The answer to that question is: YES and NO. And this makes the discussions on internet to go on perpetual. All views lack coverage and depth, however, we have included a much broader view in our research. Our research shows that the facts are quite surprising and that both sides are right and wrong. Our discoveries are groundbreaking: the atmosphere in its totality appears to be in equilibrium. And we can explain why glaciations wax and wane, and why CO2 is both a proxy and a cause.
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Global Climate Change Map – Ground Based
What is Climate?
What constitutes “climate”? Traditionally, temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall, and sunny hours give a good idea of what defines “climate”. When the patterns of these five variables permanently change on a significant scale, we could speak of a changing climate. Is this ever properly analyzed on a global scale? Hardly. This is because earth’s climate is an amazingly complex system and is still far beyond the reach of human comprehension.
So, we ask: Is our climate really changing? And if that is so, why could it be changing?
Our Own Research, as compared to Copy-Paste Beliefs
It is widely believed, particularly in climate change discussions, that we can control the climate, as we do in our cars, by reducing CO2 emissions. But a glimpse at the historical data shows us that temperatures changed constantly over time. Who or what made this CO2 a few hundred thousand years ago? Or is CO2 the effect and not the cause – because that would explain the issue much better than vice versa.
Is our climate changing? If that is the case, what is the probable cause? To see what is really going on, let us determine this by ourselves. But that requires a lot of work. Few people are willing to do that gratuitously.
Northern Versus Southern Hemisphere – Ground Level
The Relation Between CO2 and Climate Change
The correlation between CO2 and temperature is obvious. Whether we look at recent records, or at ice core data, the correlation is always present.
Is the simple conclusion that CO2 is responsible for climbing temperatures true? Is it really THAT simple? The relationship is indeed so obvious that only a fool dares to say that CO2 is not responsible for climate change – or so it seems.
Some cases of cause and effect are simple and obvious: Does asbestos cause cancer, or does cancer cause asbestos? Because asbestos preceded cancer, it is the most probable cause.
This form of straightforward thinking is popular and often true, however, in more complicated systems like climate change, it can also lead to oversimplifying causes, and this leads to a form of self-falsification without the authors themselves being aware of it. It is then easy to kick in the door for agitators of all sorts – deniers, debunkers, for conspiracists. And so the debate becomes perpetual. The reason? Lack of insight, lack of data, lack of interest in the real causes, biased positions, and so on.
Does CO2 cause climate change or does climate change cause a change in CO2 levels? The solution is in the nuances and the willingness to research deep enough.
The Elephant in the Room: CO2 Lags Behind
If we analyze the data by zooming in, we see that CO2 lags behind on the temperature data. Is this well known? The climate scientists know about it but they stubbornly ignore this problem. It is the elephant in the room.
Earth’s climate system is a feedback system. There are causes and there are effects. We must distinguish between these two to understand how such complicated mechanisms work.
When the alleged cause is lagging behind we can easily understand it is nothing more than an effect that is caused by something else. This “something else” however might be unknown to us.
We could concoct some unimaginably complicated system to fake CO2 as being the cause. But why would we create an incorrect cause-and-effect feedback system?
To become aware of the fact that CO2 is lagging behind temperature you must zoom in on the data.
It is crucial to grasp that, if you want to know which is causing what, you need many detailed data to show where the reversals are, where the direction changes, as in the graph shown below. The lag between input and output is what we refer as a form of hysteresis.
In the graph below, there is not one single example where CO2 is not behind on changes in temperature. The odds for that correlation to be coincidental is a whopping 1 to 4.3 billion. It is therefore, very unlikely that CO2 is responsible for climate change in the ice core data – hence CO2 is the EFFECT and it correlates with changing temperatures. We must add explicitly this: ONLY IN THE ICE CORE DATA.
Why is this nuance important? Because what climate skeptics always do, is to take the ice core data, and compare it with the temperature data over the last few hundred years or so. It appears you cannot compare these data simply just like that. We have discovered that CO2 is like a coin that has two sides. So, it becomes a little bit more complicated.
Temperature Leads CO2 by an Average of About 1,000 Years
Reasons Why Temperatures Increase in Urbanized Zones
About 85% of the measuring stations are on land, while land covers only about 33% of the planet. It is not difficult to see that, when we use this data, we introduce major errors when we try to calculate an average global temperature.
About 50% of the stations that are used to measure global temperature are situated at airports. Many of these stations are incorrectly located, meaning that they collect heat from the exhaust of airplanes or from the tarmac runway. Since the air traffic has increased, the heat collection by the sensors from the jet exhausts increases as well. The short and intense heat bursts of the engines accumulate to result in serious errors of many temperature measurements.
Most other stations are in expanding urbanized areas. The measurements are affected by growing traffic and growing heat radiation of buildings over the last decades. The explosive growth of air conditioners on buildings add an enormous heat source to cities and therefore influence the measurements of urban-situated weather stations.
