“CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s the stuff of life. I can’t find anything that’s not beneficial,” he said. “This comes from thousands of studies – mainly from the agricultural community, and these are not casual observers.”
Posted on 09/21/2009 9:12:15 PM PDT by Maelstorm
There’s good news on the global climate change front: All that carbon dioxide blamed for global warming is actually good for our planet, says Cody scientist and writer Leighton Steward.
“The earth’s atmosphere needs more carbon dioxide,” he said at a recent Rotary Club meeting. “That ought to get everyone’s attention.”
The CO2 level now is about 385 parts per million. It’s been as high as 7,000 during the earth’s history. *
“Climate is always changing,” he said. “You should never expect climate at an equilibrium, and history shows it’s not.”
More CO2 means better crops and forests, Steward says, but not necessarily a warmer planet since other factors play a bigger role in heating the planet.
“This relates directly to the food supply,” he said. “Green is good, and CO2 is very green.”
CO2 boosts plant growth, making them larger, faster-growing and more drought tolerant with better roots. Steward calls that good news in a world with a growing population.
“When you’re deciding what ought to be done, think about what this could do for mankind,” he said.
Taking CO2 back to pre-industrial levels would degrade habitats and push people into starvation, Steward said.
“CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s the stuff of life. I can’t find anything that’s not beneficial,” he said. “This comes from thousands of studies – mainly from the agricultural community, and these are not casual observers.”
Spending billions and enacting draconian restrictions to fight a “pollutant” that’s not a pollutant isn’t helping anyone, he said.
“If we let our factories continue to manufacture, that’s not necessarily bad and might be good,” he said. “We (pro-CO2 groups) are greener than all the green organizations lobbying to reduce CO2.”
It’s a message scientists across the world are trying to promote, and Steward cited numerous studies.
When he started researching climate change four years ago, Steward found there are 18 “drivers” of climate change, including things like variation in the shape of the earth’s orbit, sunspots and the magnetic effect of the sun.
CO2’s ability to trap heat declines logarithmically, so a great deal of the gas makes a big difference, but as the level dips the difference it makes drops exponentially.
That means doubling the current concentration of CO2 would only make a .2 degree difference, he said.
If CO2 was a significant factor in global warming, temperatures would have risen – as modeling predicted – instead of declining since 2001.
“It’s hard to argue with that,” he said. “They did not predict in any of their models that it would be cooling.”
Since the Industrial Revolution, people have pumped CO2 into the atmosphere and temperature has generally risen, though not always.
“These are natural trends,” he said. “Look at the magnitude of climate variation. Huge swings of 10, 15, 20 degrees.”
Former vice president Al Gore got facts wrong in his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Steward said.
“Clearly things were absolutely false in some cases and misleading in other cases,” he said.
For example, Gore said the earth was warming at an unprecedented rate. However, in the 1920s and ’30s, the temperature increase was more dramatic, Steward said.
Contrary to Gore’s findings, cyclone and tornado strength is actually down now, says Steward, a geologist and retired energy industry executive. He is a trustee at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and lives on the North Fork and in Texas.
Steward, the author of the best-seller “Sugar Busters,” recently published “Fire, Ice and Paradise” on climate change.
This summer, he organized a non-profit organization, “Plants Need CO2,” with the mission, “To educate the public on the positive effects of additional atmospheric CO2 and help prevent the inadvertent negative impact to human, plant and animal life if we reduce CO2.”
More than half the contributions to his group are from the coal industry, he said. CO2 is released during the burning of fossil fuels, among other sources.
“I’m not getting a penny for doing this,” he added. “It’s just something people of the earth ought to know.”
Greenies (maybe we should call them Brownies) just stick fingers in ears and go “la-la-la-la we can’t hear you, you prostitute to Big Oil”
Got into a pointless debate with a few liberals after a party.
Long story short, all of my points based on real science weren’t valid because I wasn’t a scientist, and although they weren’t scientists either their position was that scientific consensus supported their argument. Of course, points refuting scientific consensus were invalid because people who were against Anthropological Global Warming were religious nut cases.
Yes, I realize the whole debate was futile, but there was undecided in their group and they deserved to hear that there was a great deal more information out there than what he was led to believe was true. I think I got through on some points but if those liberals are his friends, then chances are he’ll have to eventually convert to their way of thinking all the way or they’ll shun him.
The scare mongers and econuts with an agenda hate it when someone like Mr. Steward comes along and speaks common sense.
He’s correct but the left will crucify him.
Am I glad you came up with that — I was afraid they were gonna put a carbon tax on CO2 emissions from my sourdough pancakes!!
It's not often you see the real truth spoken these days.
It’s really difficult for man to out-heat, or out-cool, Mother Nature.
Ping.
Science is not about finding consensus.
Science is about questioning consensus.
Politics, on the other hand,...
ping
I’ve been saying the same thing for years. It’s the way you turn carbon into becoming part of living things. Locked up in the Earth that carbon is not helping anything.
Or the DNC, Al Gore, 0bama and the hip hop GREEN Van Jones caucus; won't make billions of dollars duping us.
Imagine that a carbon based gas being good for carbon based life forms!?! Will wonders never cease?
Wow - dare I hope for an eventual return to sanity? A ray of hope... for a change?
When confronted with Gorebal Warming fear, I bring up the fact that around 1000 AD the Vikings grew grain in Greenland (which is now under permafrost). Then I ask them about the shrinking ice caps on Mars.
And to think...0bama is shaking in his boots about getting scolded about this at the U.N. in PA. in a few days because we are not ahead in the carbon footprint green crap con game. NEWSFLASH TO 0BAMA: The world hates us no matter what we do, stop selling us out!!!
