Why the greenhouse climate hypothesis is wrong - GG EIKE

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Why the greenhouse climate hypothesis is wrong Gerhard Grasruck November 26, 2023 The claim of human-caused climate change is based on the hypothesis that changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are the dominant driver of climatic variability; Carbon dioxide is considered to be crucial; it is said to be the “adjustment knob” for the climate on earth (actually the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, since, unlike carbon dioxide, this only remains in the atmosphere for a short time before being released again If precipitation fails, a role for it as a trigger for climate change is ruled out). [1] It is concluded that human emissions of carbon dioxide, which increase its concentration in the atmosphere, have a decisive influence on the climate.

How can this hypothesis be checked for correctness? In principle, there are two approaches: On the one hand, you can examine, starting from the supposed causes, whether the physical mechanism is in principle capable of producing the claimed effects. Conversely, the observed climate can be used to empirically check whether changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases actually lead to corresponding climate changes.

Let's start with the latter. If the greenhouse climate hypothesis is indeed correct, this should be easy to see - the temperature on Earth should follow the concentration of carbon dioxide; More carbon dioxide must be followed by an increase in temperature, less by a decrease in temperature. It should be noted, however, that causality can also run the other way around. It is

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easy to see that temperature can influence the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In particular, the solubility of gases in water depends on temperature. As it gets colder, it is able to dissolve more carbon dioxide; as it warms, carbon dioxide is released. So, if a correlation actually exists, it is important to establish. whichever came first.

To anticipate the result: The result is extremely unfavorable for the greenhouse climate hypothesis. It is therefore not surprising that people like to go back many millions of years into the more distant climate past, where there are extremely large uncertainties about the carbon dioxide concentrations that prevailed at the time and so there is more scope to somehow bend it to fit. However, this also means that these hypotheses, which are based on extremely shaky data, are regularly thrown out the window when new research corrects the values. For example, the Cretaceous period, characterized by tropical temperatures and in which the dinosaurs flourished, is often presented as a prime example of an extreme greenhouse climate. However, more recent studies with improved methods correct the carbon dioxide levels significantly down to a level comparable to today's level of around 420 ppm (0.048 percent), and the trend generally shows no correlation with temperature.[2]

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Figure 1 Carbon dioxide concentration and temperature in the Cretaceous period (145-66 million years ago) ii The contradictions do not become less when one considers the modern period following the Cretaceous period. Between 48 million and 34 million years ago there was a sharp drop in the average temperature of initially 5 degrees Celsius, then finally another 2.5 degrees, when Antarctica completely iced over within less than a million years. The carbon dioxide concentration shows no apparent connection: it continues to rise for several million years after the temperature has already fallen again; then drops slightly before rising again and only falls again after the temperature has reached its minimum.[3]

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Figure 2 Carbon dioxide concentration and temperature in the modern era (from 66 million years ago) iii Things get particularly interesting with the beginning of the Pleistocene 2.6 million years ago as the actual beginning of the Ice Age, when the Arctic also iced over. This triggered the alternation of cold periods, which continues to this day, in which glaciers advance to lower latitudes and cover large parts of the earth's surface, and warm or interglacial periods such as the Holocene, in which we currently find ourselves. The greenhouse climate hypothesis was originally proposed to explain precisely this period. But it was precisely the changes between warm and cold periods in this period for which an astronomical cause through periodic irregularities in the Earth's orbit could first be shown. You can actually observe a correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide - but exactly the other way around: first comes the change in temperature, then the change in carbon dioxide concentration. [4] The proponents of the greenhouse climate hypothesis were also forced to recognize this; As an attempt to explain this, they resorted to the claim that the cold period would be triggered by the temperature change, but would then be significantly strengthened by 4

carbon dioxide feedback. But they have nothing to offer as evidence for this other than their climate models.

Figure 3 Carbon dioxide concentration and temperature during the alternation of cold and warm periods over the last 400,000 years Even since the beginning of the Holocene, the current period of geological history, with the end of the last cold period around 11,000 years ago, there has been no lack of climatic variability; In particular, several distinct cooling phases can be identified, some of which had a drastic impact on the development of humanity - most recently the so-called “Little Ice Age” from around the beginning of the 14th to the middle of the 19th century. At the same time, however, there were only minor changes in the carbon dioxide concentration until the beginning of the 20th century, which do not yet show any correlation with temperature developments. Here is the tactic of the advocates of anthropogenic climate change - insofar as it solves the "Holocene dilemma", as it is called,[5] do not immediately ignore them completely - if possible, downplay these climate changes, which were generally recognized before the rise of climate change alarmism, but are no longer allowed to be. Ironically, this makes them the “climate change deniers” that they like to call their opponents.

