Weather, Climate, CO2, Greenhouse Effects
Douglas Lightfoot and Gerald Ratzer - Canada.
Comments from and about their critics
John Shanahan - USA
November 1, 2025
Introduction
John Shanahan is the host of the website: allaboutenergy.net. He has closely followed the climate science and energy publications of Douglas Lightfoot and Gerald Ratzer. He has observed criticism by several people in one organization. This is not a personal matter. It goes to the foundations of science, engineering, and reasonable criticism.
This article describes a recent visit with Gerald Ratzer and Douglas Lightfoot at McGill University in Montreal and Baie D’Urfé, Quebec, Canada. We discussed their upcoming publication about the climate science errors of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, UN IPCC.
Douglas Lightfoot is a retired Mechanical Engineer and Professional Engineer. He co-produced the documentary, Nobody’s Fuel - an engineer’s guide to saving the planet.
Gerald Ratzer is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal with a background in physics.
They have studied atmospheric physics, weather, man-made global warming alarmism, and destructive government policies about climate and energy.
Engineers made significant contributions to the development of fossil fuel and nuclear power technologies over the last 170 years.
Professional engineers take legal and liability responsibility for the accuracy and safety of the work they sign off on.
Academics, other occupations, bureaucrats, elected officials in government, and the mass media rarely take the same degree of responsibility as licensed professional engineers. They simply publish another paper, repeat the same errors, or modify future policies and insult professional engineers. It’s worked. There are millions of terrified adults and students about man-made global warming from man-made carbon dioxide, which is the same molecule as natural CO2 that is essential for life.
John Shanahan is a retired Civil-Structural Engineer and Professional Engineer with a decade of research in severe weather requirements for nuclear power plants.
The greenhouse-effect, static-global-average-parameters climate model does not explain weather and climate on the orbiting, rotating, tilted axis water planet, the Blue Marble.
Earth’s cooling and heating are controlled by the sun, weather, the oceans, and the global freshwater cycle. “Climate experts” routinely ignore weather, the oceans, and the freshwater cycle. Their greenhouse effect temperature predictions for temperature change to a tenth of a degree Celsius are based on abstract mathematical models, not on actual weather and all the water on the planet. Can you predict air conditioning performance by ignoring the system coolant?
Douglas Lightfoot’s and Gerald Ratzer's publications are based on real science and sound knowledge about the planet Earth. Do their critics have better models of Earth’s weather and climate?
Man-made global warming alarmists, analyzing infrared radiation acting on man-made carbon dioxide to explain the heating of the planet to a tenth of a degree Celsius, use questionable science. The heating and cooling of Earth is mostly determined by the sun, clouds, oceans, the relative area of oceans to land, the freshwater cycle, and infrared radiation escaping to space from the top of the atmosphere. IR’s interaction with “man-made” carbon dioxide, lower in the atmosphere, plays a very small role in determining Earth’s regional temperatures. There is energy in the weather, oceans, and the atmosphere’s currents. That reduces IR in the lower atmosphere - the principle of conservation of energy.
Governments and universities in Australia, Europe, and North America, national academies of science, the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, UN IPCC, the Vatican, questionable science advisors like John Holdren, Thomas Cochran, and Michael Mann, elected officials like Al Gore, environmental scare mongers like Bill McKibben at 350.org, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reasearch in Germany are working to destroy Western economies and depopulate the world. They are wrong about catastrophic “man-made” global warming from the use of fossil fuels. Earth’s infrared radiation, coming from the sun-heated land and ocean surfaces, does not cause tiny amounts of man-made carbon dioxide to vibrate violently to overheat the planet. Greenhouse gas climate alarmism from atmospheric carbon dioxide is bad fiction by people determined to force the world to return to its status before the 1800s, with tremendous suffering, manual labor, slave labor, miserable health care, and “almighty” rulers.
Gerald Ratzer, Canadian emeritus professor of computer science and physicist at McGill University
Douglas Lightfoot, retired Canadian professional engineer and mechanical engineer
They are discussing the errors of the UN IPCC climate reports.
What factors most influence the climate on the Earth?
Moon near. Earth distant. Earth near. Moon distant.
Can high school students, their parents, and grandparents understand what determines the climate on the moon and Earth?
Is it necessary to understand the physics of infrared radiation from heated surfaces on land and oceans acting on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to know what determines the weather?
Don’t variations in the weather from place to place and hour to hour, and mass and energy transport in the oceans and atmosphere have a greater influence on Earth’s regional temperatures than infrared radiation emitted from the land and oceans acting on small amounts of atmospheric CO2?
The Sun, the oceans, the freshwater cycle, and clouds are prime factors of weather and climate on the Blue Marble, planet Earth.
Intense local storms and regional weather of all types are determined more by the sun, the oceans, and the entire content of the atmosphere rather than by an IR-supposed greenhouse effect on CO2. Man-made climate change fearmongers are selling a terrible hoax.
The major role of infrared radiation, IR, is to enable energy to escape to space.
The IR warming effect is mainly due to its interaction with atmospheric water vapor, as seen in day and night temperature swings in deserts and moist climates. Clouds also play a significant role.
Conclusions: The climate science of Douglas Lightfoot and Gerald Ratzer is valid, not what their critics claim. They use staticglobal-average-parameter models that are unrealistic for weather and climate. The critics use models of sunlight and infrared radiation, with electromagnetic spectrum graphs that overestimate the effect of IR on CO2 and water vapor in lower elevations. That is because they ignore energy in storms, the freshwater cycle, ocean and atmospheric currents, and their heat.
All carbon dioxide is beneficial for life on Earth. We need to work together against the tremendous threat of man-made global warming alarmists, not waste time on same-side infighting.