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A recently published paper by Jonathan Cohler in the winter 2025 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS) argues that the global mean surface temperature (GMST)—the key metric underpinning international climate agreements like the Paris Accord—is thermodynamically and mathematically meaningless.
Cohler revives and highlights a 2007 analysis by Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, and Bjarne Andresen (published in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics), which demonstrated through physical and mathematical proofs that no single “global temperature” has physical meaning in the context of global warming. Different averaging methods applied to the same temperature data can produce arbitrarily different trends, rendering GMST an invalid intensive property (like averaging the temperature of boiling water and bathwater, or points on Mount Everest and the Sahara).The author contends that trillions in climate policy spending hinge on this “fiction,” with bodies like the International Standards Organization declining to define GMST and the IPCC offering only circular definitions.
Cohler concludes that reliance on such a metric indicates climate science has shifted toward political ends rather than physical reality.
Context and Counterpoints: The 2007 Essex et al. paper has been critiqued in mainstream climate science circles (e.g., a 2007 RealClimate response) as philosophically interesting but practically irrelevant. GMST is defended not as a strict thermodynamic temperature but as a statistical index or proxy that effectively tracks planetary heat content changes, particularly from well-mixed greenhouse gases. It correlates strongly with independent measures like ocean heat uptake (in joules) and enhances signal-to-noise ratios for detecting anthropogenic forcing.
The JPANDS, published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), is known for politically conservative viewpoints and has faced criticism for promoting non-mainstream positions on topics like climate change, vaccines, and health policy. It is not indexed in major databases like PubMed and is often described as outside the scientific consensus.This paper adds to ongoing debates about climate metrics but echoes long-standing arguments that have not shifted the broader scientific agreement on warming trends and their causes.
Important features of our global climate system explained, with pretty pictures and animation.
This is what we get for not changing the system that is killing us – a half-assed, piecemeal romp toward oblivion.
“Richard Smith, in a tour de force paper published in the Real-World Economics Review, “Green capitalism: the god that failed,” summed up the dilemma:
“[T]he problem is not just special interests, lobbyists and corruption. … [Under] capitalism, it is, perversely, in the general interest, in everyone’s immediate interests to do all we can to maximize growth right now, therefore, unavoidably, to maximize fossil fuel consumption right now — because practically every job in the country is, in one way or another, dependent upon fossil fuel consumption. … There is no way to cut CO2 emissions by anything like 80 percent without imposing drastic cuts across the board in industrial production. But since we live under capitalism, not socialism, no one is promising new jobs to all those … whose jobs would be at risk if fossil fuel use were really seriously curtailed. … Given capitalism, they have little choice but to focus on the short-term, to prioritize saving their jobs in the here and now to feed their kids today — and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.” [page 121, March 2011]
“Green” enterprises will not be granted an exemption. They, too, will be pushed by market forces the same as any other enterprise. Dr. Smith writes:
“Biofuels, windpower and organic crops — all might be environmentally rational here or there, but not necessarily in every case or forever. But once investments are sunk, green industries have no choice but to seek to maximize profits and grow forever regardless of social need and scientific rationality, just like any other for-profit business.” [page 142]
All the more is that so for the capitalist system as a whole. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, in their book What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, write:
“ ‘Green capitalism,’ even if products are produced using the utmost environmental care and designed for easy reuse, offers no way out of a system that must expand exponentially and thus continue to ratchet up its use of natural resources, its chemical pollution, its contaminated sewage sludge, its garbage, and its many other toxic substances. Some of these ‘fixes’ will probably slow down the rate of environmental destruction, but the magnitude of the needed changes dwarfs these approaches.” [page 120]”
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