CO2 hysteria (Bonne Posma, Leon Louw) USofA, South Africa

CO2, THE GREAT DELUSION www.co2deficit.com

Bonne Posma and Leon Louw 08 April 2019 Thankfully, Al Gore, the “science is settled” man, is not a plant. He, and others who want to stop climate change, think they are so important that, after hundreds of millions of years of change, the climate should stay the way it happened by sheer chance on about Al Gore’s 60th birthday is how it should stay forever. That is bad for plants and good for Gore, and the rest of the anti-change anti-CO2 industry.

There has always been climate change, and would always have been, but Gore et al changed that inconvenient truth when they committed humanity to defy all deities by ending climate change and freezing the status quo forever. Climate is doomed to remain for eternity the way it happened to be on Gore’s 60th.

Anyone who prefers what happened before, or what might have been, or thinks it does not matter, has been excommunicated as an anti-social “denialist” heretic.

There is, we are assured, a mercifully simple way to end climate history. All we must do is curtail CO2. From Gore’s birthday until earth suffers the heat death, complex climate determinants will, by the wave of the omnipotent IPCC wand, be replaced by a mono-causal vilified gas, CO2.

All other causes were banished miraculously and conveniently. Since humans generate a tiny proportion of the world’s plant-friendly CO2, we must stop doing so. That, after Gore et al replaced complex nature with simplistic mono-causality, will stop climate change in its tracks.

We produce CO2 to have cheap, reliable and abundant electricity, to run factories and transport systems, to allow animals to pass winds, and termites to release methane, and the like.

Unfortunately, Gore decided to have his 60th millions of years too late. CO2 happened, on that fateful day, to be near its lowest ebb ever. Instead of anguishing about dangerously low CO2, and committing humanity to restoring normal levels, high priests of anti-CO2 blind faith declared Gore’s 60th to be the perfect day.

If Gore were a plant, anti-CO2 fanaticism would deny him the fertiliser that CO2 is for plants.

More CO2 would ensure happier plants on a more verdant planet. But plants have no feelings, so contented catastrophists condemn them to battle suffocation during their short, nasty and brutish lives.

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About 280 million years ago, the earth’s atmospheric CO2 level increased from below 200 ppm (parts per million) to approximately 2,000 ppm, and remained there for 180 million years. It then declined slowly for 80 million years back to 200 ppm, where it remained for 20 million years, until recently. About 15,000 years ago, CO2 levels recovered from a dangerously low 200 ppm to the present concentration of about 400 ppm. Figure 1 shows global CO2 levels and temperatures for 300 million years.

Sequence of time lines on the following pages.

300 million years See Figure 1 on page 3

420,000 years See Figure 2 on page 3

12,000 years See Figure 3 on pages 3 and 4

1,000 years See Figure 4 on page 4

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Figure 1: CO2 and Temperature variances for the past 500 million years.

Figure 2: Vostok, Antarctica Ice Core Data (Robert Ashworth, Nasif Nahle and Hans Schreuder, 2011)

Figure 3: Holocene Temperature Variations for the previous 12,000 years (Rohde, 2018)

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Graph continued from previous illustration on page 3.

Figure 3: Holocene Temperature Variations for the previous 12,000 years (Rohde, 2018)

Figure 4: Hockey Stick Graph (Bitterman, 2013)

Co-incident with the increase in CO2 concentration to 2,000 ppm, reptiles appeared 280 million years ago, and dinosaurs appeared 30 million years thereafter ( starting at the Permian Extinction 252 million years ago). Due to the enormous amount of vegetation made available by the abundance of atmospheric CO2 plant fertilizer, there was enough to feed enormous dinosaurs, some bigger than Gore’s ego, weighing up to 70 tons (titanosaurs). A five ton elephant consumes 10% of its weight per day (500 kg/per day). If that was the weight/food ratio for dinosaurs, a titanosaur would have consumed up to 14 times more vegetation than an elephant, or 7,000 kg daily.

Considering that today’s maximum yield of corn (maize) is 500 bushels (12,500 kg) per hectare after 120 days, one of those large animals would have denuded 672 hectares of cultivated land (6.72 sq km or 2,62 sq miles) every 120 days, which would be unsustainable with today’s CO2 Page 4 of 6

atmospheric concentrationi. The extinction of dinosaurs 50 million years ago coincided with CO2 levels dipping below 1,000 ppm.

