Global warming is a political cesspool. Is it manmade? What does science say? For decades I was convinced that global warming is mainly caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the burning of fossil fuels; but then I came across the article “‘Human Induced Climate Change’—Fraud of the 21st Century,” https://www.nzcpr.com/human-induced-climate-change-fraud-of-the-21st-century/#more-36157, which made me change my mind. The author’s credentials are impressive:
“Dick Reaney PGCAS(Cant), BDS(Otago), D.Orth.RCS(London), MRACDS(Aust), FICD has studied Climate and Paleoclimatology for 40 years including numerous expeditions to the Antarctic, the North Pole, and the Himalayas. He was awarded a Visiting Scholarship to Scott Polar Research Institute in 2005 by Cambridge University, England.”
Salient Points
(1) “Climate scientists have not exactly been lily white in their recording and reporting of information.”
(2) “Climate science is a weak science. The atmosphere is chaotic and difficult to define with scientific theories.”
(3) “The effects of carbon dioxide [CO2] are speculative and influenced by ideological biases of the various scientists.”
(4) “The true reality is, ‘There is no climate emergency’ there never has been and to say CO2 is a pollutant is fraudulent in the extreme. Pollution kills. … By contrast, carbon dioxide is plant food and the life blood of the plant kingdom. CO2 underpins all life on Earth. All plants require CO2 for photosynthesis and especially photosynthetic micro-organisms, which are the pillars supporting all life on Earth.”
(5) “Carbon is not a gas and certainly not a greenhouse gas, so the carbon footprint claim is just another falsehood picked up be the politicians as a desirable turn of phrase. In fact carbon particulate matter and dust in the atmosphere from volcanos causes global cooling.”
(6) “Carbon dioxide is an extremely minor greenhouse gas, so small, that it’s deemed a trace gas and is measured in parts per million [ppm]. Today levels vary around the World from 390 ppm to 410 ppm, with an average of 400 ppm, representing just 0.04% of total atmospheric gases.”
(7) “The scientists provide false evidence to justify their case. [In] the pie graph … shown to scare the public as to how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere … the major greenhouse gas is not there!!!!!”
(8) “What is the major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere? It happens to be water vapor, yes, 97% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is water vapor.”
(9) “Nature’s contribution to the 400 ppm is 97% (or 388 ppm). Mankind’s contribution is just 3% or 12ppm. That’s all!!” In other words, we cannot do anything about 99.9988% of the atmosphere—even if we cut off all our CO2 emission.
(10) “After hundreds of billions of dollars expenditure, there is still no empirical validated evidence of human-induced global warming and the forecasts have not followed the pre-ordained catastrophist script.”
(11) “The total World temperature from 1850 to 2020 has risen just 0.8°C—an amazingly stable situation. The green lobby want the US Govt. to spend $1.2 trillion to prevent a temperature rise of just 1.5ºC in the next 30 years. How in reality, can that be justified, when there is no proof, that mankind is the problem or even CO2 for that matter?”
(12) “Let’s face the next reality—climate change is unstoppable, yes, absolutely unstoppable by any human intervention.”
(13) “Sea levels have always changed. Continents have shifted their position. … Extinctions of life are normal.”
(14) “But the changes we observe today are less than those of the past.”
(15) “The predictions by climate scientists on future climate change, are based on computer modelling, nothing more, and the data fed into them is often unreliable, has been distorted or collected in prejudiced environments, and there is evidence of outright falsification of data so their results are spurious and highly suspect.”
(16) “Geologic evidence tells us that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have been far higher than they are now. Five hundred million years ago CO2 levels were around 7,000 ppmv [by volume]. … There was no runaway green-house catastrophe or acid oceans, there was no global burn out, disintegration of the Earth, or end of the World scenario; but plants did grow, forests grew and life flourished.”
(17) “Heat is lost into space all the time particularly in the Northern Pacific … a ‘vent hole in the atmosphere’ continually releasing vast amounts of energy into space.”
(18) “Over the last 85 years there has been a slight increase in CO2 levels from 325 ppm to 400 ppm. Why? Because we now know from ice core studies that when the Earth’s temperature rises, a rise in CO2 levels follow, it is not the other way round.”
(19) “If CO2 levels dropped to 200 ppm or below it is predicted that plants will not grow and life on Earth as we know it will perish. Alternatively trials with plants have shown that the optimal CO2 concentration for photosynthesis is around 800 ppm.” We are at around 400 ppm, which is less than the average of the minimum and the best CO2 concentration (i.e., 500 ppm).
