Dr. John Happs M.Sc.1st Class; D.Phil. John has an academic background in the geosciences with special interests in climate, and paleoclimate. He has been a science educator at several universities in Australia and overseas and was President of the Western Australian Skeptics for 25 years. John has published the following books: Climate Change: A Politicised Storm in a Teacup.Climate Change: How Politics and Self-Interests Have Debased Science
We keep hearing that the planet is under threat because of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and that our goal must be to limit that warming to 1.5oC or else! Serial alarmist Al Gore told us in 2006, that we had 10 years left before the Earth: “turnsinto a total frying pan.”
It would appear that we have to put up with even more global warming scare nonsense from the United Nations (UN) Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, as he drones on about the imaginary climate crisis and how the planet is “in intensive care” and on “life support.”
Maintaining the global warming hysteria, Guterres tells us, with no supporting evidence:
“With the planet warming by as much as 1.2 degrees, and where climate disasters have forced 30 million to flee their homes, we are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.”
“No surprise that more and more people in the world don’t believe anymore in an “existential climate crisis. They realize that your familiar scaring-to-death narrative is based on over-heated computer models. Knowing the weakness of these models, why do you keep on talking about an “upcoming climate hell. And why do you still insist on “keeping the net-zero targets.?”
Guterres isn’t interested in facts. His goal is to use climate alarm to gain central control from the UN, so all rational messages about the climate will always be ignored by Guterres who ratcheted up his global warming nonsense to tell us we are now facing “global boiling.” Guterres proclaimed:
“In fact, forget “climate change. Forget “global warming” too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to boil like a cauldron. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.”
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
Guterres and many other politicians have endorsed Marx’s view when it comes to climate change hysteria. Exposing his lack of knowledge about coral reefs and everything else related to the climate, Guterres promoted more climate lies whilst saying that we must keep the global temperature from reaching 1.5oC and, if it reaches 2.0oC, coral reefs around the world will die and, presumably, we are also doomed.
So where did that silly 1.5oC or 2.0oC global warming come from?
In fact, it’s all about politics and control, courtesy of the UN.
We know that the so-called “climate summits” with their serially-failed Conferences of the Parties (COPS) have little to do with global climate. They are smokescreens for the UN’s intent of changing the world and how it is governed and UN officials have never tried to hide their intentions.
Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer was co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, and lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007. Edenhofer was clear about the UN’s ideological goals, saying:
“The climate summit in Cancun —- is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.”
He reiterated what the UN intentions are:
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”
In an interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Nov. 14, 2010) Edenhofer confessed:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
Another UN official, Connie Hedegaard said she doesn’t care about scientific facts or that people would face higher energy costs:
“Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said ‘we were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of the things you have to do in order to combat climate change?”
In 2014, Christiana Figueres replaced Yvo de Boer the Executive Secretary to the UNFCCC, the body responsible for the annual Conferences of the Parties (COPS).
When Figueres, was head of the UNFCCC, she freely admitted that the goal of the UN was never about preventing ecological calamity. Rather, it was about changing the global economic model:
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
And:
“Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.”
The UN has made clear its intention of suppressing capitalism, but who would be made to pay for the universal welfare system they are seeking?
Developing countries would receive on-going payments from those countries that are developed and successful whilst the same successful countries would be expected to lower their standard of living to meet the UN’s demands.
As Roger Franklin observed:
“Given that the UN is a spigot of innovative ideas for emptying the pockets of, well, everyone, not just the rich, and the paucity of proof that it has ever achieved anything worthwhile… .”
The UN has a Commission on Global Governance and this is seen as central to global control:
“Regionalism must precede globalism. We foresee a seamless system of governance from local communities, individual states, regional unions and up through to the United Nations itself.”
One goal would be to persuade western nations to provide climate compensation of $100 billion a year by 2020 to the UN with a commitment to pay 1.5% of their GDP annually.
Paragraph 33 of annex 1 reads:
“By 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least USD 67 billion] [in the range of USD 70-140 billion] per year.”
