In Defense Of Carbon Dioxide

Carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant, according to a lot of people up to and including the EPA. The air that we exhale is bad for the environment, we’re supposed to believe, which has become such an article of faith that even the fossil fuel energy companies have embraced it arguing for fracking on the grounds that it is lowering carbon emissions by facilitating the transfer away from coal to natural gas.

But what if carbon emissions weren’t a bad thing? Harrison Schmitt – an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an Apollo 17 astronaut, and a former U.S. senator from New Mexico – and William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton University and a former director of the office of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy question the narrative about carbon in the Wall Street Journal:

Of all of the world’s chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth’s atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

Put another way, what if the endgame in “global warming” isn’t so much a polar bear apocalypse and rising sea levels drowning communities but an expansion of our agricultural capacity and a reduction of global problems like starving?

I’m reminded of something Dennis Miller once said (I’m paraphrasing): “One man’s global warming is another man’s ‘hey it’s nice outside.'”