Climate change. Please only serious answers.

Food for thought...

You can be environmentally friendly, and not believe in anthropogenic climate change. I believe we should do what we can to ensure the air is cleaner, that we aren't polluting our waters, etc.

But no one has ever produced real evidence that human CO2 output influences global temperatures. And I do understand the science of how infrared radiation excites the CO2 molecule, reflecting some of that infrared radiation in the form of heat back toward the earth.

Here's the thing...only 0.04% of the Earth's atmosphere is composed of CO2. It's a trace molecule. And human emissions contribute roughly to 3% of that. The collective effect on global temperature is infinitesimal.

The earth is 4.6 billion years old, and has been warming and cooling the entire time. Humans have been around for roughly 200K to 300K years. That's only 0.0065% of the planet's existence...that's the blink of a gnat's eyelash in the grand scheme. An insignificant amount of time to make an evaluation.

But we know the planet was significantly warmer during the medieval era based on agricultural changes. For example, the Romans had wine vineyards in the UK back then, but it's too cold to grow those same wine grapes today. And note, there were far fewer humans. It was a non-industrialized, agriculturally based era. Petroleum as an energy source hadn't been discovered. But there was a period of several centuries when the planet was warmer than today.

Perhaps the most damning evidence are the Vostok ice cores...once the battle cry of the climate change crowd, until the following was discovered.

There is a 400K-800K year span where they studied the relationship between changes in global temperature and atmospheric CO2. What they've found was that the changes in atmospheric CO2 follows the changes in global temperature. Opposite of the entire climate change premise.

And it makes sense when you consider that the greatest source of atmospheric CO2 comes from the ocean (75%-80%). As global temperatures warm the ocean, more CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The correlation between CO2 and global temperatures exists, but the cause and effect is largely backwards.

CO2 is a life enabling compound. If it were to get too low, everything would die.