By Geologist Jonathan DuHamel
Carbon dioxide induced global warming is the major boogeyman of our times. This fear has been adopted by many governments and candidates for political office. It has spawned a call to reduce CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and turn to very unreliable “renewable” energy such as solar and wind generated electricity.
The Greenhouse Hypothesis is based largely upon the work of Svante August Arrhenius, a physicist and chemist, around 1896. He devised a formula purporting to show the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide content and global temperature. The Greenhouse Hypothesis has two major flaws: 1) It completely ignores heat transfer by convection, i.e., weather, and 2) as the new study shows, Arrhenius could not separate the effects of CO2 from those of water vapor. Additionally, the greenhouse plays a very small role in the very complicated drivers of global climate. As the UN IPCC wrote: “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible.” — Final chapter, Third Assessment Report, 2000, IPCC.
The new paper: Challenging the Greenhouse Effect Specification and the Climate Sensitivity of the IPCC by Antero Ollila, Physical Science International Journal 22(2): 19 Jan. 2019
“The main objective of this study is to analyze the GH (greenhouse) contribution effects of different sky conditions and new contribution effects that had not been considered in the earlier studies. Energy fluxes of different sky conditions are needed in the GH effect analysis. Therefore, the Earth’s annual mean energy budget has been updated.
Water vapor dominates (76.4%) the total greenhouse effect whereas CO2’s contribution is minimal (7.3%), and CO2 climate sensitivity is just 0.6°C upon doubling, about half the value used by the IPCC climate models. Clouds’ net effect is 1% based on the empirical observation.” (Read full paper) (note: the paper is very technical and sometimes hard reading)
Note that the paper says a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would produce warming of only 0.6°C. Eliminating our CO2 emissions would have almost no effect on climate.
Bottom line: Replacing fossil fuel generated electricity with solar and wind is a very expensive exercise in futility which will make our electrical grid much less reliable and have no effect on global warming.
For more background, see these previous posts:
The Broken Greenhouse – why CO2 is a minor player in global climate
Evidence that CO2 emissions do not intensify the greenhouse effect
