Scientific evidence indicates that modern warming is driven by CO2, contrary to Richard Lindzen’s claim

Key takeaway

Climate change is not only evidenced by increased global average temperature, but also by increased ocean-heat content, Arctic sea ice decline and sea level rise. All of the scientific evidence, including observational datasets and climate models, indicates that the warming and disruption of Earth’s climate system since the onset of the industrial era is due to human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2.

Reviewed content

Verdict:

Incorrect

Claim:

“Believing CO2 controls the climate is pretty close to believing in magic.”

Verdict detail

Incorrect Several independent lines of scientific evidence based on observational datasets and modeling indicate that current climate change is driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2. Scientific evidence shows that changes in all other potential climate variables are insufficient to explain modern warming.

See our method of evaluation

Full Claim

“...What is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists of many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable?”; “Believing CO2 controls the climate is pretty close to believing in magic.”

A quote on Facebook attributed to Richard Lindzen, a retired meteorologist who has received funding from fossil fuel interests, claims that climate change cannot likely be caused by a  “single variable” such as CO₂ due to the complexity of the climate system.

Climate is indeed a complex system consisting of multiple variables. However, its complexity does not indicate that scientists do not understand the main variables that are driving contemporary warming.

Since 1950, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have climbed from just above 300 parts per million (ppm) to over 400 ppm (Fig. 1). This change, caused by fossil fuel use, is particularly startling in the context of past atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, which ice core reconstructions indicate have fluctuated between around 200 and 300 ppm over periods of thousands of years during the last 800,000 years (Fig. 1).^[1,2]

While remaining in the atmosphere, CO₂ prevents heat from escaping and consequently warms the surface of Earth – a concept that is popularly known as the greenhouse effect. This theory predicts that the increase in temperature will be proportional to the logarithm of the concentration of CO2, with a time-lag of about 20 years. Figure 2 shows that this is precisely what the data shows, hence providing a strong validation of the theory, in addition to other lines of evidence. “The role of CO₂ in warming the Earth was discovered in the mid-19th century,” says James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington in a previous review of a similar claim.

Figure 1. Variations in atmospheric CO₂ concentration over the last 800,000 years. Source: NASA.

Figure 2. Global temperature plotted against atmospheric CO₂ concentration. Note the logarithmic scale of the x-axis is due to the nature of the relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature.^[3] Source: Berkeley Earth.

But how can scientists be certain that CO₂ is driving today’s warming and not, as Lindzen argues, one of the other several variables of Earth’s climate system? Scientists have calculated the influence of individual variables on Earth’s climate, and consistently find that human activities, dominantly CO₂ emissions, have driven warming following the onset of the industrial era (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Time series of effective radiative forcing (warming) caused by various mechanisms. Note that carbon dioxide (gray) contributes more to warming than all of the other well-mixed greenhouse gases (WMGHG). Note also that the majority of warming is caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Source: U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment.

“The warming from the late 1800s to the present is all due to human-caused climate change, because natural factors have changed little since then and even would have caused a slight cooling over the last 70 years rather than the warming we have observed”, noted Timothy Osborn, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, in a previous review.

Atmospheric observations also support warming driven by greenhouse gases. The scientific understanding of greenhouse gas physics predicts that CO₂ would selectively warm the lower section of the atmosphere, called the troposphere, while cooling the upper part of the atmosphere, called the stratosphere. Thus, if CO₂ is responsible for Earth’s temperature increase, we would expect to see a simultaneous warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere^[4-6], which is exactly what the data show (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. Global temperature variations in the upper atmosphere (top graph) and in the lower atmosphere (bottom graph) since the 1960s. We observe a warming at the surface and a cooling above, which is consistent with the effect of added greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Source: Met Office Hadley Centre.

If you are interested in learning more about how carbon dioxide can have such an important effect on global climate when its concentration is so small, read this article in The Conversation.

Updates:

• 9 September 2022: Content related to Lindzen’s “2% perturbation” statement was removed due to a lack of clarity about what perturbation the author refers to.

References

• 1 – Lüthi et al. (2008). High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present. Nature
• 2 – EPICA Community Members (2004). Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core. Nature
• 3 – Huang & Shahabadi (2004). Why logarithmic? A note on the dependence of radiative forcing on gas concentration. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
• 4 – Lockwood & Fröhlich (2007) Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.
• 5 – Lockwood (2008) Recent changes in solar outputs and the global mean surface temperature. III. Analysis of contributions to global mean air surface temperature rise. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.
• 6 – Santer et al. (2013). Human and natural influences on the changing thermal structure of the atmosphere. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.