The saturation effect raises questions about the popular myth about carbon dioxide – watts?

from CFACT

Collister Johnson

In recent years, the argument that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” has been at the heart of climate public policy in developed countries.

The demonization of carbon dioxide affects nearly every aspect of modern Western civilization. It condemns the burning of fossil fuels for electricity generation, the use of internal combustion engines for transportation, and the use of carbon fuels in nearly everything that supports modern civilization—even washing machines and kitchen stoves that are deemed acceptable. It forms the basis for the most absurd of all alarmist absurdities – “the social cost of carbon.”

The theory that carbon dioxide is harmful is included in the so-called “Hazard Findings” released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, which concluded that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that “threatens public health and safety.”

CO2 activism is based on one main assumption—that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to a linear and dangerous rise in global temperatures. The belief that emitting more carbon dioxide means more heat and higher temperatures is a cornerstone of the mainstream scientific paradigm.

But what if this assumption—the most common in all modern conventional wisdom—turns out to be wrong?

Over the past decade, this conventional wisdom has been challenged by impeccably qualified scientists who have turned to actual science—not political science—to refute this primary assumption behind the AGW belief system.

The peer review analysis completed in June 2020 by renowned physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden is a typical example. Mr. Happer is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and van Wijngaarden is Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University in Toronto. Mr. Harper is best known as a brilliant scientist whose insights into atmospheric physics contributed to the success of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

They conducted a highly detailed mathematical analysis of the physics of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and raised serious doubts about its ability to absorb heat once it is “saturated” at its current level of 400 parts per million and therefore unable to absorb more from the sun. heat. Therefore, any further increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – even doubling it to 800 parts per million – would only result in an increase in atmospheric temperature of 0.5 degrees Celsius (or 1 degree Fahrenheit).

The mathematically rigorous discovery was confirmed through controlled laboratory experiments conducted in 2024 by a team of seven Vienna researchers. Reverse infrared radiation. They concluded that doubling pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide from 400 ppm to 800 ppm “suggests no significant increase in infrared radiation absorption and would therefore only result in a temperature increase of at most 0.5 degrees Celsius”.

This conclusion explains why climate alarmists have never been able to explain why the Earth never experienced runaway warming in the past when carbon dioxide concentrations were 5-10 times higher than today. It also explains why United Nations climate models based on the linear warming theory have been Proved to be extremely wrong.

If the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere is well beyond the level at which increases would lead to the absorption of additional radiation, then all government policies aimed at reducing or eliminating carbon dioxide emissions to stop climate change would be the same as King Canute's efforts to stop climate change. efficient.

In short, these saturation analyzes completely refute the conventional wisdom that rising carbon dioxide levels will lead to catastrophic global warming.

They are not alone.

For example, the study “Experimental Verification of the Greenhouse Effect of Carbon Dioxide” published by German chemist Michael Schnell in 2020 also confirmed that the saturation effect of carbon dioxide causes the smallest degree of warming. Furthermore, another study conducted in 2017 by Professor Franz-Karl Reinhardt of EPF, a leading Swiss research institution, showed that doubling the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 400 ppm to 800 ppm would only produce a quarter of the One degree Celsius of temperature – too small to even measure accurately.

The impact of all this recent research—and not just the one mentioned above—is clear: the traditional view of carbon dioxide warming is unraveling. The demonization of carbon dioxide—one of the most beloved delusions in modern human history—may finally be coming to an end.

It is probably untrue that increases in carbon dioxide lead to a linear and catastrophic increase in atmospheric temperature.

The implications of CO2 saturation are a game changer and should provide the Trump administration with substantive questioning of the EPA’s harm findings.

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