In his 1975 book The Genesis Strategy, the late climate scientist Dr. Stephen Schneider reviewed contemporary climate modification proposals to reduce the severe 1960s and 1970s droughts, floods, and extreme weather…which were at that time associated with the ongoing global cooling. One proposal was to eliminate the Arctic’s sea ice by having aircraft dump black soot on the ice pack.
In 1974, Schneider reported that the Earth had warmed 0.6°C from 1880 to 1940, then cooled -0.3°C from 1940 to 1970. He suggested the warming could not have been due to human activity, but possibly the ongoing cooling might have been.
By 1975 Schneider had published a book, The Genesis Strategy, that focused on the creation of human impacts on climate. He reiterated contemporary concerns about the ongoing global cooling and that cooling leads to more extreme weather, droughts, floods, crop failures…
There were many climate modification proposals of the mid-1970s that conventional wisdom suggested would “offset an inadvertent climate change” and “stabilize the climate.” Purposely changing the climate by “creating a stratospheric dust layer” in space, “cutting down tropical forests,” diverting rivers and damming the Gulf stream, and even “creating surface temperature anomalies” could all potentially “relieve” the Earth of droughts, floods, and “gloomy long-range weather forecasts.”
One of the more prominent climate modification proposals was to “eliminate the Arctic Ocean ice pack” by “spreading black particles such as soot by aircraft” over the top of it. It was surmised that decreasing the reflectivity of a large area of the ice “would cause it to disappear in a period of about three years.” It was estimated that 10 million metric tons of soot would be needed to sufficiently blacken the ice; it would take about 500 aircraft 50 days to complete the job.
Another suggestion was to “dam the Bering Strait and pump water from the Arctic Ocean into the Pacific, thereby drawing warm Atlantic water in from the other side and raising the surface temperature enough to melt the ice pack.”
A third method proposed detonating “thermo-nuclear devices” in the middle of the Arctic Ocean to “fragment the ice.”
By the early 1980s Schneider had abandoned global cooling climate modification proposals and hopped onto the nascent global warming scare-mongering popularized by James Hansen.
In 1989 Schneider gave Discover magazine an interview (Jankovic and Schultz, 2017) in which he said climate scientists must choose between telling the truth and being effective in “working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.” The latter choice necessitates capturing the public’s imagination by offering up “scary scenarios” and making “simplified dramatic statements” while avoiding mention of “any doubts we might have.”
This climate-scientist-as-political-activist proposal has been the clarion call for what anthropogenic global warming activism has become today.
The mean July, 2021, temperature for the RURAL volcanic Japanese island of Hachijojima – in the middle of the ocean some 287 kilometers south of Tokyo, was 25.3°C. We plot the data for July going back to 1926:
Cool and wet weather expected to plague Europe into August
The previous three hot and dry European summers of 2018, 2019 and 2020 led “experts” to declare this was all the new normal for future – unless we surrender our freedom to regulatory masterminds.
But no sooner was the ink of that declaration dry, did the weather turn and deliver just the opposite this summer. Across much of Europe it’s been wet and cool. The warnings of permanent summer droughts have evaporated.
Now the latest GFS 10-day forecast for Hamburg area shows rainy weather with high temps mostly in the range of only the mid to upper 60s (18-20°C) as Atlantic lows continue to sweep across northern Europe.
The CFSv2 has continued to gradually cool the month of August in recent weeks and is now projecting a significantly supercooled and wet August 2021 in Central Europe.”
The study shows why burning trees in “sustainable” biomass plants using wood chips imported from around the world and deforestation to make way for wind parks are really bad ideas. Deforestation leads to warming.
And then imagine the effect trees have in sprawling megalopolises. One could easily argue that poor urban planning has been one of the main drivers of warming over the past 100 years. See cities with the most trees here, and here.
Forest ecosystems influence climate on global and local scales, the scientists say in the new study. One important feature of forests is the regulation of ecosystem microclimate.
Shading by trees, evaporation of water, storage of heat in biomass, and energy conversion through photosynthesis cause forests to cool themselves and their surroundings during hot weather. This can prevent damaging maximum temperatures, especially during prolonged heat waves, say scientists from Eberswalde (EUSD) in the study.
The scientist responsible for the study, Jeanette Blumröder, of the University for Sustainable Development, EUSD, states, “Increased logging and a correspondingly greater opening of the canopy drive up the maximum temperatures in the forest.”