By demonising carbon dioxide, the UN seeks to de-industrialise developed nations and so the nonsense of a carbon dioxide-driven climate emergency was born, with ridiculous claims that we can control the temperature of a planet by reducing our trivial carbon dioxide emissions. The United Nations, without any empirical evidence, foolishly predicted that, even limiting global temperature to 2.0oC this century, might just avoid dangerous climate change.
Not one piece of evidence was provided to support this ridiculous statement!
In 2018, again without any empirical evidence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed to rapidly escalating risks to the planet, should the global temperature rise between 1.5oC and 2.0oC.
The IPCC also looked at the emission reductions required to attain the mythical 1.5oC limit saying it would require halving global emissions by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century.
Ignoring the climate fluctuations that occurred over the last 10,000 years, Dr. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber convinced Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany (2005-2021) of the need for a 2.0oC target.
Schellnhuber is a well-known climate alarmist with even the media noting his alarmism. DerSpiegel said to Schellnhuber:
“One gets the impression that you are now more activist than physicist.”
Schellnhuber, with other climate alarmists, started a political process that ultimately led to the adoption of that target by the farcical Conferences of the Parties (COP) with their ever-increasing warnings about reaching 2.0oC and the world having to face the many imaginary disasters they continue to prophesise but never materialise.
How many times have we heard about those dreaded “tipping points” that never arrive. Armstrong McKay et al. (1922), in their article:
“Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points.”
They write:
“Climate tipping points are conditions beyond which changes in a part of the climate system become self-perpetuating. These changes may lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity.”
Note the words “could” and “may” and how Armstrong McKay et al. say that:
“Our assessment provides strong scientific evidence for urgent action to mitigate climate change. We show that even the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C is not safe as 1.5°C and above risks crossing multiple tipping points.”
Curiously, nothing “tipped” during the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman WarmPeriod or the Medieval Warm period?
Armstrong McKay et al. failed to provide their strong scientific evidence to justify such alarmism. Neither did they provide an explanation of why we didn’t get runaway global warming at any stage in geological time when global temperatures were much higher than anything we have experienced over the last few hundred years.
The ”tipping point” nonsense appears to be the vehicle for any scientist to jump on board and publish their alarmism without providing any empirical evidence. A classic example of this is seen in the 2023 Global Tipping Points paper from a “cast of thousands” at the University of Exeter. They write:
“More than two hundred authors and 25 institutions have offered their knowledge, time and commitment to engage in researching, discussing and writing on the topics covered in this report.”
They also point out that the report was funded by the Bezos Earth Fund with its billions of dollars to “fight climate change.”
The report was also partnered by the Earth Commission (Global Commons Alliance):
We keep hearing the monotonous nonsense about recent years being the warmest in 125,000 years, despite the fact that we have excellent data about temperatures being much higher at many stages during the 12 thousand years of the Holocene:Interestingly, it was the economist William Nordhaus back in the 1970’s who first mentioned a 2.0oC limit. Without providing any evidence, Nordhaus said:
“As a first approximation, it seems reasonable to argue that the climatic effects of carbon dioxide should be kept within the normal range of long-term climatic variation. According to most sources the range of variation between distinct climatic regimes is in the order of ±5°C, and at the present time the global climate is at the high end of this range. If there were global temperatures more than 2° or 3° above the current average temperature, this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years.”
Nordhaus clearly knew little about the Earth’s climate history over the last 12,000 years and the fact that global temperature has swung back and forth without any input from atmospheric carbon dioxide.
So, why do we know that all those claims that the planet is warming rapidly and a 1.5°C or 2.0°C global temperature rise would be dangerous to life on Earth, are ridiculous? We know they are ridiculous because:
1. Humans survived and thrived in a climate that was between 4 and 8 degrees colder than today without the shelter, clothing and technology that is at our disposal today.
2. Humans thrived during the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Minoan Warm Period and other periods that were much warmer than today and, despite what the climate alarmists say, there are more than 1,200 papers showing that the Medieval Warm Period was significant and global.
