Relax! Celebrate 400 PPM Of CO2! 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’
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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'
Prominent Scientist Dr. Will Happer Tells Congress: Earth in ‘CO2 Famine’ – Feb. 25, 2009
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.’
‘Temperature drives CO2’
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.
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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’
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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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UN freakout at 400 ppm CO2: World in ‘new danger zone.’ What a difference 1 ppm makes!
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?’
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: 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