Sun, Temperature, CO2, Oceans, Freshwater
Cycle, Infrared Radiation,
Vapor, Clouds - COMMENTS
John Shanahan
November
Demetris Koutsoyiannis, engineer - Greece..............................14
C (Kees) le Pair, physicist - Netherlands...................................14
Douglas Lightfoot, engineer - Canada.......................................16
Richard Lindzen, dynamical meteorologist - USA......................17
Jennifer Marohasy, biologist - Australia 17
Patrick Moore, Ecologist - Canada............................................18
Gerald Ratzer, computer scientist, physicist - Canada..............18
John Shanahan, engineer - USA...............................................18
Willie Soon, astrophysicist - USA..............................................20
Ronald Stein, fossil fuels, by-products, nuclear power - USA....21
Thorpe Watson, mining and metallurgy scientist - Canada.......23
Uli Weber, geophysicist - Germany...........................................24
William van Wijngaarden, physicist - Canada............................24
Gregory Wrightstone, geologist - USA.......................................24
Valentina Zharkova, mathematician - UK..................................25
Introduction
Erik Bye, physical chemist in Norway, wrote an article explaining that the warming since the early 1900s was caused by the Sun.
Simon Aegerter, physicist in Switzerland disagrees. He says that this warming is not do to the sun, but rather, the increase of CO2 from the use of fossil fuels. He points to decreases in the Sun’s energy output.
John Shanahan, engineer in the USA, knows Simon Aegerter, Erik Bye, and everyone invited to comment in this document. He is hoping to have a constructive discussion in order that we can work together to have a stable modern world with plenty of energy and essential byproducts. We must fight against people who want to deprive the world of reliable electrical and hydrocarbon energy and six-thousand-plus
essential by-products from oil.
This document presents comments on statements by Simon Aegerter, physicist, Switzerland, and John Shanahan, engineer, USA. They take different positions about man-made carbon dioxide. They also may differ from you. Therefore, we are inviting you to comment in a style that is easy to read and not too long. Hand-waving generalizations and derogatory language is not acceptable.
Everyone here agrees that the world needs plenty of energy and byproducts from oil in order to continue to have a modern world.
It is an invitation for you to participate and contribute your ideas. If you decide not to, we will quote from your publications.
People here disagree enough on man-made global warming that it prevents us from working together for a modern world. Maybe this effort will help us work together better.
Thanks
John Shanahan
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Comments
Hans Achermann, engineer - Switzerland
November 9, 2025
Rod Adams, engineer, author - USA
November 9, 2025
Walter Aeberli, engineer - Switzerland
November 9, 2025 Version - November 9, 2025
Irene Aegerter, physicist - Switzerland
November 8, 2025
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Simon Aegerter, physicist - Switzerland
November 7, 2025
Note by John Shanahan.
My family and I lived in Switzerland for nearly six years in the 1980s while I worked on nuclear power plants. We have many friends there. I know Simon and Irene Aegerter through mutual Swiss friends and through Simon’s encounter with an American atmospheric physicist that ended poorly. America was not well represented.
We are friends who have different views on man-made global warming. Below is Simon’s reply to statements by Erik Bye and me.
Comments by Simon Aegerter
Version - November 9, 2025 (a)
Sometimes, I read some of the texts from the group, and they tend to be opinionated. Everybody seems to have made up their mind. New facts are clearly not welcome. I doubt there would be a fruitful outcome. I have better things to do at my age in the little time that I have left. I simply found the statement „It’s the sun“ so preposterous that I had to look for data. I was myself surprised by what I found. I knew the late Claus Fröhlich, and I trust his data.
As an illustration of what I wrote about the group, I take the liberty to comment on your 10 points:
1) Basic science says that a graph of three lines proves nothing about the relations of the three lines.
Correlation does not mean causation, but anticorrelation excludes causation.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide is chemically identical to natural carbon dioxide. If natural carbon dioxide is essential for life and not a pollutant, man-made carbon dioxide is the same.
Right. Except it is not the character of the substance that worries some people (me included), it is the excess.
3) In a closed volume of water and atmosphere, the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide follows an increase in water temperature and vice versa. Not the other way around, as climate change alarmists claim.
The increase of CO2 in the air is caused by burning fossil fuels. That is a fact that has been proven more than 60 years ago by isotopic analysis.
4) Infrared radiation from solar-warmed land and ocean surfaces does not energize tiny amounts of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere enough to cause significant global warming of the
atmosphere and oceans.