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Figure 4 Carbon dioxide concentration and temperature in the Holocene (from 11,000 years ago) [6] Even in the 20th century, when the supposed human influence on the climate is said to be so clearly evident, things are not looking any better for the greenhouse climate hypothesis. In the first half of the 20th century, the carbon dioxide content and - initially - also the temperature increased, which early supporters of the greenhouse climate hypothesis, which was still controversial at the time, such as Guy Stewart Callendar, cited this as evidence of its validity. [7] In 1956, the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass, one of its most important representatives at the time, confidently proclaimed a “definitive test” for the cause of climate change: If carbon dioxide is responsible for climatic variability, there will be a further continuous increase in temperature However, if the influence of solar activity is decisive, cooling is to be expected over the next few decades. [8] The second occurred - although carbon dioxide concentrations continued to rise, the temperature fell for about three decades starting in the 1950s, leading to apocalyptic warnings of a new ice age in the 1970s.

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Figure 5 Carbon dioxide concentration and temperature in the 20th century [9] Significantly, there have already been attempts to blame climate change on humans - the cooling effect of aerosols contained in industrial emissions was blamed for the drop in temperature.

This explanation is still used today - initially the effect of carbon dioxide was "hidden" by the increasing aerosol emissions, but then gained the upper hand again due to its reduction through better filtering. However, the facts do not support this hypothesis at all: in the 20th century, in many parts of Europe and North America, the permeability of the atmosphere to solar radiation was initially decreasing and then increasing again. However, as expected, this development is only of regional importance; even areas that are relatively close to each other can show very different trends.[10] In addition, the timing of the trend reversal from the end of the 1980s towards more light permeability does not at all correspond to the climatic development, which already transitioned into a warming phase at the end of the 1970s (which, as is well known, was caused by a corresponding shift in climate alarmist propaganda from cooling down accompanied by 7

warming).

Figure 6 Trends in the evolution of atmospheric light transmittance. Figure a refers to the period 1923-1950, b to 1959-1989, 1950-1980 and 1952-1980 for China, Europe and the USA, c to 1994-2010 for China and 1980-2009 for Europe. ix How pronounced and how continuous this warming is remains unclear. It lasted for the next two decades, after which the temperature development stagnated; After this “pause” lasted more than a decade, a scientific working group (RSS) changed the calibration of the satellite temperature data in order to subsequently achieve warming. This interpretation was then quickly declared as the new, official temperature curve. The extent to which it is correct remains doubtful - on the contrary, another working group (UAH) corrected its results downwards for the same period.[11]

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Figure 7 Differences in the interpretation of satellite temperature data by the teams from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) x Such “revisions” of temperature data are also common for ground measurements. To give just one example, from 1999 to 2015 the temperature data for North America were gradually modified so that the present appears as the warmest period since the beginning of the 20th century instead of the 1930s.[12] It is important to remember that we are dealing with orders of magnitude of tenths of a degree - under these circumstances it is easy to put your thumb on the scale.

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Figure 8 Changes in the interpretation of temperature data from weather stations for the 20th century xi Supporters and critics of climate change alarmism spend a lot of time and energy debating the legitimacy of these manipulations. However, one can also take the view that the topic does not really have the central importance that is given to it in the public discussion. The climate is constantly changing, so it gets warmer or colder at any given time - even if warming were actually taking place, that says absolutely nothing about whether greenhouse gases are responsible.

The causal connection is crucial. And as we have seen, firstly, there can be no question of a general correlation between climate and carbon dioxide, and, secondly, in the cases where a connection can be identified, it is the change in temperature that comes before the change in concentration and not the other way around. The entire climate story is therefore nothing other than a single devastating refutation of the greenhouse climate hypothesis; Its advocates constantly have to come up with new ad hoc excuses to explain the deviations from actual developments. One can therefore justifiably apply the overused term conspiracy theorist to them: “Believe us, humans are influencing the climate to our ruin through greenhouse gases, but nature has conspired to obscure this connection!”

