Earth Is A Carbon-Starved Planet

Representative John Lindner, a Georgia Republican opines in today's Washington Times about global warming. Excerpt:

"This 4.5 billion-year-old planet has been heating or cooling every minute of its existence. The notion that humans have substantially changed the world which we inherited is just vanity. Some among us cannot tolerate the notion that their mere presence has not changed it.

"The popular notion is that humans burning fossil fuels increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus drives a dangerous increase in temperature. Pointing to ice core data, politicians have argued that past CO2 changes also caused large temperature changes. They conveniently fail to mention that the scientists who work on those ice cores know that the temperature changes actually preceded the CO2 changes — by about 400 to 800 years."

Lindner's take is not significantly different from most arguments against anthropogenic warming, it is not a recent revelation that oceans release CO2 as they warm. This fact alone should be so.....well..... inconvenient to the global warming alarmists. He continues:

"In the context of Earth's history, today we are a carbon-starved planet. The 385 parts per million (ppm) CO2 levels today are at the lower range of comfort. The more welcoming levels of CO2, for both plants and animals, have been 2000 to 3000 ppm.

"From 130 million years ago to 70 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the planet. They were fed by an outburst in plant life that thrived in an environment where CO2 levels were above 2000 ppm. 542 million years ago the planet experienced the Cambrian Explosion. In a five to ten million year period, all of the multicellular complex human and animal life forms appeared and have been found in the fossil evidence. What caused this to occur? Huge increases in oxygen. What delivered the oxygen? Huge increases in plant life. What caused that to occur? Huge increases in CO2. Where did it come from? The oceans from which CO2 was released due to a normal warming cycle.

"We have witnessed, during the past 2 to 3 million years, a planet that has warmed or cooled about 20 times. Glaciations last about 100,000 years interrupted by warming periods that last about 10,000 years. During the glaciations, the ice sheets grow and the oceans drop. Life dies for lack of food. During the warming times the oceans rise, plant life increases and animal life thrives. Our oceans have been rising, by about 2 millimeters per decade, for 8,000 years."

This is a very interesting take on the issue, I consider it to be a common-sense refutation of human causation. Click the link provided above and read the rest of it.