That’s not how it works. Molecules with more than 3 atoms have absorption bands. That means they can absorb light quanta with the right energy. They immediately re-emit the quanta, half of them downward. That’s how the greenhouse effect works. It does not seem nonsensical to assume that the effect gets stronger when there are more 3-atomic molecules.
5) The Principle of Conservation of Energy requires that weather events, ocean and air currents, and the freshwater cycle (which are often totally ignored) reduce Infrared Radiation in the lower atmosphere. Weather phenomena release IR in the upper atmosphere and higher latitudes to send energy to space and keep Earth cool. The full energy from the sun warmed land and ocean surfaces isn't available as infrared radiation in the lower elevations to act on CO2. Weather phenomena and ocean and atmospheric currents mean less IR in the lower atmosphere. There are many reasons why atmospheric CO2, particularly "man-made" carbon dioxide, does not cause catastrophic global warming, sea level rise, and changes in weather patterns. Weather and climate are natural phenomena that have existed for a billion years.
Sorry, I don’t understand this.
6) There is no closed greenhouse heating effect in the open atmosphere of Earth.
I don’t know what a „closed greenhouse heating effect" is, nor an „open atmosphere"
7) The sun is the major heating source for the Earth. Variations of orbits, tilt, and solar energy output are the main causes of climate change.
That is correct. However, the cycle of precession is 28’000 years, the cycle of oliquity 40’000 years, and the cycle of excentricity 1000’000
years. We are discussing decades. The sun’s output also changes on an eon scale. On the scale we are discussing, it is constant with a slight cyclic variation with an 11-year cycle.
8) The natural tendency is for CO2 to become sequestered in sediments that turn to rock. Human sequestering of CO2 is a tremendous waste of precious energy and pointless.
True. And a waste of money.
9) Weather and climate are well within historical ranges.
That’s doubtful. Temperature proxies are not reliable enough to know for sure. In the Holocene, it has probably never been warmer than today. We may know more in a few years.
10) Man-made global warming, etc., is a political action, not related to weather and climate in nature.
Man-made global warming is a fact that, unfortunately, has been misused by the political left to destroy the capitalist system. My recommendation: fight the misuse, not the scientifically established facts.
John, I know you read German. I recently penned a piece for the Newsletter of the „Energie Club Schweiz“. You can find it here:
Zehn Jahre Übereinkommen von Paris energieclub.ch
It pretty much sums up my present thinking until new facts come to light. New facts, not new opinions.
This is my position. If people find it wrong, flawed, preposterous, or politically incorrect – so be it. I am not going to defend it. If somebody comes up with a new fact, I might reconsider. But I have not seen a new fact in decades.
All the best
Simon Dr. Simon Aegerter Wollerau, Switzerland
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Ed Berry, Atmospheric Physicist - USA
November 9, 2025
Tom Blees, climate change J Hansen, nuclear power - USA
November 9, 2025
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Erik Bye, physical chemist - Norway
November 8, 2025
- November 9, 2025 (a)
Terigi Ciccone, engineer - USA
November 9, 2025
Bruno Comby, engineer, environmentalist - France
November 9, 2025
Geert de Vries, physicist - South Africa
November 9, 2025
- November 9, 2025
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Samuel Furfari, Energy Consultant to the EU - Belgium
November 9, 2025
Michael Hancock, computer scientist - USA
November 9, 2025
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Version - November 9, 2025 (a)
William Happer, physicist - USA
November 9, 2025
Howard Cork Hayden, physicist - USA
November 9, 2025
Vijay Jayaraj, engineer, environmental scientist - India
November 9, 2025
Kevin Kilty, geophysicist, USA
November 9, 2025
- November 9, 2025
Demetris Koutsoyiannis, engineer - Greece
November 9, 2025
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C (Kees) le Pair, physicist - Netherlands
November 8, 2025
Dear John,
Excuse me, I pass.
We showed that the AGW correlations are wrong (Yule 1926). We showed that CO2 - temperature and SP500 index –
temperature correlate equally well, like many others do. We have shown that their model predictions do not fit the subsequent measurements, and we have shown that several other factors are equally, or even more influential than CO2. We have forced the AGW adherents to reduce their supposed CO2 influence somewhat. All in vain for convincing politicised academies, doom preachers, institutes, and their financial bosses.
I have no hope that whatever we publish or communicate about your graph will influence the climate hoax. If ever the general belief in CO2 as a dominant heater disappears. It will take decades or more. Like the belief in an Earth carried by four white elephants or the belief in Papal infallibility.
Pragmatic hope lies in fading CO2 influence on governmental action and resistance against laws and regulations if we want to reduce economic and material damage.
