Update (2021)
In 2009, we began systematically investigating the challenging subject of climate change in detail. As environmentalists and scientists, we felt it was important for us to have a proper understanding of this subject, especially given how frequently our friends, family and colleagues would ask us about our thoughts on it.
Our initial research was entirely private and just between ourselves. We quickly realized how complex and multidisciplinary the subject was, and our main goal was just to understand it for ourselves.
But, after five years of careful research, we realized that we had gained a lot of important insights which would be of interest to the scientific community. So, in 2014, we launched a website, Open Peer Review Journal (oprj.net) (OPRJ for short), where we published all our results and findings as a series of eight scientific papers.
We also realized that our findings could be of interest to the general public, and so we also set up this globalwarmingsolved.com blog in which we summarized our findings in a less technical format.
Since then, we have met and/or discussed our findings with hundreds of scientists around the world. We have sought and received useful feedback on our research, and this has led to several useful scientific collaborations. We have written up and published the results of several of these collaborations in peer-reviewed scientific journals. See our “Publications” page for links to all our peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed articles (including the OPRJ papers).
However, until now, we hadn’t updated this blog since we originally launched it in 2014, with the exception of one brief post in 2017. Now, seven years later (2021), we have decided it is time to update and re-launch the website.
Our 2014 “Start Here” page was mostly based on the findings of our 8 OPRJ papers as well as our reviewing of the scientific literature on climate change at the time (including the well-known IPCC reports). We still stand by the points that we made then. In our opinion, our more recent research has, if anything, strengthened our original arguments. However, you’re welcome to view our original “Start Here” page here.
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:
- Summary: “Urbanization bias I-III”
- Summary: “Has poor station quality biased U.S. temperature trend estimates?”
- Summary: “Global temperature changes of the last millennium”
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:
- Is the Arctic melting?
- Is man-made global warming causing more hurricanes?
- What is happening to sea levels?
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.
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.
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
Most recent publications
[Updated 22 May 2017]
- R. Connolly, M. Connolly & W. Soon, 2017. Re-calibration of Arctic sea ice extent datasets using Arctic surface air temperature records>. Hydrological Sciences Journal. In press. doi: 10.1080/02626667.2017.1324974.
You can download a pre-print here.
Supplementary Information for the paper can be found at FigShare. - W. Soon, R. Connolly & M. Connolly, 2015. Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century. Earth-Science Reviews. Vol. 150, 409-452. doi: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2015.08.010.
You can download a preprint here.
Supplementary Information for the paper can be found at FigShare.
Our Open Peer Review Journal (OPRJ) articles
We have written up some of 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 OPRJ articles:
- Summary: “The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere I-III”
- Summary: “Urbanization bias I-III”
- Summary: “Has poor station quality biased U.S. temperature trend estimates?”
- Summary: “Global temperature changes of the last millennium”
But, interested readers might want to read the full articles. Below is a list of links for all eight OPRJ 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
Thanks for the login info it was a great read
No problem!
Ronin,
We make documentary films and are very excited about your latest research and your effective de-platforming for a University.
We would like to mae a documentary where you present your research in the way you would have done had it been presented at that university.
if you have any interest in that could you please email me back?
Please take up Paul’s offer Ronan. Your work needs as much exposure as possible .
Congratulations with a beautiful homepage and 8 scientific manuscripts! You guys are some prolific researchers, not many scientists write so many articles themselves, especially as first author. If they are good, you can start tomorrow as an official researcher.
May I ask, however, why did you chose to send the 8 papers to a new “journal” that you set up yourself?
The idea of peer review is to give a paper more credibility, that can only be achieved by sending the manuscripts to an independent journal. Getting published in your own journal will not lead to much credibility, I am afraid scientists will not see this as different from publishing your ideas here on your blog. If your ideas are strong, you should have nothing to fear with going to a real scientific journal.
I just wrote a blog post about peer review and credibility.
It is good that you write here that the journal is your own. I feel this is important information missing on the journal homepage itself. It gives a strange impression that there is no editorial board. If people notice later that the editors are not independent, they might feel conned.
[…] Gli piacerebbe. Purtroppo alcuni seguaci sono andati a controllare e hanno trovato una montagna di travisamenti, in particolare del gradiente termico verticale, su una rivista creata il mese scorso da Connolly padre e figlio per ripubblicare in pdf le laboriose fandonie sui gas serra privi di effetto serra, che finora pubblicavano soltanto sul sito di famiglia Global Warming solved. […]
As I understand the mechanism CO2 in the upper atmosphere causes the “green house effect”. This is where I find it difficult to comprehend since CO2 is denser than air and will therefore “sink”. It’s also soluble in water and easily washed out by rain clouds, especially since large amounts of money has been spent on reducing SO2 and NOx, which displaces CO2 from water. Plus if CO2 resides in the upper atmosphere why aren’t trees and plants 10 miles high, cos that’s what they “breathe” !!!. Probably should be looking at CH4 as the main culprit so “environmentalists” should be going after the “fracking” industry as their main target !!!
Doug Gauld, you can measure the CO2 concentration and then see that it is constant. It is well mixed over most of the atmosphere because of turbulence. This mixing is much stronger as the separation of gasses due to gravity. Even in box in a laboratory, without turbulence, the pure diffusion is sufficient to keep all gasses well mixed. If this we not the case, you could not smell much as most fragrances are also heavy molecules, as well as the ozone killing CFCs.
There is also CO2 near the ground. Thus there is no reason why trees should grow so high and doing so is costly and dangerous for the tree.
CH4 is also an important greenhouse gas. Per molecule even more than CO2, but its concentration is less and it is removed from the atmosphere within a few years.
A true skeptic would investigate himself before spreading misinformation.
Also, note that the atmosphere is 1% argon. Given its atomic weight of 40, it’s heavier than O2.
If outdoor gases stratified due to their density, that 1% would be a killer to everything near sea level.
I think Argon is 0.9% of the atmosphere with the remaining 0.1% being all the greenhouse substances including CO2. Of the 0.1% over 90% is water vapour and cirrus clouds. So CO2 is infinitesimal. Can someone tell Greta. PLEASE
Hi Doug,
First off, apologies for not responding sooner. The last few weeks have been pretty hectic & I haven’t been able to spend much time working on this blog. I’ve also been meaning to finish writing a couple more blog essays that I have in preparation, as it’s been a while since our last blog post…
Secondly, thank you for the support!
I agree that the greenhouse effect theory is badly explained & as a result, there is a lot of confusion over exactly what CO2 is supposed to be doing. However, I actually disagree with your analysis.
Experimental measurements show that CO2 is fairly well mixed throughout most of the atmosphere. It currently makes up roughly 0.04% of the atmosphere, and is estimated to have been about 0.03% before the Industrial Revolution.
The greenhouse effect theory does not assume that CO2 is confined to the upper atmosphere. Instead, the argument is that CO2 alters how the sunlight absorbed by the Earth is re-radiated back into space.
Roughly speaking, the greenhouse effect is supposed to increase the amount of energy radiated from the stratosphere (i.e., the “upper atmosphere” you mention), but decrease the amount of energy radiated from the troposphere (the “lower atmosphere”).
As a result, the average temperatures in the troposphere are supposed to get warmer (because it’s not “cooling down” as much) and the average temperatures in the stratosphere are supposed to get cooler (because it’s “cooling down faster”).
The theory (which we disagree with!) says that increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere should increase the strength of this alleged greenhouse effect, and thereby cause “global warming”.
I’m simplifying things a lot here, but that’s the rough idea.
Does that clear things up?
We provide a more detailed discussion of the theory, and why we disagree with the theory, here.