patrick.net

I don't know why one would draw this conclusion. There are a lot of things that are necessary at some level but not good when you have too much of it.

There is a similar argument in the nutrition world. People say that cholesterol is essential, and imply that this means that more is better or at least that it can't 'be bad'. Yet, people know that death rates correlate well with cholesterol levels in blood. Nobody has zero cholesterol, so the fact that it is essential is pretty much irrelevant to any debate on the issue. We need to move beyond 'x good' and 'y is bad' in our conversations.

Likewise with CO2. CO2 is constantly being generated due to natural cycles. It is essential for plants, but we are not in danger of running out of CO2 in the atmosphere. We recently passed the 400 ppm mark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere Historically, CO2 levels have been between 180 and 300 ppm for the last 400,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#/media/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg

We have dumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that it is more than 33% larger than at all points in this long history. Why would anybody look at this and say that CO2 is essential (at some small level) therefore, we should not work to reduce the CO2 level to more historically normal levels. Are they seriously afraid that plants will become extinct if we lower our CO2 emissions?

#climatedeniermyths