How much of the air we breathe is carbon dioxide? A typical answer, one writer states he hears, is 20 percent.
The actual figure is four one-hundredths of one percent (or 400 parts per million).
“How can such a small magnitude of CO2 be dooming humanity?” ex-professor Ron Ross, Ph.D., then asks, posing what he says is the “one point that can get people off the global warming obsession train.”
The gas’ atmospheric concentration isn’t readily divulged because, if it were, CO2 couldn’t be a global-warming bugaboo, says Ross. Instead, it’s just as with the number of unarmed black suspects shot by police every year, which the average person believes is in the hundreds or even thousands (actual figure: approximately 18 to 27):
Climate alarmists lend the impression that CO2 constitutes a significant portion of our atmosphere — and avoid disclosing the actual numbers.
They further claim that the gas’ concentration is increasing precipitously; that this is man’s dirty-hands handiwork; and that if we don’t rend world economies as the “remedy,” life as we know it will soon be unknown.
So putting aside the hot air about allegedly heating air, what really constitutes our air? “Seventy-eight percent of the air we breathe is nitrogen, 21 percent is oxygen, 0.9 percent is argon, and 0.1 percent is other gases,” Ross writes. “The other gases include methane (0.00017 percent); nitrous oxide (0.00003 percent); and water vapor, which varies from 0 to 4 percent.”
As for CO2, can such a minuscule proportion of it really imperil man, Ross asks? Moreover, is there truly good reason to believe that increasing levels of the gas doom Earth?
History, and pre-history, tells a different tale. Ross elaborates:
During the Cambrian period 500 million years ago, CO2 constituted over 5,000 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere. Then, 150 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, CO2 was 1,700 parts per million, more than four times what it is now. Life thrived during those periods. How can 400 parts per million be a threat to our existence?
Before humans started burning fossil fuels about 200 years ago, CO2 made up 250 parts per million of our atmosphere. It has been growing at about one part per million per year for the past 150 years. In other words, a very small magnitude is growing at a very slow rate. Is there any reason that rate will accelerate when it hasn’t in a century and a half?
Put differently, when considered geologically, CO2 is at historically low levels. “Great!” some will say. Actually, though, there’s reason to believe this is not great at all.
CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas necessary for life on Earth. In fact, astrobiologist Jack O’Malley-James warned in 2013 that life on our planet would eventually end because of too little CO2, with the gas’ atmospheric concentration dropping so low that plants wouldn’t be able to photosynthesize. (Don’t worry, this wouldn’t happen for another billion years.)
Realize here that carbon dioxide is to plants what oxygen is to man. People have reduced stamina and more trouble breathing at higher altitudes because there’s less O2 in the air. Similarly, botanists pump CO2 into their greenhouses because it facilitates plant activity (growth).
Related to this, the dinosaur age’s high CO2 levels were a major reason the Earth was then blanketed with lush foliage. Crop yields are greater when the gas’ concentration increases, and today our planet is greener than it was 20 years ago, likely partially due to CO2’s rise.
Quoting the father of toxicology, Paracelsus, Ross writes, “The dose makes the poison.” In other words, since everything is either safe or toxic at the right levels, it follows that there could conceivably be too little or too much CO2. But it’s clear there’s no threat of our overdosing on it.
Ross’s closing point is that if people knew the Truth — that, again, geologically speaking, our CO2 levels are vanishingly low — many would likely demand explanations from the warming alarmists. In the least, the latter’s claims would meet with far more skepticism.
Another lightbulb-in-the-head-lighting argument relates to the allegedly rising mercury. Simply ask: What’s the ideal average temperature for the Earth?
People won’t have an answer. Yet, then, how can they possibly know if the given climate change, whether naturally- or humanity-induced, is good or bad? For they can’t then know if the given change is bringing us closer to, or moving us farther from, that ideal temperature.
This argument is ideal itself because the question is unanswerable. There is no specific optimum temperature; only a range in which it must remain for life as we know it to exist. At higher temperatures, tropical life-forms proliferate more; at lower temperatures, Arctic ones do.
Yet note: The tropics boast 10 times as many species as does the Arctic because warmth breeds life. And “cold weather is responsible, directly or indirectly, for 17 times as many deaths as hot weather,” as even The New York Times, citing a Lancet study, had to admit in 2017.
Anyway, this pair of questions, relating to carbon dioxide and changing temperatures, constitutes a Tyson Fury-level one-two punch that can really make people think, become climate wise — and learn to stop worrying and love CO2.
