The world needs more CO2, not less

Part 1 of 2

With school kids now gradually returning from their summer holidays and disembarking their not-so-carbon-neutral planes, the Friday-for-Future demos are getting back into full swing. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I am all in favour of free speech and controversial, yet open discussions. Good arguments should always be listened to. Specifically those that are based on facts.

Just recently, I was in a client meeting in a small town in Germany, and “lucky” enough to witness one of these demos myself. Although the climate icon Greta wasn’t there, I have to admit that the throng of pupils attending was impressive. Of course, it is difficult to sense how many students show up at these demos out of conviction as opposed to being herded by their teachers or just enjoying time off from their science lessons. But the scary aspect of these happenings surely has to be the level of indoctrination that is on display.

Had students attended their classes they would know: the world needs more CO2, not less.

I will keep this plaidoyer simple. It’s strictly non political. Because politics shouldn’t interfere with science. I am simply sharing observations and applying common sense.

Charlatans in action

For people interested in the matter of global warming (or "climate crisis" as it is labeled these days), the Church of Climate currently appears to be falling apart. So-called climate activists have taken a couple of rather severe punches lately.

In fact, the traditional rationale of higher (man-made) CO2 levels leading to excessive heating of Mother Earth, to causing greenhouse effects, to negatively impacting other climate gases and thereby destroying our planet doesn’t stand up to scrutiny anymore.

Well, at least not in a way initially intended.

Instead it seems we are seeing more and more cons being exposed. The house of cards of Climate Change appears to be crumbling brick-by-brick, whilst the rhetoric and actions of those that believe in humankind climate change are getting more religous.

Firstly, there is an endless debate about the accuracy of temperature measurements, with NASA and the NOAA openly admitting that they have been “adjusting” data, sometimes years retrospectively. Chip in the discussions about UHI, or Urban Heat Islands, where human activities around the measurement point can severely distort measurements of temperature data. A measurement point that 50 years ago was set up amongst grazing cows may these days collect data in an area that emits heat from surrounding houses.

Does that mean organisations such as NASA or the NOAA are cheating? I’ll pass on that. But what is obvious is that science rarely works on the basis of garbage in - garbage out.

Next there is the destruction of the, what I would call, “enshrined law of the hockey stick”. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, an UN organisation that spearheads the narrative of the global warming agenda draws its major cornerstone from the work of Dr Michael Mann, the “inventor” of the hockey stick.

For those not familiar with the hockey stick: this postulates that for the past 1000 years or so temperatures on Earth have been largely stagnant, confined to narrowly wobbling around an artificial ideal temperature. Temperatures then suddenly and rapidly rise by the mid of the last century. 

Of course, everybody with some sanity will jump up now and point out that this is nonsense. We have seen the Middle Age Warm Period, where Vikings grew grain in Greenland for their beer (for sure the most obvious use of barley) and the Little Ice Age where millions across Europe died from starvation and cold temperatures.

Exposing this stupidity, a certain Dr Tim Ball was dragged to court by Dr Michael Mann. In August 2019, Mann’s case that he himself had initiated was thrown out by the court, largely because he was unwilling to disclose how he had arrived at his hockey stick graphs. Mann was ordered to pay all of Tim Ball’s legal bills. A similar behaviour is on record from UK based Prof Phil Jones, another protagonist promoting the idea of man-made climate change. When asked for proof, Jones simply claimed to have lost the input data for his climate models. This is certainly not inspiring any trust.

Even the IPCC itself could be accused of charlatanism. The principal remit of its work is to look for evidence of human climate change only. Sounds innocent? It isn’t.

Imagine you are a medical researcher tasked to find out the impact of coffee consumption on the prevalence of heart attacks. You must not look into issues such as smoking, lack of physical activity, deprived living standards or other factors that contribute to heart attacks. And your brief is to only find negative aspects as far as coffee consumption is concerned.

If you now think that such a study is pretty useless, you are absolutely right. But that’s exactly the approach the IPCC has taken by focussing on carbon-dioxide, or CO2, as the main culprit for allegedly man-made climate change. 

How and why is the IPCC pushing this narrative? What’s their agenda? I am afraid, but you have to wait for my next article here.

The world is a greenhouse - or is it?

With the IPCC engaging in fear-mongering tactics it is no surprise then that climate change has gathered so much traction globally. We only have “Planet A” and we are pumping up our own house with CO2, or so the punch line goes. After all, we live in a greenhouse.

It is a picture that is easy to understand. Everybody can relate to it. Just please don’t show me the science. It’s so obvious. I will happily believe the Al Gores and those who so professionally model our climate and predict the next doomsday.

