Editors’ Note: Gregory Wrightstone of the CO2 Coalition is a friend of Climate Realism, and his new book “A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity,” shows how geologic history and measured data today both demonstrate that there is no climate emergency, to the contrary, life on planet Earth is thriving. Climate Realism concurs, as explained in articles covering global greening and crop production here, here, and here, for example.
Guest Post by Lipton Matthews, originally posted at American Greatness, via WattsUpWithThat.
Few books arrive with a thesis as deliberately provocative as its title. Gregory Wrightstone’s A Very Convenient Warming: How Modest Warming and More CO₂ Are Benefiting Humanity sets out to invert nearly every assumption underlying the modern climate conversation, and it does so armed less with rhetoric than with charts, ice core data, and centuries of documented harvests. A working geologist and executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Wrightstone builds his case on a canvas that stretches from the Carboniferous swamps to next year’s crop yields, and the sheer scale of that canvas is what gives the book its persuasive force.
Rather than opening with alarm, Wrightstone opens with arithmetic. Across the past 600 million years, he calculates, atmospheric CO₂ averaged roughly 2,600 parts per million, nearly seven times the concentration measured today and two and a half times the worst-case scenario the IPCC projects for the year 2100. Framed against that backdrop, today’s 420 parts per million looks less like a crisis and more like a modest recovery from what he calls a long era of carbon starvation, one that bottomed out near 182 parts per million during recent glacial advances, close to the 150 ppm threshold below which most land plants cannot survive at all.
Explaining what drove this decline is where the book’s account of sequestration becomes essential. Two mechanisms did most of the work, by Wrightstone’s reckoning. Roughly 80 percent of removed carbon became calcium carbonate rock, chiefly limestone, precipitated from saturated ocean water or built from the accumulated shells and skeletons of marine life. The remaining 20 percent took a slower, stranger path: algae and, later, lignin-rich trees died and were buried before microbial life had evolved the enzymes needed to decompose them, entombing carbon in what would eventually become coal, oil, and natural gas. Wrightstone leans on this history to reframe fossil fuels themselves, describing coal and oil as nothing more exotic than ancient sunlight, captured by photosynthesis and stored underground until combustion returns it to circulation.
Once that premise is established, the numbers Wrightstone marshals against the “unprecedented CO₂” narrative start to compound. Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric concentration has risen roughly 140 parts per million, from about 280 to 420, yet even that increase, he notes, still sits far below the 2,600 parts per million average of Earth’s deeper history and considerably below the levels present during most of the eras when complex life flourished.
If CO₂ truly functioned as the control knob of planetary temperature, as Wrightstone puts it, the geologic record ought to show the two moving in lockstep. Instead, he lines up four separate comparisons, each spanning a different length of time, and each one undercuts the correlation rather than confirming it. Between 1943 and 1976, even as postwar industrial output pushed emissions sharply upward, global temperature fell for 33 consecutive years, a cooling trend severe enough that many scientists of the era were predicting the onset of a new ice age rather than a warming one. Reaching back further, the Central England Temperature record, the oldest continuous instrumental series in existence, shows roughly the first 250 years of post-Little Ice Age warming occurring while CO₂ levels remained at historic lows. The Medieval Warm Period presents a similar puzzle: comparable warmth occurred with concentrations some 140 parts per million below today’s figure. And looking across the full 8,000 years of the Holocene, Wrightstone finds temperatures gradually declining while CO₂ rose, an inversion he labels the Holocene Conundrum.
None of these four windows, spanning decades on one end and millennia on the other, produces the tight correlation the prevailing narrative would predict. Wrightstone instead points to Pacific Ocean cycles, particularly the El Niño Southern Oscillation, as tracking short-term temperature swings far more closely than carbon dioxide concentration ever does, a pattern he illustrates by charting El Niño events directly against satellite temperature records going back to 1950.
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Read the rest at American Greatness, here.
