Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jubelum 
I'd say, per the article, that CO2 is no problem. It's overpopulation and limited resources (water, arable land, Cheney's petrol) that we have to worry about...
You know I went to "The Nation" link you posted earlier, but couldn't view it without PAYING for 18 issues!
So I googled it and found the full text at Counterpunch here;
Is Global Warming a Sin?
So perhaps you are referring to this part of Alexander Cockburn op-ed piece?
Quote:
Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, then levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slowly increasing arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. On this graph it starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e. 1.1 billion metric tons). It peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, the USA, plummets into the Great Depression, and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 per cent drop. Hard times drove a tougher bargain than all the counsels of Al Gore or the jeremiads of the IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change). Then, in 1933 it began to climb slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.
And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, to 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380.There are, to be sure, seasonal variations in CO2, as measured since 1958 by the instruments on Mauna Loa, Hawai'i. (Pre-1958 measurements are of air bubbles trapped in glacial ice.) Summer and winter vary steadily by about 5 ppm, reflecting photosynthesis cycles. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 per cent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. Thus it is impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels.
Some background checks are in order:
From wikipedia;
Alexander Cockburn
Definitely a person of questionable character!
From RealClimate;
How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?The lag between temperature and CO2. (Gore’s got it right.)Beck to the future
That one's a DOOZIE! Lookie here;

It was recently published in the "rag" called Energy and Environment (see my detailed discourse on this "rag" in a previous GW thread).
And finally the most recent from RealClimate on the subject of AC's trash talking;
The CO2 rise. Who dunnit?
And now for some ACTUAL data in graphical format, sorry several images are in order;



And finally three carbon global emission plots are in order;



So basically AC doesn't understand the data, for some reason AC expects an IMMEDIATE change in atmospheric CO2 as human's change their CO2 emissions.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Basically, the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans takes many years to adjust to cumulative net changes in CO2 emissions, a rather small dip over a few years doesn't appear in the lower frequency of ice core CO2 measurements. Also, look at the small dip in CO2 emissions that occurred around 1980, and then look at the high resolution CO2 measurements from HI, I don't see a dip in the CO2 measurements, do you?