There is an opinion expressed at the top of the page on that link which, on the surface, appears summary and conclusive without immediate reference to an awful lot of scientific analysis, interpretation & explanation of backing data and so forth. That's not to say that it's incorrect--merely that as presented it's more of a blunt instrument to club with and not provided as a serious presentation to be debated. Comments follow.
The first such comment begins with this statement:
"CO2 is about 1/3 of one percent of air. Without CO2, the earth would be minus 18 C. Obviously CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas."
...which starts with a pretty horrible error: The current CO2 fraction in parts per million is 385 (just checked Mauna Loa).
100%=1,000,000 ppm
10%=100,000 ppm
1%=10,000 ppm
1/10%=1,000 ppm
1/3 of 1/10%=333 ppm
So, that comment's very first sentence is in error by an order of magnitude. I'm sorry, but I can't get very excited about it as a serious debate on the subject under those circumstances. To me, that webpage only really conveys the passion that people seem to have in arguing the debate in the first place. Worse, most don't even seem to have a good grip on the subject, either.
That thing about the original premise in the beginning statement that bugs me the most, though, is using that damn chart to imply that global warming is caused solely by CO2. Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. That's a mantra--say it when you wake up every morning. Of all the arguments over that graph and variations thereof, have you ever heard anyone say anything about the CO2 getting washed out of the atmosphere by precipitation?
Carbon Dioxide is soluble in water, where a lot of it becomes carbonic acid. Some of that eventually ends up as rock, for instance, like calcium carbonate, the stuff of a lot of stalagmites and stalactites. What I'm saying is that there's an awful lot of room for absorption of CO2 in the earth's crust and mineral precipitates. It doesn't just continue to accumulate in the atmosphere--it disappears. That's why it tracks downward with the temperature on that graph.
The most probable reason why it tracks upward with the largescale temperature increases is that the quantity of animal life on the planet was going up. Oh, yeah, you hear (read) all that crap about the ice melting and releasing contained CO2 but that's missing the big picture. CO2 levels are more like a proxy for the amount of animal life on the planet--raise the temperature and life begins to expand beyond the equatorial regions, spreading the CO2 with it.
Tell you what... let's say for the sake of argument that we could get Oreck (Hoover, Kirby, Electrolux, take your pick... ) to create a SuperDuperCO2Sucker that could start vacuuming CO2 out of the atmosphere and we could bring the level down to a pre-industrial age level within the year. Do you realize that the most probable immediate consequence would be starvation of a very significant portion of our current population? That scenario could happen because there would likely be a very noticeable drop in crop yields.
Now, frankly, I think there's a lot of consensus that we can't sustain the current amount of population without oil anyhow and that most predictions in serious scientific circles portend that the population will adjust down to a range of from 1/3-ish to as bad as 1/17-ish of its current number during what's sometimes called the "slide to the post-industrial stone age". You can google "
olduvai theory".
Pidgey
