What is the biggest problem with the claim that CO2 is a pollutant and causes global warming?

Question

This question is based on science so look at the actuall properties of CO2.

The students at the local High school did an experiment with some very interesting results. And just so you know their teacher is a proponent of global warming so there initial grade was not good, a "D". However when they appealed it to the school board the project was upped to an "A" after being reviewed by other teachers. Would that be considered peer review?

The responses are too funny.

Ok .... the students made a box and sealed it. Inside the box they placed a temp sensor. They took measurements for 10 days, raising and lowering the temperature around the box, recording the temp in the box. After 10 days they cycled the air in the box and brought the CO2 content of the box to aproximately 60% +or- 5%. And measured the temp for 10 days, raising and lowering the temp outside the box. With the exact same fluctuations for the exacts same amounts of time with the exact same temps(+or- 5%) the temp sensor in the box read an average temp of -2 degrease less the the readings before puting in the CO2. The box did not retain as much heat with more CO2.

But I'm sure since the proponents of global warming are so much smarter than the rest of the world they have a good explanation for this, or they will deny it all together. Thats ok though.

Answer 1

Carbon dioxide a pollutant, by jove Ronald Reagan was right afterall when he said "trees cause pollution." We laughed at his ignorance back then, but now he would be an Al Gore scientist and genius!!! Give Ron his props!!!

Answer 2

Strictly speaking , no , peer review would have involved the other students grading each other's work.

As far as global warming is concerned, look, it's like this. CO2 needs to be REGULATED, since we only regulate things that cause polution. Unless you'd just like to start regulating EVERYTHING. So yeah, make CO2 a regulated gas, make people who put more of it in the atmosphere pay for doing so.

Deniers of global warming will be debating the merits of global warming theory long after the US can't feed itself anymore, or you have to go to Canada to get a drink of uncontaminated water, because the US is about 5-10 years from turning into another dustbowl , and we probably don't have that long. It will be LONG before all the glaciers melt , or NYC is under water.

About 1/2 of the country already has water restrictions or some such. ALL of what used to be temparate parts of Australia are now seeing water restrictions which would make US citizens blanche.

How will you like it when your whole family of four wins the local "contest" to see if you can live comfortably on 200 gallons of water, per week.

As far as OIL is concerned, you don't need to worry to much, the price will shoot to 4 , 5 or 6$ a gallon and pretty much the only people able to AFFORD to drive to work will be Prius owners, there will be millions of Americans "trapped" in the suburbs.

Have fun. But you're the sucker that's been played into not thinking there's more than a few serious problems that WE ARE NOT dealing with.

Answer 3

No, this is not peer review. Usually by "peer review" we mean scientists reviewing other scientists' papers. If you want to extend that to this situation, peer review would be other students reviewing this project. It's not even expert review, since it's just "other teachers". What kind of teachers?

The first teacher was probably correct in his grade (though D may be harsh, I guess that depends on how well it was presented). CO2 is a greenhouse gas - that's an established fact. Its global warming potential has been measured and is the standard by which other molecules' global warming potential is measured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

If these kids found that CO2 doesn't have a global warming potential (or has a negative, or global cooling potential) then clearly their experiment was flawed. What kind of box did they use? If it was opaque and didn't let sunlight through, then of course it wouldn't be measuring global warming potential.

The other teachers shouldn't have intervened, because scientifically this was clearly a flawed experiment.

Answer 4

Doing a "box" experiment won't simulate it. The theory is that CO2 traps heat from the sun.

As far as a problem with the CO2 claim, here's one. Everyone knows that plants use CO2, and convert it to oxygen. Many scientists believe that an increase in CO2 will cause an increase in plant life. And, the extra plants will use up the CO2, restoring things to a natural balance.

Answer 5

If CO2 was a real bad pollutant I think mankind would already be dead. Since man breathes in air and then exhales CO2.

Answer 6

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Relatively simple laboratory tests can easily confirm this. So I don't know what sort of experiment these high school students did but I'm sure it didn't show anything contrary to what scientists are already saying.

And no, the test being reviewed by several high school teachers would hardly be considered peer review.

Answer 7

The biologic process of photosynthesis removes CO2 from the atmosphere and releases O2 (oxygen). The more trees you have, the less CO2.

Answer 8

Co2 is not a pollutant. It is food for plants, and essential to all life on earth.

Co2 is a greenhouse gas, but a minor one. Alone it is not enough to cause the major temperature increases that they predict. What they claim is that co2 is going to amplify the effects of water vapour. That is based on theory and speculation.

The growing body of evidence is showing that it is the sun that is the primary driver of the 20th century warming. Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa converted from believer in C02 driving the climate change to a skeptic. “[My conversion from believer to climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator),” Patterson explained. “Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances,” he wrote. “As the proxy results began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles. About that time, [geochemist] Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how solar signals could be amplified and control climate,” Patterson noted. Patterson says his conversion “probably cost me a lot of grant money. However, as a scientist I go where the science takes me and not were activists want me to go.” Patterson now asserts that more and more scientists are converting to climate skeptics. "When I go to a scientific meeting, there's lots of opinion out there, there's lots of discussion (about climate change). I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority,”

Critics of the theory only focus that the sun's energy
output through an 11-year sunspot cycle varies only by around 0.1 percent. This energy output variability is
insufficient on it's own, to cause the 0.6 degree Celsius increase in global temperature observed through the 20th
century. It is the by product of the increase in the sun's output, solar flares, and its interaction with cosmic rays and cloud formation that is the cause. You can read a detailed explanation here: http://www.geocraft.com/wvfossils/refere...

Answer 9

Without knowing what the uncontrolled highschool experiment was, how can we respond?

Anonymous is such a great source of information.

Do you have the actual article?