Leading to a new equilibrium. That equilibrium will not necessarily be one favorable to human life. In the same way that eating an extra 5 donuts a day might lead to a new equilibrium of your weight, but that doesn't necessarily imply one is healthy.

The global greening does show that from the perspective of a healthy, fully greened planet, the CO2 concentrations are actually too low still. Plants favor a CO2 concentration of at least 1000 ppm. That's why in agriculture, extra CO2 is used to stimulate plant growth.

I think this should be noted, since the slogan by alarmists is usually "save the planet".

>a healthy, fully greened planet

You're making a lot of very strong assumptions, notably

* That a healthy planet is a "fully green" one

* That a "fully green" planet is healthy to the organisms that currently live on that planet, particularly humans

The Jurassic Era, for example, was much more "green". Humans wouldn't have fared very well in the Jurassic Era.

Average temperatures in the Jurassic were only about +2.5C over current averages.

We're shooting north of the Carboniferous (+3C) and headed towards the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse period, where average temps were +5C to +8C over where they are now.

Probably not survivable for humanity as we know it now.

We're already seeing wet bulb temperatures over the survivable maximum in some parts of the world, imagine stacking another 3-5C on top of that. Large parts of equatorial land would be fatally warm to humanity, and the temperate band for growing crops would shift at least a thousand miles north.

Humans are not vegetables, despite what some may think.

1000 ppm is at the level where us apes have measurable reduction in reaction time and other cognitive impairments.

> 1000 ppm is at the level where us apes have measurable reduction in reaction time and other cognitive impairments.

The experiments that showed this were confusing correlation with causation. High CO2 in rooms is a marker of reduced O2, and a lack of fresh air.

If you add 1000ppm CO2 to fresh air, it actually boosts cognition due to the Bohr effect.

> The experiments that showed this were confusing correlation with causation. High CO2 in rooms is a marker of reduced O2, and a lack of fresh air.

Not to a significant degree. Oxygen is normally around 20.9%, if you raise CO2 levels by 1000 ppm, that goes down to… 20.8%. There's a bigger change to how much O2 you breathe just from the change in air pressure from going up 10 meters.

O2 turning into CO2 becomes lethal at 4%; if O2 concentrations go down in step with that (e.g your breathing causes it) you'll only be drowsy and nauseous from the latter while the former is killing you.

This distinction is also why diving rebreathers work: they remove the CO2, which is toxic much sooner than the mere lack of oxygen.

Also:

Fresh air contains less CO2. In Bohr's day, fresh air meant something like 280 ppm, today that means 440 ppm. If some future atmosphere contains 1000 ppm, that's what "fresh" means in that case.

I'm at least marginally confident you're just misreading the Bohr effect.

> The experiments that showed this were confusing correlation with causation.

What nonsense.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1

From the paper: "All studies measured the effects of exposure to artificially raised (pure) CO2"

Some studies showed no effects (for the given task) while others showed a reduction in performance.

Thank you for that paper. It shows that the proposed negative effects of CO2 do not exist.

Let's take the study by Rodeheffer. Even 15,000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere did not change the results of a thorough 90-minute test. If this is not indicative of the benignancy of CO2, I don't know what is.

Let's take the another study by Allen that showed "SMS performance was 15% lower for 945 ppm and 50% lower for 1,400 ppm relative to 550 ppm"

This was not a controlled study, but just an association study in different buildings. All the studies that use a good setup do not report marked lowering of cognitive function.

Then you can look at the paper by Herczeg and the mental performance is not really much different between 600 and 4000 ppm - merely 5% difference in errors found in the test. With only few participants, this is not significant. Since this is a short-term study, adaption to higher CO2 levels needs to be considered.

Thank you for your patience. I looked at the Rodeheffer study which does indeed conclude that CO2 has no effect on cognitive function (among submariners). I have updated my beliefs accordingly.

The nature paper does suggest that it's concerning so I have not ruled out the option of high CO2 exposure negatively affecting humans. I'll have to look into this more at some point.

Your comments have suggested you are, so I'm assuming with low confidence you are biased towards these things being positive, or much less negative than the scientific community thinks.

You are correct that there will be plenty of life on the much warmer, greener planet we are heading towards.

Well, probably. There won't be many humans around to verify.

When people say "Save the planet" they generally mean "save the planet as it currently exists", since taking 100 years to make environmental changes that usually take 3000 will have negative effects that outweigh the increase in plant life from a human perspective.

"leading to a natural equilibrium" is the rub. Easy to say but it doesn't seem to be the actual case, since CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to rise.

What even is a natural equilibrium? One meteor strike or megavolcano and things will be boned for years to come.

A lot of things we consider normal has only been averages for recorded human history, which has also seen plenty of climate outliers, and is only a small fraction of the total history of earth and life on it.

What is this other than thinly veiled, generic climate change denialism? Black-swan events are by definition not something anyone can prepare for.

Why do we always have to end up with this false dichotomy?

Why is it so hard to accept that

a) yes the climate throughout the history of our planet (at geological time scales) had a lot of variation and humans didn't live during an average climate

b) it's reasonable to worry that the climate deviates quickly and strongly from what it was throughout the history of humankind?

Why do these two points need to be opposed to each other? The timescales are so utterly incompatible. Is it because people struggle to understand what a million years is? Let alone a hundred million years.

right? And even if some new equilibrium is eventually hit, judging from past epochs... it can take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to happen.

It’s too slow to preserve what we’ve got. Yes it works, models already include this effect, it helps marginally.

I thought the issue was emissions at high altitude ?

Given we need an emissions reduction of around 99.9% just to get into a steady-state, there's plenty of issues all around.

CO2 is mixed in the atmosphere on a timescale short compared to the timescale for its natural removal. Also, there is net transport of CO2 upwards, since most release is near the surface.