Physicists’ Lab Experiment Shows A CO2 Increase From 0.04% To 100% Leads To No Observable Warming

Two University of Oslo physicists designed several variations of a tabletop experiment trying to confirm the IPCC’s claimed CO2-forcing capacity. Instead they found (a) 100% (1,000,000 ppm) CO2 “heats” air to about the same temperature that non-greenhouse gases (N2, O2 [air], Ar) do, and (b) no significant temperature difference in containers with 0.04% vs. 100% CO2.

Observations, experiments do not support a large forcing effect for CO2

Real-world outdoor observations indicate that even a massive variance in the CO2 concentration, from 0.1% to 75% during a 24-hour period over a mofette field, has no detectable effect in stimulating changes to the surface temperature. Instead, the CO2 concentration changes in response to the temperature.

Indoor tabletop experiments also demonstrate there is a very small temperature difference when adding 100% CO2 to a container. And even this tiny temperature change can be attributed to the reduction in convective cooling effect of adding CO2 molecules, not the radiative or “greenhouse” effect of CO2.

There is also no temperature difference detected when comparing CO2’s “heating” capacity to that of a non-greenhouse gas like Argon (Wagoner et al., 2010), as the “temperature rose by approximately the same amount and at the same rate as for CO2” when 100% Argon was used.

Another study questions claims of CO2’s temperature-forcing effect

And now a recently published study (Seim and Olsen, 2020) further affirms these experimental observations. The authors tested the forcing effects of increased IR radiation on temperature using a specially-designed meter-long chamber, a 500 watt halogen bulb, and IR radiation detectors.

The fundamental assumption of the greenhouse theory is that increasing the CO2 concentration by a factor of 2 or more (i.e., from 0.03% to 0.06%) leads to 2 to 4 degrees of additional warming (at least), aligning with expectations from the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

Instead of observing these strong temperature responses to increasing CO2 concentrations, Seim and Olsen found there is almost no effect at all – perhaps an additional 0.15°C at most – when adding pure (100%) CO2 to a halogen-heated chamber (+30°C). There isn’t even a detectable difference in temperature when comparing the temperature effects of CO2 to a non-greenhouse gas like Argon.

The results of these experiments led the authors to “question the fundament of the forcing laws used by the IPCC.”

Image Source: Seim and Olsen, 2020

Notable quotes from the Seim and Olsen, 2020 study:

• “[T]he idea that backscatters from CO2 is the main driver of global temperatures might be wrong.”

• “[T]he temperature [in a thermophile] with [100%] CO2 increased slightly, about 0.5% [an additional 0.15°C for a container heated from 20°C to 50°C].”

• “We do not observe any significant difference in the two curves due to the increase in the CO2 concentration from ca. 400 ppm to about 100% in the front chamber.”

• “The results of our study show the near-identical heating curves when we change from air  [N2, O2] to 100% CO2 or to Argon gas with low CO2 concentration.”

• “The warming of the Al-plate was also measured, but no extra heating was found by filling CO2 in the front chamber.”

• “These findings might question the fundament of the forcing laws used by the IPCC.”

46 responses to “Physicists’ Lab Experiment Shows A CO2 Increase From 0.0446 To 10046 Leads To No Observable Warming”

  1. Huruh

    Scientific research publishing is not a serious journal.

    1. Aussie

      I note that you do not attempt to actually address the content and conclusions of the study mentioned. Far easier to just try to divert attention by fallacious argument.

      This is typical fare for alarmists and needs to be called out whenever it occurs as it makes proper debate impossible. But that is probably the aim of those who employ it…

    2. tom0mason

      Huruh, is not a serious critic of the data, methods or results of the actual experiments performed.
      Huruh appears to be just another non-serious true believer in CO2 warming effect; aka an apostle for the church of anthropological global warming, and all the irrationally that the belief system requires.

      This good paper appears to have ruffled the feathers of this AGW believer, and this must have merit!

