Cosmic rays, not carbon dioxide, cause climate change By Douglas J. Cotton
When a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Dr John Clauser, labels the claims about greenhouse gases warming the Earth as “pseudoscience” and describes them as “a dangerous corruption of science,” I urge you to take notice. He further stated that “the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation,” and remarked that climate science has “metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”
Similarly, Professor Harold (Hal) Lewis, a distinguished physicist, called such claims “the biggest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud” he had encountered in his lifetime. Another German physicist expressed outrage upon discovering that much of what the IPCC and the media presented was “sheer nonsense,” unsupported by scientific facts or measurements. The late Dr Tim Ball, author of Human Caused Global Warming – The Biggest Deception in History, often cited this scientist.
Over a decade ago, Swedish Professor Claes Johnson, a brilliant scientist, authored a 115-page document explaining why radiation from cooler atmospheric molecules cannot transfer heat to a warmer surface, thus debunking the notion that such radiation warms the Earth.
Physics, not climatology, governs radiation and energy transfer. Physicists like those mentioned above, and I, possess a deeper understanding of atmospheric physics than many climatologists, who often rely on flawed interpretations. For example, a textbook written by Raymond Pierrehumbert often promoted a concept of “Radiative Forcing,” misleading generations of students.
Consider this: water vapor, the primary “greenhouse gas,” constitutes an average of 0.25% of the atmosphere, reaching up to 4% in humid regions. Carbon dioxide averages 0.04%, and methane a mere 0.0002%. Together, these gases account for less than 0.3% of the atmosphere.
Now, in Earth’s atmosphere, only greenhouse gases can absorb and emit radiation. The remaining 99.7% (primarily nitrogen and oxygen) do not contribute to this process. However, when examining climatology “Energy Budget” diagrams, such as those published by NASA, we see figures representing absorption and emission attributed to the atmosphere as a whole, alongside distinct values for greenhouse gases.
Public domain.
Greenhouse gas molecules generally radiate uniformly in all directions. Yet, according to these diagrams, atmospheric radiation (presumably from water vapor) appears to be directed exclusively upward, while greenhouse gas radiation is depicted as moving only downward.
A closer analysis of the diagram reveals that incoming solar radiation is approximately 340 watts per square meter. Of this, about 100 watts per square meter is reflected back into space, reflection being a process quite distinct from absorption and emission. This leaves a net influx of roughly 240 watts per square meter, which serves as the primary source of new energy, since contributions from beneath the surface are negligible in comparison.
Public domain.
Despite this, the diagram suggests that the atmosphere somehow generates additional energy, delivering not only the remaining 163 watts per square meter of solar radiation to the surface but also over 340 watts per square meter from greenhouse gases (excluding water vapor), which make up less than 0.05% of the atmosphere.
Professor Claes Johnson, in Mathematical Physics of Blackbody Radiation (page 24) explains that not all electromagnetic energy in radiation is converted to thermal energy upon reaching a target, whether that be Earth’s surface or greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere. Climatologists appear to overlook this principle, a misconception which I exposed in Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which underwent peer review and was published on multiple platforms in 2012. You may read this and my other papers here.
In essence, the “settled science” underpinning climate models and surface temperature predictions is built upon flawed assumptions and manipulated physics. My own research—spanning three decades of temperature and precipitation data from tropical regions across three continents—corroborates the findings presented in my 2013 paper, Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures. This study demonstrates that the most prolific greenhouse gas, water vapor, cools the planet by several degrees, rather than warming it, and the physics in that paper explains why this is the case.
Consequently, the widespread belief that greenhouse gases contribute to planetary warming is fundamentally incorrect and has led policymakers astray on a global scale.
It is variations in the intensity of cosmic rays (which assist cloud formation) that cause climate change, as I wrote last month in the April 19 edition of American Thinker.
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