Brian Fagan’s book: “The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilisations” looks at the impacts of past climate change, well before there was any talk of carbon dioxide emissions:
(2008, Bloomsbury Press. ISBN 078-1-59691-392-9)
3. Although we hear about “the average global temperature” there really is no such thing, since coverage on land is sparse and almost non-existent over the oceans that cover more than 70% of the planet.
4. Temperatures routinely given out on television and radio reports are commonly recorded in built-up areas and airports where the Urban Heat Island Effect is pronounced. Many of these measurements are corrupted and inevitably read higher than they are in reality.
5. Any claim that 2023, or any recent year, was the hottest year on record is completely without foundation. Putting the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and Minoan Warm Period aside, the more recent claim of a temperature record from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) selected global regions, omitted to point out that the globally dominant regional land areas, including Asia, Europe, U.S., Oceania, the Hawaiian Region, Arctic and the Antarctic showed no significant temperature increase.
6. Natural factors such as volcanic eruptions, cloud cover, solar activity, aerosols, Arctic and Antarctic-ocean circulation, polar vortex breakdown, celestial mechanics and geothermal heat all contribute to climate change with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration having the least impact – if any.
Zhang et al. (2017) used ice core data to produce a record of temperatures over time for the Greenland ice sheet. No evidence was found for increased warming there:
Tree stumps found under the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier in Southeast Iceland have been dated at roughly 3,000 years old and the well-preserved stumps were part of a massive forest that disappeared after a long period when the climate was much warmer than today:
Retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska also revealed the remains of trees which grew more than 2,000 years ago pointing to a much warmer climate at that time:
Retreat of the Quelccaya glacier in the Peruvian Andes has revealed ancient plant life dated at 5,000 years. Dr. Lonnie Thompson noted:
“The climate was warmest from 8400 to 5200 years before present, and that it cooled gradually, culminating with the Little Ice Age (200 to 500 years before present).”
Ribeiro et al. (2011) looked at climate variability in West Greenland, using evidence from a high-resolution marine palynological record from Disko Bay. They concluded that:
“The past 1500 years have been identified as one of the coldest intervals of the last 7000 years in Disko Bay.
Paul Homewood notes that Hubert Lamb was one of the leading climatologists of his time and Lamb commented extensively on the climate of the Holocene, presenting ample evidence to show that, for much of that period, temperatures were warmer than now. He pointed out that:
The northern limit of vineyards with a long history of cultivation lay some 300-500 km north of the limit of commercial vineyards in the 20thC.
In many parts of England there are traces of medieval tillage far above anything attempted in the present century, even in wartime: up to 350 m above sea level on Dartmoor and 320 m in Northumberland.
The tree line and upper limits of various crops on the hills of Central Europe were higher than today.
Mining operations at high levels in the Alps which had long been abandoned were reopened, and water supply ducts were built to take water from points which were subsequently overrun by glaciers and are in some cases still under ice.
In Central Norway the area of farming spread 100-200m up valleys and hillsides from 800 – 1000 AD, only to retreat just as decisively after 1300 AD.
The Viking colonies in W and SW Greenland were able to bury their dead sheep in soil that has since been permanently frozen.
It was also a warm period generally from N Mexico to N Canada, where forest remnants between 25 and 100 km north of the present limit have been found, radio carbon dated between 880 and 1140 AD.
Lamb also made clear that warming was not restricted to the Northern Hemisphere and Homewood summarised a few examples provided by Lamb:
Holloway (1954) has reported evidence from the forest composition of a warmer climate in South Island, New Zealand, between about 700 AD and 1400 AD, than in the centuries before and after.
On the coast of East Antarctica, at Cape Hallett, a great modern penguin rookery seems, from radiocarbon dating tests, to have been first colonised between about 400 and 700 AD, presumably during a phase of improving climate, and to have been occupied ever since.
