The oxygen of alarmism...?
Hi riverat, I see you are still plugging away at your lost cause. Nice to have you back though - quite like old times!
I can always rely on you for a weird side-stepping kind of argument. This time you have excelled yourself. You say:
"Oxygen is even more essential to OUR survival but I guarantee you wouldn't like the effects if we increased it by 40% in our atmosphere like we have CO2."
Who said we would like it? Apart from anything else the forests would all burn down. But you know (and I suspect you are hoping your readers mostly won't know) why this is such a terribly weak argument. Some facts: the first four constituents of the atmosphere are:
NITROGEN 780,840ppm (78%)
OXYGEN 209,460ppm (21%)
ARGON 9,340ppm (0.9%)
CO2 394ppm (0.04%)
Whilst increasing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere by 40% would clearly have a CATASTROPHIC effect, increasing the amount of CO2 in the same ratio would not even be noticeable because it is a trace gas (except that plants would grow faster, agriculture would have greater yields, and all sorts of other consequent good things would happen).
If you still are adhering to the strange notion that another 40% increase in CO2 from the 1750 pre-industrial baseline figure of 277ppm is going to produce a disaster, even though the last one from 1750 to 2011 generated diddly squat warming (around 1degC over 261 years) then just say so and we can all smile indulgently. But please don't try to pull off intellectually shallow comparisons like the one you just made.
.
