic sums of money on achieving something which won’t make difference. In this was case, we must start with the CO₂ ‘superpowers’ USA, China and India. Should we manage to get these to become carbon-neutral, we would have saved the planet for now and could then deal with whatever relatively minor problems remain at leisure afterwards.
If the future of life on this planet hangs on the thread it’s said to hang, we must not waste time on sending political signals or other human visions centric nonsense of this kind because the climate won’t care for them.
She’s right.
Your argument is typical of any situation where we have “the tragedy of the commons“. The answer is that every country has to do their bit.
‘Every country has to do their bit’
Off you go to India then, with that message.
Please bring back video of your trip for our entertainment….
Obviously not me personally but UK ministers have taken that message to India and it would be very unconvincing to take that message if the UK was not doing something itself- right ?
Aren’t India doing more than the UK in terms of energy storage, as they are world leaders?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-22/india-plans-to-keep-adding-coal-power-capacity-as-demand-surges
Indian, American and Chinese CO₂ emissions as killing the planet and therefore, something entirely pointless (and insanely expensive) must be done in the UK? If your neighbours house is burning, pissing onto the grill in your garden won’t help.
Technical problems – and it’s claimed that CO₂ would a technical problem – can’t be solved by symbolic politics, difficult as this may be to understand for some people. Putting any effort into NetZero UK amounts to the tacit admission that there is no global CO₂ emission problem.
WTF.
Indian, American and Chinese emissions are killing the planet but the UK trying to cut emissions is a tacit admission there’s no emission problem.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so obviously contradict themselves in so few sentences.
Indian, American and Chinese emissions are killing the planet but the UK trying to cut emissions is a tacit admission there’s no emission problem. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so obviously contradict themselves in so few sentences.
The reason is obviously that everyone except you is Nazi.
The global leaders in CO₂ emissions are the USA, India and China. Everybody else is an also-ran. Hence, if (double emphasis to ensure the conditional statement doesn’t get lost in lala land once again) human CO₂ emissions are – as the climate changers claim – killing the planet, emissions produced by these three countries need to be addressed and putting any effort in CO₂ emission in the UK is a waste of time and money. That this waste of time and money is to be undertaken despite it’s pointless wrt reducing global human CO₂ emissions thus strongly suggests that the people pressing for this don’t believe in their own stories.
WTF has Nazism got to do with this?
Your second paragraph makes perfect sense (for once), until the last bit. You’ve forgotten that some people may genuinely believe that if the UK, plus the EU and a few other countries cut emissions the rest of the world may follow. People who are deluded enough to believe we can enjoy anything close to our current standard of life are quite capable of believing the rest of the world would follow our lead.
I haven’t forgotten anything and that the people following the UN climate change agenda are stupid enough to fall for it is a truism. However, the people pushing it are certainly not. They know that no amount of CO₂-gymnastics anywhere in Europe will make a meaningful difference to global CO₂ emissions. Hence, that’s obviously not what they’re trying to accomplish. Ergo: They cannot possibly believe in their own stories as their actions contradict them.
Have you been to India recently?
I was in Bangalore the other day, the streets of the old R&R centre choked with traffic; thousands of youngsters working in Tech start ups associated with government owned electronics industry JVs with international partners.
The idea that they have any intention of restraining their economic growth because of an unproven and venal global climate scam dreamt up by a few greedy high net worth individuals in search of a one way bet is just plain silly at best; nutty.
You and so many like you are complicit in that scam. If you are not making money out of it then you are being taken for a ride.
Do you make money from the environmental industry?
‘A few years ago Forbes magazine went through the federal budget and estimated about $150 billion in spending on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama’s first term.
That didn’t include the tax subsidies that provide a 30 percent tax credit for wind and solar power — so add to those numbers about $8 billion to $10 billion a year. Then add billions more in costs attributable to the 29 states with renewable energy mandates that require utilities to buy expensive “green” energy.
Worldwide the numbers are gargantuan. Five years ago, a leftist group called the Climate Policy Initiative issued a study which found that “Global investment in climate change” reached $359 billion that year.’