The measurements from some of the stations in large urbanized areas must be corrected by other nearby remote stations before they can be used to present a global warming map. And even if we do this, we still present only the temperatures at ground level. We have no idea what happens higher up in the atmosphere, and deeper down in the oceans.
How Accurate Are the Temperature Measurements?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the number of weather stations dropped dramatically from about 12,000 in 1990 to about 6,000 stations in 1995. In the same period, the alleged global temperature started to rise dramatically.
- Cause: the “cold” stations were gone from the statistics. Mainly the warm urbanized stations remained.
- Effect: the statistics started to present a distorted picture of the global temperatures.
On the other hand, if these “cold” former Soviet stations would all show warming temperatures, than it would add a significant proportion of warming data to the existent data. But because this data is no longer available we turned to another method of measuring globally, and we discovered something surprising.
Recently, a far better way of collecting data has come into use: Remote Sensing Systems, or shortly RSS. Satellites gather data over large areas by using microwave sensors. This data is much more reliable and much easier to process than the old-fashioned weather stations that climate models are still based on.
It is important to note that this system successfully monitored the temperatures of the whole atmosphere, but it suddenly stopped to gather data in 2015, after budget cuts by NASA. RSS, as a more reliable tool to observe the climatic system, did NOT support the agenda of climate change driven by CO2 and that is something to think about …
A Temperature Scan of the Whole Atmosphere
RSS Confirms Warming of the Lower Atmosphere
The RSS data shows dramatic results and confirms our data of the ground stations in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. The low atmosphere is warming up, and the reason seems to be very obvious. CO2 is much denser than the other two main elements, N2 and O2, in what we call “air”, and so it sticks to the ground level. And because CO2 has increased dramatically due to human activity, and because it has the property to block back radiation at night, the conclusions are obvious.
Human activity is the cause of temperature change at ground level. There is no way to get around this conclusion. However, there is more to this discussion than meets the eye. For example, it is only true on the short term and at ground level. So, if humans keep emitting CO2 at high rates, it is true on the short term at ground level.
However, if one would look at specifically temperature changes of our oceans over the last few decades one would discover that here also CO2 follows the temperature changes of the oceans. Here, CO2 lags as well, and that is because the oceans store massive amounts of CO2, and emit CO2 when they slightly warm up, and absorb CO2 when they cool down a fraction.
RSS Results Over the Last Two Decades
Warming + Cooling = Equilibrium
Why is the Atmosphere as a Whole in Equilibrium?
Over the last two decades, the atmosphere as a whole is in equilibrium. The lower atmosphere warms up, while the higher atmosphere cools down.
This relatively simple formula expresses this process in a nutshell:
ΔTall = ΔTtropo × Mtropo – ΔTstrato × Mstrato = 0
Indeed, the greenhouse gases partially trap the collected warmth in the troposphere, but because the stratosphere receives less back radiation through the CO2 blockade, it cools down very rapidly. The sum of both remains the same.
The higher stratosphere then becomes affected, due to the CO2 blanket, by the much slower convection and mixing processes in the atmosphere. Large amounts of emitted CO2 cause a sort of “flash heating” in the lower atmosphere. But this heat will never be entrapped for very long due to convection and mixing. When we look at the short-term aspects, it causes sudden melting of Arctic and Antarctic regions. In the longer term, it causes periods of melting and periods of extreme freezing – a less stable climate with more extremes indeed.
Radiation is Quicker Than Convection
Radiation works much faster than convection and mixing, and that is why we witness an alleged warming of the atmosphere when lots of CO2 is emitted. You can compare it with a reflector heater versus a convector heater. The reflector heater “transmits” its energy much faster than a convector heater.
However, because the higher atmosphere, the stratosphere, cools equally down, global warming at ground level is not a simple steady process that can be tracked back to CO2 alone. Convection and mixing between the warmed up troposphere and cooled down stratopshere interferes in this process. This is why there are two confused, fanatical camps of proponents and opponents of anthropogenic climate change. They are both right and both wrong. The key is in both their viewpoints.
But because global warming has become an emotional topic, reason does not seem to work anymore. Both camps refuse to even ponder a split second at other ideas than their own.
It is crucial to understand our concept of equilibrium to fully understand the processes in the atmosphere. Eventually, the strongly cooled stratosphere will receive what it is entitled to, although it might take some time.
That is why both sides are right and wrong. The truth is in the nuances present in both viewpoints.
Is There a Cold Wave Coming?
And of course, if our civilization emits high amounts of CO2, that would then cause what we have called “flash heating”, and that is what we see today. But this flash heat will remain only for a short while in the lower atmosphere if we lower our CO2 output radically.
