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CO2 Nears 400 ppm – Relax! It’s Not Global Warming ‘End Times’ — But Only A ‘Big Yawn’ — Climate Depot Special Report

Climate Depot Special Report

[Note: The below is a longer and updated version of the article by Marc Morano that appeared on May 14, 2013 in Human Events.]

The level of carbon dioxide, a trace essential gas in the atmosphere that humans exhale from our mouths, has come very close to reaching the “symbolic” 400 parts per million (ppm) threshold in the atmosphere. Former Vice President Al Gore declared the 400 ppm level “A sad milestone. A call to action.”  New York times reporter Justin Gillis compared trace amounts of CO2 to “a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom” and warned that rising CO2 means “the fate of the earth hangs in the balance.” The New Yorker Magazine declared “Everything we use that emits carbon dioxide needs to be replaced with something that doesn’t.”  And a UK Guardian editorial declared “Swift political action can avert a carbon dioxide crisis.”

But despite the man-made global warming fear movement’s clarion call of alarm, many scientists are dismissing the 400ppm level of carbon dioxide as a non-event. Scientists point out that there are literally hundreds of factors that govern Earth’s climate and temperature – not just CO2. Renowned climatologists have declared that a doubling or even tripling of CO2 would not have major impacts on the Earth’s climate or temperature.

Scientists also note that geologically speaking, the Earth is currently in a “CO2 famine” and that the geologic record reveals that ice ages have occurred when CO2 was at 2000 ppm to as high as 8000ppm. In addition, peer-reviewed studies have documented that there have been temperatures similar to the present day on Earth when carbon dioxide was up to twenty times higher than today’s levels. And, a peer-reviewed study this year found that the present day carbon dioxide level of 400 ppm was exceeded — without any human influence — 12,750 years ago when CO2 may have reached up to 425 ppm.

Princeton U. Physicist Dr. William Happer and NASA Moonwalker & Geologist Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt wrote on May 8, 2013 in the Wall Street Journal:  “Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”

“The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather,” Happer and Schmidt wrote.

Princeton’s Dr. Happer, who has authored 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, explained in Senate testimony in 2009 that the Earth is currently in a ‘CO2 ‘famine.’ Happer explained to Congress:  ”Warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind…’CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning,” Happer added. 

“Many people don’t realize that over geological time, we’re really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) – 280 (parts per million – ppm) – that’s unheard of. Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it’s been quite higher than that,” Happer told the Senate Committee. “Earth was just fine in those times,” Happer added. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started,” Happer explained. Flashback 2009: Prominent Scientist Tells Congress: Earth in ‘CO2 Famine’

Displaying CO2 Carbon Dioxide cha...

The claim by global warming activists and scientists that CO2 is the global temperature “control knob” has been challenged in the peer-reviewed literature and the Earth’s geologic history.

[See: Peer-Reviewed Study finds ‘ancient’ Earth’s climate similar to present day — despite CO2 levels 5 to over 20 times higher than today! — Geologists reconstructed Earth’s climate belts between 460 and 445 million years ago and found ‘ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present’ — Also included ‘a brief, intense glaciation’ &

Ice Age At 2000+ PPM CO2: ‘Earth experienced an ice age 450 million years ago, with CO2 somewhere between 2000 and 8000 ppm’ &

New paper (March 2013) finds CO2 spiked to levels higher than the present during termination of last ice age — Paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews — Study ‘reconstructs CO2 levels during the termination of the last ice age and finds CO2 spiked to levels near or even exceeding those of the present, obviously without any human influence. According to the authors, ‘The record clearly demonstrates that [CO2 levels were] significantly higher than usually reported for the Last [Glacial] Termination,’ with levels of up to ~425 ppm about 12,750 years ago, which exceeds the present CO2 concentration of 395 ppm’ ]

‘You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide’

Renowned atmospheric scientist Dr. Reid Bryson, (who died in 2008), explained in 2007: “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.” Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ, agreed with Bryson. “Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapor and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will,” Duffy wrote.

Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, not just CO2.

UK Professor Emeritus of Biogeography Philip Stott of the University of London explains the crux of the entire global warming debate and rebuts the notion that CO2 is the main climate driver.

“As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets,” Stott wrote in 2008. It is not simply, the sun or CO2 when looking at global temperatures, it is the Sun, volcanoes, tilt of the Earth’s axis, water vapor, methane, clouds, ocean cycles, plate tectonics, albedo, atmospheric dust, Atmospheric Circulation, cosmic rays, particulates like Carbon Soot, forests and land use, etc. Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, not just CO2.

Even the climate activists at RealClimate.org let this point slip out in a September 20, 2008 article. “The actual temperature rise is an emergent property resulting from interactions among hundreds of factors,”RealClimate.org conceded.

Former Harvard University Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl dismissed any significance to 400ppm of CO2 in an essay on May 12, 2013 titled “Why we should work hard to raise the CO2 concentration”: “CO2 is primarily plant food while its other implications for Nature are negligible in comparison. Humanitarian orgs should work hard to help mankind to increase the CO2 concentration,” Motl wrote. “’CO2 is the key compound that plants need to grow – and, indirectly, that every organism needs to get the food at the end,” he added.

Other analyses have shown CO2 loses any ‘warming’ impact as the levels increase. See: The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas becomes ever more marginal with greater concentration – ’The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas diminishes logarithmically with increasing concentration and from the current level of ~390 ppmv, (parts per million by volume). Accordingly only ~5% of the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas remains beyond the current level’

In February 2013, global warming activists were stunned by the retreat of one of their former UN scientists. Top Swedish Climate Scientist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, formerly of the UN IPCC, declared CO2”s “heating effect is logarithmic: the higher the concentration is, the smaller the effect of a further increase.”  Bengtsson noted that global warming would not even be noticeable without modern instruments. “The warming we have had last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all’ — Award-Winning Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, formerly of UN IPCC: ‘We Are Creating Great Anxiety Without It Being Justified…there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic…The warming we have had the last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have had meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

In addition, New Zealand Climate Scientist Chris de Freitas revealed on May 1, 2009 that “warming and CO2 are not well correlated.” de Freitas added, “the effect of CO2 on global temperature is already close to its maximum. Adding more has an ever decreasing effect.” Dr. Chris de Freitas: ‘Current warm phase…is not unprecedented’ — ‘From the results of research to date, it appears the influence of increasing CO2 on global warming is almost indiscernible. Future warming could occur, but there is no evidence to suggest it will amount to much’

Australian Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer wrote on August 8, 2009: “At present, the Earth’s atmosphere is starved of CO2.” Plimer, who authored the skeptical book Heaven and Earth, added, “On all time scales, there is no correlation between temps and CO2. If there is no correlation, then there can be no causation.”

Professor Dr. Doug L. Hoffman, mathematician, computer programmer and engineer, wrote on August 24, 2009: “There have been ice ages when the levels of Co2 in Earth’s atmosphere have been many times higher than today’s.” Hoffman, who worked on environmental models and conducted research in molecular dynamics, co-authored the 2009 book, The Resilient Earth.

Other studies have shown carbon dioxide does not control the Earth’s temperature, but it is actually the reverse. See: New Paper: Danish Physicist Dr. Henrik Svensmark’s Cosmic Jackpot: ‘Svensmark stands the currently popular CO2 story on its head…Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around’ — ‘Some geoscientists want to blame the drastic alternations of hot and icy conditions during the past 500 million years on increases and decreases in carbon dioxide, which they explain in intricate ways. For Svensmark, the changes driven by the stars govern the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around…’The UK Royal Astronomical Society in London publishes Svensmark’s latest paper’

Many skeptical scientists point out that temperature leads CO2 in the ice core data. See:  ‘The ice core data clearly reveal temperature increases generally precede increasing CO2 by several hundred to a few thousand years’

 ‘Temperature drives CO2’

Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, former chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania,  spoke out in 2007 against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Gore and others. Giegengack noted “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.” (LINK) “[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa,” Giegengack explained. “It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2,” he added. (LINK) “The driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Al Gore claims, both in his film and in that book. It’s the temperature that, through those 650,000 years, controlled the CO2; not the CO2 that controlled the temperature,” he added. (LINK)

Update: In 2014, Giegengack told Climate Depot: “The Earth has experienced very few periods when CO2 was lower than it is today.”

