Even well-educated climate scientists are reluctant to admit the obvious
My brief exchange with Dr. Gavin Schmidt is an example.
Gavin Schmidt is a well-regarded “climate scientist” with considerable influence and a large following. He has been a senior advisor on climate to NASA.
Dr. Schmidt is active on X (@climateofGavin) promoting inter alia the theory that CO2 causes climate change, and with his pedigree he is followed by 67,400 users on X and many world leaders seek his inputs.
I had a short exchange with Dr. Schmidt where I asked him to respond to a very brief application of the laws of physics to the theory that increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere lead to catastrophic warming of the atmosphere and cataclysmic problems for mankind. Nothing too elaborate, just basic physics. Here is that exchange.
I posted a link to an article I had written on Substack pointing out in three slides that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would have a negligible effect on temperature of the atmosphere. Here are the slides
Dr. Schmidt took the time to respond and we had this exchange.
First, it is obvious that my application of the laws of physics was correct and I had not confused Joules and Watts. More importantly, Dr. Schmidt turned his mind to the issue and is either confused himself (which is unlikely given his credentials) or it was a weak attempt to deflect Twitter uses from the obvious fact that a doubling of CO2 cannot warm the atmosphere materially.
Dr. Schmidt didn’t contact me in response to the last post in the exchange. I am hopeful he left with a better understanding that for all of the elegance of the articles and reports emanating from his years of thorough research to try to understand climate, failure to approach the issue of radiative transfer at its simplest level led to incorrect conclusions and helped fuel a worldwide mania that fossil fuel emissions are harmful and threaten humanity.
Stated simply, the laws of physics are not optional. Dr. Schmidt has advanced understanding of important climate issues with his years of work and has earned the respect of the scientific community, but with respect to “global warming” he is just wrong.
It would be a step ahead for both him and science in general to admit the error and move on.