'Pure Junk Science': Researchers Challenge Narrative On CO2 And Warming

'Pure Junk Science': Researchers Challenge Narrative On CO2 And Warming Correlation

Katie Spence

Each year from 2023 to 2030, climate change sustainable development goals will cost every person in economies such as the United States $2,026, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development estimates. In lower-income economies, the per-person annual cost ranges from $332 to $1,864.

In total, the global price tag comes to about $5.5 trillion per year.

Separately, a report from the left-aligned nonprofit Climate Policy Initiative found that in 2021 and 2022, the world’s taxpayers spent $1.3 trillion each year on climate-related projects.

It also found that the “annual climate finance needed” from 2031 to 2050 is more than $10 trillion each year.

At its signing in August 2022, President Biden said the IRA “invests $369 billion to take the most aggressive action ever—ever, ever, ever—in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening our economic—our energy security.”

A report from Goldman Sachs put the dollar amount much higher, stating, “Critical funding for this next energy revolution is expected to come from the IRA, which will provide an estimated $1.2 trillion of incentives by 2032.”

One of Mr. Clark’s primary areas of research is paleoclimatology (the study of climate conditions using indirect records such as tree ring data, ice cores, and other proxy records), and in particular, Arctic paleohydrogeology, which is the study of the Earth’s water throughout history.

“During the ice ages, we had great temperature variations, and this has to do with, not straight-up solar activity, but the amount of solar activity that is hitting the Earth at certain important latitudes, all caused by celestial events,” Mr. Clark said.

“The Earth, in our solar system, is moving around and being jostled. And we have different orbiting patterns that affect solar input, and that creates ice ages and interglacial periods—which we’re in now. And CO2 tracks that. So we'll see enormous temperature changes, going from ice ages to interglacials, and CO2 gets very low during ice ages and very high during interglacials.

“And that gives the appearance that CO2 is driving the climate, but it’s actually following. It lags by about 800 years.”

Another peer-reviewed study, by scientist William Jackson, examined the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature over the past 425 million years.

Mr. Jackson is a distinguished research and emeritus professor for the department of chemistry at UC–Davis who specializes in understanding the role that molecules such as CO2, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide play in planetary atmospheres.

His paper, published in 2017, found that “changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration did not cause temperature change in the ancient climate.”

Similarly, a group of researchers whose report was published in Nature found that when looking at carbon isotope compositions at the million-year scale, long-term atmospheric carbon dioxide was unrelated to temperature, and even showed an inverse trend, especially after major events such as volcanic eruptions.

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