Carbon Dioxide & The Kooks

No, "Carbon Dioxide & The Kooks" isn't a country music band.

It is a story of the climate change deniers who do not get the science about the carbon dioxide in the Earth's carbon cycle.

More recently it is a story by climate change scientists who confirm the important role carbon dioxide plays in the global warming of the Earth in our time:

Water vapor and clouds are the major contributors to Earth's greenhouse effect, but a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study shows that the planet's temperature ultimately depends on the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide.

(CO2 Controls Earth's Temperature, bold added). The deniers have wacky tales:

For a start, carbon dioxide is not the dreaded killer greenhouse gas that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol five years later cracked it up to be. It is, in fact, the most important airborne fertiliser in the world, and without it there would be no green plants at all.

That is because, as any schoolchild will tell you, plants take in carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of a little sunshine, convert them into complex carbon compounds - that we either eat, build with or just admire - and oxygen, which just happens to keep the rest of the planet alive.

(Junk Science, a website of S.J. Milloy, a Fox News columnist). It is just as invalid to say drowning can't happen because water is natural to the environment.

They do not seem to get the notion of excess, nor the notion of balance, thus, they can't fathom the reality of the dangers inherent in polluting ecological realms to get them out of balance.

Like a fine-tuned turbine that will destroy itself and anything near it if it looses balance, the ecosystem is a conglomeration of balanced cycles that depend on the other cycles it interacts with also staying balanced.

If an ecological cycle, such as the CO2/carbon cycle, goes out of balance it can take the others with it ("Ecosystems will fail if they do not remain in balance.").

Climate scientists intend to counter the junk science blather:

Hundreds of US scientists are joining a mass effort to speak out on climate change, experts said Monday after skeptics gained political ground with last week's Republican gains in Congress.

The moves signals a bold approach by scientists, typically reluctant to get involved in policy debates, as US President Barack Obama's efforts to set stricter penalties for polluters face near-certain defeat in the legislature.

(Terra Daily). The growing public danger from climate change deniers will be debunked until kookiness is more easily identifiable by non-scientists.

Pricing The Priceless At The Plantation

Historians have argued about whether or not slavery in the United States was economically efficient.

It is as if The Plantation Era is to be judged by the cost of a slave, since labor is a fundamental part of the cost of goods and services.

The bottom line is that we rejected slavery whether or not economists from Cygnus considered it to be efficient or inefficient, because we consider human life to be priceless.

A new plantation mentality has developed in the "economics" of environmental law, which basically "bargains" over the cost to be paid for human life.

When the Supreme Court said it was legal to use "cost benefit analysis" to decide environmental damage assessment, that court basically put a price on the heads of all members of civilization.

The Supreme Court is saying that it is legal to protect the environment so long as it does not cost big business too much money.

When a price is placed on the priceless environment it puts a price on the priceless human life that the environment makes possible.

Dredd Blog has pointed out the reality that the main function of human government should be to enforce the laws of nature, not to ignore them by passing human legislation at odds with the laws of nature.

This blog has also posted, in accord with that view, posts pointing out that it is delusional to think human law trumps natural law.

In the United States the return to a plantation mentality is a function of the federal judiciary, which has gone back to its 1930's configuration, a time when it was a right wing "institution".