Meteorologist Tom Wysmuller: ‘The Recent Temperature and CO2 Disconnect’ — Even going back ten centuries, there have been total disconnects between temperature and the CO2 impact, or lack thereof.  From 1000AD to 1800, over a period of relatively stable CO2 values that bounced around the 280ppm level, temperatures plummeted in the Little Ice Age (LIA) and then rebounded over a century later.  CO2 values neither led nor followed the temperature declines and recoveries…CO2 seems to have had little impact in EITHER direction on the observed temperatures over that 10k year period…If CO2 is to be considered a major driver of temperatures, it is doing a counterintuitive dance around the numbers.’

Other scientists agree:

“The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round…A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact,” Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher.

“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” – Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

“Based on the laws of physics, the effect on temperature of man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels is minuscule and indiscernible from the natural variability caused in large part by changes in solar energy output.” – Atmospheric Scientist Robert L. Scotto, who has more than 30 years air quality consulting experience, served as a manager for an EPA Superfund contract and is co-founder of Minnich and Scotto, Inc., a full-service air quality consulting firm. He also is a past member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Scotto, a meteorologist who has authored or co-authored numerous technical publications and reports.

“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate…The planet’s climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” — Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

For more see: SPECIAL REPORT: More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Challenge UN IPCC & Gore

‘More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was real, global, & warmer than the present’ – when CO2 was presumably lower. — Climate Depot’s Medieval Warm Period Round Up of Studies

Climatologists: ‘400pm is cause for celebration’

Climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels and  Chip Knappenberger declared 400 ppm of CO2 was cause for ‘celebration.” “In some circles, this announcement has been met with consternation and gnashing of teeth. The proper reaction is celebration,” Michaels and Knappenberger wrote on May 14, 2013.

“Fossil fuel energy supplies about 80% of the world’s energy production—a value which has been pretty much constant for the past 40 years. During that time, the global population increased by 75%, and global energy use doubled. Global per capita energy use increased, while global energy use per $1000 GDP declined.  We are using more energy, but we are using it more efficiently. In the developed world, life expectancy has doubled since the dawn of the fossil fuel era,” they wrote.

“As we continually document (see here for our latest post), more and more science is suggesting that the rate (and thus magnitude at any point in time) of CO2-induced climate change is not as great as commonly portrayed. The lower the rate of change, the lower the resulting impact. If the rate is low enough, carbon dioxide emissions confer a net benefit. We’d like to remind readers that “it’s not the heat, it’s the sensitivity,” when it comes to carbon dioxide, and the sensitivity appears to have been overestimated,” Michaels and Knappenberger added.

“400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should remind us of our continuing success at expanding the global supply of energy to meet a growing demand. That  success which ultimately leads to an improvement of the global standard of living and a reduction in vulnerability to the vagaries of weather and climate. 400pm is cause for celebration. ‘A world lit only by fire’ is not,” they concluded.

Update – May 28, 2013: Major 30% reduction in modelers estimates of Climate Sensitivity (Skeptics were right) — ‘Effectively the power of CO2 to warm just got 30% less, according to a team of researchers, many of whom have in the past have published more alarming papers.  Remember “there is no debate” and “global warming is a fact” a lot “like gravity”. (And that gravitational constant g could be revised by a third soon, right?)’

