Ok, given that the above analogy is not at all accurate and poorly demonstrates a point, but at least I have your attention for a brief moment.
Never in a million years did I expect that one day I might agree with Australian Shock-Jock and Sydney-based neocon talkback radio host – Alan Jones, but… here I am… gobsmacked and speechless.
Well, not exactly speechless. I do have this to say…
Jones is absolutely correct in his analysis (if that is what it is) of the carbon dioxide content of the planet’s atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide actually makes up only around 400 millionths of the atmosphere. Which, if you are in any way mathematically inclined, is the same as saying it is 0.04%. And which, if you are not so mathematically inclined, could be said to be ‘peanuts’.
Granted you could make the argument that it is more accurately today something like 0.045% or even 0.05%. It doesn’t really matter since that is still ‘peanuts’, and it does not warrant all the fuss that is being made over carbon emissions – which are measured far less accurately than the atmospheric composition. Using Jones’ other analogy of a grain of sugar the current rounded proportion of 0.04% represents one grain out of every 250 such grains. This illuminates the gross inaccuracy of his Harbour Bridge comparison. But such is the stock-in-trade of radio Shock-Jocks. Nevertheless, it is still reasonable to say the CO2 ‘problem’ is no problem at all – at least in the terms in which it is currently phrased by climate alarmists.
The video clip from Wide Awake Media of Jones in action is taken from the ABC weekly TV show ‘Q and A’. I don’t know exactly when it was aired since I do not watch television these days, basing my knowledge of current affairs on more reliable evidence, but I assume it was perhaps in the last week or two.
Now for some more pertinent truth on the CO2 issue.
For many, many, millions of years now the Earth has been losing its atmospheric CO2 content. Until recent decades – since when the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been steadily growing – that falling CO2 level became drastically low, bottoming out at somewhere around 300 parts per million (ppm). It currently stands around the high 400s ppm. But even that rise is insufficient to sustain complex life on Earth in the long term and represents merely a quarter of what the CO2 levels were just a few tens of millions of years ago.
You may not have noticed that our planet is slowly desertifying, losing or limiting its capacity to sustain a sufficient level of verdancy (greenery) necessary to sustain balanced natural cycles (such as the water cycle) to produce sufficient oxygen (from vegetation – by consuming CO2) and fresh water to sustain the kind of life which relies on those things (i.e. us and others) over time. And, of course, and as a direct result of those effects, though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would admit it, becoming a major cause of the sort of wild weather effects and potentially other disturbances we see today.
So, what is our response to that situation? The most ludicrous response you could imagine. We have convinced ourselves that we need to add fuel to the fire by further reducing the already low levels of CO2 in our atmosphere. It is sheer madness!
We need, and quickly, at least three or four times the amount of CO2 than is currently present in the air we breathe, if we wish to survive much longer.
But how!!!?
No, no, no, no!! Not by ourselves doing anything (we are only good for messing things up). And anything we did do would not make the slightest difference anyway. Jones is right when he says the effect we are said to have already had on CO2 levels is only 3% of the 400ppm (that would be something like 12ppm – a truly infinitesimal amount). And it is fair to say our efforts so far have actually had no effect whatsoever, the ‘3% of the 400ppm’ being a fiction to massage our own arrogance.
We need do nothing. Simply leave it to nature to handle, while we concentrate on problems we can fix, like living in peace with each other.
So, we must assume that nature itself is entirely responsible for the whole of the rise from 300ppm to around 400ppm of atmospheric CO2. Let’s consider that for a moment. This has the appearance that nature herself, whether by sentience or simply the application of natural laws, has foreseen the problem facing at least some of her surface-resident life-forms and has applied or is in the process of applying an appropriate solution. And, since ‘there is nothing new under the Sun’ and we are aware that such happenings have occurred here before in the dim, distant past, we can safely rely on this being all that is needed – not necessarily for our own good (which would be our natural tendency to believe – since we so adore and value ourselves above anything else) but for the good of the planet. It being quite incidental that we may come through this experience as a viable species – or not.
I am still writing a piece which touches on these and other climate related issues. Still a WIP.
Not Something Else 