Climate alarmists ignore the climate history over the Holocene and those who claim that atmospheric carbon dioxide is driving imaginary global warming completely ignore the fact that carbon dioxide has never driven global temperature at any time over the last 500 million years. They also ignore the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased over the last 8,000 years whilst “global” temperature has fallen over that time:Betts et al. (2023) have said:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that there is at least a 50% chance that long-term global warming will overshoot 1.5 °C in the next decade, even with ambitious emissions cuts.”
The IPCC cannot be trusted to give any reliable scientific advice, including global temperature predictions, since we know it is a political/ideological group, spawned from the UN. It is also widely known that the IPCC has committed scientific malfeasance that has been well documented since its inception in 1988.
The global warming hysteria essentially comes from the UN, Green activists, some politicians, financial vested interests and those scientists who shamelessly seek research funding and publications by promoting climate alarmism. The media, not surprisingly, exacerbate the climate alarm, promoting the “Hottest for 125,000 years” mantra whilst ignoring the complete lack of empirical evidence in support of such nonsense.
Climate alarmists ignore the many records that do not show any global warming. Records that have been reported by numerous scientists from around the world and their evidence refuting catastrophic anthropogenic global warming continues to accumulate.
Briner et al, (2016) examined many temperature proxies from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, identifying a long running decline in temperatures over the last 3,000 years. They also found that the Greenland ice sheet has grown over that time.
MacDonald et al. (2000) used radiocarbon-dated macrofossils from across Northern Russia and Siberia to document the last 10,000 years of tree-line history and found that forest advanced to the current Arctic coastline between 9,000 and 7,000 years BP, retreating to its present position as the temperature fell by 2.5oC to 7oC.
Ingolfsson et al. (2010) showed that, although Iceland was heavily glaciated during the last Glacial maximum, present-day ice caps were absent during the mid-Holocene climate optimum.
Kato et al. (2023) used carbonate isotope thermometry from cave stalagmites in central Japan and identified a warm interval during the middle Holocene (approximately 6–5 ka).
We have come to expect global warming alarmism from government-funded organisations such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the UK MET office that claimed the 13.6oC Christmas Day, 2023, temperature was a record and a sign of on-going warming. No mention of the Central England Temperature (CET) that shows no warming trend over the last 20 years:No mention of the 50+ peer-reviewed, published papers showing that any warming that might be occurring somewhere on the planet isn’t global, unprecedented or remarkable.
The Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) has recorded temperature data from the Syowa station in Antarctica since 1977. These data show no warming since 1977:
Li et al. (2017) found that Holocene climate changes in East China resulted from summer solar insolation associated with tropical or subtropical macro-scale climatic circulations such as the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), Western Pacific Subtropical High (WPSH), and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
Li et al. suggest that solar activity has played a key role in driving the climatic fluctuations in North China during the last 22 centuries, with no indication of any unusual warming:
Rydval et al. (2017) reconstructed 800 years of summer temperatures in Scotland from tree ring data and found that summer-time warming in Scotland is likely not unique when compared to multi-decadal warm periods observed in the 1300s, 1500s, and 1730s.
Reynolds et al. (2017) re-constructed North Atlantic marine climate variability using a sclero-chronological network. In their analysis of a network of absolutely-dated annually-resolved growth increment width chronologies from the marine bivalves Glycymeris glycymeris and Arctica islandica, they found no warming trend in North Sea surface temperatures over the last 200 years: Dechnik et al. (2017) studied successive phases of Holocene reef flat development using evidence from the middle to outer Great Barrier Reef, Australia. They found several distinct reef growth phases relative to natural sea level change along the east Australian margin during the Holocene with data pointing to declining sea surface temperatures in the tropical Western Pacific Ocean:
Steiger et al. (2017 produced a global climate reconstruction using data assimilation of water isotope ratios from ice cores, this technique having been widely used due to its reliability in paleoclimatology. They found no evidence of any marked increase in global temperature:
Koutsodendris et al. (2017) looked at climate variability in SE Europe since 1450 AD using a varved sediment record from Etoliko Lagoon in Western Greece. They noted climate instability during the Holocene with marked cooling over the Little Ice Age, being particularly pronounced over the periods 1645-1715 (Maunder Minimum) and 1790-1830 (Dalton Minimum). Koutsodendris et al. attributed the cooling to reduced solar activity.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379117300471
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) do not show any unusual warming across the USA since 2005:Reid (2016) examined the HadCRUT4 time series of 166 annual values of global average temperature both deterministically and stochastically and the results compared. He concluded that:
“There is no significant trend in global average temperature.”