Mother Nature is really HOT!!! And way COOL too :)
Now, if we could only get rid of that dreaded DiHydrogen Monoxide menace (H20) all would be right in the world ...
/sarc off (of course)
When I learned a short time later that they really did mean CO2 I just shook my head. Even with only a high school education in chemistry and biology I knew it was fence-post stupid to call CO2 a pollutant.
Intelligence and common sense have no place in a society run by bloomin idiots.
CO2, is Carbon dioxide. Plants need it to make food with. Oxygen is used to digest the food the plans make. Without carbon dioxide, no plants.
CO2, is Carbon dioxide. Plants need it to make food with. Oxygen is used to digest the food the plants make. Without carbon dioxide, no plants. No plants, NO US.
all young growing plants say:
C02, its whats for supper !
coco, et al, get ahold of the video “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. its available on amazon, but apparently now takes some time to get a copy... i got 3 last Christmas for me & family.
i highly recommend this film. its all facts & contains some extra excerpts from interviews w various experts including one who was an iccp contributor at one point. he had to threaten a law suit to get his name off their contributor list. also a co-founder of greenpeace states that living things are abundant & thriving where its warm & very limited where there is frost. frost kills. compare animal population densities at Sao Paulo Brazil to Antarctic research stations.
it was available on revver.com as a downloadable or watch on site movie... its there now but there website gave me an error & wouldn’t load it...
good hunting.
its on youtube
“The Great Global Warming Swindle”
they will think you are nuts but it is true.
http://www.epa.gov/gmpo/edresources/pleistocene.html
The EPA gives numbers when we will be 'officially' back into glaciation but we will be totally screwed long before that. first signs of glaciation will be world wide drought more so then noticeable cold weather.
CO2 is plant food.
From the site:
There is debate in the scientific community about what caused the glaciers to advance and retreat, but current theory attributes it to astronomical causes. Because of variations in the earth's orbit, average summer and winter temperatures change with time. There are periods when winters are colder and summers hotter, followed by periods when winters are warmer and summers cooler. The latter are thought to produce glacial advances, because the cooler summers are not adequate to melt all of the previous winter's snow. The result is that snow and ice begin to accumulate from one winter to the next. During periods when summers were warmer, and winters cooler, the glaciers are thought to have retreated. During the Pleistocene epoch, two or more centers of glaciation in Canada probably joined to form one large sheet of ice.
No mention of people causing glaciers to advance or retreat. They must have forgotten the obligatory "human caused global warming" phrase.
Always has been. Especially population control of countries that are not communist or socialist. ....and those overpopulated warlord-run countries... keep sending in diseases too but just can't seen to wipe out those vermin sub-humans. Worse than cockroaches, they are.
The Warmers should be kissing the feet of CO2 rather than declaring it a poison.
The Warmers should be kissing the feet of CO2 rather than declaring it a poison.
The Warmers should be kissing the feet of CO2 rather than declaring it a poison.
I read something in Science about the ultimate demise of life on earth from decreasing carbon dioxide levels, and spent quite a while searching for it. I didn’t find the exact article, but I found it referenced here:
California Institute of Technology (2009, June 13). Life May Extend Planet’s ‘Life’: Billion-year Life Extension For Earth Also Doubles Odds Of Finding Life On Other Planets. ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com; /releases/2009/06/090612203303.htm
And I found this interesting blog, which also mentions the study I was looking for:
http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/too-little-co2-end-life-earth
I think there’s a risk of doing real harm by trying to decrease CO2 levels in the atmosphere. One scheme I read about involved dumping iron into the ocean to fertilize it and encourage algae growth—who ever came up with that obviously was not around when it was discovered that algae growth fueled by phosphates was causing fish kills back in the 70s, which is why the use of phosphates in detergents was drastically reduced.
You never know. You might have planted a seed of doubt in one those people's minds. The problem with many libs is that they don't doubt what their leaders tell them. And they don't really dig much themselves. A little reality thrown into their faces might be a good thing.
Wow, an educated adult stating a simple fact we all learned in 4th grade Science...
IT’S MADNESS, I TELL YOU, UTTER MADNESS!
; )
Compared to Madoff, how many millions of dollars has Algore bilked for carbon credits?
That’s a pretty cool device!!
CO2 is good for the planet and Al Gore’s bank account, but it is not a polutant; it is essential for life.
Yeah, and our learned in the law Supreme Court has designated carbon dioxide as a pollutant. They are very poor scientists, though.
At that point, I realized this is a stacked game.
At the same time that the Vikings were flourishing (well a century or two later maybe) there is strong evidence that Marco Polo sailed an ice-free Arctic Ocean all the way over to Greenland. He “saw the Pole Star in the South” (by compass) according to one of his journals, and drew a map of the north coast of Canada. An iceless Arctic Ocean is not without precedent.
Next time you get into such a discussion, tell your friends that you KNOW a scientist personally who has been working on this subject for over a decade- me, who states flat out that the IPCC and the climate models are WRONG. In fact, one of the major climate modelers recently admitted they are wrong. I tell you that there are many more scientists who agree with me than with alGore; the IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific one. Tell them about the firestorms raging in the American Chemical Society due to their journal editor writing “science is settled” silliness. The American Physical Society is similarly under attack for their stupid philosophy. The Australians came over to consult with the US gov’t about the “science” and when they returned to Australia, they reversed their “climate change” CO2 restrictions because the science is so lacking. Japanese, Russian, Canadian, and many other nations are completely in disagreement with the IPCC.
Use me, a scientist you know who has studied the subject at length, for credibility.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
