All of us will remember the warning that correlation doesn’t prove causation. On the other hand, the absence of correlation does prove the absence of causation.

Patrick Hunt has kindly agreed to permit me to publish his reassuring article that the “climate crisis” isn’t a crisis, and isn’t caused by human emissions of CO2. That is demonstrated by a lack of correlation between climate change and CO2, when examined over a longer time period than the usual 150-200 years What is less reassuring is the trillions we are spending to try to change something we can’t change. Thinking about the futures of my children and grandchildren, I am far more worried about the harmful impacts of government climate policies than I am about climate change itself.

So, dear readers, meet Patrick Hunt:

Patrick Hunt is a retired entrepreneur who spent 35 years in the high-tech field. He now lives in Victoria, BC.

He received a BA in Economics and Political Science from the Royal Military College, and also served as a submariner in the Royal Canadian Navy. In his political career he was a former Nova Scotia Conservative MLA.

Today, Patrick is President of Climate Realists of BC (www.climaterealists.ca), an informal group of concerned Canadian citizens, drawn from a range of professional backgrounds, including climate science.  This group has been studying and writing about climate change and government climate policies for several years.

Introduction

I am an environmentalist.  My economics honours paper five decades ago was titled “Pollution in Perspective” and it proposed ways to finance the cleanup of our land, water and air. 

There has been a lot of media coverage over the recent years about “greenhouse gases” (GHG), and that the cause of global warming is increasing amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), especially man-made or anthropogenic CO2, in the atmosphere.  I have many friends who hold that belief and are convinced that human-made CO2 is the thermostat that is causing global warming. 

I began to look at climate change more closely in June 2004 when I observed two unrelated graphs in separate rooms at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta.  One plotted atmospheric CO2 over 4.4 billion years of the Earth’s existence and the other plotted the world’s average surface temperature over the same period.  I walked back and forth between those two rooms at least 10 times to confirm my observation; there was NO correlation between the two graphs that I could observe! There was no overlapping trendline. 

Afterwards, I began to research in earnest the correlation between CO2 and temperature over geological time.  What I found is a weak negative correlation of -0.19. In other words, CO2 and temperature are not positively correlated.

I then became aware of the elaborate efforts being made to silence anyone who dared question the supposed scientific consensus that anthropogenic CO2 was the primary cause of global warming.  I realized that many of the arguments supporting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) narrative were questionable because they were based on computer models that did not correspond with direct observation.  Some even relied on altering historical records to support the IPCC hypothesis, including the Michael Mann “hockey stick” graph, which eliminated the Medieval Warming Period (roughly 950-1250 AD) to hide the fact that CO2 has gone up since then, while temperatures has gone down (negative correlation).

For example, about 16,000 years ago most of Canada was covered by well over a kilometer of ice.  It was 8 degrees Celsius (°C) colder than today, and CO2 was 180 parts per million (PPM), just 30 PPM more than what is needed for plants to survive.  Without any contribution from mankind, by the time Hannibal drove his elephants through the Alps to battle the Romans in 181 BC the temperature had increased 9 °C and CO2 had increased 44% to 260 PPM.  This could not be done today because the mountain passes are now filled with snow year-round.  Since then, the earth has cooled 1 °C and CO2 has increased 62% to 420 PPM.  So what is the relationship between CO2 and temperature?  Is there a positive, a negative, or a random correlation?  It appears random to me.

I am not a climate change denier, and I know no one who believes the climate has not changed.  But there are plenty of well-informed people, including reputable scientists, who question the IPCC hypothesis.  There is ample evidence that the climate has always been changing, with cycles of warming and cooling, and continues to change today.  

What makes up the Greenhouse Gas effect?

Water vapour makes up 95% of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) effect.  CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, but its impact on the earth temperature is small and its added impact diminishes with its concentration in the atmosphere.  CO2 represents only 3.6% of the total GHG effect.  Human activities are only responsible for 3.2% of the total production of CO2; this means that human-generated CO2 is only 0.12% of the total GHG effect. 

Naturally occurring CO2 makes up the other 96.8% of the CO2 production, consisting of such things as rotting vegetation, animals and humans exhaling, and volcanic eruptions.  Even if every human on earth were to die tomorrow, the impact on the GHG effect would be insignificant – less than a rounding error.

If there had been a Conference of the Parties in 1970, similar to the 2015 Paris conference, the climate crisis that world leaders and environmental scientists would have then been discussing would have been global cooling. 

Sixty years ago, many scientists were predicting the start of a new Ice Age.  The temperature was higher in the 1930s during the “dustbowl” period than the temperature is today.  During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the global temperature was decreasing, and some scientists then were speculating that the increase in CO2 was causing global cooling.  The earth’s temperature started to rise again in the early 1970s but peaked in 1998 and has levelled off since then.  During all this time, the atmospheric CO2 level kept rising. 

No one would deny that CO2 is an essential plant nutrient.  As CO2 has increased in the atmosphere, so too has the global biomass, including food crops for a growing population.  Plants grow bigger and faster with more CO2, and they require less water.  Over the 50 years that satellites have been able to make accurate measurements, Earth’s biomass has increased by 20%.  Seventy percent of that increase has been attributed to the increase in CO2.

