Pope Leo XIV, the newly elected pope, has recently championed the Vatican’s plan to become the world’s first carbon-neutral state by developing a large solar farm on land near Rome. This initiative is inspired by the environmental legacy of Pope Francis and aims to generate enough electricity to meet the Vatican’s needs and potentially provide excess energy to the local community. The Vatican’s efforts are part of a broader push for climate action, with Leo XIV actively promoting the transition away from fossil fuels and emphasizing the moral imperative of environmental stewardship. He also took part in the “Raising Hope for Climate Justice” International Conference in Castelgandolfo, Italy on Oct 1, where he blessed a chunk of a Greenland iceberg. See the picture:
Pope Leo asked eloquently: “What must be done now to ensure that caring for our common home and listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, are seen and felt as divisive issues?”
“Everyone in society, through nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls,” the pope said.
“Citizens need to take an active role in political decision-making at national, regional and local levels,” he said. “Only then will it be possible to mitigate the damage done to the environment.”
What they still do not know is that rising CO2 levels is responsible for less than 10% of the climate change, and water in all its forms; ice, water, water vapor and clouds is responsible for over half of climate change. Land use changes are also more important. Let me explain it further:
Many years ago, around 1976 Dr. James Lovelock bought a number of Hewlett Packard 5840 Gas Chromatographs to be set up in some of the most remote places of the earth to study pollution and its effect on the climate. What he found was an unexpectedly large amount of dimethylsulphide (DMS) in the atmosphere, and that acted as a
condensation point for cloud formation. He was then a longtime paid consultant for Hewlett Packard, so he came over from his native England a couple of times a year, always willing to hold a seminar for us engineers working at Hewlett Packard Analytical, and at one of them he sprung “Daisy-world” on us before it was published; mostly to see if we could poke holes in his hypothesis. It involved a world that consisted of only two flowers, black daisies and white daisies. The computer simulation starts out with a cold world and a weak sun. The sun slowly warms up (about 1 percent every ten million years), and at some time suddenly black daisies appear and cover the earth. This warms the earth some more and white daisies appear. As the sun varies in intensity the mix of white and black daisies changes and this keeps the earth at a stable temperature, as they have different reflective properties. He then went on to say that the whole earth is like a living organism. Some time later he presented the paper and afterwards we asked him how it was received. “You won’t believe it”, he answered. ”Now there are people who actually believe the earth is a living organism. They demand follow-up articles that justifies their belief.” He had partly himself to blame, the name he had chosen was “the GAIA hypothesis,” Gaia being the Mother Earth Goddess. Talking about religion the Mother Earth people now had their goddess, and expressions like. “The earth has a temperature” became commonplace. For me, being a Christian I read with wonderment what God has to say about Creation and the Ecosystem.
Starting in Genesis 1:1; In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This can be described in scientific terms: From nothing God created space and matter. What happened to “In the beginning”? It turns out that matter has to be accompanied with space or it will not work. And time is a derived property from the existence of matter and space. Without space and matter time does not exist. So the creation of matter and space also defined the beginning of time. What about God? The laws of physics tells us you cannot create something out of nothing. This proves that we and everything else cannot possibly exist. But we do, and therefore there must have been something existing before anything existed. This is God, and He can be defied in one word: Presence. When Moses saw the burning bush he asked who it was. And God answered “I am that I am”, in a way describing the eternal presence, without beginning and end. This is the God I believe in: Out of time and space since He created it, and also in time and space since it is part of His creation.
The expression “in the beginning” is in Hebrew bereshit which means in the beginning. The same phrase begins the gospel of John 1:1 “Inthebeginning was theWord, and theWord was with God, and theWord was God.” Here the word translated beginning is “Arch” like in archangel and means “the chief” or “the most important one’ referring to the Word. It is in past tense which means that the Word existed before the beginning. Another reference is found in Titus 1:1 “inthe hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before thebeginning of time,” In this verse the word eternal and the word time is in Greek aionion , which means a very long time, like the time span of a dynasty. Nowadays eon has a meaning of a thousand million years in Geology and Astronomy, but the original meaning is a very long time which may or may not be defined. It is sometimes translated of the ages. Here is a song that spiritually speaks to me:
The normal state of the Earth is being in an ice age. If there were no greenhouse gasses at all, the temperature average for the earth would be about -20 C. But there are greenhouse gasses that increases the present world average temperature to about 15 C.
The earth every now and then warms up and enters an interglaciary period, and then slowly cools down again. People have noticed that for the last few ice ages the CO2 levels have closely tracked temperature, at least for Antarctica.
From this chart we can see that for an 18F (10 C) rise in temperature the CO2 level rose 85 PPM. Today;s CO2 level is 425 ppm, a rise of about 165 ppm from pre-industrial levels of about 260 ppm. If the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature still holds we should experience a temperature rise of about 9C for an average temperature on earth to rise to about 23 C (73F) in the near future.
This must be some of the information fed to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he pleaded for immediate radical action on climate change, saying that record-shattering July temperatures show Earth has passed from a warming phase into an “era of global boiling”.
In the book “An inconvenient truth” Al Gore used a very similar chart from the Vostok research site in Antartica, and he used the temperature scale in deviation from normal, hiding the fact that it showed temperatures in Antartica which are not very representative for average temperatures on earth. While the CO2 concentration is about the same everywhere on earth, 20,000 years ago it was about 180ppm. In Vostok, Antarctica the corresponding water vapor concentration was about 50 ppm in the Antarctic winter.
Al Gore chose the Antarctic to show the correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, but does that hold for the rest of the earth?
It was in Antarctica the last Ice age began to end; 19,000 years ago. Why did it end?
To answer that we must look at the
Right now the Earth is near its most circular path, nearing optimum,which is a very good place to be, minimizing yearly temperature cycles globally
Likewise the obliquity angle is about half way between minimum and maximum and is slowly decreasing.This is also good.
The most important of the cycles is the precession cycle. 19,000 years ago it gave most annular heat to the southern hemisphere. This does not normally trigger an end to the ice age, only every 16th cycle or so, when all cycles work together plus the influence of Jupiter and Saturn.One way to describe it is like the rotation in a tilt-a-whirl, popular in many county fairs. You sit peacefully in your car and go around and up and down and nothing happens, and suddenly the centrifugal forces pins you to the back of the car, the more the merrier. But for it to happen, all forces must come together. There could have been a large ice berg break-off, a volcanic eruption spewing ash over the southern hemisphere, an earthquake or a meteoric impact causing a tsunami that caused the start of the beginning of the end of the ice age. One thing is sure, there was no anthropogenic origin (rising CO2 didn’t start it), The question is:
Which came first, rising temperature or rising CO2 level?
The only way to answer that question is to measure what actually happened.
(from LiveScience By Wynne Parry published April 04, 2012.
