Global warming alarmists would have us believe that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from current levels around 350 PPM (parts per million) would be the end of life of life on Earth as we know it.  I'd like to take a look at this claim in the light of what one could call "planetary common sense".

Our atmosphere is roughly 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, plus trace gasses.  If an alien race were to look at this composition, it would be apparent that life exists, because that much free oxygen could not exist in the atmosphere unless some process outside of the normal entropic chemical reactions were occurring.  There are just too many things that like to bind with oxygen, and without life the presence of free oxygen in the atmosphere would be minimal.

Science tells us that the road to life on earth as we know it started with the evolution of photosynthesis in primitive blue-green algae, which ultimately transformed our atmosphere by converting carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight into simple sugars and oxygen.  The algae got the chemical energy and building materials it needed, and our atmosphere got oxygenated.

Now here's the rub - to generate the current levels of oxygen, there must have been at least 21% carbon dioxide in our atmosphere prior to the evolution of photosynthesis.  It was likely much higher, when one considers that much of the carbon in the incredible biomass of our planet came from the sequestration of carbon from our atmosphere.

To put this in terms of the roughly 350 PPM of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere today, at one time there was at least 210,000 PPM of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere!

How could life have ever have come to be if this planet was such a greenhouse?

I couldn't spell it out better than this guy has here:

"BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE"

Another skeptic to man-made global warming steps forward:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html
http://mises.org/story/2571

This from David Evans, who describes himself thus: "I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector."

Talk about crossing over the line!

The introduction to Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications begins:


From there, a number of conclusions and observations are made about the implications on climate change, including this colossal leap of logic:


Now, I had started to write this massive blog post picking at numerous issues I had with the supposed validity of the supposed energy balance value, when it struck me that this paper seems to totally forget about one of the most powerful forces in the universe: entropy.  That is, the tendency of matter to tend towards a state of inert uniformity.  And if it weren't for the complex chemical, weather, geological, and biological mechanisms at work on our planet, it would be just a hunk of rock with nothing happening, same as it was yesterday and the day before.

But that's not the case here on the third rock from the sun!  Lots is going on, and it takes energy for that to happen, for mountains to push up, for water to rise and fall, for trees to grow, you name it.  Energy is stored chemically in proteins built by every living cell, as potential energy every time something is place on a shelf, and these are all forms of "usable" energy that allow our world to be such a dynamic place.  All of these things reduce the entropy of the system, and it takes energy to do that!

So when he figured that an "energy balance" retaining one watt per square meter from the 1350 that come our way from the sun would boil away the oceans, did anyone first try to figure out what the "energy budget" of the planet might be?