This also explains the central role that the infamous climate models play in the worldview of anthropogenic climate change. It is claimed that with their help one is able to isolate the factors that supposedly “hide” the connection and thus make it plausible that the climate is supposedly controlled by greenhouse gases. In reality, however, climate models, at least those that 10

assume greenhouse gases as a determining factor, are completely incapable of reproducing the real climate; The only way to bring this even halfway into agreement with the actually observed climate is to first 'tune' it, as the technical term for it is called. When “modeling” – especially when it comes to cloud formation – there are massive uncertainties about the climatic processes, which are now simply arbitrarily determined so that in the end the actually observed climate data is at least somewhat produced. Mind you, this is only about reproducing historical climates - we're not even talking about predictions. Ironically, to the extent that the climate models are given any meaningful value at all, they not only do not confirm the greenhouse climate hypothesis, but, on the contrary, refute it. [13] Given the inability of the greenhouse climate hypothesis to explain past climates, it is not surprising that it even fails to make predictions. A fundamental criterion that distinguishes a legitimate scientific theory is its falsifiability. It makes clearly defined predictions, based on the occurrence or absence of which their correctness can be judged. The complete failure of the greenhouse climate hypothesis in this test was implicitly admitted by its adherents when they renamed “global warming” to “climate change”; Whether hot or cold, floods or droughts, everything can be sold as climate change. The question that can embarrass any climate change alarmist is: “Which climatic event would you accept as a refutation of the greenhouse climate hypothesis – and therefore human-caused climate change?” It is difficult to answer this question because almost every conceivable refutation has already been done.

So much for the empirical side of the greenhouse climate hypothesis.

Things don't look any better if we approach it from the other side, from the physical causes. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere (so far this has increased from 0.028 to 0.042 percent since the 19th century, i.e. by around half) would increase the radiation flux by around 1 percent or 3.7 watts per square meter lead. Proponents of the greenhouse climate hypothesis claim that their atmospheric radiation models must be correct because they correctly reproduce Earth's infrared 11

radiation into space as measured by satellites. Trick: This measured infrared radiation is exactly the parameter for the reproduction of which the models are first “tuned” - of course, this doesn't prove anything at all.

But, even if we accept the value for a moment, the effect would be minimal on the earth's surface with an average temperature of 15 degrees Celsius, this increase in irradiation would correspond to a temperature increase of 0.7 degrees Celsius, based on the Stefan-Boltzmann law Radiative upper limit of the atmosphere (at around 5-6 kilometers altitude and -18 degrees Celsius) where the radiation into space occurs, it would be 1 degree Celsius.

The altitude at which the energy input predominantly occurs varies depending on the latitude, so the global average value is somewhere between 0.7 and 1 degree Celsius. [14] Not even climate change alarmists dare claim that a temperature increase of less than 1 degree Celsius would lead to harmful effects. Therefore, in their climate “models” they are forced to assume a significant amplification (roughly threefold) of this warming through positive feedback effects.

Primarily, these are supposed to come about because the initial warming leads to the evaporation of more water, which, since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, leads to even more warming and so on (as an aside, this would be because the additional water vapor would be called precipitation has to come down again, lead to a wetter climate - floods can perhaps be explained by this, but drought catastrophes by no means.) Temperature changes dampening negative feedback effects, in particular the fact that more water vapor leads to more clouds, which predominantly have a cooling effect, are considered to be of minor importance dismissed.

Of course, this hypothetical massive increase would then have to apply not only to greenhouse gases, but also to other temperature changes. The assumptions of the greenhouse climate hypothesis would result in an extremely unstable climate, which its representatives are not only not afraid to admit but, as the shrill warnings about climatic “tipping points” show, even prominently integrate into their alarmist propaganda.

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In reality, however, they are digging their own argumentative grave, because under these circumstances the relative stability of the earth's climate becomes simply inexplicable. It would require that just as many greenhouse gases have been added or withdrawn from the atmosphere over billions of years of Earth's history to keep the climate within a temperature corridor suitable for the development of higher life - an almost incredible chain of coincidences. The simple fact of our existence is a powerful argument against a climate characterized by destabilizing positive feedbacks and thus the greenhouse climate hypothesis. On the contrary, everything indicates that negative feedback – i.e. damping – dominates the climatic system. [15] A particularly remarkable indication of this is the so-called “paradox of the early weak sun”: in the early days of Earth's history, solar radiation was around 30 percent weaker than it is today. The Earth should have been covered in ice and remained so for most of its history. In fact, it was even warmer than today - an impressive demonstration of the climatic system's ability to cushion massive changes in the energy balance.

