The foundational tenet of climate alarmism is that atmospheric carbon dioxide directly drives climate change. It is true that, in a simple relationship, roughly doubling the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere leads to a one degree Celsius rise in temperature.
The problem, though, is that the real world is anything but simple. The Earth is not a sealed bell jar with just a mix of gases. That the relationship between atmospheric CO₂ and temperature is absolutely not a simple one, consider, for instance, that the Earth experienced extensive continental glaciation at a time when atmospheric CO₂ levels were 14–16 times higher than today.
More importantly, for most of the Earth’s history, atmospheric CO₂ levels plainly did not drive temperature. In fact, the correlation is the other way around.
That is: temperatures rose centuries before atmospheric CO₂ levels.
A particular substance in the chemical synthesis of the atmosphere that has been regarded as an essential climate driver is CO2. It has been generally thought that it is a strong greenhouse gas and its concentration in the atmosphere determines temperature. In the last decades, the observed atmospheric [CO2] increase was presented as the cause of the (also observed) temperature rise. In addition, the [CO2] increase in the last century was blamed on human actions, namely the burning of fossil fuels. According to this narrative, which is simplistic and negligent of the huge complexity of the climatic system, humans emit CO2 by burning fossil fuels, and the emissions accumulate into the atmosphere and increase the greenhouse effect causing increase in temperature. However, it is healthy to question whether these premises and the narrative are valid.
Here’s where we hit the troublesome questions for the climate narrative. Firstly, is CO₂ a driver of climate change, or an internal variable of the climate system? Does a trace gas in the atmosphere even have a decisive role in climate? With the biosphere responsible for 96 per cent of emissions, is the four per cent from human activity, of a gas making up 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere, the total and decisive cause of recent climate change?
Most importantly, does CO₂ drive temperature, or vice versa? This is an absolutely crucial question: if it’s the latter, then the entire rationale for ‘Net Zero’ collapses.
The consistent stochastic methodology for causality identification further developed in this study, as opposite to inconsistent deterministic methods, clearly supports a single conclusion: While there is a close relationship between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concertation, it is temperature that leads, while [CO2] lags. That is, the causality direction is T->CO₂ and not the opposite, as emphatically promoted in the last decades. This is the case not only in the distant past and on large time scales, but also in the recent period covered by reliable instrumental records. This happens not only at the monthly or annual time scale, but also at the decadal time scale […]
In conclusion, both the paleoclimatic and the instrumental data confirm the same causality direction for all time scales, from very large to very short, and all periods […]
Did human actions, such as fossil fuel combustion and other presumed ‘unnatural’ actions, reverse directionality, as the popular claim is? Perhaps, but no analysis based on observational data has shown that. Rather, such claims are based on imagination and climatic models full of assumptions.
In the end, the causality direction (CO₂ causing temperature rise) promoted by climate models is the opposite to that of the real-world data.
As Richard Feynman said, If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong… It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.
The study, Stochastic assessment of temperature–CO2 causal relationship in climate from the Phanerozoic through modern times, by Demetris Koutsoyiannis, is published in the journal Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering.
