How Natural Climate Events Debunk Today’s GHG-Driven Catastrophic Claims
Climate alarmism is reaching new heights in the media, with doomsday scenarios about the imminent collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) making headlines.
Articles like the recent one in Science Focus warn us of catastrophic climate shifts in the near future if greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions aren’t reined in. But this singular focus on GHGs as the driver of all climate change is not only scientifically shaky but ethically dubious.
It ignores the fact that Earth has undergone significant, even global, climate events with little to no shifts in atmospheric GHGs. One such case, often overlooked in today’s discourse, is the 4.2-kiloyear event, a severe climate disruption that occurred about 4,200 years ago.
Let’s explore this event in detail and examine what it tells us about natural climate variability and how the current GHG-centric narrative might be a convenient, and possibly lucrative, distraction.
What Was the 4.2-Kiloyear Event?
The 4.2-kiloyear event, which occurred around 2200 BCE, marked the end of the Holocene climatic optimum, a warm period that had sustained human civilization for millennia.
This event triggered widespread aridification in regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia, causing prolonged droughts that contributed to the collapse of multiple ancient civilizations, including the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, and the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley.
While the exact causes remain debated, one thing is clear: there was no significant rise in GHGs such as CO2 during this period.
The climate shifts of the 4.2-kyr event were triggered by natural variations, likely changes in solar activity, shifts in oceanic circulation patterns like the AMOC, or even volcanic activity.
What’s striking about this event is that it demonstrates how large-scale, global climate disruptions can occur without any discernible human interference or significant alterations in atmospheric GHGs.
Dome Fuji wet extraction added. Time scale is AICC2012. Taylor and Siple Dome shifted by 250 years to fit time scale. B/A is the Bolling Allerod and LGM is the Last Glacial Maximum. Source: https://clintel.org/holocene-co2-variability-and-underlying-trends/
The figure above provides a clear representation of CO2 levels throughout the Holocene, including key climatic events such as the Younger Dryas. Notably, throughout the period that encompasses the 4.2-kyr event, CO2 levels remained relatively stable, hovering around 270 ppm.
This is critical to understanding the drivers of this major climate disruption. Despite significant global aridification and cooling, there was no corresponding change in atmospheric CO2 or other GHGs.
This absence of GHG spikes during major climate events like the 4.2-kyr event reinforces the point that climate shifts can occur independently of anthropogenic emissions.
The figure shows that even during events such as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age, CO2 levels fluctuated very little.
In essence, the 4.2-kyr event and other natural climate shifts documented in this figure provide compelling evidence that attributing modern climate changes solely to CO2 increases is an oversimplification that ignores recent changes in Earth’s climate system.
How Can We Blame CO2 for Everything Today?
Fast forward to today, where we are told that virtually all observed climate changes, be they shifts in temperature, increased storm activity, or even sea level changes, are driven by rising GHG levels. But suppose the 4.2-kyr event teaches us anything.
In that case, it’s that attributing every climate fluctuation to one variable, especially when history shows us that complex, multifactorial drivers exist, is not only simplistic but misleading.
This brings us to the recent media hysteria over the potential collapse of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), a crucial system that redistributes heat from the tropics to northern regions.
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David Hamilton Russell
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AGW is based on the GHE, which is 100 to 1 overstated because in reality, GHGs only radiate 1% of the energy they absorb. The other 99% goes to establish local thermal equilibrium (LTE) at each altitude, which means the energy 1% GHGs absorbs\ is shared equally with the 99% non-GHGs at each altitude. Thus at all times, GHGs only have 1% of the energy the absorb net of thermalization to radiate. As therefore the GHE is 100 to 1 overstated, then AGW is 100 to 1 overstated and can be safely ignored.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi David Hamilton Russell,
Been a while since you last comment and I missed reading them. Because of your comment I took a second read of this article which I had dismissed and forgotten. The primary reason I dismissed it is I question how atmospheric levels of CO2 were measured before there were instruments to measure them. And the data of the figure was of Antarctica; which is a pretty unique part of our planet.
If you to my last comment at another article you will find a link to Arrhenius’s empirical essay which I question if anyone these days has actually read it. Have you?
