Eric Hines: Is rising atmospheric CO2 a threat to humanity?
ChatGPT: The rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is a threat to humanity in several ways. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to global warming and climate change. The increase in CO2 emissions is the primary cause of global warming, which is leading to a range of harmful effects, including rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and the loss of biodiversity.
Recall the climatistas who have been running around (sort of) gluing themselves to museum art, throwing messy food at the art, and one group, pleased to call themselves scientists, even glued themselves to the floor of a luxury sports car dealership showroom floor. All that in the name of saving the planet from overheating. (In that last case, dealership management just left them there, refusing to feed them or give them bowls into which to empty their bladders and bowels. Management just closed up and turned out the lights. Good for dealership management).
King Charles III, who ascended the British throne in the aftermath of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II’s, unfortunate death, is a zealous climate activist.
He said less than a year ago in a speech in front of the UN COP26,
The scale and scope of the threat we face call for a global systems level solution based on radically transforming our current fossil fuel based economy to one that is genuinely renewable and sustainable[.]
Global systems level.
I have a couple questions.
When was the last time Prince Charles traveled to India or to the People’s Republic of China to…encourage…them to join this global system of his?
Another installment, this one from Canada—Vancouver, BC.
That city has a brand new fire engine. It’s all electric: not a drop of evil hydrocarbon in it for fuel or any other power. Never mind that it can’t function as a fire engine. It’s ALL ELECTRIC. Yay.
[T]he new e-truck will cost $300,000 more than a comparable diesel model, pump 40 per cent less water and have such a short range (30 km) because of its enormous weight that it will have to have backup diesel power in case it runs out of juice on the way to a blaze.
But, the city points out, it won’t give off diesel fumes and will be much quieter than existing diesel fire trucks.
California has decided to ban all ICE car sales in the State by 2035—in the name of only zero-emission cars being allowed to be sold.
Never mind that it’s an impossible task, or that California, Washington, and Massachusetts are deceiving all of us and themselves with their claim of and demand for zero-emissions in cars sold in those States. This is, to use the technical term, a crock. Zero-emission cars are an impossibility, and it will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future of human history.
The Progressive-Democratic Party’s just passed Climate Correction Act/Inflation Reduction Act—Party can’t decide which it is—as doing wonders for Earth’s climate.
The Biden administration claims the law will enable the US to reduce carbon emissions in 2030 by around 40% below 2005 levels.
Environmentalist and Copenhagen Consensus President Bjorn Lomborg offered some actual data on the matter.
If you plug the predicted emissions decline into the climate model used for all major United Nations climate reports, it turns out the global temperature will be cut by only 0.0009 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. This is assuming the law’s emission reductions end when its funding does after 2030. But even if you charitably assume they’ll somehow be sustained through 2100 without any interruption, the impact on global temperature will still be almost unnoticeable, at 0.028 degree Fahrenheit.
Here is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal with the Build Reduced Back Act just passed unilaterally by Party in the Senate and about to be passed unilaterally by Party in the House, in a nutshell as summarized by the Wall Street Journal:
[It] won’t reduce inflation, won’t reduce the budget deficit, and it won’t reduce the world’s temperature. What it will do is transfer some $369 billion from taxpayers and drug companies to the pockets of green energy businesses and investors.
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section concerning net-zero and carbon emissions, a writer asks
When can we have an honest discussion of a plan to reduce carbon emissions?
We cannot until we have an honest discussion of the context of carbon emissions and why we should care about them. That context includes all the epochs of higher planetary temperatures and lush life, epochs of higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and lush life, and those separate sets of epochs’ lack of correlation with each other.
As even the wokest of the woke “Green” energy aficionados know, oil is at the heart of a modern economy, both for energy and for other products.
Also negatively impacted by the Greens’ attack on hydrocarbons:
Much is made of our current hydrocarbon-based energy and industry economy and the resulting pumping of carbon dioxide—CO2—into the atmosphere, with the supposedly bad planetary warming associated with that pumping.
Hydrogen production is being seriously looked at as a substitute source of energy, along with solar and wind energy production (although the extreme costs and environmental pollutions of the latter two are being ignored). Hydrogen, though, is supposed to be utterly clean: its only product from use, after all, is water.
Air Liquide, one of the three truly major producers of hydrogen for energy production use, for instance, believes that hydrogen will be