THE QUICK CHECK

An Evidence Based Investigation of Fact and Fiction

Since the 1990s we’ve been told that catastrophic climate change is happening because of carbon dioxide. Climate science has advanced in leaps and bounds. Scientists are making discoveries that question the greenhouse gases as the sole cause and even the leading cause of climate change.

IS THE CLIMATE REALLY CHANGING?

NASA defines climate change as a period of at least 30 years. Weather is what changes from day to day and year to year. The Sahara Desert wasn’t a desert 4,500 years ago. The light yellow area was grassland, the light green area was mixed woodland and grassland. The Fertile Crescent was cooler and greener than today’s arid land.

Courtesy of National Geographic, Volume 246.

A TIME LINE OF TEMPERATURE AND CARBON DIOXIDE CHANGE

10,000 years ago the world was 2 C (3.8 F) hotter than 2000 as shown below (far right) and 1 C (1.8 F) than today. It stayed hotter for the next 4,000 years. Carbon dioxide rose from 240 to 260 parts per million of air (ppm). There weren’t any man-made greenhouse gases
6,000 years ago the temperature dropped to what we have today and stayed that way for another 4,000 years. Carbon dioxide rose to 280 ppm.
2,000 years ago the temperature began a 1,500 year decline to the start of The Little Ice Age 550 years ago. Carbon dioxide levels stayed at 280 ppm.
Carbon dioxide began to rise in 1750 CE. The temperature began to rise 80 years later which also marked the end of The Little Ice Age.

Dr. Vinther’s 12,000 Year Graph of six Greenland ice cores begins 11,500 years ago as the world emerged from the frigid Younger Dryas years. Zero on the vertical temperature axis is the 1880 to 1960 CE average temperature.

Dr. Rosenthal’s 12,000 Year Graph of the tropical Makassar Straight temperatures (black line) is overlaid with Dr. Vinther’s graph (gold line) showing that changes in the Arctic and Tropics were global, not regional like the Medieval Warm.

Both graphs show the 12,000 year time line as 10,000 BCE to 2000 CE.
The temperature at 0 on the time line changes 2.5 C (4.5 F) from one century to the next.
That happens several time demonstrating that our current rise of 1.5 C since 1800 isn’t exceptional.

500 MILLION YEARS of climate history shows that global temperatures were much hotter than today - except during the ice ages shown at the far right. Carbon Dioxide was also higher. The Arctic, Greenland and Antarctica were ice free most of the time.

The graph was created for this website by overlaying carbon dioxide data by Dr. Robert Berner on a Smithsonian Institute graph showing temperature data from NOAA.

THE CORRELATION FALLACY

Comparing the movement of lines on any graph only suggests a possible relationship, never proof of anything.

Imagine a graph of hot dog sales at the beach and shark attacks. Summer weather brings people to the beach which leads to an increase in hot dog sales. Summer weather also brings warmer water which cause sharks to migrate northward and the inevitable shark attacks. The lines on this graph would show that increased hot dog sales cause shark attacks.

Mistaking the lines on a graph as proof of anything is called the Correlation Fallacy. It is the fundamental error made by all those who so badly wanted to find the cause of climate change that they mistook the lines on graphs like the one below and in An Inconvenient Truth as proof that carbon dioxide was causing climate change.

Compressing an 800,000 year graph of the ice ages to fit in a book or on screen reduces 1,000 years to 1/25th of an inch (1 mm) making it impossible to see differences of 800 years between two lines. A 2006 in depth study of the ice age data found that carbon dioxide followed temperature by about 800 years. The study was widely accepted by climate scientists.

IS CLIMATE CHANGE REALLY CATASTROPHIC ?

Earth’s atmospheric temperature has risen 1.5 C (2.7 F) since 1800. Yet the Vinther and Rosenthal’s graphs together with the Time Line Data show that we are still below the average temperature of the last 10,000 years. The average temperatures between 10,000 to 6,000 years ago were a full degree Celsius higher than today. Then they were the same as we have now for the next 4,000 years.

While the atmospheric temperature has risen 1.5 C, the upper level ocean temperature (200 m, 660 ft) has risen only 1 degree C since 1800. Most of the vast, deeper ocean has stayed about 4 C (39 F). Dr. Lovelock said: “The ocean’s heat capacity is about 1,000 times greater than that of the land and atmosphere”. Further gradual global warming may happen but the ocean’s ability to absorb shows that catastrophic global warming is highly unlikely.

MELTING ICE and OCEAN LEVELS Melting sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans cannot raise the sea level because they are floating ice which is simply water in a different form. As low altitude mountain glaciers melt, NASA says sea level is predicted to rise about 1/10th of an inch (2.5 mm) per decade. Scientists say we are a long way from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melting.