This chart is very interesting. It shows the Antarctic temperature, starting to rise 19,000 years ago, global temperature and global CO2. The chart clearly shows that Antarctic temperature rose first, followed by rising CO2 levels for the first 4000 years. The CO2 level in the Northern Hemisphere follows the level in the Southern Hemisphere with only a 2 year time lag.
At about 14,000 years ago the Precession changed so solar radiation began to favor the Northern Hemisphere. At this time the CO2 levels had already increased to about 240 PPM but the ocean temperature was still lagging. In the Northern Hemisphere the CO2 rise came before the temperature rise. As we can see from the above picture temperature did lead CO2 levels by about 620 years +- 600 years in the Southern Hemisphere, whereas in the Northern Hemisphere CO2 leads Temperature by about 720+- 300 years for a global lead of CO2 rise over Temperature rise of 400 +- 340 years. But it is important to note that it was temperature that rose first, and as the oceans began to slowly warm up CO2 was released from the warming water hundreds of years later.
Then about 11,500 years ago CO2 levels leveled off at 265 PPM and began a slow decline to 260 PPM while global temperatures rose one degree C during the next 3,500 years. 8,000 years ago began a slow decrease in temperature. Then with no major change in CO2 levels temperatures declined by about 2,5 C until the end of the ‘little ice age’.
The chart above compares two temperature proxy reconstructions. The orange reconstruction is the Vinther (2009) elevation corrected Greenland temperature reconstruction from ice cores. The black reconstruction is from Rosenthal (2013) and is his 500-meter depth temperature reconstruction in the Makassar Strait, Indonesia. It is thought to represent sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific Ocean. The Greenland temperatures are taken from ice cores from Southeastern Greenland. These are all indirect measures derived from O2 isotopes in Greenland and from sea shells and other sources in the sea bottom of Makassar Strait
As the graph shows, temperatures follow each other very closely until the industrial revolution, when for the first time in 10,000 years the Greenland temperature start to increase, but the Makassar Strait temp doesn’t. One could argue that ocean temperature change lags atmospheric change by about 300 years.
Let us take a closer look at the temperature changes in the last 46.5 years, the only time we have good satellite records of global temperatures, and they are indeed rising.
Yes. in the last 46.5 years the global lower atmosphere average temperature has risen about 0.8C. The question is: How much of this is due to rising CO2, how mush to H2O in all its forms: vapor, clouds, liquid, ice; and how much is due to other factors, such as Methane, Nitrous oxide, and the greening of the earth?
When global temperature increases 0.8 degrees Celsius and relative humidity stays the same there will be 5.5% more water vapor in the air. How much of the temperature rise is attributable to a 5.5% increase in water vapor?
To answer that we must take a look at the greenhouse effect. Without it the earth would be an ice ball with an average temperature about 34C cooler than today. The earth can be considered a black body that obeys laws for black body radiation, the Stefan–Boltzmann law that states that the total energy radiation is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature (Kelvin), so an increase in global temp from 14C to 14.8C results in an increase of 1.01% in the total greenhouse effect (a smaller increase in the atmospheric window).
To sum it up: Since water vapor is fundamental I will count it first, and the effect of all the other greenhouse gases will be additional, remembering that the total absorption in any frequency band can never exceed 100% of available energy. Water vapor absorbs all available black body energy in all wavelengths except in the atmospheric window (7 to 17 μm) The increase of absorption occurs in the atmospheric window, and in some bands of the incoming sunlight in the near infrared region. The bands are 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.1, 1.4 and 1.9 μm. Together, they make up 90% of the greenhouse gas temperature rise, or 29.9 degree C. When global temperatures increase by 0.8 C there will be 5.5% more water water vaporassuming relative humidity will stay constant, there will be an additional 0.17 C temperature rise.
Total greenhouse effect 33 C, Greenhouse effect from water vapor is 29.9C
Increased greenhouse effect from 5.5 % water vapor increase 0.17C. This is true only if relative humidity stayed constant. How much has the relative humidity changed?
From a temperature increase standpoint the change is too small to change the results. However relative humidity has a great influence in the formation of clouds. We now has the 46.5 years of satellite data of clouds, but I only have the cloud averages. We all know that clouds cool by day and warm by night. During night, what is under clouds will absorb all the black body radiation, but re-emit as a new black body above the clouds, but at a much lower absolute temperature, depending on the cloud height. This is the smaller night effect.
Much more important is the daytime reflection of incoming sunlight. The most important clouds are the low level cumulus clouds that forms from humid air rising in daytime sunshine and disappear in the evening, but all clouds reflect back the incoming sun. All I have is statistics of cloud averages, but not where and when they appear and dissolve, but I will make the assumption that averages prevail. This is recent statistics of world average cloud cover:
The cloud cover average (extrapolated) has decreased 3.45% in 46.5 years How much has temperature increased in the same time?
The total temperature rise due to less cloud cover over 46.5 years is 0.23C
Now it is time to see the effect of CO2 increase. In 1979 it was about 327 ppm, now it is about 427 ppm, a 27% rise in 46.5 years. If there was no water vapor in the atmosphere the greenhouse effect of CO2 would be 5.09C at 327 ppm and 5.28 C at 427 ppm. The reason it does not rise more as CO2 rises is that from 13 to 17 μm the temperature rise is limited because all available energy in that band is already fully absorbed. But it gets worse; the water vapor is already the dominant absorber, so the net addition from increased CO2 is only 30% of what would be if there was no water vapor, that is 1.527 C at 327 ppm and 1.584C at 427 ppm for a total CO2 rise of 0.057C.
Likewise Methane and N2O absorption both occur around the 8 μm wavelength, where water vapor already absorb about 80% of all available energy, so that means both Methane and N20 are attenuated by about a factor of five from what they would have been had there been no water vapor.
Methane concentration has increased from 1.6 ppm to 1.9 ppm, leading to a temperature increase of 0.03C in 46.5 years.
N2O concentration has increased from 300 ppb to 340 ppb, leading to a temperature increase of 0.006C in 46.5 years.
The Arctic has experienced a temperature rise due to increased cloud cover and snowfall. It is due to increased heat transfer from the American Gulf in the form of water vapor, clouds, rain, and snow. When water vapor condensates into clouds, over 500 calories per gram of energy is released, and when it condensates into snow, another 80 calories per gram gets released. As water vapor increases with temperature, the Arctic gets less cold but snowier. The snow acts as an insulator on the sea ice, allowing the ice to freeze slower in the winter, and melt faster from the underside. This lead to a global warming of 0.06C in the last 46.5 years.
No such heating has occurred as of yet in the Antarctic. It is still the largest desert in the world; a hostile ice desert. (I wonder why Al Gore chose this climate to represent the relation between CO2 and temperature).
Add up all temperature changes so far in the 46.5 years of satellite data
Increased greenhouse effect from 5 % water vapor increase: 0.17C.
Total temperature rise due to less cloud cover over 46.5 years is 0.23C
Total temperature rise due to increased CO2 levels in 46.5 years is 0.057C.
Total temperature rise due to increased Methane levels in 46.5 years is 0.03C.