    3. Luigi

      Nature published an article from China stating that there is no COVID infection from normal contacts without masks. The Article from China observing the situation now in Wuhan.
      And despite Nature is a serious and respectable journal, I still see lockdowns and masks everywhere in Europe and the USA.

      The the point is: is it a matter of science or of politics?
      The answer is: it’s a matter of politics.
      Politicians take their decisions, draw a program and then they only seek consens. Until surveys state that people believe them, they go on. And mainly they cannot say “we were wrong” because the opposition would attack them.

      That’s why we have run in such absurd situations in which we are told that cooling is due to global warming, articles are accepted by “respectable” journals only if they agree with the political line (otherwise reviewers find flaws).

      So where is honesty here?

  2. BobW in NC

    Great Post!!!

  3. Jonas

    Not one day too late. Experiment is the king of physics.

  4. pochas94

    You have to be careful of items in local thermal equilibrium. Items you put in an oven, or in your living room, will all come to the same temperature regardless of composition. This is Kirchoff’s radiation law which applies to air, CO2, or anything. To answer the CO2 question you need a far-from-equilibrium situation such as the sun-earth-space system. It does make a small difference what color you paint a satellite, and it would make a small difference what “color” the earth appears from space. Not to us, but to an alien that can see in the infrared.

  5. Aussie

    Allmendinger , a Swiss researcher, conducted similar experiments and came to the same conclusion.

    The continual assumptions that CO2 is in fact a greenhouse gas need to be challenged. We have temperatures in the past not correlated with CO2 changes, so either the CO2 forcing is very weak or the other factors completely overwhelm it.

    We need to applaud these researchers for taking a back to basics approach.

    1. Yonason

      I linked to his material in a post awaiting moderation, but here’s a good one that was featured on Jennifer Marohasy’s blog.
      http://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/03/recycling-of-heat-in-the-atmosphere-is-impossible/
      As he shows, there are pitfalls to ignoring the details.

  6. EdB

    Any delta heating will, if confined, be converted to delta pressure.

    If not confined, the initial volume will expand, thus limiting the temperature rise.

    Did the box sufficiently constrain the volume of gas or air?

    A temperature change of 2C on 288 K is only 0.7%

    A volume change of 0.7% is trivial if the box is not made of steel. Unfortunately, it is lined with styrofoam, with a flexible reflective covering.

    I would expect only i tiny temperature change.

    1. Yonason

      “If not confined, the initial volume will expand, thus limiting the temperature rise.” – EdB

      You mean like the atmosphere?

      1. EdB

        Yes, exactly like the atmosphere.

    2. Roy Martin

      Small holes were made in each chamber to keep pressure constant – see caption for Figure 3.

  7. Yonason

    Others have done related experiments. You will find some here…
    http://www.biocab.org/Index.html

  8. Erast van Doren

    Greenhouse effect comes from higher effective emission height in presence of CO2. No table-top experiment can simulate that. Therefore, all such experiments are complete and utter nonsense. You should be ashamed to have published such BS.

  9. Jon-Anders Grannes

    Norway 1 April? Could be a prank?

    1. Jon-Anders Grannes

      The Study is from 2020 so forget my comment above.

  10. Harry Dale Huffman

    There is no real-world “greenhouse effect” due to “greenhouse gases”. There is no “radiation forcings” of the global mean temperature, at any level in the real atmosphere.

    The standard, and inescapable correction of all of today’s “climate science”, remains my comparing the temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus with those of Earth, at points of equal pressure and over the full range of tropospheric pressures on Earth.

    Everyone is wasting their efforts and their very lives by ignoring the Venus/Earth comparison. The consensus science is both backwards and upside down, by taking temperature to be a function of radiation, rather than the truth of the very reverse of that purported cause-and-effect.

    And in such a situation, of global and universal incompetence among the supposed “experts”, “peer review” as practiced in the journals is a total fraud, as they all think they “know” the “settled science”.

    1. EdB

      Where can I find such a comparision?

