Sit next to a potted plant. 

As you breathe out carbon dioxide, the plant uses photosynthesis to convert the carbon in the carbon dioxide to the plant’s roots and foliage and in the process releases the oxygen that sustains your life. That is a great system. Now grab the plant and pull it up by the roots.  Several things happen—perhaps more than that if the plant happens not to belong to you!  The first is quite direct.  The plant can no longer perform its miracle so stops utilizing carbon dioxide, thereby allowing carbon dioxide levels to increase and no longer releasing oxygen. 

The second thing that happens is less direct. See all of those roots in the pulled plant? They represent stored carbon that was previously in the soil, i.e., they represent topsoil.  Carbon cannot just disappear, so those roots will decompose (largely via oxidation) to carbon products that end up in the air, primarily carbon dioxide but certainly some small amount of methane as well. Both carbon dioxide and methane are considered primary global warming gasses even though their impact is dwarfed by the impact of that especially nasty global warming gas—water vapor, a gas not yet deemed a pollutant by our EPA and whose contribution to the greenhouse gas story is most often ignored.

 

Although global warming has itself been questioned because we have had at least ten years of relative temperature stability, a few years means very little in geologic time. We may indeed be having global warming. Temperature cycles have varied through the earth’s history and will undoubtedly continue to do so. To the extent that we should be concerned about global warming, there are many esoteric discussions of factors that might be relevant. Here is just one article, followed by civil, rational, reasoned discussion, often challenging the author’s conclusion.  That is as it should be.   http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant-greenhouse-gas/#more-107326

Were you to read through an article such as that cited and follow the discussion, you might soon start thinking that evaluation of the merits is above your scientific training; you simply need to trust the scientists and ascribe to the “settled science” of the global warming advocates. You need to do no such thing.

Remember the potted plant? Now let’s extend the concept to our entire earth. We have massively depleted forage and topsoil and continue to do so. That forage and topsoil was a primary storage for carbon. Where did those trillions of pounds of carbon go that were previously stored by plants, both above and underground? They didn’t just disappear.  Yet they remain largely unaccounted for by the “settled” science that attributes our increased carbon dioxide levels to burning fossil fuels. Depletion of forage and topsoil is just one of several very significant sources of carbon dioxide that remain mostly absent from global warming gas calculations.  

I, a supposed global warming skeptic, am actually quite concerned about the high levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. But the solution to the carbon dioxide problem requires neither a tax on carbon emissions nor the massive redistribution of wealth that would accompany such a tax. If reduction of carbon dioxide levels is truly what we are after, rather than the politically expedient proceeds from a carbon tax, a proven practical WORKABLE approach for sequestration of carbon has already been demonstrated.  This approach does not require extensive governmental intervention nor does it require either direct or indirect taxpayer subsidy:  

 

We may indeed need to save the planet.  We definitely need to save our economy, but primarily from the misdirection of the politically correct and the “settled” science that remains harmfully and deceptively incomplete.

***Gary A. Howie MSc, PhD*** is a business owner/rancher and a Life & Liberty News contributor