Frequently, I read where a politician like John Kerry; Al Gore; Joe Biden; or António Guterres, the secretary general of the U.N., has stated: "We must keep the increase of the average temperature of the Earth to 1.5°C or less; it has already risen 1.1°C since the beginning of the industrial age."  The implication of such a statement is that the Earth is on a path to thermal destruction if we humans don't take action to save the planet.  Aside from exhibiting the height of man's hubris to think that we could control any basic aspect of nature; such a statement demonstrates either a profound ignorance about fundamental physics or an intent to deceive.  I suspect that it is both.

The concept of an average temperature of the Earth is a figment of the climate scientist's imagination, conjured up to try to prove a fraudulent hypothesis.  The Earth has no average temperature; the temperature of the Earth is different at every point in time and space.  The Earth is never in thermal equilibrium.  It should be apparent to anyone that if you add two temperatures together and average them, you get a meaningless number.  A calculation of similar value would be to determine the average ZIP code in the United States to locate the average American city (49663 — Manton, Mich., pop. 1,324).

Thermodynamics, the branch of physics that deals with the movement of heat, defines temperature as a proxy for the average kinetic energy of the molecules in a system.  It is related to the quantity of thermal energy present in the system.  The concept of temperature as a proxy for the kinetic energy of the molecules in a system is derived from the "Kinetic Theory of Gases," which was developed in the 1850s and proven by experimentation in 1947.

This concept is what is known as a first principle of science.  An understanding of the scientific definition of temperature is important to an understanding of the fraudulent claims of politicians and climate scientists who promote the man-made global warming hypothesis.

Kinetic energy is the energy associated with the motion of an object, such as a golf ball, a moving car, an airplane, or a molecule of air.  A system is a volume that has a boundary.  Any object in motion has kinetic energy, and it can be calculated using the formula K.E. = 1/2 m v², where m=mass and v=velocity of the object.

How are thermal energy, temperature, and kinetic energy related?  When a system gains or loses thermal energy from its surroundings through the transfer of thermal (heat) energy, its temperature increases or decreases.  The thermal energy absorbed or lost increases or decreases the kinetic energy of the molecules in the system, causing them to move faster or slower.  As a result, the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the system changes, and we read that change with a thermometer.  

If the temperature of the air in a system represents the average kinetic energy of the air molecules in a system, ask yourself this simple question: "How can the kinetic energy of the air molecules in my room affect the kinetic energy of the air molecules in a room halfway around the world?  The answer is that it can't!  The system that constitutes your room or the atmosphere that surrounds your city is not adjacent to a system halfway around the world!  The air molecules in your room or in your city cannot interact with air molecules in a city halfway around the world and affect the kinetic energy (temperature) of those distant molecules!

This fact demonstrates an important concept about heat transfer in a fluid or gas like air.  For thermal energy (heat energy) to pass from one system to another, the systems must be adjacent to each other — that is, they must share a thermal boundary permeable to heat.  That is a fundamental law of thermodynamics.  Climate scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change may develop complicated computer models that employ coupled partial differential equations to simulate the movement of thermal energy from one place to another around the globe to calculate an average temperature of the Earth, but this is pseudoscience!  These models use incomplete data and infer heat transfer interactions that are impossible to predict.  Adding the temperature of Moscow (20°F) to Miami (74°F) in January yields an average of 47°F.  Does anyone think that number has any practical value?  It certainly has no scientific value.

In my book titled Global Warming: The Great Deception-The Triumph of Dollars and Politics Over Science and Why You Should Care, I cite published, peer-reviewed scientific research, employing the first principles of the relevant scientific fields of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, atmospheric physics, and spectroscopy, to prove that CO2 does not cause global warming.  I use publicly available data from the world's temperature databases to prove that there has been no significant global warming of the Earth's atmosphere, oceans or land mass as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased, thereby falsifying the global warming hypothesis.  I use publicly available information to demonstrate that the motivation of the U.N. IPCC, certain world politicians, and global investment firms is to gain financially by promoting the fraudulent hypothesis.  It is all about the money and political power.  Science has been sacrificed on the altar of political opportunism for economic and political gain.

I was born and raised in the southern part of the U.S. and have hunted and fished all my life.  One thing I learned is that if you want to kill a snake, you must cut off its head.  The head of the global warming snake is pseudoscience, and its body is money.  The concept of an average temperature of the Earth is based on pseudoscience.

Guy K. Mitchell, Jr. is the author of a book titled Global Warming: The Great Deception — The Triumph of Dollars and Politics Over Science and Why You Should Care.  It placed #3 on the "Wall Street Journal's" Top Ten Best Selling Book list in April 2023.

Image: Don from USA via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).