Stephen Moore
Shockingly large sums of money, but still relatively small change compared with the cost of achieving net zero. Bill Gates reckons $200trillion by 2050, which is almost certainly a massive underestimate. There it could well be $15trillion a year.
There are nowhere NEAR enough rare earth resources on the planet to do NetZero. Mike Kelly in the UK there is not enough Molybdenum for batteries for EVs for the UK alone.
It truly is insanity.
You’ve been on this page after I replied to your comment re Graph 1 and Graph 2. Are you going to reply to me, or is your silence an admission that you can’t and you know I’m right.
I am sorry. I can’t keep up with all the comments and I am now confused as to which of your replies you are referring to. Maybe you could link to it?
There’s no point the UK doing our bit when it’s blindingly obvious that India, China etc. aren’t going to do their bit.
More importantly there’s no point doing our bit, because that bit doesn’t need to be done.
But it is only the wealthy west that is “doing their bit”. ——-I always hear this silly argument that the UK must be “world leaders” in fighting climate change. —-WHY? I would prefer if we were “world leaders” in controlling our borders. The whole idea behind this eco socialism masquerading as some kind of settled science is that the wealthy west has become prosperous by using way more than our fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground and we should stop doing that first. This is really POLITICS. It has nothing to do with science. It all emanates from the UN IPCC who are a political body, not a scientific one and their conclusions are all entirely political. It is the politics of Sustainable Deveopment with climate as the very plausible excuse. It is about wealth and resources rather than anything to do with the climate.
With respect to the first two graphs, it is sad that a distinguished emeritus professor should be reduced to recycling tired old sceptical arguments that have been refuted time and time again in the decades since they were first put forward.
The third chart is more credible but Wijngaarden and Happer conclude that:
Increasing carbon dioxide will cause a small additional surface warming. It is difficult to calculate exactly how much, but our best estimate is that it is about 1 C for every doubling of CO2 concentration, when all feedbacks are correctly accounted for
The key point being the role of feedbacks, primarily water vapour. They dismiss this fundamental part of the picture with a couple of sentences:
But most climate models have predicted much more warming than has been observed, so there is no observational support for strong positive feedbacks
But this is highly disputable and the subject of many papers and much research – not a few words at the end of paper.
Positive feedbacks are not common in nature. Onus is on those proposing them to prove their existence. That hasn’t been done.
Professor Richard Lindzen said a similar same thing.
Positive feedbacks are not common in nature.
They are very common – but of course by their very nature they are unstable and cannot go on indefinitely. Any time that rate of growth is proportional to state of growth you have positive feedback – hurricanes and similar storm systems forming, almost any multicellular life form in its early stage ...
“cannot go on indefinately”???———You mean they peter out. Because the overarching feedbacks are NEGATIVE. Stability is therefore created , and that is what we have had for billions of years. Without negative feedbacks in place we would not be here.
Two matters.
Climate science abandoned real science way back.
I FoI’ed the CC to request them to point me to formal proof of 1. Above.
They couldn’t. Referred me to countless IPCC papers, none of which did either,
Correct. ——-The whole idea of dangerous climate change incudes there being positive feedbacks. But if feedbacks were positive in the past the earths climate would not be as stable as it has been for billions of years. ——-United Nations Politics gets away with saying anything they want with no evidence to back it up and then they use The Argument From Authority to insist that everything they say is ultimate truth because “all scientists agree” ——-Except no they do not.
Show how the first 2 graphs have been proved wrong, rather than climate alarmists simply saying they’re wrong.
The satellite data shows a warming trend of 0.14 degrees per decade. The average predicted warming is at least 0.25 degrees per decade therefore most climate models have predicted far more warming than has been observed.
The few words at the end of the paper are correct. IMO they should of been given far more prominence at the beginning.
Not too mention the lower warming of the upper atmosphere than predicted. See Pofessor John Christy.
The Tropospheric hot spot. Which never happened. Same for the warming of Antarctica. Warming of both poles a core premise of CAGW. Instead, it’s got colder.
