What we have found
1. We are not warming the planet
For several decades now, it has been widely believed that humans are causing unusual global warming by increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Our research has convinced us that this man-made global warming theory is wrong. We will explain why we have come to this conclusion on this website.
It is true that humans have been increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because of our use of fossil fuels. Before the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide seems to have been about 0.03% of the atmosphere, while it is now about 0.04%.
However, our research has shown that:
It doesn’t matter whether we double, treble or even quadruple the carbon dioxide concentration. Carbon dioxide has
no impact on atmospheric temperatures.
We carried out new laboratory experiments, and analysed the data from millions of weather balloons, to calculate exactly how much global warming carbon dioxide was causing. When we did this, we discovered that the answer was zero.
It turns out that some of the assumptions used in man-made global warming theory (and in the current climate models) had never actually been tested. When we tested them, we discovered that they were invalid.
See the link below for a discussion of why:
In addition, we have also shown that:
The “unusual global warming” that has caused such concern is
not unusual, after all.
We found that the world
naturally switches between periods of global warming and periods of global cooling, with each period lasting several decades.
We also identified a number of serious mistakes in the studies which had claimed that there has been unusual global warming. These mistakes meant that the amount of warming in the last global warming period (1980s-2000s) was
overestimated and the amount of cooling in the last global cooling period (1950s-1970s) was
underestimated.
When these mistakes are corrected, it turns out that it was just as warm in the 1930s-1940s as it is now.
See the following links for our global temperature analysis:
2. We are not causing catastrophic climate change
In recent years, we have been inundated with tragic reports of disasters from hurricanes, typhoons, floods, droughts, etc. We are also told that there have been dramatic decreases in the Arctic sea ice, and that sea levels are rising. This has led many people to believe that we are causing an increase in extreme weather events, melting in the Arctic, dangerous sea level rises.
However, this
perception of catastrophic climate changes seems to be mostly down to simple improvements in our climate monitoring technology.
Our ability to monitor and report on extreme weather events and changes in the climate has dramatically improved in recent years. This means that we are now able to detect events and changes which we wouldn’t have
noticed when they occurred in the past. This doesn’t mean these events and changes are unusual. It just means that we’ve only started noticing them!
We discuss our analysis for some of these phenomena in the following essays:
3. The scientific consensus on global warming was premature
First of all, the theory behind man-made global warming was based on a number of fundamental assumptions which had never been tested. When we tested those assumptions, we found that several of them were invalid.
Our research also identified several important energy transmission mechanisms which had been neglected by the theory.
Taken together, these results show that the man-made global theory was wrong. This means that the scientific consensus on global warming was also wrong.
Secondly, it seems that the attempts to get a scientific consensus on man-made global warming were overly forced. Although there are a lot of scientists who believe that we are warming the planet, and that we need to urgently do something about, there are quite a few climate scientists who don’t agree with that.
See our blog posts about the
scientific consensus:
4. Increasing or reducing our carbon footprint will make no difference to the climate
Many people think that burning fossil fuels causes global warming, and that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. As a result, major policy changes are being pushed worldwide in a desperate attempt to urgently reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.
For example:
- Carbon taxes are being implemented to penalise the use of fossil fuels
- Uneconomical wind turbine and solar power projects are being subsidised and promoted, purely as a means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions
- Agricultural land is being diverted to producing biofuels, solely because they have no net carbon emisssions
- People are being unnecessarily made to feel guilty for their personal “carbon footprint”
Our research has shown that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has
no impact on global temperatures, or the climate.
This means that increasing or decreasing our fossil fuel usage, or our “carbon footprint”, will make no difference to the climate.
There may be other reasons we might have to change our lifestyles, or how we produce our energy… but worrying about climate change is not one of them!
The methods we used
For our research, we used a wide range of data sources, including:
- More than 13 million weather balloons
- Temperature records from more than 7000 weather stations, distributed across the entire planet
- Satellite measurements of incoming/outgoing radiation, atmospheric temperatures, sea levels, atmospheric carbon dioxide and sea ice extents
- Various climate proxy datasets, such as tree rings, ice core records and lake sediments
- Radiative physics algorithms used by the current climate models
- More than 500 tidal gauge records
- Mass balance records from more than 100 glaciers
- Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements from 11 monitoring stations
We have read and analysed 1000s of peer-reviewed articles on climate change. In addition, we studied those findings reported in non-peer reviewed sources, such as internet sites and blogs.
