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Comment by garyclarke27 | Hacker News Reader

Yes CO2 emmisions have obviously dropped. Interestingly levels of most pollutants measurable in the atmosphere have dropped sharply, whilst CO2 levels have continued to rise, ie the crisis has had zero effect on CO2. Joe Bastardi (weather genius) explains that this is because most CO2 comes from the ocean, not mankind. He also reminds us that recent warming simce the cool 70’s is mostly driven by slight increases in water vapour in the arctic regions, where it has a dramatic effect, because they are so dry and so cold. Maybe time to revist those pseudo scientific, crystal ball gazing, climate models, the ones that have to keep postponing their predictions of doom and catastrophe - kind of similar to the recent pandemic models - which have also driven ruinessly expensive policy making.

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Climate models take into account the oceans; and predict pretty well https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

If there was some way of letting you stand on the train tracks while I stood next to it, I would argue that rumbling might be a train so maybe don’t stand there. But in this analogy I still argue but you hold me onto the tracks with you; what is it you really stand for?

Can’t reply to the dead post. But in case the author wanted to learn something:

Yes you are correct, most carbon is cycled through the oceans. Problem is that we’ve been moving non-cycling carbon from fossils sources into that cycle.

Here’s a good animated model https://youtu.be/dwVsD9CiokY

In this case it doesn't matter, because the tracks are long since abandoned and there are no trains coming. Once the UN updates their "facts" to reflect the actual facts and no longer promotes climate hysteria, will you stop screaming about the impending train coming to mow us down?

> most CO2 comes from the ocean, not mankind

This is either a straight falsehood or a misleading claim about net CO2.

I don't know what the original commenter said, or whether it deserved to be flagged, but it's undeniably true that human emissions only account for 5% of the planet's total emissions.

No, just no. The planet doesn't have "emissions". It has a carbon cycle, a vast and complex network of producers and consumers that ultimately reach a balance where atmospheric concentrations have been relatively stable for hundreds of thousands of years. We have added to the total carbon by burning trillions of tons of trapped carbon and have cumulatively pushed the concentration of CO2 to levels not seen in millions of years. We have completely and totally overwhelmed the carbon cycle with our additional emissions.

So by your own admission, the carbon cycle contains producers.

So it is not a lie to point out that human emissions are a small percentage of total emissions.

Bringing up the rest of the information about the carbon cycle does not turn the previous true statement into a false statement.

> Bringing up the rest of the information about the carbon cycle does not turn the previous true statement into a false statement.

I am pointing out how your framing is misleading to the point of being intentionally deceptive. It doesn't matter if it is 1% or 0.1% of the rest of the "producers". Our emissions are in excess; they overwhelm the balance of the carbon cycle and we 100% own the cumulative increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. You can't blame volcanoes or cow farts because the cycle has run just fine with them for millions of years.

>You can't blame volcanoes or cow farts because the cycle has run just fine with them for millions of years.

But I can ask questions like "is the environment so unstable that a 5% change will push the balance out of equilibrium? Have cow farts and volcanos really been so stable over millions of years? Are there other negative feedbacks that we're missing? Why can't we focus on modifying the 95% of producers or 100% of consumers instead of focusing on crashing our economy over the 5% of CO2 that we make?" Etc.

It's one thing to point to a true fact and explain why it doesn't come to a conclusion that you think people think it implies. It's another thing to have a comment flagged for deletion because it brings up facts that run counter to a certain narrative.

The idea that a statement of truth is labelled as "intentionally deceptive" by certain people with an agenda is a tremendous red flag for outside observers.

You are welcome to ask any questions you like, at the risk of continually dragging the discussion back to remedial things that have been addressed, at length and in detail, to very high confidence, by hundreds of papers. It's hard to distinguish sometimes between honest questions out of curiosity and active disruption campaigns by highly motivated trolls. I'm not calling you a troll here, but I've seen so many discussions about this topic that TBH the kinds of questions you ask and the manner in which you persist set off alarm bells, especially bringing up the red herring about economic impacts, which belies a different set of priorities besides an interest in the details of our impact on climate. As such I am less inclined to engage with you and instead would point you to reading detailed materials that address your questions (spoiler alert: this 5% you continue to hammer on is not the cumulative number, but nevertheless, yes, absolutely, the climate is very sensitive to CO2 levels and we have already experienced warming due to it, and have already locked in future warming because of where we have pushed CO2 levels). The IPCC reports on climate change are a good place to start. They aren't perfect, but they are the sum of many thousands upon thousands of professional researchers who study exactly the questions that you raise. If you're instead interested in dismissing many people's work with some silly gotchas using "common sense", then I'm just going to wander off now.

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