The 23rd issue of @Liberty, the IRR’s policy bulletin, written by engineer and energy expert Andrew Kenny, examines the scientific reasons why widespread public alarm over “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” is in fact unfounded.

As Kenny writes, the belief that mankind is raising global temperatures dangerously by increasing carbon dioxide (CO²) in the air has become a ruling conviction of the modern age. It provides funding and careers for large numbers of activists, bureaucrats, activists, and politicians around the world. But basic physics shows that CO², a weak greenhouse gas, can never have an important effect on temperatures. Observation confirms this.

The climate is always changing. It has been changing since the Earth was born, about 4.5 billion years ago. Given changes in the Sun, changes in the Earth’s orbit, changes in the Earth’s continents, changes in the Earth’s geology, and the Earth’s continual rotation, it cannot be otherwise. CO² is also changing, but changes in CO² have never been seen to have any significant effect on global temperatures.

The slight warming of the 20th Century, which stopped in around 1996, was no different from the Mediaeval Warm Period a thousand years ago, when temperatures were higher than now. This warm period, like others before it in the Earth’s history, was entirely natural. There is no evidence to show that the recent warming was not entirely natural too.

There is also no basis in science for the notion that rising CO² increases the frequency or severity of extreme weather events (floods, droughts, storms, cyclones, extreme heat, extreme cold, and so on). Observation over the last 50 years shows no such increase.

CO² is entirely clean, safe, and natural. It is NOT a pollutant. On the contrary, it is essential to the plant life upon which we all depend. Without it the human race and all other higher mammals would perish. It is a wonderful gas, and its levels are now extremely low in the history of planet Earth, probably dangerously low.

Our planet faces many serious environmental problems, but manmade climate change is not such a threat. It is no threat at all. For the sake of our planet and of the poor people who live on it, we need to end this unfounded and extravagant belief, and turn to science and reason to protect our environment from the many real threats that it confronts.