Weather Eye with John Maunder

My new book from Amazon -Extracts from a few pages from Chapter 1

Viewpoint One 

Net zero policies will have a trivial effect on temperature, but disastrous effects on people worldwide. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and William Happer Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Princeton University in a review dated July 14, 2024, wrote that the United States and countries worldwide are vigorously pursuing regulations and subsidies to reduce CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050 on the assumption, as stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the “evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is the main driver of climate change” and is “responsible for more than 50% of the change.” They comment that they are career physicists with a special expertise in radiation physics, which describes how CO2 affects heat flow in Earth’s atmosphere. The physics of carbon dioxide is that CO2 ’s ability to warm the planet is determined by its ability to absorb heat, which decreases rapidly as CO2 ’s concentration in the atmosphere increases. This scientific fact about CO2 changes everything about the popular view of CO2 and climate change. 

At today’s CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of approximately 420 parts per million, additional amounts of CO2 have little ability to absorb heat and therefore it is now a weak greenhouse gas. At higher concentrations in the future, the ability of future increases to warm the planet will be even smaller. This also means that the common assumption that CO2 is “the main driver of climate change” is scientifically false. In short, more CO2 cannot cause catastrophic global warming or more extreme weather. Neither can greenhouse gases of methane (CH4) or nitrous oxide (N2 O) the levels of which are so small that they are irrelevant to climate. They further comment that referring to additional atmospheric CO2 as “carbon pollution” is “complete nonsense”. More CO2 does no harm. Quite the contrary, Lindzen and Happer say that more CO2 does two good things for humanity: (1) It provides a beneficial increase in temperature, although slight and much less than natural fluctuations, and (2) It creates more food for people worldwide.  They say that net zero efforts will have a trivial effect on temperature. More of the atmospheric greenhouse gas, CO2 , will increase temperature, but only slightly. How changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases affect radiation transfer are described by precise physical equations that have never failed to describe 28 Climate Change : Nature is in Control What controls the weather dice? 29 observations of the real world. They applied these formulas to the massive efforts in the U. S. and worldwide to reduce CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050 in a paper by R. Lindzen, W. Happer and W. van Wijngaarden, Net Zero Avoided Temperature Increase, (Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase - CO2 Coalition; http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07392.  They show that all the efforts to achieve net zero emissions of CO2, if fully implemented, will have a trivial effect on temperature: • United States Net Zero by 2050 -- only avoids a temperature increase of 0. 015 °F with no positive feedback, and only 0.06 °F with a positive feedback of 4 that is typically built into the models of the IPCC. • Worldwide Net Zero by 2050 -- only avoids a temperature increase of 0.13 °F or 0.50 °F with a factor of 4 positive feedback. These numbers are trivial, but the cost of achieving them would be disastrous to people worldwide. In the United States and worldwide, Net zero regulations and subsidies will have disastrous effects, including elimination of coal-fired and gas fired power plants that provide the majority of the world’s electricity; elimination of gas-fuelled heaters and cooking stoves; elimination of internal combustion engines for transportation and other uses; elimination of energy sources and feedstocks for producing nitrogen fertilizer that feeds nearly half the world as well as for the manufacture of nearly everything used in daily life. Investments into inefficient “green” energy technologies diverts resources from more useful purposes.  These and other effects would destroy entire economies. More CO2 means more food. Contrary to the demonization of CO2 as a pollutant, increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 boosts the amount of food available to people worldwide, including in drought stricken areas. Doubling CO2 to 800 ppm, for example, will increase global food supplies by a significant amount. Thus, CO2 emissions should not be reduced, but increased to provide more food worldwide. There would be no risk of catastrophic global warming or extreme weather because CO2 is now a weak greenhouse gas. Reducing CO2 emissions will reduce the amount of food available to people worldwide and produce no benefit to the climate. Fossil fuels must not be eliminated. Net zero requires that fossil fuels be eliminated because they account for about 90% of human-induced CO2 emissions. However, the elimination of fossil fuels will have no effect on the climate since CO2 is now a weak greenhouse gas. The use of fossil fuels should be expanded because they provide more CO2 which makes more food, are used to make nitrogen fertilizer that enables the feeding of about half of the world’s population, and provide reliable and inexpensive energy for people everywhere, especially for the two-thirds of the world’s population without adequate access to electricity. Conclusion: All net zero actions worldwide should be stopped immediately. All net zero CO2 regulations and subsidies in the United States and worldwide must be stopped as soon as possible to avoid the disastrous effects on people worldwide, especially in developing countries. 