A massive cold blanket will fall on us and cause a lot of troubles, like crop losses and frozen ports if we stop to emit CO2 without a sensible phasing out policy. And because radical CO2 reduction seems to be one of the main goals of all governments, there is a massive cooling wave coming. Don’t throw away your warm coat too soon!
The Ultimate Key to Many Questions
What Caused the Large Temperature Changes?
The biggest remaining question is: what caused the very large long-term temperature swings of the last glaciations?
- Sunspots? No.
- El Niño and El Niña? No.
- Bretagnon oscillations? No.
- PDO? No.
- Hallstatt cycles? No.
- Earth Crust Deformations? Yes!
Earth Crust Shifts are rejected and even ridiculed by geologists, while they offer the only rational explanation for the very large long-term temperature swings around the “setpoint”. We have gathered an incredible amount of data and are sure that crustal deformations are the only explanation for what science has called “glaciation cycles”.
Crustal deformation are ultimately caused by expansion of our planet and this also caused gravity to increase over time. Our data suggests that geologists are still living in the 19th century when it comes to major Earth changes. Pangaea is a fact, however, it covered the whole planet…when it was smaller in diameter. Increasing gravity also caused the major extinctions of life on earth, like that of the dinosaurs. You can find profound research on this topic on our website.
What happens with ice core samples considering the assumption that the crust was fixed? The interpretations will lead to conclusions of very large temperature swings, which in fact never took place. Shifts in climatic zones, which are not validated as such, lead automatically to the idea that the Earth was in a series of ice ages, while there is never any mechanism that was found to have caused such frigid events.
On the question, does CO2 causes climate changes? is the answer: they are both right and wrong at the same time. One must look at this issue from a broader, higher perspective to understand what is going on. Only then you can see that both perspectives contain parts of a much bigger picture, and that both sides have something useful to say.
It is time to gradually phase out the fossil fuel era, over a slow course of about 50 years.
© 2015- by Mario Buildreps et al.
https://mariobuildreps.com
Proofreading and editing: J.B.
54 Responses
Would love to see an update on this article since we have hit such hit peaks in Carbon measurements of 415 ppm. This multi million dollar industry seems to be based on measuring the impacts and carbon, taxes and credits, Yet happy to let sinks such as forests to disappear. Millions spent on models where we only know a fraction of how it all works and the smallest change can change the predictions. Add in the Sun, Earth, Cosmic Rays, Clouds, Deforestation, Deep Ocean time to heat and cool, historical moving land mass and moving Ocean currents etc. the calculations are endless. I agree we are now reaching a point where making the weather more extreme and changing its course, but in reality will we ever actually reduce the carbon output enough to change this, what about other things mined like fertilizer and peat? As the world population Grows we have More people, more cattle, more bacteria, more bugs more of everything, and yes they will eat up more carbon, but also create more… .. . A world on Carbon steroids our seesaw will only get worse. Not really Global warming, more like the creation of localized Climate Extremes.
Over the course of the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, the climate has changed a lot. This is true. But the rapid warming we’re seeing now can’t be explained by natural cycles of warming and cooling. The kind of changes that would normally happen over hundreds of thousands of years are happening in decades.
That is true, and I hope if you read the article well enough you will notice that we partially agree with the climate alarmists. However, the stratosphere stored so much coldness over the last decades, that cutting CO2 emissions in a short time might be a very bad idea, because the atmosphere will level out these differences in a very short time.
Professor William Happer, PhD at Princeton, developed the CO2 lasers on observatories to create a guide star to allow rapid adjustments in focus depending upon the atmosphere.
Dr. Happer claims the Earth is in a CO2 drought, and his video is on YouTube in “Conversations That Matter’. Dr. Happer explains why CO2 is not the driver for climate change, and he explains how CO2 has a natural limit to its warming effect. The Ice Age we have been in for the past 2.5 million years is not Earth’s typical climate. The Earth has usually been much warmer, with higher levels of CO2. Note the NASA satellite study and look up the ‘Greening of the Earth’. In the past 30 years, the Earth has dramatically greened due to increase CO2 levels. It appears the Earth has been getting colder and colder, since the lows for each glaciation cycle are lower, and the highs of the interglacial warming periods are also lower. Some scientists have said that carbonaceous plankton and shellfish have been sequestering carbon and removing CO2 from the atmosphere over millions of years accounting for the drop in CO2 from pre-Ice Age levels.
“The correlation between CO2 and temperature is obvious.”
If you go back for the past 500 million years, the correlation between temperature and CO2 disappears. But there is no doubt that most CO2 is stored in the world ocean, and when temperatures rise, atmospheric CO2 naturally rises. (not to mention volcanic emissions)
There’s an analogy that I use to describe CO2 entering the atmosphere from the oceans. I tell people to open two cans of soda and place one on the counter at room temperature, and to put the other in the refrigerator and see which one goes flat first. Most people understand this as soon as I tell them.