Warmists claim: Last time CO2 was this high, the world was underwater? Reality: NO, actually — ‘Ice sheets DIDN’T melt 3 million years B.C., say scientists’ — ‘It is the kind of study that changes how people think about our past climate and what our future holds’

World’s biggest ice sheets likely more stable than previously believed‘Until now, many research groups have studied this shoreline and concluded that during a warm period three million years ago, the Greenland, West Antarctic and a fraction of East Antarctic ice sheets collapsed, raising the sea level at least 35 metres. But the new findings by Rowley and his team suggest that these ice sheets, particularly the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (the world’s largest), were probably more stable’

No Correlation Between Global Sea Ice Area And CO2: ‘Since Earth passed Hansen’s tipping point of 350 ppm CO2, there has been no trend in global sea ice area. There is more sea ice for the date than when CO2 was 350 ppm’

Northern Hemisphere Snow Extent Up Sharply Since CO2 Hit 350 PPM — ‘Rutgers University Climate Lab :: Global Snow Lab November to April snow extent was the highest on record this year, and has increased sharply since CO2 hit Hansen’s global warming tipping point of 350 PPM. There is no long term trend, and no indication that snowfall correlates with CO2 in any way’

The website Real Science celebrated rising CO2 levels, claiming in a May 11, 2013 article that “Humans Thrive In Increasing CO2.” Global warming activists ‘are busy claiming that 400 PPM CO2 will destroy the human race. The numbers indicate something completely different,” Real Science explained with the below chart.

ScreenHunter_125 May. 11 08.19

 

Related Links:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been

The tropical Arctic

A Smithsonian Institution project has tried to reconstruct temperatures for the Phanerozoic Eon, or roughly the last half a billion years. Preliminary results released in 2019 showed warm temperatures dominating most of that time, with global temperatures repeatedly rising above 80°F and even 90°F—much too warm for ice sheets or perennial sea ice. About 250 million years ago, around the equator of the supercontinent Pangea, it was even too hot for peat swamps!

A graph showing Earth's surface temperature over the past half a billion years

Preliminary results from a Smithsonian Institution project led by Scott Wing and Brian Huber, showing Earth’s average surface temperature over the past 500 million years.  For most of the time, global temperatures appear to have been too warm (red portions of line) for persistent polar ice caps. The most recent 50 million years are an exception. Image adapted from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Geologists and paleontologists have found that, in the last 100 million years, global temperatures have peaked twice. One spike was the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse roughly 92 million years ago, about 25 million years before Earth’s last dinosaurs went extinct. Widespread volcanic activity may have boosted atmospheric carbon dioxide. Temperatures were so high that champsosaurs (crocodile-like reptiles) lived as far north as the Canadian Arctic, and warm-temperature forests thrived near the South Pole.

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Bloomberg News features Climate Depot’s Morano: ‘The Earth has had many-times-higher levels of CO2 in the past. Americans should welcome the 400 ppm threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy, and this means that global-warming fearmongers are going to be proven wrong’

Climate Depot Round Up: ‘The great warmist retreat has officially begun. The mainstream media cannot maintain the official man-made global warming narrative any longer’

UK Telegraph: ‘Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?’ — Global temp lull ‘raises the possibility that Carbon dioxide may be less potent than has been thought in heating the planet’

New Report: ‘Extreme Weather Report 2012′: ‘Latest peer-reviewed studies, data & analyses undermine claims that current weather is ‘unprecedented’ or a ‘new normal’ — Climate Depot’s New 35-Page Report: ‘Current weather is neither historically unprecedented, nor unusual’ — ‘Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases’ — Presented at UN Climate Conference in Doha, Qatar on Dec. 6, 2012

Unfalsifiable Climate Astrology: More Than 30 Contradictory Pairs Of Peer-Reviewed Papers: ‘Boreal forest fires may increase…Boreal forest fires may continue decreasing’ — ‘Earth’s rotation to slow down…Earth’s rotation to speed up…Great Lakes less snow…Great Lakes more snow…Malaria may increase…Malaria may continue decreasing…San Francisco less foggy…San Francisco more foggy…Winters maybe warmer…Winters maybe colder’

