The Carbon Dioxide Thermometer and the Cause of Global Warming

• Published in: Energy & Environment
• Main Author: Calder, Nigel
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 1999
• Subjects: Energy (miscellaneous); Energy Engineering and Power Technology; Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment; Environmental Engineering; ice core
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1260/0958305991499252; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1260/0958305991499252

Carbon dioxide in the air may be increasing because the world is warming. This possibility, which contradicts the hypothesis of an enhanced greenhouse warming driven by man-made emissions, is here pursued in two ways. First, increments in carbon dioxide are treated as readings of a natural thermometer that tracks global and hemispheric temperature deviations, as gauged by meteorologists' thermometers. Calibration of the carbon dioxide thermometer to conventional temperatures then leads to a history of carbon dioxide since 1856 that diverges from the ice-core record. Secondly, the increments of carbon dioxide can also be accounted for, without reference to temperature, by the combined effects of cosmic rays, El Niño and volcanoes. The most durable effect is due to cosmic rays. A solar wind history, used as a long-term proxy for the cosmic rays, gives a carbon dioxide history similar to that inferred from the global temperature deviations.