Hi Alan, that is indeed a great way to explain people what happens when the oceans cool down or warm up!
Cheers! Mario.
I really appreciate this post. I have been looking everywhere for this! Thank goodness I found it on Bing. You’ve made my day! Thx again.
Hi Mario,
A very recent study shows the relation between increasing cosmic rays (because of less activity of the sun), lower cloud cover and increasing temperatures.
It shows that any increase in temperatures was because of this increase of the lower cloud cover.
http://climatescience.blogspot.com/2019/07/global-warming-controlled-by-clouds-new.html
Thanks for posting the link, Kenneth. Clouds are much more a powerful greenhouse “gas” than CO2 or Methane. The whole mechanism how the earth keeps its temperature relatively stable at ground level is insanely more complex than science currently can understand.
My pleasure.
This is also a nice watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMTPF1blpQ
Great work on the Youtube videos.
Currently I am studying in more detail the research of Ned Nikolov and his research points out that CO2 has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect. Instead there is an enhancement to the surface radiation by the sun, caused by adiabatic gas compression of the total atmosphere.
It appears that CO2 really does not have anything to do with temperatures.
His research has been peer reviewed and has already been accepted in the scientific community.
Apparently very recently another researcher came to the same conclusions by using air balloons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfRBr7PEawY
Their general conclusion: the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium.
That seems to explain your result that shows that the temperature of the total atmosphere is in balance.
Here is an interesting interview with these same scientific researchers in which they explain their findings in easy words and also talk about what is happening inside the scientific community.
https://gemmaodoherty.com/videos/
click playlist and scroll to 6-9-2019
They are still looking for an answer to explain the ice ages.
[11:49]
Thank for posting the links to the research about thermodynamic equilibrium, Kenneth. The facts are in the data similar as we have discovered.
My pleasure. However, the answer to the question if climate change is caused by CO2 is NO.
As the research by Ronan and Michael Connolly show, CO2 absorpts heat but almost instantly releases this heat again, so there is no trapping of heat by CO2 what so ever.
Thermodynamic equilibrium is all well & good but we humans do not live up there where the air is cool. we live down here where the air is getting hotter & hotter and all signs point to it getting too hot for human life. Science & scientists all have their theories and many conflict. It’s nice that many of the researchers want to take the data and twist it in the direction that fits their belief but all that really matters is the effect of climate change on human life. Therein lies the problem. All the banter about causes etc. makes little sense. We are NOT “saving the planet”, the correct verbiage is we need to be finding a way to save human life. The planet will possibly do a lot better with humans gone, and we are well on our way!!
It is important to know there is equilibrium, because it means that if humans stop to emit CO2, the balance will be restored within a few years. That is why it is important to work to that goal.
I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was
great. I do not know who you are but definitely you are going to be a famous blogger if you are not already 😉 Cheers!
And as another addition this brings me back to the research about global brightening and contrails that I mentioned earlier.
It showed that the composition of the radiation from the sun changes slightly because of the ice crystals in the contrails.
Even if this is only a slight change, this could have a certain effect on the behavior of clouds. This is pointed out in their research as well. And this possibly is causing some changes in weather pattern already.
That to me is one of the things that is noticeable in the weather in the last years. Things like changes in the jet stream, more precipitation in areas where it is normally much dryer and vice versa. Warmer temperatures in areas where it is normally colder and vice versa. Stronger and more sudden rainfalls. These are some of the things that I noticed when I watch the news.
In other words, a slight disturbance in the natural formation of clouds and the effects of this on the distribution of temperature and precipitation. However, it is possibly impossible to prove that it is indeed the contrails that are causing all this.
We could try to put water filters on all airplanes overnight and see what difference it would make.
Some short movies that explain the technology that is in swift development and will probably be ready in 10-20 years from now. It is mostly a matter of finding a cost-effective solution.
This is real and most probably not a smart thing to do even if it seems to be an efficient solar power solution.
https://singularityhub.com/2018/12/31/why-the-future-of-solar-power-is-from-space/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtNwYweL6hY&feature=youtu.be
https://youtu.be/eBCbdThIJNE
My apology for bringing up the topic of solar energy from space.
I guess it will never be a feasible option and just like the CO2 climate change hoax this seems to be another hoax to support the idea that solar panels and windmills can be economically viable compared to fossil fuels. They are not. This is because they are not scalable and far less efficient than fossil fuels. You would need huge amounts of land and huge amounts of windmills or solar panels to get the same amount of power that you would get with for instance a coal power plant. There is a good reason why renewable energy is only such a small percent of worldwide’s power supply.
I know I sound like a proponent of the big oil companies now, but please look into the feasibility of these techniques and you will see it is nonsense and can only exist with funding.
So please don’t worry about solar energy from space causing problems on earth. Again, sorry to bring this up.