We designed and carried out a number of new laboratory experiments to study energy transmission within the atmosphere.
We developed new analytical tools for studying weather balloon data.
We identified major statistical, logical and methodological errors in a number of widely-used studies. We then reanalysed the data used by these studies using more appropriate methods.
Our motivation for this work
We received no funding for this work. However, as you can probably tell from our
About Us page, as a family, we are passionate about science and very concerned about the environment. Specifically, since the 1980s, we have been concerned about overfishing and the mismanagement of water resources. See the
Overfishing.org website for an overview of the overfishing problem.
The National Aquarium which we founded and ran from 1991-1996 in Ireland.
In 1989, we set up and built the National Aquarium in Ireland to promote public awareness of the beauty and fragility of the ocean ecosystems. We ran this from 1991-1996, and it became the most popular privately-owned tourist attraction in the country.
It seems to us that the overfishing of declining world fish stocks will not supply enough fish to meet the requirements of an expanding world population. For that reason, we believe that a major expansion of fish farming is needed now and in the coming years. Unfortunately, most of the current fish farming techniques are expensive, non-sustainable and typically involve overcrowding of the fish being grown.
Since 1996, we have been researching and developing new technologies to improve the current methods of fish-farming and waste-water treatment. Out of this research, we have developed new ecologically-friendly techniques which give high yields of healthier (and happier) fish, without causing
any water pollution (because we recycle our water), and at a much cheaper cost than the current approaches.
We have been granted patents for our new fish-farming methods, waste-water treatment systems and a new heat exchange system. We have also developed cheap and efficient waste water treatment methods, and several new energy efficient building materials and techniques. Currently, we are refining our systems so that they can be easily set-up and maintained by farmers in any country.
One of the laboratories in our aquatic research facilities.
While we were investigating the fish habitats in different parts of the world, we were not finding any evidence for the
unusual global warming predicted by the man-made global warming theory. We were finding that there had been some small climate changes, but they all seemed to be well within the ranges that the fish were used to. In other words, the climate changes we were detecting seemed to be a result of the natural climate variability of the planet.
In addition, our research into the solubility of carbon dioxide and other gases in water was giving us experimental results which did not agree with the standard models for the carbon cycle, or the claims that carbon dioxide was causing ocean acidification as well as global warming.
With that in mind, in early 2009, we started carefully studying the science behind the man-made global warming theory, and analysing the data for ourselves. Our research has revealed that increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in atmosphere does
not cause global warming.
In addition, our findings provide important insights into various aspects of the weather, e.g.:
- The reasons for the different temperature profiles in the atmosphere
- The mechanisms by which energy is distributed throughout the atmosphere
- New explanations for why tropical cyclones form
- A better understanding for the locations of the jet streams
- Understanding the differences between the calculated and measured atmospheric pressures (a) near ground level during Arctic winters and (b) above the tropopause
So, we believe that our research should lead to major advances in weather prediction.
Where to learn more about our research
We have written up the main findings of our research in the form of eight scientific articles. We have submitted all eight of these articles, and the accompanying data, for open peer review at the
Open Peer Review Journal. This is a forum we have established to ensure our findings can receive careful scrutiny from the entire scientific community.
We have written several essays to provide non-technical summaries of these articles:
But, interested readers might want to read the full articles. Below is a list of links for all eight articles:
- The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere I. Phase change associated with the tropopause – Michael Connolly & Ronan Connolly, 2014a
- The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere II. Multimerization of atmospheric gases above the troposphere – Michael Connolly & Ronan Connolly, 2014b
- The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere III. Pervective power – Michael Connolly & Ronan Connolly, 2014c
- Urbanization bias I. Is it a negligible problem for global temperature estimates? – Ronan Connolly & Michael Connolly, 2014a
- Urbanization bias II. An assessment of the NASA GISS urbanization adjustment method – Ronan Connolly & Michael Connolly, 2014b
- Urbanization bias III. Estimating the extent of bias in the Historical Climatology Network datasets – Ronan Connolly & Michael Connolly, 2014c
- Has poor station quality biased U.S. temperature trend estimates? – Ronan Connolly & Michael Connolly, 2014d
- Global temperature changes of the last millennium – Ronan Connolly & Michael Connolly, 2014e
