Company line has been that CO2 is the cause of global warming. You have to forgive me, they keep shifting so fast it’s hard to keep up with the current narrative. As for you, don’t you find it repugnant all the misinformation in the name of politics and power?
Isn't it obvious??? Have I been too subtle again?? Geez, I guess I gotta work on that - become more outspoken, emphatic, and blatant!! Absolutely yes. By both sides. The bigger problem goes to ongoing sustainability - what can humans on this planet 'live with' when it comes to extremes - and typically, it leans more toward the tree-hugger side than the pro-nuke side. (I have said before, I am a tree hugger - probably not like you envision that, though, due to the warped/twisted picture painted by large corporate agricultural interests.)
There is so much still unknown BUT I do know for a fact that overall temperature has been climbing for a while - couple hundred years. Blip or trend? We won't live long enough to know for sure. A new variable has been thrown into it that is very disturbing - the CO2 level. In all those previous cycles, the range was about 200 to 280 ppm for the limits! We have been steadily going WAY past that for quite a while. Average is 400 ppm now! THAT if nothing else should raise a red flag that is deserving of a lot of attention - and I think it is getting the attention. It puts a huge wrinkle into all the models such that we have no basis for comparison - EVER!!
As I noted previously, what I feel will be the biggest manifestation of trouble will be with our primary food plants. While increased CO2 would nominally be a good thing, it will take a relatively small change in temperature to be absolutely catastrophic for us. We as a species cannot live using the current plant selections if the temperature gets above about 86 degrees. And it doesn't even have to get close to that on average - if it gets to daily averages of 86 or so in late May or early June, we are toast! No pollination, no crops. No 7 billion people on the planet. Why have pollinators disappeared to the tune of 95%+ ?? Are they the canary in the mineshaft for food production? (Cold spells have similar effects)
Will the species go extinct? Not likely, but we have been involved in extinction events that have lowered the human population to as low as 10,000 - 150,000 (estimates) planet-wide in very recent times - like 10 to 15,000 years ago. Who knows what went on 300,000 years ago with the early ancestors....? They existed, but probably not in large numbers.
So, we have seen just in recorded history, "little ice ages" and desertification, where massive famine and plague have blasted half the population. Now scale those percentages to 7 billion. We could end up with 3 + billion dead bodies laying around in just a handful of years very easily.
We should be treading much more lightly than we do....
Pollinators - I mentioned them in passing and that is a huge topic on it's own. I suspect, and there are some indications in this direction, that GMO foods have made a significant contribution to this problem. Big GMO goals - herbicide and pesticide resistance, so ever bigger doses can be applied to get rid of the "better" weeds and plant eating bugs we are creating using these chemicals. Kind of a similar interaction to the anti-biotic efficacy problems we are now enjoying due to massive overuse of anti-biotics. Plant gets sprayed with either herbicide or insecticide (both most of the time), bug eats it - dies. "Unintended consequence" event - pollinators also partake...also die. We have lost way too many!!
Doesn't help that urban residents have just gone totally insane over green, weed free, bug free lawns! Idiotic! "Bill of goods" sold by parasites! Done by fools! And contributing to the problem in a big way!