0.5°C warmer with 10% less trees
An extensive series of measurements in beech forests and pine forests in northern Germany from the heat summers of 2018 and 2019 confirm that whenever the canopy is opened by 10%, the “average maximum temperatures increase by about half a degree Celsius”.
In a heavily thinned forest with a disintegrated canopy and interspersed with wind turbine access roads, the microclimatic regulation that is characteristic of forests is lost. This leads to severe heat and drought-induced damage and the dieback of old exposed trees in particular, new study finds. Photo: Copyright P. Gosselin
9°C warmer with 67% less biomass
In biomass-poor pine plantations (177 m3 per hectare), the average maximum temperature was 9°C higher than in relatively biomass-rich beech forests (> 565 m3 per hectare).
Over 13°C warmer in opened canopy pine forest
When pine plantations alone are considered, a significant influence of use intensity is also evident: during the hottest day in 2019, the difference in peak temperatures between those with a relatively dense canopy (72%) and those with a particularly open one (46%) was more than 13°C, the authors found.
Deforestation to make way for wind parks leads to severe heat and drought-induced damage and the dieback of old exposed trees . Photo: Copyright P. Gosselin
Trees guard against extreme weather?
Project leader Prof. Dr. Pierre Ibisch summarizes, “The conclusion is that forest managers therefore have some control in climate change over how much the forests entrusted to them heat up and are potentially damaged as a result. Higher biomass stocks and a closed canopy are insurance against extreme weather.”
The paper also critically discusses and casts doubt on previously common silvicultural recommendations to promote forest thinning. Water losses and the risk of heat damage increase with thinning. The authors recommend to keep the canopy as closed as possible (at least 80%) and to use the forests accordingly cautiously. In addition, they confirm the well-known demand to develop the simply structured conifer monocultures into structurally rich mixed deciduous forests as quickly as possible.
CO2 cools the planet?
What the scientists don’s bring up, however, is CO2’s impact on forest growth: More CO2 means more tree growth, which leads to cooling.
Original study: Blumroeder, Jeanette S., Felix May, Werner Härdtle, and Pierre L. Ibisch (2021) Forestry contributed to warming of forest ecosystems in northern Germany during the extreme summers of 2018 and 2019. Ecological Solutions and Evidence. DOI 10.1002/2688-8319.12087. Link to the article and the journal.
Authors:
Jeanette Silvin Blumröder & Prof. Dr. Pierre L. Ibisch Centre for Econics and Ecosystem Management, Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development
Dr. Felix May AG Theoretische Biologie, Institut für Biologie, Freie Universität Berlin
Prof. Dr. Werner Härdtle Institut für Ökologie, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
For further questions, please contact:
Expert contact
Prof. Dr. Pierre Ibisch
Professor for Nature Conservation
Tel.: +49 3334 657-178 pierre.ibisch@hnee.de
Press contact
Corinna Hartwig
Communications and media relations
Tel.: +49 3334 657-227 presse@hnee.de
Dozens of rapid warming and cooling periods episodically occurred throughout the last glacial. However, they have often been dismissed as local-only events. A 2020 study published in Science robustly affirms steeper-than-today warming periods spanned both hemispheres and 23 of 25 were “globally synchronous.”
Geologists have long recognized that Greenland abruptly warmed up by 5 to 16°C “within a few decades to centuries” about 25 times in the last ~100,000 years (Capron et al., 2021).
These past abrupt climate changes do not even require a clear external trigger to explain their provenance. They can simply be “unforced or noise-induced oscillations” internal to the climate system (Capron et al., 2021, Li and Born, 2019).
The magnitude and rapidity of the temperature changes occurring during the last glacial were many times greater than what has been observed in the modern era.
In the last 100 years , for example, Greenland has not experienced any obvious net warming. In fact, not only was the “1919–32 warming trend […] 33% greater in magnitude than the 1994–2007 warming” (Box et al., 2009), but the Greenland ice sheet has not warmed (net) since the early 2000s.
Globally, the average warming rate is just 0.05°C per decade since 1860 (Zhu et al., 2018).
When it’s pointed out that there were about 25 unforced, naturally-occurring abrupt climate changes (called interstadials) much faster and of much greater magnitude than the last few centuries, those wishing to advance the claim that modern warming is human-induced and unprecedented typically suggest these past warming episodes were just local changes specific to Greenland.
