Climate Change: Understanding Why CO2 is Innocent and Humanity Only an Accomplice of Nature—Strategies, Findings, and Consequences in Brief

The carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by human activities is considered responsible for global warming and dramatic climatic excesses in a few decades. This future is predicted by an international organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This article is intended to present a summary of the essential steps of an original approach initiated to introduce hard sciences in the area of ​​climate changes. Taking the role of a refrigerant in a refrigerator as model, it was first found that the mechanism proposed by the IPCC can be replaced by an original one based on heat, wherever it comes from, managed by water and its transitions between solid, liquid and gaseous physical forms. This new mechanism was given value by its applicability to temperature and ocean level changes during past glacial cycles. Next, the thermodynamics of ice melting was used to show a large imbalance in favor of heat during the last deglaciation, a quasi-equilibrium maintained by ice melt and evaporation during the first thousands years of the current Holocene interglacial plateau, and the return of excess heat at the origin of the currently observed ice disappearance. Whether anthropogenic heat in growth can be responsible of global warming is discussed. So far, the limits of the variations in temperature in force for the last 8,000 years are still respected but at the expenses of significant increases in the frequency and magnitude of climatic events. The interest of the energy transition carried out at a forced pace throughout the world must be reexamined in the light of the role given to heat. This work suggests that keeping climate events within acceptable limits requires reducing anthropogenic heat, in particular the capture of thermal infrared radiations, and not banning carbon energy in favor of electricity which, it should not be forgotten, also contributes to anthropogenic heat.