In 2009 H. Leighton Steward, a New York Times bestselling author, published an excellent book “Fire, Ice and Paradise”.  The book is well organized and written for non-specialists in an easily understandable language. It is instructive and convincing. The panel IPCC will have great problems to argument against the many driving forces which are responsible for the never ending climate change. Climate changed before people were on Earth and will forever change in unpredictable time scales. With this historical overview as a professional geologist Steward points in the right direction.

But when geologists write about climate and it’s never ending changes they often forget to declare what they mean by climate. Generally they give no definition and explanation because they think in geological time scales, in categories of thousands and millions of years. But if we nowadays speak about Global Climate Change on a book for politicians and the higher educated  middle class each scientist is obliged to define what he understands by “climate”. This is very important because no one on Earth has at any time felt, observed and measured what we call “climate”. Climate is an abstract idea, a calculated mean state of different weather situations over a specific period of time. It’s worth to take a look into the Encyclopaedia Britannica (London 1963):

“Climate is the average condition of the atmosphere at a locality or over an area. Climatology is the science dealing with climate; it is a subfield of meteorology. Climate is determined by the daily weather events and their seasonal patterns. It is usually described in terms of a variety of climatic elements. In common practice these include temperature, humidity, amounts of rain and snow, duration of sunshine, cloud amounts, wind direction and speed, weather phenomena such as fog, frost, rain and thunderstorm… Observation of the climatic elements should cover several decades in order to describe the climate adequately. From these observations the frequency distribution of measured quantities can be obtained. The arithmetic means of the observed values of various elements have often been used exclusively as a basis for describing and comparing climates. This approach has considerably limitations because it conveys essentially only a static picture of the atmospheric surroundings. These, everyone knows, belong to the most fickle environmental factors in human life. The mean is mainly useful because it is a statistic, readily derived from large numbers of observations. However, the mean is not necessarily the most often observed values (mode) nor does it always split the observations in half (median). All mean values should be viewed with this reservation in mind.”

Note:  The “weather world” is a dynamic living world, always moving and changing! The “climatic world” is statistically calculated, a static, dead world. Climate change is always following and not causing weather changes. Philosophizing and speculating about climate change without bearing in mind the indomitable, inconstant and indeterminable weather doesn’t lead to any real conclusion, is irrational, insufficient and inadmissible. It’s voodoo-science!

Leighton Steward as a geologist unmasks the IPCC chapter by chapter in his book in his retrospective glances of the different and constantly changing earth climates. He makes two insignificant but suspicious faults in the chapter “Climatic Drivers” he makes two insignificant but suspicious faults. In lieu of his own knowledge of atmospheric physics he thoughtlessly plagiarized the politically correct mainstream meaning of IPCC and opened himself to criticism.

Steward writes: “The sun provides nearly all of the heat that reaches Earth’s atmosphere and surface… As the Sun’s visible energy (light) encounters Earth’s atmosphere, most of this energy passes through the atmosphere and strikes the planet surface… Of the dominant amount of the visible light that reaches Earth’s surface, nearly half is absorbed, more than a quarter is reflected  back into space, and the rest is radiated back as non-visible infrared energy and temporarily “trapped” by the various greenhouse gases. This “trapped” heat helps keep Earth’s lower atmosphere warm and Earth’s surface from being frozen.”

Let’s look once more into the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Concerning the key-word “Historical Spectroscopy” we read: “The composite nature of white light was first demonstrated by Isaac Newton (1664) when he allowed sunlight entering a round hole in a shutter to pass through a glass prism and fall on a screen. This elongated and coloured image of the Sun he called spectrum. In 1800 W. Herschel studied the spectral distribution of heat from the s with the aid of thermometers and found the maximum temperature beyond the red end, thus discovering the infra-red spectrum. In 1801 J. W. Ritter, studying the effect of spectral light upon silver salts, found this action extending beyond the violet, thus discovering the ultra-violet spectrum. The first connection between spectral colour and wavelength appeared in 1802 when Th. Young substituted his wave theory of light for Newton’s corpuscular theory, explained the colours of thin films, and calculated the approximate wave lengths of the seven colours recognized by Newton. …  Although Fraunhofer and others observed that certain bright lines in the spectra of the flames seemed to coincide with dark lines in the solar spectrum it remained for G. R. Kirchhoff in 1859 to enunciate the general law connecting absorption and emission of light and to emphasize the fact that each species of atom has a uniquely characteristic spectrum.”