Mammals appeared on earth 220 million years ago. Without Gore et al, they survived at least three prolonged ice ages, and eons of global warming. For 170 million years, or 77% of their existence, C02 levels fluctuated between 1,000 ppm and 2,200 ppm, well above the levels generating trendy climate hysteria today. Historic CO2 levels, five times higher than now, did not cause mammalian extinction.

In An Inconvenient Truthii, Al Gore reproduced a tiny sliver of time, 420,000 thousand years (a paltry 0.014% of the time animals have been on earth), and based dire predictions of the earth’s demise on computer simulations informed by that period. None of the alarmist predictions were informed by or consistent with long-term evidence, and none were accurate.

No surprises there, since none relied on experimental research.

A mere 12,000 years since the last ice age, when the Florida home of one of the authors would have been 300 miles (480 km) from the Gulf of Mexico, compared to eight miles (13 km) now, the sea level rose 100 meters (300 ft) and the global temperature increased by about two degrees Celsius (4oF)(Figure 3).

Like Gore, climate celebrity, Michael Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, took another tiny sliver of time from the record (Figure 4), representing a mere 1,000 years, or 0.0003 % of the time since animals appeared. With it, he conjured the notoriously fraudulent “hockey stick” curve. He used the equivalent of a horse’s hair in a pasture to predict earth’s demise unless CO2 concentrations are reduced to below 350 ppm. He was disgraced when the fact he had doctored the graph was exposediii.

The geological record and the history of life on earth shows that the significance of CO2 perturbations is more apparent than real. If radical climate policies really do force CO2 levels down substantially, life on earth may well be endangered, as opposed to enriched, by more CO2. Since CO2 levels are near dangerously low levels, humanity should, if it does anything at all, redress the CO2 deficit rather than aggravate it.

Although we know that current CO2 levels are dangerously low, we do not know how much below 200 ppm would be fatal. Most plants will perish between 50 ppm and 170 ppm, probably nearer the upper limit. The war on CO2 is “playing with fire”iv.

Gore and Mann, with fellow travellers and followers, want you to believe that their fleeting temporal presence is more significant than the balance of life on earth. They arrogantly want random temperatures and CO2 concentrations in their lifetimes to be presumed perfect for ever. They want you to believe that nature got it wrong for 300 million years, and they do not want you to ask how life flourished without their climate protocols, treaties and accords.

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Such arrogance was lampooned in 1903 by Mark Twain in Was the World Made for Man. In response to Alfred Wallace’s Man’s Place in the Universe, which argued that humans were the culmination of creation, Twain ended his essay about the history of man thus: Man has been here for 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

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Works Cited Bitterman, K. (2013, May 5). Hockey Stick Graph. Retrieved March 29, 2019, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph Robert A. Berner and Zavareth Kothavala. (2001). Geocarb III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 Over Phanerozoic Time. Retrieved March 15, 2019, from Geocraft: https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/Geocarb_III-Berner.pdf Robert Ashworth, Nasif Nahle and Hans Schreuder. (2011, May 10). Gore had Cause and Effect Reversed. Retrieved March 18, 2019, from Ice Age Now: https://www.iceagenow.com/Gore_had_Cause_and_Effect_Reversed.htm Rohde, R. A. (2018, October 6). Holocene Temperature Variations. Retrieved March 29, 2019, from Wikipedia : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png Seagrave, W. (2012). Ice Ages. Retrieved March 15, 2019, from History of the Universe: http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/?p=iceage.htm i

Even current modestly rising CO2 levels boost plant growth. Retrieved April 5, 2019. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/grl.50563 ii According to a British court, Gore’s blockbuster movie has at least 9 convenient untruths. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/oct/11/climatechange iii Retrieved April 5. 2019. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graphhas-been-proven-wrong/ iv Laci M. Gerhart and Joy K. Ward. Plant responses to low CO2 of the past. Retrieved April 3, 2019. https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2010.03441.x Tolbert, N. E., Benker, C., Beck E. (1995). The Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide Compensation Points of C3 Plants.

Retrieved April 3, 2019. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/92/24/11230.full.pdf

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