CLIMATE CHANGE: what does it mean?

CO2: Some Interesting Facts

CO2, the biggest component of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, receives a bad rap from everyone in the global warming/climate change debate. It is the bad actor. We have to curtail CO2 emissions or the whole world will become a desert, or so goes the rhetoric.

Far from it!

Anyone who studied high school chemistry knows that without CO2 there would be no photosynthesis; and without photosynthesis there would be no forests, no farms, and no food!

In short, CO2 is essential for life.

The basic process is elementary. In the presence of sunlight, plants convert CO2 into sugar, which is food for them. The more CO2 is available the faster and bigger plants grow. Of course, water is also important, but it appears that even when water is limited, a high level of CO2 promotes stronger plant growth.

In a world witnessing a population explosion, one would think that high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would be good, as a growing population needs increasing quantities of food just for survival.

During my own lifetime of seventy years, the world's population more than tripled from less than two and a half to seven and a half billion. That's simply astounding! Where will it stop?

Humans, as all other animals, are CO2 producing machines. We breathe O2 and exhale CO2. I find it very interesting how nature has provided it's own checks and balances in the natural cycle. Each additional person produces additional CO2 that goes to produce the additional food needed. If this hadn't been the case, the population growth we have witnessed wouldn't have been possible. The world would have quickly reached the limiting point of food production and global population would have plateaued long ago.

So, why has CO2 become such a threat?

That's a very interesting question. In the post-industrial world, animals (including humans) have been replaced as the major CO2 producers. The modern world is highly mechanized and has become overdependent on fossil fuels for electricity production, transportation, and petrochemicals, which have given us the era of plastics and synthetic materials.

Fossil fuels have become the biggest contributors of CO2 emissions to our biosphere. If it were not for the toxic and carcinogenic emissions associated with burning and processing them, the result would be beneficial to humans, as it promotes more plant growth to feed all animals.

So, the problem is not higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but higher levels of contaminants that are hazardous to our health. The number of deaths associated with such contamination are staggering. Each year, the World Health Organization publishes the appalling numbers of deaths and human suffering from fossil-fuel burning, but the powers that be are narrowly focused on global warming and climate change!

As will be seen shortly, the battle should not be over CO2, but over poisonous and cancerous substances emitted from the burning of fossil fuels. More specifically, the battle should be over removing the hazardous particulates, not the CO2 gases, from the power plants, cars, trains, and planes that use them.

It is a fraudulent claim that high CO2 levels in the atmosphere are responsible for global warming. The cause of global warming and cooling is the sun! More specifically, it is the earth's orbit around the sun, which changes from an ellipse to a perfect circle every one hundred thousand years. That's why every one hundred thousand years the earth has seen an ice age. They occurred regularly for eons, well before the debut of humans on the earth's stage, and certainly well before the industrial revolution!

During each warming and cooling cycle, CO2 levels have fluctuated from high to low with perfect regularity, but always as a consequence of the changes in solar radiation: never as the cause of warming or cooling!

CO2 level are currently much higher than the peak of any other warming cycle that has been observed scientifically from ice cores going back to almost half a million years ago. Yet, there has been no significant warming! Certainly, temperatures have not increased in lock step with rises in CO2 levels. During my lifetime, CO2 levels have gone up 33% (from 300 to 400 ppm): during the same period, global temperatures went up less than half a degree, or less than 2.5%!

In contrast, plant growth throughout the world has been increasing at about 1% per year, or about 70% during my lifetime. According to a 2013 study from the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which estimated that the value of atmospheric CO2 enrichment increased "from $18.5 billion in 1961 to over $140 billion by 2011, amounting to a total sum of $3.2 trillion over the 50-year period 1961-2011." Consequently, our overpopulated world has benefited immensely from higher plant growth, while suffering no significant temperature effects.

Those are the facts that are little talked about in the emotional debate about the hazards of CO2!

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I have been reading the sunspot activity reports published by NASA regularly and I'm convinced that, over the next few decades, global temperatures may actually drop, even if ever so slightly! We are now witnessing low sunspot activity, which is associated with cooling trends.