Interesting thoughts from the original article:
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/03/20/why-i-am-climate-change-skeptic
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“...Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down
steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million
to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution.
If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have
become too low to support life on Earth.
Without carbon dioxide above 150 parts per million,
all plants would die.
Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops
have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level
in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.
At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests,
and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide.
The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth,
given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million,
nearly four times higher than today...”
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Makes me wonder if there is some long term millions of years cycle where:
The CO2 increases, and the plant life explodes.
The plants absorb the CO2, and the CO2 decreases.
The plant life dies off, and the CO2 increases.
“Settled Science” from 45 years ago:
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The battle to feed humanity is over.
In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines.
Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death
in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
Population control is the only answer.
- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)
I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
- Paul Ehrlich in (1969)
In ten years all the important animal life in the sea will be extinct.
Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)
If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder
for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000.
This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.
- Kenneth E. F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)
The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord
with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization,
mechanization, urbanization, and exploding population.
- Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man” (1971)
There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically
and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production
with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth.
The drop in food production could begin quite soon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate
so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
- Newsweek, April 28, (1975)
This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people.
If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine,
world chaos, and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.
- Lowell Ponte “The Cooling” (1976)
Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity,
in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.
- Paul Ehrlich in (1976)
This cooling trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
- Peter Gwynne, Newsweek (1976)