According to senior climate scientist, the idea that carbon dioxide and climate are unrelated is completely inconsistent with legitimate science.
Climate scientists claim that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide trap heat in the atmosphere and warming global temperatures. According to scientists, both the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures are continuing to rise at a historically unprecedented rate.
The text in the tweet reads, “There’s no correlation between carbon dioxide & climate & never was. “CO2 has been steadily declining for millions of years and is in trouble. The weather is also getting colder, not warmer.” Peter Clack, a Twitter user, frequently disseminates false information about climate change.
The tweet received over 1,000 retweets in less than two weeks, while the Instagram post was liked more than 100 times in less than a week. Climate scientists claim that carbon dioxide and global temperatures are indissolubly linked.
According to senior climate scientist Howard Diamond of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Air Resources Laboratory, the idea that carbon dioxide and climate are unrelated is completely inconsistent with legitimate science.
“That simply goes counter to all the available scientific data and research we have collected and developed over nearly 200 years,” Diamond said in an email. The ability of CO2 to prevent escaping long-wave radiation, such as heat, from the planet’s surface and back into space is clearly demonstrated by empirical data.
Marcus Sarofim, an environmental scientist with the EPA’s Climate Science and Impacts division, concurred. The warming in global temperatures has been directly attributed, according to scientists, to an unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide emissions from human activity.
Several graphs in the screenshotted post purport to demonstrate that there is no correlation between carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperatures.
The graphs, according to Diamond, do not accurately depict the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperatures. The top right chart is from a Yale University study published in 2001.
However, Diamond said that the graph “simply tells us that we have less CO2 today than we did, say, 540 million years ago,” and no credible climate scientist would dispute that. The chart does not appear with the title “CO2 famine for the past several tens of millions of years” in the original paper.
The other two graphs, according to Diamond, were his first exposure to them, and he wasn’t sure what information was used to produce them. The data are not cited in either of the other graphs. USA TODAY requested comments from Clack and an Instagram user.
The Instagram user didn’t offer any proof to back up the claim made in the post. According to Diamond, the levels of carbon dioxide are at their highest point in more than three million years.
For the first time since scientists began monitoring levels in the middle of the twentieth century, atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeded 400 parts per million in 2013. 2021 saw a high of 414 parts per million, according to NOAA. The amount of carbon dioxide that has recently increased in the Earth’s atmosphere is understated in the article.
The ‘modest uptake’ that is being discussed would actually result in a 50% increase in global CO2 levels, which Diamond called anything but modest. “A jump of 100 ppm, which is what we have seen over the past 60 years, normally takes about 20,000 years in the natural world.”
According to NOAA data, the annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been sharply rising over the past few decades. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases every year as a result of human activities like the burning of fossil fuels that release more carbon dioxide than natural processes can absorb.
NASA and NOAA data show that since 1880, the Earth’s temperature has increased by an average of.1 degrees per decade, or about 2 degrees overall. Since 1981, the rate of warming has nearly doubled, and since the 1980s, temperatures have been rising at a rate of more than 0.3 degrees per decade.