Note: Nearly 7 % of the Sun’s energy is in the ultra-violet spectrum, 46 % in the infra-red and 47 % in the visible spectrum. The Sun’s spectrum ranges from about 0,28 to the region of 3 micrometers. The visible part runs from 0,29 to 0,79 micrometers. Taking all absorption lines of all gases in the atmosphere and assuming that the Earth radiates like a ”black body” a range between 8 and 12 micrometers where no absorption occurs remains in the radiation spectrum of the Earth. This range is called the “permanently open radiation window” of the atmosphere. Through this always open “window” nearly all the invisible infra-red radiation of the Earth’s surface can escape into the space, unabsorbed! Therefore the atmosphere can’t function like a greenhouse. If the Earth isn’t a colossal greenhouse, then  the term “greenhouse gases” is by nature confusing or misleading. The comparison of the Earth with a hothouse for exotic plants in cool climates is inadmissible, physically dishonest and simply wrong!

In the chapter “Greenhouse Gases” Steward writes  with enthusiasm:  “Hooray for greenhouse gases! Greenhouse gases are very important in retaining the heat radiated from Earth’s surface. Unlike other gases… the greenhouse gases trap non-visible, infrared heat that is radiated back into the atmosphere from Earth’s surface and thus helps warm the atmosphere. Without them Earth would be frozen, since most of the sun’s incoming energy simply would be reflected and radiated back into space.” This is wrong! If a bucket has a “hole” it will lose water, if the atmosphere has an open “window” the radiation will escape automatically and the Earth will lose warmth. The strong daily up and down of the surface temperatures on cloudless days is the factual evidence that the hypothesis of the existence of a “natural greenhouse effect” is false and not in accordance with the observed and measured facts in meteorology.  Otherwise it would be impossible to photograph the invisible heat radiation of the Earth’s surface during day and night by weather satellites. These pictures show the temperature distribution on Earth and all objects on it. They demonstrate that the radiation window is open for all heat radiation with temperatures between  -50° C and +100° C.

A look back at Earth’s historical climate record, her paleo-climates, indicates that CO2 has had no effect on Earth’s climates. Ice core analyses by scientists from around the world have established this relationship: Changes in atmospheric CO2 follow changes in Earth’s temperature! A cause does not follow an effect! Even the man-made global warming enthusiasts have not been able to turn the results of these analyses around. CO2 is the food that green plants eat. Plants need carbon dioxide. To call CO2 a “pollutant” is an abject lie. Steward writes: “I have heard that people say their plants grow better if they talk with them every day. While this old saying is thought by many to be an “old wives’ tale”, it underscores the benefit of CO2 to plants because we release CO2 with every breath we exhale. Animal life, including people, takes in oxygen and gives back CO2.”

The past is the key to the future. Vulnerability to the climate has been a feature of human existence for all the human history. There have always been droughts and floods and hurricanes and heat waves. We in the industrialized world tend to ignore or forget just how harsh and precarious life was in the preindustrial era, and still is today all over the world. The claim that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing large-scale changes to the Earth’s climate systems -dramatically increasing the risk of climate catastrophe- is omnipresent and trumpeted daily with ever-increasing alarm. Severe weather events have become a weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of politics. But remember: It is the weather that causes climate! The variety of weather on Earth causes the diversity of climates. These different climates cause the biological diversity, the multiplicity of life on Earth.

CO2 is the staff of life for Earth’s plant kingdom, which is the beginning of the planet’s food chain. Without CO2 in the atmosphere there would be no life on Earth.

Oppenheim, June 2010

Dr. Wolfgang Thüne