As an addition to my latest post. If this turns out to be correct, we will learn that earth’s climate depends mostly on the radiation from the sun and the rest of the universe and this is delicate balance.
Currently there are a lot of experiments going on in solar energy from space. Please just look it up if you are not familiar with this subject yet. This will cause artificial changes in this delicate balance and will probably cause problems. The effect of that will be far greater than human CO2 emmissions.
Hi Mario,
I still am not convinced by your explanation that you give about your discovery that the total atmosphere is in balance. I think this is potentially another great discovery, but in my opinion your current interpretation of cause and effect for this is not correct.
Can you please take into consideration an alternative explanation for this? I would like to recommend to just assume for once that CO2 does not have any influence in this.
You believe in the earth as a living organism and in that way you are probably inspired by James Lovelock. This researcher did recently admit that he was wrong about the Gaia hypothesis. Just as he was wrong on a lot of other things.
What I would like to propose is to state that the universe is a living system where everything is interdependent and interconnected. The earth is a part of it and is dependent from the sun and the rest of the universe.
So your explanation of the balancing atmosphere is that humans warmed up the stratosphere because of CO2 and this caused flash heating. As a reaction to this you say that the earth decided to cool down the troposphere to keep the total atmosphere in balance. And that radiation acts quicker than convection and mixing and that we can expect the lower stratosphere to cool down at some point. Central in your view is that the earth is a living being that can make decisions on her own.
Here is my alternative explanation that does not see the earth as an isolated system but as a part of a greater whole.
Radiation from the sun reaches the earth and when it hits the atmosphere the radiation converts to light. When the radiation hits the earth’s surface this radiation converts to heat. Part of the radiation is reflected back into space and because heat moves from hot to cold, part of the heat moves back into the upper atmosphere. Another part stays in the lower atmosphere.
The most important factor that controls how much heat goes back into the upper atmosphere is clouds. Clouds are formed by a mix of water vapor and cosmic rays. Svensmark did a lot of research into this.
When solar activity is low, more cosmic rays reach the earth’s atmosphere and more clouds are formed. Having a net effect of keeping the warm air in the lower atmosphere. And as a result there will be cooling of the upper atmosphere.
As soon as that the activity of the sun increases again, the cosmic rays decrease, there will be less clouds and because of that warm air from the lower atmosphere will move more into the upper atmosphere.
If I am right on this, there is indeed a perfect balancing mechanism that keeps the temperature on the earth in balance. But it is not only the earth that is creating this effect. It’s the total system of the earth, the sun and the rest of the universe.
If this is indeed how it works, you made another huge discovery.
I see I mixed up the stratosphere and the troposphere in this post.
Maybe I should correct this before you approve this post, otherwise people will get confused.
Here is some information about Svensmark’s hypothesis.
His research is not completed yet and there are questions to be answered.
Possibly your discovery of the temperature of the atmosphere being in balance could help these guys a lot.
I bet they would be interested to hear from you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU1qg8HceGI
Hi Mario. I have a skeptical question. In your analysis what percentage of CO2 of the current level of around 400 ppm do you think is the result of human emmissions?
I know that most sources on the internet state that this is only 3%, but this appears to be wrong.
That’s a tough question. I solely depend on other sources to answer that question. I see that different sources produce different data, so there’s a lot of controversy in the data itself, let alone the interpretations. Sources that are suspected to serve a political agenda probably show incorrect data. The data from the University of Exeter seems to be reliable enough, because it’s a small University outside the circles of all the climate nonsense. It’s unlikely they have a false agenda.
According to this data are CO2 levels risen with 13 ppm over the last 5 years, so that’s 2.6 ppm per year on average. The annual fluctuations of the CO2 levels are around 8.5 ppm. That would make the human part to be around 30% of the total CO2 production cycle. You can safely assume that the human part is also 30% of the current 410 ppm, which would make the human share around 123 ppm that is currently present in the atmosphere.
It is a simple truth that human produced CO2 will cause a lot of troubles in the coming decades. Denying that is caused by ignorance and short-sightedness. The endless discussion about CO2 and dragging the ice ages on the scene is still possible because no one has even discovered what we have discovered, that ice ages were caused by crustal deformations. You MUST separate in all discussions the ancient temperatures and CO2 levels of what humans are doing today, pumping CO2 in the atmosphere.
Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for.
I think you are making a small mistake. CO2 levels did rise from 280 to 410 in the last 150 years.
So it would be 30% of the difference between these 2 numbers: 39 ppm
And 91 ppm would be the natural amount.
This leaves me with one more question at the moment.
Thanks to your wonderful discoveries we know there are 4 causes of global warming:
1. human emissions
2. the activity of the sun
3. the rebound effect
4. global brightening by contrails (still to be proven / accepted)
If we go back before the start of the industrial revolution, what happened to the global temperatures back then?