(20) There is only “1 CO2 molecule in 3,000 air molecules” (i.e., all gases combined—including nitrogen and oxygen—not just greenhouse gases).
(21) “Methane (CH4) is another greenhouse gas that the politicians and scientists like to bander about. It is produced in Nature and by mankind. … Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that very quickly oxidizes in air to H2O and CO2. Its content in the atmosphere is so small compared with CO2 that it is measured in parts per billion, and once it oxidizes it ceases to be a potent greenhouse gas.”
(22) “Three aspects of the earth’s orbit, each of which have an impact on global climate … the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not circular but elliptical and irregular … the Earth wobbles on its spin axis … [and] shifts in the tilt of the Earth’s spin axis.”
(23) “The sun goes through quiet periods with no sun-spot activity to active periods with multiple sun-spot and magnetic activity.”
(24) “An energetic sun blasts away cosmic radiation, there is less low-level cloud, and the planet reflects less energy back into space and the surface of the Earth warms. … Clouds reflect some 60% of the sun’s radiation. … A change of just 1% in cloudiness of the planet would account for all of the 20th and 21st century warming.”
(25) “Another factor that has a significant effect on our climate is the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt”—ocean currents.
(26) “Another factor affecting the climate is volcanic action. A volcano in one single eruption can spew more CO2 into the atmosphere than man puts up in 20 years. … Some … volcanic eruption[s] … spewed out more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire human race has emitted in all its years on Earth!!!”
(27) “Along with CO2, volcanos spew out huge amounts of volcanic ash and dust which circulate around the globe and block the sun’s energy thus reducing the Earth’s temperature.”
(28) Fraudulent data manipulation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports was exposed; periods of hundreds of years, much warmer and much cooler than nowadays, were blatantly truncated; falsely showing an “unprecedented” recent temperature rise—the “famous hockey stick graph.”
(29) “Some 30 billion dollars has been spent to avert a speculated 0.5°C temperature rise by 2050. So far this has not made a scrap of difference to our climate.”
(30) “One of the key assertions in Global Warming claims is that man has caused CO2 to increase by approx. 35% over the last 150 years. This assertion is nonsense. The huge release of CO2 … is completely unmeasured … [or] unknown.”
(31) “The Earth will go into another ice-age. Some scientists consider we are already going there.”
(32) “There is simply no evidence to link carbon dioxide with these climate events. It is scare mongering at its worst.”
(33) Despite the fact that the Arctic ice cap is admittedly thinning, “Currently the Antarctic ice cap is growing. Over the last 4 years it grew to the tune of 45 billion tons of ice and snow each year. … The Southern Ocean sea ice cover has grown by 9–10% over the last two decades and last winter extended over a 1000 miles out, more than doubling the size of the Antarctic Continent. In so doing massive amounts of solar energy were reflected by the ice back into space, reducing the warming of the Southern Ocean.”
(34) “The IPCC is a dinosaur and like the dinosaurs it needs to become extinct, so that real scientists and policy makers can do a better job.”
(35) “Political reaction to human-induced global warming based on incomplete science can only be extraordinarily costly, will distort energy policy as it’s already done with un-necessary carbon taxes, and will make the poor even poorer.”
(36) “Most of the scientists know they are on a gravy train and they are not about to let it go. For they have distorted data and fabricated results to suit their predictions.”
(37) “We should also be weary of those ‘political saviors’ who unbelievably, do not understand the science of climate change but claim to know how to fix it—by a raft of restrictions and laws reducing our freedoms and way of life—simply they don’t.”
(38) “In the case of the non-problem of human induced climate change through CO2 we need to have the courage to very thoughtfully do nothing, but learn to adapt to the natural processes that drive climate change as man has done for thousands of years, and we must do again.”
(39) “Instead of [spending money] curbing emissions [we] need to build better dykes or levies. We need to upskill and equip our rescue services, our fire services, our air rescue and medical services, our disaster relief and humanitarian services.”
I strongly suggest reading the whole of Reaney’s article.
Conclusion:
The author concludes his article by stating,
(40) “In essence if you truly believe that mankind is driving climate change and that we can somehow stop it; then you need to be in therapy or taking stronger medicine. … The current science of climate change is the best funded, politically-driven, pseudo-scientific scam, in history. … If Nature had a face it would be laughing at us right now!!!”
