David Craig, on September 2nd, 2022Friday/weekend blog
The big issue?
A reader raised the following issue: for the human caused climate change to be valid there must be a strong correlation with CO2 leading, although as we know correlation is not proof of causation. I do not understand why the correlation analysis has not been done because it will stop the nonsense immediately.
So, let’s try to answer this:
A tale of two theories
As all readers hopefully know, there are two main theories about the role CO2 plays or doesn’t play in the Earth’s climate.
The climate catastrophists
The climate catastrophist, net-zero fanatics believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas which traps heat. Therefore the more CO2 there is in the Earth’s atmosphere, the hotter the Earth will become. As CO2 has risen from 0.03% (300 parts per million) of the Earth’s atmosphere to just over 0.04% (420 parts per million) of the Earth’s atmosphere since the start of the industrial age, the catastrophists believe that the rise on CO2 from a tiny 0.03% to 0.042% of the Earth’s atmosphere is causing unstoppable global warming.
This slightly ignores the fact that CO2 has been much higher in the past (the black line on the chart and left-hand scale):
Yet even when atmospheric CO2 levels were over 4,000 parts per million – ten times today’s levels – the Earth didn’t overheat then. Moreover, CO2 is an essential plant food. Many agriculturalists install CO2 generators in their greenhouses to promote plant growth and the ideal atmospheric CO2 level is probably around 0.1% (1,000 parts per million). Moreover, were CO2 levels to drop below 0.02% (200 parts per million) most plant life on Earth would die and humans would become extinct.
Though it would be rather amusing if, in their attempts to ‘save the planet, the crazed greenies invented a machine which could extract CO2 from the atmosphere and managed to bring CO2 levels below 0.02% accidentally wiping out plant life and the human race.
The climate realists
The climate realists (or ‘science deniers’ according to the climate catastrophists) believe that CO2 levels are largely a result of the Earth’s temperature. They propose that the Earth goes through regular cycles of warming and cooling:
As the Earth warms, more CO2 is released from the oceans into the atmosphere and, as the Earth cools, more CO2 is absorbed by the oceans.
Why have there not been any definitive studies?
Given how important it is to establish whether rising atmospheric CO2 causes warming or is a result of warming, the question then arises – why have there not been any definitive studies to settle this once and for all?
The answer is that I think this study has been done. It was based on ice cores taken at the Vostok Antarctic research station analysing temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels for the last 420,000 years:
The results were written up in a 2019 paper published in the Periodicals of Engineering and Natural Sciences. The paper was titled Time and frequency analysis of Vostok ice core climate data (note 29 in my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS)
The paper found that in 3 out of 4 time periods “CO2 lags temperature”. The data from the fourth period wasn’t so clear. The study concluded: “Although originally thought that the CO2 data might be considered as proof of its causal role in global warming, it is now widely considered that CO2 lags temperature change and its lower rate of solution in and release from sea water is more likely the cause of the relationship”.
Given that the West is committing social and economic suicide in the belief that CO2 is causing temperature change, you might have thought that the conclusion of the Vostok ice cores study would have been widely reported and would even have caused our political rulers to rethink their lunatic obsession with totally pointless economically-destructive net zero.
Why have there not been any further studies?
Then the question arises – why have there not been any further studies to confirm or refute the conclusions of the Time and frequency analysis of Vostok ice core climate data paper detailed above.
I’ll propose three reasons:
- no climate scientist would ever get a grant to analyse whether the theory of CO2-caused climate change is the greatest scientific mistake/ fraud in human history since the time that we were all assured that the Earth was flat and that the Sun orbited around the Earth
- if a climate scientist were to begin such a study, he or she would immediately be harassed and excoriated by mobs of woke students claiming that the scientist was being paid by ‘Big Oil’ and demanding a halt to the research and that the scientist be fired and never allowed to work ever again
- even if a scientist did the research and managed to keep their job, no publication would accept their paper and the results would either be ignored by the mainstream media or else the mainstream media would launch a vituperative ad hominem campaign to discredit the scientist and hound them out of their job
Mass murderer or convenient pretext?
