Eric, 100% of people thought the stars rotated around the Earth back in the day. Earth was the centre of the universe and people were the centre of creation. Now people see it differently. Same with CO2.
It doesn't matter how many people think something, it's whether they are right or not that matters. Your 97% is not a correct representation of what people think. That figure itself is bung science.
I have published quite a bit of information here in SI and nobody has refuted it [other than the argument "your feet stink" which is of course not an argument]. The nearest was decades ago when an environmentalist [a personal friend, who happens to know the original CO2 measurer and son] corrected me on what I thought about the proportion of CO2 and I revised my thinking on that thanks to his information.
Part of the faulty thinking of environmentalists is that they think that people opposing them are evil-doing ignoramuses who want to destroy the world and are paid by Exxon and BP to do it. In fact, I'm quite the opposite. My normal inclination is to think that if people are polluting then it's almost certainly bad. Back in the early 1980s, my argument was that until something was proven to be safe, we should assume it is not.
In those days, the common very annoying mistake was to claim that there was no evidence that something was harmful. My argument was that there was no evidence at all and that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. My argument is now standard. But it is incorrectly used.
It doesn't mean that everything we do is bad. It means that things that are bad, such as lead, which poisons brains, is almost certainly bad if sprayed into the air for people to breathe. The fact that the harm has not been measured does not mean it is safe. It should be assumed that something that is likely to be harmful actually is.
CO2 is another kettle of fish altogether. CO2 is not harmful. It is the foundation of life and some quantity is absolutely essential. The optimum is assumed to be that which existed immediately people started measuring how much there was in the air. But with a long term point of view, we now know that CO2 levels in the air have varied enormously, and have trended down from 6000 parts per million when the carboniferous plants stripped petatons of carbon dioxide and buried it as coal and when fauna deposited petatons of dead marine life in kilometres of sedimentary material which was subducted under continental crusts to be deposited as oil and gas in vast amounts. Not to mention in limestone such as the Nullabour plain, the Dolomites and White Cliffs of Dover and everywhere.
The Alarmists make the faulty assumption that the optimum amount of CO2 was whatever it was when the first measurements were made. That's not true. Their argument is that everything had adapted to homeopathic amounts of CO2 and so it was a good level. But even if the idea that CO2 is heating Earth up is true, Earth has been in an ice age for millions of years, and the last 10,000 years has been interglacial. So keeping it warm is a good thing. If more CO2 will help keep us warm, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Earth was not in stable heat equilibrium. It was and is unstable. Reglaciation is the great danger, not "runaway" global warming, which has never happened even at 6000 ppm CO2.
There you are, a "paper" published specially for you. Not peer reviewed. You can review it if you like.
Mqurice |