If this can be compared to the rate of increasing temperatures that we currently have, we can make a conclusion about how much the human emissions and contrails are contributing to the warming.
The weight of each cause is not clear yet in my opinion.
The curve is not lineair, it is progressive (I do not understand the calculation you propose above, please explain). The increase went probably slow 150 years ago, and during the global industrialization, the CO2 emissions increased. I would say that between 280 and 290 is a natural CO2 level (410-410*30% = 287), that is when everything is in balance. The 2.6 ppm per year on average is over the last 5 years. How did they measure CO2 150 years ago compared to the measurements of today? I don’t know if you can simply make connections between them and perform conclusive calculations.
Increasing activity of the sun causes sea temperatures to rise, and rising sea temperatures causes release of CO2. Decreasing activity of the sun causes the sea temperatures to drop and cause absorption of CO2. This is a balanced process and I think this runs in harmony with the Hallstatt cycles every 2,000-2,500 years.
Yes, the rebound effect plays a role in this large game. The recuperation process of the biosphere still takes some few thousand years to become finally balanced. The only main factor that is then left (outside human activity) is solar activity. The sun is the main cause of major fluctuations in our climate, and that is easy to understand for all.
Contrails reflect sunlight, but they also trap heat. Take for example the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010, it caused air traffic shutdown on one of the most dense air traffic routes. There are people who say that less air traffic caused temperatures to drop a bit. But it can also argued that the volcanic ash cloud caused this temperature drop. I would say it was the volcano, because of its massive scale compared to the air traffic. Or maybe it was a mix of these two. You have to keep all options (all variables) open, and when you are impatient of nature this is a difficult thing to deal with.
What makes things so difficult to discuss is that nature (read; solar activity) also causes extreme high and low CO2 levels. This makes the discussion so difficult on forums where people want to be right on dualistic point of views on the short term.
Yes it is not an easy subject. That’s why there is so much controversy and disagreement I guess, even among some very intelligent people.
About the contrails, you are talking about trapping heat and reflecting sunlight. But that is not the effect that I am talking about.
What has been discovered with global brightening is that the ice particles in contrails let trough another part of the sunlight (the diffuse part), which causes the sun to shine in an artificial way so to speak. This can be regarded as accidental geo-engineering and this is yet another process that causes warming. It is not the same as the greenhouse effect.
For the explanation on what calculation I proposed I will make another post later. It was about looking at the rate at which the global temperature increased before the industrial revolution, which would leave out most of the human causes I assume. Leaving you with the temperature increase of the rebound effect and the activity of the sun.
I found this thermometer measurements from England dating back to 1659.
It shows the rate at which the temperatures in England increased until now.
I assume this is the rate of temperature increase that is caused by the rebound effect. Not sure if it enough to look only at the temperatures in England though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFHX526NPbE&t=624s
The graph can be found at 10:26 minutes.
Thank you for posting this, Kenneth. Interesting, but this is only one station. And it is tricky to discuss this topic publicly with such persuasion as the guy in the video does. Fig. 1 shows the result of over hundred stations. The Northern hemisphere is certainly warming, and that is the trend that we see in the ice age graph, indeed the rebound effect that still goes on.
It would be interesting to know the location of this station and how it possibly could have been affected by urbanization and the disappearance of forests in England over the last centuries. Urbanization and deforestation is really a big thing for local stations.
Hi Mario, yes that is a good question. I don’t know.
The guy in the video does not know everything just like anybody else and I don’t necessarily agree on everything.
He is wrong on the last glaciation cycles for instance.
But overall, to me, there seems to be a lot of truth in his story.
Here is another question. When I look at fig.5 from this article I can see that the CO2 levels did never exceed the 300 ppm until now.
Is this because the last crustal deformation was the largest one and the rebound effect is the largest here and because of that there is also a higher amount of CO2 that is released from the oceans? This could explain the level of 400 ppm maybe?
Or is this because of another natural phenomenon that has not been described yet?
The flash heating is not logical to me as first it is showed that CO2 lags temperature, and at the same time it is said that temperatures can rise temporarily because of the CO2 that humans put in the atmosphere. Can you please explain in more detail what makes the man-made CO2 different from the CO2 that is released from the oceans because of the rebound effect?
If the CO2 that is released by the ocean does not cause temperatures to rise, why would man-made CO2 do this?
At the moment this does not yet make any sense to me.
I think I understand your confusion. CO2 goes both ways:
1) In a natural environment (the 450ky ice records) lags CO2 on temperature changes mainly because ocean temperatures vary. The delayed release or absorption is caused by the upheaval of the biosphere due to crustal deformations.
2) Man-made CO2 causes flash heating of the lower atmosphere.
These two things have in fact nothing to do with each other, but when you assemble them as to be one cause/effect cycle you get definitely confused. We are talking about TWO different things here.