Astrophysicists tasked with finding planets in other solar systems that might be conducive to life do not look for planets with a similar temperature to the Earth; they look for planets that are 5°C warmer than the earth’s present temperature.  (See “In Search for a Planet Better than Earth: Top Contenders for a Superhabitable World” by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, René Heller, and Edward Guinan, 2020.)  As one astrophysicist, describing the Earth, put it, “There is more biomass and diversity of species at the equator than at the poles!

What else could cause climate change if it is not CO2? 

Numerous scientists have identified the SUN as the main cause of climate change!  For instance, the well known Milankovitch Cycles explain changes in the Earth’s climate and surface temperature as the Earth’s orbit cyclically changes the distance from the Sun, and its axial tilt to the Sun. Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian geologist and astronomer, also observed the correlation between the number of sunspots and the temperature on earth (more sunspots = more warming and vice-versa). Humans have no influence over sunspots.

Other factors that affect the Earth’s climate and surface temperature are:

• variations in the Sun’s luminosity
• variations in the Sun’s magnetic field
• cosmic rays
• the Earth’s magnetic field
• the amount of heat stored in or released from the oceans
• the Earth’s atmosphere itself.

The sun causes climate change not only on earth, but on other planets and moons in our solar system.  (See H.I. Abdussamatov, “The new Little Ice Age has started,” Elsevier, 2016.)

Original research by Tom Gallagher, a Canadian geoscientist, has found strong correlations between major temperature changes and continental drift, which has opened and shut gates such as the Bering Strait and Panama Isthmus, as well as the flow through the Mediterranean and the Arabian Gulf north of India, before India became attached to Asia.  Gallagher also points to the role of the oceans as a store of 83% of the Earth’s CO2 and a store and transporter of energy over time and around the world. 

From his research Gallagher concluded that “CO2 and temperature proxies do not correlate in geologic climate data” and that over geological time there is a very weak, negative correlation between CO2 and temperature – a slight inverse correlation.  His video is available at: https://youtu.be/K6tWEjkEiZU.

To argue that CO2 is the thermostat regulating the earth temperature, one must, at a minimum, prove a positive correlation, and preferably a strong correlation, between CO2 and temperature. 

The Relationship Between CO2 and Temperature

The graph below plots CO2 and temperature over the last 550 million years.  It is by Dr. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, who created this graph by overlaying a graph of CO2 going back 550 million years, found in a 2003 Nature magazine article with another graph of the Earth temperature over the same period, found in a 2007 Nature magazine article.  The title of his paper is “Data From two Independent Studies Show No Correlation Between CO2 And Temperature”, July 30, 2020.  See: www.climatedepot.com/2020/07/30/data-from-2-independent-studies-show-no-correlation-between-co2-and-temperature.

The first red arrow points out a time when CO2 was high while temperature was low.  The second red arrow points out a time when CO2 was low while temperature was high. 

If increases in atmospheric CO2, and specifically anthropogenic CO2, were the cause of global warming, as claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), then the Earth could not have been in an Ice Age when CO2 was over 4,000 PPM, as it was 440 million years ago.

What Prof. Lüdecke clearly shows in the above graph confirms what I first observed at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. As Prof. Lüdecke concluded, “The result shows the long claimed atmospheric CO2-global temperature correlation doesn’t exist.”  Without correlation, there can be no causation.  The lack of correlation disproves the hypothesis that CO2, man-made or natural, is causing global warming.

Before committing billions of dollars in an attempt to reduce CO2, the Canadian Government should do a proper cost-benefit analysis of its goal of Net Zero by the year 2050.  It should also do a proper cost-benefit analysis of the effects of doubling CO2 and increasing the temperature 2°C by 2100.  Bjorn Lomborg does this cost-benefit analysis in his 2021 book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.  It should be required reading for anyone interested in the massive cost of trying (and failing) to stop climate change.

If CO2 is not the primary cause of global warming, why should we approve of the world governments, including our federal, provincial, and municipal governments, collectively spending trillions of dollars each year in a futile attempt to control global warming by cutting CO2 to meet their Paris Accord promises? 

The McKinsey Report entitled “The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it could bring,” dated January 25, 2022, estimates the cost to the world economy of reaching the goal of Net-Zero by 2050 would be US$275 trillion, or almost US$10 trillion per year.

Canada produces about 2% of the world output of anthropogenic CO2, so its 2% contribution of the world cost would be US$5.5 trillion, or US$183 billion per year.  This works out to CDN$186,480 for each Canadian, or CDN$6,216 per year per person in today’s dollars!  For a family of four that’s CDN$24,864 a year that could be spent on other, more necessary things.

So, I ask those who believe in the theory that man-made CO2 is the cause of global warming:

• What scientific evidence do you rely on?
• What Coefficient of Correlation between CO2 and temperature do you use?  Over what period of time?
• What are the costs, and what are the benefits, of a world that has 800 ppm of CO2 and is 2°C warmer than today?  What is wrong with a warmer world with more plant food (CO2 is a fertilizer) anyway? 
• Is it cheaper and more certain to adapt to climate change than to attempt to prevent climate change?
• What if most countries that made CO2 reduction commitments do not honour their commitments (as the vast majority will not)?  What then?
• Are you personally willing to risk CDN$186,480 for every Canadian over the next 30 years to test your hypothesis?  I am NOT.

Patrick Hunt, Victoria, BC, Canada