That brings us back to the question in the headline of this blog:
- Are atmospheric CO2 levels really responsible for the deaths of thousands in climate-related disasters and could rising atmospheric CO2 levels really lead to the extinction of the human race?
- Or is the CO2 climate-catastrophist movement a massive scientific blunder/fraud which is being used by luddite, West-loathing, progress-hating fools and knaves looking for a purpose in their empty lives and cynical globalist politicians using it as a means of increasing their control over us by impoverishing us and imposing ever more restrictions on our freedoms?
I know what I believe is happening!
Category: 
Watching the terrible scences in Pakistan, I have written to our governments regarding the abandoned plastic boats they are storing in Kent at great expense, incase the owners come forward to claim them. Boris wrote back but soon his attention wandered and he was asking me if I knew how to remove £439,00 rolls of wallpaper off walls of the spare bog done up like a Turkish brothel.
He then asked if I could help him find a good home for 439 stray Afghan dogs that he has locked in the second pantry and If I know anything about quickie divorces designed to dump people disguised as horses.
Boris is beset by problems at this time. His wife’s latest escapade where on live TV she ran aroung a Ukranian supermarket for one minute, filling it with US landmines to be legally exported to Syria was not a very good look,even if their was a few quid in it.It was strangley remenicint of the Blair Bitch project where teams of scientists worked day and night to try to make “Just call me Tory’s” wife appear to not sleep in an old Camp Coffee bottle, at the bottom of a a grade “A” sewage filled pond somewhere near you.
Taking a lead from Winston Churchill, ( Brandy for Breakfast),Boris then ordered an immediate and overdue attack on the French military, three quarters of which,were lucky enough to be rescued at Dunkirk, These French soldiers then demaned that they be repatriated to France so they could again take up arms fight their own people and us for the Germans and went on to kill America, British, Canadian and a host of other allied soliers who were shot dead trying to stop millions of enslaved europeans being murdered in Nazi camps.
Silly old French. All they had to do was tell the French EDF Energy supplier to increase prices to the UK by five times and the UK would have collapsed without a shot being fired with the dead from hypothermia piled in our streets, discuuing the benefits of Brexit as the last hot breath evacuated their froth corrupted lungs.
“We can’t o’done anything about this” wailed a chourous of Negro, Asian, Muslim worshiping Innuit and Wild Pig Hunters from Papu New Guinea, who appear to make up most of the present cabinet.
” Even though we are the most ancient established democratic government on the planet, we have no control of the vast wealth of gas or oil around our shores, inclucing billions of tons of coal and gas and oil that could be fracked within months of the go ahead. You see, it’an unregulated market, which we allowed the City Boys to rip the country to shreds with in exchange for a small fee. If you are not happy, you must be a filthy communist “! Said “Three Hoof’s Good.”
“For now, collect you stuff from the food bank. I put some extra green hair dye in there and some pink paint should you wish to paint a boat and hold up traffic on your way to the pop up methodone clinic.”
” All you have to do is sign that you are a BLM supporter, that you Think George FLyod was a fine fellow an you think his wife should have been handed £100 MIllion from the state coffers, even before there was a trial date agreed.
The science is just convenient cover and the scientists go where the money is to fund research. The government/elitists provide the money and get the answers they want.
The rest is just political but sadly no mainstream party is prepared to challenge. They are hoping that when it goes tits up they are not left holding the shit biscuit.
One consolation at least in the uk is that the tories are about to be eliminated as a result of their adherence to the green ideology and their cowardice. But sadly the electorate seem to think their saviour is another identikit blairite party who will probably go even further and make things even worse.
Oh Brian, you really are Bad! I await your posts with joy. It’s good to find something to chuckle over to aid breakfast digestion rather than choking with rage as I read the latest news!
