A Very Short But Important Climate Change Primer #2

I want everyone to get to know the CO2 molecule really well before we talk about the wind turbines. I call it, "the Miracle Molecule".

Before we start, I want to apologize for talking so much about the lack of interest in the Card Counting tutorial. My purpose was not to get more upvotes, and I know I got some out of sympathy, but to let everyone know that I follow the interest you show in various posts very closely. I do this because it is important to me NOT to waste your time with posts that you have no interest in. I’m still considering closing down the Card Counting posts unless there are subscribers who want to see them through.

I knew up front that this was a fairly limited specialty area but I knew the mathematics of it was interesting to people who like these sorts of things and there are a good handful of you out there. I didn’t expect you to “board the next flight to Reno” as Eric and I did back in 1979 but if you do ever find yourself at a blackjack table- casinos are cropping up everywhere now- what you have already learned plus the basic strategy which I will teach you tonight- will allow you to play for a few hours for the entertainment value, without losing your shirt.

I’ll finish it out in about 4 days if people would like me to, mixed in with topics of more general interest such as Covid, Climate Change, and current events.

Today’s Climate Change Tutorial #2 is short and sweet. It will serve as another arrow in your quiver when you need to shut down a Climatista or two when they’ve carried on just a little too long about how man-made CO2 is causing the planet to burn up.

Having lots - relatively speaking- of CO2 in the atmosphere is a good thing. I’ve already shown (in Climate Change Primer #1) that it’s a miniscule amount that couldn’t possibly have much of an effect on global temperature. My claims have been born out by the data showing that while the CO2 doubled, the temperature only went up a degree or so (over a 100 year span). Furthermore, when you consider the amount man has any influence on, you have to multiply that miniscule amount by .03.

A few years ago in the Democratic Party’s Presidential Climate Change Town Hall, every candidate referred to CO2 as “poison” or “toxic”. They all used the expression “CO2 pollution”.

These are people who want to spend (according to Obama’s proposal for this century (with which they all agree), more than $100 Trillion to prevent the temperature from increasing less than one degree more than it would have if we hadn’t spent (more like wasted) the $100 Trillion WHEN WE DON’T EVEN KNOW IF GOING UPM THAT LESS THAN ONE DEGREE MORE WOULD MAKE QUALITY OF LIFE BETTER OR WORSE.

We do know that the last degree or so temperature increased over the last 100 years was an enormous benefit to us here on Earth. First of all, about ten times more people freeze to death every year than die because of high temperatures, so there’s that. Even the Democrats understand that quality of life diminishes rapidly when you die.

Then you have to look back to a time when the 20th century began. Life was really hard back then. The average family in the U.S., comprising 5 1/2 souls- it was 9 in 1800 and only 3.13 today- lived on $3,000 per year.

In today’s dollars…

Think about that for a second. Families didn’t have $3,000 to spend per year in 1900. What parents were able to provide for themselves and their 3 1/2 children in the way of food, clothing, shelter, the very occasional gift for mom and the children- perhaps a piece of candy at Christmas, was what $3,000 would buy TODAY FOR THE WHOLE YEAR, NOT what $3,000 would have bought back then. That’s $3,000/365 days = $8.2/5.5 people = $1.49 per person per day . To repeat, that’s $1.49 per person in the average family IN TODAY’S DOLLARS. Can you live on $1.49 a day considering you have to get your housing, food, shelter, and clothing from it?

I couldn’t. No chance, even if I was homeless and found a blanket and some clothes in a dumpster, collected rainwater to drink (on days that it rained), and ate what I found in the garbage. No chance.

I’d be sick all the time, basically, from poor nutrition, living in the elements and injuries (stepping on glass, falling down, teeth abscesses from never cleaning my teeth, etc., etc., and not being able to afford antibiotics.

