Part 1 of an important article by Don Batten and the CMI team entitled Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Go to http://www.creation.com to see the entire article.

Several important facts and concerns about this debate:

CO₂ is ‘plant food’: Planet Earth’s plants would benefit from more of it, not less. Indeed, the increase in CO₂ is now responsible for 30% of the world’s biomass production (food and fibre) over the last century, as documented in a paper in Nature in 2017.⁸¹ This is food for people and animals. And with more CO₂ in the air, plants have to spend less time with their leaf pores (stomata) open. Thus they lose less water during the day and can survive on less water.⁸² Deserts are greening, largely because of the extra CO₂. With the pre-Flood Earth having up to 15 times the CO₂ that we have now, plant productivity would have been amazing. That is where fossil fuels came from, as the vegetation of the pre-Flood world was buried during the Flood and then converted into coal and oil. The draw-down in atmospheric CO₂, with the burial of much carbon in the ground and the re-vegetation of the earth after the Flood, has resulted in the CO₂ ‘drought’ that we are now in. This has been hampering plant productivity and the carrying capacity of planet Earth (at levels from 50–170 ppm, depending on the species, plants die)

Green House Gases (GHGs) are essential for life: Without them, the average temperature would be ~33°C lower; in other words, we would be well and truly frozen!²⁷ Nearly all of this GHG effect is due to water vapour, and only about 3.3°C is due to CO₂. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, which have no greenhouse effect. Many discussions of climate change have excluded the effects of water vapour, which should respond dynamically to changes in temperature. Yet, since water has a much greater greenhouse effect, the exclusion of water from the debate is inexcusable. Other significant GHGs include methane, nitrous oxide, and chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs), which were popular refrigerants in the past that have been removed from the equation.

Source of human global warming: If the concern was truly about saving the planet from global warming due to human-generated CO₂, then the greatest sources of CO₂ should be the main target for the action? Then why, when China is the world’s largest CO₂ producer, is no one protesting outside Chinese embassies? Australia (for example) contributes just 1.2% of the world’s emissions, and yet is a target for activism. Yet if its emissions disappeared completely (with Australia reduced to a pre-industrial age), it would not make a detectable difference in world CO₂ levels. China had nearly a thousand gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired electricity generation as of 2018, compared to 36 GW for Australia. Moreover, neither China nor India have any target to reduce their total CO2 emissions under the Paris Accord. Hundreds of new coal-fired power stations are planned for China, India, and other places. Where are the protests about China and India ‘destroying the planet’? The moral imperative should surely be to go after the biggest contributors first.

Fake News: In 1989 the UN said, “Entire nations will be wiped out by the year 2000 if sea level rises are not stopped.” Did this happen? No! Tuvalu, a Pacific Ocean nation of island atolls, is a favourite poster child for this claim. However, Tuvalu has increased 3% in land area over the last 40 years.

In 2007, Dr Tim Flannery, an evolutionary mammologist who headed up the Australian government’s climate change unit, predicted that even the rain that would fall would not be enough to fill reservoirs. Largely based on such dire predictions, desalination plants were built in three Australian states, at great expense; two have never been used. Australia has had major floods since then. Such expensive mistakes make it harder for governments to invest in major new projects if a real need arises. Flannery also said in 2008, “Just imagine yourself in a world five years from now [2013], when there is no more ice over the Arctic.” Similarly, in 2008 Al Gore said that the polar ice would be gone by the summer of 2014. They were echoing the common view of ‘mainstream’ climate scientists (e.g. James Hansen, Peter Wadhams, and others, widely reported in media outlets). The Arctic sea ice area measured each September (the end of summer, its lowest extent of the year) declined from about 7.5 million km^₂ in 1980 to about 4–5.5 million km^₂ from 2010–2020 (NSIDC/NASA)—which is still a lot of ice, so the predictions of no ice were seriously out of touch with reality. Please note that fluctuations in the amount of Arctic ice are expected. Besides short-term variation, there could be long-term trends as well. Also, this cannot be divorced from a discussion of the Ice Age caused by the Genesis Flood.

Failed Predictions: The most relevant failed predictions of the climate alarmists are those regarding rising global temperature, from the climate models.

The planet has warmed by about 0.8°C since 1880²⁴ and half of this warming occurred before there was any significant change in the CO₂²⁵(that is, this part of the warming could not be due to human activity).

Atmospheric CO₂ has increased since 1860 from about 285 ppm (parts-per-million; 0.029%) to 410 ppm (0.041%) in 2020. The rate of rise is about 2 ppm per year, or about a 50% rise over 160 years. It is important to realise the human contribution to CO₂ emissions through the burning of fossil fuels is less than 5% of the total global carbon budget. Other sources include changes in land use (e.g. deforestation), volcanoes, the weathering of rocks, the release of carbon dioxide from the oceans (any warming of the oceans results in CO₂ being less soluble and therefore it is released into the atmosphere), the breakdown of organic remains (dead wood in forests), etc.

More Fake News: The claim that 97% of scientists agree that human-generated CO₂ will cause catastrophic warming to planet earth is fake news. When the raw data are examined, according to the authors’ own ratings, only 64 of the nearly 12,000 papers actually claimed that most of the warming is caused by human activity. In a follow-up analysis of the same papers, other researchers found that only 41 of those 64 papers endorsed the position that most of global warming was man-made.³¹ Taking into consideration that ⅔ of the papers expressed no view, that amounts to less than 1% of the papers that expressed a view. How did the authors get their 97%? They amalgamated all views that human-generated greenhouse gases are causing some warming. This is a trivial finding. In the USA, the Global Warming Petition Project has garnered the signatures of some 31,500 scientists resident in the USA alone, including over 9,000 with PhDs, who dispute the claim that CO₂ will cause serious problems.²⁹ This alone casts serious doubt on the 97% figure.

In 2016 alone, over 500 papers were published in peer-reviewed science journals that seriously questioned the supposed ‘consensus’ on climate change.³³

Some high-profile scientists who dispute the alarmism include:

1. Lennart O. Bengtsson, who was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.
2. John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
3. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama in Huntsville, and NASA. He and Dr John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites.³⁵
4. Judith A. Curry, who due to the “craziness” of the politicization of climate science, in 2017 took early retirement from her position as Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, USA, a position she had held for 15 years.
5. Richard S. Lindzen, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, contributed to the IPCC’s 1995 and 2001 reports but became skeptical of the alarmist climate model projections.
6. Nir J. Shaviv, Professor and Chair of the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

There are many others. In September 2019, a global network of 500 prominent climate scientists and professionals stated that there is no ‘climate emergency’. They invited the UN to organize with them a constructive high-level meeting between world-class scientists on both sides of the climate debate early in 2020.³⁶