You assert there was no relationship between CO2 and temperature for billions of years, this is a worthless point to make for the following reasons: The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. CO2 is one of a group of green house gases and, as the planet was a molten rock without an atmosphere for the first 1/2 billion years. Further, the original atmosphere was made of hydrogen sulfide and methane (a greenhouse gas), so greenhouse gases were drivers of temperature, it’s just CO2 wasn’t the major ingredient. The first oxygen producing life forms didn’t appear until 2 billion years ago, so the first oxygen rich atmosphere didn’t appear until approximately 2 billion years ago and took hundreds of millions of years to reach an oxygen-rich equilibrium.
The point scientists are trying to make and I think you are willfully trying to misunderstand is that the planet’s atmosphere had reached a natural equilibrium and the *only* variable to change in the last two hundred years is man-made pollution, specifically CO2 as a result of fossil fuel burning. The CO2 that is being produced by burning fossil fuels has a different 13CO/12CO ratio than naturally occurring release (from animals, volcanoes). We know it is man-made, accumulating in the atmosphere, and additive in the atmosphere. The sun activity, volcanic activity, and naturally occurring gas release has not varied. The pollution we are putting in the air is also increasing as the 7 billion people in the world increase their consumption of fossil fuels.
We can fingerprint this CO2 pollution, as stated above, and we can test the impact of increased CO2 levels with other variables held constant in the most BASIC scientific experiments. Literally, build a greenhouse, put a thermometer in it, and put a heat lamp over it. Change the gas content inside. See what happens. Precipitation changes, soil temperatures change, air temperature changes.
The only changes in the last two hundred years have been human industrialization. Industrialization which has produced enough toxic output to change entire river and bay ecosystems, smog, and soil/erosion patterns. Look at China’s Yellow River, the Mississippi, or Yamuna river. Smog over major industrialized cities like LA or Beijing. Human behavior impacts the environment on global scales. We know this, it is not a difficult thing to demonstrate human activity has eco-system changing impacts. We have the ability to put species into extinction, divert continent spanning rivers, create dams that change the water tables for entire countries, to change the acidity and salt levels of millions of square kilometers, to pollute oceans with visible pollution for hundreds of square miles. Turning your car on in your garage will build up enough poisonous vapors to kill a person and will observably impact temperature, having a planet with 1 billion cars is enough to create observable smog and pollution. The suggestion it does not impact the atmosphere doesn’t even pass the credibility test.
I’m not sure if this blog is run by someone who knows the science and is trying to intentionally mislead others through the same “industry of doubt” that drove the cigarette companies to claim there was no link between cigarettes and lung/oral cancer for twenty years, or if his business background is simply insufficient to provide a foundation for understanding chemical and physical processes on a global scale. I hope anyone else who accidentally discovers this site will have the critical thinking skills to question it.
