The false science behind the Biden green program

Little further warming will occur at present levels of atmospheric CO₂, even if present levels were to double from 400 ppm to 800 ppm.

by Richard Schulman

The green program behind President Biden’s post-inaugural flood of executive orders is unscientific and deficient in economic and geostrategic common sense. The major media have endeavored to conceal that truth by means of three decades of spurious climate scare stories.

The claim that humanity faces an imminent global warming catastrophe because of its use of fossil fuels is junk science. The central lie pushed by major media and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that increases in atmospheric CO₂ from fossil-fuel use will keep boosting global temperatures. This supposedly will be further multiplied catastrophically by positive feedback: as oceans warm, atmospheric water vapor, another greenhouse gas, will increase. This will foster more warming, which will further warm the oceans, generating more atmospheric water vapor, and so on. The result of these alleged positive feedback mechanisms for CO₂ and H₂O, the narratives claim, will be that Earth ends up being a hot lifeless planet like Venus.

The feedbacks are negative

If such positive feedbacks existed, Earth already would have turned into another Venus. The reason this hasn’t happened is because negative feedback mechanisms operate for both CO₂ and H₂O. These the IPCC and media have studiously avoided discussing before the public:

The truth of the matter is that increases in atmospheric CO₂ have rapidly diminishing power as a greenhouse gas. Little further warming will occur at present levels of atmospheric CO₂, even if present levels were to double from 400 ppm to 800 ppm.

This has been explained recently in papers by W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer (“Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases”), William Happer “Radiation Transfer,” and Howard Hayden (“CO₂ and Climate: A Tutorial”).

William Happer is Professor Emeritus in Physics at Princeton University. The Happer paper, “Radiation Transfer,” was issued as one of nine “Red Team” type papers by the Executive Office of the President of the United States during the last days of the Trump administration. They were subsequently denied that White House imprimatur by Trump Science Advisor, Kelvin Droegemeier. Climate scientist Roy Spencer, another of the “Red Team” authors, believes Droegemeier did this “for political purposes and professional gain.” Droegemeier served on the National Science Board for 12 years during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. From 2012 to 2016, he served as Obama’s Vice Chairman of the NSB.

Kerry the latest prophet of doom

Present atmospheric CO₂ levels are around 410 parts per million. The global warming catastrophists animating the Biden administration believe that further increases will doom the planet. Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry, the latest in a long line of failed prophets of doom, gives the planet just nine more years unless drastic action is taken against fossil fuel consumption.

Hayden writes that: “[T]he warming that would be caused by the next 400 ppmv (parts per million by volume) of CO₂ would be about one-tenth as much as caused by the first 400 ppmv.  Again, this is likely an overestimate.”

In “Radiation Transfer,” Happer writes:

At the mean distance of Earth from the Sun, sunlight carries an energy flux of about 1,360 Watts per square meter (Wm^-2) …. [F]or cloud-free temperate latitudes, doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide would decrease thermal radiation to space by about 3 Wm^-2.

Seasonal warming greater than doubled CO₂ warming

By way of comparison, Happer writes, because of the Earth’s elliptical orbit, which modestly modifies the distance between Sun and Earth during its annual orbit, “there is 91 Wm^-2 change [in] flux from summer to winter.” In other words, the extra heating of Earth by a doubling of CO₂ from present values would produce just 3.3% of the heat difference regularly observed on Earth between January vs. July. “Great  efforts  are  needed  to  concoct  a ‘scientific’ argument that 3 Wm^-2 is worth worrying about,” Happer concludes, adding that

Any doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations will produce the same 3 Wm^-2 decrease of flux to space whether we consider doubling the pre-industrial value of 280 parts per million (ppm) to 560 ppm, which could happen by about the year 2100 at the current rate of increase around  2  ppm/year.  Doubling the current 410 ppm atmospheric concentration to 820 ppm would take about two centuries.

