In 1961, Frank Drake developed a formula to estimate the number of advanced civilizations that exist in the Milky Way and that might contact us, or be detected by us.
It looks to me that plants are too efficient at pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and that is being sequestered in soils & seabed sediment. If that continued and you had a big die-off of plants & animals, eventually the carbon would return to the atmosphere but the Earth's ecosystem would be devastated and take a long time to recover. Time is running out.
Conclusion: Yeah humans. Good job returning a whole lot of carbon back to the atmosphere. Likely preventing the next ice age as well. I think we collectively deserve a reward except for the Malthusians & Doomers who must be considered the enemies of all life on Earth. Sad fact, the Malthusians are running the Western World right now. We need to get rid of them.
In 1971, the late Stephen Schneider, then an acolyte of "the coming ice age" cult, who later became a high priest of the "global warming" cult, calculated that DOUBLING the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would ADD 0.8 degrees Celsius to the temperature, and that increasing it by ten times would increase the temperature by at most 2.5 degrees. His conclusion was that there was nothing we could to to stop the coming ice age. Svante Arrhenius wrote about this logarithmic relationship between column abundance of a gas and temperature in 1908. I wrote about this in other articles in my substack.
You clearly didn't understand the article. Read it again, carefully. Plants are largely in equilibrium with CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants and animals in the oceans that armor plate themselves with limestone are depleting it.
I’m sorry but this is all speculation, nobody knows what the atmosphere was like millions of years ago, and if plants are in equilibrium then carbon dioxide is not a problem anyone ever needed to be concerned about.
But we have climate hysteria which has become the new religion.
I feel I am allowed to question how anyone could claim to know what the atmosphere was like a thousand years ago let alone millions of years ago.
You can question how we know, but you really ought to make an effort to find out how it's done before claiming it cannot be known.
Actually, we do know, from analysis of ice cores, ocean bottom sediments, stalactites, bogs, .... This isn't hard to find.
Essentially all of the coal was deposited in the Carboniferous and Permian periods, during the 100 million years between when plants started making lignin, and before fungi started metabolizing it. We have a pretty good idea how much coal there is, and can calculate how much CO2 had to be taken out of the atmosphere to make it. All of the limestone and chalk was made by creatures and plants in the oceans. There are no other sources of them. We have a pretty good idea how much there is, and how much CO2 had to be taken out of the atmosphere to make them.
Putting on my doctoral biologist hat, while much life would disappear below 150 ppmv CO2, not all of it would. Life below the seabed, by some estimates, is a greater biomass than life above it. That said, it is incorrect to believe that plants would die out in 9 million years. (Ignoring human carbon). There is a short (only in relative terms) and a long carbon cycle. This planet has maintained a pretty steady state due to plate tectonics for hundreds of millions of years.
I didn't argue that all life would disappear, only life that depends upon plants. I explicitly wrote that bacteria, viruses, and maybe fungi would likely survive. The planet has NOT maintained a steady state of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. It was chaotic, falling from 7,000 ppmv in the Precambrian Period to 180 ppmv in the middle of the Permian, then rising chaotically to 2,800 ppmv at the end of the Jurassic period, then declined on an almost straight line to the present. The 500 million year graph isn't in this article, but is in another of my articles on the same substack, https://vsnyder.substack.com/p/are-humans-really-causing-climate
The Carbon Cycle article is interesting, for some definition of "interesting," but doesn't say anything about the very long term (150 million year) straight-line decline from 2,500 ppmv to 280 ppmv. The only long-term graph in the article you asked me to read shows sixty million years of oxygen-18, a proxy used to measure temperature. At the rate of 14.8 ppmv per million years, the 800,000-year range shown in the only graph that shows CO2 concentrations is irrelevant. How do you see an 11.8 ppmv average change in a chaotic graph that shows variation between 200 and 300 ppmv? You need the raw data to run a linear regression, which might not be the same as the long-term average on a scale that represents only 0.5% of the total range. The article admits that calcium carbonate sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and mentions that it's recycled through volcanoes, but does not quantify the relationship. At least when Paul Ehrlich and Amory Lovins are trying to make persuasive arguments by waving their hands, you can listen to their hypnotically sonorous voices.
It looks to me that plants are too efficient at pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and that is being sequestered in soils & seabed sediment. If that continued and you had a big die-off of plants & animals, eventually the carbon would return to the atmosphere but the Earth's ecosystem would be devastated and take a long time to recover. Time is running out.
