A new study refutes claims by climate radicals that more CO2 in the atmosphere necessarily causes higher temperatures. Rather, it seems to work the other way around. However, most of all, fossil fuels don’t really play a role. Seeking “net zero” based on model calculations and ignoring actual observations is clearly not a good idea.
The claim, made mainly by climate radicals, that increasing the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere causes the so-called greenhouse effect and thus increases temperatures, is increasingly being put to the test. A new study shows that the direction of causality “CO2 → Temperature” does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Rather, according to Professor Koutsoyiannis et al. In their study the opposite appears to be the case.
Already in 2022, scientists published a two-part study (Part 1 and Part 2) in “The Royal Society”. There he claimed: “The results (…) clearly indicate a (unidirectional) potential causal mechanism with T as the cause and (CO₂) as the effect. Therefore, the popular view that an increase in (CO₂) leads to an increase in T can be excluded as it violates the necessary condition for this direction of causation.
In the third part of their study, scientists once again clearly demonstrated that observations show exactly the opposite of the well-known claim. Accordingly, the increase in temperature takes six or more months to slow compared to the increase in CO2. He writes thus: “All evidence obtained as a result of the analysis points to a unidirectional, potentially causal relationship with T (temperature) as the cause and (CO₂) as the effect.”
This is the result of actual observations by scientists, while climate radicals rely only on calculated climate models. The researchers point out that there were periods when temperatures rose rapidly despite CO2 emissions falling and periods when temperatures fell even as emissions skyrocketed. And that’s not all: human emissions from fossil fuels are 9.4 GtC/year, equivalent to about four percent of global emissions of 216 GtC/year.
Koutsoyannis and colleagues show in the appendix of their new paper that gases from respiration and heating could lead to an emissions rate of 31.6 GtC/year using basic chemistry. This is three and a half times more than the annual emissions from fossil fuels (9.4 GtC). The conclusion that rising CO2 concentrations may be caused by warming appears to be supported by observations. Modern increases in CO2 may therefore be largely natural.
However, it also makes it clear that all efforts to “decarbonize” the economy and transportation are completely futile and doomed to failure. With “net zero,” those 9.4 gigatons of carbon will no longer be released into the atmosphere, but in the end it won’t matter. On the one hand, these few percentages of total emissions do not make the bread fatter and, as scientists have already shown, CO2 ultimately plays no causal role in global warming, but is clearly a consequence of it.
