A Climate Declaration from the Czech Republic

A climate declaration from the Czech Republic

An expert working group of natural scientists (especially geologists) has been established in the Czech Republic and has prepared the following Declaration for politicians and the general public in the Czech Republic (but also elsewhere in the world). The scientists see this declaration as building on the CLINTEL Declaration and as a further development on the basis of new findings in their field.

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The Declaration: Scientists debunk the Green Deal or…the king is naked

We are mostly geologists, but we work with experts in all relevant fields (including the international organisation CLINTEL). Basic geological research and mapping has provided the most evidence of ongoing climate change on Earth, long before so-called anthropogenic global warming came into vogue.

It is not true that natural climate change is (except perhaps in the case of major disasters, which recur after a very long time) very slow. There is already evidence from the relatively recent past (the Quaternary) of repeated very rapid temperature changes, and this at a time when there was no significant human influence, let alone human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases, including CO₂. On the contrary, it has been clearly demonstrated that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations was a consequence of rising temperatures. The release or uptake of GHGs then affected temperatures only secondarily (as a positive feedback). The sensitivity of GHG concentrations to temperature changes has been demonstrated in many examples, even on short time scales at the time of instrumental measurements.

Current climatology, at least the results presented to the public as the ‘consensus of scientists’, unilaterally emphasizes only GHG emissions. Greenhouse gases, which prevent incident energy from being radiated back into space, are last in the chain of factors (solar radiation, reflectivity) affecting temperatures.

The significance of changes in solar activity (whose fluctuations over the period of instrumental measurements alone are energetically comparable to the reported greenhouse gas forcing) is usually ignored, on the grounds that it shows no temporal correlation with temperatures on short time scales. The period of significantly above-average solar activity, which began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and has not yet completely ended, must have had some effect on temperatures. It has been documented that there are physical mechanisms that explain why average temperatures may not respond immediately to changes in solar activity (e.g. energy accumulation in the oceans and in the Earth’s crust and its delayed release). However, some climatologists have apparently taken the attitude of ‘if we can’t calculate it, we’ll ignore it’ – which is totally unacceptable in serious science with the opportunities offered in the 21st century.

The atmosphere is steadily moving towards rebalancing with the ocean, which contains orders of magnitude more CO₂ (including other forms of carbon that can easily transfer to it). It is therefore not within human power to significantly deviate the atmospheric CO₂ content from equilibrium values in the long term view. The calculations used by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which nonsensically separate ‘natural’ CO₂ from ‘emitted’ CO₂, lead to unrealistically high year-to-year variability in the uptake of ‘emitted’ CO₂ and are therefore not a credible basis for answering the question of how much CO₂ and other human-emitted greenhouse gases actually remain in the atmosphere (more precisely: how much lower concentrations would be if anthropogenic emissions were not present).

‘Carbon neutrality’, as the main objective of the current measures extremely affecting the economy, is therefore only of ideological significance, because maintaining certain concentrations of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases would only be realistic if temperatures did not change significantly in the long time (even from natural causes).

Concentrating a great deal of effort on preventing global warming must therefore have a very uncertain outcome even under very favourable circumstances. Much more effective is adaptation to climate change itself (which humanity has been doing for the entirety of its existence). Also important are the efforts devoted to regional or local climate, where the impact of human activity is already very real (heat islands, disruption of small water cycles, etc.). We reject the propaganda that warming is a priori bad and increases the frequency of extremes of all kinds, because such claims are completely contradicted by the geological record and current observations (there is no denying, for example, the positive effect of higher precipitation and higher CO2 concentrations on vegetation growth, including agricultural crops, in the vast majority of the world).

Mgr. Miloš Faltus, Ph.D.
RNDr. Tomáš Fürst, Ph.D.
RNDr. Pavel Kalenda, CSc.
Mgr. Jiří Kobza
RNDr. Dobroslav Matějka, CSc.
Mgr. Václav Procházka, Ph.D.
The spokesperson for this group is Pavel Kalenda:  PKalenda@seznam.cz