(The Epoch Times)—Nuclear scientist Digby Macdonald said that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not the primary driver of global temperature changes.
In a recent episode of EpochTV’s Bay Area Innovators program, Macdonald said that temperature rises first, followed by CO2.
He pointed to the example of a carbonated drink and how a rise in temperature will cause the drink to release its CO2 faster, causing it to go flat.
“That’s the very reason why you put your beer in a refrigerator,” he said. “If you want the fizzy drink to be tangy … you put it in the refrigerator so the CO2 remains in the drink.”
Macdonald said one of the reasons for the change in climate is the Milankovitch cycle—the regular variations in the elliptical path the earth travels around the sun.
He said that cycle changes every 100,000 years and an ice age occurs when it’s the most elliptical because the earth is receiving a lot less solar radiation and heat.
This cycle, combined with the earth’s wobble and sunspot activity, are the drivers of climate, he said.
“There’s nothing that you and I can do about that,” Macdonald said. “That’s okay, because if we rely upon the historical record, we go through these maxima and minima.”
He said during the Roman period it was one of the maxima, in which temperatures were about two to four degrees higher than now, and there was a large advance in civilization.
He said the changes can be traced in history, which shows the temperature has swung all over the place.
“Right now, as far as temperature is concerned, we’re about a quarter of the way up between the low minimum and the high maximum,” he said. “So we’re still on the low side. So we’ve got a long way to go, and the changes are very small. We’re talking about, for instance, fractions of a degree centigrade.”
By analyzing the bubbles of gas trapped in arctic ice using spectroscopy, the concentration of CO2 can be found, while the temperature is reflected in isotopic distributions, Macdonald said.
With that, he said, it’s possible to determine what the CO2 level was as well as the coinciding temperature, at different points in time, including thousands of years ago.
“If you go back to a hundred and something years, people were skating on the River Thames in London. That was called the mini ice age, because the temperature dropped to quite a low value,” he said. “So we’re actually recovering from a mini ice age, and so the temperature’s got nowhere else to go but up, and that’s what it’s doing at the moment. It’s got nothing to do with CO2.”
Macdonald said that all the money spent on programs blaming CO2 for climate change is based on politics, and the money would be better directed toward more pressing societal issues such as health care and homelessness.
He said the data doesn’t support the reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body that says CO2 is the culprit for climate change.
If the IPCC were correct, he said, you would find a situation where the CO2 rises first, being the cause, and the effect is the rise in temperature. He said they didn’t check the causality relationship to see if that’s valid.
“That’s what I did,” he said. “I found out that in fact, the temperature rises, and then the CO2 comes out.”
“Water vapor [is] the only gas in the Earth’s atmosphere that keeps the Earth warm,” he said, referring to a paper by Douglas Lightfoot.
Macdonald said the impacts of CO2, methane, and nitrogen oxide are immeasurable.
In an article, Macdonald wrote that Lake Vostok in Antarctica has the most extensive ice core records, and close examination of the temperature changes and atmospheric CO2 records shows that the temperature fell before the CO2 level did.
He said that if the temperature falls, the CO2 level in the atmosphere goes down, and CO2 eventually combines with carbon ions to form limestone in the ocean.
Macdonald joined the CO2 Coalition to help provide facts, resources, and information about the vital role carbon dioxide plays in the environment, including the limitations of climate models as well as the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emissions.
He said the coalition emphasizes that CO2 is not a pollutant; it’s plant food, and it’s a very important part of the photosynthesis cycle.
The coalition includes people from many different professions, including geologists, chemists, and physicists, he said. Member John Clauser is a Nobel laureate in physics, and chair William Happer is a famous physics professor.
Macdonald said the CO2 Coalition has just launched an education program that’s aimed at the K–12 level.
“There’s no single weather on the earth; there are many weathers,” he said. For example, the weather in San Francisco is noticeably different from the weather in Santa Clara just 45 miles away.
“And the definition of climate is the weather integrated over three months. That also leads to many different climates, not one climate.”
He said politicians need to rethink what they’re doing by condemning CO2, because if the CO2 level gets too low, plants won’t grow in abundance and the implications are mass starvation and poverty.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.