Oops. Warmists wrong again! LA Times: Carbon dioxide in atmosphere did not break 400 ppm at Hawaii site: ‘Carbon dioxide measurements in the Earth’s atmosphere did not break the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million at a Hawaiian observatory last week, according to a revised reading from the nation’s climate observers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revised its May 9 reading at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, saying it remained fractions of a point below the level of 400 ppm, at 399.89′

Fmr. Harvard U. Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: ‘Why we should work hard to raise the CO2 concentration’: ‘CO2 is primarily plant food while its other implications for Nature are negligible in comparison. Humanitarian orgs should work hard to help mankind to increase the CO2 concentration’ — ‘CO2 is the key compound that plants need to grow – and, indirectly, that every organism needs to get the food at the end. See, for example, the hysterical reactions by Climate Science Watchthe lousy and badly biased astronomer Phil Plaitanti-Fox-News attack dog organization Media Matters for America, and many others. Many of them seem to literally say that it’s been disproven that plants need CO2 to grow; I kid you not’

New Yorker: ‘Everything we use that emits carbon dioxide needs to be replaced with something that doesn’t’. — ‘Does that include our lungs?!”

Bloomberg News features Climate Depot’s Morano: ‘The Earth has had many-times-higher levels of CO2 in the past. Americans should welcome the 400 ppm threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy, and this means that global-warming fearmongers are going to be proven wrong’

Peer-Reviewed Study finds ‘ancient’ Earth’s climate similar to present day — despite CO2 levels 5 to over 20 times higher than today! — Geologists reconstructed Earth’s climate belts between 460 and 445 million years ago and found ‘ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present’ — Also included ‘a brief, intense glaciation’

Ice Age At 2000+ PPM CO2: ‘Earth experienced an ice age 450 million years ago, with CO2 somewhere between 2000 and 8000 ppm’

Prominent Scientist Dr. Will Happer Tells Congress: Earth in ‘CO2 Famine’ – Feb. 25, 2009

Prominent Princeton Scientist Dr. Happer Testifies to Congress: ‘Warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind’ — ‘CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning’

New Paper: Danish Physicist Dr. Henrik Svensmark’s Cosmic Jackpot: ‘Svensmark stands the currently popular CO2 story on its head…Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around’ — ‘Some geoscientists want to blame the drastic alternations of hot and icy conditions during the past 500 million years on increases and decreases in carbon dioxide, which they explain in intricate ways. For Svensmark, the changes driven by the stars govern the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around…’The UK Royal Astronomical Society in London publishes Svensmark’s latest paper’

Flashback: Climate Depot Fact Sheet on CO2: Rising CO2 a Boon for Biosphere – Earth in ‘CO2 Famine’

Meteorologist Tom Wysmuller: ‘The Recent Temperature and CO2 Disconnect’ — Even going back ten centuries, there have been total disconnects between temperature and the CO2 impact, or lack thereof.  From 1000AD to 1800, over a period of relatively stable CO2 values that bounced around the 280ppm level, temperatures plummeted in the Little Ice Age (LIA) and then rebounded over a century later.  CO2 values neither led nor followed the temperature declines and recoveries…CO2 seems to have had little impact in EITHER direction on the observed temperatures over that 10k year period…If CO2 is to be considered a major driver of temperatures, it is doing a counterintuitive dance around the numbers.’

Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack, the chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania,  spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Gore and others. Giegengack does not even consider global warming among the top ten environmental problems.

“In terms of [global warming’s] capacity to cause the human species harm, I don’t think it makes it into the top 10,” Giegengack said in an interview in the May/June 2007 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette. (LINK) Giegengack also noted “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.” (LINK) “[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa,” Giegengack explained. “It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2,” he added. (LINK) “The driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Al Gore claims, both in his film and in that book. It’s the temperature that, through those 650,000 years, controlled the CO2; not the CO2 that controlled the temperature,” he added. (LINK)

