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A Book Calls the CO2 Warming Theory the Century's Biggest Lie

original Science

I recently read a book with quite a provocative title.

Global Warming: The “CO2 is the culprit” theory is the biggest lie of the century

The book compiles contributions from several researchers, each writing from their own perspective, and since it isn’t built around a single throughline, I’m putting together a loose summary here partly for my own understanding. I should note that I’m not an expert in this field, so I won’t be adjudicating which side is right. Doing so would rather spoil the point.

I want to focus purely on laying out, in somewhat digested form, what the authors intended to say. The authors are researchers at several universities and national research institutes, including Tokyo Institute of Technology. That said, some biased views do crop up here and there. But that reflects the tone of the work itself, and I won’t be strengthening or weakening it here.

From a macro perspective, I won’t deny that there’s a correlation between rising CO2 and warming. That’s a fact.

Still, several doubts remain. For example,

[The influence of clouds]

Where does the Earth’s surface heat mainly come from? The sun. How much of that solar heat gets absorbed can be expressed by a coefficient called “albedo.” The ocean, for instance, reflects most sunlight, giving it 0.9. Soil is low, but deserts are surprisingly high. Clouds are what dynamically change the albedo figure, and what governs how clouds form is aerosols (particulates in the air). When aerosols are abundant, clouds form, sunlight doesn’t reach the surface, and cooling progresses (the same story as the period when the dinosaurs went extinct).

Some argue that the IPCC’s GCMs (general circulation models) underestimate the Earth’s overall albedo, making CO2’s contribution look larger than it actually is.

Increasing water vapor has a stronger greenhouse effect than increasing CO2. That’s a fact. And precisely because this is known, researchers have built models linking CO2 to warming through a feedback loop: as CO2 increases and temperature rises slightly, atmospheric water vapor increases, which raises the temperature further, which increases water vapor again, and so on. But the process of atmospheric water vapor formation — cloud formation — remains difficult to predict, and reliable data is lacking. Yet public consensus has somehow already settled on this picture.

[Back and forth between warm and cold. Public opinion swings back and forth too]

Looking back at public opinion: around 1900, a researcher named Ångström discovered that CO2’s infrared absorption certainly holds true at high altitude, but near the surface the effect of water vapor is so much larger that CO2 has almost no influence. This finding put an end, for a time, to the “anthropogenic CO2 theory.” But when abnormal weather occurred in the 1930s, a researcher named Callendar (an energy scholar, an outsider to meteorology) revived the CO2 global warming theory. Because it coincided with a period of abnormal weather, it won public support at once. But contrary to his predictions, a cold period arrived in Callendar’s later years, and he reportedly died in despair.

Around 1960–70, the theory of an approaching ice age was under discussion. This flipped to the warming theory in the 80s. A busy story indeed.

Around 1977, the Earth entered another warm cycle, and the CO2 theory was once again treated as though it were established fact. But that too was followed by another abrupt shift toward cooling from 2006 onward. Amid a string of heavy snowfalls and severe cold, IPCC-affiliated scholars scrambled to manage public opinion.

The cooling after 1990 was due to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. In 1993, Japan experienced a rice shortage. A cool summer led to a 26% drop in harvest, and Thai rice was imported to make up the shortfall.

In 2012, a study showed that changes in sea surface temperature could largely be explained by ocean currents. Ocean currents, in turn, can be explained by rotation, revolution, and other gravitational effects — CO2 doesn’t come into it. There’s also a hypothesis that warming could melt Greenland’s ice, and the resulting influx of freshwater into the ocean could halt the ocean’s large-scale circulation (the premise behind “The Day After Tomorrow”), but it isn’t considered a dominant factor.

Ocean temperatures around Japan fluctuate constantly due to El Niño and La Niña. CO2’s contribution is negligible by comparison.

Looking further back: temperatures began falling 65 million years ago, and an ice age began 2 million years ago. Ice ages alternate with relatively warm interglacial periods on roughly a 100,000-year cycle. We entered the current interglacial period 12,000 years ago, and the warmest point was the Jomon period 6,000 years ago. At that time, sea levels rose, and the area around present-day Tokyo is believed to have been submerged.

The Cretaceous period, from 145 million to 65 million years ago, was dramatically hotter, with no ice at either pole.

