CO2 Mitigation versus Our Ecosystems

The Monterey Declaration on Climate Mitigation at the expense of Healthy Ecosystems

Nov 21, 2025

Joseph A. Biello, Michael T. Montgomery, Chuck Pezeshki and Kathryn Hudacek Harlow

Since the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, environmentalism has become synonymous with anthropogenic climate change activism and carbon dioxide reduction. However, efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through a pivot to green energy have increasingly impacted the wild environment of the planet and damaged large parts of our landscape and ecosystem, while only providing low energy density for human use. Furthermore, there has been increasing interest in large-scale efforts at mitigating warming; efforts whose secondary effects are not understood and could have catastrophic consequences both environmentally and economically. Some examples of these interventions include the clear cutting of high latitude vegetation to increase the amount of visible solar light that our planet reflects back to space, the release of toxins (such as sulphur dioxide) or non-toxins (calcium carbonate dust) into the atmosphere to do the same, the endangerment of birds, sea mammals and reptiles by invasive clean energy farms, and sequestering wood underground to prevent carbon release.

We recognize the irreplaceable role of intact ecosystems upon which we depend for the health of the planet, and for life itself. So, we stand affirmed against destroying these ecosystems in the name of limiting our carbon dioxide footprint.

Instruments of weather observation became sophisticated and widespread enough to begin to measure Earth’s climate only in the early 20th Century, just after the end of the Little Ice Age. This period also coincided with the maturation of the Industrial Revolution and the increase in industrially emitted CO2. Despite our greater understanding of atmosphere/ocean dynamics, we continue to struggle to disentangle natural versus anthropogenic climate variability.

Observations from a wide range of sources have consistently shown the warming of our planet’s atmosphere and surface of about 1.3 degrees Centigrade since 1860. Human-emitted carbon dioxide through the burning of fossil fuels has been partially implicated in this warming, which has been understood since the work of Arhennius (1896), Manabe et al. (1965), and more recently through large-scale computational models of the general circulation of the atmosphere and oceans.

Over the past several decades, some atmospheric and oceanic scientists have warned that the observed warming constitutes an existential threat to humanity and the larger biosphere. These scientists assert that the frequency of observed disastrous weather events can be ascribed to climate change caused by human-emitted CO2. Using computational models, atmospheric and oceanic scientists, working through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have predicted that climate change, through our emissions of CO2, will result in:

Ocean rise and the devastation of low-lying human communities,
The bleaching of coral reefs due to CO2 ocean acidification, leading to the collapse of reef biota;
The desertification of southern Europe;
Increased wildfire risk throughout the middle latitudes;
Water scarcity in the Indus/Brahmaputra and other watersheds;
Increased tropical cyclone intensity;
The poleward deviation of the midlatitude storm tracks;
The rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets;
The shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC),

among many other predictions.

However, in the three decades since the Kyoto Protocol, observations have enabled us to compare predictions to reality, and the observations paint a starkly different picture than the computational models have suggested:

Taken together, the observational evidence has caused us to question the popular narrative that global warming will have catastrophic consequences for weather, that climate models capture the cause of global warming, and that climate models reliably predict regional weather tendencies as the planet warms.

The failure of climate models to reproduce major observations, and their inability to properly account for all manner of phenomena (among which are cloud albedo changes, carbon transport by rivers, increasing Antarctic ice, and the effect of forests to modulate the water cycle) creates an epistemological crisis for climate science. We ask, does our knowledge of the atmosphere/ocean system flow from our observations, or is it imparted by computer models of climate, which are limited in their assimilation of, as well as their resolution of, these phenomena?

With the confidence we learned from Galileo’s example, and generations of scientists who followed him, we assert that neither the consensus of the scientific community, the consensus of policy makers, nor the peer review process can determine scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is only attained through the scientific method, where theory must be tested against observations. In the words of Richard Feynman “If your theory disagrees with experiment, it is wrong”. Current climate models do not attain this standard, and therefore should not be used to determine policy that affects billions of people.

The atmosphere/ocean system is an archetype example of a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, infinite-dimensional dynamical system. It is in a state of turbulent flow comprising large-scale waves, coherent vortices, filamentary structures, and large-scale gyre circulations that in aggregate reaches a statistical equilibrium, which is robust against small changes in their features; it does not tend to have tipping points. In the example of our atmosphere, the changing feature is the increasing amount of the trace gas, CO2. The robust statistical equilibrium is the state of the climate.

We must realize that the atmosphere-ocean system has inherent fluctuations (internal variability) that often manifest as a quasi-periodically changing climate. These changes are an inevitable feature of the complex atmosphere-ocean geofluid enveloping planet Earth. An example of such an internal oscillation is the approximate 3-8 year El Nino-Southern Oscillation. Elsewhere in the solar system, is the example of the 22 year magnetic cycle in the Sun, which gives rise to Sunspots. In fact, there were long periods with a dearth of sunspots in the past, such as during the Maunder Minimum, shortly after Sunspots were discovered by Galileo. The point of these examples is that, while our CO2 output has an effect on the atmosphere-ocean geofluid, natural oscillations are ubiquitous and significant; controlling CO2 output will likely have a limited effect on Earth’s future temperature.

Therefore, we have become convinced that the premise that modern humans can adjust a single control knob, CO2 emissions, and dramatically affect the climate is highly questionable from the physical perspective, and unsupported observationally. More importantly, we are concerned that policies which focus on controlling CO2 emissions will do more harm to regional ecosystems than they will do good for the global climate.

We must acknowledge that green energy (nuclear fission excluded) has an enormous land and ecological footprint for the energy it produces, and a rapid conversion to renewable energy will be unable to reliably and affordably satisfy the energy needs of Earth’s people. We must recognize that grandiose ideas to cool the planet may have unintended, unpredictable consequences and may lead to catastrophic damage to the environment. Finally, we must be cognizant that climate change alarmism has broken the spirit of a generation of our youth, many of whom are convinced of the inevitability of global climate catastrophe.

We call on researchers to revisit atmosphere/ocean science fundamentals in light of CERES satellite observations of decreasing planetary albedo and increasing outgoing longwave radiation which contradict the standard CO2 narrative. Researchers must recognize that their role is to produce unbiased observations and predictions, and advise policy makers. However, public policy is determined by the democratic voices of the inhabitants of our planet; it is they who ultimately weigh and measure the advice and balance their values and policy preferences. We call on the whole population to push back against CO2 net-zero hysteria and to insist that public policy strike a healthy balance between developing communities, building resilient infrastructure, and preserving wild ecosystems.

Joseph Biello

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