Artificial Intelligence, AI, is penetrating scientific methodology. It is a deadly cancer to science. Every AI system contains filters. And they are ultimately determined by the system owners. It is a track leading off from that of empirical data-based philosophy. Although it may take the programmers some time to translate their boss's vague instructions into working software.
To me, the central problem in climatology is:
What makes the “World’s surface temperature” (about 288 K) 132 K warmer than our Sun (1362 Wm-2) could make a black sphere in the same orbit if it did not transport energy by its own processes and rotation?
Yours,
Kees. Dr. C. (Kees) le Pair Nieuwegein, Netherlands
E: clepair@casema.nl
W: http://www.clepair.net/
Douglas Lightfoot, engineer - Canada
November 9, 2025
John:
We already have the correct response.
The warming effect of carbon dioxide is too small to measure. See: Reliable Physics Demand Revision of the IPCC Global Warming Potentials. Available at:
https://setpublisher.com/index.php/jbas/article/view/2509 or at: https://doi.org/10.29169/1927-5129.2024.20.05 https://doi.org/10.29169/1927-5129.2024.20.05
The Earth has a robust cooling system that keeps it from overheating. See: The Sun Evaporates Water to Cool the Earth for Life to Flourish. Version - November 9, 2025 (a)
Available at: https://doi.org/10.29169/1927-5129.2025.21.03
I hope these peer-reviewed and published papers help.
Best regards,
Doug Lightfoot
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Richard Lindzen, dynamical meteorologist - USA
November 9, 2025
Jennifer Marohasy, biologist - Australia
November 9, 2025
Patrick Moore, Ecologist - Canada
November 8, 2025
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Gerald Ratzer, computer scientist, physicist - Canada
November 9,,2025
John Shanahan, engineer - USA
November 7, 2025
- November 9, 2025
The website allaboutenergy.net presents articles from five kinds of authors on the topic of man-made global warming:
1) Natural and man-made carbon dioxide are equally good. Use fossil fuels and nuclear power. These people are searching for truth in science and plentiful energy for mankind for thousands of years into the future.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Don’t use fossil fuels or nuclear power. These people are some of the worst enemies of the modern world, and especially the poor.
3) Man-made carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Don’t use fossil fuels. Some of these people are advocates for nuclear power. It is a shame. They have enough science education to know better.
4) People who can’t make up their minds or they go along with the alarmists. They never think they have to give up reliable electricity and all the benefits of the modern world.
5) The billions of people who don’t have access to reliable electricity, plentiful energy from fossil fuels, and good economies. They are unfortunate victims of the man-made global warming alarmists.
Man-made global warming alarmists of all stripes are a serious problem for humanity, worse than many other threats. They must be dealt with quickly. They have had their way since the 1970s.
Willie Soon, astrophysicist - USA
November 7, 2025
Dear colleagues:
I wrote a commentary on that paper by Mike Lockwood and Claus Frohlich when it first appeared in 2007. But that is ancient history with a few more understandings and insights over the years.
The bottom line is that they used (1) a "global" temperature curve that is contaminated by Urban Heat Island effects and (2) strictly one of the more than 24 TSI reconstructions available. So the proposition that such a paper and graph had already proven that the Sun has no role in climate is simply "not even wrong".
Two formal papers that we have recently published can fully account for and explain what is going on:
1. R. Connolly, W. Soon, M. Connolly, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, C.J. Butler, R.G. Cionco, A.G. Elias, V. Fedorov, H. Harde, G.W. Henry, D.V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D.R. Legates, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, L. Szarka, V.M. Velasco Herrera, H. Yan and W.J. Zhang (2023). "Challenges in the detection and attribution of Northern Hemisphere surface temperature trends since 1850". Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e. ( ). Supplementary Materials.
Version - November 9, 2025 (a)
2. Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon, Michael Connolly, Rodolfo Gustavo Cionco, Ana G. Elias, Gregory W. Henry, Nicola Scafetta, and Víctor M. Velasco Herrera (2024). "Multiple New or Updated Satellite Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) Composites (1978–2023)". The Astrophysical Journal, 975 (1), 102, https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad7794. (Open access).
Best regards,
Willie Soon
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Ronald Stein, fossil fuels, by-products, nuclear power - USA
November 9, 2025
Just a few hundred years ago, before oil, the world was unspoiled and dominated by mother nature and the wild animal kingdom. There were fewer humans competing with the animals due to humanity’s limited ability to survive what mother nature provided. Before oil, life was hard and dirty, with many weather and disease related deaths.