There was a Little Ice Age during the Edo period. Little ice ages come packaged with famine and warfare: the fall of the Southern Song, the fall of the Ming, the French Revolution, Japan’s Warring States period. Abnormal weather occurs before a little ice age sets in, which makes it more plausible to view the present as a harbinger of one than as evidence of runaway warming.

[The IPCC’s overreach]

During the 2014 cold wave, one IPCC-aligned scholar explained it by arguing that CO2-driven warming had melted Arctic ice, causing the cold westerlies that should circle the Arctic to meander south into America instead. Another IPCC-aligned scholar criticized this, saying no one else advocates that theory. Apparently, running a few weather simulations with slightly varied conditions produces cases where the westerlies meander anyway — in other words, the phenomenon falls within the range of natural variation. The jet stream, circling the mid-latitudes, separates warm air from cold air. Moscow, for example, normally sits on the cold side, in Arctic air. If the westerlies meander and pass north of Moscow, the city ends up on the warm side, and a sudden warming occurs for that year alone. It’s simply the westerlies’ caprice. The same IPCC-affiliated scholar who raised that criticism nonetheless added that the heavy snow was still due to warming-driven increases in water vapor.

Dr. Manabe, called the father of CO2-driven warming theory, built the one-dimensional model from which the IPCC’s predictive models descend. But that model rests on a somewhat forced assumption — a constant lapse rate, meaning the temperature drop per unit of altitude stays fixed — and it has drawn criticism for having been extended as-is into three dimensions. Even Hansen, a leading figure who argues for CO2-driven warming, has made sharp criticisms on this point.

Questions also remain about whether the climate models can function properly at all, given that they ignore changes in solar energy, simplify ocean currents, and disregard biochemical changes. The “thermohaline circulation,” for instance, is a major heat-transport mechanism, and climate discussions that ignore its influence shouldn’t really be considered valid. Current models, in fact, fail to correctly explain things that have actually happened in the past.

The famous “hockey stick curve” presented in the IPCC’s 2001 report is false. Looking at temperature change from the year 1000 to 2000, it appears to shoot up dramatically around the year 2000. This is claimed to be linked to rising CO2, but zooming into the graph shows the rise actually beginning around 1900, and the only explanation offered is the unsatisfying claim that the period after 1900 reflects natural variation while the period after 1950 reflects human causes.

Another thorny issue: two-thirds of the IPCC’s reports are policy-discussion papers that don’t require peer review, so it’s hard to say they’re all grounded in solid scientific findings. It’s a mixed bag — not that all of it is wrong.

Planetary boundaries, or the Earth’s limits, are another shaky concept. The IPCC’s Johan Rockström, who advocates the basis of the SDGs, claims that if CO2 exceeds 400 ppm, it will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and eventually turn Earth into something like Venus, but he has presented no clear numerical basis for this. Even researchers who share his general outlook disagree about where the boundary actually lies. Given that, it’s strange that the figure “400 ppm” has taken on a life of its own. The people who insist most strongly that we are already at the CO2 limit are basing that claim on Rockström’s theory.

The Lysenko affair offers a cautionary parallel. Soviet authorities backed the twentieth-century biologist Trofim Lysenko, who denied genetics and Mendel’s laws, and suppressed and executed scholars who supported genetics and criticized him. This is said to have set Soviet genetic science back by 40 years. Some worry that something similar is now on the verge of happening in climate science.

Reducing petroleum consumption does have value. Technology to capture CO2 may be needed in the future, but not now. SOx, on the other hand, should absolutely be reduced, since it promotes cooling — and cooling brings mass die-offs of living organisms.

Shale gas deserves a mention too. Fossil fuels, being the accumulated remains of organic matter, are lighter by specific gravity and have historically been mined from relatively shallow points within underground folds. Advances in extraction technology have made it possible to extract fuel from smaller, narrower gaps within these folds (shale layers) as well. That’s shale gas. Factoring this in, fossil fuels are said to last another 200 years.

[Questions about measurement]

Among NOAA’s observation stations, which are ranked on a five-tier quality scale, most fall into rank 4, second from the bottom, and the IPCC uses data from these. If you collect data only from rank-1 stations, however, the conclusion is that temperatures haven’t risen much since 1930.

