Carbon dioxide facts

Mr Ed Diery in his letter to SFT (30/6) claims to be a scientist, yet he offers no scientific evidence for his belief in global warming caused by an increase in carbon dioxide from man’s activities. That is probably because there is no scientific evidence for such manmade global warming. His arguments are typical of its genre: “widely acknowledged as a greenhouse gas” and “may reach a tipping point…… consequences may be disastrous”.
There is no doubt that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased, but temperatures have not reacted accordingly. In fact, the world’s temperatures decreased between 1940 and 1975 when carbon dioxide emissions were rapidly rising. Furthermore, there has been a slight global cooling over the past 10 years, again with rising carbon dioxide levels. It is obvious therefore that carbon dioxide levels are not driving our temperatures. It is a sad reflection on science that much of it has deteriorated into a belief system in the new environmental religion. Instead of looking at empirical evidence, so-called scientists now refer to majority belief. Labor and Green politicians have done a good job of brainwashing the public against carbon dioxide by continuing to call it “pollution”. As an ex-science teacher, Mr Diery would know that carbon dioxide is in fact the basic food of all our plant life, which in turn feeds every creature on this planet. The more carbon dioxide we have in our atmosphere the better our plants will grow and the more able we will be to feed our rapidly increasing population.
Tony Hassall, Ballandean