WIKIPEDIA
Wikipedia is a very good encyclopedia, except that when it comes to debated science, it leans towards the mainstream side. If not, the majority of scientists will jump on its throat. (Another case, for example, is “Macroevolution.”) So, obviously, it’s going to find data that somehow supports its conclusion in the article.
I purposely took the raw numbers from Wikipedia, here, knowing its bias, so no one could say I was fudging numbers. That’s how science works: you give the opposite side the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s do our calculation assuming Wikipedia’s numbers.
Greenhouse Gases
According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas (see first table), the greenhouse gases and their concentrations are:
Water vapor = 10–50,000 ppm, average = 25,005 ppm
Carbon dioxide = ~400 ppm
Methane = ~1.8 ppm
Ozone = 2–8 ppm, average = 5 ppm
Total greenhouse gases = 25,005+400+2+5 = 25,412 ppm of the atmosphere
Carbon Dioxide
According to NASA, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/, the carbon dioxide concentration was 382.88 ppm in January 2007 rising to 417.87ppm in January 2022 (see the first graph). In other words, it rose by (417.87-382.88) = 34.99 ppm in 15 years.
Calculation
So the actual measured rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the last 15 years has been (34.99/15) = 2.333 ppm per year.
Let’s assume this increase is all manmade.
This means that the greenhouse effect is getting worse by (2.333/25,412) = 0.0000918 or 0.00918% per year.
For the greenhouse effect to increase by just 1% we need (1/0.00918) = 108.9 years.
Now, fluctuations of 1% happen from year to year (the earth can handle it easily), and this is after more than a century (approximately 109 years).
Conclusion
This initial calculation puts things in perspective: the main contributor to the global warming we are experiencing is the sun and the earth’s orbit around it (read Reaney’s article), but we can do nothing about it. Notice that I’m not denying the earth’s warming up, but the above numbers show it’s not carbon dioxide that’s causing it.
MY CALCULATION
Some readers might still challenge this article stating that at least 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is manmade, and that Dick Reaney must have been paid by the beef/meat industry to come up with such an article. So, I decided to collect some independent numbers, which, I think, might help counter this objection. Forget Dick Reaney’s article for a moment, and let’s make our own calculations from first principles to see who’s right.
According to Wikipedia, which endorses manmade, CO2-driven global warming, and therefore biased in that direction, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas,
“The primary greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere are water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and ozone (O3). … Water vapor accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect.”
Water Vapor
Now, when it comes to the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, there seems to be significant disagreement.
(1) According to the University of Arizona website, http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall16/atmo336/lectures/sec1/composition.html#:~:text=The%20Atmosphere%20has%20two%20main,most%202%25%20of%20the%20atmosphere,
“Water vapor only averages about 0.4% [i.e., 4,000 ppm] of the total gases, however, it varies quite a lot depending on time and place, and can be over 2% [i.e., >20,000 ppm] of the total under warm, humid conditions.”
This implies an average of 1.2% or 12,000 ppm.
(2) According to the Sciencing website, https://sciencing.com/percentage-water-vapor-atmosphere-19385.html,
“The percent of water vapor in the cold Arctic and Antarctic … may reach as low as 0.2 percent [i.e., 2,000 ppm] while the warmest tropical air may contain up to 4 percent [i.e., 40,000 ppm] water vapor.”
This implies an average of about 2.1% or 21,000 ppm.
(3) In the first table, Wikipedia gives 10 ppm to 50,000 ppm for the water vapor range: that is, an average of 25,005 ppm, or about 2.5%.
(4) Reaney’s water vapor atmospheric concentration estimate seems a little bit too high at “90/3000” (i.e., about 3% = 30,000 ppm).
So, let’s take an average of 1.2% or 12,000 ppm—the minimum of the above four averages—suggested by the University of Arizona website.
Please note also that the atmospheric concentration of water vapor will increase as the global temperature rises: thus decreasing the CO2 percentage contribution to the greenhouse effect I calculated below.
Carbon Dioxide
Now, according to NASA’s website, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/, the total carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was about 419.53 ppm on November 18, 2022; so the percentage greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide alone is roughly 420/(12,000+420+2+5) = 420/12,427 = 0.03380 = about 3.4%. So Reaney seems a little under in estimating the carbon dioxide contribution at less than 3% of the greenhouse gases—see item (8) in the “Salient Points” section..
