Correcting the Climate Curriculum for Schools: accentuate the positive on CO2

The facile labelling of rising CO2 levels as an imminent threat to our wellbeing is the basis of a great deal of scaremongering, including in materials aimed at children.  The swing to alarmism has been dramatic and will be corrected in due course as the climate system continues to behave as if the rising CO2 does not matter very much.  Just as you might expect for a trace gas which is a minor contributor to the atmospheric heat engine as it occupies itself with transferring heat to the poles each day.

Here is a new campaign which does indeed look on the bright side as far as CO2 is concerned - the Carbon Positive Campaign (hat-tip Greenie Watch).

I must say this appeals to me as a powerful counter to the relentless alarmism that has contaminated our mass media, our political affairs, and indeed educational materials and events for children. 

The campaign comes from here: http://climateofsophistry.com/2013/02/12/carbon-positive-campaign/, and I will reproduce that post below.  As and when an outstanding curriculum on climate for schools is constructed, it will in my view include elements of this.

The Carbon Positive Campaign

Please join the fun, exciting, life-affirming, environment benefiting, life-creating campaign for carbon dioxide!

The Carbon Positive Campaign!

Within 50 years, in the time of our children and grand-children, we will have improved the environment and created a lush, green, productive, life-filled planet Earth with all of the beneficial green plant food carbon dioxide we are re-adding and giving back to the environment.

The carbon that is currently trapped in hydrocarbon fuels used to be life!  It used to be carbon circulating in the global biospheric process of life, and sustained a lush, green planet, that could support huge creatures like dinosaurs in the past.  Today, that carbon-based life has been trapped underground and has formed hydrocarbon fuels that humans can access.  Humans get to use that old carbon, which has turned into hydrocarbon fuel, for benefiting our standard of life and relieving poverty on a global scale, and enriching human livelihood in general with the energy it provides.  That hydrocarbon fuel has supported a tremendous and enriching transformation and development of human society in the last hundred years.

For the last few millions years, the carbon dioxide concentration in the air was getting so low that plant life was almost ready to stop being able to perform photosynthesis!  This would have spelled the extinction of almost all life on the planet, and this extinction would have been global and possibly permanent!  It was a very close call.  Luckily, by the grace of God, evolution, Gaia, or whatever you would like to believe – even convenient and lucky happenstance – humans came along at just the right geological time-period to return that trapped life, carbon, back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide where it can then turn back into plants and sustain new and more life.  Isn’t it amazing?

It is the most wonderful win-win situation that nature could have provided for us.  We get cheap, beneficial, life-enriching energy, and the environment gets back its own source of fuel.  It is exactly like how animals and humans breathe out carbon dioxide, and then plants turn around and breathe it in as food, and then produce oxygen for us to breath again.  The circle of life.  Except now, we’ve industrialized that process and are returning much more food back to the environment where it is supposed to be, and where it can do some good in creating new life.  We’re giving back the breathe of life by using hydrocarbons and giving carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere, and this new carbon dioxide can now go back into real, living life, in the present and future.

We can use this wealth supplied by hydrocarbons and the time it gives us to develop new, future-oriented sources of power such as advanced nuclear, fusion, and whatever power generation technology science might invent, because eventually hydrocarbon fuels may become too limited to provide the energy requirements we desire.  And when we get to that point, we will be able to always look back and think of all the good that we did for the environment by reinvigorating it with its own carbon dioxide – carbon that had been trapped away from its use in creating and being life.

Please help spread the word of this fantastic news and fantastic science!

The author of this is Joseph Postma, and he provides some background on his thinking in the About section of his blog.  Here is an extract:

 'I got interested in the climate science debate because I used to believe in anthropogenic global warming and climate change.  I naturally enjoy debate and independent learning and so I wanted to understand the science of global warming, so that I could communicate and debate against “deniers” more knowledgeably.  However, I experienced one of the greatest shocks and re-evaluations of my world-view when I discovered that the science which underlies global warming and anthropogenic climate change isn’t good science at all, but it is better described merely as the appearance of doing science.  Ultimately, I have scientifically concluded that global warming is an invented scheme for political control via manufactured politics using manufactured science, blaming everything on carbon dioxide which is actually the greenest and most environmentally-friendly gas there is.  My research on climate (pseudo) science has actually uncovered a very humorous irony: the true “deniers” and “flat earthers” in the climate change debate are the people who believe in the greenhouse effect!  They’re the people who deny that the climate changes naturally without humans, and that it changes at rates and magnitudes far greater than we are experiencing in modern times!  This has all been proven scientifically and all of the science actually proves that modern changes are rather benign and unimportant, but the alarmist and greenie ideologues continue to deny the science, and they have billions of dollars of charity money from oil companies and environmental organizations to continue to publicize their political reinterpretation (i.e. invention) of the actual scientific results.'