Total temperature rise due to increased N2O levels in 46.5 years is 0.006C.
Warming in the Arctic (globalized) over 46.5 years: 0.06 C.
Warming due to increased Ozone over 46.5 years: 0.004 C.
Warming due to increased HFC gasses over 46.5 years: 0.0015 C.
The total temperature increase noticed so far: 0.5585C. CO2 is responsible for 10% of the found rise, and Methane for 6% of the experienced rise.
There is one very interesting side effect of rising CO2, and to a much less extent; rising Methane levels. It leads to a substantial greening of the earth. The leaf area has been steadily increasing in areas where the leaf area is not fully saturated:
This picture shows the Leaf Area Index increase over the last 46.5 years.As we can see there is no increase in the deserts and in the dense rain forests, but overall there has been between 15 and 20% increase in the LAI. More leafs, more area to absorb CO2.
The rise in CO2 concentration from 327 ppm to 427 ppm makes the effective growth rate of vegetation increase about 25% on average. There is a wide variation between plant sensitivity to increased CO2, but they all react favorably up to more than 1000 ppm concentration.
Using this information there should have been an increase in vegetation of 25 + 15% of CO2 uptake by vegetation worldwide without any other use of fertilizer. (Notice that the leaf area index did not increase much in the tropical rain forests since the leaf area is already fully optimized.
If one looks at the total greening of the earth the total leaf area did increase even in the rain forests, in some other areas by as much as 50%.
However, there are a few areas where the leaf areas decreased. these areas are where there is a deficit of water for optimal leaf growth. This is worrying, since the areas of water deficiency are areas where people want to live. An extreme example is today’s Iran, where the water reservoirs are running dry, and all water used in the hot summer is taken from aquifers that are also running dry. And it is getting worse:
The following picture shows the drying up of the earth between 2003 and 2013 in sea level equivalence from 0 to 2 mm
The areas most affected are the U.S. and Mexico Southwest, the South American Pampas, Southern Europe. Northern Africa, The Arabian Peninsula, The Middle East from Syria to Iraq, Iran Kazakhstan, Pakistan and North Western India, This is from 2014 to 2024 and it shows it is getting worse. The aquifers are getting consumed
To take water out of aquifers without replacing it leads to an inevitable desertification of the areas where people want to live. Desertification leads to disaster, the rivers dry up and the areas become uninhabitable.
Urban heat islands: The worlds urban areas are growing rapidly and are now housing more than half the world’s population. It is now occupying more than 1% of the land area and has grown 0.15 % of the total area of the world. People living in urban areas, especially in areas with air conditioning are experiencing ‘local global warming’ of about 7F in the U.S. It is still large in all urban areas, maybe 4F on global average. (This is why people living in a megalopolis are convinced in global warming, they are living it.) Total global warming effect in the last 46.5 years: 0.033C
Draining land for infrastructure. We are doing what we can now to preserve wetlands, but wherever a road or other structure such as an airport is being built, proper drainage and land improvement is being performed. In the last 46.5 years about 1% of the worlds land surface has been drained and made dry. This is another heat effect that I estimate to lead to about 2C in the affected areas leading to a world temperature increase of 0.04C
Temperature increase from greening of the earth (without taking into account a changing cloud cover that is accounted for separately 0.002C
Temperature decrease from desertification of the earth: 0.001C
Total estimated temperature rise: 0.6325C
Summary: Temperature change due toWhat to do
Loss of cloud cover: 0.23C or 36%
5% increase in absolute humidity: 0.17C or 27%
Warming in the Arctic: 0.06C 0r 9,5%
Increased CO2: 0.057% or 9%
Infrastructure land use change: 0.04C or 6.3%
Urban heat islands: 0.033C or 5.2%
Increased Methane levels: 4.7%
All 0ther causes: 2.3%
What to do.
To go carbon neutral and do nothing else will solve less than 10% of the perceived problem. Neutralize Methane increase will add less than 5% to the solution
No, the problem is all about water, clouds and desertification.
In the next 100 years or so we will experience a magnetic polar reversal, and this may lead to an unprecedented rash of volcanic activity since the magnetic force reversals will activate magma in ways that we cannot yet foresee. When volcanic ash reaches the stratosphere it stays there for years causing global cooling. The Milankovitch cycles points to a slow cooling down of the earth.
The current rise in CO2 is very good. It has helped us feed another 2 billion people, not to mention all the wild life and plant growth.
The CO2 increase will delay the onset of the next ice age by about 2000 years. Without it we would still be in the little ice age.
The very first Earth Day was celebrated April 22 1970, on the 100 year anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin (Владимир Ильич Ленин). True green environmentalists keep telling me it is just a coincidence. I think not..
The first Earth Day in Philadelphia 1970 featured Ira Einhorn (The Unicorn Killer) as master of Ceremonies. For those too young to remember, he murdered his girlfriend , stuffed her in a piece of luggage in his apartment and kept her there for seven years, and no one smelled a dead rat). He was finally convicted many years later. The big environmental scare of that day was the threat of a new Ice Age. The clarion call was: “In the year 2000 temperatures will have fallen 10 degrees”, the culprit was pollution, especially acid rain.
Things have changed, and we have experienced decades of climate change, or so they say, but it depends very much on where you live. Most of the increased temperature since 1970 is due to cleaner air in the industrialized nations, there are now more thunderstorms as opposed to daylong rains. This leads to fewer clouds and less reflection of incoming light back into space. This means warmer days.
What forms clouds is saturated humidity with a sufficient aerosol to form condensing spots. The best solution is to plant trees that provide enough aerosols to form clouds. This is especially important in the American Southwest and the whole 10-40 degrees latitude region where the majority of the world’s population lives.
USA can be seen as two very different regions: In the West the fight is about water rights; in the East it is about water responsibilities.
My proposal is that we reshape the water rights laws so that water rights belong to the land. Where it rains, as much as possible of the rain should remain on that land without building dams. By building swales and planting trees at high elevations the erosion from flash floods will diminish, and more water will remain in the ground, causing rivers to flow year round rather than seasonal. As it is now a house owner in Arizona cannot even water his plants from what falls on his roof or driveway.
In the East the opposite is true. When you build a house with a driveway you must also provide a catch basin capable of absorbing all the rain that falls on the improved property, sufficient to absorb a substantial rainstorm.
As it is now, the aquifers is the west are being drained, and need to be restored. Yes, without restoring the aquifers the American Southwest will experience desertification.
By far, the strongest greenhouse gas is water vapor, not because it is very strong of itself, but it absorbs nearly all outgoing energy in the infrared spectrum except in the so called atmospheric window, where it only partially absorbs. Yet water vapor is missing from the IPCC AR6 chart seen here:
IPCC has consistently treated the effect of greenhouse gasses as additive, but it is impossible to absorb more than 100% of all emitted energy for a given wavelength. This leads to an overestimation of absorption when 2 or more gasses are present. For example, if CO2 absorbs 90% of available energy at 13 μm and water vapor another 50%, the sum is 90% + (1 -0.9} * 0.5 = 95%, not 140%
This will change the relative importance of greenhouse gasses drastically so it must be tested against reality. We now have a good global satellite temperature record from 1980 to 2022 or 43 years:
During this time the temperature rise was 0.5 C, which translates to 2.375 W/m2 ERF
Water vapor.