But a growing body of evidence from 63 independently published records has led scientists to conclude there was “synchronous timing” (within a few decades) spanning the entire globe – from Greenland to Antarctica to the tropics and mid-latitudes – for 23 of these 25 warming episodes (Corrick et al., 2020).
In other words, modern global warming is no more “special” in its magnitude or speed than the much larger unforced global climate changes internal to the climate system pervading the last glacial period.
Climate alarmism is looking increasingly like organized fraud and deception.
A German YouTube video reveals a number of charts prepared by Tony Heller illustrating how climate alarmists hide data in order to produce an alarming impression of the globe’s climate.
Today we present 4 pairs of charts to show how climate alarmists carefully cherrypick their start points and ignore all the available data in order to create totally phony climate scenarios.
US HEAT WAVES
The first pair looks at US heat waves. The alarmist chart starts at 1960, and so shows what appears to be an alarming trend:
But the data go back much further, and so the heat wave story loses all its alarm:
The first half of 2021 saw a massive 20% drop in wind power consumption in Germany…while “coal power saw a renaissance.”
In the latest climate video, Die kalte Sonne cites a variety of electric utility companies and electric power trade associations concerning electric power consumption in Germany for the first half of 2021.
The share of renewable energies in gross electric power consumption in the first half of 2021 fell from 50% to 43% compared to a year earlier,” Die kalte Sonne reports. “The production of onshore and offshore wind energy decreased by 20%.”
Unfavorable weather conditions
The reason for the steep drop, according to the findings, was due to unfavorable weather conditions. “This year, especially in the first quarter, the wind was particularly still and the sun output was low.”
Solar energy output on the other hand rose a modest 2%.
Coal picked up the slack
So where did all the missing electric power come from?
According to Die kalte Sonne:
Coal energy saw a renaissance. Brown coal [lignite] power plants produced 45.8 terawatt-hours of the net power – that is the power mix that comes out of the outlet. That’s a strong increase of 37.6% compared to 2020, when only 33.6 terawatt-hours were produced.
The net production by black coal power plants also increased, by 38.9% to 20.4 terawatt-hours after 14.4 terawatt-hours in 2020.”
In total, that means total coal power rose from 48 terawatt-hours to 66.2 terawatt hours, a whopping 38% increase!
From 1979-2018 East Antarctica cooled -0.70°C/decade (-2.8°C), West Antarctica cooled -0.42°C/decade (-1.68°C), but the Antarctic Peninsula warmed 0.18°C/decade (0.72°C). Thus, as a whole, the Antarctic continent has cooled by about -1.5°C to -2°C during the same period CO2 rose from 337 to 410 ppm.
“The temperature trend from ERA5 is consistent with that from observations, in which a cooling trend dominates East Antarctica and West Antarctica, while a warming trend exists in the Antarctic Peninsula except during austral summer.”
“The trends in ERA reanalyses and observations are all negative in East Antarctica in all annual and seasons, and the fastest cooling trend appears in MAM, andthe cooling rate of this season is more than 1 °C per decade. In West Antarctica, the ERA5 trends are similar to observation trends, whereas there is a difference between ERA5 trends and ERA-Interim in SON, as reflected in a warming trend in ERA-Interim while a cooling trend is observed in ERA5. ERA5 exhibits a significant cooling trend in annual data, MAM, and JJA, and the trends from ERA-Interim always fail to pass the significance test.”
“It is also worth mentioning that the ERA5 shows a faster cooling rate than ERA-Interim and observations in West Antarctica. Over the Antarctic Peninsula, trends of annual and seasonal temperature means in ERA reanalyses and observations are not significant. ERA5 presents a warming trend with the exception of DJF, as is the case for ERA-Interim and station records.”
Leibnitz scientists find no significant trends for the whole of Germany in terms of heavy rainfall
We hear the message all the time from the German mainstream media and climate alarmists: Weather extremes are becoming more and more frequent, as the recent flood shows.
The two scientists from the renowned Leibnitz research network analyzed data and found no significant trends for the whole of Germany in terms of heavy rainfall.
