There's an old saying that says you shouldn't be so open-minded that your brain falls out. Sure, be open to new things, but not without a healthy dose of skepticism. For some reason, though, people who define their identity as skeptics often show themselves to be gullible enough to fall for any old lie that reinforces their supposed skepticism (which is why this isn't the “Climate Skeptic Roundup”).
For example, Environment Editor Chris Morrison of the UK-based and oft-fact-checked COVID and climate disinfo site The Daily Sceptic resurrected the false CO2 saturation argument last week in an attempt to argue that “Net Zero is Completely Pointless.”
The bogus claim goes something like this: if we keep pumping out CO2, everything will be totally fine because the atmosphere will eventually reach a “saturation point,” after which additional CO2 will not have any warming effect. Unfortunately for the fossil fuel industry and The Daily Sceptic, this argument is false on multiple (atmospheric) levels, and has been for 123 years. It's based on a flawed study that Swedish physicist Knut Ångström conducted all the way back in 1900.
What’s really going on is that higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) impede the flow of infrared radiation into space. GHGs like CO2 absorb infrared radiation as heat. Normally, that heat rises into space at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere, where there are less GHGs and the air is thinner. However, as we burn fossil fuels and emit more climate pollution, these gasses spread to the upper levels of the atmosphere, and the flow of infrared radiation to space has to occur at a much higher altitude, where it is colder and heat doesn’t escape as effectively. As a result, more heat is recycled back down, raising temperatures in the lower atmosphere and on the Earth’s surface.
The CO2 saturation argument fails to differentiate between the lower and upper levels of the atmosphere. As DeSmog's debunking put it almost fifteen years ago, “Since the higher layers are the ones that determine whether or not… excess energy leaves the atmosphere (and, thus, how much extra warming occurs), whether or not the surface levels are saturated – and, just to be clear, they’re not – makes little difference.”
Chris Morrison himself admits that the CO2 saturation argument “has been ignored in the important science journals and its findings have not been reported in mainstream media,” and he asks, “Why is this?” Well, the argument is being ignored because it’s wrong. It’s really as simple as that!
And if Morrison were actually a skeptical journalist, he would have done the research and found that out for himself. After all, his sources are not exactly credible. The two academics he cites to back up his CO2 saturation claims are William Happer and William van Wijngaarden, who are both part of a well-known climate disinformation group called the CO2 Coalition that is backed by some of the top funders of climate denial. William Happer in particular has directly received fossil fuel funding, so he’s probably not the person you want to go to for unbiased information about fossil fuel pollution.
Just in case the CO2 saturation lies didn’t work, Morrison also added some thinly-veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories for good measure, calling net zero targets “a political project now embedded in many countries around the world and supported by an almost unlimited transfer of wealth to many controlling and financially-interested elites.”
Sowing doubt about climate science using biased, fossil-funded scientists and spreading hateful conspiracy theories is standard practice for dedicated disinformation sites like The Daily Sceptic, which was founded in response to COVID but is already so lacking in fresh material that it had to resort to century-old lies.