Pray For CO2

It is bizarre to see all the world's leaders up in a tizzy over the alleged need to sequester CO2. If they had any sense they be praying for CO2 levels to double. It's the only way we can feed the world's exploding population. According to one of the world's leading climatologists, James Hansen, who testified in April 2007 before the U.S. Congress, by the year 2050 world population will increase from something over 6 billion to nearly 10 billion, a 50% increase. This is a crisis by anyone's reckoning. The question is, what to do about it? Now Hansen has a solution (of sorts). He says in order to feed the world's rapidly growing population we have to (1) increase the yield per acre for wheat and other seed crops, (2) do it with less fertilizer and (3) make all this happen while still using less water.

As perhaps Hansen himself realizes, this is asking too much. We have already had our Green Revolution. Given our current climate, there is not going to be any more great increases in crop yield. Further big increases are an impossibility. Well almost an impossibility. There actually is one way to get the kinds of yields necessary to feed the world's exploding population and that is to dramatically increase CO2 levels.

As every plant biologist knows, the more CO2 in the atmosphere the faster plants grow and the better they tolerate heat. Yields go up with less water and less fertilizer. The reason is that CO2 is not the pollutant that everyone nowdays sees to think it is. It's a great benefit to makind. It's a natural airborne fertilizer.

Right now the world's CO2 concentration is about 400 ppm. If this were to go up 80% to 700 parts for million the result would be a 30% increase in the agricultural productivity for leafy plants (vegetables, grasses and grains) and a 50% increase in productivity for woody ones (trees). If you intend to feed 10 billion people by 2050, the only way to do is to increase CO2. And yet when you go to leading scientists for the International Panel on Climate Change, like James Hansen, they are frantic to reduce CO2.

This is only only wrong, it's an unforgivable blunder. We can't reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. To do so is to invite disaster. Billions of people will starve. If we want to be able to feed 10 billion people in 2050, we would do everything possible to increase CO2, not reduce it. CO2 is the solution, not the problem. But only if we double it from our current levels.

As for all the other negative claims about CO2--that it's going to make the earth warmer, melt the glaciers, inundate the planet, drown the people, kill all the animals and result in the end of life as we know it--none of this is going to happen. From looking at ice cores in Greenland and Anrctica we know that the earth has gone though hundreds of warming periods in the last 300,000 years. The last time was a thousand years ago. It was called the Medieval Warm Period or the Medieval Climate Optimum. It was the best thing that ever happened to us.

Temperatures were three to 5° warmer than they are today. Food production soared, the population of Europe increased 50%, people were healthier, taller, their height shot up 2 inches. It was a huge boon to agriculture, architecture, art, culure, learning, invention and civilization in general.

And yet thanks to the media and certain scientists who have let their ideology run away with their common sense most educated people in this country are terrified of global warming. All around the country, schoolteachers, who ought to know better, are going into classrooms and giving kids these panicky one-sided accounts about the rapidly approaching end of the world. Whole classrooms have being thrown into panic. Kids wake up in their beds with nightmares. One father reported that when a helium balloon popped at a birthday party one boy burst into tears because he thought it would make the ozone hole bigger.

This is indefensible. There is no reason to terrify the children (or anyone for that matter). The planet is not on the verge of disaster. It's going through another one of its normal warming periods. Instead of scaring the kids, we should be telling them the truth--CO2 is good for plants, good for people and good for the planet.