It is very instructive to extrapolate this development into the future because exactly what was predicted to happen in the past is carelessly predicted. For example, one climate model predicts that increasing solar radiation by 8 percent would lead to a global temperature increase of 40 degrees Celsius in 850 million years. [16] Not long after, an unchecked greenhouse temperature feedback cycle would be triggered, which would lead to the evaporation of the oceans within a short period of time.

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Figure 9 Earth's temperature development in the future based on a 3D climate model [17] The obvious question is: What reason is there to believe that this very moment in Earth's history is so magical that the 30 percent increase in solar radiation over the last four and a half billion years had no discernible effect, but for the next 10 percent there were massive temperature increases up to... Can the oceans boil away? The climate modelers are deliberately keeping quiet about this, making it clear once again that they cannot explain climatic developments on Earth, despite all assurances to the contrary.

Conclusion: The most important counterargument to the greenhouse climate hypothesis is the complete lack of arguments for it - there is simply nothing to refute. It may be appropriate, in certain circumstances, not to immediately abandon a hypothesis if it explains well some of the observed facts, even if it obviously does not work in another aspect; But in the case of the greenhouse climate hypothesis, literally everything speaks against it.

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Under these circumstances, the only remaining justification for not definitively rejecting the greenhouse climate hypothesis would be that no better approaches to explaining climatic variability exist. But that is definitely not the case - on the contrary, despite the politically motivated concentration on the greenhouse climate hypothesis, a picture of the factors that actually determine the climate has become increasingly clear: for periods of years to decades, it is mainly internal oscillations of the earth's climatic system such as El Niño Events and aerosols occasionally emitted during volcanic eruptions are of importance. Over centuries and millennia, cycles of solar activity are dominant, while over periods of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, there are changes in the Earth's axial tilt and orientation and the eccentricity of its orbit around the Sun. Over even longer periods of time, millions of years, changes in the Earth's geography caused by plate tectonics become noticeable. There is simply no room left for the greenhouse climate hypothesis.

1. This expression was even used in the title of a supposedly serious scientific paper: Lacis et al. 2010, Atmospheric CO2: Principal control knob governing Earth's temperature (nasa.gov) ↑ 2. CO2 and temperature decoupling at the million-year scale during the Cretaceous Greenhouse | Scientific Reports (nature.com) ↑ 3. Javier Vinós, Climate of the Past, Present and Future. A scientific debate, 2nd ed. Chapter 9.3.4 Cenozoic climate. ↑ 4. Petit et al. 1999, Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica ↑ 5. Liu et al 2014, The Holocene temperature conundrum, Kaufman, DS, Broadman, E 2023, Revisiting the Holocene global temperature conundrum ↑ 6. Javier Vinós, Climate of the Past, Present and Future. A scientific debate, 2nd ed. Chapter 4 Holocene Climatic Variability ↑ 7. GS Callendar 1938, The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature ↑ 8. Gilbert Plass 1956, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change ↑ 9. Confrontation between the different theories that explain the causes of global warming ↑ 15

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He, Y., Wang, K., Zhou, C., Wild, M. 2018, A Revisit of Global Dimming and Brightening Based on the Sunshine Duration Fig. 4 ↑ 11. Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998 (carbonbrief.org) ↑ 12.If The Data Doesn't Match The Theory – Change The Data – Climate Change Dispatch ↑ 13.Criticism of the greenhouse climate change hypothesis, part 1 Through “tuning” to appropriate models | EIKE – European Institute for Climate & Energy (eike-klima-energie.eu) ↑ 14.Sejas et al 2021, Understanding the Differences Between TOA and Surface Energy Budget Attributions of Surface Warming ↑ 15.Willis Eschenbach, Observational and theoretical evidence that cloud feedback decreases global warming ↑ 16.Leconte et al 2013, Increased insulation threshold for runaway greenhouse processes on Earth-like planets | Nature ↑ 17.When will the Earth lose its oceans? ↑ About the author: He is a software developer who has repeatedly been confronted with the errors of climate ideology, including in the development of solar technology and charging stations for electric cars. He is currently employed by a well-known German manufacturer of heating technology; Heat pumps are of course a big topic, but there are already signs that this threatens to become no less of a debacle.

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