Do animals such as cows increase CO2 levels?

@ArishMell You forgot about where they got that carbon. It is from plants. Where do the plants get their carbon? From the animals. it is a closed loop. You can't increase what is only being recycled.

@hippyjoe1955 No, I didn't forget at all. You'd already stated it; but there are two cycles in action. The one you mean - making protein - and respiration.

Normally of course, all more or less in balance.

@ArishMell There is only one cycle. the CO2 animals breathe out or methane that they expell is greeted with joy by the plants. The fact is that CO2 levels have been dropping for a very long time as the formation of coal and coral etc take the CO2 out of the cycle. According to the big brains the CO2 was at critical levels for plant survival and with the small increase brought about by mankind the plants are thriving. More plants mean more animals. The earth is a funny thing. The more it is used the healthier it becomes.

@hippyjoe1955 Used... or abused.

The problem with coal of course is that having locked a lot of carbon up for millions of years, we have burnt vast quantities to put more carbon-dioxide back into the atmosphere than the present vegetation can take up.

@ArishMell Actually we have not burned that much at all. Kind of funny how little we have actually used. The entire province of Alberta is sitting on 6 feet of coal. Enough coal to meet all of North America's energy demand for 350 years. Where did that coal come from? How much CO2 is captured in it and how much do you think we have burned in the last 100 years in comparison to what is stored there? So if the earth did not burn up when all that CO2 in coal and coral was free CO2 why would it suddenly burn up when we raise the CO2 levels one or two parts per million? Something doesn't add up there.

@hippyjoe1955 I didn't say we've burnt all the coal; just burnt enough for scientists 100 years ago to start calculating the possible effects. They were largely ignored because at the time coal was pretty much the universal fuel, and they used contemporary consumption figues that put the danger point so far ahead that understandably, no-one thought much of it.

Also of course, until really into the second half of the 20C there was a touching faith in ever more technical progress and a curious belief about "taming Nature". There's a phrase not heard for decades now, 'cos we've learnt we can't "tame Nature"! We can bite it though - and it will bite back, harder.

The Earth is not "burning up". The Coal Measures were laid down in tropical to sub-tropical conditions. Coal is nearly all carbon, basically fossil peat and decayed wood; so by burning it we convert most of it to carbon-dioxide. Left alone, it would stay buried as a rock.

@ArishMell Yeah and they thought that you could tell someone's personality by looking at the bumps on your head too. Science is not a guide to anything and changes more often than my wife changes her clothes which happens at least once daily. The fact is there is nothing to the hoax. CO2 is not a driver of climate and never was.

@hippyjoe1955 If you despise science so much, why do you, and why are using the Internet ?

@ArishMell I am simply pointing out that science is the act of questioning. It is not the act of accepting what others say is true. Take for instance the science that said the earth was flat or the science that said you could understand a personality by looking at the bumps on his head or the science that says COVID was a mass killer and therefore you must wear masks and stand 6 feet apart and must inject an untested vax to prevent its spread. Or the science that says life came from non life for no reason and through undirected agency.

@ArishMell Here is a little thought experiment for you. You have 10 gallons of water in a 10 gallon bucket. How much more water would you have if you had a 20 gallon bucket? The obvious answer is none. You only have 10 gallons of water regardless of the size of the bucket it is in. The same is true of CO2 and heat. CO2 only absorbs a tiny fraction of the IR spectrum. In fact it captures all of that radiation now. So if all the heat is captured by 400 ppm of CO2 how much more heat would be captured if the CO2 was at 800 ppm? Obviously none. There is no more heat to capture. IOW CO2 despite its terrible reputation is not a driver of climate change. The earth's orbit the activity of the sun are the drivers of climate change as we can observe by past warm and cold periods when man was not putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Yes there were ice ages and yest it was much warmer during Roman times than it is now. It was also warmer during the Viking times. But climate changes and it can not be shown that mankind is any kind of influence on said change.

@hippyjoe1955 The concept of climate-change by human activities arose from examining evidence of past cold and warm times and their rates of change.

The CO2 does not itself capture the Sun's heat, though the atmosphere as a whole warms. Instead it acts like a shield, or the glass of a greenhouse, preventing heat being radiated back into Space.

Indeed it is called a greenhouse gas because that is what it is doing: allowing UV light from the Sun through, but when that energy is re-radiated as Infra-red radiation (heat) the CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere traps some of it. Though this has always happened naturally the natural rates of change are far lower than what we are seeing now because we have spent the last 200 years pouring larger, and increasingly larger, volumes of the stuff into the air than would normally happen.

This was predicted long ago but ignored until only very recently.

@ArishMell The idea is that CO2 is 'excited' by a narrow band if IR radiation. It is not about trapping heat since heat from air is dissipated into space when the sun sets. There is nothing magical about CO2 that keeps more heat than oxygen or nitrogen and as a trace gas even if it did it would so miniscule we couldn't measure it. Water vapour is much more heat/cooling blanket than any of the invisible gases combined and we are doing nothing to control it.....

@hippyjoe1955 yes,water-vapaour is more effective than CO2 but we can't do anything about that. We can though stop converting carbon into carbon-dioxide, or more sensibly greatly diminish its use, and that is what most countries are trying to do.

Whether they are going about it in the right way is another matter, but at least they are making the attempt.

@ArishMell CO2 is not a driver of climate change. It is plant food. More CO2 = more plants. More plants = more animals. Adding C02 is a net benefit. Give a listen to Dr Patrick Moore founder of Green Peace. You can find his talks on YouTube. Interesting man.