This is a good chart to see the relative importance of all major greenhouse gasses:
It is to be noted that water vapor also absorbs the incoming solar radiation in certain wavelengths, but solar influx is assumed to be constant.
When average temperature rises 0.5 C, the possible absorption rises by 2.375 W/m2 minus the energy that escapes through the atmospheric window.Water vapor through saturation: is responsible for all of this increase except where other gasses also absorb in the atmospheric window, and in the atmospheric window the absorption must be proportionally shared, subject to the 100% absorption limitation.The atmospheric window is about 26% of all the emitted radiation so net water absorption is 0.74 * 2.375 = 1.6 W.m2 or 0.34 C. However, the relative humidity is also decreasing, see picture:
Between 1980 and 2022 the net humidity increase is 3.6% minus 0.75% relative humidity for a net increase of 3.54%. This increase only matters in the atmospheric window which is on average 25% saturated, so the total increase from water vapor increase is 0.26 * 2.375 * 0.25 * 0.9925 = 0.15 W/m2 or 0.03 C., to be added to the total before increase in humidity.This means that for a 0.5C temperature increase between 1980 and 2022 the total sensitivity to water vapor is 1.75 W/m2 or 0.37 C. A confirming picture of the total cloud cover shows the , but temperature sensitivity to the decline in cloud cover between 1980 and 2015
This is of course a very crude method, since it incorporates all temperature rises from all sources, which is 0,5C degrees, from which should be deducted the 0.08C rise from all. This is of course a very cruse assessment of the influence of clouds vary greatly between low clouds, middle clouds and high clouds; as well as when they occur, day or night, and even what time of day they appear. Because of this complexity IPCC has consistently failed to give clouds their full respect. The clouds are the main regulator of temperature on earth!
Carbon dioxide
CO2 is the strongest greenhouse gas after water vapor. The only wavelength band that is meaningful is 13 to 17.4 μm and absorption occurs from both CO2 and water vapor. Since they exist together, the effect of each of them must be proportionally allocated, or the sum of them added would exceed 100%
Between 1980 and 2022 the CO2 levels rose from 335 ppm to 415 ppm or 24% increase. The temperature increase 0.5 C. The net temperature increase or ERF in the 13 to 17.4 μm band is 0.035C or +0.17 W/m2 for the water vapor and 0.04C or +0.19 W/m2 for the CO2. To see how the calculation was made, go to Appendix 1.
Methane.
Methane gas is created from a variety of sources, both man made and natural. See pie chart
The good thing about methane is that its lifetime in the atmosphere is only 10 to 15 years, and the real contribution to climate change is only 1/5th of what is commonly advertised, since iits absorption bands occur together with partly saturated absorption from water vapor. See appendix 2.
In 1980 the CH4 concentration was 1.6 ppm and will be 2.0 ppm in 2022 which results in an increase of the greenhouse effect of 0.035 C or 0.17 W/m2 ERF from rising levels of Methane since 1980.
N2O.
Atmospheric N2Olevels averaged 336 ppb (parts per billion) during 2022, about and was 301 ppb in 1980. It is a 300 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 by itself, because its absorption is not saturated in the atmosphere. When water vapor is dominant it is diminished by over 70% since it is at the edges of the Atmospheric window. For calculations see Appendix 3.
In 1980 the N2O concentration was 0.3 ppm which results in an increase of the greenhouse effect of 0.0065 C or 0.031 W/m2 ERF from rising levels of N2O since 1980 .
Ozone.
Ozone occurs as stratospheric O3 which is good. It protects us from uv radiation. O3 in the troposphere is considered harmful if it is over 0.08% It is normally around 0,01% in the troposphere. For calculations and figures, see appendix 4.
When the earth’s temperature rises by 0.5C, from 1980 to 2022, the amount of tropospheric O3 probably rises by 2% (Lacking good data I am guessing wildly, in urban areas it may be much more, but this is global average). This comes to 0.0034C temperature increase or 0.016 W/m2 ERF from O3, from 1980 to 2022.
CFC gasses.
CFC’s are cheap and efficient gasses to use in refrigerators and air conditioners.Their use rose rapidly until it was discovered they destroyed the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere, so its use, got banned in 1994, later diminished including its use in inhalers. CFCs has since diminished slowly and is maybe already below the levels in 1980. See also Appendix 5.
HFC gasses.
HFCs replaced CFCs and are rapidly growing in use, and the compressor seals still leak. For pictures on why they are a growing concern for the future, see Appendix 6.
The temperature increase from 1980 to 2022 was 0.0015 C or 0.007 W/m2 ERF.
Summary of all greenhouse effect causes for temperature rise from 1980 until 2022:
Effect from water vapor increase: 0.37 C or 1.75 W/m2; 80.9% of total
Effect from rising CO2: 0.04C or 0.19 W/m2; 8.78% of total
Effect from rising Methane: 0.036 C or 0.17 W/m2, 7.86% of total
Effect from rising N2O: 0.0065 C or 0.031 W/m2 1.4% of total
Effect from rising Ozone: 0.0034C or 0.016 W/m2 0.7% of total
Effect from rising HFCs : 0.0015 C or 0.007 W/m2 0.3% of total
TOTAL TEMPERATURE CHANGE 1980 to 2022: 0.4544C or 2.164 W/m2
Conclusion
CO2 amounts to less than 10% if the temperature increase since 1980, and so does Methane. The green new deal is a pipe dream that does not solve the climate problem, but will make it worse.the price of lithium carbonate used in batteries has risen sixteen-fold between 2020 and late 2022. Since then, it has dropped to one third of its peak price. China has corned the market in Lithium for now. There is not enough Lithium to be economically and ecologically justifiable to mine to meet demand in the future. Since solar and wind power are intermittent supplier of electricity they can never be used as base supplier of energy. Other solutions must be offered
Actions to be taken
What congress is doing to solve the problem.
Congress has passed the anti-inflation bill that included over 300 billion to fight climate change, and it included more solar panels and wind turbine motors to be imported from China. The experience from Europe is that electricity from solar panels and windmills is 5.7 times as expensive as conventional power generation.
This analysis was done for 2019, before COVID. The situation is worse now, with electricity rares up to 80 c/kWh, topping $1 /kWh last winter in some countries before subsides.
Even at the current increased European Gas prices, the estimated excess expenditures on Weather-Dependent “Renewables” in Europe is still very large: $0.5 trillion in capital expenditures and $1.2 trillion excess expenditures in the long-term.
These simple calculations show that any claim that Wind and Solar power are now cost competitive with conventional fossil fuel (Gas-fired) generation are patently false. The figures give an outline of the financial achievements of Green activists in stopping fracking for gas in Europe, close on to $1.2 trillion of excess costs.
