Is It Warm In Here...Or Just Me?

Ask the typical Harvard grad: "Where do trees get the stuff they're made of?" Nine out of ten will tell you "From the ground!" But you can say "Nope, from the air. From carbon dioxide!"

You can ask the typical American: "How much of the air is carbon dioxide?" And you'll hear answers of anywhere from 2% to 50%. But that's wrong, too.

It's less than that. MUCH less. CO2 makes up only 0.0385% of Earth's atmosphere. And it has risen from 0.0290% in the past hundred years. That's a total change to the atmosphere of less than 1/10th of 1%. Whoop-de-doo!

Let's put that in perspective: Suppose the atmosphere were a $100 bill. CO2 would make up just 3 cents of that amount. If I told you that at the beginning of the 20th century you had $100 and 3 cents in your bank account and 100 years later you had $100 and 4 cents, would you say "OMG, my account balance is rising dramatically!"? I don't think so.

Not only is CO2 a puny component of Earth's atmosphere, man's contribution to that sum of CO2 is insignificant compared to "natural" sources of CO2 (volcanoes, plants, animals and even bacteria). We humans -- even with all our cars, factories, and farms -- contribute only about 5% to Earth's store of CO2. That means if we utterly ceased to exist, 19/20th's of all the CO2 in the world would STILL be pumping away into the atmosphere...naturally. (And remember, that's 19/20th of the 0.0385%!)

The world's oceans dwarf all other sources of CO2. There is 50-60 times more CO2 in the oceans than in Earth's atmosphere. And when Earth warms up, that CO2 comes out of solution. (If Al Gore had gotten higher than C's and D's in his college physical science classes, he'd know that the solubility of gas decreases in warmer liquids.)

What Al neglects to tell -- in fact, what he refuses to reveal because it DESTROYS his whole "man-made global warming" argument -- is that the earth ALWAYS gets warmer BEFORE CO2 levels rise. That's because warmer oceans RELEASE CO2 as the SUN warms the earth. It is NEVER the reverse.

Other planets in our solar system (Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, etc.) have likewise warmed during the past 100 years. Did we cause those temperature increases too, Al?

Give me a break!