      1. Brett Keane

        Ed, Harry used the Nasa planetary data if I remember right. Works wherever our Voyagers etc. measured in tropopauses. Brett Keane

        1. Brett Keane

          Whoops EdB – I think I meant Tropospheres!

  11. A C Osborn

    These experiments go back a long way to Arrhenius and Ankstrom.
    Frank Very of the USA did a very good round up of the tests and understanding back in those days and published this document.

    ftp://ftp.library.noaa.gov/noaa_documents.lib/NOAA_historic_documents/WB/Bulletin/Bulletin_G.pdf

    His results mirror those of this latest experiment.
    As do another recent experiment using natural CO2 releases from a Lake

  12. KJERNEKRAFT, MILJØ OG KLIMA – IvarS.no
  13. Zoe Phin

    Nice

  14. L'esperimento di laboratorio dei fisici mostra che un aumento di CO2 dallo 0,04% al 100% porta a un riscaldamento non osservabile

    […] Fonte: No Tricks Zone […]

  15. TL Winslow

    There’s never been any need to perform kiddie lab experiments to verify basic thermal physics. In light of the U.N. IPCC’s fake claims of mysterious CO2 “back radiation” of so many watts per square meter that acts like a second Sun, the only valid experiment would be to fill one tube with water and dirt and gaseous CO2 and shine a 5500C Sun lamp on it, then see if CO2’s back radiation could heat up a second tube filled with water and dirt at OC. Zonk!

    CO2’s weak puny 15 micron photons have a Planck radiation temperature of -80C (colder than dry ice), which can’t melt an ice cube. There is just no heat in -80C. Atmospheric CO2 can’t even interfere with Earth surface radiation, whose normal temperature range is -50C to +50C. That radiation just passes it by. The CO2 greenhouse gas theory isn’t a theory, it’s a fake physics hoax.

    Now the CO2 hoaxers are changing the goalposts by claiming that CO2 releases its “heat” higher and higher in the atmosphere, forcing the surface to warm to maintain the “energy balance”. If there were such a thing, the only way the Earth’s surface can be warmed is if more HEAT RADIATION radiated it. With the Earth, the only heat radiation is the 5500C photons from the Sun, which because of all the cooling processes can’t raise surface temperatures much higher than 50C, after which the surface radiates that heat back toward space to cool.

    The atmosphere isn’t a greenhouse, it’s a giant chimney that just cools the surface of solar heat. The Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits a blanket from raising your body temperature, only allowing it to slow cooling. Just the same, nothing in the atmosphere can raise Earth surface temperatures, only slow cooling. It’s not radiation but convective cooling that moderates temperature swings to make the surface livable, not CO2 “back radiation” or phantom feedback from the upper atmosphere.

    The IPCC was founded and thrives on mass ignorance of thermal physics. To fight them and their beehive of lies I’m providing a free Climate Science 101 course that will arm anybody’s mind to fight them and win, if they won’t shut you out or cancel you first. It’s good to win every argument.

    http://www.historyscoper.com/climatescience101.html

  16. Labor-Experiment: Eine CO2-Zunahme von 0,04% auf 100% würde keine merkbare Erwärmung mit sich bringen! – EIKE – Europäisches Institut für Klima & Energie
  17. Labor-Experiment: Eine CO2-Zunahme von 0,04% auf 100% würde keine merkbare Erwärmung mit sich bringen! – Climate- Science.press
  18. Amit

    CO2 increase is a real problem. Most of the countries are working on it but it is very surprising that on one hand, they try to minimize the CO2 emissions and on the other hand they are in the mass production of CO2. Lets take an example of Space missions and Aeroplanes. How much they deteriorate our nature by producing such a huge amount of CO2. And most interesting is that international Aviation emission is not counted for that country – https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation

    Big countries are also contributing to CO2 emission through cars. Nearly 70% CO2 emission coming from the road transportation especially from cars. If we take an average family car like Ford Focus 2000cc, https://suggestrank.com/compare/cars/11441/Ford-F-250%20Super%20Duty-2016-vs-Ford-Fusion%20Energi-2016-vs-Ford-Focus-2016 – it will produce almost 130 gm CO2 per KM. On average in one year, if it travels 20,000KM, then it will produce almost 2500 KG of CO2. Which is too much?

