Anthropomorphic climate change states that through our industrial revolution, mankind has been burning fossil fuels which release CO2 into the atmosphere. Since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it traps more heat in the earth’s atmosphere causing warming. This warming will melt Arctic and Antarctic ice causing flooding. It will create detrimental shifts in rain patterns that will negatively impact agriculture we rely on for subsistence. In short, climate change is an existential threat that will end human existence if we don’t stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere.
This topic is too complicated to explain fully in a brief blog post. However, I hope to respectfully present some dissenting opinions that deserve equal consideration from the popular narrative that has been advocated by government leaders.
Bjorn Lomborg – Climate Change is NOT a Priority
Bjorn Lomborg is the author of False Alarm. His education is in political science, and his life has been invested in studying contrarian views to predominate environmental ideals. In his published book, False Alarm, Lomborg states that he takes the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific research at face value and believes the earth is warming. He agrees with the IPCC that global warming is caused by increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. His objection to the Climate Change movement isn’t the underlying science, but the reaction to the IPCC’s predictions. In his view, these reactions will cause damage to our economies and harm the poorest of the world populations.
The first reaction he objects to is to stop using nuclear and fossil fuel energy and replace it with wind and solar electricity generation.
The second reaction he objects to is to prioritize malinvestment in wind and solar at the expense of not investing in at least ten higher priorities that will improve our world.
You can order Bjorn Lomborg’s book False Alarm if you want to learn more about his ideas about how we should better prepare for climate change than making an attempt to reverse it. You can also follow many of Bjorn Lomborg’s posts on LinkedIn.
Patrick Moore – Increased CO2 is Good for Our Ecosystem
Patrick Moore was a co-founder of Greenpeace in the early 1970’s fighting nuclear testing, seal clubbing, and killing whales. He left Greenpeace when it seemed that they adopted the theory that all mankind was bad for the planet. Moore points to evidence in deep ice core samples that indicate that atmospheric CO2 levels in the Cambrian period were 4,000 ppm. Our best estimates indicate we have raised atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm in 1900 to 416 ppm in the present day. Moore states that these high CO2 levels are beneficial for life on our early planet. He further states that there is little correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2 levels in our primordial past.
Moore indicates that not only is CO2 not correlated directly with atmospheric temperature, but that it has been the life force for our earth for millions of years. The fossil fuels that we find today are made from carbon that was all once freely available in our atmosphere. These high levels of primordial atmospheric CO2 were captured by robust plant life and buried in the forms of coal, oil, and natural gas. In our human era, this buried carbon had created carbon scarcity where plant life struggled to exist. Our industrial age has released much of the carbon dioxide needed for robust plant life and other life on planet earth.
You can watch Patrick Moore’s Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture he gave in 2015 (GWPF) on Youtube, if you want to learn more about why he believes what he does.
William Happer – There’s a Chemical Limit to CO2-Based Warming
William Happer is a Physicist who has expertise in the interaction of light and gas at the atomic level. Dr. Happer believes that while CO2 does capture heat, there is a limit to how much CO2 can act as a warming agent in the atmosphere. His analogy is painting a barn red. Each coat of red paint will make the barn slightly redder. However, once the barn is red, added coats of red paint make no difference. In addition to cute barn-painting analogies, there is science behind his theory that was developed by Max Planck, Karl Schwarzchild, Joseph Stephan, and Ludwig Boltzmann. These scientists created the formulae to calculate the greenhouse gas effect of different atmospheric gasses including CO2. Based on this theory a 100% increase in CO2 will increase the greenhouse trapping effect of CO2 by 1%. Increasing CO2 concentrations much more will have little effect on its effect as a greenhouse gas.
Mainstream scientists understand this science because this scientific knowledge has been around since the 1950’s. Still, their climate models give more credit to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere for warming than they deserve.
You can hear/watch Dr. Happer’s explanation of this principle in a video that is posted on Youtube of a presentation he gave to the Institute of Public Affairs in September 2023.
Judith Curry – Climate Science has been Hijacked by Political Partisans
Judith Curry is a climate scientist who had been tasked with studying the intensity of Hurricane Katrina and how climate change affected the strength of modern hurricanes. She believes that CO2 is a minor factor in warming the atmosphere, and the scientific reports that are produced by scientists are spun in an unscientific way by ambitious government leaders. She resigned from Georgia Tech, in a well-paying position in 2017 because her research was not aligned with the narrative advocated by the mainstream scientific community. Dr. Curry believes that climate models exaggerate the level of warming that can be contributed to CO2 emissions.
If you want to better learn about Judith Curry’s take on climate change science and how it relates to the political propaganda of our time, I encourage you to read her latest book, entitled Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response.
