Warming, you say?
Even if the weather leaves you cold, there is no escaping the announcements of heat records following one another in the media. The alarmist hype describes a planet on the verge of boiling. As Antonio Guterres declared in July 2023,“the era of global warming has ended” (sic), “the era of global boiling has arrived”[1] (sic).
Yet, on a geological scale, we are living in one of the coldest periods...
The Washington Post, between two announcements of temperature records[2], reported in September on a study published in Science[3] on a new reconstruction of the climate over the past 485 million years[4].
This study puts the remarks of the UN Secretary-General and the litany of temperature records into perspective. This new graph does not differ much from the data already available to us[5] but the Washington Post, perhaps mischievously, added a few annotations such as the arrival of vertebrates (390 million years ago), of mammals (225 million years ago) and the extinction of the dinosaurs (65 million years ago).
The article nonetheless remains catastrophist, pointing to the latest “unprecedented” (sic) rebound in temperatures towards 15°C. Apart from our last cycle of glaciations, which is a recent phenomenon on a geological scale, one has to go back some 330 million years to find a climate this cold.
Above all, the planet seems to be cooling. The average temperature when vertebrates and mammals appeared was around 25° C, i.e. 10°C more than today. We still have a huge margin before boiling point.
The thermal inertia of air makes the idea of the planet warming through a marginal change in the composition of its atmosphere a difficult one. As a reminder, there is 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 cannot counter the laws of thermodynamics. When solar radiation stops, because of a cloud or sunset, our atmosphere quickly gives off its heat, owing to its very low inertia, and through convection currents.
Only the oceans can provide planetary central heating when the sun’s pilot light is “switched off”. The thermal inertia of water, for an equal volume, is about 3300 times greater than that of air, no less. To put it another way, you will never manage to heat your bathwater with a hairdryer.
Finally, let us remember that historically, temperature changes have preceded those of CO2 by 600 to 800 years[6] and that the causal relationship between the two is complex[7]. However, if the positive feedback between CO2 and temperature were strong enough to trigger an uncontrollable runaway, the Earth would have experienced phases of continuous warming, which has never happened despite CO2 levels ten to twenty times higher than today.
These fundamentals are elementary, but the public’s weak grasp of science allows this catastrophist discourse to persist, “Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning” (A. Guterres)[8] whose absurdity is matched only by the corruption that reigns in a science subservient to ideology.
Réginald de Potesta de Waleffe for BAM
Standfirst and illustration by BAM!
[1] Hottest July ever signals ‘era of global boiling has arrived’ says UN chief | UN News
[2] 4 hottest days ever observed raise fears of a planet nearing ‘tipping points’
[3] A 485‑million‑year history of Earth’s surface temperature | Science
[4] Scientists calculate Earth’s temperature changes over 485 million years - The Washington Post
[5] Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
[6] Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III | Science
[7] Revisiting causality using stochastics: 2. Applications | Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
[8] Hottest July ever signals ‘era of global boiling has arrived’ says UN chief | UN News