Dr Darko Butina: Why CO2 Has Nothing to Do With Earth’s Temperature
Independent scientists are increasingly disregarding the greenhouse gas theory as a valid explanation of earth’s climate mechanism.
Herein we summarise Dr Darko Butina’s compelling paper – one of the myriad studies from Principia Scientific – that explains why carbon dioxide is not our climate’s control knob.
A Summary of Darko Butina’s Critique of Greenhouse Theory
In a paper first published as a PROM contribution in 2013 and updated in 2019, retired chemist Darko Butina offers a direct, molecule-centred challenge to the greenhouse theory (GHT) and the classification of greenhouse gases. [1]
Writing for a general audience from the standpoint of someone who spent a working life measuring the properties of real molecules, Butina argues that the theory rests on a virtual framework disconnected from the physical reality of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.
His central claim is straightforward: carbon dioxide, present at roughly 400 parts per million, has nothing measurable to do with the temperatures we actually experience.
The same molecules that keep the planet from overheating by day also keep it from freezing by night, and those molecules are overwhelmingly nitrogen, oxygen and water.
Butina begins by noting a historical oddity. Although the greenhouse effect is routinely traced to Svante Arrhenius around 1900, he contends that Arrhenius never used the term “greenhouse” in any paper and would never have confused the properties of pure CO₂ with its contribution inside a dilute mixture called air.
The modern linkage, he suggests, was constructed much later through successive citations that gradually turned an invented pedigree into “well-established fact.” The practical consequence, in his view, is that GHT arrived fully formed in the late 1980s without the classic scientific paper that would normally introduce a new theory, complete with experimental tests and clear definitions.
Because the theory is framed in terms that cannot be checked against direct measurements of the atmosphere as it actually exists, it cannot be falsified by ordinary scientific methods. Butina therefore sets himself a different task: explain the observed differences between Earth and the airless Moon using only the well-measured properties of molecules, without invoking greenhouse gases at all.
If he succeeds, GHT is unnecessary; if he fails, the theory stands.
The core of the argument is the distinction between pure substances and mixtures. Every molecule has a unique, fixed set of physical properties—heat capacity, density, infrared absorption and so on—regardless of whether it is day or night, on Earth or anywhere else.
Air, however, is not a single substance. It is a collection of independent gas molecules that do not form chemical bonds with one another. Its overall behaviour is simply the weighted sum of the behaviours of its constituents. Nitrogen makes up about 78 percent, oxygen 21 percent and CO₂ roughly 0.04 percent.
When the measured heat capacities of pure N₂ and O₂ are scaled by these fractions, they already account for more than 99 percent of the heat capacity of real air. CO₂’s share is 0.0004. In practical terms, if a kilogram of air warms by 1 °C, CO₂ contributes only 0.0004 °C of that warming.
Doubling its concentration would raise the figure to 0.0008 °C—far below the resolution of ordinary thermometers.
A thermometer, Butina reminds readers, does not measure some abstract “global temperature.” It records the average kinetic energy of the molecules that happen to be colliding with its bulb.
Given that each CO₂ molecule is surrounded by roughly 2,500 molecules of N₂ and O₂, those collisions are dominated by the major gases. Standard laboratory instruments confirm the same point: an ordinary infrared spectrometer filled with a gram of air shows essentially zero absorption, because the CO₂ fraction is too small to register.
Specialised CO₂ detectors work only by ignoring 99.99 percent of the sample and focusing exclusively on the trace component.
The moderating influence of the atmosphere and oceans becomes clearer when Earth is compared with the Moon. At the surface the Moon swings between roughly +123 °C and –233 °C. Earth’s extremes are far milder: about +58 °C and –89 °C.
The difference, Butina argues, is not a selective blanket of greenhouse gases that somehow appears only at night. It is the sheer mass of molecules that must be heated or cooled. The atmosphere contains on the order of 10¹⁸ kilograms of gas; warming that mass by a single degree requires 10¹⁸ kilojoules.
The oceans hold roughly 10²¹ kilograms of water, whose heat capacity is four times higher still. The top few metres of seawater can store as much heat as the entire atmosphere. Heat arriving from the Sun does not simply “deposit” itself on a surface at sea level and then wait to be re-radiated; it is continuously absorbed, mixed and slowly redistributed by an immense reservoir of N₂, O₂ and H₂O.
The same reservoir continues to exchange heat through the night. There is no need to invent a daytime CO₂ that is transparent and a nighttime CO₂ that acts as a proxy sun.
Butina lists ten assumptions he believes underpin the greenhouse framework and finds each of them at odds with measurement. The theory treats the Earth’s surface as beginning at sea level, ignoring the 100 km of atmosphere above it.
It treats the oceans as having no depth. It assigns no daytime heat capacity to either air or water, and none to nitrogen or oxygen.
It implies that molecules change their fundamental properties between day and night. It equates the behaviour of pure CO₂ with its behaviour inside a 2,500-to-1 mixture. And it treats a concentration of 400 ppm as if it were somehow comparable to 1 000 000 ppm. Correcting any of these points, he writes, removes the need to invoke CO₂ as a climate control knob.
To illustrate how temperature actually behaves on a real planet, Butina turns to one of the longest continuous daily records available: the Armagh Observatory series in Northern Ireland, spanning 1844–2004. Plotting the difference between daily maximum and minimum temperatures for each calendar day across 161 years reveals swings of several degrees to more than 20 °C on individual dates.
photo: Armagh Observatory
These ranges reflect the actual heat energy available to the molecules surrounding a fixed thermometer on that day and in that year. In contrast, the much-discussed “global temperature” change of 0.7 °C over a century averages to 0.007 °C per year—an amount invisible against the background of ordinary daily and seasonal variation.
Understanding trends in maximum temperatures, he argues, first requires understanding the corresponding minimum temperatures, because the former is simply the latter plus the energy the Sun was able to supply that day. That energy budget is governed by the Sun itself and by the movements of the N₂ and O₂ molecules that stand between the Sun and the instrument.
Butina closes by urging that temperature and CO₂ be treated as separate subjects. Temperature patterns are driven by solar input and by the physical dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans. Observed changes in ground-level CO₂ concentrations are better explained by the temperature-dependent solubility of the gas in water and by the photosynthetic activity of plants. A forthcoming companion paper, he notes, would examine CO₂ on its own terms.
Whether or not one ultimately accepts every step of the argument, the paper’s value for a general reader lies in its insistence on returning to measurable quantities: the heat capacities listed in engineering handbooks, the molecular ratios that can be verified in any laboratory, the daily thermometer readings that have been recorded for generations, and the simple arithmetic that follows once those numbers are accepted.
In Butina’s telling, the planet is already protected by three ordinary molecules—nitrogen, oxygen and water—whose collective thermal mass dwarfs any contribution from the trace gas that has dominated public discussion for three decades.
[1] https://principia-scientific.com/publications/Butina-Virual-vs-Reality.pdf
About the author: Dr Darko Butina is retired scientist with 20 years of experience in experimental carbon-based chemistry in drug discovery and 20 years of experience of modelling data generated by calibrated instruments and various biological screens.