Be cautious comparing todays ppm CO2 levels with the ice record levels. I would regard these studies comparative and not directly absolute. What I mean with that is the following. If there were periods of a few centuries, some few hundred thousand years ago, where CO2 levels rocketed above 1000 ppm they were definitely recorded in the ice layers shortly after. But after many thousand years these layers have become compressed, and became thinner, and so the extreme levels could easily “leak” into other layers.
I understand that these are 2 different processes, but I don’t yet understand completely how the 2 processes work separately from each other.
The explanation of the leaked CO2 records seems plausible. But couldn’t it be that the CO2 level is currently rising because of another natural process that has a much longer time span?
You most probably have seen this graph before:
https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/0c2f60c1-e6de-489f-ae3e-d08b73db7f70/Slide4-0001.JPG/:/rs=w:1280
If I look at the part in which the former poles existed, the curve shows a straight line until now. You would expect this curve to go up or down at some point.
Is the rise in the CO2 level to currently around 400 ppm really caused by the sun cycles and the rebound effect only?
Or could it also be a possibility that this is the result of yet another natural process? And that we are currently in a situation similar to what the graph shows at 280 million years ago.
In the last 600 million years the level of CO2 dropped twice to a low level as we currently have.
The first time was around 280 million years when vascular plants came into existence. The second time was around 150 million years ago when flowering plants came into existence. The graph at page 14 in this presentation shows this:
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/2017/80618wrightstone/ndx_wrightstone.pdf
Plants seem to have had a huge role in changing the composition of the atmosphere.
If the introduction of plants that can perform photosynthesis had such a big impact on the CO2 levels, could the removal of plants have the reverse effect? Are there studies that show how much CO2 levels are expected to rise because of man-made plant destruction?
In addition to my last reply here are some more thoughts on the role of plants.
If we would look what would happen when we just eliminate all plants from our planet, there would not be any photosynthesis and the level of CO2 would probably rise to what is was before plants started to play a role in the composition of the atmosphere.
The current situation is that humans remove part of the vegetation of the planet, which releases CO2 in the atmosphere and lowers the ability to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. But there could be more to it.
It could also be that the rate of photosynthesis changes because of human actions. It could be that this rate currently decreases because of global brightening or dimming. If that is the case this could possibly be another explanation for the increase of CO2 to about 400 ppm. Who knows.
The same presentation about global dimming and global brightening hints that these effects could affect photosynthesis and plant growth (see page 23, 25 and 26): https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2015/files/2015/12/Wild-slides.pdf
According to slide 26 carbon uptake increases during global dimming. So during global brightening the carbon uptake decreases.
What would happen if all forests on our planet would burn?
Will the released CO2 cause a worldwide rise in temperatures?
Would this be a temporary effect that will be balanced by the earth’s atmosphere in a few decennia? Or would this have a permanent effect?
Put in different way: are humans responsible for short term temporary climate change by destroying forests after all?
On the short term, let say for the next few centuries, the effects are catastrophic, that is to say if these fires continue. CO2 will rise and that will cause flash heating of the troposphere. The earth will become a hostile place for a long time. The Earth’s biosphere needs a few millenniums to rebalance. I’m not sure if current humanity will play a major role in this next game. I think not. New species will appear and new chances will emerge after some 50 to 100 millenniums from now.
Thank you Mario. Let’s hope this scenario will never come true.
In this article you focus on CO2 as the main man-made greenhouse gas. But what about water vapor? CO2 makes up only a small percentage of all the greenhouse gases.
What about clouds and for instance smoke from burning forests?
There are a lot of planes in the air nowadays and these create contrails that can spread out into clouds that seem to whiten the sky. Couldn’t these clouds have a much larger effect than man-made CO2 on flash heating of the lower atmosphere?
Indeed is water vapour a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. But what is often forgotten in these comparisons is that water has to be vapourized before it can become clouds. This process distracts heat from the surface. If there’s little solar energy reaching the surface there’s less vapourized, so there’s less energy extracted from the surface, but that also means less clouds, and because there are less clouds there’s more solar energy reaching the surface. This is a self regulating system that keeps the planet at “set point.”
Contrails from airplanes, that’s a whole other story. A lot of traffic during the day would prevent solar energy to reach the surface, disturbs the natural process. A lot of traffic during the night would prevent back radiation to get back into space. Smoke from burning forests also prevents solar energy to enter the lower region of the troposphere. But these clouds do not blanket the entire planet, neither do contrails. Only CO2 blankets the entire planet and disturbs the natural process of cooling our planet at night. C02 and methane are greenhouse gases, that is simply undeniable. They are no strong greenhouse gases but they blanket the entire atmosphere and that makes them so influential.
Thank you again. That makes sense to me.