The basic story was already known in 1971. As reported by The Week That Was (TWTW, January 23, 2021), S.I. Rasool, an atmospheric chemist, and Stephen Schneider, a climatologist who was a lead author of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR, 2001), wrote that “[A]lthough the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

Schneider flips from icebox to hothouse Earth

When the article was written in 1971, the media rage was how Earth was about to turn to ice. Later, Schneider recanted his earlier view and became an advocate of cutting greenhouse gases to stop the planet from runaway warming.

Scientists are permitted to correct prior mistakes. Had Schneider discovered new science to justify his about-face? No, only the politics of climate change had changed.

As Schneider explained in a now notorious 1989 interview in Discover magazine:

On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but… But we are not just scientists… [W]e’d like to see the world a better place [by] working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.

Unsurprisingly, Schneider, poster boy for the scientist turned opportunist, was eulogized in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report.

TWTW concludes: “Is there any reason why the public should believe government scientists who assert dangerous global warming? Or the politicians who claim a climate emergency?”

The physics of diminishing CO₂ greenhouse behavior

The reason that CO₂ exhibited diminishing returns as a greenhouse gas (GHG) — even before present atmospheric levels were reached — is that to be a GHG, an atmospheric gas must prevent infrared radiation from escaping into space. CO₂ does this only in a very narrow band of infrared frequencies (the 14 to 16 micrometer band). This band quickly, at much lower atmospheric levels of CO₂ than at present, tends towards saturation. But meanwhile, radiation across the rest of the much larger spectrum of infrared frequencies escapes into space, thereby maintaining Earth at an equilibrium temperature. This is one of the important negative feedback mechanisms that prevents Earth from becoming a Venus.

Why isn’t this obvious to the climate catastrophists backing the UN’s IPCC? There are two approaches to this question: one, scientific; the other sociological. The scientific rationale, if there is a respectable rationale to be made, is described by Hayden as follows:

[W]e know from satellite measurements that the temperature rise since about 1979 has been almost 0.6º C, far above that caused directly by CO₂. Climate scientists are fully aware of these numbers. They know that increasing CO₂ concentration—by itself—has little effect on temperature even if the amount doubles. The claim is that the warming is amplified by the increase in the H₂O greenhouse effect.

If this claim is wrong, any warming beyond the little that can be attributed to increased CO₂ must be of natural origin (or changes in land use, not fossil fuels).

H₂O greenhouse behavior also diminishes

Hayden adds:

In case you are wondering why the earth did not bootstrap itself into boiling temperatures during the Eemian Interglacial, the Holocene Climate Optimum, the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, or thousands of other warmings, the answer is that the climate is not controlled by positive feedback—where hot weather begets even hotter weather—but by negative feedback—where, as things get hotter, they shed more heat. For the last half-billion years, this negative feedback system has kept the temperature of the surface of the earth within a few percent of its present 288 K.

Water vapor also is subject to negative feedback. Increased atmospheric levels of it condense as clouds, rain, snow, or ice. Nor does it escape the same saturation effect to which CO₂ is subject. Wijngaarden and Happer write:

[A]t current concentrations, the forcings [greenhouse gas behaviors] from all greenhouse gases are saturated. The saturations of the abundant greenhouse gases H₂O and CO₂ are so extreme that the per-molecule forcing is attenuated by four orders of magnitude with respect to the optically thin values [values at lower concentrations]. Saturation also suppresses the forcing power per molecule for the less abundant greenhouse gases O₃ , N₂O and CH₄ from their optically thin values, but far less than for H₂O and CO₂.

The cheapening of climate science programs

A compelling sociological explanation for the perspectives of the CO₂ catastrophists is provided by climate scientist Judith Curry. In an interview with Christopher Balkaran of the Strong and Free podcast channel, she explains what happened to the field of climate studies between when she began to study climate at graduate school in the late seventies and early eighties and the present.

