Isramart : Man-made CO2 has minimal effect on climate change, claim global-warming skeptics

Isramart news:
If the man-made-climate-change true-believers are correct, humans thoughtlessly contaminate the earth’s atmosphere each time they exhale.

Why? Because with each breath, humans expel a mouthful of carbon dioxide (CO2), the so-called bad-guy atmospheric gas blamed by environmental guru Al Gore and other climate-change Casandras for increasing global temperatures. (For the record, recent global surface temperatures have been going down, even as CO2 levels have gone up.)

So far, none of the global warmists who jetted into Copenhagen last week to attend the UN’s IPCC climate-change conclave has gone so far as to suggest that their fellow homo sapiens should breathe more sparingly lest the earth turn into a sauna and the polar caps melt.

But for years, government-funded scientists and their legion of “Green” supporters, aided by willing media mouthpieces, have excoriated industrialized countries for polluting the earth’s atmosphere with a noxious blanket of CO2, thereby creating a mercury-rising “greenhouse effect” that, they claim, will unleash a horror of cataclysmic weather events across the globe.

But does the oft-maligned CO2 deserve all the criticism? Is it truly the nasty culprit behind impending climate chaos? Or is it merely the fall-guy – a convenient climate-change patsy forced to shoulder the blame, while the sun, cosmic galactic rays, ocean currents, volcanoes and other climate influencers get a free pass?

These are not unimportant questions. A growing body of climate experts believes it is disingenuous and, frankly, unscientific to blame CO2 – a minuscule constituent of the planet’s atmosphere – for the small increase in average global surface temperatures, roughly 1.33 degrees, that has occurred during the last century.

Here are a few CO2 facts, from Geocraft.com, that have either been swept aside or simply escaped the eyes of mainstream news outlets – those ever-vigilant guardians of the planet – whose job is to inform the public about such weighty matters, but who seem more interested in boosting readership and TV ratings by deluging audiences with a never-ending torrent of climate-change scare stories.

Fact 1: At 385 parts per million (ppm), CO2 is a minor constituent of earth's atmosphere – less than 4/100 of 1 percent of all gases present. Compared to earlier geologic times, earth's current atmosphere is CO2-impoverished.

Fact 2: CO2 is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. Plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen as a waste product. Humans and animals breathe oxygen and emit CO2 as a waste product.

Fact 3: Carbon dioxide is a nutrient, not a pollutant, and all life – plants and animals alike – benefit from more of it. All life on earth is carbon-based and CO2 is an essential ingredient. When plant-growers want to stimulate plant growth, they introduce more carbon dioxide.

Fact 4: CO2 emissions do not stay in the atmosphere. They are continually recycled by terrestrial plant life and earth's oceans – the watery repository for most terrestrial carbon dioxide.

Fact 5: Water vapor is by far the most abundant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95 percent of Earth's greenhouse effect, and man’s contribution to it is insignificant. Anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 contributions are responsible for only about 0.117 percent (see accompanying graph) of Earth's greenhouse effect. Using a real-world comparison, 0.117 percent of a football field would equal just over 4 inches.

Fact 6: When other anthropogenic greenhouse gases – methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and trace elements such as CFCs – are added to the above CO2 figure (.117 percent), the total human contribution to greenhouse gases is .28 percent.

Those numbers are very telling, yet conspicuously absent from the spate of news stories over recent years predicting a climate meltdown. Quite simply, the volume of CO2 produced by humans is tiny compared to the percentage of water vapor, the big kahuna of greenhouse gases.

As the Geocraft article mentions:

“Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small – perhaps undetectable – effect on global climate.”

Even if CO2 levels were to double or triple, no harm would come to the planet. Why? Because, contrary to the nonstop fright-mongering by the IPCC, Green lobby and researchers in search of grant money, CO2 is neither a pollutant nor enemy of mankind. It is one of life’s essential elements.

As researcher Sherwood Idso, president of the Tempe, Ariz. Center of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, has demonstrated, plants thrive in high-CO2 environments (humans, when they exhale, do plants a favor). Atmospheric CO2 enrichment stimulates agriculture by enhancing leaf photosynthesis, resulting in higher crop yields and increased global food production.

During the Jurassic period, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were in the neighborhood of 1,950 ppm – five times the concentration of today’s modest 385 ppm. During that period, the earth flourished in the fertile embrace of life-giving CO2.

As physical science and mathematics professor Richard F. Yada writes in his 2009 paper, “Reality Check: CO2”:

“The great lesson from geologic history is that carbon dioxide is critical to life. The move to label it as a pollutant is simply preposterous. The logical extension to that thought process is that the government has legally regulated life. The notion would be laughable if it were not so tragically real.”

Will the greenhouse-effect prognosticators stand down for a moment from their doom-and-gloom forecasts, reappraise their research, and take a second look at CO2 and its impact on global climate, searching only for the truth instead of the next round of government funding? Don’t hold your breath.

Kirk Myers' Examiner column appears several times weekly. To receive alerts when a new article is posted, click on the “subscribe” button at the top of the page. Upcoming topics: the carbon-credit game, grant money and science, and the Green movement.