Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People by Spencer Roy

Author:Spencer, Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

This is not meant to imply that the increase in CO2 has no effect. I’m just illustrating how graphs can be manipulated to make a small effect seem very large (or very small). The same trick is often used when plotting global temperatures; a relatively small increase can be made to look very dramatic. Just because we have the technology to monitor a trace gas in the atmosphere and plot its increase on an expanded scale on a graph is not necessarily evidence that something bad is happening. I have exchanged emails several times with someone who has been genuinely distraught over the increase in atmospheric CO2, believing it will make it dangerous for us to breathe, even though indoor air we breathe routinely has two to three times the CO2 content of outdoor air.

Both oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are necessary for life to exist on Earth. Plants are the start of the food chain on land and in the ocean, and photosynthesis requires CO2 in order to occur. Despite the necessity of both carbon dioxide and oxygen for life, there is over 500 times as much oxygen in the atmosphere as there is carbon dioxide! This is an amazing disparity between two gases that are both essential for life. CO2 levels below 200 ppm are considered barely sufficient for modern plants to survive, and pre-industrial levels were not much higher than that, down around 275 ppm. It remains somewhat of a mystery how plants survived the Ice Ages, when CO2 levels were estimated to have been as low as 150 ppm. I have had a plant physiologist tell me that it is almost like plants have been starved from a lack of CO2, and now that we are putting more CO2 back into the atmosphere, life is breathing more freely.

Some skeptics claim that human CO2 emissions can’t be the reason for the atmospheric rise in CO2 because nature emits about 20 to 30 times as much CO2 as humans do. Strictly speaking, this statistic is true. But nature also absorbs 20 to 30 times as much CO2 as we emit. In other words, nature is believed to be in balance in terms of how much CO2 is emitted from the surface (mainly through decaying vegetation) versus how much is absorbed through the surface (mainly through growing vegetation). This is all part of the natural carbon cycle.

Let’s look at it in pictorial form. The very small fraction of our atmosphere that is CO2 has natural exchanges with the surface that are much larger than the human source.

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