CO2 Sensitivity: Lukewarmers Edging Closer to Zero

Yet another peer-reviewed paper on CO2 climate sensitivity confirms a wider scientific shift towards zero. It follows a growing trend among international researchers in admitting carbon dioxide is NOT a climate driver. Over on WUWT (April 24, 2018) Anthony Watts gives his readers the scoop:

New paper by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry suggests future warming would be a third to nearly half of what the IPCC claims.”

Government ‘experts’ had long insisted CO2 was up at “ten percent” of the so-called greenhouse effect. [1]

But, as Kenneth Richard shows over on notrickzone, there are now no fewer than 75 peer reviewed papers discrediting the entire premise of a CO2-driven radiative greenhouse gas effect (GHE).  Principia Scientific International scientists have two such papers published in mainstream journals, here and here.

Despite the growing evidence, like sheep many folk still blindly believe there MUST be a logarithmic warming effect from carbon dioxide. True believers at WUWT justify this junk science here. It isn’t logarithmic, it isn’t linear either (though many alarmists say it’s linear). The lukewarmers just can’t agree how tiny that logarithmic number should be. Some studies now put the climate sensitivity number as low as 0.02C for a doubling of CO2. In any rational person’s mind we are now surely in the territory of accepting a paradigm shift.

Quite simply, the greenhouse gas theory does NOT stand as a credible explanation of climate change.

Seemingly still unwilling to concede defeat, those who claim CO2 “must” cause some warming – the ‘lukewarmers’ (so-called skeptics of man-made global warming) remain locked into an uncomfortable march towards the position held by Principia Scientific International (‘The Slayers’).

Since 2010  our work has shown carbon dioxide is NOT our climate’s control knob. We say Svante Arrhenius (1896) got it wrong when he calculated:

“if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression”

Sadly, during those lost years the world’s taxpayers have wasted trillions while these ‘scientists’ remained stubbornly wedded to greenhouse gas theory nonsense.

As lead author, Lewis, explains:

The full paper by Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry, 2018: The impact of recent forcing and ocean heat uptake data on estimates of climate sensitivity. Journal of Climate, is located at: https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0667.1

These geniuses still assume a direct monotonic relationship of temperature to CO2. They buy into a gross oversimplification of Earth’s climate sold to the world by NASA’s James Hansen since the 1980’s.

The reader comments on WUWT about the paper must be uncomfortable reading for Anthony Watts, Monckton, Spencer, Lindzen et al. People just aren’t buying their ‘middle of the road’ brand of science any more.

Please give up on this nonsense about CO2’s so-called logarithmic warming impact.

As Joseph E Postma notes:

“And even with logarithmic CO2 absorption, how much heating can 1 in 2500 molecules have on the rest, particularly when energy is equipartitioned among degrees of freedom, and CO2 has more degrees of freedom than O2 and N2, meaning that it will be kinetically COLDER than those gases in any case, while being mixed in with them?  In a gas, it is energy which gets equipartitioned, not temperature.  The kinetic temperature of a particular species in a gas ensemble is proportional to the mean kinetic energy of the gas, divided by the number of degrees of freedom of the particular species.  CO2 absorbs energy from the gas and puts it into additional internal degrees of freedom, and thus should have a lower kinetic temperature than the other atmospheric gas species.  Therefore, perhaps CO2 really is a basic atmospheric coolant.”

Yes, that’s right. If anything, carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in the atmosphere. Those ‘near zero’ lukewarmers are simply as wrong as those government junk science alarmists.

[1] Where did “Carbon dioxide contributes 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the effect” come from? Kiehl and Trenberth (1997) calculate CO2 as about 26{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the “greenhouse” effect (see CO2- An Insignificant Trace Gas? – Part Five.  Going back to Ramanathan and Coakley 1978, they had a wide range for CO2’s contribution to the ‘greenhouse effect’ –  between 9 and 26 percent


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Comments (2)

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    Steve Dembo

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    Ice core data has shown that CO2 follows temperature, CO2 does not lead temperature changes.

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Joseph A Olson

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    “Non Science Nonsense” at CanadaFreePress, April 2010, my reply to Judy Curry and her fake Disney/Discover debate with the hockey stick Mann, and the first use of the term LUKEWARMISTS….for the Thermodynamically impaired fake skeptics.

    Reply

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