Can anyone refute this?

Question

carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. it is, in effect, plant food. the amount of carbon dioxide present is not harmful to the environment. picture a stack of 100,000 dollar bills, representing all the gases in the atmosphere. carbon dioxide would represent about 38 dollars of that. if the libs are so fearful of carbon footprints, let them all hold their breath as long as possible, cause we breathe in oxygen, and breath out carbon dioxide.

Answer 1

I myself do not believe in the specific term global warming! I do believe in climate change and that it is impossible to avoid! Climate change has been occurring on Earth long before man was around. What makes me laugh, is when an idiot trades his 38 mpg Toyota Corolla for a Prius Hybrid that saves a whopping 10 miles per gallon, which at 12000 miles per year, and  at $3 a gallon, means they save about $200-$300 a year after losing $8000 on their trade, and dishing out $5-8k more on the hybrid vs non hybrid of the same model. Cars are less than .33% of all the C02 emissions emmited by man!

Besides, with troubles like Middle East, China, North Korea, (h**l, maybe Japan soon), Hillary Clinton, Ossama, the Asteroid heading for Earth,  World War 3, Yellow Stone Park eruption, MS 13, Crystal Meth,  Earth Quakes, various calenders end in the yeat 2012, and many other catastophes, we will be praying for something minor like climate change!!!!

Answer 2

Richard are you saying that only trees take in CO2.  What about Grass, Flowers, Weeds?  Don't most plants live off of CO2 including Crops.  How much more CO2 does a tree eat than other plants that replace it?

Answer 3

oh, but it is harmful. it is building up too quickly, and that widens the ozone layer. Remember all the stuff about that?

Plus, our huge outflow of carbon dioxide in combination of our deforestation makes the whole plant food thing much much less so. remember, the amazon makes 40% of our oxygen, but we are still destroying it!

Answer 4

Yes.  Although your post is basically true, it isn't entirely on point: carbon dioxide has numerous absorption bands in the infrared spectrum, so is peculiarly good at absorbing and re-radiating infrared.  So, infrared radiation from the surface, instead of going directly into space, gets kicked around in the atmosphere and may not get radiated away at all -- and it is this effect which has people concerned, and calling CO2 a "greenhouse gas."  Now, some data: the atmospheric CO2 level has increased from 350 ppm to 390 ppm over the past forty years.  The earth's temperature appears to have been increasing of late; glaciers are retreating in many places.  Whether these effects are correlated, and whether one causes the other (and if so, which) are unsettled questions; one cannot conduct planet-wide experiments to get good data.

Answer 5

Nice hypothesis but inaccurate.  The problem with it assumes there are enough plants around to convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen.   Sadly that is not the case and we are producing far too much carbon dioxide to be replaced by the deminishing forest lands.

Answer 6

Hey pin, have you ever thought about where the coal for electricity or the oil for your SUV came from? Oh, that's right, it came from plants and since CO2 is plant food, great! We're making more coal and oil by producing more CO2. Right?

Wrong. This may be a little too scientific for you. Or, you're probably one of those who don't believe in evolution. Back in prehistoric times, the bacteria that reconverts fixed carbon (solid form) back to CO2 (gas form) didn't exist. That's right. That little bug evolved from a non-cellulose ingesting creature to one that ate wood. In those days you could leave a stack of lumber in your back yard and it wouldn't rot--never.

That's why we have coal and oil. We will never have it again due to the bacteria. Ever wonder why plastic stays in our landfills for so long--there's nothing yet alive that breaks it down. Today's plastic is equivalent to prehistoric wood.

So, what are we doing. We're taking all that CO2 that was fixed in solid form from coal and oil and returning it to the air. Is it getting fixed (turned back into solid form) by organic matter? Yeah, the trees and plants are converting it; however, those little critters are returning it back to the air--back to CO2. Today your stack of lumber rots. The only way to prevent those critters are to deprive them of oxygen--bury 'em. This doesn't happen very often.

That's why those dinosaur books always begin with the earth being warmer and the air thicker. That was global warming dude--when most of the CO2 was in the atmosphere.

If you read this far, you may have learned something.

Answer 7

Yeah, that's pretty simple to refute.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.  Done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_...

CO2 is also plant food.

Your stack of bills analogy is not accurate, because not all molecules in the atmosphere are equal.  For example, nitrogen makes up the majority of the atmosphere and is not a greenhouse gas.  Yet you're saying it's just as much of a 'dollar bill' as a molecule of CO2.

Here's a better analogy.  CO2 is about 380 ppm in the atmosphere, which is about 1 part per 2600 molecules.  So let's say you have 2600 life forms on you (bacteria etc.).  Somebody asks you 'hey, can I put this elephant on your head?'  You answer 'sure, it's just 380 ppm of the life forms on me.  That's nothing to worry about.  It's like 38 bills out of a stack of 100,000 dollar bills.'

So the guy drops an elephant on your head, and you're crushed because you ignored its mass.  In this case, the elephant's mass is equivalent to the global warming potential of CO2, which your analogy ignores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm...

The CO2 we breathe is part of the natural carbon cycle and does not contribute to global warming.  When we burn fossil fuels and release carbon that's been trapped for millions of years into the atmosphere, that's what causes global warming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycl...

By the way, before anyone dismisses what I'm saying because I'm linking to Wikipedia, I'm not getting any of my information from there.  I'm just linking to the Wikipedia pages so that you can read further about these concepts.

Answer 8

You're the victim of a false dichotomy, either/or.  CO2 is BOTH a greenhouse gas AND a plant nutrient.  Plants can't use all of what we're pumping into the atmosphere; if they could, the Keeling curve wouldn't be a curve.

The effects of greenhouse warming have been estimated since Svante Arrhenius in 1896, before infrared radiation was called infrared (IIRC they called it "dark radiation").