The False Temperature Claims That Underpin the COP30 Alarmist Agenda

The next two weeks of COP30 will see three favourite climate scares relentlessly broadcast to promote the fast-fading hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. They are: breaching a 1.5°C global ‘threshold’ leading to runaway temperatures; human-caused tipping points producing unimaginable natural disasters; and attribution of single-event bad weather to the use of natural hydrocarbons. The 1.5°C figure is a meaningless number invented by politicians and activists to concentrate Net Zero minds; tipping points are climate model codswallop; and ditto attribution crystal ball-gazing. None of them are backed up by credible scientific evidence and observation. Which of course is why political elites have trashed the scientific process of inquiry, banned and cancelled any dissenting discussion and declared the matter ‘settled’.

The foundation scam is temperature. The world is said to be warming dramatically, leading to tipping points and worsening extreme weather. Changes are said to be occurring at unprecedented rates and are caused primarily by humans increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. In fact the temperature rise is small, about 1°C over 200 years (making allowance for all the fake temperature estimates and urban heat-ravaged measurements) and similar rises are commonplace in both the historical and paleo record. The recent ‘hottest evah’ rises have been seen in the past – sudden changes in temperature are caused by sudden local events such as volcano eruptions. As it happens, the underwater Hunga Tonga volcano released vast quantity of water vapour into the upper atmosphere in 2022, a ‘greenhouse’ warming event that would have been helped along by a recent strong El Niño oscillation. Recent accurate satellite measurements show the overall global temperature has been falling during 2025.

Don’t take my word for all this natural movement. Professor Mark Maslin is a Professor of something termed Earth Systems Science at UCL and one of the authors of a recent tipping point report timed for COP30. This particular computer model-based bilge suggested that warm water corals may already be crossing their “thermal tipping points”, despite the fact that coral has been around for hundreds of millions of years and survives in waters between 24-32°C. This would appear to be the same Mark Maslin who as a humble geography lecturer in 1999 wrote a paper that said possibly most of the large climate changes involving movements of several degrees occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, “and perhaps even a few years”. These days he whines that “Earth is already becoming unliveable”, while climate change politics helps build “a new political and socio-economic system”. In 2018, he was one of a number of eco-activists who signed a letter to the Guardian saying they would no longer “lend their credibility” by debating climate science scepticism.

No wonder people like Maslin – needless to say a BBC regular on all learned climate Armageddon matters – walked away from climate science debate. Tying CO₂ levels to rising temperatures to make Left-wing political capital relies on observations from just a few recent years. Widen the observations out to hundreds and then hundreds of millions of years gives a different picture. Sometimes temperatures rise and fall at the same time as CO₂, sometimes not. Sometimes even CO₂ levels rise before the following temperatures, more often than not they don’t. The simple explanation that warming gases such as CO₂ become ‘saturated’ once they pass certain concentrations, with heating falling off a logarithmic cliff, is a scientific hypothesis or opinion, but it has much to offer when past observational evidence is considered.

Let us consider some of these observations starting with the long term record over 600 million years. The graph below shows wide temperature-CO₂ divergence.

Over 600 million years it is difficult to observe any general lockstep connection between temperature and gas. It might, however, be noted that over 600 million years, CO₂ has generally been declining in the atmosphere to the near denuded levels seen today. As we have seen over the last 40 years even small rises in CO₂ lead to significant planet-wide biomass growth. All that CO₂ was good for the dinosaurs who roamed the Earth until 66 million years ago, with levels more than three times higher than today. The little extra has also been good for humans since recent crop yields have soared and helped to alleviate naturally-occurring world famine.

These records of course are very long term and are compiled from proxies with accuracy only to a few thousand years. In the more immediate record we find additional and conclusive proof that CO₂ is not the main climate thermostat. Temperatures in medieval times were similar to today, possibly slightly higher in the Roman period and often 3-4°C higher in the Holocene thermal maximum around 8,000 to 5,000 years ago. During these periods, CO₂ was remarkably stable around 260 parts per million, a mark that is in fact dangerously low to sustain life on Earth. The notorious Michael-Mann-1,000-year temperature ‘hockey stick’ removed the linking problem by abolishing the medieval warming period and the subsequent little ice age that ran up to around 1800.

Remarkable recent scientific evidence has emerged to suggest that abrupt rises in temperature have been a feature of the global climate going back to the iceless Jurassic period over 150 million years ago. Dramatic temperature changes based on 1,500-year cycles, as the younger Maslin can testify, have been known to have occurred in Greenland and the North Atlantic. But a group of French scientists led by Slah Boulila from the Sorbonne found large temperature hikes going back millions of years across the globe. The scientists noted warming up to 15°C within a few decades, “pointing to abrupt and severe changes in Earth’s past climate”. The 1,500 year cycles are often called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events after the scientists who discovered them. Some scientists have downplayed the initial DO findings and suggested the short term temperatures rises of around 1.5°C were caused by specific northern hemisphere oscillations of ice sheets and surrounding waters.

However, the French scientists note: “The 1,500-year cycle is documented in both hemispheres, in other oceans and in continents.” Their work is said to support the global nature of DO-like events, and in particular that their potential primary cause is independent of ice sheet dynamics. Meanwhile, scientific evidence continues to grow indicating much higher temperatures a few thousand years ago. One recent paper found the plant Ceratopteris had grown 8,000 years ago at 40°N in northern China, suggesting winter temperatures 7.7°C higher than today. Another found types of molluscs surviving in the Arctic Svalbard 9,000 years ago that indicated temperatures were 6°C warmer.

The current Net Zero fantasy rests on catastrophising tiny temperature rises that frankly are not even measured properly, demonising CO₂ boosts that are helping Earth return to a more healthy biosphere and atmospheric balance, inventing ‘tipping points’ using junk computer models and insulting the intelligence with untestable tales claiming humans are making the weather worse.

And they call us sceptics the ‘deniers’.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.