Have a good day
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David Hamilton Russell
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I don’t know how to find your last comment. Help me out there. My position seems impervious to anything Arrhenius might have said. It is a deductive argument based on two widely held premises, namely: 1) GHGs are 1% of the troposphere; and 2) LTE. It is essentially irrefutable. One could attack the premises, but LTE is textbook thermodynamics. Good luck with that. GHGs being 1% might be challenged. Maybe it’s 1.03% or 0.98% but this is really merely a quibble and my deductions therefore stands.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi David,
As I read about the atmospheric greenhouse I find a multitude of evidence that no currently seems to have read Arrhenius’s. empirical essay of 1896 Here’s a link to it.
(https://www.rsc.org/images/arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf)
I am going to keep reminding of what I commented until someone dares to refute what I wrote.
Have a good cay
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David Hamilton Russell
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I still don’t know what you wrote (are you referring to your article on Stonehenge?). Anyway, as for Arrhenius he performed no experiments. He gets credit for work supporting AGW, but I don’t see it. Consider:
Bibliographic list [3] contains 4 references to Arrhenius’ works on the greenhouse effect. Here we will talk about the article published in 1896, where the main ideas of the author are quite fully formulated [11].
In the first paragraph of this article, S. Arrhenius compares the atmosphere with the glass of a hothouse, referring to the work of Fourier [6] mentioned above, although there is no such comparison in the original. Since such a comparison has been repeated many times in subsequent popular articles, it deserves detailed consideration. From the point of view of physics, it is incorrect to compare the Earth’s atmosphere and a solid body, since the intrinsic volume of molecules is a fraction of a percent of the total volume of a gas at normal pressure and in glass the interatomic distances are smaller than the sizes of gas molecules. Glass, like other transparent solid materials with low thermal conductivity, is used in hothouses and greenhouses precisely because it prevents air particles from carrying away heat into the surrounding space; the air itself cannot replace the roof and walls of the greenhouse. To what extent is the atmosphere capable of retaining heat, emitted by the heated earth can be seen from the magnitude of the difference between day and night temperatures in the desert, where there is no influence on this process of clouds and vegetation. The value of the temperature difference can reach 40 K, which clearly does not indicate the correctness of the above comparison.
The experimental basis for the work of Arrhenius was the measurement of the intensity (“a strength of a ray”) of the reflected radiation of the Moon at different wavelengths, completed by S.P. Langley (1884). Assuming that the observed changes in intensity with wavelength are due to the absorption of lunar radiation by water vapor and carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, Arrhenius calculated the absorption coefficients of each of these components for certain amounts of carbon dioxide (parameter K) and water vapor (parameter W). Identifying the absorption of infrared and thermal radiation, he “obtained the total heat-radiation for every series of observations, reduced to K = 1.5 and W = 0.88” (p.241). (Note that in real conditions the amount of water vapor is many times greater than CO2).
Discussing this question, it is necessary first of all to note that the reflected radiation of the Moon cannot be thermal radiation: the amount of thermal energy absorbed by the moon surface during the day is small, and this energy is dissipated in space without reaching the Earth’s atmosphere, S.Arrhenius wrote: “Now the temperature of the moon is nearly the same than that of earth” (p.240), but this statement was doubtful at that time, and now it is refuted by the results of modern research [12]. These data show huge temperature differences on the Moon, on the order of 300 K in the equatorial regions and 200 K in the polar regions. Given such differences and the rapid change in surface temperature depending on the angle of incidence of the sun’s rays, it makes no sense at all to talk about the average temperature of the Moon. Since the surface temperature changes rapidly, both the radiation energy (the Stefan-Boltzmann law) and the position of the radiation maximum on the wavelength axis (Wien’s law) also change. It follows that the observed changes in lunar radiation may be caused by a change in the temperature of the Moon, and not by gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Judging from the references in the article, Arrhenius was unfamiliar with Foote’s work, but knew about Tyndall’s experiment (see above). Apparently, he considered the Tyndall experiment to be insufficiently convincing proof of the greenhouse effect, since he proposed his own idea (p.239): “one should, strictly speaking, arrange experiments on the absorption of heat from a body at 15o by means of appropriate quantities of both gases”. (Both gases are H2 O and CO2 ). We will never know how Arrhenius intended to carry out such an experiment; it is only known that for this it was necessary “very expensive apparatus beyond that in my disposal”. As a result, neither Arrhenius nor his followers received experimental confirmation of the existence of the greenhouse effect.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi David,
Here another link you might visit. (https://principia-scientific.com/ancestors-tracing-history-scientific-method/)
Have a good day
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