I am not yet completely sure if the contrail clouds can be neglected, even if these clouds do not blanket the entire planet.
The self regulating system of natural clouds seems like a delicate balance. Could it be possible that this balance can be disturbed by artificial clouds, even if these artificial clouds are still in the minority? I guess the contrail clouds don’t distract heat from the surface like natural clouds do.
Are you familiar with the Vonnegut climate change theory?
I found some information about it and wonder if this theory is worth a closer look.
http://artificialclouds.com/
Here you can find some more information about the potential impact of contrail clouds.
It appears not to be about the greenhouse gas effect, but the fact that sunlight reaches the earth in a different way due to the ice crystals in the contrail clouds.
https://www.climategate.nl/2015/12/chemtrails-een-alarmistische-onthulling/
The article is written a bit like a joke, but it was meant serious.
The author also links to a presentation about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoGZrwzWHJI&feature=youtu.be (from 11:00)
I watched the entire presentation and this is what I understand from it:
Ice crystals in contrail clouds indeed change the way sunlight reaches the earth’s surface. The diffused sunlight increases and this causes global brightening.
At 8:00 in the presentation you can see 2 graphs that show the difference between the global warming between the northern and the southern hemisphere. This shows that overall the planet gets warmer. This seems like a natural process as you explain with the rebound effect from the last crustal deformation.
In the southern hemisphere however, this warming is a straight upward curve.
At the northern hemisphere, the slope of the curve in the period from 1958-1985 is downward because air pollution from aerosols caused global dimming and this suppressed global warming. By 1985 this pollution from aerosols decreased but air traffic increased. And as explained further on in the presentation, airplanes creates ice crystals that scatter the sunlight more to the earth’s surface. And this causes global brightening.
You can see the effect in the graph for the northern hemisphere. The slope on the right part of the curve is higher than at the southern hemisphere.
So it seems that air traffic is not the main cause of global warming, but at the same time it seems to increase the warming quite a bit. Couldn’t this effect be the same as the flash heating that you got out of the RSS data from the last 20 years?
Interesting information, Kenneth. Thanks. We will look into the data and possible consequences.
You are welcome.
I am curious if you will find something new.
hi,
I comment on this page. There is no need to worry about CO2.
CO2 is an important resource that makes the earth’s atmosphere.
https://etherealmatters.org/article/muon-fusion-create-earths-atmosphere
When the earth expands, a large amount of water and CO2 come out.
Sorry, these page are written in Japanese. Please use google transfer.
http://zao.jp/index.php?blog=12&p=454&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
It rains a lot.
http://zao.jp/index.php?blog=12&p=497&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Did my detailed comment go thru.
Excellent detailed yet concise & easy to read coverage of a very contentious subject Mario, I commend you. This should be published in every newspaper on the globe,
How sad it is that climate alarmism, fed by the green movement, vested interests, governments & gullible media now fuels a shockingly wasteful trillion dollar industry that costs the earth but does nothing to save it.
In the meantime, more pressing problems facing humanity such as poverty & REAL (not co2) pollution are unchecked. (This is made clear in your example re NASA abandoning satellite temperature monitoring technology, not because of funding shortage but because this more accurate system didn’t fit their agenda).
One thing missing in your earth crust causation of glacial periods / climate change is the Younger Dryas period comet /s that thrust the earth back into a deep freeze (when it was just emerging from the last ice age) some 18,000 years ago, causing crust distortion, volcanic upheaval & massive scale melting of the North America & European ice sheets. Once a theory that was laughed at by now almost entirely accepted. Thus regular bombardments of the earth in the past are large contributors to long term climate change patterns.
(And surely sunspot activity the main contributor to short term climate change – eg., the “little ice age”, lasting over 200 years around the 16th century where it was well documented by scientists & astronomers that there was substantial reduction in sun spot activity).
In past periods of cold, humanity & life on earth have suffered. In warming periods, we & life have flourished- so much for “global warming “ harming us….!
Thank you for your comment, Paul. We have done with our small team many months of research to this topic without knowing where it would be heading to. I was as surprised as everyone else. But if you give it a thought it is so obvious and logic that it is astounding to see that we with our small budgets and small team had to come up with these results. This is not the last article on this topic. We will maybe publish a paper on this topic as well. The real problem, pollution of (nano)plastics in our oceans and the whole food chain, does not get the attention it should have. Thanks again for your visit and your support.
My personal feeling about the whole debate has generally always been “I don’t want to poison the air or the water” – who wants to breathe in terrible stuff and kill of our wonderful oceans, lakes and rivers. I personally feel it would be a far less polemical way of talking about our over-consumption of non renewable energy sources. Nobody wants to dirty their own back yard.
Thank you for your comment, Chris. I fully agree with your stance. Pollution is a serious problem. The question however remains whether CO2 causes climate change on the long term; that is highly questionable. Most probably not.