Key points:
- Ice-core records covering several glacial cycles show temperature typically rising first, with CO2 following hundreds of years later.
- Over hundreds of millions of years, CO2 and temperature have often moved independently or in opposite directions.
- The global mean temperature record is an average of scattered station data, and the roughly 1-degree Celsius rise since 1900 is small next to normal local swings.
- CO2 has diminishing warming effects, while water vapor and clouds dominate Earth's greenhouse effect.
- CO2 is plant food that has contributed to global greening and higher crop yields.
- Energy policy built on net-zero goals has already produced turmoil in Germany, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands.
The chain of inference nobody checks
Every alarming headline about a warming planet begins with a single number: the global mean surface temperature anomaly. According to a 2020 paper published by the CO2 Coalition, it is only one link in a fairly long chain of inference leading to the claimed need for worldwide CO2 cuts. The authors are hardly fringe figures. Richard Lindzen is an MIT professor emeritus, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a lead author of the scientific volume of the UN IPCC's third assessment report. John Christy directs the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and has served as Alabama's state climatologist since 2000. He and Roy Spencer built a satellite temperature data set that earned NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
Their argument is that the public treats the anomaly as a direct instrument reading, when it is really an average of widely scattered station data. Those individual readings fall almost evenly between large positive and negative values. The average is what remains after the swings cancel, the old problem of "small differences of large numbers," as the paper puts it, echoing a warning from the late Stan Grotch of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory three decades ago.
Consider what the number means on the ground. If one station had recorded the entire global increase, its annual range of minus 10 to 40 C in 1900 would now run from minus 9 to 41. People, crops and weather there would struggle to tell the difference. The charts that frighten the public look dramatic only because they omit the range of the original data and stretch the scale. Running averages of 5 to 11 years smooth away the noise, and they can smooth away meaningful features too. Meanwhile, Americans already live with annual swings of about 25 C in Miami and 55 degrees in Denver. Against that, a 1.2-degree rise over 120 years is easily manageable.
Ice cores, saturation and a greening planet
The causation story fares no better in the deep past. A CO2 Coalition video (now taken down) walks through the geological record and reports that over hundreds of millions of years, CO2 and temperature have often moved independently or even in opposite directions. In ice cores spanning the last several glacial cycles, temperature typically rises first and CO2 follows hundreds of years later. That sequence runs opposite to the cause-and-effect story the public is sold.
Physics adds another problem for the climate change alarmists. The video explains that additional CO2 produces diminishing warming because the relevant infrared bands are already saturated, while water vapor and clouds dominate the greenhouse effect. Geologist G. Shanmugam of the University of Texas at Arlington, writing in the Journal of the Geological Society of India in 2023, notes that the climate has changed naturally over the past 600 million years without a single ton of human fossil fuel emissions. Warming and cooling periods came and went long before humans arrived. In his view, the ultimate driver of climate is the Sun - and this is way beyond human control or influence. Using calculations based on the work of Van Wijngaarden and Happer, he projects only a trivial rise in CO2 and temperature by 2100, one that would hinder neither population growth nor economic growth.
Meanwhile, it should be stated from the get-go that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food. It has contributed to global greening and higher crop yields, a benefit almost never mentioned by the same institutions that demand its elimination. Worrying about climate and the end of the world, or attempting to engineer the climate and weather, or controlling CO2 levels for some desired planetary result is foolish.
The real-world costs of the crusade are already visible. Shanmugam points to Germany's retreat to coal after the energy crisis that followed Russia's February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and to Sri Lanka's 2022 bankruptcy, which he attributes to an ESG-driven ban on chemical fertilizers. He also cites the 2023 provincial election victory of the Dutch farmers' party BBB, which opposed a government plan to cut livestock numbers by 30 percent to reduce nitrogen emissions. His conclusion is blunt: resources spent fighting global warming should be redirected toward eliminating global poverty.
A skeptical public is entitled to ask why a policy that would upend energy, farming and food supplies rests on a temperature record its own critics say is misleading, and on a causal story the ice cores appear to contradict. Demanding that evidence be examined is not denial. It is the oldest discipline in science.
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