CLAIM: A Twitter user, Peter Clack, has made a claim (archived) that global temperatures are falling and not rising.
Peter Clack in his February 9 post said “there’s no correlation between carbon dioxide & climate & never was. A recent modest uptake in CO2 from 280ppm to 400ppm is only brief & has helped with a greener world.
“But CO2 is in trouble & in steady decline for millions of years. Temperatures are also falling, ‘not’ rising.”
There’s no correlation between carbon dioxide & climate & never was. A recent modest uptake in CO2 from 280ppm to 400ppm is only brief & has helped with a greener world. But CO2 is in trouble & in steady decline for millions of years. Temperatures are also falling, ‘not’ rising. pic.twitter.com/qEY8FMkDFY
— Peter Clack (@PeterDClack) February 9, 2023
The post was accompanied by three different images/graphs illustrating the non-correlation of CO2 and Global temperature, as well as the Global temperature in the past 65 million years.
As of February 20, the tweet has 1,455 retweets and 2,963 likes with several comments.
Global Temperature
Global temperature, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a fundamental measurement for describing the climate, and the temperature in particular places can have wide-ranging effects on human life and ecosystems.
The global temperature record, therefore, shows the fluctuations in the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans through various spans of time.
NASA measures the global temperature from more than 20,000 weather stations, ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research stations.
Currently, the average temperature lies somewhere around 57 degrees Fahrenheit (13.9 degrees Celsius)
CO2 and Global Temperature
The burning of Fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) causes the “greenhouse effect” in Earth’s atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is when the sun’s rays penetrate the atmosphere, but when that heat is reflected off the surface cannot escape back into space.
Gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels prevent the heat from leaving the atmosphere. These greenhouse gasses are carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide.
The excess heat in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to rise overtime, otherwise known as global warming.
According to Science Direct, there has been a steady increase in the surface temperature of the Earth, since the late 19th century, giving the excessive production of CO2 released into the atmosphere as the causative factor.
Rebecca Lindsey and Luann Dahlman on Climate.gov shared that “the amount of future warming the Earth will experience depends on how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we emit in the coming decades.
“Today, our activities—burning fossil fuels and clearing forests—add about 11 billion metric tons of carbon (equivalent to a little over 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide) to the atmosphere each year. Because that is more carbon than natural processes can remove, atmospheric carbon dioxide increases each year.”
Rising Global Temperature
NASA reported that the global temperatures in 2022 were 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.89 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951-1980), making 2022 to be the Earth’s 5th warmest year since 1880.
According to NASA, “The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.11 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th-century average.”
Also, Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organization, confirmed that the global temperature has been rising and 2022 was nominally the fifth warmest year on Earth since 1850.
Climate Central raised the concern that the temperature in 2022 is dangerously close to the internationally-agreed goal of limiting global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels.
Verdict
The claim that the global temperature is falling and not rising is FALSE. Indicators and reports show that the global temperature is rising. The 10 warmest years across the entirety of recorded human history have all occurred since 2005.
This fact-check was produced by BONews Service with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck, International Fact-Checking Network, and African Fact-Checking Alliance network.