It would be better not to import any solar panels and wind power generators from China and let them pay for the extra cost rather than building more coal burning plants. After all they were planning to build over a thousand new plants between now and 2030, all legal under the Paris accord. This would benefit the world climate much more, since Chinese coal plants are far more polluting, since China has far less stringent environmental regulations than U.S.
U.S. uses 13.5% of the world’s coal, and eliminating U.S. CO2 emissions would in time reduce the world temperature by 0.023C, providing no other country, such as China and India would increase their use of Coal, which they are, to the total of 1300 new coal plants between now and 2030. This would raise global temperature by more than 0.06 C.
What congress should do instead.
a. What congress should do immediately.
Immediately stop downblending U 233 and pass The Thorium Energy security act SB 4242a. See more here.
2. Remove Thorium from the list of nuclear source material. The half-life of Thorium232 is 14 billion years, so its radioactivity is barely above background noise. More importantly, while Thorium is fertile, it is not fissile and should therefore not be included in the list. This would make it far easier to mine rare earth metals, as long as the ore consists of less than 0.05% Uranium, but any amount of Thorium is allowed without classifying the ore “Source material”.
3. Separate nuclear power into 3 categories. a. conventional nuclear power. b. Thorium breeder reactors that make more U233 than it consumes.c. Thorium reactors that reduce nuclear waste, and d. Plutonium and other trans uranium depletion reactors.
4. Stop buying solar panels from China. Stop buying wind turbine generators from China. Let them install those in China and pay 5 times as much for their electricity.
5. Immediately form a commission led by competent people, not politicians; to decide how to best expand the electric grid and to best harden it against electro-magnetic pulses, whether solar or nuclear and to safeguard it against sabotage.
6. Remove all subsidies on electric cars, solar panels and wind generators, but continue to encourage energy conservation.
7. Encourage research and development of Thorium fueled reactors, especially liquid salt reactors by drastically simplifying and speeding up the approval process. President Trump issued an executive order in the last month of his presidency EO 13972 specifying that the United States must sustain its ability to meet the energy requirements for its national defense and space exploration initiatives. The ability to use small modular reactors will help maintain and advance United States dominance and strategic leadership across the space and terrestrial domains. This EO should be expanded to include civilian small modular reactors, including Liquid salt Thorium reactors less than 200 MW, which are the only valid reactors for space exploration.
Appendix 1, CO2
The following chart shows both CO2 and H2O are absorbing greenhouse gases, with H20 being the stronger greenhouse gas, absorbing over a much wider spectrum, and they overlap for the most part. But it also matters in what frequency ranges they absorb.
For this we will have to look at the frequency ranges of the incoming solar radiation and the outgoing black body radiation of the earth. It is the latter that causes the greenhouse effect. Take a look at this chart:
The red area represents the observed amount of solar radiation that reaches the earth’s surface. the white area under the red line represents radiation absorbed in the atmosphere. Likewise, the blue area represents the outgoing black body radiation that is not absorbed. The remaining white area under the magenta, blue or black line represents the retained absorbed energy that causes the greenhouse effect.
Let us now take a look at the Carbon Dioxide bands of absorption, at 2.7, 4.3 and 15 μm. Of them the 2.7 and 4.3 μm bands absorb where there is little black body radiation, the only band that counts is at 14.9 μm, and that is in a band where the black body radiation is near its maximum. Let us first consider the CO2 alone in a dry atmosphere, that is one with no water vapor at all. We will investigate the concentration of 335 ppm (in 1980) and 415 ppm (in 2022)
The very top line of the top black band represents total absorption at 415 ppm, the bottom of the black black band represents absorption at 335 ppm. Divide the frequency spectrum in 3 parts, below 14 μm, 14-16 μm, and above 16 μm, In the 13 to 14 μm band 66% of available energy is absorbed at 335 ppm, 70% at 415 ppm. in the 14 to 16 μm band 100% of available energy is absorbed at both 335 and 415 ppm. In the > 16 μm the numbers are also 66 and 70%. In addition, temperature is 0.5 C higher at 415 than at 335 ppm, so available energy is 0.7 % higher at 415 ppm.
The net result is greenhouse gas contribution for CO2 is 5.10 C at 335 ppm and 5.26 C at 415 ppm and 1.5C higher ambient temperature for a dry atmosphere.
The normal way to account for greenhouse gasses contribution is to simply add together the CO2 contribution and the contribution from water vapor. This leads to the wrong result for in doing so, the total result is more than 100% for some energy band, because it is impossible to add more than 100% of all available energy for a given wavelength. Again, the spectrum of interest is 13 to 17.4 μm.
The first thing to notice is that no absorption exceeds 100% , so at 14.9 μm wavelength CO2 absorbed 100%, and water vapor absorbed another 75%, the total sum is still 100%. It is impossible to absorb more than 100% of the total energy available for that wavelength. Therefore between the wavelengths 14 and 16 μm all energy was absorbed regardless of CO2 concentration and water vapor concentration. The only fair way to allocate the absorption is proportionally, 57% to CO2 and 43% to water vapor. Likewise, the 13 to 14 μm band is not fully saturated, so the total absorption is 62% of available energy for CO2 and 33% for water vapor. In the 16 to 17.4 μm range the total absorption is 44% for CO2 and 55 % for water vapor. For CO2 at 335 ppm and average temp 13.5 C the total temperature rise, when proportionally allocated comes to 2.73 C for the CO2 and 2.30 C for the water vapor. For CO2 at 415 ppm and an average temp 0.5 C higher, at 14 C average the net temperature increase or ERF in the 13 to 17.4 μm band is 0.035C or +0.17 W/m2 for the water vapor and 0.04C or +0.19 W/m2 for the CO2.
Appendix 2, Methane
Atmospheric methanelevels averaged 2.0 ppm (parts per million) during 2022, or around 25% greater than in 1980. It is a 28 times stronger greenhouse gas by itself unlike CO2, because its absorption is not saturated in the atmosphere. On the other hand the lifetime of Methane in the atmosphere is 10 to 15 years, some of the Methane eating bacteria will do its job. There is only one significant absorption band that absorbs in the atmospheric window at 7.7 μm, at the edge of the atmospheric window.
The picture shows a small peak at 7.7μm. This is because at lower wavelengths absorption from water vapor has nearly eliminated the CH4 contribution. Remember that total absorption can never exceed 100 %, so the maximum absorption from CH4 occurs at 7.7μm. At 1.6 ppm it amounts to a greenhouse effect of 0.68 C for a dry gas.
The only major absorption line at 7.7 μm has two side lobes, at 7.5 and 7.9 μm. In the 7.5 μm sideband water vapor already absorbs nearly all energy, so the NH4 is of little effect. In the 7.9 μm sideband water vapor is 50% saturated at that level and the NH4 net absorption is 20% the net greenhouse effect is one fifth of the effect for a dry gas, or 0.14 C. In 1980 the CH4 concentration was 1.6 ppm and will be 2.0 ppm in 2022 which results in an increase of the greenhouse effect of 0.035 C or 0.17 W/m2 ERF from rising levels of Methane since 1980
Appendix 3, N2O.
