Climate alarmists claim
that increased levels
of atmospheric CO2
will cause catastrophic
global warming,
ocean acidification,
and other imagind
horrors.
Physicist William Happer says:
"CO2 concentrations have been much higher than present values over most of the history of life.
Even though CO2 concentrations were measured in thousands of parts per million by volume (ppm) over most of the Phanerozoic, not the few hundred ppm of today, life flourished in the oceans and on the land.
Average pH values in the ocean surface were as low as pH = 7.7, a bit lower than the pH = 8.1 today.
But this was still far from acidic, pH < 7, because of the enormous natural alkalinity of seawater.
The mean global temperature was sometimes higher and sometimes lower than today’s.
But the temperature did not correlate very well with CO2 levels.
For example, there were ice ages in the Ordovician, some 450 million years ago, when the CO2 levels were several thousand ppm.
Discussions of climate today almost always involve fossil fuels.
Some people claim that fossil fuels are inherently evil.
Quite the contrary, the use of fossil fuels to power modern society gives the average person a standard of living that only the wealthiest could enjoy a few centuries ago.
... fossil fuels must be burned responsibly, deploying cost-effective technologies that minimize emissions of real pollutants such as fly ash, carbon monoxide, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, etc.
Extremists have conflated these genuine environmental concerns with the emission of CO2, which cannot be economically removed from exhaust gases.
Calling CO2 a “pollutant” that must be eliminated, with even more zeal than real pollutants, is Orwellian Newspeak.
... The Earth has already “experimented” with much higher CO2 levels than we have today or that can be produced by the combustion of all economically recoverable fossil fuels.
There is no doubt that the concentrations of CO2 are increasing.
... exhaled human breath typically consists of f = 40,000 ppm to 50,000 ppm of CO2, a fact that should make one wonder about the campaign to demonize CO2 as a “pollutant.”
Without strong ventilation, CO2 levels in rooms filled with lots of people commonly reach 2,000 ppm with no apparent ill effects.
The US Navy tries to keep CO2 levels in submarines below f = 5,000 ppm to avoid any measurable effect on sailors and NASA sets similar limits for humans in spacecraft.
Both humans and power plants exhale mostly nitrogen and about 1% argon.
The remainder consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and oxygen.
Humans exhale about the same fraction of water vapor as a power plant, but less carbon dioxide and more oxygen.
The “smoke” from the stacks of the power plant, or from the girl’s breath on a frosty day, is condensed water vapor.
CO2 is completely transparent.
Each human exhales about 1 kg of CO2 per day, so the 320 million people of the United States “pollute” the atmosphere with about 320,000 metric tons of CO2 per day.
Around the year 1861, John Tyndall (1820–1893) discovered that gaseous molecules of H2O, CO2, and many other volatile chemicals are transparent to visible light, but can absorb invisible heat radiation, like that given off by a warm tea kettle or by the Earth’s surface and atmosphere.
Today, we call these “greenhouse gases,” and we know that the absorption is mostly due to oscillating electric dipole moments, induced by the vibrations and rotations of the molecules.
Tyndall correctly recognized in 1861 that the most important greenhouse gas of the Earth’s atmosphere is water vapor. CO2 was a modest supporting actor, then as now.
Predictions about what more CO2 will do to the Earth’s climate are based on numerical modeling of the fluid flows in the atmosphere and oceans.
If increasing CO2 causes very large warming, harm can indeed be done.
But most studies suggest that warmings of up to 2 K will be good for the planet, extending growing seasons, cutting winter heating bills, etc.
The warming ΔT of is a value averaged over the entire surface of the Earth and over an entire year.
It is a very small number compared to the temperature differences between day and night, or between winter and summer at most locations on the Earth.
The warming from CO2 is expected to be greater at night than during the day, and greater near the poles than near the equator.
Contrary to the predictions of most climate models, there has been very little warming of the Earth’s surface over the last two decades.
More CO2 in the atmosphere will be good for life on planet earth.
Few realize that the world has been in a CO2 famine for millions of years — a long time for us, but a passing moment in geological history.
Over the past 550 million years since the Cambrian, when abundant fossils first appeared in the sedimentary record, CO2 levels have averaged many thousands of parts per million (ppm), not today’s few hundred ppm, which is not that far above the minimum level, around 150 ppm, when many plants die of CO2 starvation.
All green plants grow faster with more atmospheric CO2. It is found that the growth rate is approximately proportional to the square root of the CO2 concentrations, so the increase in CO2 concentrations from about 300 ppm to 400 ppm over the past century should have increased growth rates by a factor of about √(4/3) = 1.15, or 15%.
We owe our existence to green plants that convert CO2 molecules and water molecules, H2O, to carbohydrates with the aid of sunlight.
Land plants get the carbon they need from the CO2 in the air.
Other essential nutrients — water, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc. — come from the soil.
Just as plants grow better in fertilized, well-watered soils, they grow better in air with several times higher CO2 concentrations than present values.
The low CO2 levels of the past tens of millions of years have driven the development of C4 plants (corn and sugar cane, for example) ...
Thousands of experiments leave no doubt that all plants, both the great majority with the old-fashioned C3 path, but also those with the new-fangled C4 path, grow better with more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Of equal or greater importance, more CO2 in the atmosphere makes plants more drought-resistant.
Plant leaves are perforated by stomata, little holes in the gas-tight surface skin that allow CO2 molecules to diffuse from the outside atmosphere into the moist interior of the leaf where they are photosynthesized into carbohydrates.
A leaf in full sunlight can easily reach a temperature of 30 C, where the concentration of water molecules, H2O, in the moist interior air of the leaf is about 42,000 ppm, more than one hundred times greater than the 400 ppm concentration of CO2 in fresh air outside the leaf.
And CO2 molecules, being much heavier than H2O molecules, diffuse more slowly in air.
So, depending on the relative humidity of the outside air, as many as 100 H2O molecules can diffuse out of the leaf for every CO2 molecule that diffuses in, to be captured by photosynthesis.
This is the reason that most land plants need at least 100 grams of water to produce one gram of carbohydrate.
If the amount of CO2 doubles in the atmosphere, plants reduce the number of stomata in newly grown leaves by about a factor of two.
With half as many stomata to leak water vapor, plants need about half as much water.
The Earth is in no danger from increasing levels of CO2.
More CO2 will be a major benefit to the biosphere and to humanity.
Over the past tens of millions of years, the Earth has been in a CO2 famine with respect to the optimal levels for plants, the levels that have prevailed over most of the geological history of land plants.
There was probably CO2 starvation of some plants during the coldest periods of recent ice ages.
... more atmospheric CO2 will substantially increase plant growth rates and drought resistance.
There is no reason to limit the use of fossil fuels because they release CO2 to the atmosphere.
However, fossil fuels do need to be mined, transported, and burned with cost-effective controls of real environmental problems — for example, fly ash, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, volatile organic compounds, groundwater contamination, etc.
The global warming crusade has been driven by many forces: political imperatives, huge amounts of research funds for scientists willing to support politicians, crony capitalists getting rich from “saving the planet,” the puzzling need by so many people to feel a sense of guilt, anxieties about overpopulation of the world, etc.
But genuine science has not been one of the drivers.
Widespread scientific illiteracy — alas, even in the scientific community — has facilitated this latest episode of human folly."