First note that the saturation effect was physically verified by researchers in 2024.
The Saturation effect questions the prevailing narrative on CO2
The assertion that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” has been the centerpiece of public policy on climate for the developed world in recent years.
Demonizing CO2 has impacted virtually every aspect of modern Western civilization. It condemns the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, the use of combustion engines for transportation, and the employment of carbon fuels for virtually everything supporting modern civilization – even down to the kind of washing machines and kitchen stoves that are deemed acceptable. It forms the basis for the most grotesque of all the alarmist shibboleths – the “social cost of carbon”.
The theory that CO2 is malevolent was enshrined in the so-called “Endangerment Finding” issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, which held that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that “threatens public health and safety”.
CO2 radicalism rests on one main assumption – that increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause a linear and dangerous increase in global temperature. The belief that more CO2 emitted equals significantly more heat and higher temperature is a cornerstone of the ruling scientific paradigm.
But what if this assumption – the most ubiquitous of all modern conventional wisdoms – turns out to be mistaken?
This conventional wisdom has been questioned over the last decade by impeccably credentialed scientists who have undertaken actual science – not political science – to contradict this primary assumption underlying the AGW belief system.
Case in point is the peer-reviewed analysis completed in June, 2020 by eminent physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden. Mr. Happer is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and van Wijngaarden is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University in Toronto, Both men are accomplished and renowned physicists with over 500 published papers to their credit. Mr. Happer is best known as the brilliant scientist whose insight into the physics of the atmosphere empowered the success of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
They applied highly detailed mathematical analytics to the physics of CO2 in the atmosphere and raised serious doubts about CO2’s ability to absorb heat after becoming “saturated” at current levels of 400 parts per million, and therefore unable to absorb significanty more heat from the Sun. Thus, any further increases in atmospheric CO2 – even doubling that amount to 800 parts per million – would only result in minimal increases in atmospheric temperature of 0.5C, or 1degree Fahrenheit.
This mathematically rigorous finding was validated through a controlled laboratory experiment conducted by a team of seven Viennese researchers in 2024. They measured the back infrared radiation of CO2 in a test chamber with increasing CO2 concentrations emulating realistic atmospheric conditions. They concluded that doubling CO2 from pre-industrial levels from 400 to 800 ppm “shows no measurable increase in infrared radiation absorption, and thus can lead to just 0.5C warming increase at most”.
This conclusion illustrates the reason why climate alarmists have never been able to explain the reason why the Earth has never experienced runaway warming in the past when CO2 levels were 5-10 times more concentrated than today, nor why the UN climate models based on linear warming theory have been proven to be so terribly wrong.
If the CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere is well beyond the level where increases are causing additional radiation to be absorbed, then all the government policies intended to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions in order to stop climate change are just as effective as King Canute’s efforts to control the tides.
In short, these saturation analyses thoroughly refute the conventional wisdom that increasing levels of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming.
And they are not alone.
For example, in 2020 German chemist Michael Schnell published his study “Experimental Verification of the CO2 Greenhouse Effect” which also confirmed that the saturation effect of CO2 results in minimal warming. In addition, Franz-Karl Reinhardt, a professor with the leading Swiss research facility EPF, undertook another study in 2017 which demonstrated that a doubling of the current level of atmospheric CO2 from 400ppm to 800ppm would produce only be one quarter of 1 degree Celsius – too small to even be accurately measured.
The impact of all these recent studies – and there are many more than just the ones mentioned above – is clear: the conventional wisdom regarding CO2 warming is unraveling. The demonization of CO2 – one of the greatest popular delusions in modern human history – may finally be coming to an end.
It may well not be not true that an increase in CO2 causes a linear and catastrophic increase in atmospheric temperature.
The implication of CO2 saturation is a game changer, and should provide the Trump Administration with a substantial line of questioning of EPA’s Endangerment Finding.
Centinel2012 