Viewpoint Two

* An expert working group of natural scientists (especially geologists) has been established in the Czech Republic and has prepared the following Declaration for politicians and the general public in the Czech Republic (but also elsewhere in the world). They are mostly geologists, but they work with experts in all relevant fields (including the international organisation CLINTEL). Basic geological research and mapping has provided the most evidence of ongoing climate change on Earth, long before so-called anthropogenic global warming came into vogue. It is not true that natural climate change is very slow,(except perhaps in the case of major disasters, which recur after a very long time). There is already evidence from the relatively recent past (the Quaternary) of repeated very rapid temperature changes, and this at a time when there was no significant human influence, let alone human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases, including CO2. On the contrary, it has been clearly demonstrated that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations was a consequence of rising temperatures.  The release or uptake of GHGs then affected temperatures only secondarily (as a positive feedback). The sensitivity of GHG concentrations to temperature changes has been demonstrated in many examples, even on short time scales at the time of instrumental measurements. Current climatology, at least the results presented to the public as the ‘consensus of scientists’, unilaterally emphasizes only GHG emissions. Greenhouse gases, which prevent incident energy from being radiated back into space, are last in the chain of factors (solar radiation, reflectivity) affecting temperatures. The significance of changes in solar activity (whose fluctuations over the period of instrumental measurements alone are energetically comparable to the reported greenhouse gas forcing) is usually ignored, on the grounds that it shows no temporal correlation with temperatures on short time scales. The period of significantly above-average solar activity, which began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and has not 30 Climate Change : Nature is in Control What controls the weather dice? 31 yet completely ended, must have had some effect on temperatures. It has been documented that there are physical mechanisms that explain why average temperatures may not respond immediately to changes in solar activity (e.g. energy accumulation in the oceans and in the Earth’s crust and its delayed release). However, some climatologists have apparently taken the attitude of ‘if we can’t calculate it, we’ll ignore it’ – which is totally unacceptable in serious science with the opportunities offered in the 21st century. The atmosphere is steadily moving towards rebalancing with the ocean, which contains orders of magnitude more CO2 (including other forms of carbon that can easily transfer to it). It is therefore not within human power to significantly deviate the atmospheric CO2 content from equilibrium values in the long term view. The calculations used by the IPCC, which nonsensically separate ‘natural’ CO2 from ‘emitted’ CO2, lead to unrealistically high year-to-year variability in the uptake of ‘emitted’ CO2 and are therefore not a credible basis for answering the question of how much CO2 and other human-emitted greenhouse gases actually remain in the atmosphere (more precisely: how much lower concentrations would be if anthropogenic emissions were not present).  ‘Carbon neutrality’, as the main objective of the current measures extremely affecting the economy, is therefore only of ideological significance, because maintaining certain concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases would only be realistic if temperatures did not change significantly in the long time (even from natural causes). Concentrating a great deal of effort on preventing global warming must therefore have a very uncertain outcome even under very favourable circumstances. Much more effective is adaptation to climate change itself (which humanity has been doing for the entirety of its existence). Also important are the efforts devoted to regional or local climate, where the impact of human activity is already very real (heat islands, disruption of small water cycles, etc.). We reject the propaganda that warming is a priori bad and increases the frequency of extremes of all kinds, because such claims are completely contradicted by the geological record and current observations (there is no denying, for example, the positive effect of higher precipitation and higher CO2 concentrations on vegetation growth, including agricultural crops, in the vast majority of the world). Mgr. Miloš Faltus, Ph.D.,RNDr. Tomáš Fürst, Ph.D.,RNDr. Pavel Kalenda, CSc.,Mgr. Jiří Kobza.,RNDr. Dobroslav Matějka, CSc.,Mgr. Václav Procházka, Ph.D.

Viewpoint 3 

From the UN Climate Action for August 2024. “For a liveable climate: Net zero commitments must be backed by credible action. Put simply, net zero means cutting carbon emissions to a small amount of residual emissions that can be absorbed and durably stored by nature and other CO2 removal measures, leaving zero in the atmosphere.” Why is net zero in current national plans fall short of what is required? In May 2021, the International Energy Association published its landmark report Net Zero Emissions by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector. The report set out a narrow but feasible pathway for the global energy sector to contribute to the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.  The Net Zero Roadmap quickly became an important benchmark for policy makers, industry, the financial sector and civil society. Since the report was released, many changes have taken place, notably amid the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Energy sector CO2 emissions have continued to rise, reaching a new record in 2022. Yet there are also increasing grounds for optimism: the last two years have also seen remarkable progress in developing and deploying some key clean energy technologies. The 2023 update to Net Zero Roadmap surveys this complex and dynamic landscape and sets out an updated pathway to net zero by 2050, taking account of the key developments that have occurred since 2021.

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My new book is available from Amazon.com