The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced two advertisements promoting carbon dioxide (C02) — that’s right promoting C02 — for American television. To watch the video’s click here.
The key theme is that C02 is life giving and not a pollutant. The fact that we breathe C02 out, and plants breathe C02 in, is repeated.
No reference is made to the elevated levels of C02 in the atmosphere as a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels. Is it on this basis that C02 has been labelled a pollutant? What is the definition of a pollutant? According to my dictionary it is something that “contaminates”.
I think I could mount an argument for both sides of this debate.
Beyond the elevated levels of carbon dioxide are going to change climate argument, it could be argued as long as it comes out of a car exhaust or chimney stack it is unnatural and therefore a pollutant regardless of concentration.
On the C02 is natural, “we call it life” side, I would ask the question what is the “correct” concentration of atmospheric C02?
Is climate change a moral issue, as much as a scientific issue?
Over at Real Climate the response to the videos has been more emotional than analytical, click here for the post. Though they make some good points regarding the second video and what’s happening to the world’s glaciers:
“They only discuss one scientific point which relates to whether ‘glaciers are melting’. Unsurprisingly, they don’t discuss the dramatic evidence of tropical glacier melting, the almost worldwide retreat of other mountain glaciers, the rapid acceleration of fringing glaciers on Greenland or the Antarctic peninsula. Neither do they mention that the preliminary gravity measurements imply that both Antarctica and Greenland appear to be net contributors to sea level rise. No. The only studies that they highlight are ones which demonstrate that in the interior of the ice shelves, there is actually some accumulation of snow (which clearly balances some of the fringing loss). These studies actually confirm climate model predictions that as the poles warm, water vapour there will increase and so, in general, will precipitation. In the extreme environments of the central ice sheets, it will not get warm enough to rain and so snowfall and accumulation are expected to increase.
To be sure, calculating the net balance of the ice sheets is difficult and given the uncertainties of different techniques (altimeters, gravity measurements, interferometers etc.) and the shortness of many of the records, it’s difficult to make very definitive statements about the present day situation. Our sense of the data is that Greenland is probably losing mass – the rapid wasting around the edge is larger than the accumulation in the center, whereas Antarctica in toto is a more difficult call.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.