"You can double the amount of CO2, and it will not have a noticeable effect on the Earth's mean surface temperature, period. That's a hard calculation," Denis Rancourt says in a video posted to Facebook December 6.
Rancourt, a Canadian physicist who was dismissed from his tenured professor position by the University of Ottawa for academic fraud in 2009, also touts his scientific credentials in the video to deny the existence of climate change and falsely claim "there was no pandemic" (archived here).
The short clip also spread widely on X, where Rancourt himself reshared it.
The footage is not new. It comes from a talk Rancourt gave at a 2023 business event in Ottawa.
In the speech, he made several false statements, including about the reality of climate change and the impact of methane emissions on the warming of the planet -- topics AFP has investigated before. AFP has also debunked false claims traced to Rancourt during the coronavirus pandemic.
His claim about the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is also inaccurate, scientists told AFP.
Slashing CO2 emissions is essential to slow down climate change.
"We have known since the calculations of Nobel prize-winning physical chemist Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s of the impact increasing CO2 would have on temperature," Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian atmospheric scientist, told AFP on December 11 (archived here).
Hayhoe cited scientific literature from 1896 demonstrating the influence of "carbonic...
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