“Certain ‘feedback loops’ naturally control the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A warmer temperature drives gases out of solution in the ocean and releases them,” he continued. “[Today, humans] are putting 6.5 billion tons of fossil-fuel carbon into the atmosphere, and only 3.5 billion is staying there, so 3 billion tons is going somewhere else. In the past, when the Earth’s climate rose, CO2 came out of the ocean, the soils, and the permafrost. Today as temperatures rise, excess CO2 is instead going into those and other reservoirs. This reversed flux is very important. Because of this, if we reduced the rate at which we put carbon into the atmosphere, it won’t reduce the concentration in the atmosphere; CO2 is just going to come back out of these reservoirs … If we were to stop manufacturing CO2 tomorrow, we wouldn’t see the effects of that for generations,” Giegengack said.

NASA Moonwalker Harrison H. Schmitt & Prof. William Happer in WSJ: ‘Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case’

The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas becomes ever more marginal with greater concentration – ’The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas diminishes logarithmically with increasing concentration and from the current level of ~390 ppmv, (parts per million by volume). Accordingly only ~5% of the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas remains beyond the current level’

Warmists Claim: ‘Carbon dioxide and global warming: More is NOT better’ – ‘Then there’s the problem of rate. Sure, CO2 levels were higher in the past. But it’s not just the amount the counts, it’s how quickly it rose to that amount. Solid research done over the past few years has shown that the current rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is entirely unprecedented over at least the past 11,000 years (and almost certainly much farther back than that). There were times in the past when the amount was higher, but it took millennia to reach those levels. We’re about to blow through the record like a rocket, and we’ve done it in a mere century.’

Rebuttal: Princeton physicist Dr. William Happer responds to alleged ‘rapid change’ argument:

Happer: ‘The argument that plants and animals cannot adapt to rapid change is largely baloney. There are enormous changes in temperature from summer to winter, in humidity from wet seasons to dry season, from very alkaline, warm ocean surface water in the tropics to cold, much less alkaline deep waters, to nearly pH neutral waters off landmasses bordering the arctic. As I have measured many times, simply walking out of a Princeton lecture hall to the open air, can change the CO2 concentration from 1200 ppm in the hall to 450 ppm outside. The same transit commonly goes with a temperature change of 10 C or more.  Greenhouse operators change CO2 concentrations from ambient, say 400 ppm, to 2000 ppm in 15 minutes — with absolutely no ill effects to the plants. The CO2 concentrations in a corn field can change from under 300 ppm or less at noon to 600 ppm or more at midnight, depending on wind conditions.

Alas, rational arguments with committed warmists help no more than economic arguments used to work with committed Soviet Marxists. They used to cite hundreds of peer reviewed papers to prove how well socialism worked and how it would soon bury outmoded capitalism. One can easily find similar examples of self-deception by right-wing apparatchiks. So this seems to be a bug in whatever program controls the human mind.  Madison, Hamilton and Jay clearly understood the problem, self interest, which they assumed would always trump reason, honor, decency, etc.

In writing the US Constitution, they tried to work around this lamentable flaw of the human mind, which is easy to ignore, or to rationalize as a virtue.

[End Dr. Happer response]

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More Links: 

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https://twitter.com/DawnTJ90/status/1355244691084750850

UN freakout at 400 ppm CO2: World in ‘new danger zone.’ What a difference 1 ppm makes!

’Level of carbon dioxide in air passes feared milestone’: ‘It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster’

Reaction to Climate Depot’s 400ppm of CO2: ‘The Happy Green Planet, Why Has Global Warming Stopped?’ ‘At the end of its distorted and deliberately alarmist article, Bloomberg cites Marc Morano, former spokesman for GOP Senator James Inhofe and the executive editor of Climate Depot, saying the earth has had much higher CO2 levels in the past, and ‘Americans should welcome the 400 parts-per-million threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy’. Happy Green Planet, as the biosphere grows faster than previous – but not happy for the Global Warming doomsters and fearmongers who started wrong, and are being proven wrong by the science they claim to respect.