This includes all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: the net of that emitted by both nature and humans minus that absorbed by plants and microorganisms.
Again, according to the NASA website, the carbon dioxide concentration increased from 382.88 ppm, in January 2007, to 417.87 ppm, in January 2022 (see the first graph). Assuming this net increase is all due to human activity, it comes to about (417.87-382.88) = 34.99 ppm in 15 years. 34.99/15 = 2.33 ppm per annum.
Conclusion
Now, according to Reaney, the man-made carbon dioxide throughout these years was only about 12 ppm—12/34.99 is roughly 1 in 3 manmade. But let’s just forget about that: let’s assume all of the increase in CO2 is manmade.
Still, even at NASA’s annual rate of increase of carbon dioxide, it will take about half a century, 53.3 years [= (1/100)/(2.333/12,427)], to increase the greenhouse effect by just 1%. As I already pointed out above, fluctuations of this order of magnitude (1%) can happen naturally from year to year—not fifty-odd years.
So the author of the article, Dick Reaney, is right. The other 97% of the so-called climate scientists, including their peer-reviewed papers, are wrong—they must be the ones with monetary interests, as indeed the author contends. Numbers never lie!
OBJECTION
Someone might still object that my calculations were underestimated by a factor of 5, pointing to Wikipedia’s first table showing that the carbon dioxide “greenhouse-effect percentage contribution” is between 9% and 26%, that is, an average of 17.5% (as opposed to 3.4%) from “My Calculation” above.
Naturally, if at least 97% of the climate scientists agree that global warming is caused by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, to 97 articles that shoot my syllogism down, I’d be lucky to find 3 that agree with me, right? As I argued above, Wikipedia is going to, somehow, justify its conclusion to agree with mainstream scientists. So, where are the flaws we find in Wikipedia’s article? We must look at things from first principles to see who’s right.
Flaws
(1) If we add up the average percentage contributions (in Wikipedia’s first table): 54% + 17.5% + 6.5% + 5% = 83%. What happened to the other 17%? At least, the table needs some sort of explanation.
(2) Wikipedia also states,
“Water vapor accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect, between 36% and 66% for clear sky conditions and between 66% and 85% when including clouds.”
Why is 72% the maximum contribution (in the same table) and not 85%?
(3) The “Atmospheric absorption and scattering” graphs show clearly that water vapor absorbs much more energy than carbon dioxide; both in the infrared and visible regions, not to mention water vapor absorbs much more in the visible regions (the smaller wavelengths), which are more energetic.
(4) Regarding the “greenhouse-effect contribution,” Wikipedia needs to prove/show that a molecule of carbon dioxide causes about 5 times the greenhouse effect as a water vapor molecule. The natural assumption is that they are equally responsible, if not less—see item (3) in this section. Indeed equality is what Reaney’s article assumes.
(5) Reflected light: most importantly, something the article doesn’t even mention is reflected light on the oceans, seas, rivers, ice, and clouds acting as mirrors (or partial mirrors). Oceans cover more than 70% of the earth’s surface. These reflected rays do not follow black body radiation—see items (24) and (33) in the “Salient Points” section.
MY CONCLUSION
The fact that, according to NASA, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is increasing, is an indication that, on average, the earth is warming up—see item (18) in the “Salient Points” section. So I’m not denying we are experiencing global warming.
What this article shows, however, is that the global warming we are experiencing is not manmade: it’s due to the sun’s complex cycles and Earth’s even-more complex orbit and spin, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The misinformation and fearmongering by the climate scientists stem from their monetary interests, not from good science.
References
NASA. “Global Climate Change, Vital Signs of the Planet: Carbon Dioxide”: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/, last updated December 16, 2022.
Reaney, Dick. “‘Human Induced Climate Change’—Fraud of the 21st Century”: https://www.nzcpr.com/human-induced-climate-change-fraud-of-the-21st-century/#more-36157, posted February 9, 2022.
Sciencing. “Percentage of Water Vapor in the Atmosphere”: https://sciencing.com/percentage-water-vapor-atmosphere-19385.html, updated July 2, 2019 by Karen G. Blaettler.
University of Arizona. “Composition of the Atmosphere”: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall16/atmo336/lectures/sec1/composition.html#:~:text=The%20Atmosphere%20has%20two%20main,most%202%25%20of%20the%20atmosphere, Fall 2015.
Wikipedia, s.v. “Greenhouse Gas”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas, last edited December 15, 2022.
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