But the narrative has been shattered all along. In a US House Meeting with Dr John Christy in February 2016 it became clear that despite the billions of $$ that went into climate research, the climate models got their predictions wrong by a large margin. Reality does not play ball. Almost all models (apart from an outlier Russian version) were out by a factor of 2 to 3. At that point you would have expected a professional organisation to shut shop.

A competent scientist would have concluded the following: we had that hypothesis of the Earth being a big greenhouse - actual measured data from the real world have proved us wrong - lets try and find a different approach.

Not so the IPCC who still seem to be in love with their hockey sticks.

Of course, one might suspect that temperatures will start to rapidly rise again very soon. After all the Summer 2019 was comparatively hot (though I should not be talking about the weather here). But was it? September 2019 has seen a climate change expedition stuck in thick ice off the coast of Norway. It was freezing cold so they had to be rescued by helicopter. Russia has just experienced its coldest summer in recorded history in over 150 years, with temperatures about 6 degrees below long-term averages [1]. Now, I am wondering how this will be reflected in the upcoming climate change data.

All of that does not sound like a cosy greenhouse to me.

But let’s not be misled by anecdotal evidence. Let’s go back to science.

It’s becoming exciting. I promise.

In one of the latest developments, two Irish scientists, Drs Michael and Ronan Connolly, have in fact very much disproved the theory of Mother Earth being a greenhouse. Remember, the greenhouse argument is at the core of the IPCC story. 

The results of their studies are nothing short of another severe body blow to those who believe that CO2 will trap the heat and eventually burn the planet. And better yet, it’s not just another model like the numerous hockey sticks. It follows basic science. It follows the laws of gas. It uses Einstein’s findings. And most importantly, it almost perfectly matches the observed reality.

The key messages from the Connollys’ work:

• there is no such thing like a greenhouse effect, no magic layer that traps hot air
• the Earth’s atmosphere is pretty much in an equilibrium i.e. energy that is absorbed is also re-emitted back into space
• the current IPCC climate model temperature projections are worthless

Or in other words: The amount of CO2 mankind emits into the atmosphere does not have any material impact on how much the temperatures will rise or fall.

When you then also consider that - even by the IPCC’s own admission - only a tiny little fraction of our air consists of genuinely “man-made” CO2, that calls into question the sanity of those spreading horror scenarios.

Interested readers may want to take some clues from Connolly’s presentation [2].

Fertilising the planet

So, if it doesn’t matter how we go about our CO2 emission, wouldn’t it be time to have a look at the positives of heightened carbon levels? Time to get CO2 out of the climate killer corner that so categorically suggests it is dangerous? Time to stop sharing fairy tales about it being the main reason for global warming?

Absolutely.

Our atmosphere is in fact at a very low level of carbon dioxide at this point in time of the Earth’s history. Some while back life on our planet was actually close to extinction. Over millions of years CO2 levels in the atmosphere had come down from 10% to the current 0.04% (412ppm). All the while, the Earth had been constantly sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, depositing it into sediments, oceans, life, and oil and gas reserves.

It has been literally almost killing itself. Plants will die at CO2 levels below 150ppm. We came close to that level at around 180ppm, a point where life as we know it would have ceased to exist. 

We have to understand CO2 as something what it really is: a crucial building block for life. It’s not a pollutant. It’s not a killer gas. In fact, greenhouses around the world even use CO2 as a potent fertiliser for their crop, enriching the air to levels of 0.1% (or 1000 to even 1200ppm).

Similar mechanisms can be observed in marine life, which, despite all the talk about ocean acidification in the higher water layers is flourishing under increased levels of dissolved CO2. To understand this, we simply need to go back to the roots of science and must not forget that carbon is the most important ingredient to life on Earth.

Looking for proof? Now, whether man-made or not, the impact of a heightened CO2 content in the atmosphere can be witnessed in numerous NASA satellite images. Never before has the planet been as green as it is today. Overall, there has been an increase of plant foliage of more than 5% since 2000. Interestingly, the greening effect is most pronounced in previously arid areas, hinting at a chance that even deserts will again be overgrown by vegetation in a distant future.

As a positive side effect, CO2 contributes to our food security. Plants grow faster and bigger.

We are not destroying our planet by giving back some of the CO2 trapped in the crust of the Earth into the atmosphere. Quite the contrary. Does that mean we should consume our resources as if there was no tomorrow? Cut down large swathes of forest? Pollute our house? Fail to clean up?

Categorically, no. But we also shouldn’t be too concerned about putting more CO2 out in the open. And, we should call out those who seek to profit from the climate hysteria.

After all: we need more CO2, not less.