TJ, you have got a false premise.
On the environmental / climate-change set of issues, I am not as agnostic as I am on CoVid and vaxx for CoVid.
I believe the less impact we make on then environment, the safer.
Back in the early 1980s when I was given lead in petrol and other emissions problems to deal with by BP, I read a lot, pondered plenty and abandoned my previous guess that lead was unlikely to be a problem due to dilution. I realised it was a great calamity to have ever used it. Like mercury in vaccines = a really stupid idea.
In the process of considering the problems and risks I kept coming up against the argument = there was no evidence of harm. Enraged by the stupidity of that idea I explained that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence aka the precautionary principle. Those 2 terms were not then used and I was arguing from first principles not slogans.
Your less is safer argument is good for things like lead mercury, soot in air, sulphur oxides, benzene, 1 nitro pyrene (from diesels), and other poisons.
But CO2 is not a poison and not a pollutant.
Not only is CO2 not a pollutant, it's the fundamental building block of life. Chlorophyll was invented early in life to turn the vast quantity of CO2 in air into life.
Yes to the simpletons who say CO2 can be used as a poison. But water can be too, yet drinking it remains popular as does skiing, doing laundry, having a bath/shower and nice cups of tea. Too much of lots of things is bad for our health.
How much CO2 in air is too much?
There is a thing called The Tragedy of the Commons.
Like people catching fish, moas, other game, cutting trees for wood etc, too much depletes the resource and famine results.
People are intelligent so resources get managed to avoid tragedies of commons.
But plants are not intelligent.
Plants for hundreds of millions of years stripped CO2 from air. After the food chain the carbonates, coal, hydrocarbons, tars and gases were buried permanently in earth's crust.
Before humans started recycling coal, peat, limestone, oil, methane, the atmospheric CO2 had been stripped from 8000 ppm all the way down to famine level 270 ppm. Starvation for gigatons of plants.
It was only in lush, moist places that plants could proliferate.
Plants need water.
The less CO2 there is, the more water they need to process the little bit of CO2 into their greenery. Hence deserts and design of cacti and other plants balancing little water, not much CO2 but lots of sun.
The false premise you have adopted without thought is Earth Was In Balance, then people messed it up with increasing CO2.
Earth was not in Balance. The CO2 stripping continued. Kilometres of sediment on the ocean floor contains megatons of carbon in various forms.
When the oceanic crust is subducted, some comes back up in volcanoes or leaks back to the surface through sedimentary layers. So there is some recycling. But the overall process is gradual stripping of carbon. Some even ends up in diamond pipes as in South Africa.
The question is what's the best level of CO2?
The Greenhouse Effect climate models have been proven useless. The economic models based on those failed climate models are even more useless.
After 40 years of watching and waiting, sea levels and ocean temperature have not changed. There is blather about the uppermost ocean water temperatures but that's dodgy data at best. Air temperature has not changed either other than 1 degree which was due to end of little ice age. The big predictions were false.
I guess something like 1000ppm is ideal. But maybe 500 ppm would be.
I guess human population crash, technology developments, migration, adaptation, nuclear war and asteroid ocean splash will make current CO2 worries a quaint joke like we look back at silly foibles of bygone eras.
Earth is not in Balance. On balance, more CO2 is good.
Earth does not love us. Snowball Earth is a real risk. The precautionary principle = stop depleting CO2. Get it back up to a safe level. Stupid plants and ecosphere nearly ended life on Earth. The oil industry came along just in time to save us. You're welcome.
Mqurice |
