The "Pollutant"

clipped from epw.senate.gov “The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell’s Ministry of Information in the novel 1984: ‘He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.’ The IPCC has made no serious attempt to model the natural variations of the earth’s temperature in the past. Whatever caused these large past variations, it was not due to people burning coal and oil.  If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?” he stated.   “I keep hearing about the ‘pollutant CO2,’ or about ‘poisoning the atmosphere’ with CO2, or about minimizing our ‘carbon footprint.’  This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: ‘But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ CO2 is not a pollutant Plants, and our own primate ancestors evolved when the levels of atmospheric CO2 were about 1000 ppm, a level that we will probably not reach by burning fossil fuels