Why Net Zero CO2 is Social Suicide
Greta and her handlers are upset that political leaders followed advice from epidemiologists and imposed lockdowns against Covid, but not against climate change. Commenters at Not a Lot of People Know That exposed Greta’s ignorance for championing Net Zero policies to reduce atmospheric CO2. One problem is the impracticality of removing CO2 to put into storage. Broadlands noted:
NET stands for Negative Emission Technology. That means industrial removal and geological burial of billions of tons of CO2 under pressure. The irony is the fact that they cannot fit a lot into those geological locations…not even one part-per-million. Greta’s puppeteers don’t even realize that themselves. Certainly not Mr. Biden’s experts as they tool up to spend trillions.
Even more dangerous is activists failing to recognize we are presently suffering from a dearth of CO2, not a surplus Pardonmeforbreathing drew the implications from the above graph (excerpted):
If you look at the Surface Temperature vs Atmospheric CO2 Concentration in the chart you will see something more concerning AND REAL than the over hyped COVID and Climate Change put together. This is data is not new and shows the problem with the Carbon Cycle is caused by a linear decrease in atmospheric CO2 for the last 160 million years. Far from being too much CO2 which is hyped by the priests of climatism, there is way too little. Reach160ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and photosynthesis is compromised. We were only 20ppm away from it during the first part of the current Ice Age. Us driving our SUVs to the supermarket inadvertently has temporarily halted the decline so mankind deserves a big pat on the back!
Greta and her fellow lemmings racing to the cliff edge who pull her strings want to spend BILLIONS and BILLIONS getting us to a real extinction event even quicker! .
Background from William Happer (2019)
From Happer’s Statement: CO₂ will be a major benefit to the Earth Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Figure 1. The ratio, RCO2, of past atmospheric CO2 concentrations to average values (about 300 ppm) of the past few million years, This particular proxy record comes from analyzing the fraction of the rare stable isotope 13C to the dominant isotope 12C in carbonate sediments and paleosols. Other proxies give qualitatively similar results.
Fig. 1 summarizes the most important theme of this discussion. It is not true that releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere is a dangerous, unprecedented experiment. The Earth has already “experimented” with much higher CO2 levels than we have today or that can be produced by the combustion of all economically recoverable fossil fuels.
More CO2 in the atmosphere will be good for life on planet earth. Few realize that the world has been in a CO2 famine for millions of years — a long time for us, but a passing moment in geological history. Over the past 550 million years since the Cambrian, when abundant fossils first appeared in the sedimentary record, CO2 levels have averaged many thousands of parts per million (ppm), not today’s few hundred ppm, which is not that far above the minimum level, around 150 ppm, when many plants die of CO2 starvation.
Summary
The Earth is in no danger from increasing levels of CO2. More CO2 will be a major benefit to the biosphere and to humanity. Some of the reasons are:
- As shown in Fig. 1, much higher CO2 levels than today’s prevailed over most last 550 million years of higher life forms on Earth. Geological history shows that the biosphere does better with more CO2.
- As shown in Fig. 13 and Fig. 14, observations over the past two decades show that the warming predicted by climate models has been greatly exaggerated. The temperature increase for doubling CO2 levels appears to be close to the feedback-free doubling sensitivity of S =1 K, and much less than the “most likely” value S = 3 K promoted by the IPCC and assumed in most climate models.
- As shown in Fig. 12, if CO2 emissions continue at levels comparable to those today, centuries will be needed for the added CO2 to warm the Earth’s surface by 2 K, generally considered to be a safe and even beneficial amount.
- Over the past tens of millions of years, the Earth has been in a CO2 famine with respect to the optimal levels for plants, the levels that have prevailed over most of the geological history of land plants. There was probably CO2 starvation of some plants during the coldest periods of recent ice ages. As shown in Fig. 15–17, more atmospheric CO2 will substantially increase plant growth rates and drought resistance.
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