Atmospheric N2Olevels averaged 336 ppb (parts per billion) during 2022, about and was 301 ppb in 1980. It is a 300 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 by itself, because its absorption is not saturated in the atmosphere. When water vapor is dominant it is diminished by over 70% since it is at the edges of the Atmospheric window. On the other hand the lifetime of N20 in the atmosphere is short and is typically greatest at 5 p.m. One of the major reasons for the N2O increase is the increase of fertilization with nitrates, the other is from diesel fumes from trains, boats, ships, trucks and mining equipment
The picture shows a double N2O peak at 7.4 and 7.8 μm. . At 0.336 ppm in 2022it amounts to a greenhouse effect of 0.325 C for a dry gas. In the 7.4 μm band water vapor is saturated, in the 7.8 μm band 80% is saturated by water vapor.In 1980 the N2O concentration was 0.3 ppm which results in an increase of the greenhouse effect of 0.0065 C or 0.031 W/m2 ERF from rising levels of N2O since 1980 .
N2O is commonly called laughing gas, and is hazardous in high concentrations, and should be limited in confined places, but in concentrations of under 1 ppm nobody laughs because of that.
Appendix 4, Ozone.
Ozone or 03 is good if it is in the stratosphere. There it helps to absorb the ultraviolet and cosmic rays from the sun and other cosmic radiation. Ozone is bad if it is near the ground. The total proportion of O3 in the troposphere is about 0.01 ppm, yet it is a substantial greenhouse gas because it forms by uv radiation in the stratosphere and mesosphere, and thus protecting us from uv damage. See figure:
The O3 in the troposphere on the other hand is bad. It is normally around 0.01 ppm, but is considered damaging if people are exposed to more than 0.08 ppm in an 8 hour period. This can happen in urban environments in warm and stagnant weather, typically through car traffic. It is a great greenhouse gas because its main absorption band is at 9.5 μm, right in the atmospheric window where the outgoing black body radiation is the greatest. See fig:
The dotted blue line at 9.5 μm represents the tropospheric absorption, the total absorption is between the brown and the solid blue line. The total greenhouse effect from O3 is 0.88C, but the stratosphere does not interact very much with the troposphere, so the stratospheric O3 does not count as a greenhouse gas, only tropospheric O3. The total contribution to the greenhouse effect from tropospheric O3 is about 1/5 of the total, because atmospheric O2 absorbs in the same band limits the temperature rise to 0.17C When the earth’s temperature rises by 0.5C, from 1980 to 2022, the amount of tropospheric O3 probably rises by 2% (Lacking good data I am guessing wildly, in urban areas it may be much more, but this is global average). This comes to 0.0035C temperature increase or 0.016 W/m2 ERF from O3, from 1980 to 2022.
Appendix 5, CFC gasses.
ChloroFluoroCarbon (CFC) gasses started to be manufactured at the beginning of the refrigeration age, replacing ice as the refrigerant. It soon appeared in the atmosphere, mostly due to leaks in the air conditioner compressor seals. It didn’t amount to much as a greenhouse gas even though it was five thousand times more efficient than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. It was discovered that CFCs ate up the Ozone in the stratosphere, and if it continued to increase it could deplete the protective Ozone layer faster than it could be produced. In fact it created an Ozone hole over Antarctica. So it got forbidden Jan 17, 1994, In 2020 even China stopped production. Since 1994 CFC are decreasing by about 1% per year, but cheating persisted, especially among poorer nations and China. By 2022 it will probably have a greenhouse effect of 0.01C or 0,05 W/m2 ERF.
Appendix 6, HFC gases.
CFC started to be phased out and replaced by HydroFluoroCarbons (HFC), less efficient and more expensive, but at least they do not deplete the Ozone layer that protects us from cancer. Some of the HFCs are even bigger greenhouse effect generators than CFC, but well worth it to protect the Ozone layer. Their biggest absorption bands are in the middle of the atmospheric window.
If nothing is done to control them they will increase from nothing in 1980 until 2022 and beyond. See fig: NOAA Research News
The temperature increase from 1980 to 2022 was 0.0014 C or 0.007 W/m2 ERF..
Despite many nations transitioning away from fossil fuels, in 2023, world coal consumption reached a staggering 164 exajoules (EJ) of energy, a record high for any year.
For this graphic, Visual Capitalist has partnered with Range ETFs to explore the role coal plays in the global energy mix and determine which regions still consume large quantities of coal.
The Role of Coal in Global Energy
Coal is a significant player in the global energy mix, contributing 26% of the world’s energy in 2023, more than all non-fossil fuel sources combined. The only energy source that contributed more to the global energy mix was oil.
Here’s how that consumption breaks down by region:
Region
Consumption (1018 joules)
Share %
China
91.9
56.1%
Asia Pacific (excluding China)
43.8
26.7%
Americas
10.0
6.1%
Europe
8.4
5.1%
CIS*
5.5
3.4%
Africa
4.1
2.5%
Middle East
0.4
0.2%
Total
164.0
100%
Coal consumption has decreased in many regions. For example, both North America and Europe reduced their energy consumption from coal by 16% in 2023. However, a heavy reliance on coal in the Asia Pacific region has led to global coal consumption remaining essentially the same over the past 10 years.
When I saw this statistics I immediately looked up: What is the U.S role in global coal consumption and found out it was 8.2 EJ om 2023 or 5.0% of world consumption.
China’s coal consumption is more than eleven times larger than the U.S Coal consumption. In fact, their appetite for mining coal is that they even mine coal with a noticeable Uranium content, and burn it without separating out the Uranium first, leading to severe health problems for the people downwind from the coal burning power plants. In addition, since scrubbing is expensive the operators have the scrubbers down for maintenance as often as they can get away with it.
China is also the world leader in cement production. In 2022 China produced 2,1 billion metric tons of cement, or 64% of the world total. By comparison, U.S. produced 95 million metric tons, or about 22 times less than China.
But where China has U.S and the rest of the world over a barrel is in the mining and production of rare earth metals. China mined 240,000 metric tons in 2023, or about 64% 0f the worlds total, but China is also the world’s largest importer of rare earth metal ore for refining. By comparison, US mined 43,000 metric tons, but most of it is still refined in China. The US regulatory environment makes it a slow process to get permits. China has strict export controls over who can be allowed to buy refined rare earth metals, and they always want a favor in return for doing so.
We have our work cut out for us. Right now we are too dependent on China to fully be able to sever our dependence on China.
