Much of the ongoing science debate, ignored by almost all media, concerns equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) – the increase in the global temperature that will follow a doubling of atmospheric CO2. When green activists talk of ‘settled’ science, they refer to their certainty that humans drive all or most of the changes in the climate. But this political certitude is far from settled among scientists, notably those who study physics and chemistry.
Nobody actually knows what the ECS figure is, so estimates are made all the way up to 6°C. These are then used in climate models, which have spent the last 40 years producing inaccurate forecasts.
In addition, a worst case prediction or ‘pathway’ called RCP8.5 assumes that temperatures will rise by 5°C in less than 80 years. This ‘pathway’ was quoted in 57% of the disaster scenarios in the recent doomsday IPCC report.
No Tricks Zone highlighted a recent paper from the German physics Professor Dieter Schildknecht from Bielefeld University. This work suggested that a further atmospheric increase of CO2 beyond 300 parts per million (it currently stands at around 418 ppm) “cannot lead to an appreciably stronger absorption of radiation, and consequently cannot affect the Earth’s climate”.
This finding is one of many that suggest the ability of CO2 to radiate heat back to the Earth’s surface declines rapidly after a certain point. Professor Schildknecht finds that doubling CO2 leads to 0.5°C warming as ”absorption reaches close to 100%”. He concludes that the effect of an anthropogenic CO2 increase on the Earth’s climate is “fairly negligible”....<<<Read More>>>...
