by A. May & M. Crok, May 29, 2024 in AmJEconSociology
Dear signatories of the Clintel World Climate Declaration
We are very excited to announce the publication of our peer reviewed paper titled “Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems“. It was published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. The paper was written by Andy May, retired petrophysicist and currently climate writer and blogger, and Clintel director Marcel Crok.
Crok and May coordinated the ambitious Clintel project to analyse the IPCC AR6 report, which last year led to the publication of the Clintel book The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC. In the book we document serious errors and biases in the latest IPCC report.
The new paper is largely based on the many interesting findings of that book.
The new paper gets a lot of attention, mostly positive and some critical (of course). This has led to an impressive attention score (which gives an indication of how much the paper is being discussed on blogs and on X/twitter). The paper is already in the 99th percentile.
It was a little expensive (2330 euros) to make the paper open access so we decided not to do that this time. But our submitted version can be downloaded for free.
Signatories of the World Climate Declaration could help us boosting the paper even further by writing about it on blogs and/or discussing the paper on X (twitter).
Andy May has been responding very promptly to some of the criticism on the paper, see here, here and here.
The full abstract of the paper can be read below:
Prior to the mid-19th century, Earth was in the grip of the Little Ice Age. Since then, temperatures have on average trended upward. At the same time, human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased, and the interest of scientists has turned to consider the extent of the relative contributions of anthropogenic CO2 and natural forces to warming.
The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group II (WGII) claims that human-caused climate change or global warming is dangerous. According to the report, “Human-induced climate change … has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability. … The rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt (high confidence)” (IPCC, 2022a, p. 9).
The AR6 WGI and WGII reports measure climate change as the global warming since 1750 or 1850. The period before these dates is commonly referred to as the “pre-industrial period.” The Little Ice Age, a phrase rarely used in AR6, extends from about 1300 to 1850. It was a very cold and miserable time for humanity, with a lot of well documented extreme weather in the historical record from all over the Northern Hemisphere. It was also a time of frequent famines and pandemics. Arguably today’s climate is better than then, not worse.
None-the-less, the IPCC claims that extreme weather events are worse now than in the past, however observations do not support this. Some extreme weather events, such as the land area under extreme drought (Lomborg, 2020), is decreasing, not increasing. Globally the incidence of hurricanes shows no significant trend (IPCC, 2013, p. 216; Lomborg, 2020).
Observations show no increase in damage or any danger to humanity today due to extreme weather or global warming (Crok & May, 2023, pp. 140–161; Scafetta, 2024). Climate change mitigation, according to AR6, means curtailing the use of fossil fuels, even though fossil fuels are still abundant and inexpensive. Since the current climate is arguably better than the pre-industrial climate and we have observed no increase in extreme weather or climate mortality, we conclude that we can plan to adapt to any future changes. Until a danger is identified, there is no need to eliminate fossil fuel use.