PLANTS Advocates say we are approaching catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide is for plants what oxygen is for us. When carbon dioxide levels plunged to 180 parts per million (ppm) during the ice ages it was starvation level for plants. The carbon dioxide Death Zone for plants is 150 ppm.

Plants thrive in higher levels of carbon dioxide. Their ideal level is four times higher than today’s level of 420 ppm. Many greenhouses operate at carbon dioxide levels two to three times higher than our 420 ppm. Workers do not require special breathing apparatus to work those enriched carbon dioxide environments. Even levels of 2,000 ppm do not harm people.

Rising levels of carbon dioxide make plants more productive which is helping feed our ever increasing global population. We also benefit by the more productive plants producing more oxygen. “From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands have shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” NASA

THE JURASSIC PERIOD when dinosaurs roamed the earth carbon dioxide levels were four to six times higher than today as shown in the 500 Million Year graph above. The fossil records show that dinosaurs thrived. Plants thrived. Coral, clams and shell fish thrived. The oceans did not become acidic because of higher temperatures and the much higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

WHY DO WE BELIEVE CARBON DIOXIDE IS CAUSING CLIMATE CHANGE ?

The idea was proposed in 1895 but gained little traction until the late 1980s when preliminary data of the Greenland and Antarctic ice core data became available. The highly compressed graphs appeared to show carbon dioxide and temperature changing together. The graphs looked like the answer. As well as making the Correlation Fallacy mistake, no one was concerned that Ice Ages are a unique with half of the northern hemisphere completely frozen.

Former United States Vice President Al Gore compounded the mistake by presenting the data as a graph in his speaking tour and book, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), advocating carbon dioxide as the cause of climate change. The media jumped on it. Wide spread skepticism swung to public acceptance.

Contrary to what the “100% of climate scientists agree” claim, many climate scientists do not agree. Dr. Lovelock, a highly respected scientist and a leader of the early carbon dioxide advocates, did something in 2014 scientists rarely do. He reversed his position and said it was a mistake to say carbon dioxide controls temperature. “We're no longer in a position to say that just because carbon dioxide rises … the temperature will rise likewise.” (James Ephraim Lovelock chief scientist at MI5 for two decades.)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/no-longer-the-darling-of-the-green-movement-lovelock-explains-himself/article19571394 (Nelles interview)

Climate scientists who have published statistical research on the Antarctic ice cores since 2000 agree.

“Temperature rises first, followed by an increase in atmospheric CO2.”

Floridies: Global Warming and Carbon Dioxide Through Sciences

“CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 +/- 200 years”.

Caillon: Science 2003;299(5613):1728–31

How could Dr. Lovelock and so many climate scientists have gotten it wrong in the 1990s? As Dr. Lovelock went on to say in that interview:

“We were carried away by the (correlation) between the ice cores of Antarctica.”

THE GREENHOUSE GASES THAT HEAT THE ATMOSPHERE

There are three types of greenhouse gases: those that heat, those that cool and water which does both. Subtracting those that cool from those that heat leaves only carbon dioxide and methane. As of January, 2026 carbon dioxide stands at 425 ppm and methane at 2 ppm. Carbon dioxide is the standard against which all other gases are compared. Methane has been rated at twenty times stronger than carbon dioxide for decades equating it’s 2 ppm to 40 ppm of carbon dioxide. Based on questionable modelling advocates now rate it’s 2 ppm at 80 ppm. Either way, rounding those gases off at 500 ppm means 1 greenhouse gas molecule has to heat 2000 molecules of air around it to raise and maintain the temperature increase. Radiant energy moving at the speed of light says that’s impossible.

This is where water takes center stage. As a liquid, water droplets form clouds which block solar energy while water as vapor (aka humidity) absorbs energy. There are 80 times more water vapour molecules in tropical air than the carbon dioxide plus methane duo. That ratio gradually declines to 10 times near the polar regions. NASA and the IPCC concur that humidity is far and away the dominant greenhouse gas.

Why isn’t humidity part of the greenhouse conversation? The MIT Climate Portal says it’s because a water vapor molecule’s time in the atmosphere is only days or weeks. But it’s the constant total daily volume that matters, not how long an individual molecule lasts. Another answer is that it is nature and can’t be regulated so why talk about it? A third response is that humidity’s dominance diminishes the importance of the carbon dioxide - methane narrative.

