Policy Documents

CO2-Induced Global Warming: A Skeptic's View of Potential Climate Change

Sherwood Idso –
April 9, 1998

In a paper published in Climate Research journal, scientist Sherwood Idso professes his skepticism of the predictions of significant CO2-induced global warming that are being made by state-of-the-art climate models, due to the number of planetary cooling forces that are intensified by warmer temperatures and by the strengthening of biological processes that are enhanced by the same rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration that drives the warming. Several of these cooling forces have individually been estimated to be of equivalent magnitude, but of opposite sign, to the typically predicted greenhouse effect of a doubling of the air's CO2 content, which suggests to me that little net temperature change will ultimately result from the ongoing buildup of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.