AmericanThinker | Gregory Young | Jan. 11, 2009
If one were to script a Global Warming scam one would have to be a knot-head or brain-dead to pick Carbon Dioxide (CO2) as the lead factor.
Of course we know now that CO2 was rolled out as the “poster child” nemesis against the environment. It was meant to get us hysterical enough to plead with our politicians to exact a tax on our carbon footprints so that we can save the planet earth. But it’s turning out that the CO2 “poster child” has significant problems. Despite the fact that Carbon is a part of the CO2 molecule, the atmospheric science of CO2 directly contradicts what the AGW alarmists are trying to sell us. Promoting CO2 as the environmental monkey on our back is absolutely ludicrous. CO2 is friend to all life, not a foe.
I have already covered some of the arguments against CO2 as the lead agent causing Global Warming before in American Thinker pointing out (as many more are today) that Global Warming is a hoax of the worst order. So I won’t repeat those details here. Suffice to say that current CO2 levels hover around 385 parts per million (ppm), a relatively minor constituent of earth’s entire atmosphere — less than 4/100ths of 1% of all gases present.
Nevertheless, Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming (AGW) proponents demand that unless we immediately reduce the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere to less than 350 ppm, we (that is mankind) will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.
Historically, and at one significant point indeed, CO2 atmospheric concentrations were much, much higher, 6,000 plus ppm. And guess what? The earth was more than just fine. It was incredibly filled with life. This fact seems to fall on deaf ears when talking to Global Warming protagonists. So, to make things picture clear, consider the graph below. It is a representation of the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere from the Cambrian Age to the present.
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How can CO2 be such an environmental “downer,” when the majority of life on the earth has in the past benefited by such abundance? And not just by a little, but by a lot?
Remember too that there were no people around at that time. No industry. No SUVs. No coal-fired furnaces. No shopping malls and miles of blacktop. There was a lot of life, for sure, all eating, reproducing — and being shamefully flatulent no doubt. Yet sky-high CO2 concentrations didn’t appear to do anything to disrupt the effusion of life covering the entire planet, filling the waterways and oceans.
Incidentally, we also know that man-made CO2 pollution being responsible for global warming is not supported by historical fact. The period known as the Holocene Maximum (approximately 7500 to 4000 years ago) is a good example — so-named because it was the hottest period in human history, long before humans invented industrial pollution. Furthermore, earth’s temperature and CO2 levels today have reached levels similar to a previous interglacial cycle known as the Eemian Interglacial Period of 120,000 – 140,000 years ago, a cycle lasting some 20,000 years before the earth returned to a full-fledged ice age immediately afterward.[i]
But still the AGW crowd clings to their mantra. I can only surmise that AGW advocates are experiencing cognitive dissonance and splitting, consciously choosing to be unaware of earth’s geophysical and climatic history. For instance, revised Russian Ice Core Data from the Antarctica show that CO2 has been increasing steadily for the last 18,000 years. Yet again, AGW proponents claim that CO2 levels now are unnaturally high and are only the result of the last 200 years or so of human pollution.
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