By Lee Gerhard

Climate scientists would be less likely to issue dire warnings of planetary doom if they gave more credence to the geological history of the past several million years. Instead, they rely on computer models that are biased by the preconceptions of their manipulators and incapable of accounting for the myriad factors influencing global temperatures.

Minuscule recent warming, whatever the cause, is inconsequential in light of the long record of data found in Antarctica ice cores that go back 800,000 years. The bottom line is that Earth is colder by nearly 3 degrees Celsius than it was 3,000 years ago and is just now climbing out of its longest cold spell of the last 10,000 years. Blaring headlines about record heat waves of the past 100 years are meaningless, hysterical blather.

A deeper dive into geologic history — based partly on the record stored over millions of years in deep-ocean sediments — shows that today’s carbon dioxide concentrations of 420 parts per million are a fraction of past levels that reached 5,000 ppm and more. Carbon dioxide is nearly at its lowest level ever since plant life began so many millions of years ago and well below the optimum amount for the health of most vegetation.

In fact, the 280-ppm concentration of the mid-19th century is uncomfortably close to the point at which plant life dies — below 150 ppm. Given that all life depends on adequate amounts of this gas, proposals to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide are nothing less than reckless.

Any global increase in carbon dioxide will be beneficial and have nearly no impact on future temperature. In contrast, demonstrated in the “bible” of human history and climate change compiled by the late professor Hubert Lamb at the University of East Anglia, cold kills.

During the Little Ice Age in parts of England, the “yearly number of burials exceeded the births from the 1660’s until about 1730,” he reported.

Why, then, are so many demonizing fossil fuels? The wealth enabled by coal, oil and natural gas has provided the leisure — and funding — for numerous researchers to focus on climate change instead of struggling to stay alive. Global society is absolutely dependent upon cheap and plentiful energy for its survival. Why would some demand that civilization retreat from useful energy sources to bring back mass starvation, poverty and horse-drawn buggies?

To dream of a utopian world is perhaps admirable, but to inflict suffering upon society through ignorance of science is deplorable.

Humanity is deprived of precious learning when so many favor the ideology and fearmongering of climate alarmists over the meticulous research of eminent physical scientists such as Richard Alley, professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University, who pioneered studies of ice cores, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explored the incredible complexity of atmospheric physics.

We could easily name dozens of others similarly credentialed, who are largely unknown outside the scientific community.

The public is “protected” from empirical data by legacy and social media censors who eagerly broadcast the supposed need to restrict global warming to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius — artificial constructs with no scientific basis.

We thus suffer the consequences of unwarranted regulatory intrusions into daily life, be they restrictions on heating, air conditioning, dishwashers and stoves or the increased price and reduced availability of electricity. The effects of these range from annoying to life-threatening.

There is no global climate emergency. There is, however, a widespread knowledge crisis.

This commentary was first published at The Washington Times on May 1, 2024.

Lee Gerhard is a senior scientist emeritus at the University of Kansas, past director of the Kansas Geological Survey, member of the CO2 Coalition, retired Getty Professor of Geological Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, and co-author of “Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change.” He has a doctorate in geology.