The Greenhouse Gases Are What Gets Heated

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Radiative Forcing Is How They Get Heated

Humidity, carbon dioxide and methane are only half of the heating equation. They are what gets heated. How they get heated is by a complex process called Radiative Forcing. Short wave solar energy heats the land and sea. Everything heated gives off long wave energy which heats the greenhouse gases. The gases, dominated by humidity, are a secondary planet warmer. Some of their energy is absorbed by plants while the rest works its way up and out of the atmosphere.

Graph by Frank van Mierlo : PW is a petawatt, one billion million watts of energy

DOES RADIATIVE FORCING CAUSE CLIMATE CHANGE?

The sun‘s power is constant and the greenhouse gases are increasing slightly every year. Logic says that constant solar energy plus increasing greenhouse gases must cause constant temperature increase. But it doesn’t. Temperature graphs going back hundreds of years to hundreds of millions of years show that temperature does not carry forward consistently. Without that consistency, radiative forcing of greenhouse gases cannot be the sole cause of climate change, they can only be one of the causes of climate change.

RADIATIVE COOLING

While our average global temperature is 59 F (14 C), the mid latitudes experience temperatures between -25 C (-17 F) and 40 C (105 F) and occasionally more extreme. With the dinosaur era’s average global temperature of 86 F (30 C) degrees their summer temperatures should have soared into the 50s C (140 F). How could the dinosaurs have survived when the earth’s average temperatures were so much hotter than today?

They didn’t for the simple reason that proteins then and now start to break down when body temperature reaches 106 F (41 C). Reptiles cannot survive body temperatures hotter than mammals. Neither could the dinosaurs. And neither could the plants that sustained their massive bodies. The fossil record proves life was abundant which means temperature maximums were close to ours despite their far higher global average temperature. That can only mean the world has mechanisms that limit temperatures.

That mechanism is Radiative Cooling. It counters Radiative Forcing’s ability to heat the planet. “If the temperature of the Earth rises, the planet rapidly emits an increasing amount of heat to space”. It’s like a governor on an engine, cruise control in a car. The physics are explained in The Deep Check version of this website and at NASA, keyword search proportional.

A SUMMARY OF TODAY’S CLIMATE SCIENCE

6,000 to 10,000 years ago our planet was a full degree Celsius (1.8 F) hotter than it is today (2020 - 2025). People were not creating greenhouse gases and the gases were nearly half of what they are now.
Advances in ice core analysis show that temperature leads carbon dioxide by 800 years, +/- 200 years.
Radiative Forcing heats the atmosphere and is a major factor of weather.
Radiative Cooling limits Radiative Forcing’s climate warming ability.

RECENT CLIMATE CHANGE DISCOVERIES

Nature has been changing the climate since the world began without any help from mankind’s greenhouse gases.

EARTH’S ORBIT Dr. Milankovitch proposed a ground breaking theory in three parts:

Orbital Eccentricity: Earth’s orbit around the sun changes from round (milder summers and winters) to oval (more extreme seasonal variations) in 100,000 year cycles.
Axial Obliquity: How far the earth tilts toward and away from the sun between summer and winter varies in 41,000 year cycles.
Axial Precession: The earth also leans like a wobbling top as it tilts toward and away from the sun in a 26,000 year circle. It’s currently warming the southern hemisphere more in its summer than the northern hemisphere in its summer.
They are believed to have a major impact on earth’s climate but are of little relevance now because their gradual changes take many thousands of years.
Images courtesy of NASA in collaboration with Florida Atlantic University.

Highly accurate technology and computing power have confirmed Dr. Milankovic’s theories. Climate scientists have noticed a loose correlation between cooling alignments and the ice ages of the last two and a half million years. Research is investigating how much these three factors can heat and cool earth’s climate. Yet the Milankovic Cycles have been in motion for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years. They don’t help explain why earth’s climate has been so much cooler for the last two and a half million years.

CASSIOPEIA’S Wandering Star

Recent astrophysics research found a star (HD 7977) of the Cassiopeia Constellation passed close enough to our solar system 2.8 million years ago to disturb the orbits of our giant outer planets. Their orbital wobbles in turn disturbed earth’s orbit and occurred shortly before the start of the current progression of ice ages and interglacial warm periods (including the one we live in). Has earth return to its pre-Cassiopea fly-pass orbit or has our orbit been permanently affected?

EARTH’S MAGNETIC POLES

Another interesting relationship is the correlation between climate change and the movement of earth’s magnetic north pole. In 200 AD (red dot upper left) earth’s magnetic north pole was located on the coast of Siberia. The middle east was referred to as The Fertile Crescent, then a green and temperate region. By 750 AD the magnetic north pole had moved to the northern tip of Canada’s Baffin Island. The middle east had become hotter and dryer. In 1,000 AD the magnetic north pole was at the geographic north pole. Europe and some other parts of the world were experiencing the Medieval Warm. By 1,500 the magnetic north pole was in the Arctic Ocean slowly migrating to Canada’s northern coast. The Little Ice Age began. The magnetic north pole stayed near Canada’s north shore until fifty years ago when it began to move rapidly north and west toward Siberia. Now it’s closer to Siberia than Canada again and the world is warming.