When I came to the U.S. as a resident alien immigrant from a beautiful, clean Sweden in the spring of 1968 I was horrified at what I found. In Sweden they were worried about the fact that some lakes were fertilized four times more than agricultural fields, acid rain killed the trouts in the already acid lakes and seeds laced with Mercury as a preservative killed off most of the eagles and owls. None of this seemed to bother the Americans. Coming in to Rochester in N.Y the stench from the fish washing up on the shore of lake Ontario was strong, I read of a river catching on fire in Ohio and the smell of coal burning power plants without scrubbers was bad, almost as bad as in the coal and steel region of Germany. It was also the height of the Vietnam wars, and people were protesting. Many of the protestors were communists at hart, and they also turned to pollution. The aerosol pollution led to a decrease in global temperatures, so the mantra was: The ice age is coming! The worst prediction I read was that the global temperatures would be ten degrees Fahrenheit lower by the year 2000! Most predictions were not that wild, but they all pointed down, ice age, here we come! The urge to clean up the pollution grew stronger and the Earth Day movement was formed, but they had to find just the right day to have the first. Since this was to become a global movement they decided on the birthday of Lenin, his 100th, very fitting for a globalist movement. That was 1970 in Philadelphia, featured Ira Einhorn (The Unicorn Killer) as master of Ceremonies.
Now fifty four years later the mantra has changed to climate change, specifically carbon pollution and carbon footprint. As the scientists were wrong then, the ice age is coming soon, so they are wrong now. The rise in CO2 causes climate change all right, and it would be really bad unless something else also changes as the CO2 concentration changes. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, much stronger than CO2, and they both add to the greenhouse effect, but only at temperatures below freezing. In the tropics there is 50 times as much water vapor as there is CO2, so the tropics is not affected at all by rising CO2 levels. In the Arctic the situation is quite different. Water vapor is also a condensing gas, and forms clouds in the atmosphere. Clouds cool by day and warm by night, but the effect of cooling by day is much larger than the warming by night, so clouds act as the major temperature regulator on earth. That is why the tropical temperature was about the same in the tropics as now when the CO2 level was over 10000 ppm, 25 times as large as now hundreds of millions of years ago. There is zero risk of overheating, there is no “tipping point” on the warm side, the clouds take care of that. On the other hand we know that because we have too little CO2 in the air we will have a new ice age. When will it come? Not in the next thousand years, in fact, by increasing the CO2 levels we will delay the onset of the next ice age. What will happen at the Poles? They will be less cold in the winters, it will snow more but the summers will be about the same, held largely at the melting point of water.
The last 44 years we have good satellite data of the temperature rise, CO2 rise, all pollutants , cloud cover and the like, so we can examine the earth how it has responded to the rising CO2 levels, and the results are very surprising: CO2 rise contributes less than 5% of the increase is due to the CO2 rise, nearly all the changes are due to water effects, either as increased water vapor and decreasing clouds. Here are the results:
Effect from rising CO2: 0.04C or 0.19 W/m2; 4,66% of total
Effect from increasing water vapor: 0.37 C or 1.75 W/m2; 42.9% of total
Effect from rising Methane: 0.036 C or 0.17 W/m2, 4.17% of total
Effect from rising N2O: 0.0065 C or 0.031 W/m2 0.8% of total
Effect from rising Ozone: 0.0034C or 0.016 W/m2 0.4% of total
Effect from rising HFCs : 0.0015 C or 0.007 W/m2 0.2% of total
Effect from decreasing cloud cover: 0.39 C or 1.89 W/m2. 46.4 % of total
Warming of the Northern Arctic: 0.1 C. or 0.475 W/m2;11.6% of total
Cooling from pollution aerosols: 0.1 C or 0.475W/m2; – 11.6% of total
Temperature increase from greening of the earth 0.0063C or 0.030 W/m2; 0.7% of total
Temperature decrease from areas of desertification 0.0015C 0.007 W/m2; 0.2% of total
TOTAL TEMPERATURE CHANGE 1980 to 2022: 0.8522 C or 4.077 W/m2
While I realize that increasing CO2 levels contribute to climate change, it is on balance positive, since the earth is increasingly fertilized by increasing CO2 In fact the earth has been more than 15% greener since industrial age by increasing CO2 alone, enabling us to feed 2 billion more people without increasing fossil fuel generated fertilizer. The extra greening means more clouds generating aerosols, which is good except where it already rains too much.
Where we have a problem is with the arid areas, where much water is drawn from the aquifers, the best clean water there is. When the aquifers are deleted desertification sets in. This has already happened in Kazakhstan, where lake Aral disappeared as soon as the Amu- and Syr-darja rivers were siphoned off to produce cotton. This worked fine for about ten years, then the lake dried up, the rains stopped and the rivers dried up. China has built 12 dams in the Mekong river, so now the once reliable yearly floodings stopped and the harvest in the lowlands are disrupted. The once reliable Nile river is a shadow of its former self, all the silt stays above the Aswan Dam rather than fertilizing the lower Nile. The U.S. southwest aquifers are being drawn down and will no longer produce anywhere near as much water as they used to. The whole American Southwest is slowly undergoing desertification. We need to rethink our use of water rather than waste trillions of dollars on CO2 control, which will solve only 5% of the problem.
The other problem with water is waste quality. A most pressing problem is micro plastics. Some of it comes from tire wear. Electric cars are heavier than gasoline cars, leading to more tire wear. Another problem is with water sanitation, Microplastics does not accumulate well in silt,neither does it break down easily. Another problem is antibiotics excreting in the urine of both people and animals, birth control and other medications excreted through urine will act as harmful pollutants,
We have our work cut out for us. There are solutions to all of these problems, but they all require energy, either as heat or electricity. The only possible solution is nuclear power, specifically molten salt nuclear power. Nuclear power can be generated from U233, U 235 and Plutonium 239. These are the available options. We have already used up most of the U 235, which is less than 0.7 percent of the available Uranium. Small modular Reactors can use Thorium, spent Nuclear fuel and depleted Uranium for fuel, all with using special mixtures to sustain a generation. One specially exciting option is to use a molten salt generator as a heat source and incinerate plastics and other trash without supplying Oxygen. That will produce hot gas that will be used for electricity generation, and the resulting Carbon can be made in the form of Graphene.
These are exciting times. We have the solutions ready to clean up the earth by going nuclear with SMRs of many types. They will lessen the mining demands on the earth significantly as they operate under atmospheric pressure. In addition they will make us less dependent on expanding the national grid, the power can be generated where it is used. I could go on, but here are The many cases why Thorium Nuclear Power is the only realistic solution to the world’s energy problems.
Thorium is the long time solution. In the short time we should deplete the nuclear Plutonium waste as fast as possible.
The Earth can be described as a black body with energy coming in, mostly from the sun and an equivalent amount of energy being emitted. This follows the the Stefan–Boltzmann law, which states that the total energy radiated per unit surface area of a black body across all wavelengths per unit time j ⋆ (also known as the black-body radiant emittance) is directly proportional to the fourth power of the black body’s thermodynamic temperatureT: The average temperature on earth is 14 C or 287.15 degree Kelvin. This means that for every degree the earth gets warmer it emits 1.4% more energy. The sun’s incoming energy is nearly constant, well within +- 0,5%, so if the earth warms up more than one degree Celsius, it must come from changes on earth.