After oil, the products MADE FROM oil allowed us to create various modes of transportation, a medical industry, and electronics and communications systems. Those products from oil reduced infant mortality, extended longevity from 40+ to more than 80+, and gave the public the ability to move anywhere in the world via planes, trains, ships, and vehicles, and virtually eliminated deaths from most diseases and from all forms of weather, All of that apparent “progress” is being “blamed” on the introduction of oil into society.
After oil was discovered a few hundred years ago, the world populated from 1 to 8 billion.
The population growth was not from that useless black tar, but it was the products and transportation fuels MADE FROM oil that continue to be demanded by humanity.
The world has yet to come up with a clone or substitute for that black tar, to maintain the supply chain of products and fuels now demanded by the 8 billion on this planet.
Ronald Stein, P.E. Author
Columnist
Consultant
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Thorpe Watson, mining and metallurgy scientist - Canada
November 9, 2025
Uli Weber, geophysicist - Germany
November, 9, 2025
- November 9, 2025
William van Wijngaarden, physicist - Canada
November 9, 2025
Gregory Wrightstone, geologist - USA
November 9, 2025
Valentina Zharkova, mathematician - UK
November 9, 2025
Here is my attempt to reiterate the ideas which indicate that the current climate change is a natural event in the terrestrial life which occurred many times before still keeping the planet alive and flourishing.
1. Global warming issue (https://solargsm.com).
We have a variety of the proposed scenarios why CO2 and other
green house gasses cannot heat the terrestrial atmosphere and most of them, similarly to the IPCC approach, still assuming internal resources in the earth atmosphere itself (clouds, albedo, galactic cosmic rays) which redistribute within the atmosphere the constant radiation of the sun.
Well..What we have discovered that the solar radiation input into the terrestrial an other planet atmospheres is not constant at all but increasing in the current millennium (1600-2600) with every years because the solar inertial motion imposed by the gravitation of large planets (book chapter Zharkova, 2021 https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/75534, section 5 for summary). The sun is getting closer to the Earth orbit in MarchAugust, thus causing additional energy deposition not counted in the IPCC and any other models. However, we have shown in a few recent papers that the decrease of the Sun-Earth distances taken from the official NASA ephemeris for the two millennia (600-1600 and 1600-2600) leads to a substantial deposition of solar radiation to the Earth that follows the temperature increase curve used by IPCC (Zharkova et al, 2023a https://www.scirp.org/pdf/ns_2023033010033932.pdf, Zharkova and Vasilieva, 2024 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=138752).
Hence the solar forcing in all models of atmospheric heating DO NOT include the main energy input by the Sun!
Each kind of the scenarios proposed in the first paragraph can play its role in the redistribution of solar energy within the terrestrial atmosphere if the correct solar forcing is considered, e.g. if the increase solar radiation coming to the Earth since Maunder minimum is considered. If we unite our forces at this point we can deliver a powerful message to the world instead of competing each
with other.
2. Grand Solar Minimum and little ice age (https://solargsm.com)
However, the discussions of the item 1 has more academic value at this stage because the most pending issue for the Earth atmosphere comes from a reduction of solar activity in the grand solar minimum (2020-2053, Zharkova et al, 2015
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep15689,Zharkova et al, 2018a,b https://solargsm.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/zharkova_iau 335_paper1.pdf and https://solargsm.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/zharkova_repl y2usoskin_jastp17.pdf; Zharkova 2020
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.17 96243). The comparison of our SA index with that of sunspots is given in Zharkova et al, 2023b
https://solargsm.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/zharkova_etal _mnras2023.pdf just to cut any objection because of some differences in appearances of these indices cause by different entities of solar activity (poloidal and toroidal magnetic fields).
The IPCC and AGW people have found the arrival of GSM to be the most dangerous for their models propaganda because this GSM and little ice age associated with it will undoubtedly prove that despite all the current warming (on whatever reason), the reduction of solar radiation owing to GSM will lead to the cooling of terrestrial atmosphere and to not further heating. And despite the Sun being in the maximum of its cycle 25 this cooling is already showing its signs as per blogs posted from the media worldwide in my webpage https://solargsm.com.
With my warmest regards Version - November 9, 2025 (a)
Valentina
Prof. Valentina Zharkova
Director of ZVS Research Enterprise Ltd. London, EC1V 2NX, UK
Emerita Prof. of Mathematics
MSc, PhD, FRAS, FLMS, FHEA
Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering
Faculty of Engineering and Environment
Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne UK
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