Reducing human emissions has almost no effect on global temperatures.

An inconvenient  new study published in Nature Communications highlights the double-bind consequences of maintaining the view that humans fundamentally control the global climate. This paradigm incentivizes scientists to publish studies that insist humans simultaneously cause both warming and cooling, flooding and drought, glacier retreat and advance, etc., with our everyday activities.

The inevitable and consistent conclusion inherent in most of these studies is that governmental policymaking is the key variable determining climate outcomes.

It is now commonly believed that humans fundamentally control the temperature of the air and ocean primarily by (1) increasing or reducing the atmospheric CO2 concentration, or by (2) increasing or reducing the air pollution (aerosols, particulates) associated with industrialization and energy consumption.

The authors of this study assert that the net climate sensitivity to a 24 ppm decrease in atmospheric CO2 by 2070 – achieved via China’s transition to “net zero” emissions alone – is just -0.03°C ±0.09°C.

This figure is derived by assuming that the global cooling alleged to be produced by a 24 ppm CO2 reduction over the next 50 years, -0.16°C, is almost completely offset by the global warming, +0.12°C, derived from China’s ongoing (successful) air pollution reduction policies during this same time period.

“The global warming from air pollutant reductions can largely offset the climate cooling benefit of CO2 reduction even by around 2060, when net-zero CO2 emissions are reached. The combined global effect is an insignificant cooling of -0.03K ±0.09K.”

Succinctly, the authors assert reducing anthropogenic emissions (both CO2 and aerosols, particulates) causes both cooling and warming simultaneously, and thus they effectively offset or cancel each other out. Ambitious CO2 reduction policies, such as the pursuit of “net zero” CO2 emissions in the coming decades, have almost no effect on climate “for half a century”.

“Even aggressive climate policies like carbon neutrality are not sufficient to cool the planet by ~2070 due to the competing effect of air pollutant reduction.”

So what is achieved by pursuing wildly expensive government-sponsored decarbonization policies? If these calculations are to be believed, a three-one-hundredths of a degree change in global temperature. So, zero.

Image Source: Zhao et al., 2026