The abstract:
Climate change is expected to affect the occurrence of heavy rainfall. We analyzed trends of heavy rainfall days for the last decades in Germany. For all available stations with daily data, days exceeding daily thresholds (10, 20, 30 mm) were counted annually. The Mann–Kendall trend test was applied to overlapping periods of 30 years (1951–2019). This period was extended to 1901 for 111 stations. The stations were aggregated by natural regions to assess regional patterns. Impacts of data inconsistencies on the calculated trends were evaluated with the metadata and recent hourly data. Although the trend variability depended on the chosen exceedance threshold, a general long-term trend for the whole of Germany was consistently not evident. After 1951, stable positive trends occurred in the mountainous south and partly in the northern coastal region, while parts of Central Germany experienced negative trends. The frequent location shifts and the recent change in the time interval for daily rainfall could affect individual trends but were statistically insignificant for regional analyses. A case study supported that heavy rains became more erosive during the last 20 years. The results showed the merit of historical data for a better understanding of recent changes in heavy rainfall.”
Regional differences
The paper’s Figure 6 below shows increasing (red) and decreasing (blue) trends of heavy rainfall days with ≥20 mm at rainfall stations, for years (y), summer (s), and winter (w):
Germany as a whole, however, is showing no real overall trend.
A veteran meteorologist calls Germany’s natural catastrophe management a “failed state” after over 200 people were killed despite warnings having been issued days early.
Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann slams Germany’s failure to heed early flood warnings. Image: Twitter.com/kachelmann
In an interview with the online Austrian Der Standard, veteran meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann said it was clear that meteorological warnings of devastating floods in Germany were known to the authorities at an early stage. Yet, over 200 died in the floods in a failure to evacuate on time.
Nothing has changed in years
“When nobody does anything, then there are lots of dead people,” said the Swiss meteorologist. And Kachelmann is not optimistic about Germany’s crusty old emergency management bureaucracy changing any time soon: “I have no doubt that nothing will change in this state of affairs, because nothing has changed for years and decades and many such events in the past.”
“Failed state”
He added: “Germany has long been a failed state when it comes to protecting people from natural catastrophes.” Kachelmann believes that under normal political conditions, the heads of North Rhine Westphalia and Rhineland Palatinate – and that of the regional network of ARD flagship German television – would have to resign.
He told Der Standard that it would be very worthwhile for German natural catastrophe prevention and management authorities to learn from the USA when it come to how to react to natural disasters, e.g. tornadoes and hurricanes.
It’s not the first time the seasoned meteorologist has railed against Germany’s ineptitude when it comes to issuing storm warnings. In 2018, he criticized German public television for what he said was a failure to adequately warn the public before North Sea storm Xavier barreled through northern Germany on October 5, killing 7 people.
CO2 scaremongering and the truth about German floods
By Fred F. Mueller
Last week we saw flood disasters in various areas of Germany and other European countries, especially in the area of the Ahr River, which have not only caused billions in damage, but tragically also claimed up to more than 200 lives. Considering that there had been precise warnings days before, it is hard to understand why the warnings issued by scientists at the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) were hardly listened to.
Initially, the German DWD weather services also the public media warned of “heavy rain” and were late in issuing (if at all) warnings of rapidly rising floods. As a result, people were caught unprepared in many cases and couldn’t save even the most basic necessities. In addition to the numerous fatalities, thousands of residents have seen their livelihoods destroyed.
Alarmists couldn’t even predict 48 hours in advance, let alone 50 years
It is all the more pathetic that now, in the days following the catastrophe, precisely the same “weather and climate prophets” and their mainstream media affiliates now speak of an “unprecedented” catastrophe and blame it on climate change caused by CO2 emissions. These eternal doomsday warners claim they can see 50 or more years into the future, but did not warn of the floods until they were almost here.
Now they are trying to explain away this glitch. A prime example of this was recently provided by German professor Mojib Latif, the chairman of the German Climate Consortium, who has been a media darling for many years. In an interview with the newspaper FAZ (unfortunately now behind a paywall), he was asked directly whether this event was clearly climate or weather related, and delivered a prime example of doublespeak.
He began his answer with the classic: “No, but”, and then went on to blame more or less everything on climate change in a torrent of words. There was talk of warmer air due to climate change, which could absorb more water vapor, and of the Mediterranean Sea, which is also warmer due to climate change and whose evaporation could provide more rain.
A real work of art was his formulations on the new fashionable topic of the climate alarmists: the allegedly weakening jet stream. He described this point as “controversial, but scientifically quite plausible” and spoke in the subjunctive of “could” and “would”.
Latif goes out on a limb
Mr. Latif then became even bolder when asked what was unusual about last week’s floods. He told the FAZ: “Up to now, there has been material damage. Now many people are dying. That was only the case in developing countries before. If we consider the other extremes, such as the heat waves with record temperatures, we as humanity are leaving the comfort zone. Slowly it’s getting dangerous, and I sometimes have the feeling that politicians still don’t get the message.”
