MYTH 1: Increased levels of CO2 would prove harmful to life, health, and the planet.
FACT: CO2 is an essential component of life on this planet, without CO2, there would be no life here. Noted Agronomist Dr. Sylvan Wittier, who has studied crops and the effect of increased levels of CO2 on all plant life, states emphatically that increased levels of CO2 produces more growth (more food), more plant growth (trees, etc), and produces no adverse consequences. CO2 is not a pollutant and it’s intellectually dishonest to state that. From an agronomy standpoint, there is no known negative to increased levels of CO2.
MYTH2: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. However, the ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects") i.e. local heat retention due to urban sprawl, not global warming…and it is these, 'false high' ground readings which are then programmed into the disreputable climate models used by your favorite environmental groups such as Greenpeace, which live up to the GIGO acronym — Garbage In, Garbage Out.
MYTH 3: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, about 96.5% is water vapor and clouds, with the remainder being trace gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O. CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. And then the human portion of that 0.037% is incredibly small. But isn't CO2 the most important of the greenhouse gases? Nope. Not even close. Most of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, which is about 100 times as abundant in the atmosphere as CO2 and thus has a much larger effect. Water vapor is by far the most important and overwhelming greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention these important facts. CO2 is NOT a “powerful greenhouse gas,” as claimed by environmentalists. Water is the most powerful greenhouse gas, and CO2 and other trace gases are no more or no less “greenhouse” producing than is water.
MYTH 4: Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant.
FACT: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously.
MYTH 5: Reducing car use will cut carbon dioxide levels and save the planet!
FACT: The planet does not need saving from this mythical problem of CO2 emissions from cars, but taking this on anyway, removing every car from every road in every country overnight would NOT produce any change in the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere, and in any case it is pointless trying to alter climate by changing carbon dioxide levels as the cause and effect is the other way round! — It is changes in the activity of the Sun that cause temperature changes on earth, with any temperature rise causing carbon dioxide to de-gas from the oceans.
MYTH 6: Receding glaciers, the calving of ice shelves, and the shrinking of snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro are proof of global warming.
FACT: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating. It’s normal. Besides, glacier's health is dependent as much on precipitation as on temperature. What you see on your television newscasts are images of the annual summer melt off, which happens every single year and is nothing new.
Global warming is not melting Mt. Kilimanjaro's alpine glacier. Temperatures at Mt. Kilimanjaro have been slightly cooling since at least the middle of the twentieth century, and those temperatures virtually never rise above freezing. Scientists have long known that deforestation at the base of the mountain is causing the mountaintop glacier to shrink, by reducing the moisture and resultant precipitation in mountain updrafts.
MYTH 7: The earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.
FACT: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be gotten somewhat warmer last century, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. And now the western Arctic is cooling again. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica.
Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.
MYTH 8: There are only a tiny handful of maverick scientists who dispute that man-made global warming theory is true.
FACT: There are literally tens of thousands of signatures from scientists worldwide on many petitions, ranging from the Oregon Petition Project, the Manhattan Declaration, all the way to the Leipzig Declaration which all state that there is no evidence for the man-made global warming theory nor is there any impact from mankind’s activities on climate. Many scientists are now dissenting against Al Gore and the IPCC and strongly believe that the Kyoto agreement is a total waste of time, expensive, dangerous and one of the biggest political scams ever perpetrated on the public … as H L Mencken said "The fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" … the desire to save the world usually fronts a desire to rule it. Of the scientists who support the climate change theory, many are on payrolls of government agencies and others are simply securing their funding. The consensus is clear: Man-made climate change is a hoax. Pro-global warming scientists spend great effort in attempting to control the dissemination of the information on this and related topics.
MYTH 9: It's never been warmer in the past.
FACT: We are in a relatively cool period and it used to be much warmer over countless periods in the past. Even just a few hundred years ago, the Vikings used to live in parts of Greenland without snow, and vineyards flourished in the North of London! There is nothing apocalyptic about warmer temperatures, in fact it's quite the opposite. In the UK, every mild winter saves 20,000 cold-related deaths, and scaled up over northern Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. Sensible people should be cheering any rise in global temperatures, there would be less death, less disease, and less suffering by the people who live on this planet.
MYTH 10: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no evidence that CO2 is a measurable driver of global warming, let alone the tiny amount released by humankind. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Upwards of 97% of the atmospheric CO2 comes not from man, but from the oceans, plants, and other forms of life.
Effectively, the man-made global warming theorists have put effect before cause — this completely debunks the entire global warming theory and shows that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a futile exercise! There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.
To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 has any effect on global warming or can cause "climate change". However, there is plenty of scientific proof that the Earth has been cooling while CO2 has risen, and that increased CO2 is very beneficial to our planet.
THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT
Over 95 percent of the Greenhouse Effect is the result of atmospheric water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. But because water droplets held in suspension (clouds) make almost as good a reflector as they do a thermal insulator, there is little rise in daytime temperatures due to the Greenhouse Effect.
Any greenhouse warming, if it does occur, is limited to primarily increasing nighttime temperatures, which provides beneficial moderation of nighttime low temperatures, but no increase in daytime high temperatures. Without the “greenhouse effect,” there would not be life on this planet. The greenhouse effect keep temperatures moderate and livable. To demonize the “greenhouse effect” is also intellectually dishonest.
The biggest source of greenhouse gas is our oceans. Furthermore, animals and volcanoes produce so much CO2 that it completely dwarfs mankind’s insignificantly tiny emissions.
Some of the foregoing data is contributed by co2science.org