‘recycling ….arguments…..that have been refuted…’
Interesting that you do not reference any of these many refutations…….
Could that possibly be because you believe that tired and very dim old socialist fascist tripe that ‘the science is settled’……..?
When “the science” is referenced, what is in fact being referenced is ideology.
Covid did the same.
I’d ask for details, purely out of curosity. But at the end of the day, I am not sure it is us that you have to convince- try the 1% richest for starters, as they are massive energy consumers with their private jets and massive mansions. The next thing is to have a go at persuading China and India and Russia to go Net Zero. Good luck with that.
Most feedbacks in nature are NEGATIVE not POSITIVE. ——Otherwise we would not be here today. There is no evidence that CO2 is causing dangerous climate change. The idea that it is comes from models full of assumptions and guesses, but for political purposes. The Politics that people like yourself almost completely ignore. You seem to have this idea that scientists in white coats busy themselves all day with hardly time for a cheese roll and then run to government with their findings and government have no choice but to act. If you think like that it is easy to see why you have the views you do———–It is government who provide more and more funding to “climate change” and less and less funding to “climate”. He who pays the piper calls the tune. ——They have an agenda. ——–Sustainable Development.
Several people have quite reasonably asked me for references to support my claim that the first two charts make points that have been refuted.
Chart 1
First it is inaccurate (https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/03/can-we-make-better-graphs-of-global-temperature-history/)
Second even if it were accurate you cannot deduce anything about the relationship between CO2 and the earth’s surface temperature. The timescales are so large they are dominated by the things such as the strength of the sun and continental drift which work over millions of years. (https://skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past-intermediate.htm)
Chart 2
See this article. The key points being:
realclimate didn’t provide a graph that showed their estimates of temperature and CO2. If they had of done it would show no correlation between the 2. Temperature reconstructions reconstructions of the last 10,000 years also show no correlation with CO2. The junk science ones such as Mikey Mann’s hockey stick have been thoroughly debunked.
Provide the newer high resolution ice core data.
Respond to might point about the large discrepancy between model predictions and satellite data.
Isn’t it laughable that a climate alarmist goes to climate alarmist websites for his information and then assumes that all must be ultimate truth? In science yo question everything. The fact that climate alarmists NEVER question anything about their pet theory reveals one thing. ——-They suffer from a serious dose of Confirmation Bias.
I wonder if you’re going to be the first person to make a comment on DS that doesn’t get a single like.
They finally got one after about 2 and a half hours. Bet they phoned a friend.
The simple fact is that we do not know how much changing CO2 levels can affect climate, and we can’t explain the large observed effects due to solar changes……and much surface temperature measurement is of uncertain provenance…… so nut zero is precisely that……
Delighted to see this although it’s been known for some years now. The whole thing has been a fraud from start to finish. The idea that a vital trace gas might compromise our future has always been nonsense or non science. Keep at it and watch as the stupid politicians wake up.
The climate scam was cobbled together in 1972 by the Club of Rome. That’s it. That is all their is to it.
Discussion over.
Prf Will Happer is a lovely man and very good at explaining the nonsense. See his videos on YouTube and be educated
Have some more…
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”
As always: Follow the money.
I’m looking for the source reference for the first 600 million year CO2/Temp graph. I followed through the Patrick Moore citing and ended up at a Biocarb.org page which was blank. The Biocarb home site is not in English so couldn’t track it further. Can anyone help, it’s a pretty important graph.
How many people are going to read this compared to those who listen to the TV garbage from Attenborough, Chris Packham and the latest trio on Channel 4 – Kevin McCloud, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Mary Portas not to mention the influence that dear Greta has had on polticians and school children. And as Prince William told everybody at the Earth Shot prize giving, the change has been so rapid in the past year that we can all see it happening. His audience agreed and not one drew attention to all the King’s predictions that have failed to materialise.
The age of science has come and gone. It is how we feel that matters.
Here’s one for Mr Dalby, with a reference.