Fact-checking Latif’s dramatism
With that, he went quite far out on a limb. Let’s look at the facts about the flood of the Ahr. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary to his statement in the form of historical high water marks (Fig. 1), administrative reports as well as records of local researchers.
Figure 1. Water level marker for the 1804 flood in the suburb of Walporzheim, Pützgasse 9 (Photo: Reinhardhauke, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).
The flood disasters of 1804 and 1910
What was probably the most catastrophic flood event in recent history hit the villages along the Ahr already at a “CO2-free” time in 1804. According to the records of the then French administration, 129 residential houses, 162 barns and stables, 18 mills and eight forges were completely destroyed. In addition, hundreds of houses, barns and stables, as well as two mills and a blacksmith’s shop were severely damaged.
Vineyards and fruit trees in the Ahr Valley were largely destroyed and nearly 30 bridges collapsed. Along with numerous horses and cattle that drowned in the floods, 63 people also lost their lives.
Another catastrophic flood later occurred in 1910. Although it was not quite as powerful as the one in 1804, there was again immense damage to houses and state buildings, as well as to the Ahr Valley Railway, which was just being constructed. Interestingly, between these two historic catastrophes and the current one, the time intervals are just over 100 years.
Has flood intensity increased “due to climate change”?
The frontrunners of “climate catastrophism” in Germany – politicians from chancellor Merkel (Christian Democrats), finance minister Scholz and environment minister Schulze (Social Democrats), Baerbock (Greens), Lindner (Liberals) and Wissler (Leftists) to climate alarmist Mojib Latif and his fellow prophets – are currently exploiting the catastrophe with all their might. Elections are just two months away, and everything must be done to divert public attention from their own failures.
Looking at historical peak discharge
If one doesn’t want to fall for this, one should compare the intensity of the current event with historical examples. Here, on the one hand, the records of Thomas Roggenkamp and Jürgen Herget in the “Heimatjahrbuch Kreis Ahrweiler 2015” are helpful, where they reconstructed the so-called peak discharges of some highwater events between 1804 and 1920. For the last decades and also for the beginning of the current catastrophe, detailed records of the flood reporting service of the State Office for the Environment of Rhineland-Palatinate are available. Their homepage lists both the water levels and the so-called peak discharges of the ten worst flood events of the Ahr River in the years from 1984 to 2016. Although these measuring points are located at different places today than during the earlier floods, the spatial distances are small enough to allow comparisons. What is important here are not so much the respective water level gauge values, because these purely depend on the specific location, but the peak discharge in cubic meters/second (m3/s). This is the flow rate at the peak of the flood wave and allows conclusions to be drawn about the force and destructive power of the flow even on different locations.
Overview of the region
First, it is helpful to get an overview of the region affected by the rainfall, Figure 2:
Figure 2. The flooded area stretches along the Ahr River, from Müsch to Oberwinter. (Graphic: flood reporting service)
The Ahr is a river with a total length of just about 85 km. In quiet times, only some 8 m3/sec of water pass through the Altenahr gauge. In the worst flood of the last 40 years in 2016, on the other hand, at a water level of 371 cm, the flow reached 236 m3/sec, some 30 times as much. In the current flood, the maximum water level was initially given as 575 cm, and later was estimated to be well over 700 cm.
On the homepage of the flood reporting service, the following table was found showing the extent of historical flood events at the Altenahr gauge, Figure 3:
Figure 3. Tabular recording of highwater events for Altenahr (Source: flood reporting service)
It is interesting to note first of all that at least ten highwater events have occurred at the Ahr in the last approx. 40 years, i.e. on average one every four years. The table allows us to determine an approximate correlation between water level and peak discharge with the help of Excel, Figure 4:
Figure 4. The approximation of the data of the flood reporting service with the help of a linear equation provides a quite good coefficient of determination R2 (Graphics: Author)
Furthermore, a maximum water level of 575 cm could be extracted from the following graph on the homepage of the flood warning service, Figure 5:
Figure 5. Graphical representation of the water level measurement data for Altenahr, time 20 July 2021, 13:36 h (Graph: Flood Reporting Service)
Using the water level taken from Figure 5 with the equation shown in Figure 4, we find an approximate peak discharge of 341 m3/s. Interestingly, however, Figure 5 was later exchanged for another one that same afternoon at 4:36 p.m., Figure 6:
Figure 6. Modified graphical representation of the water level measurement data for Altenahr (Graphic: Flood Reporting Service)
The reasons for this exchange can only be speculated. If one assumes a speculative level value of 800 cm for the equation, a peak discharge of 470 m3/s would result according to the above equation. This is almost sixty times the normal water flow.
