All plants need CO2 to live. That is my evidence.
By that logic:
Global warming > melting polar ice caps > more water > all people need water to live > thriving people.
I don't particularly want to debate you on whether climate change is due to human influence, simply because I think that at this point that fact is moot - it doesn't matter whether humans are causing it, we have to deal with it at this point whether we're the cause or not.
The problem of climate change is that the climate of the Earth is not simple...and therefore simple predictions like "more CO2 > more plants > more food" just don't matter.
The various species (all forms of life) that inhabit the Earth's biosphere are specifically adapted to their climate. Changes in local environments lead to mass migrations and die-offs...but when we take the scale
global, we see all hell break loose. The biosphere is a complex set of
interrelated and
interdependent balanced ecosystems.
Let's provide a single example:
In the Gulf of Mexico today, there are "dead zones." These "dead zones" were not caused by the recent oil spills - they are older than that.
They are the result of algae blooms - increased plant growth due to excess fertilizer runoff, basically - not terribly different from what one would imagine if increased atmospheric CO2 actually leads directly to increased plant growth.
The problem is that plants, including algae, produce oxygen.
THis is a problem because oxygen (beyond a certain level) is
toxic... as well as the fact that the process is unrestrained and the algae consume
all of the CO2 in the "dead zones" until all
other plants die off.
The result is that the ecosystem in these regions is completely disrupted from the ground up, killing
everything in hundred-mile areas of the ocean. All from an unintended and unforseen consequence of using fertilizer to grow more crops for humans.
What will the results of increased CO2 in the atmosphere be, leaving aside the greenhouse effect?
I don't know, and neither do you, except that we know that it will disrupt the delicate balance of a complex series of interdependent ecologies upon which human life depends.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.
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