Ed Bohman

There is a great misconception about rising CO₂ levels at the heart of global warming. Doubling CO₂ levels from 400 ppm to 800 ppm retains the exact same incremental amount of longwave radiation as doubling it from 200 ppm to 400 ppm did—even though the actual volume of CO₂ added has doubled. This reduction in the rate of heat retention continues to fall along a sliding scale of a logarithmic curve; no matter how much the global level of CO₂ increases, it's effects continue to fall by half. The atmosphere gets a bit warmer as CO₂ increases, but not nearly as much as before. As CO₂ levels increase, warming slows down dramatically, and continue to drop. This means forecasts of runaway warming from CO₂ alone is not only improbable, it is impossible. This occurs because the primary absorption bands for CO₂ (centered around the 15-micrometer wavelength) are already heavily saturated. This saturation effect begins at 100 ppm. Each incremental increase in atmospheric CO₂ traps less escaping longwave radiation than the preceding unit. What this means is that as atmospheric CO₂ increases, it absorbs less and less escaping longwave radiation. The effects of more CO₂ fall away sharply. The global warming narrative as shaped and presented by a United Nations-led collective of investors, asset managers, and political figures, neglects to tell you this. The UN has never clearly explained how the effects of higher CO₂ will continue falling along this predictable logarithmic curve. As CO₂ levels rise, the rate of temperature increase falls and slows down dramatically. The bureaucratic mechanisms being used are based on things like levels of carbon taxes, the amount of subsidies being paid to install wind and solar installations and land-use restrictions. These are all being justified using simplified catastrophic projections, they ignore the natural stabilising buffers built into Earth’s physics and biology. The Earth system does not behave like an uncontrolled runaway machine. It behaves exactly like a complex, heavily buffered dynamic planetary equilibrium should. It is entirely dominated by this logarithmic decline in the rate of warming and the powerful role of biological feedback loops. Revisiting the empirical realities of vast levels of terrestrial greening and CO₂ radiative saturation levels does not mean ignoring environmental stewardship. Instead, it exposes the deliberate disconnect between real physical science and the economic and political mandates designed to manage it. The primary driver is funding it and market it as part of a vast new economy based on a transitionto intermittent renewable energy. This staggering cost of $9.2 trillion every year represents roughly 9% of total global GDP—with the cumulative $275 trillion price tag amounting to nearly 2.5 times the total annual output of the entire planet. IMAGE: Relationship between CO₂ and radiative forcing.