Which flood was the worst?
As already stated, the climate alarmists are constantly telling us we are in for ever stronger and worse weather catastrophes in the coming decades because of man-made CO2.
Mr. Latif, as one of the most prominent among them, stated in the FAZ interview, referring to the disaster in Ahrweiler: “Up to today, there had been material damage. This time, many people have died. Such consequences were restricted rather to developing countries before. If we also take the other extremes into consideration, such as heat waves with record temperatures, we as humanity are now leaving the comfort zone. So slowly it’s getting dangerous, and I sometimes have the feeling that politicians don’t get it.”
Really? Let’s have a closer look at his “comfort zone with less CO2,” by looking at the flood disasters of 1910 and 1804. Thanks to the meticulousness of the local historians Thomas Roggenkamp and Jürgen Herget, we have reconstructed figures of the peak discharges for both events at hand. For the flood of 1910, the crest value is given as 585 m3/s. The 1910 flood was thus worse but nevertheless largely comparable to the one that the inhabitants of the Ahr valley had to go through now.
1200 m3/s in 1804
However, both are far overshadowed by the disaster of 1804, whose water discharge, with a peak discharge of about 1,200 m3/s, was twice as massive as the 1910 event. Compared to the current flood, the factor is almost threefold.
The fact that the damage and loss of life were so great this time is due to the fact that many more people live in the affected region today than 100 or even 200 years ago, and our possessions are worth much more than they were back then. CO2 on the other hand, virtually did not play any role back then.
Facts contradict “follow the science”
In view of these facts, it becomes clear how quickly the “scientists” who constantly want to make us believe in the “climate catastrophe caused by man-made CO2” can be refuted by simple, hard reality. In 1804 mankind had produced almost no CO2 at all and in 1910 only negligible amounts of the gas. These people with their high-sounding academic titles and their fuss with complicated computer programs act as if they could predict the future for decades or even centuries. Yet they have all too obviously failed at the purely practical task of warning the inhabitants of the imminent danger. They, the politicians and the journalists who spread their messages as if they were definitive wisdom, bear responsibility: not for the fact of the flood, but for the lack of preparation and warning of the population. And this is exactly what they want to distract from with the propaganda offensive for “more climate protection” that is currently being launched in pre-election Germany on a really massive scale.
Forty to 50 years ago there was “general agreement” in estimates of the resulting radiative forcing (1 to 2 W/m²) and surface temperature change (0.5°C ±0.3°C) when directly doubling CO2 concentrations from 280 to 560 ppm. By the late 1980s the “consensus” estimates doubled to 3.7 W/m² forcing and 1.2°C warming instead. Apparently “basic physics” changed.
It is today considered IPCC-endorsed“settled science” that doubling CO2 concentrations from their preindustrial value (280 ppm to 560 ppm) directly leads to a temperature change of 1.2°C without the alleged positive feedbacks with water vapor and clouds to amplify this warming further.
As recently as the early 1980s, however, the “general agreement amongst different modelers” put the global surface temperature change resulting from doubling CO2 “between 0.2 and 0.4K.”
In 1984 Andrew Lacis – the scientist who later claimed CO2 is the Earth’s temperature control knob – co-authored a paper that put the radiative forcing response to doubling CO2 at “only 1 – 2 W/m²” , which is the temperature equivalent of between about 0.2 and 0.8°C.
Again, 1 to 2 W/m² and 0.2 to 0.8°C were the norm for the no-feedback climate sensitivity estimates throughout the 1970s and first half of the 1980s, or before the “consensus” opinion doubled these values in the late-1980s.
In the early 1970s, it was also the “consensus” that the spectral band where CO2 exerts its radiative effect is saturated or nearly so, which means diminished warming the more CO2 rises. Thus, multiplying CO2 by a factor of 6 or 8 will still produce less than 2°C warming.
Low climate sensitivity estimates became a problem for those wishing to portray CO2 as much more influential variable. By the mid-1980s it became more and more acceptable to say doubling CO2 produces a forcing of 3.7 W/m² and a warming of 1.2°C. And to this day these values are assumed to be “basic physics.”
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