RIP: Skeptical Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack Dies – Ripped Gore & declared ‘CO2 is not the villain that it has been portrayed’ – Fmr. Chair of at Earth & Env. Science Dept at U. of Penn – Featured in Climate Hustle 1 & 2
Obituary: Robert F. “Gieg” Giegengack, an emeritus professor of earth and environmental studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, died on June 4 after a brief illness. He was 83. Robert Giegengack – Former chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Giegengack has done field research on six continents, conducted peer-review studies on the geological archives of climate and spent much of his academic career doing field work on the history of climate. Authored 200 peer-reviewed papers. # Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: “It is a sad day to lose such a prominent scientist. My prayers to his family and friends. Bob was in regular contact with me over the years, answering questions, and offering commentary and scientific charts. He was appalled at what climate science had become. He was a true inspiration in academia for his courage and his quest for scientific truth.” # Watch: Clip from ‘Climate Hustle’: Does more CO2 = warmer world? Renowned Ivy League Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack answers CO2 is not the “control knob” of the climate There is a lack of connection between higher levels of CO2 and warming. During the Ice Age, CO2 levels were 10 times higher than they are today. There are many, many factors which impact climate – including volcanoes, wind oscillations, solar activity, ocean cycles, volcanoes, tilt of the Earth’s axis, and land use. CO2 is just one factor, and not the control knob of the climate. University of Pennsylvania geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack has declared, “CO2 is not the villain that it has been portrayed.” Today’s levels of roughly 400 parts per million (PPM) of CO2 are not alarming. In geologic terms, today’s CO2 levels are among the lowest in earth’s history. … University of Pennsylvania Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack noted: “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.” Flashback: Prominent Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack dissents – Laments ‘hubris’ of those who ‘believe that we can ‘control’ climate – Denounces ‘semi-religious campaign’ Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack – Former chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania: Giegengack laments “the enormity of the hubris that leads us to believe that we can ‘control’ climate by controlling anthropogenic emission of CO2.” “If anthropogenic CO2 is contributing to climate warming now under way, nothing we are doing, or contemplating doing, can have any measurable effect on that warming.” Global Warming/Climate Change has evolved into “a semi-religious campaign advanced by well-intended people who feel, deep in their hearts, that they are ‘saving the planet.’” “It beggars the imagination to assert that the natural factors that drove the warming trend from 18,000 years ago to ~300 years ago (with some unexplained temperature reversals) abruptly stopped operating at the end of the Little Ice Age to accommodate our political need to attribute climate variability to human industrial activity.” “Today’s climate is close to the coolest it has been in 540,000,000 years, and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is close to the lowest it has been.” “Climate models are instructive, but they lead to scenarios, not predictions. They can be manipulated to yield desired outputs.” — Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, former chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke out in 2007 against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Gore and others. Giegengack noted “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.” (LINK) “[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa,” Giegengack explained. “It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2,” he added. (LINK) “The driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Al Gore claims, both in his film and in that book. It’s the temperature that, through those 650,000 years, controlled the CO2; not the CO2 that controlled the temperature,” he added. (LINK) In 2014, Giegengack told Climate Depot: “The Earth has experienced very few periods when CO2 was lower than it is today.” # Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, the chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Gore and others. Giegengack does not even consider global warming among the top ten environmental problems. “In terms of [global warming’s] capacity to cause the human species harm, I don’t think it makes it into the top 10,” Giegengack said in an interview in the May/June 2007 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. (LINK) Giegengack also noted “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.” (LINK) “[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa,” Giegengack explained. “It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2,” he added. (LINK) “The driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Al Gore claims, both in his film and in that book. It’s the temperature that, through those 650,000 years, controlled the CO2; not the CO2 that controlled the temperature,” he added. (LINK) “Certain ‘feedback loops’ naturally control the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A warmer temperature drives gases out of solution in the ocean and releases them,” he continued. “[Today, humans] are putting 6.5 billion tons of fossil-fuel carbon into the atmosphere, and only 3.5 billion is staying there, so 3 billion tons is going somewhere else. In the past, when the Earth’s climate rose, CO2 came out of the ocean, the soils, and the permafrost. Today as temperatures rise, excess CO2 is instead going into those and other reservoirs. This reversed flux is very important. Because of this, if we reduced the rate at which we put carbon into the atmosphere, it won’t reduce the concentration in the atmosphere; CO2 is just going to come back out of these reservoirs … If we were to stop manufacturing CO2 tomorrow, we wouldn’t see the effects of that for generations,” Giegengack said.