January 22, 2025

The CO2 canard is coming apart at the seams

By John M. Contino

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions (methane, nitrous oxide, and some other stuff) are pollutants under the Clean Air Act and that the government has the authority to curb them.

Since then, the world has been subjected to numerous climate-related laws and treaties, along with assorted governmental, academic, and corporate pressures — all serving to hype the “existential threat” that is climate change.  The number-one culprit all along has been atmospheric carbon dioxide.

There is nothing inherently wrong with qualitative versus quantitative statements, but there has been an inordinate amount of hand-waving to explain away the failure over the last 50 years of global temperatures to rise nearly as fast as predicted by the climate alarmists.

“Watts Up With That” claims to be the “world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change,” for which Collister Johnson recently wrote a short but powerful article with an unassuming title: “The saturation effect questions the prevailing narrative on CO2.”

Over that last decade, several pedigreed scientists have performed qualitative analyses and experiments to disprove the assumption that “increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause a linear and dangerous increase in global temperatures.”

William Happer and William van Wijngaarden are both “accomplished and renowned physicists with over 500 published papers to their credit.”

They applied highly detailed mathematical analytics to the physics of CO2 in the atmosphere and raised serious doubts about CO2’s ability to absorb heat after becoming “saturated” at current levels of 400 parts per million, and therefore unable to absorb significantly more heat from the Sun. Thus, any further increases in atmospheric CO2 — even doubling that amount to 800 parts per million — would only result in minimal increases in atmospheric temperature of 0.5C, or 1degree Fahrenheit. [snip]

This mathematically rigorous finding was validated through a controlled laboratory experiment conducted by a team of seven Viennese researchers in 2024. They measured the back infrared radiation of CO2 in a test chamber with increasing CO2 concentrations emulating realistic atmospheric conditions. They concluded that doubling CO2 from pre-industrial levels from 400 to 800 ppm “shows no measurable increase in infrared radiation absorption, and thus can lead to just 0.5C warming increase at most.”

In recent years, other prominent scientists have performed studies that confirm that this saturation effect causes minimal increases in temperature as CO2 levels rise.  There is no linear relationship between rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures.  This explains why the Earth “has never experienced runaway warming in the past when CO2 levels were 5–10 times more concentrated than today.”  The planet was, however, more lush with vegetation than it is today.