Carbon dioxide is not evil, could actually benefit earth's plant life

By Jonathan DuHamel
Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Gov. Janet Napolitano and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality are sparring with the Arizona Legislature over the Western Climate Initiative, which would impose restrictions on carbon-dioxide emissions in Arizona and several other western states.

The governor wants to set a statewide goal to reduce Arizona's greenhouse-gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2020, and to 50 percent below 2000 levels by 2040.

Perhaps our next governor will look at the science rather than the politics and remove Arizona from the Western Climate Initiative and quash implementation of any other scheme to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. There are five good reasons to do so:

● There is no evidence that carbon dioxide is, or ever has been, a significant driver of temperature. All the scary scenarios we hear exist only in the virtual world of computer modeling, modeling based on assumptions that are proving to be wrong.

● There is good evidence that the greenhouse model used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is wrong. The panel's greenhouse theory holds that temperature trends (rate of warming, not absolute temperature) should increase by 200 percent to 300 percent with altitude, peaking at around 10 kilometers — a characteristic "fingerprint" for green house warming.

However, actual measurements from weather balloons and satellites show the opposite result: no increasing temperature trend with altitude. In other words, the model-predicted "fingerprint" of anthropogenic, greenhouse warming is absent in nature.

● Restriction of carbon emissions will harm our economy by making energy more expensive and increasing compliance costs for businesses, schools and government buildings.

● Even if you believe that carbon dioxide emissions have a significant effect on temperature, the human contribution to total greenhouse gas emissions is insignificant — approximately two-tenths of 1 percent (0.2 percent). Therefore any scheme to limit emissions will fail to have an effect on temperature.

● Carbon dioxide is vital to all life on this planet. Over the long geological perspective, current concentrations of carbon dioxide are dangerously low. Plant life becomes more robust and more water efficient at higher concentrations. This has implications for our food supply.

The governor and the Department of Environmental Quality invoke the U.N. panel and its "2,500 scientists" as their authority. But those "2,500" are not all scientists, nor do they all agree. Also there is a group of more than 31,000 scientists that says:

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.

"Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

To see a list of those scientists and read the scientific basis for their statement, go to http://www.petitionproject.org/ online.