Sea level rise isn’t easy to measure. Wind and atmospheric pressure alone can shift it by as much as 1000 centimeters almost instantly. It’s also easily affected by ocean currents and eddies. No one has adequately explained how a legitimate value is being measured.

Global average temperatures from before satellite observation began in the 1980s also carry many doubts, yet they’re treated as if they were fact, with arbitrary corrections applied along the way.

[CO2 and the food crisis]

Warming actually helps with food shortages. In the 1990s, the IPCC began linking food crises to warming. But experimental results point the other way. At around a 2-degree rise, higher temperatures increase crop yields, and CO2 helps too. Since this conclusion would mean losing funding, these research results were quietly published in academic journals rather than publicized. So, to make the case for a food crisis, warming has to be linked to desertification instead. But regions with zero rainfall are limited to begin with, and while higher temperatures increase evaporation from land, two-thirds of the Earth is ocean, so the effect is minor.

Global crop yields per unit area have kept rising regardless, purely due to technological progress. Places like Australia see large swings up and down, because rather than relying on technology, farmers there continue working vast fields in a rough way, which makes them more vulnerable to weather.

With warming, Russia could become a major breadbasket. In the past, rice couldn’t be grown in Hokkaido in Japan, but now it can.

Meanwhile, global population is nearly flat in developed countries. It’s projected to rise dramatically in Africa but settle, a hundred years from now, at a level not so different from today. A food crisis may be temporary, and if so, overproduction — rather than crisis — may be what actually awaits.

[Things that actually won’t happen even if warming occurs]

Several things commonly assumed to follow from warming are wrong.

Polar bears will not go extinct. If they were going to die from the level of warming happening now, they would already have gone extinct during the medieval warm period. Brown bears and polar bears are biologically the same species — the difference is comparable to that between people of different skin color. Would white people go extinct if they moved to Southeast Asia? Polar bears are actually increasing, causing various problems, including attacks on people and raids on food stores.

Coral bleaching has nothing to do with warming. Corals catch plankton themselves, but that’s not enough nutrition, so they keep algae inside their own bodies. This is what gives coral its color. As coastal development progresses, agriculture develops and nutrients spread around, flowing into the sea via rivers. Nutrients become abundant, and the coral-algae symbiosis breaks down. Bleaching, in other words, is a phenomenon that occurs precisely when conditions are lucky for coral — when nutrients are abundant. Warming has nothing whatsoever to do with it. If warming caused coral bleaching, the bleaching would start with corals in tropical regions right on the equator.

The methane released even if Arctic ice melts is negligible. Even if Arctic ice melts and methane hydrate is released, not much methane gas actually results, because methane-oxidizing bacteria consume it as food.

The rise in felt temperature owes more to the urban heat island effect from asphalt than to global warming. Buildings have gone up along Tokyo Bay too, so the sea’s cooling effect can no longer be counted on there. Living in the suburbs helps. That said, the summer temperature rise is under 1 degree, while the winter rise is over 3 degrees. In a way, conditions have actually become more comfortable overall.

[The SDGs]

France’s Yellow Vest movement put it plainly: elites talk about the end of the world — environmental problems — but ordinary people worry about whether they’ll get paid at the end of the month. Among the SDGs, an awareness survey conducted by the UN ranked the environment dead last.

The root of environmental problems is population growth. A population of 10 billion is projected for 2050, but the trend is expected to turn toward decline once we get past that.

The SDGs contain a built-in contradiction. Roughly half of the 17 goals are pie-in-the-sky and unachievable, and the rest tie back to climate, which gives the whole framework a scheming impression.

Take hunger as an example. Warming should be welcome for solving the food problem. Yet CO2, supposedly the root cause of hunger, is what we’re reducing.

[The dangers of clean energy]

Clean energy sounds nice, but the accounting ignores the fossil fuels used in constructing facilities and developing components, and energy efficiency remains poor. As a result, the energy obtained from 1,000 solar panels can barely produce even 2 new solar panels.

Eco-products, in the end, are made possible only by using large amounts of fossil fuel somewhere along the line. It’s an image trick: make someone else use the fossil fuels while keeping your own hands clean.

Renewable energy subsidies persist on shaky ground. The effectiveness of solar and wind power is overstated, and their costs are understated. Impacts on migratory birds and the deforestation caused by biomass use are ignored as well.