    My overall point is Countries have to work seriously on their intention to reduce CO2 emission in our lovely atmosphere.

  19. pochas94

    One of the early attempts to demonstrate or debunk the greenhouse effect was Wood’s 1909 experiment. Here is a later replication of Woods experiment, by Vaughan R. Pratt of Stanford University. I wish he had placed an opaque sheet on the glass for comparison. His conclusion:

    “Wood’s apparatus and methodology are unsuited to answering his question as to whether IR-trapping materials are capable of significant warming, because the addition of glass to the salt box rendered the two boxes either the same or differing at most in the amount of glass used. Furthermore the variation within the boxes dwarfs the variation between the boxes, making any single measurement of temperature in each box meaningless without recognizing and compensating for that effect.”

    http://clim.stanford.edu/WoodExpt/

    1. Yonason

      I’m not sure why Wood didn’t mention why he used glass – perhaps because everyone back then didn’t have to be told? My guess is that he used it because about 1/2 the light from the sun is IR, and the first half of the expt was to see what effect IR trapped inside the box was, and the second half, with the glass over both, was to block the solar IR to prevent it from influencing the result (presumably especially in the box with the salt window (transparent to IR). There is a slight difference between the with and without glass over both, but it’s hard to say if it’s meaningful, since it’s so small.

  20. david russell

    This experiment looks solid to me. The paper is marred by a number of silly narrative mistakes, but they are irrelevant to the conclusion. Indeed the conclusion I reach is that CO2-based AGW is disproven.

    1. Denis Ables

      “disproven”. ? Yes, but they never had any evidence that CO2 was having a significant impact on global warming.

  21. Denis Ables

    Before we begin boosting little reflecting mirrors into orbit, or spend trillions fighting global warming perhaps we should first consider the big picture. Mother Nature’s likely forth-coming increase in average cloud cover may be just as effective.

    Nowadays ice ages are referred to as “glaciations”, apparently because it is now recognized that our planet has been experiencing a 65 million year cooling trend. Over the past 1.3 million years there have been 13 glaciations, average duration 90,000 years, each followed by a warming period (such as we now enjoy) average duration 10,000 years.

    Google “Post-Glaciation Sea Level Rise” and/or “12,000 year graph of sea level” if the graph does not appear in place of this comment.

    This graph sends an important message because it very likely reflects typical sea level response during any of the past 13 warming periods. About 6,000 years ago the RATE of increase in sea level began to decrease and that decreasing rate has continued. Our current rate of increase is a minuscule 1 to 3 mm per year. Glacier melt is apparently ending. During this warming period sea level has increased more than 400 feet. The alarm about rising ocean levels during the past several decades involves the last few inches of sea level increase. CO2 increase is brought on, at least partially, by recent human activity which began around the mid 1800s. However, there was at least one cooling period between 1945 and 1975, even as CO2 was steadily increasing. The popular belief is that increasing CO2 causes global warming which not only warms the oceans, but also causes glacier melt.

    However, there is no evidence that CO2 has ever had any impact on our global temperature. The proponents of warming have authored numerous computer models to justify their position. But these models all assume that CO2 causes warming and, further, that the actual culprit is water vapor feedback which generates 2 to 3 times the temperature increase as supposedly brought on by CO2 increase.

    A recent experiment demonstrates that neither .04% nor 100% CO2 has little, if any, impact on global warming. Since that experiment shows that CO2 has little impact on warming this also rules out the possibility of any significant impact by water vapor feedback. In any event the assumption about water vapor feedback depends on the applicability of the greenhouse gas theory to the open atmosphere. The GHG theory brings with it a necessary condition – there must also be a warmer region about 10km above the tropics, a “hot spot”. Despite decades of radiosondes that hot spot has never been found. The alarmists attempted rebuttal about that missing hot spot offers little more than speculation as to where that missing hot spot may have gone.

