industrial emissions smoke stacks
Forget 'settled' science or 'consensus' - that is a political construct designed to quash debate in the interests of promoting a command-and-control Net Zero agenda. One of the great drivers of continual changes in the climate is heat exchange within both the atmosphere and the Earth's surface. Current understanding of the entire picture is limited, and it seems the opportunity has been taken to fill this gap by blaming carbon dioxide almost entirely for the recent gentle warming. A new paper on the so-called 'greenhouse' effect highlights the vital role played by oceans and water vapour flows. CO2 is said to have "minimal effect" on the Earth's temperature and climate.

The paper has been published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and is written by meteorologist William Kininmonth, a former consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation's Commission for Climatology and former head of the Australian Government's National Climate Centre. Kininmonth argues that the oceans are the "vital inertial and thermal flywheels" of the climate system. If one wants to control climate, it will be necessary to control the oceans, he argues. "Efforts to decarbonise in the hope of affecting global temperatures will be in vain," he adds.

In Kininmonth's view, the recent warming is "probably simply the result of fluctuations in the ever-changing ocean circulation". CO2 "must be recognised" as a very minor contributor to the observed warming, and one that is unlikely to prolong the warming trend beyond the peak generated by the natural oceanic oscillations, he notes. He explains that the main driver of global temperature is the movement of energy in water, both in the oceans and the atmosphere after evaporation.

co2 graph
© Kininmonth 2022As CO₂ concentration increases from 0 to 600 parts per million (green bars), the total strength of the greenhouse effect, measured as the energy the greenhouse gases radiate to the Earth’s surface, barely changes (orange line).
Kininmonth proposes that tropical oceans have warmed recently, not as a result of additional atmospheric CO2, but most likely because of a reduction of heat as ocean currents have slowed. Heat has been exchanged with the tropical atmosphere, and transported by the winds to enhance northern polar warming. It is accepted that warming over the Arctic has been greater in the recent past than elsewhere over the globe. Ocean surface temperature in the tropics has warmed much less than the Arctic. However Arctic warming has occurred predominantly during the cold winter half of the year, when the surface is largely in darkness. For Kininmonth, this implies that it can only be the result of heat transport from warmer latitudes. Kininmonth's conclusions are of course a subject for scientific argument and debate, but It might be noted that they provide a plausible insight into why temperatures at the South Pole have barely moved for at least 50 years.

Settled science is all in on the predominant role of CO2 acting as the climate control thermostat. As we reported recently in the Daily Sceptic, a bizarre 'fact check' by Facebook partner Climate Feedback of one of our previous articles stated: "Natural (non-human) drivers of climate change have been mostly stable since the onset of modern warming and all the available scientific evidence implicates human greenhouse gas emissions as the primary culprit." As I argued, the claim that the climate has not undergone any natural change for almost 200 years is nonsense. Not a scrap of evidence can be submitted to back up this proposition, and Climate Feedback's claim is little more than a denial of climate change.

The political narrative, however, seems to demand that like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, six impossible things must be believed before breakfast. To back up the narrative, imprecise science often ends up being fed into climate models, along with improbable guesses of massive CO2-caused future global warming. But as Dr. John Christie, Professor of Atmospheric and Earth Sciences at the University of Alabama, recently noted: "Models fail to reproduce accurate energy flows, and this is the guts of how the climate system works."

Despite this, climate models remain exhibit A in the attempt to prove that we are on a path to climate disaster unless humans stop using fossil fuels. But increasingly, their controversial role is being called into question. The recent World Climate Declaration signed by around 250 university professors, and led by a Nobel physics laureate, noted that models had many shortcomings, "and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools". We must free ourselves from the "naïve belief" in immature climate models. In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science, it states.

Of course Kininmonth's work will be largely ignored in the mainstream. The BBC will bin it, the Guardian might be tempted to run its usual in-house slur that bungs are being paid by BP; anyone publicising its conclusions runs the risk of woke corporations like PayPal suddenly withdrawing financial transactional services, while footling 'fact checks' will ensure black marks and warnings across social media. GWPF invited the Royal Society and the Met Office to review the Kininmonth paper, promising any response would be published as an appendix. "No reply was received," noted the Foundation.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic's Environment Editor