Researchgate.net, Public Domain Each dot represents a 50 yr. progression.

Is this correlation between climate change and pole movement just a coincidence or is it suggesting a real possibility? “Analysis of the movement of the Earth's magnetic poles over the last 105 years demonstrates strong correlations between the position of the north magnetic, and geomagnetic poles …. Although these correlations are surprising, a statistical analysis shows there is a less than one percent chance they are random …” (A. K. Kerton, 2009)

While it appears highly likely that the movement of earth’s magnetic poles are contributing to climate change, how is that possible since air is not attracted to magnetism? One possibility is that while water is attracted to static electricity, it is repelled by magnetism. Could the higher density of water in atmospheric rivers and hurricanes be enough for them to be affected, even slightly, by the movement of earth’s magnetic poles? Could the differences in density due to temperature layers and salinity concentrations be enough, even slightly, to affect ocean currents? The possibility is being studied.

GRAVITY WAVES

Recent research found that the movement of earth’s magnetic poles is causing gravity waves that affect earth’s very high altitude magnetic radiation shield. This in turn affects air currents in the earth’s upper atmosphere. Other researchers found that changes to the upper atmosphere affected lower levels of the atmosphere, the stratosphere and the troposphere, which is where our weather happens.

THE SUN

Yet if everything currently known about climate change conspired to reach its maximum cold phase at the same time, it still wouldn’t be cold enough to explain the abrupt 1,200 year long plunge back to the near ice age temperatures during the Younger Dryas (12,700 to 11,500 years ago). What caused that abrupt plunge and equally fast recovery? Could it happen again? The simplest explanation is the sun. We’ve always been told the sun’s strength doesn’t change. It might be time to rethink that.

It’s been known for centuries that the sun’s north and south poles reverse like clockwork every eleven years. When they reverse there is a sharp rise in sun spot (solar storm) activity as shown in the even march of the blue spikes. The black line shows the moving average number of sun spots. During the Maunder Minimum it flat-lined which coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age. The Dalton Minimum also had significantly fewer sun spots and was the last cold phase of the Little Ice Age. Is the drop in temperature and sun spots a coincidence ?

“The correlation between the sun’s strength and temperature for 660 years indicates a 98% probability that the Little Ice Age was caused by variations in the sun’s strength. If the period is limited to 1650 to 1890, the probability increases to 99.99%.”

(Dr. W.K. Schmutz)

POPULATION

Global Population Growth

1 billion in 1800 1.6 billion in 1900 5.4 billion in 1950 6.1 billion in 2000 8.1 billion in 2024

The global population is expected to reach 10 billion in 25 years.

Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions in 2022: Total 889 Gt. (Gt = gigaton = billion ton)

Natural Sources 848 Gt. Human Sources 41 Gt. Fossil Fuels 37.8 Gt.

Fossil Fuel Emissions were only 4.3% of the total global carbon dioxide emissions total.

Springer, 2022 Data (shown here); IEA, Global Energy Review 2025, p.31

The red carbon dioxide line is similar to the temperature - carbon dioxide curve seen in many online graphs. Graph created by DeepSeek, 2025 for this website.

It’s tempting to look at how close the lines are and conclude that carbon dioxide levels will rise with population growth. The global population is expected to grow from 8 to 10 billion by 2050, a 25% increase.

How would a 25% increase carbon dioxide affect global warming?

The ice cores show that carbon dioxide follows temperature by 800 years.
Historic temperature - carbon dioxide graphs show that carbon dioxide has little to no effect on climate change.
Humidity is a far larger factor in radiative forcing than carbon dioxide reducing its effect.
A global temperature increase would be restrained by radiative cooling.

WHAT NOW?

We have had 450 years of very slow climate change causing generation after generation to believe the climate doesn’t change. Now we see it changing. Research since 2005 has led many climate scientists to believe carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases are neither the sole cause nor the dominant cause of climate change. They recognize that the forces of nature are calling the shots as they always have.

Yet politicians and the green industry are fixated on just 200 years of earth’s climate history and are deeply invested in that belief. Will we continue with the outdated 1990s belief that the greenhouse gases are the cause of climate change or will we look at the evidence and turn the trillions of dollars intended to reduce the greenhouse gases into readying the world for the potential effects of climate change?

More detail about each topic is available in THE DEEP CHECK version.

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