Natural energy brings its own environmental destruction. To generate energy equivalent to 1 cubic meter of fossil fuel, you’d need to build a dam that drops 40,000 cubic meters of water 100 meters. Wind power requires 5 times the land of hydropower, and solar requires 4 times.

The 2015 flooding of the Kinu River illustrates the risk. Natural levees had been cut down to install a mega-solar facility, and a new levee was being built further out, but the work was still incomplete.

Geothermal power has 1/50th the energy efficiency of heavy oil — and that’s still relatively decent compared to some alternatives.

One securities firm lied outright: it recommended fuel cell stocks to clients while taking the opposite position itself.

Germany’s environmentalism has followed its own strange arc. Historically, Germany held the view that humans should adapt to nature. But having pushed forward with a nuclear phase-out, it ended up increasing thermal power generation, and is now suffering the consequences.

[Agitation through misinformation]

The world is full of agitation that’s either baseless or built on flatly wrong grounds. A few examples:

A causal link between warming and abnormal weather events like typhoons, heat waves, and wildfires has never been proven, and the correlation itself is weak to begin with.

Tuvalu appears to be sinking into the sea not because of warming but because of land subsidence from unplanned groundwater pumping. The same thing happened in various parts of postwar Japan and became a problem there too.

The mass extinction of the Paleozoic era, roughly 250 million years ago, is often misread the same way. The largest regression of the sea in history is known to have occurred during that period, and even elementary-school science tells you that sea regression happens when ice forms — in other words, it’s straightforward to infer that it was an ice age. Despite this, some scholars build hypotheses claiming that era was actually a warm period, in order to curry favor with the IPCC and secure research funding.

The Club of Rome offers a historical warning of its own. Around 1972, a field of “warning studies” produced numerous negative predictions, predictions that would ideally have turned out wrong. Among them, only the population growth prediction turned out correct. Of the warnings made 50 years ago, population growth was the one and only thing that came true as predicted.

[CO2 and politics]

As a basic premise, the state can control the tone of research. Whether a researcher secures outside research funding affects their career advancement. And publishing a paper requires peer review. Controlling researcher-driven public opinion is, in fact, fairly easy.

The environment has become a diplomatic tool in the post-nuclear-weapons era. The IPCC was established in 1990 as an analytical body to gather materials for drafting treaties at COP. Up until the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the IPCC didn’t actually push the anthropogenic greenhouse-effect theory all that strongly. It’s not simply that everything is the IPCC’s fault. Behind the scenes, nations had reached a quiet agreement that the environment would be the next diplomatic tool. The UN, too, saw environmental issues as a perfect vehicle for peaceful international cooperation and rode along with the current.

From an energy-policy standpoint, reducing CO2 makes sense, but there’s also a story, told with some plausibility, that Thatcher pushed the “CO2 is the villain” theory to shift Britain away from coal, and that the IPCC was created partly to serve that purpose.

German reunification played into this too. In 1987, the Bundestag decided to tackle the issue of global warming. This was needed to signal to Britain and France that Germany would not expand its military and would spend money elsewhere instead, smoothing the path toward reunification and EU membership.

The EU has in mind the idea of a carbon tariff — additional tariffs on countries that haven’t reduced CO2. This is sure to provoke backlash, but the EU needs to recoup the advance investments it has already made. The reason the Kyoto Protocol’s reduction targets were met, notably, was the Lehman Shock: emissions don’t drop that quickly unless the economy is forced to contract. Demanding CO2 reductions is effectively the same as demanding that a country cut its own national strength. It’s developing countries whose CO2 emissions will increase from here on; developed countries, in fact, will barely change going forward. So developed nations are, in effect, telling countries that have only just escaped the poorest tier: stop talking about money and think about the planet instead.

The environmental left’s real target is the powers-that-be in their own countries. As mentioned earlier, if you’re going to blame fossil fuels, the logical first targets are China and India. Developed countries are already taking action, and it’s harsh to demand the same of developing countries right now. The most reasonable target would logically be the “former developing countries” that have already become sufficiently wealthy.

Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2019, arguing that since China had become the largest emitter, there was no reason for the developed countries that came before it to keep working so hard on reductions.

[Summary]

The IPCC’s lies, as the book frames them:

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/10/362/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.