The best way to find out how the earth reacts to changes is to provide an impulse and see what happens. One such impulse was the open air atomic tests in the early 1960s.
Cosmic radiation in the form of iron nuclei is the major source of the generation of Carbon 14. When fossil fuel is burned there is very little C14 in the CO2 generated, but if it is burned by digestion of food, by fermentation, by burning wood or by wildfire, it contains the same concentration of C14 as was in the air at the time of the generation of the biomass. Since C14 has a half life of 5700 +- 40 years, we could find out the age of that biomass -or could we?
This is one of my very favorite slides. The best way of finding out how a black body responds is by introducing an impulse and see what happens. In this case the impulse was open air nuclear bomb tests, performed mostly by United States and the Soviet Union, but all occurred in the Northern Hemisphere. Test stations to see the amount of C14 in the air were set up in Austria and New Zealand. What did we learn? We learnt that the air mixes between the Northern and the Southern Hemisphere in about 2 years, and because the half-life of C14 shown here is 12.5 years, not 5700 years, it shows the absorption rate in the oceans and into new biomass. These values would have been difficult if not impossible to find out without open air Nuclear tests, Were the tests bad? You bet, but since they happened, you glean what you can from it. What else did we learn? You can no longer use carbon dating if there is any chance of contamination with newer biomass, or if it is newer than 1955 A.D.
In examining a black body, in this case the Earth for distinguishing properties it is very useful to observe how it reacts to impulses. We want to see which impulse response lead to climate change and which are just weather changes. All impulses lead to a response with a time delay.
There are those that say that climate change the worst threat to the world as we know it, worse than all out nuclear war. This is false.
Before we tackle the impulse change that everybody are worried about, the onset and growth of the industrial age and its outputs, let us examine few other impulses first.
The steady state of the earth is an ice age, and in the next segment we will examine how the earth ended the Ice age.
The weather has been warm lately. the earth has set a string of new maximum temperatures in July and will set a new absolute record for the month of July since the beginning of satellite record in 1979. The once reputable Forbes Magazine expressed it this way: July 4 was the warmest day in over 100,000 years! Now wait a minute! Aren’t we still recovering from the little ice age? See chart:
It was warmer for 9,000 of the last 10,000 years than it is now!
Now take a look at the temperatures before 1979.
How bad were the heatwaves of the 1930s years of the dust bowl compared to the heatwave of 2023? Granted , there were many more temp measurement stations in the 1930s , not all of which fully measured up to accepted standards, but the heatwaves were both worse and more widespread then. Look at the two maps:
Yes, things were worse in 1936. How did they even survive, with only 70% of America being electrified, and nearly all of rural America being without electricity, and it was not until 1935 as the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), a New Deal agency promoting rural electrification was established. Very few had air conditioning of those that had electricity. How did they survive?
Not very well, see chart:
The life expectancy dropped by 4 years for all between the years 1931 to 1936.
The weather has been warm lately. the earth has set a string of new maximum temperatures in July and will set a new absolute record for the month of July since the beginning of satellite record in 1079. The once reputable Forbes Magazine expressed it this way: July 4 was the warmest day in over 100,000 years! Now wait a minute! Aren’t we still recovering from the little ice age? See chart:
It was warmer for 9,000 of the last 10,000 years than it is now!
Let us take a look at what is happening to the Arctic ice sheet. Its demise has been predicted to be total well before 2020. How is that going? The Danish Meteorological institute takes daily measurements of the Arctic and Greenland’s ice sheet, volume and temperature.
It seems pretty normal to me, no runaway ice melt the last few years. I fact this year the Arctic temperature above the 80th latitude has been at or below normal since late April. How about the ice on Greenland?
The ice gain, and the summer ice loss over Greenland seem pretty normal to me.Yes the snow melt was delayed by a month,followed bya stronger than normal snow melt. This is all within the boundaries of normal weather.
The heat wave in the south and Southwest of U.S.A. was caused by a blocking high pressure, causing less clouds, less winds and in part less rain than normal. This happens some years, but can still be explained as weather.
This tweet from the twice defeated presidential candidate and 2016 election denier Hillary Clinton caught my attention for its many factual errors. This is the forwarded tweet:
It begins with factual recording from the Washington Post. It is a record string of very hot days in Phoenix. In fact, today is the 25th day of over 110F, and continuing.
The next headline is from CNN tells of the heat wave all over the south, where nearly every community in the area shows one heat record after another. The count is more than twice as high now. The heat wave continues. About the only record not broken is the maximum temperature in Death Valley, still standing at 134°F (57°C) on July 10, 1913.
Not to be outdone, MSNBC chimes in with “We are in uncharted territory”, which is true since worldwide satellite measurements didn’t start until 1979. So it isn’t very surprising that new records will be set. The time frame is only 44 years.
But Forbes magazine takes the cake: The once serious business publication states that July 4 was the hottest day in over 100,000 years! The real temperature after the little ice age isn’t even back to the medieval warm period, much less the Roman warm period, even less than the Minoan warming
Even more interesting is the temperature in the Holocene Climate optimum:
From this chart we can see, even as there were no global measurements taken it was warmer during 8000 of the last 10,000 years, at least according to the Greenland Ice Cores.
But back to the Hillary tweet: CBS claimed that Earth just had the hottest June on record. What they forgot to mention was “since worldwide satellite records began in 1979”
This calls for a Limerick
The Climate change pace in this plot
shows voting next fall means a lot.
No original sin
if Republicans win
since temperatures will be less hot.
From Wattsupwiththat.com comes this interesting plot: (Thanks, David Middleton)
From this we can see that the global temperature changes according to hadcrut4gl are:
During the presidency of George H W Bush temperatures fell by 0.20 C/decade
During the presidency of Bill Clinton temperatures rose by 0.26 C/decade
During the presidency of George W Bush temperatures fell by 0.04 C/decade
During the presidency of Barack H Obama temperatures rose by 0.42 C/decade
So far , during the Presidency of Donald J Trump global temperatures have receded 0.24 C.
President Donald J Trump ended his presidency with a temperature decline of 0.37C/decade.
So far, during Joe Biden ‘s presidency temperatures are up 0.18C, and that was before the latest heatwave.
It seems the hot air is coming from Democrats, and with Republicans cooler minds prevail
And a bonus question. During the 1930s the number, length and severity of U.S heatwaves was much worse. Who was president for most of that time?
Oh and by the way, in the 1930s the CO2 level was around 300 ppm. It is now 418.4 ppm or 40% higher.
(also known as the black-body 
The average temperature on earth is 14 C or 287.15 degree Kelvin. This means that for every degree the earth gets warmer it emits 1.4% more energy. The sun’s incoming energy is nearly constant, well within +- 0,5%, so if the earth warms up more than one degree Celsius, it must come from changes on earth. 
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 