Climate Change Is Governed by Hundreds of Factors; the Idea that We Can Manage Climate Change Predictably by Understanding and Manipulating One Politically-Selected Factor (CO2), Is As Misguided As It Gets

What Really Causes Climate Change

The claim by global warming activists that CO2 is the global temperature control knob has been challenged in the peer-reviewed literature. That’s simply not what the earth’s geologic history shows.

As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere than with CO2. “There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather,” Happer and Schmitt wrote.

One peer-reviewed study found the climate of the “ancient” Earth similar to ours—despite CO2 levels five times higher than those today. Geologists reconstructed Earth’s climate belts between 460 and 445 million years ago and found “ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.”

Geoffrey G. Duffy, an award-winning professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who has authored hundreds of scientific studies, pointed out, “Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapor and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.”

In fact, climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, not just CO2.

University of London Professor Emeritus of Biogeography Philip Stott, whom we have already met, rebuts the notion that CO2 is the main climate change driver. “As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets,” Stott wrote in 2008.

Atmospheric scientist Robert L. Scotto, past member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) who has authored or co-authored numerous technical publications and reports, has said, “Based on the laws of physics, the effect on temperature of man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels is minuscule and indiscernible from the natural variability caused in large part by changes in solar energy output.”

--Marc Morano, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2018), e-book.