 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
|||||||||
A Service of The Greening Earth Society
|
Climate Change
FAQs Q: Is CO2 a pollutant? A: No. CO2 is a fundamental building block for life on earth. Life on earth is carbon based. Plants – the anchor of our planet’s food chain – rely on carbon dioxide for life, itself. CO2 is no more a pollutant than water is a poison. Q: But isn’t the question, really, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? A: In some abstract sense, perhaps. The question itself assumes there is known to be some optimal concentration of carbon dioxide beyond which its effect becomes detrimental, either to life itself or by inducing catastrophic changes in earth’s climate. With the problem usually posed in the context of a potential doubling of the atmosphere’s concentration from around 360 parts per million (360 ppm) to something like 750 ppm over the course of the next hundred years, life itself isn’t threatened. Greenhouses routinely circulate 1000 ppm concentrations of CO2. Time spent in the climate section of our website will reveal that there are significant scientific questions concerning the probability, timing, and magnitude of potential changes in climate from a doubling of CO2, and greater. Q: Are you actually taking the position that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion are beneficial to life on earth? A: Yes. Higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 increase plant productivity, water use efficiency, and their resistance to a variety of environmental stresses including heat, drought, cold, pests, deficient nutrients, and air pollution. Introducing well-documented techniques to manage forests, crops, and grazing land can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, improve soil productivity, reduce erosion and the use of chemical fertilizers, and fossil fuel combustion in farming itself. Time spent in the CO2 section of our website will help you explore this often overlooked and frequently denigrated body of research. It’s exciting stuff and an antidote to gloom-and-doom about potential changes in earth’s climate from human’s use of fossil fuels and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