Steve Koonin – Climate Science isn’t Telling Us What Alarmists Claim
Steve Koonin was an American theoretical physicist, science advisor to President Barack Obama, professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, and former director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. Steve Koonin has been instrumental in reviewing IPCC scientific research to set policy on energy and climate science.
The questions that Dr. Koonin answers are:
Are large amounts in emissions reductions warranted?
Is reducing CO2 emissions desirable?
Is reduction of CO2 emissions to levels prescribed by the IPCC possible?
The answers he gives to all these questions is a resounding NO.
Koonin’s solutions to climate change is where he sets himself apart from other scientists in offering pragmatic directions to take in a world where climate science is not settled.
Cancel the “climate crisis”.
Create objective summaries of the science of climate for non-scientists that inform instead of scare.
Create balanced and objective information on energy and climate for government leaders to make better energy regulatory decisions.
Continue to track environmental statistics to build a substantial database of surface temperatures, sea levels, and other data to continue to analyze global climate.
Focus more on adaptation to climate change in lieu of controlling the climate.
Continue to innovate and create energy technology that reduces overall CO2 emissions.
Koonin appears to be aligned with Bjorn Lomborg with the exception that he believes we are not as certain as we claim to be on CO2 caused climate change. You may better understand Dr. Koonin’s views on climate change by reading his book entitled, Unsettled.
The Mainstream Climate Change Perspective
I am bewildered with how popular climate change alarmism has become in the world. Especially among younger people. This makes perfect sense if you believe that the older generations don’t care about your future. Here are the statements that have become believable in our current age:
“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change” – Andrea Ocasio-Cortez (January 2019)
“Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” - Al Gore (December 2009)
“How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" Gretta Thunberg (September 2019)
Here is how scientific conjecture is turned into mass hysteria. The International Panel on Climate Change or IPCC creates reports and report summaries that are loaded with confusing language. The reports include words that communicate confidence like: “unrefuted” or “unequivocal” or “unprecedented”. These same reports include words that highlight uncertainty like: “very likely” or “approximately” or “virtually certain”. The reports are littered with subjective statistical terms like: “low confidence”, “medium confidence”, and “high confidence”.
There is a reason for this wording. Scientists and technical writers must use words of confidence that can be echoed by government leaders to imply the science of climate is “settled”. They must use words of uncertainty to avoid legal and ethical peril.
IPCC scientists get paid to research anthropomorphic climate change. If there is no such thing, their jobs and their life’s purpose evaporate. They cannot describe the science of their work in a way that can be understood by government leaders, and so they correlate world events with CO2 levels and say, “correlation equals causation”. As Dr. Moore points out, there is not even a correlation over long periods of time.
If these scientists use hard science, they come up empty. By empty, I don’t mean that the theory of man-caused climate change is proven false. I mean that they have no scientific proof one way or the other. This “I don’t know” answer is not acceptable to the masses. It’s like a prosecutor who cannot find the guilty party for an unsolved crime. The prosecutor succumbs to pressure and arrests the most likely suspect. They try this suspect in the court of public opinion. Since the public is anxious to get retribution for such a heinous crime, they are glad to overlook evidence that exonerates the accused.
The scientific rigor of the dissenters listed in this article seem to have a better connection between scientific principles and their theories than do reports emanating from the IPCC. This popular fear narrative has gained so much momentum that it is taught in K-12 schools and colleges. Dissenting opinions or scientific theories are silenced and will certainly not receive funding from government or academia.
What do I think?
I study, read, watch, and listen to multiple opinions. It may be obvious to a reader of this article what I believe. I tend to side with Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin. We must be diligent about how we impact our environment. However, wind and solar are not good energy solutions, even if CO2 is causing global warming. Nuclear electricity generation is a better direction. We will develop much better energy technologies over the next century that will make solar, wind, and nuclear seem primitive by comparison. The emergency nature of the climate crisis will cost trillions of dollars to solve the wrong problem. Money spent to adapt to a changing climate is a much better investment than futile efforts to control CO2 emissions. Coal, natural gas, and oil are finite resources. This means we will inevitably need to find alternatives to these sources of energy in our distant future (100-200 years). I am an avid energy conservationist and believe we can find ways to reduce energy usage and dramatically improve energy efficiency.
Regardless of what you believe, or what I believe, I hope that we study this important topic in an objective and scientific way.
About the Author
Jeff Schuster is an accomplished businessman, engineer, and writer. Three of Jeff's books are attempts at helping people understand and solve political problems that are being made worse by political partisanship. His first book, Trial & Error, is a collection of 14 short stories. ReEngineering Education is a story of innovative education reform in the midst of political corruption. Engineering Unity is Jeff's most recent book published in August 2023 addressing political polarization on wedge issues that politicians use to divide us. You are welcome to join our private Facebook group called Reengineering Politics where we discuss politically polarizing topics in a civil manner.
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