Conclusion: Yeah humans. Good job returning a whole lot of carbon back to the atmosphere. Likely preventing the next ice age as well. I think we collectively deserve a reward except for the Malthusians & Doomers who must be considered the enemies of all life on Earth. Sad fact, the Malthusians are running the Western World right now. We need to get rid of them.
In 1971, the late Stephen Schneider, then an acolyte of "the coming ice age" cult, who later became a high priest of the "global warming" cult, calculated that DOUBLING the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would ADD 0.8 degrees Celsius to the temperature, and that increasing it by ten times would increase the temperature by at most 2.5 degrees. His conclusion was that there was nothing we could to to stop the coming ice age. Svante Arrhenius wrote about this logarithmic relationship between column abundance of a gas and temperature in 1908. I wrote about this in other articles in my substack.
Looks to me like complete guesswork. How does anyone know what the atmosphere was like millions of years ago?
Now we have so called scientists claiming that climate change is an existential threat, and using geo engineering to mess around with the weather.
Leave nature alone!
When I asked a scientist about plants consuming the CO2 they replied, yeah but the wrong type of plants use it!
I wasn’t bright enough to ask what the wrong sort of plant was.
You clearly didn't understand the article. Read it again, carefully. Plants are largely in equilibrium with CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants and animals in the oceans that armor plate themselves with limestone are depleting it.
I’m sorry but this is all speculation, nobody knows what the atmosphere was like millions of years ago, and if plants are in equilibrium then carbon dioxide is not a problem anyone ever needed to be concerned about.
But we have climate hysteria which has become the new religion.
I feel I am allowed to question how anyone could claim to know what the atmosphere was like a thousand years ago let alone millions of years ago.
You can question how we know, but you really ought to make an effort to find out how it's done before claiming it cannot be known.
Actually, we do know, from analysis of ice cores, ocean bottom sediments, stalactites, bogs, .... This isn't hard to find.
Essentially all of the coal was deposited in the Carboniferous and Permian periods, during the 100 million years between when plants started making lignin, and before fungi started metabolizing it. We have a pretty good idea how much coal there is, and can calculate how much CO2 had to be taken out of the atmosphere to make it. All of the limestone and chalk was made by creatures and plants in the oceans. There are no other sources of them. We have a pretty good idea how much there is, and how much CO2 had to be taken out of the atmosphere to make them.
Putting on my doctoral biologist hat, while much life would disappear below 150 ppmv CO2, not all of it would. Life below the seabed, by some estimates, is a greater biomass than life above it. That said, it is incorrect to believe that plants would die out in 9 million years. (Ignoring human carbon). There is a short (only in relative terms) and a long carbon cycle. This planet has maintained a pretty steady state due to plate tectonics for hundreds of millions of years.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle
I didn't argue that all life would disappear, only life that depends upon plants. I explicitly wrote that bacteria, viruses, and maybe fungi would likely survive. The planet has NOT maintained a steady state of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. It was chaotic, falling from 7,000 ppmv in the Precambrian Period to 180 ppmv in the middle of the Permian, then rising chaotically to 2,800 ppmv at the end of the Jurassic period, then declined on an almost straight line to the present. The 500 million year graph isn't in this article, but is in another of my articles on the same substack, https://vsnyder.substack.com/p/are-humans-really-causing-climate
How is it steadystate, are you saying the graph of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is wrong?
Click on the link and read. It's pretty interesting
The Carbon Cycle article is interesting, for some definition of "interesting," but doesn't say anything about the very long term (150 million year) straight-line decline from 2,500 ppmv to 280 ppmv. The only long-term graph in the article you asked me to read shows sixty million years of oxygen-18, a proxy used to measure temperature. At the rate of 14.8 ppmv per million years, the 800,000-year range shown in the only graph that shows CO2 concentrations is irrelevant. How do you see an 11.8 ppmv average change in a chaotic graph that shows variation between 200 and 300 ppmv? You need the raw data to run a linear regression, which might not be the same as the long-term average on a scale that represents only 0.5% of the total range. The article admits that calcium carbonate sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and mentions that it's recycled through volcanoes, but does not quantify the relationship. At least when Paul Ehrlich and Amory Lovins are trying to make persuasive arguments by waving their hands, you can listen to their hypnotically sonorous voices.