Fact check: Claim that there is no correlation between climate and atmospheric CO2 is false
Environmental activists from Greenpeace inflate a giant balloon reading "CO2" in front of the fair grounds, venue of the International Auto Show (IAA) in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, on September 10, 2019.
What you need to know:
- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), states that “Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet, causing climate change".
- Scientists admits that the high CO2 levels recorded nowadays are contributing to global warming, scientists admit.
Climate change has been proven by scientists to be caused by carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that comes from burning of fossil fuels.
However, climate change denialists intent on derailing the climate debate, have claimed that there is no correlation between climate change and carbon dioxide.
On April 23, 2023, Godfrey Bloom said in a tweet: “There is no correlation between climate & atmospheric CO2 So emissions are totally irrelevant. See http://godfreybloom.uk/climate/ for a forensic independent scientific exposure of the great climate hoax Fact not emotion.”
The tweet was in response to Zakir Ranganathandrawing attention to climate change due to human-driven pollution over the past 200 years.
According to his bio on the microblogging platform, Godfrey Bloom is an England-based author and journalist.
However, science evidence contradicts the assertions of this journalist, whose Twitter account is followed by 40K+ people.
In an article titled How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming? Columbia Climate School delves into how carbon dioxide traps heat.
“When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves, which we feel as heat. These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will escape back into space if unimpeded. Oxygen and nitrogen don’t interfere with infrared waves in the atmosphere,” reads the article.
“With CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it’s different. Carbon dioxide, for example, absorbs energy at a variety of wavelengths between 2,000 and 15,000 nanometers — a range that overlaps with that of infrared energy. As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect.”
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), states that “Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet, causing climate change. Human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50% in less than 200 years.”
“Carbon dioxide is an important heat-trapping gas, or greenhouse gas, that comes from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels (such as coal, oil, and natural gas), from wildfires, and from natural processes like volcanic eruptions. Since the beginning of industrial times (in the 18th century), human activities have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide by 50 per cent – meaning the amount of carbon dioxide is now 150 per cent of its value in 1750. This is greater than what naturally happened at the end of the last ice age 20,000 years ago,” say NASA.
The high CO2 levels recorded nowadays are contributing to global warming, scientists admit.
“Today, CO2 levels are higher than they have been in at least three million years. And although they still account for only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, that still adds up to billions upon billions of tons of heat-trapping gas. For example, in 2019 alone, humans dumped 36.44 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, where it will linger for hundreds of years. So there are plenty of CO2 molecules to provide a heat-trapping blanket across the entire atmosphere,” explains
This evidence therefore illustrates that the claim that there is no correlation between climate and atmospheric CO2 is false.
This fact check was produced by Nation with support from Code for Africa's Pesa Check, the International Fact-Checking Network and the African Fact-Checking Alliance Network.
