An illustration that CO2 won't roast the Earth in a runaway tipping point…

s/funny/sarcastic/p

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:39 pm
“Uh-oh, the CO₂ level is dropping fast. Won’t be much longer until the plants shut down, then all life expires except a few small critters not using oxygen-based respiration.”
I hope you are not serious and that you just neglected to mark the comment as being snark.

Richard Holle says:
Reply; the problem as I see it is there is way too much calcium buffering mass in the earth planetary body, and it is slowly absorbing all of the CO2, we need to find a way to geoengineer a release of CO2 from the rock, shell, and coral sequestration that is starving the green plants in the long run.
A lime kiln does exactly that and has been in use by man since prehistory. It needs a heat source though.

The CO2 production from cement making process is temporary, the fresh concrete re absorbs as much CO2 as was released in the slaking process, was the problem with the sealed biosphere building experiment, organic matter decomposed into methane and CO2 then was sequestered back into the concrete, taking the oxygen with it till it got low oxygen content life threatening.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html
Lots more links in Google.

Interesting that the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, aka “Carboniferous” is very low in CO2 but this was the era when almost all global coal seams were laid down! This means that the very high CO2 previously created these enormous tropical swamps which died down in the Carboniferous sequestering all the C as coal without any help from us. It is just mind boggling that we have spent $2 trillion because of the pathetic CO2 problem illustrated in this graph. It seems as if the Climategate scandal, which put CAGW into a downward spiral, allowed shackled, closeted scientists to come out of the woodwork and release a pent up store of scientific papers.
Kit Carruthers says:
August 8, 2013 at 4:00 pm
“Your graphs show nothing about temperature, so where does the assertion come that CO2 won’t affect temperature? A more meaningful (not to mention honest) illustration would be to show palaeo temperatures plotted with CO2 concentrations.”
True, but it is well known anyway that the swings from min to max throughout the last billion years has only been 8-10 degrees. Note the high (lets give it ~+6 degree C higher to be generous) coincides with 7000 ppm CO2, that’s ~20 times present CO2, that’s just over 4 doublings so Climate sensitivity is 1.5C per doubling, that’s a nice generous figure. Compare this with 5 or 6 degrees by 2100 and you will see why non-members of the club are crying foul with IPCC and the Hockey Team.

What are the views today of James Lovelock?

I am James Lovelock, scientist and author, known as the originator of Gaia theory, a view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating entity that keeps the surface environment always fit for life… I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilization. – Bishop Hill, James Lovelock, 12 December 2012 (in a letter noted by Phillip Bratby) via (WUWT 1/26/2013)

Lovelock was not so much recanting Climate Change alarmism, but taking issue with some of solutions proposed by the Greens.
There is an NBC report: ‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate from April 23, 2012 that where he is definitely slowing down his alarmism.

The new book will discuss how humanity can change the way it acts in order to help regulate the Earth’s natural systems, performing a role similar to the harmonious one played by plants when they absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
[The book] will also reflect his new opinion that global warming has not occurred as he had expected. “The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,”..
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now. ,,, The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,”…
Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”
He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, … “It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.
“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.
…he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” ….
Lovelock said he would not take back a word of his seminal work “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,” published in 1979. But of “Revenge of Gaia,” published in 2006, he said he had gone too far in describing what the warming Earth would see over the next century. “I would be a little more cautious — but then that would have spoilt the book,” he quipped.

His 1979 book made the crucial observation that the Sun has gradually warmed as it aged. What kept the Earth comfortable was life’s net consumption of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A negative feedback loop to keep life from using up too much carbon dioxide and thus making the climate cool and slow life down. If it warmed, life would use up more carbon dioxide and restore the balance. The drama of Gaia is that the planet is nearly out of carbon dioxide buffer. Carbon dioxide cannot go down much more without starving plants and we are at a sensitive portion of the logaritmic curve, so ice ages can easily happen. I believed the theory then and it is still a live hypothesis.
There seems little doubt that Lovelock still believes that rising CO2 levels will result in warming and that humans must do something to stop it. Buy I was struck by this statement:
“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age” This is an important rejoinder to any claims of “Precautionary Principle” because there are TWO possibilities to try to avoid.

If the whole premise was true that CO2, sunlight and water vapour created a run away warming effect then we have just discovered a free perpetual energy source more powerful than PV cells, wind etc combined. based on that why is it that we havent built reactors to take advantage of such a powerfull free energy source??

Scott says:
August 8, 2013 at 6:13 pm

If the whole premise was true that CO2, sunlight and water vapour created a run away warming effect then we have just discovered a free perpetual energy source more powerful than PV cells, wind etc combined. based on that why is it that we havent built reactors to take advantage of such a powerfull free energy source??

We have–they’re called “forests”.
Now the Greens don’t want us cutting down and burning anything.
Are they trying to drive CO2 even lower?
Are they setting up such a devastating array of CO2-hungry monsters that when fossil fuels are finally outlawed, foodstuff plants will die out, taking us with them?
Are people with too much time and evil thoughts on their hands going to destroy most of us in their quest for a Green Nirvana?
Rather looks like it.

And there was a proliferation of biodiversity and rapid evolution in the Cambrian….