Why You Should Love Carbon Dioxide

Carbon dioxide, or C02, is the invisible gas from which all life is made, thanks to the miracle of photosynthesis. CO2 has been declining in the atmosphere for 50 or 60 million years, and is now near the all time low (which was about 20,000 years ago). Without CO2, there would be virtually no life on our planet. Some plants, known as C4, have the ability to concentrate CO2 up in their leaves to facilitate more efficient photosynthesis. They have become more successful in the last 20 or 30 million years. Grasses are an example.

The C3 plants we eat evolved when the CO2 level was somewhere in the 2,000 to 3,000parts per million (ppm) range. The CO2 level today is 415ppm.
It is bizarre that so many people claim the CO2 level in the mid-1700s was perfect, and any change from then is bad news. But that science-free belief is the foundation of the modern climate alarmism (the anti-CO2 cult).

We should look to geological history to understand where the carbon cycle should be. Bigger and faster growing C3 plants, that use less water too,  will support more animal animal and human life on our planet. That sounds like a good goal, based on science. The optimum CO2 level for most of the plants humans and animals eat tells us the optimum CO2 level in the atmosphere. Paranoia about a small CO2 increase in during the past few hundred years, is due to gross scientific ignorance. CO2, a trace gas is vital to life, and more CO2 in the atmosphere would be good news.

The climate alarmists made up a science-free global average temperature target of +2.0 degrees C. from the mid-1700s because their propaganda works better with a specific target. There is no real science behind +2.0 degrees C., or +1.5 degrees C.  Those targets are politics, not science. 

In fact, the average global temperature has already increased by at least +1.5 degrees C., possibly by +2.0 degrees C., over the past 325 years. And that warming was good news -- the late 1600s were a colder than usual century. People living at the time hated the cold climate and there were famines in Europe.

Countries like Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Russia and Scandinavia would gain from a slightly warmer world. Actual warming since 1979, when near-global satellite data were first available, has been mainly in the northern half of the Northern Hemisphere, mainly in the six coldest months of the year, and mainly at night. You may not have known that fact because a single global average temperature hides all important details !

One new technology, called Direct Air Capture (DAC), uses machines to pull CO2 directly out of the atmosphere. There have been experiments in Switzerland and Canada. But energy and water resources needed to drive these machines are very large scale.


DAC needs large amounts of heat to make the process work.  Total energy required for global DACs would exceed current global natural gas consumption!  You have to use a lot of fossil fuel energy to capture the CO2.  That should end to the whole idea of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.  Also, Henry’s Law ensures us that it is impossible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Any attempt to do so will simply result in more CO2 coming out of the oceans to replace it !

To remove and safely store just one part-per-million of CO2 would requirte geological storage of almost eight Gigatons of oxidized carbon … 7,800 million metric tons. At current annual rates of all industrial CO2 storage methodologies combined, it would take about 200 years to store just one ppm of CO2.

We already have a fully functioning "machine" for removing “carbon” from the air. It’s called Plant Biology. It's very green. It runs on sunlight.  If it were actually necessary to remove CO2 from the air, nature is excellent at this. Grow lots of crops and trees, let them air dry, then store them underground  and their carbon  will be captured and stored !

Plants and trees use water, C02 and sunlight to make sugars and oxygen (O2). Fossil fuel s are really only stored sun energy. When coal oil and natural gas are burned, what is produced is what went in: Water, CO2 and energy.  Note on planting trees to absorb CO2: Trees don't absorb CO2 when they have no leaves, which can be considerable part of a year.