Have you ever heard someone say (Please excuse the vulgar language), “He’s piss poor” or “He doesn’t have a pot to piss in”. These weren’t just expressions then. They were earnest descriptions of the kind of poverty people lived in back in the day. They were taken from a time when people were so poor, everyone in the family had to urinate into a big pot that would be taken at the end of the week to town where the father of that family (or the mother if she lost her husband) would sell urine they had collected over that week to leather-tanning shops. That’s what “piss poor” meant. When you didn’t have a pot to piss in, you were so poor, you couldn’t afford a pot.

Sure, there were rich people, like John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world at the time with something like $300 Billion in today’s dollars. But I can make a good case that someone on welfare nowadays lives better than he did in 1900 in most ways.

1. he drank dirty, very smelly yellow water filled with bacteria (it wasn’t until 1908 that we started putting chlorine in our water to disinfect it), 2) He rode around on muddy streets in carriages behind smelly horses, 3) If he needed surgery, sorry, NO ANESTHESIA. They made you drink a bottle of bourbon (but not John D. His religion forbade it) and four strong men held you down while the surgeon cut you open with a dull knife while awake (if drunk), screaming all the while. When they started using cocaine for anesthesia a lot of surgeons became addicts after performing “experiments” on themselves. “Here’s your surgeon. He’s strung out on cocaine now but he’s going to remove part of your liver where we think the problem is. He’s never had anyone survive it yet but, hey, the law of averages are in your favor, right? These four wrestlers will be holding you down. We will be using rolled up cow intestines we got from the slaughterhouse for suture material because nobody has invented electrocautery yet. Don’t worry, we rinsed the cow intestines off real good (in the bacteria-laden) smelly water and if you get an infection, we can cut your abscess open and drain the pus. (Sorry, no one has discovered antibiotics yet except for one that helps with syphilis. But we might pour some mercury and arsenic in your wound before we sew it up. They also work against STDs. If you bleed too much (we’re not sure exactly how much that is, exactly…sorry…, we’ll give you someone else’s blood and hope you don’t get a transfusion reaction. No one has thought of matching blood types yet… sorry…etc., etc. 4) No antibiotics. People died of simple bacterial infections that progressed to sepsis all the time or they got treated with mercury or arsenic. Both of these killed many patients treated this way. 5) He didn’t even have air conditioning, for god sakes, let alone an Obama phone.

Ok, Ok. Living was really hard in 1900. Life expectancy was only 46.3 for men and 48.3 for women. Would we have progressed to a higher quality of life had the temperature not gone up a degree? I don’t think so. Remember the debunked Malthusian book, “The Population Bomb”? The author’s theory was that we were going to have to limit the population because we weren’t going to have enough to eat.

Enter CO2 increases to save the day.

A couple dozen years ago, we reached the point where no one died of starvation any more (unless an African war-lord prevented food from getting to people for political reasons). By the early 2000s, people in Sudan ate a diet that was equivalent to what people ate in Portugal in the 1950s. We had solved world hunger thanks in no small part to CO2 increases.

That is, until lockdowns were put in place in 2020, disrupting the supply chains that distributed food all around the globe.

Starvation has returned with a vengeance. The W.H.O. predicts 140 million people will starve to death because of those disruptions by the time all is said and done. I’m talking about the same poor people in Sudan who were eating as well as circa 1950 Portuguese.

Speaking of yellow water, it’s very clean and clear today but it’s getting dangerously scarce, you could say, but mostly, that means expensive because we can always desalinate our oceans. Did you know that the more abundant CO2 is in the air, the less water plants need to grow?

You remember photosynthesis, the process that helps plants get through their dormant seasons by making sugar they can use for energy, don’t you?

Photosynthesis: CO2 + water + phosphate + chlorophyl/light → Sugar + oxygen

(6CO2 + 6H2O + P + chlorophyl/light → H6-O12-C6 + 6O2

Here’s the really great thing for those who value water: CO2 gets into plants not through the soil like water and other nutrients, but through pores in the leaves of the plant. As CO2 rises, the plants downregulate their pores. Fewer pores means less water loss through evaporation Thus having lots of CO2 in the atmosphere enables farmers to use less water to nourish their crops; water we can drink!

Not to mention this effect on non agricultural plants and trees.

CO2 is no poison. It’s a miracle molecule.