However, the serious stuff. YES, to Hinckley and nuclear power, ASAP. But why, oh WHY are we going, begging bowl in hand, to French-owned EDF and to, of all abominations, CHINA, to help finance the £30 billion quid it’s going to cost? Is £30 billion correct, or should there be another nought on the end? If it IS £Thirty Billion, why can’t we finance it ourselves? Yes, ask other nations for technical advice and pay them accordingly if we no longer have the know-how in the UK, but to get them to take actual shares in it? Shares on which the UK will be paying in some way into perpetuity? Deplorable, when we are – at current predictions – going to end up paying more than three times £30 billion for the totally unnecessary HS2. Last estimate I found yesterday of final costs was almost £100 billion and relentlessly rising. No mention has been made of abandoning this useless, vanity, country-side and farm-land wrecking project, wanted only by the very few rich enough to pay what travel on it will cost. I am appalled at the level of the so-called “hustings” for PM. No pressing for policies on illegal entry into the UK via the rubber boats, no questions as far as I know as to whether to continue with HS2, no meaningful mention of the idiotic net zero. Our nation truly is in terrible times.
Many thanks for providing the reference. I think your comments at the end are a true summary of the situation, perhaps summed up with the mantra “the science is settled”. It still leaves us with the bigger question – what can we do about it?
This morning I saw two brief clips on Instagram from GB News. One was about the climate protesters damaging petrol stations and hiding in holes in the ground, with the police concerned about their safety rather than the law breaking. The second was Mark Steyn about Boris and buying new kettles. He pointed out that Boris’s belief in eco twaddle had damaged the country and brought his reign to an end. It sums up what you say and I cannot see the new PM doing anything about it. The belief that we are controlling the climate is just insanity and it cannot have a good ending.
On the theme of correlation, the same bad science is entering the vaccine death debate. It is claimed that there is a correlation between vaccine rollouts and increasing deaths. This is not proof of the claim. There are other factors that can contribute and they are being ignored. This is not how we advance our understanding. If the vaccines are causing deaths then the problem was with the failed trials before approval and the failure of regulators and governments to protect us. There isn’t much we can do once poison has been injected into people. GB News is campaigning for compensation but they never say where the money is coming from.
I had not seen the reference you gave and is was only written in 2019. What surprised me was the low number of data points in the ice core records. There are only around 360 in Table 1 for a period of 430,000 years. How is it possible for the ice core graphs to show such detailed variation with a small number of data points? Have I missed something?
I haven’t paid much attention to the ice core analysis but I have wondered about the accuracy. I have no idea how they determine the year they are looking at and I also understand that the trapped air migrates in the cores.
What the authors appear to be doing is to use machine learning to generate missing data. How can this make sense? It reminds of what Tony Heller has pointed out about the modern temperature record, which is that many temperatures are generated from models and then claimed to be measured. He has also been looking at temperature records with the analysis tool on his website and he has shown that temperatures in England in 1976 were higher for longer than they have been this year. The Met Office averages the temperatures and the details vanish and so it claims this year is the hottest on record. It is meaningless analysis.
I always have to object when I read that heat is trapped. By definition it is not possible. I might accept that thermal energy is trapped but this is only possible in nature if there are no temperature differences, and if that happens the universe will be dead. Even our attempts to trap thermal energy in a thermos flask only slow the heat loss down.
The only way, in my view, to determine whether the earth is warming or cooling is to calculate the total thermal energy of the earth’s system and look for changes. There is a vast difference in the thermal capacity of air and water and most of the energy is in the water and land masses and temperature is not the same as thermal energy. Put your hand in water and air at 100c and you will find out why, and why it is wrong to look only at air temperatures.
When you read the last sentence in the report on ice cores it shows that the authors don’t understand thermodynamics. They talk about water vapour heating the atmosphere as if this is new thermal energy that appears. Water vapour is a cooling mechanism. It needs thermal energy from the surface to cause the evaporation which cools the surface and takes the heat into the atmosphere. When the water vapour condenses it then escapes into space. It cannot return to heat the surface again because of the laws of thermodynamics.