Dakota Beacon

From the Bismarck Tribune: Carbon fast: Churches urging CO2 reduction during Lent

Another example of good people with good intentions being misled.

Though a skeptic, I can admit that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and does have some warming influence on the atmosphere. My belief is that it's small and much less than the influence of the powerful natural cycles from the sun, ocean and other sources that have dominated for millions of years and we've only scratched the surface of understanding. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is still just a theory.

Here's the thing that gets me most on these people and CO2. CO2 is helping us to feed the world. There are less hungry and starving in a world that has more CO2. Increasing CO2, increases plant growth and crop yields. This is not a theory. On this, the science is settled and the debate should be over.

Greenhouses use CO2 enrichment generators and pump up the carbon dioxide to much higher levels than the atmospheric CO2 for their plants. Need I say more. There are many other factors that play a role in the real world including the availability of other nutrients, amount of sun and plant species/type but after reviewing dozens of studies, I've been using a rule of thumb to go by.

In the current range of atmospheric CO2, an increase or decrease of 10 ppm (parts per  million) or CO2 results in an increase or decrease of 1% plant growth. Going from 280 ppm to 390 ppm is a 110 ppm increase. From this, I would guestimate that plants overall are growing 11% faster and bigger than they would be if CO2 levels had not risen. That equates to crop yields and worldwide food production up 11% because of CO2 up that amount.

Food production has more than kept up with the worlds growing population. It's well known that advances in technology, plant genetics and so on are the major contributors. This is completely covered up by AGW proponents. There are many, many other elements to the cover up but that's the one that gets me the most. We are portrayed as the big, bad selfish polluters, hurting the poor starving, vulnerable people of the world.  Fact is, just the opposite. We produce much of the food and our non polluting CO2 emissions are helping us to do it better......much better.