re: Is there proof that CO2 causes warming?

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It’s everything after that where the science completely breaks down and it becomes the Wild West of alarmism, scare tactics and questionable motives. In other words, I came to feel they’ve gotten the diagnosis right enough to be taken seriously, but they’ve totally exaggerated the symptoms, the necessary treatment and the prognosis. By symptoms, I mean the reckless (even intentional) conflating of weather and climate (to be fair, skeptics do this, too). By necessary treatment, I mean the rapid decarbonization despite any negative economic impacts. And by the prognosis, I mean all of the apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster type scenarios they’ve painted for a few decades now.

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I am not a scientist either nor have I done the research that you have done but that's about as well put as I've seen. These threads on here aren't going to change the minds of the readers on here because everyone has their minds made up, already. It would take a fool to believe that man has had no impact on the earth since our beginning. But, if you fudge the numbers once then you've pretty much lost my support for any and all the numbers. If we are going to die in 12 years, then fudging numbers should not be necessary.

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Yep, still here.

More plants are growing is what I mean when I say the Earth is greening. LINK

This is just one link, but there are a lot of 'em out there about the Earth getting greener.

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OK. Thanks.

I understand where you are coming from.

To talk about what I want to talk about, we need to talk about reservoirs and flux. Reservoirs are where materials are stored, and flux is the amount/amount of time it takes for materials to move from one reservoir to another.


A tree is made of living tissue and that tissue has carbon in it. That carbon comes from the CO2 in the air and is kept in the tissue as long as the plant is alive.

So, essentially what we are talking about here is a plant is a reservoir of CO2 for about 100 years (estimate). And that CO2 leaves the tree and is returned to the atmosphere once the tissues are degraded/metabolized during decomposition. The new reservoir of CO2 is the atmosphere, which was the initial reservoir that the plants built their tissues from. The flux that movement of CO2 for that plant over its lifespan.

Now think about this for all trees. If you think about it, in the long term, plants should be balanced in the amount of CO2 they take in and the CO2 they release upon death. So, CO2 in the atmosphere should be constant over a long period of time even if plants are present.

The CO2 is still rising and will continue to rise not from plants, but by short-cutting a longer reservoir to reservoir flux: hydrocarbons.

What if lots and lots of living tissue that were in a reservoir was locked away from any measurable flux until mountains were made, or streambanks eroded? Well, that would be balanced too, not a 100 years for a complete cycle, but 100s of millions of years to stay balanced. Humans have found a way to shortcut that system by drilling for these hydrocarbons and using them...creating CO2 putting it in a different reservoir (atmosphere) in an unbalanced way.



Yes, the Earth has had a higher ppm of CO2. Yes life thrived during those times. What didn't happen in those cases was a significant change in the flux of CO2 over short periods of time like we are seeing now, if that happens there's an extinction.

Yeah, dude.

This was a reply to his question.

I can't cover every single thing.

The difference between applied science, like the moon shot, and theoretical science like climate modeling can not be overstated.

Last time there was a flow release there was an extinction?

Theoretical nonsense.

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Now think about this for all trees. If you think about it, in the long term, plants should be balanced in the amount of CO2 they take in and the CO2 they release upon death. So, CO2 in the atmosphere should be constant over a long period of time even if plants are present.

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First, thanks for taking the time to explain this.

Just a few questions, though;

I see what you're saying about individual plants, but what happens when the number of plants is growing at a pretty good clip like we have now? Isn't this action helping to diminish the problems you're talking about w/ more co2 eventually being put in the air? IOW, your post seems to indicate there is a zero sum game w/ the total number of plants on Earth. If I misread, then my apologies.

Also, more co2 for these plants makes them much more efficient at using water to survive. It's this a great thing for life on Earth?

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You can find some conflicting data out there, but the conclusion I came to is that it appeared reasonably supported in the data that there’s some correlation between CO2 and warming. So that component of the global warming theory I came to agree with.

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And here is the problem. The data you are seeing is not data - it is data that has been tweaked and corrected and manipulated to show what they want you to see - which is a correlation of temperature to rising CO2. NASA and NOAA announce corrections fairly often, and every correction I am aware of either increases recent temperature or decreases historic temperature. Here are a couple of links that explain some of the problems -


61% made up data


More about made up data

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It’s everything after that where the science completely breaks down and it becomes the Wild West of alarmism, scare tactics and questionable motives.

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As an engineer - when you frick with the data, it is no longer science. When data is blatantly made up and added in a way to drive a conclusion and that conclusion is used to extract money from companies, governments, and individuals, many words can be used and science is not one of them.