Yes you suffer from a lack of education.
CO2 is necessary for photosynthesis (plant growth). But too much CO2 can be poison for plant growth.
What is the percentage of CO2 now and what percentage would poison the plants? As I have said about my visit to Fossil Butte NP, they claim CO2 was 20 times what it is presently in the distant past and apparently gave rise to the abundant life that ended up being the sequestered carbon in our fossil fuels. Do you know what level would be poisonous and are we close to that level?
IndyCA35: I heard from Rock Chuck on this. According to him we aren't even close to harmful levels of CO2 if I understood correctly. What do you say?
To be honest with you, Hastings, I don't know. My guess is that we could raise CO2 levels a lot more and there would still be lots of plant life, maybe even more than now.
The real problem is the other things that higher CO2 levels could cause. Specifically, raising the level of the oceans. Now if you melt the Arctic ice cap, it will not raise the sea level because the ice there is already floating in the ocean, as some have posted. But if you melt the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps, which are not floating in the sea, the melt water will flow into the oceans and raise the levels. Eventually a lot of people, as in millions, would have to move. There would be other changes. For instance, we have had a very rainy summer here but they've had droughts in the west. Was that caused by climate change? I don't know.
Whatever the cause, I think the Green New Deal stuff is a mistake. Forget windmills and solar panels. What we should do is emphasize nuclear energy. It's a lot safer than in Japan or Russia and it works. Better yet, we should launch a crash program to make hydrogen fusion (like a controlled H-bomb) work. the people working on that are very close to making it practical. The fuel would be water and the waste would not be radioactive.
Unfortunately, with jerks like Obama, Biden, and Kerry in charge, it's hard to make rational decisions without cheap short-term politics.
