The prevailing belief that human activity, quantified in terms of carbon emissions, is responsible for global warming and climate instability that constitute an existential threat to the planet, became a policy-guiding concern for international organisations and governments. The associated policies are increasingly intrusive, pursuing behavioural monitoring and control of private lives, and economically anticompetitive and restrictive, in a rapidly evolving domain of regulatory oversight. The theory of anthropogenic climate change is supported by two pillars of inferential evidence: scientific consensus, and the correlation between CO2 emissions and global temperature. Both of these pillars fail on close scrutiny.
The claim that 97% of climate scientists agree that human emissions are the primary cause of global warming derives from the work John Cook. Cook (2013) calculated this number by excluding 66% of climate scientists who did not state their position on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). For the remaining 34%, he considered 3 criteria: a) explicit endorsement that humans are the primary cause of climate change in recent times, b) unqualified endorsement of AGW, meaning that humans contribute something/anything to warming but are not necessarily the primary cause of climate change c) implicit endorsement of some human contribution to climate change. Cook then lumps all these criteria together and claims that 97% of the 34% agree on AGW theory. He does not clarify in the conclusions that AGW in that context means even very slight or negligible contribution to warming; not that 97% agree that humans are the primary driver of the recent warming.
The fatal defect in Cook’s work appears only in his second study, where he performs a sleight of hand and substitutes his earlier, weak definition of AGW consensus, that humans contribute to global warming but are not necessarily the dominant cause, with the strong IPCC definition: “Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that humans are causing recent global warming. The consensus position is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statement that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”.
From this point on, IPCC adopted Cook’s “evidence” in support of their different definition of anthropogenic climate change, and so his false claim of 97% consensus about the IPCC position was misrepresented as a scientific fact. Ironically, the claim of consensus about anthropogenic climate change would not have any evidential value even if it were true, because consensus about beliefs is not evidence of the facts those beliefs are about.
Since Humlum (2013) we know that human emissions of CO2 are not the primary driver of global temperature, despite the recent correlation of trends. Humlum et al. have shown, by analysing the official climate data-sets, that the rate of change of global temperature shows zero sensitivity to the rate of change of CO2 concentration. If the atmospheric concentration of CO2 were the dominant cause of global warming, then a faster accumulation of CO2 (like increasing the flow of fuel to the engine) would have to result in faster global warming (the engine generating more power), but this was not the case. Humlum’s study attracted aggressive criticism for his largely speculative, alternative theory of climate change, but nobody attempted to analytically refute his basic, primary conclusion, that the rate of global warming does not increase in response to an increased rate of CO2 emissions, which is a necessary feature of (strong) anthropogenic climate change as defined by IPCC.
RETHINKING THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT (Report)
“The IPCC claims that the atmosphere, warmed by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations, has heated the oceans below. However, this cannot be true, because, in the tropics at least, the atmosphere is cooler than the ocean.
Varying carbon dioxide concentrations do have an influence; as they increase, the emission of radiation to the surface increases, warming the ocean surface. However, as noted in Table 1, the effect over the tropics is small. In fact, it is possible to calculate that the increase in carbon dioxide concentration, from 337 ppm to 411 ppm, only results in an increased energy flow of 0.3 W/m2. That is far too little to explain an increased ocean temperature of 0.4°C, because the increased temperature in turn increases the flow of energy to the atmosphere by about 3.5 W/m2.
In other words, while a small amount of extra energy has gone into the tropical ocean surface as a result of increased carbon dioxide concentrations, eight times as much has been escaping to the atmosphere. The absorption of additional radiation energy from the change in carbon dioxide concentration is insufficient to support the rise in latent heat loss from the increase in surface temperature.
This leaves changes in ocean currents as the only plausible explanation for the warming of the tropical reservoir. Importantly, this idea is supported by real-world evidence, such as the observed slowing of the Gulf Stream.”
I understand the underlying mechanism as follows. The slower the tropical ocean currents the less heat is transported by water away from the equatorial region, causing higher tropical ocean temperature, causing higher evaporation and therefore more latent heat transferred from water to vapour, to be released as sensible heat via condensation in the atmosphere, plus higher partial density of atmospheric vapour which is the dominant greenhouse gas.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2022/09/Kininmonth-Greenhouse-Effect.pdf
Is the article already finished or is the rest paywalled? It is so short. No hockey stick, no grand solar minimum...?