Archibald submitted the following article in response to a feature published in the March edition of International Coal News detailing the coal sector’s push to become part of the carbon solution, rather than the problem:

IT SADDENS ME when I read a trade journal such as International Coal News and it contains an article that is based on global warming due to carbon dioxide being real. That might lead to some people in the industry thinking that what they do for a living is inherently bad and that how they earn their living is a necessary evil.

It’s not, because global warming due to carbon dioxide isn’t happening. It is a complete fiction.

While climate change is real in that the climate is always changing and the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is real, the effect at the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is minuscule.

The greenhouse gasses keep the planet 30°C warmer than it would otherwise be if they weren’t in the atmosphere. So the average temperature of the planet’s surface is 15C instead of -15C. Of that effect, 80% is provided by water vapour, 10% by carbon dioxide and methane, ozone and so on make up the remaining 10%. So the warming provided by carbon dioxide is 3C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 286 parts per million.

Let’s round that up to 300ppm to make the maths easier. You could be forgiven for thinking that if 300ppm produces three degrees of warming, the relationship is that every one hundred parts per million produces a degree of warming.

We are adding 2ppm to the atmosphere each year which is 100ppm every 50 years and at that rate the world would heat up at a fair clip.

But the relationship isn’t arithmetic, it is logarithmic.

The University of Chicago has an online program called Modtran which allows you to put in an assumed atmospheric carbon dioxide content and it will tell you how much atmospheric heating that produces.

It turns out that the first 20ppm produces half of the heating effect to date. The effect rapidly drops away as the carbon dioxide concentration increases.

By the time we get to the current level in the atmosphere of 400ppm, the heating effect is only 0.1C per one hundred parts per million. At that rate, the temperature of the atmosphere might rise by 0.2C every 100 years. The relationship between atmospheric concentration and heating effect is shown by the graph published here.

The total atmospheric heating from carbon dioxide to date is of the order of 0.1C. By the time humanity has dug up all the rocks we can economically burn, and burnt them, the total heating effect from carbon dioxide might be of the order of 0.4C.

This would take a couple of centuries. A rise of this magnitude would be lost in the noise of the climate system. This agrees with observations which have not found any signature from carbon dioxide-related heating in the atmosphere.

The carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere is actually dangerously low, not dangerously high. During the glacial periods of our current ice age, the level got as low as 180ppm. Plant growth shuts down at 150ppm.

Several times in the last three million years, life above sea level came within 30ppm of extinction due to a lack of carbon dioxide. The more humanity can increase the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the safer life on Earth will be.

This is also a far more plausible reason for the warming of the planet during the current Modern Warm Period which followed the ending of the Little Ice Age in 1900. The energy that keeps the Earth from looking like Pluto comes from the Sun and the level and make-up of that energy does change.

The Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than it had been in the previous 8000 years. The Sun started getting more active in the mid-19th century and the world’s glaciers started retreating at about the same time.

Since the 1970s, the world has enjoyed the best climatic conditions, and thus agricultural growing conditions, since the 13th century. But what the Sun gives it can also take away. Solar physicists have been warning for over a decade now that the Sun is entering a prolonged period of low activity similar to that of the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1710.

The reduction in solar activity now being observed will result in temperatures returning to the levels of the mid-19th century at best, with the possibility of revisiting the lows of the 17th and 18th centuries. Peak summer temperatures may not change much but the length of the growing season will shorten at both ends, playing havoc with crop yields.

The notion of global warming has resulted in an enormous misallocation of resources in some Western societies but we can be thankful to it for one thing. If it had not been for the outrageous prostitution of science in the global warming cause, then the field of climate would not have attracted the attention that has determined what is actually happening to the Earth’s climate. Humanity would otherwise be sleepwalking into the severe cold period in train. Global warming due to carbon dioxide is of no consequence and the world is cooling anyway.

David Archibald is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014). The first coal mine he worked at was Goonyella in the Bowen Basin in 1978.