SO WHAT THE HELL IS CO2, AND WHY IS IT SO EVIL?

Well the short answer is that Co2 stands for carbon dioxide and far from being evil it is vital to all forms of life on earth. Now this is a fact and we have the right to expect that people engaging in this debate have at least a very basic knowledge of what they are talking about. However listening to a young ‘environmentalist’ (whatever that is) on the radio the other day I was shocked to hear that according to him it would be far better for the planet if we could get rid of all Co2, which of course would turn the earth into a giant replica of the moon – but with less life on it.

So how much Co2 do we have in the atmosphere? Well listening to all the Climate Change Fanatics (CCF’s) you could well be convinced that it comprises just about all of it, this is in fact nonsense. It is present in such small amounts that it is classified as a ‘trace gas’, it comprises 380 parts per million of the total gasses making up the earth’s atmosphere. Now the problem with throwing labels like that at you is it is very difficult to relate to it. I mean do you know how much a million is? I know it’s a big figure but have no idea how big.

Try this, imagine a matchstick, now we all know how big one of those is. They are about 2 millimetres wide. Now if you lay 1 million matchsticks side by side you would have a row of matchsticks approximately one and a quarter miles long. I think many of us can visualise a mile and a quarter. Now count off 380 matchsticks, that is about 29 ½” inches long, about the distance from your armpit to the tips of your fingers. The length of you arm compared to 1 ¼ miles is the amount of Co2 there is in the atmosphere. However the vast majority of that 380 ppm is not manmade, it comes from natural sources. Mankind only emits about 3.4% of this figure, that’s about 1”. So you have 1 1/4" miles representing all the atmosphere, only an arms length of that is Co2 and of that amount only half a thumb length is manmade. But it doesn’t stop there; of that 1” only about half goes into the atmosphere, the other half is absorbed by plants and other surface level sinks that absorb Co2.
So to recap the amount of manmade Co2 that actually enters the atmosphere is the equivalent of a thumbnail compared to 1 1/4 miles! Not very much is it? Now according to the CCF’s this thumbnail is so powerful it can change the entire planet, it will causes mountains to fall and seas to rise, deserts to, well do something ( they’re not quite sure what) and fields to do something else. Oh come on. Let’s stop and think for a minute. One thing us humans are very good at doing is killing each other, and boy can we think up some interesting and varied ways to do it. I have seen myself the effect of explosives against tanks, seen huge lorries shredded by machine guns and men vaporised by explosives. Don’t you think that if a gas like Co2 could have so much power the arms manufacturers would have turned it into a weapon by now?
The fact is that Co2 is vital for life on earth (in spite of the US Supreme Court classifying it as a ‘pollutant’, what was that all about. Without Co2 nothing would live, no plants, no animals, no insects nothing – all dead, all gone.
Here’s something to think about, if all mankind vanished from the earth tomorrow, it would only take a few months for the additional plant life to make up the Co2 levels to what we were contributing.
Next we are going to take a look at Greenhouse Gasses, what are they and are they part of the axis of evil too?