Quite to the contrary to this bizarre belief, life exploded inexplicably, the literal "Cambrian explosion," when CO2 levels ranged in the 3,000-8,000 parts per million.
And if levels ever fell below 150 ppm (which ironically we came pretty close to reaching in the pre-industrial age) its quite possible that most life on earth would simply die out.
Levels below 300 are generally associated with ice ages and environmental destruction.
Significant moves in either direction could have a huge impact on human life. Like ok you may have had events in the past at very high levels of co2 that resulted in an increase of life on the planet, but going back to those levels may not be good for humanity specifically. Increasing global temperatures 5C+ or whatever the number is would be extremely risky for us. To me it seems desirable to limit the amount to what it has been when humanity has been healthiest.
It’s less about total amounts and much more about rate of change. The actual issue is the rate of change acceleration that the industrial era has seen. The rate of change is the fastest in recorded human history.
Obviously the screeching freak outs over this issue are absurd, but that doesn’t change the fact that accelerating rate of change of most systems is generally hard to manage for biological entities.
There is exactly zero evidence to suggest that warmer climates or previously cold areas becoming warm has any effect other than less death. Cold is the absolute #1 environmental killer. And all of the warming we have seen so far is almost exclusively in the colder areas, which still have no clear and direct link to CO2 levels, despite the broad acceptance that there is a cause and effect, which conveniently takes huge breaks, or reverse for a little while.
Nothing over the last 100 years about more energy and warmer temperatures suggest anything at all except that fewer people die and there is more and greener environments. In fact environmental deaths have fallen faster than the value of the dollar.
The dollar inflation has only had it lose ~98% of its value, while environmental deaths have fallen by more than 99%.
Your belief is pure propaganda and extrapolation that doesn't align with reality. Environmental deaths have virtually done nothing but decline.
I’m not a climate scientist or an expert in that area at all so my opinion really doesn’t matter lol. But I’m assuming the decrease in deaths is highly attributable to improvements to infrastructure and widespread use of air conditioning.
That’s correct, the most important being people being able to heat their homes with electricity.
I can intuitively take this at face value, except that coldest areas are the ones most affected, and are generally “life deserts.” I think largely the most reliable connection to higher CO2 levels post industrial age is what NASA terms, “the great greening.” The earth is literally visibly greener, and if you test this in any controlled environment with slightly higher CO2 levels, plants grow faster, healthier, and a deeper green.
I can agree with all that. The only issue is that the rates we are seeing are estimated at 100-200x faster than during the great greening. So there are issues with how a system adapts. The ocean acidification can outpace the ability for marine life to adapt which can create a cascade of failures.
Current estimates put the rate of change of ocean PH at roughly10x faster than any period in the past 300 million years. Functioning ocean ecosystems are critical to human flourishing. 20% of the protein humans eat come from the oceans.
If the corals and scavenger animals of the seas can’t cope with the ph changes and being shell based there is evidence that they can’t it could be a rough century for the seas.
As a non-scientific layman, I’m geniunely curious.. how can we deduce what the pH rate of change of the ocean was 250 million years ago?
Only way I know is ice cores. But I doubt the precision claimed. There may be other means they do in tandem but I don’t know them specifically.
They use fossilized plankton who’s shells contain minerals which they can determine the acidity that the animal existed within. I admit I don’t know the state of the art of this but this allows them to go deep into the past when the oceans covered much of the earth.
They study fossilized plankton. It is possible that the acidification can be adapted to quickly enough or that plankton that can handle it flourishes and helps to bring down the acid levels. We really don’t know.
The issue isn’t that the oceans can’t handle more co2 it’s that the life in the ocean may not be able to handle the rapid influx of co2 and moves in ph. The ph scale is logarithmic so minimal changes could mean a mass die off of critical animals.
The high level reason is humans ability to adapt to a naturally dangerous climate.
This is possible in large part due to fossil fuels.
Cheap, abundant, reliable energy begets human flourishing.
The temperature is not even connected to the CO2 level.
I’m going to trust actual climate scientists on this subject 🤷♂️
Yeah, pick your own scientist😆 The majority is neglecting the biggest factor of the surface temperature, clouds. Isn't that strange?
Are you a climate scientist?
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The blue bell-shaped curve shows the amount of solar energy flux (at different wavelengths, x-axis) radiated to space from an earth with no atmosphere. (Most is in the infrared region 400-1000 or so.) The green line is the flux with an atmosphere with no CO2 but with all other greenhouse gases at their standard concentrations. The black line is for all greenhouse gases, CO2 included, at their standard concentrations. The red line is for twice the standard concentration of CO2 (400 to 800 ppm) but with all the other greenhouse gases unchanged.
At 400 ppm CO2 does have a greenhouse effect: Radiated energy is reduced in the 500-700 frequency range. But an increase to 800 ppm has almost no additional effect – the black and red lines are almost the same. Doubling the standard concentration of CO2 from 400 to 800 ppm has almost no additional greenhouse effect.