    If this 1.3 million year trend continues then expect another glaciation in the near future. (“near” may involve a few decades). In any event, another foot or two of water covering the Big Apple is hardly as concerning as sitting under a mile high glacier for most of the next 90,000 years.

    There’s more. Sun activity (sun spots) has recently gone quiet. Sun activity has driven both warming and cooling during the past 800,000 years according to Don Easterbrook (geologist). His book “The Solar Magnetic Cause of Climate Changes and Origin of the Ice Ages” is available at Amazon. No computer models needed, only data. John Casey also talks about sun influence in “Dark Winter”.

    Henrik Svensmark, Danish physicist, was claiming the same back in the 90s. Svensmark’s theory is that cosmic rays entering the lower atmosphere contribute to cloud cover. (CERN has long since validated Svensmark’s theory.) The normally unchanging stream of cosmic rays entering the lower atmosphere are partially blocked when the sun is active because of its magnetic field. An active sun therefore results in fewer cosmic rays entering the lower atmosphere hence lower average cloud cover which implies that more sun radiation reaches the earth’s surface hence a warmer earth. When the sun is inactive the earth receives more cosmic rays which leads to more cloud cover. More sun radiation is reflected back to space so less reaches the earth’s surface which leads to cooling. Cloud cover dictates climate.

    The sun has been active until recently which supposedly brought on our current warming. But recently the sun has become quiet so average cloud cover should be increasing and a cooling should follow. Some indications of the arrival of cooling are the temperature “hiatus” since 2016, (see Dr. Roy Spencer’s graph) also February 2021 was the coolest in about four decades, and Texas recently experienced a record cold winter.

  22. NASA Pushes Propaganda For Kids: Casts Greenhouse Gases As Superheroes That ‘Turn Into Tiny Heaters’

    […] Contrary to NASA’s claims, CO2 molecules do not act “exactly how” the walls of a greenhouse do. Real-world experiments have shown CO2 is no more or less effective at “trapping heat” than a non-greenhouse gas like Argon…. […]

  23. NASA Pushes Propaganda For Kids: Casts Greenhouse Gases As Superheroes That ‘Turn Into Tiny Heaters’ – Climate- Science.press

    […] Contrary to NASA’s claims, CO2 molecules do not act “exactly how” the walls of a greenhouse do. Real-world experiments have shown CO2 is no more or less effective at “trapping heat” than a non-greenhouse gas like Argon is, and…. […]

  24. NASA Pushes Propaganda For Kids: Casts Greenhouse Gases As Superheroes That ‘Turn Into Tiny Heaters’ | What Causes Global Warming

    […] Contrary to NASA’s claims, CO2 molecules do not act “exactly how” the walls of a greenhouse do. Real-world experiments have shown CO2 is no more or less effective at “trapping heat” than a non-greenhouse gas like Argon…. […]

  25. NASA Pushes Kiddie Disinfo: Calls Greenhouse Gases Superheroes That ‘Turn Into Tiny Heaters’ – Need Change Now

    […] Real-world experiments have shown CO2 is no more or less effective at “trapping heat” than a non-greenhouse gas like Argon is, and…. […]

  26. NASA Pushes Kiddie Disinfo: Calls Greenhouse Gases Superheroes That ‘Turn Into Tiny Heaters’ | altnews.org

    […] Real-world experiments have shown CO2 is no more or less effective at “trapping heat” than a non-greenhouse gas like Argon is, and…. […]

  27. NASA Pushes Kiddie Disinfo: Calls Greenhouse Gases Superheroes That ‘Turn Into Tiny Heaters’ – Menopausal Mother Nature

    […] Real-world experiments have shown CO2 is no more or less effective at “trapping heat” than a non-greenhouse gas like Argon is, and…. […]

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this. More information at our Data Privacy Policy

Close