Curry: Climate change wasn’t a really big issue at that point. At the time, it was all about geophysical fluid dynamics, trying to understand the circulations of atmosphere and the ocean, radiative transfer, cloud physics. It was, it was very physics based. I would hear in the media about people talking about, Oh, the ice age is coming , or doom and gloom from CO₂ emissions, but nobody was really paying attention to all that very much in terms of what I would say the mainstream field until the late 1980s, really.

Balkaran: [B]eing a kid of the nineties watching Captain Planet and other cartoons at a young age, all I heard of… was how important the environment is. It’s taken over so many, so many spheres of our discourse…. [W]as… this kind of protest towards big oil or capitalism more broadly?

IPCC’s anti-capitalist background

Curry: [A] lot of it comes from the UN Environmental Program. At the time, there was a push towards world government, socialistic kind of leanings, don’t like capitalism and big oil… [T]he UNEP was one of the sponsoring organizations for the IPCC…. [I]n the early days, a lot of scientists didn’t like this at all. [T]hey didn’t think that we should be going in this direction… [T]hey didn’t want to get involved in man-made climate change under the auspices of the IPCC. They said, this is just a whole political thing. This is not what we do. We seek to understand all the processes and climate dynamics.
…
[D]efenders of the IPCC started pushing the idea that anybody who doubts us or challenges us, they are in the pay of big oil. After that, it became much more difficult to really challenge all that. And certainly by the turn of the century, anybody who was questioning the hockey stick or any of these other things were slammed as deniers and ostracized. And then after Climategate in 2010, the consensus enforcers became very militant. So it’s a combination of politics, and some mediocre scientists trying to protect their careers. [T]hey saw this whole thing as a way for career advancement, and it gives them a seat at the big table and political power….
…
[A]t some point you start to get second order belief…. Individual scientists only look at a piece of it, and then they start accepting what the consensus says on the other topics. A scientist working on some aspect of the climate problem may know very little about carbon dioxide, the carbon budget, radiative transfer, all that fundamental science, but they will accept the climate consensus because it’s easy and good for their career. And so it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And now we have way too much confidence in some very dubious climate models and inadequate data sets.
…
I was old school at the University of Chicago with geophysical fluid dynamics and all this really hard stuff…. There’s very few universities that have good programs in climate dynamics at this point…. Climate dynamics is still there, but it’s far from dominant…. [T]here are all these new degree programs spinning up in climate, that are far away from the geo-physical roots. These new programs combine policy with a little bit of science and economics and whatever… [T]he science part of it basically gets minimized. And that’s where all the students are running to… leaving a talent dearth of people with the good mathematical physical mindset and wanting to enter into the more challenging fields.
…
[P]eople have said Trump is anti-science. I don’t think he’s anti-science, he just doesn’t pay attention to it. What he pays attention to is energy policy. This doesn’t necessarily make you anti-science. It makes you ignoring science…. And then we have, on the other side of the aisle, politicians [who] say, “I believe in science” and they don’t understand anything about it…. It’s like they’re believing in Santa Claus. [I]t’s really a political and cultural signifier rather than any real understanding.

[end of Curry excerpts]

Retribution in 2022?

In conclusion, the Biden administration is basing its entire economic and geopolitical policies on bad CO₂ science. The policies are harmful to working people here and abroad. The policies abandon US fossil fuel strengths to the benefit of a hostile China, Russia, and Iran. They damage the US economy. As Sen. John Barasso (R-Wyo) pointed out in a USA Today op-ed,

A federal leasing ban would kill an estimated 62,000 jobs in New Mexico, nearly 120,000 in Texas and more than 33,000 in my home state of Wyoming next year alone, according to the American Petroleum Institute. It will also eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that these states depend on for public schools, roads, water projects and other essential services. In response to the Keystone cancellation, TC Energy has announced 1,000 layoffs, and the potential union jobs lost could be 10 times higher.

If there’s something approximating a fair election in 2022, Democrats will pay a price for their unscientific climate policy, so contrary to the national interest, in the House of Representatives and Senate.

[Minor editorial corrections made on 2/6/2021.]