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by woliveirajr 272 days ago
Perfect. It should be no surprise but sometimes it is: some people get really surprised when they discover that higher temperatures, extra light and more CO2 make plants bigger. Or when they find out that pre-historical times had less oxygen and more CO2.

CO2 is so demonized that people forget that it's essential to life (at least, to some forms of life).

3 comments

I don’t think any credible person is saying CO2 is dangerous to life.

The changes to the climate can disrupt things like ocean currents to disastrous effect. Atmospheric gas won’t kill anyone, we’ll kill each other over access to resources like food and water.

CO2 isn’t demonized. People focus on the harms because the beneficial aspects are well known, not argued, and not particularly relevant when making pretty much any real-world decision.
It’s not that more CO2 is bad it’s that the rate of change is faster than any time in the geologic history of earth. And every mass extinction including the dinosaurs involved abrupt changes to CO2 levels. Every living thing is made out of carbon that came from CO2. Every scientist studying climate change knows this. But every organism on this planet evolved for ice age like conditions and in the span of 200 years we turned the earth’s thermostat from Ice Age to Hot House