The alarmist media will continue to tell us that 2023 was the “Earth’s hottest year on record” and that the planet is warming dangerously, when data from around the world clearly exposes these lies.
There is no doubt that some regions have shown no significant net temperature changes or trends in either direction for hundreds of years. In contrast, some parts of the Earth have been warming at some point in the last 150 years whilst other regions have been cooling for decades. In fact, there are more than 600 peer-reviewed, published papers that show no global warming:
We can completely ignore what climate models predict since their past predictions have been shown to be spectacularly wrong.Model “warming output” is generated for political purposes in attempts to maintain the media alarmism and to show that Antonio Guterres and the UN are correct in forecasting their “global boiling” nonsense.
Drawing on peer-reviewed, published studies, Gosselin (2023) has provided an excellent summary of failed global temperature predictions made by models:
We can also ignore any predictions of future catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that is promoted by most of the media, especially the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):
We can also ignore any predictions of future catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that is promoted by the alarmist British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC):
The politicised IPCC and the many vested interest groups continue to argue that global temperature is largely controlled by the trivial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Dr. Dennis Hedke responds
“In summary, what the actual evidence shows–not models–is that earth’s temperature is totally independent of CO2 concentration. Any suggestion to the contrary is based on ill-conceived and false conclusions. These are but a few examples of the overwhelming evidence that refutes the current narrative that is driven by media and multiple federal agencies, not the least of which is NASA, NOAA, DoD, and others that have chosen to seek advice from ‘researchers’ whose very livelihood rests on wholly irresponsible, irrational conclusions.”
The US Historical Climate Network has produced data that shows declining temperatures in Arkansas with no link to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels: The politicised IPCC continues to consider the Sun to have a minimal or zero influence on global temperature although Higgs (2023) has provided 33 points that show the Sun and not carbon dioxide is the main driver of climate change.
There is now a large body of evidence pointing to the Sun as the principal driver of climate change. Lightfoot and Ratzer (2022) have shown how the Sun controls the Earth’s temperature daily and over decades and millennia:
Fedorov et al. (2022) have shown that Holocene climate changes and specifically the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period are linked to the long and deep changes in summer insolation:
Dr. Ronan Connolly, from the Centre for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), was critical of the way in which the IPCC continues to promote atmospheric carbon dioxide as the main contributor to climate change:
“The IPCC is mandated to find a consensus on the causes of climate change. I understand the political usefulness of having a consensus view in that it makes things easier for politicians. However, science doesn’t work by consensus. In fact, science thrives best when scientists are allowed to disagree with each other and to investigate the various reasons for disagreement. I fear that by effectively only considering the datasets and studies that support their chosen narrative, the IPCC have seriously hampered scientific progress into genuinely understanding the causes of recent and future climate change. I am particularly disturbed by their inability to satisfactorily explain the rural temperature trends.”
Perhaps the last word should go to Dr. Roy Spencer who reminds us, once again, about the impact of urbanisation on temperatures quoted by the media:
“Over 50% of the population now lives in urban areas, and that fraction is supposed to approach 70% by 2045. This summer we have seen how the media reports on temperature records being broken for various cities and they usually concate urban warmth with global warming even through such record-breaking warmth would increasingly occur even with no global warming.”
In light of the overwhelming evidence that there is no unusual warming of the Earth and no evidence for a carbon dioxide–temperature link, one has to ask the question:
Will the media and vested interests ever admit there is no evidence for carbon dioxide driven catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?
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