This Is Good

An ultraconservative reactionary political position is being called “progressive.”

'The flowering plants evolved to be most efficient when the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 1,000 parts per million. But the percentage had dropped to a mere 200 parts per million. Plants tried to adapt by evolving a new, more efficient way of using the little remaining CO2. The new mechanism, the C4 pathway, appeared in grasses, including corn and wheat, which enabled these plants to expand into the plains. If the carbon dioxide percentage had stayed low — or worse, had decreased further — the entire biosphere would have been endangered.

Fortunately for the plants and the rest of the biosphere depending on them, a wonderful thing happened about 150,000 years ago: a new animal species, Homo sapiens, evolved. This creature was endowed with a huge brain, enabling it to invent a way to help the plants with their CO2 problem. Gigantic amounts of carbon had been deposited deep underground in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. Not only were these reservoirs of carbon locked away in rock, but they were in forms of carbon that the plants could not use.

These wonderful humans, however, worked hard to help the plants. Not only did the humans dig the coal, oil, and natural gas, bringing it to the surface, but they converted these raw materials into the only form of carbon that plants could use: carbon dioxide. Due to the diligent plant-saving efforts of the humans, the CO2 atmospheric percentage is now at nearly 390 parts per million. Were humans to continue in their biosphere-rescuing efforts at the present rate, the CO2 level will be returned to normal in a mere few hundred years.'

Comments

[Geoff Brown]

AGW/gorebull warming is based on poor assumptions. The only hard data in their collection is that humans are emitting more CO2 now than ever before. This is clearly so. But everything else?
It is not clear that, in fact, the globe has warmed in the last 150 years. Records are incomplete at best. Some points have certainly recorded warming but most are in urban heat islands and many of the measuring units are constructed to skew the temperature up.
It is not clear how much the change in atmospheric CO2 is due to human emissions and activities. The increasing human emissions are too small to have raised the atmospheric CO2 as much as measurements seem to show it has risen.
It is not clear that the atmospheric CO2 has risen as much as claimed. The Mauna Loa observations are the usual baseline but I have read (can't cite source) that not all reporting stations show the same changes.
It is not clear that CO2 would have driven any changes that may or may not have happened anyway. A simple R-squared measure of atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures doesn't come in at a very high value.
It is not clear that a slightly warmer world would be unusual or that a slightly warmer world would be less prosperous in any dimension than a slightly cooler world.
It is clear that the AGW gang's favorite temperature gauge has fallen in the last several years as CO2 emissions have risen. Dr. Hansen's usual measure was actually lower at the time of his 20th anniversary speech than it was on the day he first raised the global warming flag in Congress.
It is clear that some glaciers have advanced and others have retreated.
It is clear that the long-term trend in ocean levels has remained constant, not accelerating.
It is clear that every catastrophic global warming model is wrong. They have no predictive value and don't even work if you back up twenty years and ask them what will happen.
It is clear that many of the AGW gang would like to reduce the standard of living for most people on the globe and prevent an improvement in the standard of living for the globe's poorest inhabitants.