6 billion+ emitters of carbon dioxide!?

Question

If I remember correctly from my biology classes, whenever animals exhale, they are exhaling carbon dioxide. With over six billion humans, and how many billions of other animals on the planet, how much of the carbon dioxide being spewed into the environment is the result of simple breathing? Do we all need to start holding our breaths?

And along the same lines, I also remember hearing that plants require carbon dioxide to live. So if we do hold our breaths and are able to eliminate other sources of carbon dioxide emissions, how are the plants going to live?

According to your numbers, 6 billion people will exhale 4.8 trillion pounds of CO2 per year. If you are calling that insignificant, how can you continue to call CO2 a pollutant at all?

According to the below website, an average car puts out 8,000 pounds of CO2 per year, while the average person puts out 800 pounds of CO2 per year. According to worldwatch.org, in 2002 there were about 531 million cars in the world. That means, with there being more than 1000 times more people than there are cars in the world; over 500 billion pounds more CO2 is being put into the atmosphere by breathing than by car exhaust.

Answer 1

"we note that (1) an average person exhales approximately 2.2 pounds of CO2 per day, (2) the burning of one gallon of gasoline produces about 20 pounds of CO2, and (3) the world's volcanoes, on average, only emit about 3% as much CO2 as what is produced by anthropogenic activity. "

Looks like we can keep breathing for a while!

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/c/summaries/co2sources.jsp

Answer 2

its not the exhaled carbon dioxide that is the problem, its the carbon dioxide generated by burning fossil fuels oil 80+ million BBLs/day countless coal fired power plants to generate electricity, deforestation, thousand of refineries, plastics manufacturing plants, and so on. There is a great image of earth at night taken from space, lights sparkling, its very nice, but the lights cover the entire globe, there is not a single place without lights from human activity, except the Sahara and Antartica. As to the plants part of your question yes plants need carbon dioxide, but they dont need an increase in the levels of it.