Warmist Media Matters Upset at media for quoting Climate Depot: Climate Change, ‘Happy Plants,’ And False Balance – ‘Bloomberg News Gives Equal Weight To Climate Misinformer And Scientists’ – ‘Marc Morano is not a scientist and has no scientific education…[he] has compared climate science to the Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, and medieval witchcraft. Moreover, his argument is laughable: by focusing on how carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth in a controlled environment, he ignores that our huge emissions of it and other greenhouse gases are warming up the planet, thereby increasing the risk of extreme rainfall and drought to the detriment of agriculture…So why is Bloomberg News not only featuring Morano, but giving his discredited argument equal weight to the extensive evidence presented by scientists?’

Hmm: As CO2 hits its highest level since 1958, Nenana Ice Classic threatens one of its latest breakup dates since 1907

CO2 increases of 80ppm to 100ppm are normal: ‘While CO2 has increased by 85 ppm from when measurements began  in 1958 and are estimated to have risen by 120 ppm since 1750, we should also realize that increases of 80 ppm to 100 pm occurred during the last 3 glaciations without humans burning fossil fuels. ‘Air trapped in bubbles in polar ice cores constitutes an archive for the reconstruction of the global carbon cycle and the relation between greenhouse gases and climate in the past. High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations. Despite strongly decreasing temperatures, high carbon dioxide concentrations can be sustained for thousands of years during glaciations; the size of this phase lag is probably connected to the duration of the preceding warm period, which controls the change in land ice coverage and the buildup of the terrestrial biosphere.’

JunkScience.com: NOAA Debunks 400 ppm CO2 Panic: Last time CO2 at 400 ppm Earth was ‘much warmer than today’ and sea-level was 10-20 meters higher: ‘So it doesn’t sound like CO2 is too has much to do with temperature or sea-level. Amid 400 ppm CO2 panic, AZStar Net reports: And to see what the future is, scientists look to the past. The last time the worldwide carbon level probably hit 400 ppm was about 2 million years ago’

Observer editorial: ‘Increasingly erratic violent storms look destined to blight our planet…civilization rests on the happy fact that since the last ice age, the planet’s climate has been cool and stable’

Observer editorial: Climate change: ‘Swift political action can avert a carbon dioxide crisis’

Pride of Stupidity: NYTimes puts ridiculous 400 ppm CO2 headline on front page, above fold

JunkScience.com: Stupidest 400 ppm CO2 headline — ‘World Hits Dreaded CO2 Saturation Level’ — No, the 24-hour average at Mauna Loa was measured at 400 ppm for the first time. If that the atmosphere was “saturated” with CO2 at 400 ppm, then global warming alarmism would be over.

UPI gets 400 ppm CO2 headline right: ‘Carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere top symbolic level’ — If this non-event had to be reported, the UPI got it right

NY Times warmist Justis Gillis compares trace amounts of CO2 to ‘a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom’

JunkScience.com: Mauna Loa Manipulation? Is the 400 ppm CO2 reading confounded by volcanic emissions? We have the graphs you decide’

New Yorker: ‘Everything we use that emits carbon dioxide needs to be replaced with something that doesn’t’. — ‘Does that include our lungs?!”

Small Sampling of Low CO2 extreme weather events:  

Round up of low CO2 ‘extreme weather’: 1954 Shock News: Multiple Low CO2 Hurricanes Targeted New England

1969: Low CO2 Hurricane Killed 1,000 People

1957: 500 Killed By Low CO2 Hurricane

1900 Shock News: 86% Of Swiss Glaciers Retreating – With CO2 Below 300 PPM

1880: Low CO2 Tornado Killed Dozens

1896 Shock News: Almost 500 Killed During May Tornado Outbreak

1921 Shock News: 100 People Killed In San Antonio Flood

Shock News: New York Had Numerous Major Hurricanes Below 350 PPM

May 1951 Shock News: Low CO2 Tornado Destroyed 25 Villages – Killed 500 People

1969: Low CO2 Hurricane Killed 1,000 People

1957: 500 Killed By Low CO2 Hurricane

 

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